The Marble Orchard. Alex Taylor
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wheel and cranked the engine and sat waiting while Loat stood beside the open door, the moonlight falling damp and slick over his body.
“I’ll be going now,” he said. “I know you have a lot of prayers to say before the sun comes up.” Loat got in the car and pulled the door shut. Presto clicked the headlights on and then turned the car around in the yard and they drove off on the road leading away from the river.
For a long time, Clem stood on the porch listening to the Cadillac’s tires bicker over the gravel until the sound receded and no noise was left in the night but the crickets and the wind preening at the trees.
When he came back inside, Derna was sitting on the couch. She kept the shotgun propped between her thighs, clutching the barrel with both hands as if it were a broom.
“Where is Beam?” she asked.
Clem stuck the pistol in the waist of his jeans. “Gone is all I can say. I don’t know where to.”
Derna shook her head absently. Her gaze lay on the front window, its curtains silvered to a frosty glow from the moonlight. “I can’t see why it would be both of them to go at the same time,” she said. “Both my boys.”
“Beam’s out getting drunk and he’ll be back by good daylight,” said Clem. “You don’t need to worry over him.”
Derna kept her eyes on the window. She pulled her hair over her shoulder and began running her fingers through it. “Get my vacuum, Clem. I feel like doing a little cleaning right now.”
It was what she was prone to do during hard times. She would mix buckets of suds to mop with, or run a dust cloth over all the furniture if certain dreams chased her from sleep, no matter the hour. It was her way to draw the filth out of the corners of the house whenever life tilted toward disaster, as if polished floors and ironed sheets could bring a timid peace to a place where death or ruin had touched its hand.
Clem was suddenly struck by the memory of Derna back when she’d lived with Loat. He’d dressed her in sleek fitting summer dresses of bright pastel and gave her the duties of cleaning house. Called her “Dollbaby.”
“I like to watch Dollbaby push that broom,” he’d say, grinning as Derna bowed to guide a few dust kittens into a scoop. Then he’d let his eyes drift shut and nod his head back. “Sometimes, I just close my eyes and listen to her moving in her dress. Sounds slow and easy enough to put me straight to sleep.”
When only one or two men were visiting Loat, Derna seemed a bit laggard in her duties, slow to empty the slop jar or to feed dinner scraps to the dogs. But when the house bucked and shook with a wild humid fury, the air charged with the electric hum of men bent in grudge and anger toward one another, Derna came alive. Clem remembered coming over for games of seven card and watching Derna creep into the room full of men where the smoke vined up the newspapered walls and the chips clinked on the baize table, her look cautious but simpering, as if she’d undertaken a great dare by entering the midst of these drunken gamblers. She tended to linger about, her rouged lips cut into a thin smile while she bussed drinks or swept cigarette butts from the tongue-and-groove floor.
Other than to sneak quick glances or give flirty winks, most of the card players ignored her. This changed one night when a liquored tobacco planter named Boyce Hazelip took umbrage toward Derna’s loitering in the smoky shadows.
“Loat, that woman a yours makes me nervous,” he said, running a yellow fingernail over his chips, his gray beard dripping from his chin like mossy slime. He was an older man, and often deferred to or at least humored because of his seniority, but as the night wore on he tipped his cup more and more and his eyes often went darty and mean toward Derna, especially as his losses began to tally up.
“I say, Loat, do you not have a keep to put that woman in?” he asked. “She’s staring at me like a cat.”
It was long summer, and the jar flies bumped and whirred against the window screens. Derna stood with her back to the dead woodstove just behind Loat, feeling the cold iron against her rump through her sheer cotton dress. Yes, she had been staring at Hazelip, but only because she found his bald, peeling head a wonder, so warty and livered with moles it appeared like a globe of some reddened world with all its scars and rifted valleys.
“I can see how having a woman look your way would make you nervous, Boyce,” said Loat. “It likely don’t happen too often to an ugly sonuvabitch like you.”
Hazelip chewed his bottom lip and glared at Loat, who didn’t look up from his cards. “What if I was to say I think she’s been tipping hands to you all night?” he said.
The rest of the gamblers, Clem included, hushed their idle chatter. Loat raised his eyes to the old man and laid his cards face down on the table. He folded his hands calmly over one another. “You’re not happy with the way things are going?” he asked.
Hazelip bobbed his chin toward the towers of chips that sat in front of Loat like a city in miniature. “You take all the honey and don’t leave none for me,” he said.
Loat straightened in his chair. He addressed the table at large, but did not look away from Hazelip. “Any of you other boys think Dollbaby’s been tipping hands to me?”
Including Clem, there were six men at the table, and they all looked at their cards or up at the uncovered bulb burning on its wire in the ceiling and said nothing. In later years, Clem wondered what would’ve happened if he hadn’t been the one to speak, if things would have been different if he’d been able to hold to his quiet, to let someone else answer Loat’s question. But after nearly a minute of silence, he broke and declared that the thought of Derna tipping hands had never entered his mind. Everyone at the table but Hazelip seconded this, some with grudging whispers, others with eager nods.
“Looks to be nobody but you thinks the game’s rigged, Boyce.” Loat unfolded his hands and placed them at either side of his stack of chips. “Maybe you better take back what you said.”
Hazelip’s eyes goggled about the table, searching the gaze of his fellow gamblers, but none would meet his looks. In the thatch of his beard, the old man’s lips began a slight tremor and his damp yellow whiskers twitched as if something were trying to burrow into his face, and then he settled his stare on Derna who stood still and gape-eyed against the stove.
“I can’t take it back,” Hazelip muttered. His eyes clocked upward to the lone light dangling from a ceiling joist and then drifted down again to look at Loat. His hand was creeping slowly toward the pocket of his Dungarees where everyone knew he carried a .25 caliber pistol, but Loat remained steady in his chair as his breath whistled over the flange of his tiny nostrils.
“If you can’t take it back, then I guess you’d better leave,” he said.
Hazelip’s hand suddenly stopped and lay like a flattened crab on the tabletop. His mouth opened a bit, the small worn kernels of his teeth just visible behind his cracked lips. Slowly, he scooted his chair back and stood. A sheen of sweat glossed his brow. He patted his beard down against his chest and grunted. “You know as well as me that woman’s been tipping cards to you.”
Loat looked at his hands. He drew a Case knife from his trousers and began paring the blue earth from under his fingernails with the blade and then wiping it clean on the edge of the baize. “If that’s the story you want to tell there’s nothing I can do for you,” he said.
“It’s not a story,” replied Hazelip. “It’s the truth.”
Loat closed the knife and laid it on the table. He watched it for a moment as if he expected it to spring off the table at his command. “I think you are an old man who has had too much to drink and whose mind isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “But if you keep talking, these facts won’t help you.”
He then raised his eyes to Hazelip, and the two locked their stares. What Clem remembered most, however, was the look of expectant joy that rode Derna’s face, her eyes bright and hungry as a girl in the throes of her first ravishing. She fumbled with the collar of her dress, revealing the milky flesh of