The Marrowbone Marble Company. Glenn Taylor
Backing out of the driveway, he saw her silhouette through the window blinds. She still had that spike straight posture, whether she toted the baby or not. Most times she toted. He wanted to go back in and hold them both. Tell them he loved them. But he didn’t. His foot found the clutch and his eye found the road.
On Route 52, Ledford rolled the window down and stuck his head out as he drove. He let the wind in under his eyelids.
His wristwatch read noon. He could be in Chicago by midnight.
* * *
THE PAPERWEIGHT WAS ten inches of steel, the sawed-off end of an overunder shotgun barrel. Ledford stared at its two openings. From where he sat, slumped and fighting sleep, the glow of the desk lamp illuminated the gun barrels’ insides, so that he watched a spider there, walking its tightrope. It was magnificent. The kind of thing he’d taken to noticing more of late. “Hello,” he whispered to the spider. He wanted to lean forward and stick his finger in the barrel, but he was too drunk to move.
The air inside Erm’s bookie office was stale. Wallpaper glue gone bad, whiskey molding in the floorboards. When the doorknob turned, Ledford’s breathing seized. His back was to the door.
“Wake up Erminio,” someone said.
Erm jerked to attention in the slatback chair across the desk from Ledford. Erm swiveled and whirled and nearly fell to the floor. The creak of the chair seized Ledford by the nerve endings. He thought about grabbing the paperweight. It made a fine weapon. Instead, he stood and turned to face whoever had entered.
It was Loaf, the giant associate from the racetrack. Uncle Fiore’s bodyguard. His nose was red and swollen, and the buttons on his vest were mismatched. “You going to sleep while your uncle gets an ulcer?” he said.
“I’m up, I’m up,” Erm answered. He fumbled with the papers on his desk as if to look useful.
Loaf sized up Ledford. “Who the fuck are you?” he asked. His breath was rotten from four feet off.
“Ledford. We met at Hawthorne last summer.”
Loaf knew who he was. The question was a customary greeting. “Yeah. Ledford.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped at snot and sweat alike. Loaf had little regard for his face.
On a leather love seat against the far wall, a naked woman shifted under the afghan that half-covered her. The curve in her spine was something to behold. There was a birthmark on her hip. She sighed.
Ledford sat back down and looked at the gun barrel and wished he hadn’t felt the impulse to use it for clubbing the head of an unknown man. The spider was gone. The glow from the lamp’s green hood lit Erm a seasick hue. He coughed hard and spat in the trashcan at his feet. “I’m on it,” he said to Loaf. The door closed.
“Half-wit son of a bitch,” Erm muttered. “You want breakfast?”
They walked to the diner on Ashland in silence. Both ordered coffee and corned beef hash and eggs. Erm kept coughing and spitting, this time on the dirty linoleum. He smeared it with his wingtip.
Ledford looked out the window. Chicago had not given him what he was looking for. The booze worked as it always had, but he wouldn’t lie down with another woman. This didn’t sit right with Erm. And that morning, at two a.m., a phone call had come that threw a switch in every happy man at the card table and the bar. The phone call made mugshots out of smiles. Erm’s cousin had been hit by a car and killed.
The cousin, Uncle Fiore’s favorite son, was a book-smart street enforcer with a straight job for appearances. A plumber who left behind a wife and three girls.
The waitress refilled their coffees. “Listen to this,” Erm said. He had the newspaper quartered in his left hand, coffee cup in his right. The diner was getting crowded. Erm took quick looks at the front door over Ledford’s shoulder. He tongued his bridge of porcelain teeth between swallows. He read aloud. “Louis Bacigalupo, thirty-four years old, a union plumber, was injured fatally Tuesday morning just two days after his wife and three daughters had honored him with a Father’s Day luncheon in his home.” Erm took a drink. “What the hell does injured fatally mean? Who ever heard of injured fatally?” The waitress put their plates in front of them and Ledford said thank you. Erm kept on reading. “The auto driver was charged with reckless driving and released under fifty dollars bond.”
Ledford knew what came next. It had been in the whispers that started after the two-a.m. phone call. It had been in the face of an associate who’d taken Erm aside at the basement card game. They’d left soon after for Erm’s crowded bookie office, with Ledford down two hundred, his ace hand still on the way.
The naked woman had appeared from the hallway, lay down without a word, and slept.
There were meetings in the office corner to which Ledford was not invited, but he knew the good word. Murder was on the tongues of these men.
The “auto driver” was out on bond. He’d be dead inside a day.
The corned beef hash steamed. “I’m going to hit the road after breakfast,” Ledford said. He picked up his knife and fork.
Erm set the paper down. “You just got here Leadfoot.” He broke bacon into little pieces and stabbed them with a fork.
“Yeah.”
Erm looked out the window at a couple walking by. They held hands and smiled. “You feelin uneasy? This kind of shit make you squirm these days?” He watched the couple turn the corner.
“You’re the squirmy Ermie,” Ledford said. “I’m just Loyal.” They both laughed a little, Erm’s cut short. Ledford went on. “Look, I been thinking too much lately. And now the baby and Rachel.” He felt like talking to Erm instead of just pushing bullshit back and forth, the only thing they’d ever done. He felt like telling Erm that he wanted to read books again like he had after the war, that a theology professor was on his mind, a man who’d told him of William Wilberforce and Mohandas Gandhi, that his mind was on God and birth and death, on Mack Wells and those who shared his skin color. He wanted to tell Erm that they’d been sold bad goods. That they didn’t have to claw and tear and hate and kill and always, everywhere, win. But Erm wasn’t the kind of friend you said such things to. Ledford had never wanted that kind.
He split an egg yolk with his fork. “It doesn’t have to be this way Erm,” he managed.
Erm looked at him, frowned. Then he said, “Fuck you Ledford,” and got up and licked his thumb. He pulled two dollar bills from a thick fold and dropped them on the chipped red laminate.
A leather strap of beat-up Christmas bells hung on the doorknob. It sounded as he walked away.
LEDFORD STOOD IN the dark and looked at them. Mother and baby. He’d come in so quiet that Rachel hadn’t stirred. She slept with her arm across her forehead, her chest rising slow and even. Mary lay beside her, on her back, both arms up over her head as if stretching. She was a tiny thing. Ledford smiled. He’d hold them more, he thought. Tell them that he loved them. He’d make a change.
THE HOT DOGS at Wiggins were fifteen cents apiece. Ledford sat at the countertop on a swivel stool, wiping chili from the corners of his mouth. The Very Reverend C. Rice Thompson sat to his right. He marveled at how young Ledford had eaten four hot dogs in the time it took him to put down two. “You’ve got no problems with your appetite,” he said.
“Never have.” Ledford watched the proprietor move from the cash register to the counter-back. He pulled two cigars from an opened display box of White Owls. They were for the fat man in overalls paying his check. The elastic bands cut an X across the fat man’s back. Ledford watched him breathe heavy at the register. “Most times my stomach can hold its own,” he told the Reverend, “it’s my ears and brain that have been getting to me.” He finished off his second Coke and put the bottle on the counter. Looked at the White Owl box again. Next to it was a stack of Doublemint chewing