The Marble Orchard. Alex Taylor
ain’t got nothing at all but this here duffel bag.” The man nodded to his luggage slouched in a corner of the deck. “Ain’t nothing in there but extra clothes.”
“You might want to think about changing into them then,” Beam sneered. “Less maybe those in that duffel are worse off than the grimy shit you’re wearing now.”
The man smiled thinly, his eyes cinching into a squint. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Old enough to take this boat back to the side you come from and not give your sorry ass a ride nowhere.”
“I can walk to a bridge.”
Beam threw his hands up and returned to the cabin. He started the engine and began moving back toward the eastern landing. He had no patience for this sort of dawdling. Clem had told him that folks would likely try to bull him over on the ferry on account of his youth and that he couldn’t tolerate such behavior, and so he didn’t, but in truth he hated the gruffness it took to get by in this world, the brute and angry scowling at life that gave a man the upper hand.
The man stuck his head back into the cabin and leaned against the metal door frame. “Hey, man. I was just shitting you. I got five dollars.”
Beam cut the throttle and turned to him. “Let’s see it.”
“Sure, man. Here.” The man dug a wallet of cracked brown leather from his back pocket and produced a wad of singles and handed them to Beam, who counted and then folded them into the plastic Tupperware till sitting on the control panel. Then he ground the starter to life and reversed the prop so the ferry scooted along toward the western landing on the other side of the river.
“I hope that little joke didn’t hurt your feelings none,” the man said. He still hung in the cabin door, his face pale and slick in the feeble light.
Beam steadied the engine and stepped back on deck. The man moved aside to let him pass. For a time, they studied one another in the glum shadows.
“Are you a Sheetmire?” the man asked.
Beam nodded. “Yeah, I am,” he said. The man didn’t look familiar, but plenty knew which family ran the ferry and there rested no surprise in a stranger saying his name.
“I don’t remember you,” the man said. He wiped at his mustache and squinted at Beam, as if trying to fix him in his mind amid a myriad of others. “You don’t look like any Sheetmire.”
A chill rushed in off the river and Beam zipped up the green nylon racing jacket he was wearing. “What do I look like?” he asked.
The man smiled. “Now there’s a dangerous question.” He leaned back against the boat railing and folded his arms across his chest and regarded Beam with a look of snide ridicule. “I hate to tell you this, but I don’t believe Hollywood’s gonna be calling you anytime soon.”
Beam eyed the man curiously. He stood close to the duffel and his entire form seemed to rise from the bag as if he were but some séance trick, a jester’s prank with his shaven head and mustache, the flesh of his face slick and daubed with harlequin light from the cabin and running bulbs of the ferry.
“Who are you?” Beam asked.
The man shook his head once. “You wouldn’t know me,” he said.
Beam spat over the railing into the water. The hull groaned against the current and the river drifted through its own blank darkness, and there came an utterance of depths against the underside of the ferry.
“Where are you going?” Beam asked.
The man looked downstream to where the moonlight rode jagged and broken on the river like mishandled glass.
“Just across,” he said.
“There ain’t much to go to on this side of the river,” said Beam, nodding to the shore as it slowly emerged out the dark. “Just dirt and corn mostly.”
“Way I like it,” said the man. “I like the open air where it ain’t crowded. A man can’t disappear in a city.” He waved a hand at the night and all its distance. “But out here, a fellow can just… be gone.”
The man turned and leaned over the railing like a drunk slouched against a bar. Beam went inside the cabin and cut the throttle back to let the ferry coast. When he reemerged onto the deck, the man was still watching the river tremble along below him.
“Where are you coming from?” Beam asked.
The man looked over his shoulder, his face utterly blank and calm. “Where I come from,” he said, “is a place a boy like you don’t never want to see.”
A fire of anger rushed through Beam and then blew out, a cold crater left in its absence. He didn’t like the way the man had called him a boy, or the way his smile had wormed its way from his face to leave a look empty and unreadable. Beam did not consider himself a boy. He was nineteen, full of bull piss with his own portion of meanness lurking in him, the kind of youth who’d grit teeth at shop windows and bathroom mirrors, at stolen hubcaps and snatched silverware, anything fool enough to throw his own mug back at him. But this stranger had come out of the night teetering with drink to gibe and prod him, and he felt the bite of something old and fierce in his blood. Watching the stranger on the ferry deck, Beam had a sudden vision of throwing the man overboard. The river would take him. There would be a brief plunge, the water broken in a garland of dingy spray before it settled again. It’s what Beam’s father Clem might have done, in his early years. Lurching and cruel in his youth, a frequent thief, Clem had aged into a soft routine of diet soda and bran flakes. But he had been right, in his time. Flash lightning through his veins every Friday night, he slid through those early years on a highway of blood. Beam could barely believe the stories he’d heard, the ones told to him by old loose-mouthed men who rode the ferry, about how a man might wind up broke or broken if he rode the deck after taking too much drink. The years had left a few drift scraps of recollected violence in his memory—waking in the night to the sound of gunfire and then running down to the ferry to find his father bowed over a prone stranger on the deck, looking up at Beam on the landing to say, “No worries. He ain’t dead.” Because Clem had never been a killer. Gruff and lean, he’d been a drinker and a taker of easy money, a schemer at backroom poker games and a parking lot brawler, and the worst crime he’d dipped his hands into was yanking dollars off the drunks who rode the ferry at night. Caution was the word he preached to Beam now, slipping country wisdom into dinnertime conversation. “Don’t get dizzy when the fists go to flying,” he would say. “And don’t throw no punches unless it’s worth a good amount of dough. You don’t want to pull a jail term for short pay.”
“The Gasping is a deep river,” the stranger said, pulling Beam away from his thoughts. The man had turned back to regard the water, his arms folded over the metal railings.
Beam didn’t say anything. He’d stowed an Igloo cooler beside the cabin for his shift and he opened it and took out a bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade and drank from it and then put it away again and closed the cooler.
“They say it’s so deep that it just don’t have any bottom in some spots.” The man turned and put his back to the railings so that he stared at Beam. “You believe that?”
Beam shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Somebody told that the Army Corp of Engineers is going to come down here one day with sonar equipment and find the bottom,” he said. “But I don’t think they’ll find it even then because I just don’t think there’s any bottom to find down there. What do you think about that?”
“I think there has to be a bottom,” said Beam. “Somewhere. Things just can’t sink forever.”
“Maybe so.” The man looked out over the water. “They say a man that jumps off the highest mountain has ten minutes to fall before he hits the ground.”
“No.”
“That’s what they say. But what I want to know is who’s the dumb