The Marble Orchard. Alex Taylor
do awful like they used to.” He wiped a finger over his teeth, scratched the plaque away with his thumbnail, then wiped his finger against his trouser leg. “They just don’t like being benchwarmers,” he said. “That’s all it is.”
“Old timers,” Donaldson said, slinging water from the brim of his hat. “You’re about to be one yourself aren’t you, Elvis?”
“If I live long enough.”
“Old timers,” repeated Pretshue. “What the fuck do they know?”
Elvis cracked his window and the rain flitted in. “One thing I do know is how much I hate this weather,” he said.
The cruiser topped a rise and Elvis let it coast to the bottom before pulling under a stand of cottonwoods where several other cruisers were parked already. An ambulance idled there also, as well as the county coroner’s burgundy Buick. Beyond the trees, the Gasping rolled by, its waters swollen from the recent rain. Men stood on the shore. Elvis’ deputies, shrinkwrapped in raincoats. At their feet, a body bound with logging chain.
“Reckon that’s our boy wrapped up in those?” Donaldson asked.
“I hope to hell it is,” said Pretshue. “That fucker has been trouble and I hope he’s drowned. That’d solve my headaches.”
All three men exited the cruiser. Elvis went first down the steep bank, followed closely by the two troopers. The deputies nodded to him as he approached, but only gave cold glares to Donaldson and Pretshue.
When Elvis reached the river bank, he squatted beside the body. The fishes and turtles had been at it and some of its fingers were missing and a wet reek like carpet left too long in a cellar hung in the air.
“Whoever did it, Elvis, they weighed him down with this.” The coroner toed a three foot section of railroad track lying in the mud. He was a tall thin man with a dark complexion and under the blank sky he seemed like a streak of ink running out of the clouds. He spoke with a deep wet croak. “It wasn’t enough,” he said. “Two old boys out running trot lines come on him this morning. Just floating. I’d say he’s been under for a day at the most and probably not even that long.” The coroner propped his boot on the section of track and wiped both hands against his trousers and then through his hair. He wore no raincoat. “What I mean is, I’d wager he was put in there last night.”
Elvis nodded and scraped at his chin. “Looks like somebody gave him a swat to the head there,” he said, pointing to the puckered wound on the dead man’s brow. “This your boy, Donaldson?”
The trooper stepped closer and leaned in, stowing his hands on his knees.
“I don’t know. Hard to tell from what the river’s done to him.” Donaldson stood up, running a thumbnail over his belt. “I thought you would know him, Elvis.”
“Me? Why would I know him?”
“Well, this is your county. You run him in when he had the wreck and killed that woman. I thought you’d know him.”
Elvis sighed. He dragged his hat lower on his brow. “That,” he said, “was nine years ago.”
Pretshue pushed his hands into his pockets. The plastic poncho rattled around him, and his nostrils flared as a green tint rose under his cheekbones. “Hell,” he said. “If you don’t know him, then who does?”
Elvis stood up and looked at the covey of deputies. “Where are those old boys at that found him?”
Someone pointed downstream.
Under a red gum stood two men, each dressed in ball caps and shiny rubber hip-waders. They drank coffee from Styrofoam cups. Their johnboat was hitched to a sycamore root jutting from the bank, and they watched it closely as if it were a nervous horse they expected to bolt at any moment.
“He was out there,” one of them said when Elvis and the troopers approached. The man raised his coffee cup and pointed to the river with his pinky, but the world before his finger was unmarkable and without definite origin, an empty spill before windbraided trees, and he might have meant any place in all that wide coursing surge. “We brung him to shore then called you boys down.” He looked past Elvis at the body lying in the sandy mud. “Dead as a drownt cow.”
“Yes.” Elvis nodded. He took a small steno pad and pen from his shirt pocket and began running the pen nervously over the notebook wires. “He is.”
The man who’d spoken snuffled and drew a sleeve under his nose. His friend, features honed like a hatchet blade, put his hands in his pockets and rocked on his boot heels. “You know who it is, don’t you?” he asked.
Elvis flipped the steno pad open, holding the white page under his hat out of the rain. “No. Do you?”
“Course. That’s Paul Duncan. The one stole that car and hit that Cliver lady about ten years back. The same one busted out of Eddyville a few days ago.” The man drained his coffee cup and swallowed. “That’s Loat’s boy.”
WEDNESDAY
From his porch, Loat watched the cruiser slip under the awning of hackberry boughs and then climb the slight rise of his driveway, rocking over the washed out ruts in the gravel before it came to a stop in the muddy yard. He held a neon orange hardhat in his lap and sat spooning soggy cornflakes out of it, milk slipping off his chin onto the porch boards. As the sheriff and two state troopers came through the yard, he stowed the makeshift cereal bowl under his chair, folded his hands over his belly and snorted. Behind him, Presto Geary came through the screen door. His weight made the wooden floor groan, and Loat smelled his stink, a mixture of underarm and motor oil.
“What do they want?” Presto asked.
Loat leaned back in the nylon camp chair he was sitting in. “Same thing they been wanting all week, I’d guess,” he said.
Elvis and the two officers crossed through the yard’s scant grass. When they reached the porch, the sheriff put a boot on the bottom step and looked up at Loat and Presto as they were paired under the slanted roof of the house with its peeling blue paint, their faces creased and turned by the early gray light to a hard bruised color.
“Morning,” said Loat.
Elvis nodded, then gestured to the men behind him. “Loat, this is Officer Donaldson and Officer Pretshue,” he said. “State boys.”
“I can see what kind of uniforms they’re wearing.” Loat wiped a hand over his mouth and snorted again. “Y’all come looking for that one you lost out of Eddyville, the story’s same now as it’s ever going to be. He’s not been here and I ain’t heard a thing from him.”
Elvis scraped the water from his cheeks and dried his hand against his trousers. “We think we found him,” he said. “In the river.”
Loat leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. His light gray hair was spackled like grout to his forehead and he brushed it back over his scalp and sat drawing thin breaths through the tiny slits of his nostrils. Many had remarked on the smallness of his nose, which was no more than a pink bump beneath his putty-colored eyes, and at times it caused his breath to emit a high adenoidal whistle that sounded like the grate and squeak of old water piping. Now, as he sat staring at the sheriff, his nostrils dilated and flexed as if he’d caught the aroma of something unpleasant in the air.
“You think you found Paul?” he asked.
Elvis nodded. “Just this morning.” He rested a hand on the stoop railing, the sleeve of his poncho dripping strings of water over the wet footstones.
With his poncho and flushed cheeks, Loat thought the man resembled a shrink-wrapped cut of butcher’s work. “Y’all come on up here out of the weather,” he said. “Then you can tell me the rest of it.”
Elvis moved on up the stoop and the two troopers