The Marble Orchard Read Free Page B

head. “No, sir.”
    “I aim to have them throw a mattress down before I get in the grave. Maybe even a nice quilt or blanket.”
    Beam looked at the man. He expected to see a grin, but the man was stern and serious, his lips a pale seam in his black whiskers.
    “I wouldn’t want to think about it,” Beam said.
    The man snorted and pulled at the rifle strap on his shoulder. “Reckon nobody does,” he said.

I
    TUESDAY
    Someone called to Beam from the far bank of the river through the darkness. He heard the man’s voice as it dropped to him dismal and slow.
    “I won’t run you for less than five dollars,” Beam yelled in answer.
    Spasms of moonlight fell through the rearing trees. The moon itself was mirrored in the river, a doppelganger moon trembling on the black water, and everywhere hung a stillness seemingly permanent, a quiet that gave form to the night’s own immensity.
    Beam walked to the bow of the ferry. Moths whirred in the hull lights and he swatted them away. On the landing opposite stood the man who’d called to him, the moon dusting him with a weak and diffuse light.
    “You got five dollars?” Beam hollered.
    The man picked up a small duffel and hoisted the strap over one shoulder. He turned and began walking away from the river as if in disgust, rising up the landing until his form receded under the locust boughs with their elongate seedpods hung like dead lanterns in those grim and thorny trees. Beam watched him go.
    Since sundown, he’d only given passage to a sulking farmer in a rattling tractor, and the want for company had settled on him a lonesomeness that shivered up through his hands as he gripped the flatboat’s railing. He was used to the feeling. It seemed to follow him wherever he went, though he rarely strayed much beyond the ferry and the surrounding bottom country. On nights his daddy let him off duty, Beam might drive Old Doginto the town of Drakesboro to shoot nine ball at The Doe Eyed Lady, a cramped diner that sold fountain drinks and burgers on Wonderbread, the meat so rare and bloody it turned the buns the color of velvet cake. He shot quarter games when money was tight, dollar high when he’d managed to come by extra dough. He had loose friends who joked and ogled the waitresses with him. But even in those times, when the swell of the diner’s clanging noise shrank down and all the billiards slowed and stilled, Beam yet felt a deep loneliness stagger through him, its footsteps heavy and ominous. He felt it again as he watched the man trek up the landing away from the river.
    Beam unhitched the keeper chains from the jetty cleats and piled them on the flatboat, then crossed the stern and stepped into the tug. He goosed the throttle and the engine gurgled up and a froth of water boiled from the prop as the ferry crept slowly into the current, and the pulleys screaked along their cables. Driftwood bobbled on the river and the soured reek of mud and locust blossoms rose sharp and hot above the charred stink of diesel. When he was close, Beam cut the engine and let the ferry coast into the landing, the aluminum hull grating on the concrete, and then he fastened the chains to the bollards.
    “Five dollars is good money if all you got to do to earn it is run across this river here,” said the man with the duffel. He’d walked back down the landing and now stood just out of the hem of the ferry lights.
    “You got a boat to row yourself across with?” Beam asked.
    “No,” the man said.
    “Then I guess you ain’t got room to complain about the fare.”
    The stranger made no reply. He was a broad man and his scalp showed under a thin crew cut. He wore a pale blue collared shirt creased with filth and the corduroy trousers withered against his legs were also dirty and too small for him so that his bare ankles shone white and boney below the cuffs, and when he stepped aboard the ferry Beam saw the broken tennis shoes hewore were caked with cow manure. A red mustache seeped