The Marrowbone Marble Company

by Glenn Taylor

  Noah smelled of Aqua Velva and gin. The big man smelled of day-old sweat and mildew. Mary tried to bite the hand across her mouth, but it was pressed too hard. She tried to swing her arms and legs, but the men only squeezed her tighter. She was in a vise.

  “I’ll rip that film out of your movie machine,” Noah said into her ear.

  “And I’ll rip your blue jeans and panties off too.” He pressed his groin further into her backside, his arms locked around hers.

  Tears welled in Mary’s eyes. Her breathing went shaky against the big man’s hand.

  “Big Jim here’ll have you first,” Noah whispered. He stuck his tongue in her earhole. “Hussy like you can take on two in a row I’d imagine.”

  Mary went still. She listened for the footfalls of Mack Wells on the gym floor, but there was nothing.

  Big Jim pressed his face to hers. “I’m goin to take my hand away,” he said. A chunk of his nose had been bitten off in a bar fight. He had no eyebrows to speak of. “You make a sound, I’ll do to you what he said I would.” His eyes said he meant it. “You stay quiet, we’ll leave you be.”

  He took his hand away. Mary shook and whimpered a little. The two men stepped back enough to let her fall to the floor, and then Noah took the camera and tore the film out. He put it in his coat pocket and dropped the camera beside her. He said, “There is no way a bunch of Communist longhairs is going to sway an election in Wayne County.” The gin was starting to wear off and his voice lacked the meanness he’d intended. “You keep what happened here to yourself, or it’ll get uglier for everybody at Marrowbone.” Even as he said it, Noah Ball heard the weakness behind his words. He already regretted agreeing to Charlie’s plan of intimidation, and he already feared what would come if the girl didn’t abide.

  Mary gathered her camera as they stepped from the booth and re-pulled the curtain. She smelled them on her skin. She couldn’t catch her breath. What would her daddy do, she wondered, when she told him about this?

  THE CLYDESDALE COLLARS were ill-fitted for Boo and Silver, but the horses pulled steady nonetheless. Behind them, Dimple bent his knees and rode the drag harrow’s T-bar, which he’d fashioned from a downed hickory limb. It was near big as a telephone pole. Trailing him, the heavy chain drug the earth below, loosening the hillside where corn would soon grow. He gripped the leather traces and kept the slack even. In his thumbs, he could feel Silver and Boo strain with each step—the movements of their muscles conducted through the leather like electricity. His palms tingled.

  Dimple had bought the half-rotted collars from old W. D. Ray up the road. W.D. appeared to be liquidating his every possession. He’d wanted five dollars for both collars, and he threw in the brass hames and traces at no charge. When Dimple had offered more, the old man told him, “Rapture’s a comin. Your paper money won’t mean a thing.”

  At the end of the last row, Dimple told the horses, “Whoa,” and stepped off the harrow. He fed them both browned apple slices from his jacket pocket and scratched at their muzzles. Boo had tiny white warts growing all over hers. Papilloma, Staples had called the warts one day. Dimple often wondered how the man knew all that he did.

  He unhitched the horses, relieved them of their harnesses, and turned them loose in the pasture.

  He watched them eat grass, his boot perched on the bottom rung of the split-rail fence. The section swayed a bit, and Dimple shook the post. Another one too wobbly for his liking. He’d have to come back with his sledgehammer.

  Ledford approached from behind. He had a Thermos of coffee and two tin cups. “Thought you could use a little,” he said.

  Dimple nodded his appreciation and took what was offered. It was fresh, and it opened his airways when he sniffed it. Burned his throat when he swallowed.

  “Listen,” Ledford said. “I wondered if I might talk to you about Noah Ball.”

  “The mortician?” Dimple had a toothache. He wasn’t in the mood to talk around things.

  “That’s right.” For two days, ever since Mary told him what happened to her, Ledford had been praying for the strength to stay calm. He’d been trying to figure how to keep blood off his hands.

  Dimple smelled trouble.

  Everybody knew Noah Ball to be a greedy man, and everybody knew he lined the pockets of his friends at the county court. He made their dead kin look pretty in their coffins, and they made him head of the poverty commission. What nobody knew, including Dimple and Wimpy, was what Noah Ball had done to Mary in the voting booth. Ledford had decided to change that.

  Across the pasture, Boo neighed and butted her head against Silver’s haunches. He ignored her.

  “Noah disrespected Mary over at Poke Branch in the primary,” Ledford said.

  “Disrespected her how?” Dimple asked.

  Ledford breathed deep. “He put his hands on her,” he said. “Told her he’d do worse if she squealed.”

  Dimple frowned and regarded the horses. He’d always thought Mary a beautiful child. There was a burning sensation behind his eyes, and he wondered why Ledford hadn’t paid Noah Ball a visit. “Somethin got to be done on that,” he said.

  Ledford agreed. “It’s taken everything I have not to do it myself, but I made a promise…” He didn’t finish the thought. It sounded absurd on the air. Neither man spoke for a moment.

  “What’s Paul Maynard say on it?” Dimple asked.

  “He doesn’t know about it. Nobody does.”

  Dimple looked out over the hillside pasture. They’d cleared a good bit of land for it and the cornfield too. The wind picked up. “Cold front comin,” Dimple said. He shot back the last of his coffee. “Me and Wimpy’ll pay Noah Ball a visit day after tomorrow.”

  Ledford looked at the ground below his feet. “I appreciate it,” he said. He thought for a moment. “I believe we could keep this kind of thing between me, you, and Wimpy, and that’d be it,” he said.

  Dimple watched the horses. The tips of their ears swiveled. He shook the loose fencepost again. “Should have dug these deeper,” he said.

  THE BALL MORTUARY was housed in an old, two-story Victorian on Salvation Street in Elmwood. The gables were trimmed in intricate circles, like a line of bull’s-eyes. There were cornices across the top tower and the porch wrapped around the left side of the house. Its boards creaked under Dimple as he fingered the gingerbread trim along a windowsill. “I hate this kind of house,” he told Wimpy, who followed.

  “I think it’s pretty,” Wimpy said.

  When they got to the side door, Dimple gave the knob a try. It was unlocked. When he opened it, the stained glass seemed to move in its lead cames, as if the whole panel might fall.

  There was music inside the house. The further in they stepped, the louder it got. It was coming from below.

  The Bonecutters took out their bandanas.

  Down in the basement, Gene Autry was on the phonograph. Noah Ball loved Gene Autry songs, and if there was a duet, he always sang in time with the woman. “I’ve got spurs that jingle jangle jingle,” he crooned, slightly louder than the record player in the corner. He moved his feet on the checkbox linoleum floor, never picking up Gene Autry’s intended rhythm. Noah was a vain man, as evidenced by his manicured mustache and nose-holes plucked clean of strays. He wore yellow rubber gloves and flicked his middle finger against an orange tube he’d inserted into the carotid artery of the dead woman before him on the table. She was old. Her skin was gray. He’d yet to trim her toenails, which had gone black and curled over the ends of her toes like snail shells.

  He went on singing. “And that song ain’t so very far from—”

  The cold nose of the Smith & Wesson was at his neck. “Walk over and shut it off,” Dimple said.

  Noah did as he was told, the revolver’s barrel stuck to him all the way. He was careful not to scratch his record when he lifted the needle.

  In an instant, the room was silent. Out of the corner of his eye, Noah made out a second man at the foot of the stairs, and in the silver reflection
of the embalming tank to his left, he could see a dark figure behind him.

  “Cover her up,” Dimple said. He hated to see a dead woman like that, her parts out in the open.

  Noah threw a sheet over the body. He’d yet to utter a word. He thought momentarily of the secret room he kept behind the bookcase.

  Dimple took the gun from his neck and stepped back. He cocked his right leg as far as he could and swung it forward hard, his shinbone connecting dead center between the man’s legs. Noah emitted a sound like that of a vacuum turning on and dropped to the floor.

  The brothers wore the black toboggans Rachel had knit them three Christmases back. It was the first time they’d ever put them on. They wore their bandanas clear up to the eyes. Paisley red, and old. Each had on a common barn coat and blue jeans. Their oldest, most nondescript boots.

  Noah stared up at them from the floor, where he clutched at the rising bruise in his stomach and tried not to retch. He thought his eyes might be playing tricks on him. These two were out of a movie.

  “See here, Noah Ball,” Dimple said. “And I mean listen. Or next time, I’ll take those crushed nuts of yours with me like a souvenir, and I’ll rip your dick out, too, you hear me?”

  Noah just breathed heavy. “Hear me?” Dimple roared.

  Wimpy pulled a seven-inch dagger blade from his belt. He raised it up and swung it down, ironwood handle heavy as its name. The knife tip stuck in the linoleum with a dull thud.

  “Yes, yes, I hear you,” Noah managed. He pissed himself a little, wondered if there was blood in it.

  Dimple crouched to him. His revolvered hand went lazy. “You ever lay a finger on another Marrowbone woman,” he said, pointing with his gun, “that knife’ll be up to the hilt in your danglers.”

  Noah shuddered. He made a quiet, whimpering sound, then managed to stay relatively still.

  Dimple stood up. They’d started to walk up the stairs when he turned back. “You tell your cousin Charlie or Shorty Maynard about this, you’ll be might sorry,” he said. “Do you think I mean what I say?” he asked. It had gotten sweaty under the bandana. He could smell his own foul breath.

  “Yessir,” Noah said. He was prone, his chin tucked.

  From the stairs, they could only see the ugly crown of his balding head. “Me and him both got no problem stabbin’ a man like you,” Dimple said. “Gets easier ever time we do it.” He glared over the bandana’s rim, stepped down from the stair, and walked to the record player. He lifted the arm and set the needle down. The whistles waddled happy. “Try not to sing the ladies’ part this time,” Dimple said. “You ain’t got the pipes for it.” He ascended the stairs behind his brother.

  Gene Autry sang, “Yippy yay, there’ll be no wedding bells today.”

  JUNE 1966

  CHARLES TOWN RACE TRACK was a half-miler in the state’s eastern panhandle. Erm had first bet its windows in 1948—a side trip from some business in Baltimore. “Bush league,” Chicago bookies said of the West Virginia track. The purse on a day’s races wasn’t half that of a track like Hawthorne. But by 1966, Erm owned and stabled three horses at Charles Town, and he had everyone on the take.

  He had two Airstream trailers out back of the stables. One was for Fury. The other was for Erm and his girl of the month.

  At five a.m., Fury shoved a doughnut in Willy’s mouth and flicked him in the forehead. The trailer smelled of beer. “Let’s go,” Fury said. “We’re going to miss the morning workout.”

  The sun rose over the steel plant smokestacks, casting shadows across the track’s turned dirt. Exercise boys in dusty T-shirts mounted horses on the afternoon card, and a man with a cigarette behind each ear called out the day’s scratches. “Ain’t no rain comin,” he said. “Stay on your mount or that dirt’ll snap your neck.” He pulled the cigarette from his right ear and lit it with the one in his lips.

  Erm leaned on the rail by the finish pole. He studied his short form and talked to a fat man in a bowler hat. “Him,” Erm said, pointing to a young jockey working out Tuna Melt, one of his three horses.

  “Smart,” the fat man said. “Save two bills makin him git up this early.”

  “Damn right,” Erm said. The exercise boys commanded a two-dollar rate for morning work, but a prospective jockey got nothing.

  Erm watched the kid around the quarter turn. His stirrups were too low.

  Willy squinted at the sun. He’d never been to the eastern panhandle, and its relative flatness didn’t agree with him.

  “Here,” Fury said. He handed Willy a paper cup of steaming coffee.

  “Thanks.”

  “You see the kid on the brown filly? That’s the new jock.” Fury pointed to the same rider his father was watching.

  “Did you ever want to be a jockey?” Willy scorched his tongue on the coffee.

  “What the fuck are you talking about? I’m five foot ten.” Fury snorted morning snot and spat it on the ground.

  “Oh. Yeah,” Willy said. He gripped the track’s rail in his hand, knocked his cast against it. Across his forearm, in black paint on plaster, were the words ORB WAS HERE. Willy had punched a wall at the gym and broken two bones in his hand and wrist. The doctor had shaken his head at the X rays. “You’ve fractured both a carpal and metacarpal,” he’d said, pointing with his pencil to something Willy couldn’t see.

  His temper had gotten the better of him again. He’d been on edge, in the first place—Josephine was keeping him a secret from her family. Something had happened to Mary that no one would speak to. Then, Hambone Maynard had sold Orb a cup of lemonade for a nickel. After watching him drink it down, Hambone told Orb that he’d pissed in it. Orb ran off to sit with his dogs. Chester found him there, reported the event to Willy at the gym. “The hefty boy called Orb a bad name,” Chester had said. “He called Orb a dough-baked half-wit.” That’s when Willy punched the wall. He’d lain in bed for three days after the cast. He’d taken up smoking again.

  He’d be a freshman at Marshall in August. Fury wasn’t going to college. He’d enlisted in the Marine Corps. Vietnam awaited, and this was Fury’s last hurrah.

  By the day’s third race, the sun cut through the grandstand opening. Fury and Willy sat on benches and ate hot dogs with onion and mustard. “Watch this,” Fury said. He pulled a gold-handled magnifying glass from the big paper sack at his feet. It was difficult to find the right angle, but eventually Fury found it. The sun’s rays came through the glass in a pinpoint of blue-white light.

  Willy watched the target just below them, a man wearing overalls in the infield.

  “Watch his neck,” Fury said. A circle the size of a ladybug danced on the tanned neck of the overalled man. Fury got it still. The man twitched and twisted free. His arm shot back and slapped his burnt skin.

  This delighted Willy. He laughed RC Cola right out his nose-holes. Fury shushed him and hid the magnifying glass. The man had turned around and was searching wildly for the yellowjacket that stung him. Fury said, “Stupid railbird hillbilly. Half wit’ll spend his last dollar on a longshot cause he likes its name.” He knocked back the end of a beer.

  Willy quit laughing.

  Inside the riders’ room, four tiny men sat at a card table playing five-card draw. All smoked. All wore undershirts and jockstraps. Four Styrofoam cups bled rings on the cheap laminate top, screwdrivers all around. They anted and called and the youngest laid out his cards. “Four eights, King high,” he said.

  There was a groan, then the sliding of quarters into a pile.

  Three other jockeys were in the room, pulling on socks in front of their lockers. Two were overweight and one was bald. They’d not been invited to play.

  Erm came through the door. “Take a walk,” he said to the men at the lockers.

  “But we got to get in our silks,” the bald one answered.

  Erm stuck his face in the bald man’s direction. “I said take a fuckin walk.”

  They did so.

  Erm pulled a chair to the card table and produc
ed four envelopes from his inside pocket. “Just do what we talked about,” he said.

  Back by the grandstand, a ticket stooper looked up women’s skirts. “Look at this bum,” Fury said, pointing to the man. “Anything for a beaver shot I guess.”

  When the announcer called “Twenty minutes to post,” Fury reached into his brown bag and produced a fat roll of bills.

  “Why don’t you just keep that in your pocket?” Willy asked.

  Fury didn’t answer. He was peeling off fifties. He licked his thumb just as he’d seen his father do a thousand times. He handed six fifty-dollar bills to Willy and put six of his own in his shirt pocket. “Remember,” he said, “all you have to say is one sentence—‘Twenty-five on Tuna Melt to win, fifteen on First Edition to place, ten on Heav’nly King to show.’ Say it back to me.”

  Willy repeated it word for word. He’d have to say it six more times in the next twenty minutes.

  When they got to the betting bay, lines were longer than Fury had anticipated. “Fucking payday,” he said under his breath. They’d have to work fast. “Look,” he said to Willy. “Stagger your lines. Got it? Go to that one first, then skip down two lines to that one, skip two more, and so on.” He pointed as he explained. “Keep your ballcap on at the first, take it off at the second, and keep rotating that way.”

  “Got it,” Willy said.

  “Most of these ticket sifters are in the know,” Fury said. “But you can’t be too careful.”

  Fury slid into the bathroom. Inside a stall, he pulled an overcoat, fedora, and sunglasses from his brown bag. He put them on and headed for the betting windows.

  In all, they placed the same bet to twelve different countermen. Fury changed in the bathroom again, and they walked back to their seats with eighteen tickets apiece.

  When the gate opened, two of the paid-off jockeys yanked hard on their reins. They kept their elbows tucked so as not to be obvious. Their horses would never recover from such a start. The kid on Tuna Melt got a great break from the three position. After the morning workout, he’d adjusted his stirrups, and now he was riding hard all the way.