Outside, Andre regarded the highway from the coulee out. He’d traveled it a hundred times, if once. College returning home, Highway 2, first, you hit the air force base, then Reardan, then the Lincoln county seat of Davenport, then Creston in the scablands. Andre recalled seventh-grade basketball, a balcony extended over one of their gymnasium’s corners, where the Creston team would force the ball out of bounds then blanket the inbounder with their tallest player. Opponents had to bounce a pass between his legs or risk the balcony. Eight miles later, Wilbur, and more wheat country, million-dollar land. From Wilbur, you divert for the coulee through more wheat until the highway descended into the rocks. Once an Ice Age glacial dam near Clark Fork stopped a Montana full of water. A thaw blasted the country into a mile-wide gutter. The place looks ravaged by giants.
The highway drops and the coulee walls rise and the sky becomes just a block of blue. Then you see the river, the reservoir, and farther, a mass of concrete that backs the Columbia into Canada.
The dog whimpered in the shadows then squatted and leapt for the open dumpster. Her claws scraped the metal. The sound doubled in the cold stillness. Andre skidded a jerky piece across the frozen lot. The dog halted. She inched herself to the meat, sniffed then ate; he offered her more, each closer until she arrived at his feet. Andre held out his hands and she licked them clean. A piece of him knew Claire would be asleep in the warmed car when he returned and it would be as if he’d never left her, while another remained certain she would be absent and whatever had happened between them had not.
* * *
Claire awoke an hour later, Andre’s shoulder pillowing her cheek; her mouth wet a line on his sleeve.
“Your coffee’s bad,” he told her. “You want more?”
Claire shook her head. “It keeps me awake, as you can tell.” She yawned. “Do you see anyone?”
“Just the doctor there when I’m down with something.”
“To date, I mean.”
Andre didn’t reply. Finally he piled the two empty cups on the floor into his own then stuffed them with the napkins that remained.
“You do,” Claire said.
“What?”
“See someone.”
Andre laughed. Claire wrapped herself in the arms of her jacket.
“Why are you cleaning my car, if not to go?”
Andre stopped.
“I told him to shove off because of you. Stack, I mean,” Claire said.
She dipped her shoulders under her coat then offered her hand to shake and make an end of it. Andre took it. Her skin was as smooth as when he first touched it and his as thick. Her words were all he’d had of a woman’s voice outside grocery checkers and barmaids in two years, and the kiss his first not inflicted by alcohol or mistletoe since high school. The wadded napkins had unfolded inside the cup like petals on a flower, their slumping middle soaked with the dregs. He undid one and let it float to the carpet then another until she joined him, laughing, and soon the floor was cluttered with their mess and more when they rummaged scraps from the glove box and under the seats.
After a time, Andre returned once more to the market for fresh coffee. In the bathroom, he twisted the water to hot, then clamped his eyes shut and scoured his face with powdered soap and stared into the mirror over the sink. Once, in high school, he had scored eighteen points in a basketball playoff, yet near the game’s end stood at the free throw line, certain he would miss. In the second before he directed the shot forward and watched it careen off the rim, everything came clear and he understood that he’d arrived at the boundary of himself and would progress no further.
The back door was next to the restrooms and he employed it again after swapping the two coffees for a six-pack of stout.
Outside, the dog looked at him woefully. Andre opened a beer and ignored her. He filled his pockets with the others then lit out across a field for a road that led to another that led to his trailer and the whiskey there.
GENESIS
October 1941–November 1950
Neither Andre nor Smoker had access enough to their mother’s history to determine where the conflagration she was began. And she was as confounded as the boys.
As a child, summers, Peg spent many days with her mother’s aunt. In a small house overlooking the dam, her great-aunt baked or steamed or braised exotic foods for her neighbors just to satisfy her curious palate. All hours, she maintained a picnic table lined with meals and quantities a business concern would envy. She had cut back the lawn to construct a series of gardens, which held leeks, cabbage, jicama, radicchio, peppers, legumes, squashes of many kinds, turnips, yams, carrots, radishes, onions, chives, endive, dill, sage, turmeric, fennel, and marjoram. Peach and apricot trees shaded carrots in rows and a potato patch. Each summer evening with an air rifle she plunked the raccoons that ventured up the cliff’s twilight to rob her. She reared chickens in a roost on a fenced side lot and two goats for cheese and fried kid. She had tried sheep awhile and a Guernsey but could not hush them enough for the neighbors.
As a toddler, Peg pulled weeds for quarters and when she wanted to ride the carnival coasters. Perhaps, if she had lasted longer, she may have kept Peg sorted out, but she died from a brain aneurism before Peg enrolled in first grade.
By then Peg’s first-blood aunts had scattered like dandelion hair under a hard breath: Bernie, the oldest, into three short-lived marriages and, finally, the low-level political toil in which widows and intellectual divorcées engage to remain of consequence. She once said men were far more satisfying as well-dressed ideas than hairy-legged chimps with no pants.
Martha, the youngest, as dramatic as Bernie was aloof, her mouth a lipstick smear and her mascara-penciled eyebrows wings in flight over smoky gray eyes, burned through her days like a prairie fire with a tailwind. She clipped flowers and put them in her hair and donned loud-print blouses and frightened everyone but her children, whom in summers she deposited with her mother for the season. Peg’s father would permit her to camp with them under the stars where they smoked and hyperventilated and sniffed model glue from paper bags.
Together, the sisters were open wounds and Peg’s father, born in the middle, would flit from one end of the yard to the other at family gatherings, like a bee trying to pollinate warmth between the two. Their hard feelings troubled him more than either of the principals, who counted their anger as only another fact in the world and saw nothing lost in saying so.
Peg had a series of uncles, as well, though none were blood: mechanics and construction cohorts of her father without children of their own to stir or coddle. Edgar, her father’s best friend since grade school, was an orphan. He collected Peg three times a week after dance classes when her parents were otherwise occupied. Peg was a beauty already and aware of it. But when she flirted with him, as prepubescent girls will do, he simply offered her a Tootsie Pop and tuned the radio and sang in falsetto to Frankie Valli, all of which struck Peg as strange as most of her father’s friends leered at her from behind beer bottles and harassed her with Indian burns and tickling if her parents left the room. She prepared for such visits by stuffing her blouse and underwear with toilet paper. As a last resort she pissed her pants and hurried off to change.
* * *
Another uncle, Quantrill, limped as if tipped forward into an ever-present wind, due to a bullet Owen the Cop planted into his spine years before. The month following the shooting, the doctors expected Quantrill to die, then, after he was out of the woods, to remain wheelchair-bound. But fishing season Quantrill hobbled to Osborn Bay and cast in a line. Two hours later he’d landed a stringer of crappie.
By then he was out of surprises, though. Using a shovel was impossible and driving heavy equipment for more than ten minutes numbed his legs so he couldn’t operate pedals. He was a skilled engineer and accepted occasional state survey contracts, but smoked and drank coffee on his house’s covered porch mostly, alternating between two chairs and a swing to remain comfortable. He once attempted to coax
Peg to jerk him off, but she found his hairy fist of balls and dick humorous and laughed, and he quickly zipped his canvas trousers and neither the subject nor his loins were raised again.
When Peg was eight, a neighbor woman hired Quantrill to paint her living room. Quantrill delivered Peg a brush and paint-filled coffee can, told her to go at the walls, then left for the tavern. Peg coated anything within reach. The woman lit into her but Quantrill claimed she was just being thorough. Quantrill did not appreciate argument. The next weekend, Peg found him by the fire pit in his back lot. Next to him was a matchbook and a heavy family Bible. He snapped a stick on a stone edge, watched it light, and then tossed the match into the pit. It died at the hole’s bottom. Quantrill ripped several pages from the Bible and sailed them into the pit, then struck another match. It caught. The pages yellowed with heat and released granite-colored smoke. Quantrill added more then tugged his lower lip like he was figuring. The flame burned low. He wadded several pages into a ball and tossed it at the coals.
“This book, it means something to that woman,” Quantrill explained. He tore another page. “Burning it means something, too.”
Quantrill arranged kindling sticks over the blaze and, when it pinked to coals, added a quartered tamarack. His skin appeared to soften as morning lifted. He set a grate over the fire and a skillet on it then added two ropes of sausage and scrambled the better part of a dozen eggs, then divided them onto paper plates and they drank orange juice from the carton and they breakfasted like gladiators.
* * *
On the other hand, Peg’s parents’ home appeared to possess a stability many of her peers’ lacked. The police only visited to inquire concerning Quantrill’s whereabouts. Her father drank occasionally and her mother not at all. Alcohol made her violently ill. The two spoke to each other civilly and when they disagreed didn’t empty the cabinets or clobber one another with frozen hams or ketchup bottles. Her mother grew petunias and dug weeds because the neighbors expected it. Her father rose at the hour the auto parts manager demanded and returned when the man turned him loose. He derived his most pleasure Saturday mornings, when, in jeans and a plain T-shirt, he tugged at bolts and hunted sticky lifters or bleeding gaskets under the hood of his ’41 Mercury Straight Eight. Several times locals offered twice what it booked and once a collector put up a ’45 Chevy and a ’38 Pontiac Streak to no avail.
When Peg was nine, her father fell from a ladder. With no insurance, he was compelled to sell the car to Quantrill, who let it sit in his driveway. Her father, though, walked the ten blocks separating their houses and ratcheted the braces and nursed the water or fuel pump just like he still possessed it. It was the history he could not face: the parts missing, the misfiring motor of his life.
* * *
By fifth grade, though, Peg either rained vitriol and blows on any adult or child who twisted her tail or stewed at her desk and piled bilious clouds in her mind in order to do so. She was mean weather, not a misguided urchin. Her teachers, good women, attempted to coax potential from her. She loathed the word. She’d rather be called an elephant, rather be an elephant—then she’d only have to pack weight, which was not nearly as bulky as other people’s convictions.
The principal resorted to a retired crone who isolated Peg inside a tiny room for special-ed kids. The woman hissed and plunked Peg’s ear with a ruler whenever she lifted her gaze from her worksheets. “I’ve set straight the likes of you many times, dear,” the woman told her.
The second day Peg sniffed at the woman when she neared her desk.
“What,” the woman said.
“I smell something spoiled,” Peg told her.
“You smell nothing of the kind.”
That evening Peg rustled half a dozen bad eggs from her uncle’s refrigerator. She hid two in an unused desk.
“It’s you,” Peg told her. “You smell like female problems.”
“I do not.” The woman huffed, but any time she approached, Peg grimaced. The woman spent twenty minutes searching the room for odors.
After class, Peg added two more eggs to the radiator vents. Next morning, the woman lined an air freshener and two cans of Lysol on her desk. Peg twisted the thermostat to high.
“Don’t you bathe?” Peg asked the woman.
“You just keep to yourself,” the crone replied, but the authority in her had departed. The next morning she arrived in disarray and applied her lipstick skittishly in front of the coatroom mirror, then rearranged her gray hair and bobby-pinned it in place, but it fell apart before she crossed the room. Peg walked to the board. DOUCHE, she wrote in perfect capital letters.
The woman scurried from the room. Through a window, Peg saw her enter her car and drive from the parking lot. Peg collected the eggs and threw them into the back lot. An hour later the principal escorted her to her regular classroom.
That evening, after an hour detention, the high-school sports bus delivered her home. An overcast sky drizzled. Peg traversed the damp lawn to her family’s front porch and shook herself dry. In the big window, she recognized her parents’ heads. Her father nursed a beer and nodded with the TV news. Her mother scratched at a crossword puzzle. They were accustomed to Peg’s late returns and teacher’s notes and principal’s phone calls.
The end of the light leaked from the sky. Inside, her parents and the room grew yellow and warm in the house lights. Her father extended his arm across the recliner arm and held her mother’s hand, his thumb circling the tiny bones in her mother’s wrist. Peg locked one hand upon the other and searched out the same places, but finding them, felt nothing.
The television anchorman talked but from outside he was just a huge, understanding face she couldn’t hear. Her parents’ hands remained joined and Peg recognized, with the kind of sudden intuition children possess, that her parents, unlike the newsman, were genuine and ordinary, a thing to be proud of compared to a man in makeup reading news at a camera. They aspired nothing past tending each other’s needs and looking after her. Peg knew, if she decided to, she could come through the door and crawl into her father’s recliner and he would loop an arm over her so she could burrow into him and be less separate. And her mother would scurry into the kitchen and fetch her a meal with a glass of milk. Peg would devour the food while they peppered her with questions about her day and she would have a different life, one with quiet and holding hands. It was not some promised land a desert and forty years off. All it required was to twist the knob and lean on the door. Part of her wanted to be warmed and fed by these good people. They were strangers, yes, but everyone was a stranger to everyone else. Her mother and father didn’t intend their strangeness toward her nor she to them and perhaps faith and goodwill could wear a path to each other.
Peg remained on the porch a long while. Her parents’ hands separated. Her mother set out the TV trays and delivered silverware and salt and pepper to her father, then a plate full of roast and potatoes and carrots in gravy. Then she did for herself. They ate carefully, as if eating mattered, and it did; everything mattered for them: the garden, the carburetor float, the silverware in order, and the end wrenches lined accurately in the shop cabinet. And Peg, she mattered as well, most of all, maybe. Each night, separately or together, her parents entered her room after they thought she was asleep. They straightened the dresser drawers, lined underwear and socks in one, blouses in another, T-shirts and pajamas in another yet. They organized her disheveled knickknacks on shelves her father had constructed and tested monthly for level. They repeated the behavior like prayer. And like prayer it was as much for them as for her, Peg knew.
She circled to the backyard and smoked a cigarette. The neighbors’ tabby cat leaped from the slatted fence and approached. It rubbed her legs and purred. Peg scratched it and the cat tipped its nose to the sky with a look past joy—not ecstasy, she knew about that from Quantrill’s stag films—it was, she decided, certainty. The animal was happy and before or after did not penetrate now.
Peg backhanded the cat
and watched it roll then scramble to its feet and examine her, blinking. Then it trod forward and again wound through Peg’s ankles. That was what hope looked like. Peg petted the cat for half an hour until a noise inside startled the animal and it bolted for the fence and home.
Peg checked the kitchen from the back window. Her mother had lined the dishes to dry in the Rubbermaid rack and retreated to the living room. Peg carefully inched open the back slider and descended the stairs to her room in the basement, where she turned the music up and leafed through a Cosmopolitan. Above she heard her parents’ footsteps and felt their worry and it didn’t much concern her.
2
EXODUS
August 1991
Smoker had mounted his hunting camper onto the pickup bed. The roof was patched with tar twice a year and the tin seams resealed a dozen times. Inside, it stank of mold and male sweat and fried meat. In the cabinets were boxes of stale cookies and soda crackers. Rivets in the walls kept the plywood paneling from splitting. Andre added his ditty bag to the mess.
“Where’s your gun?” Smoker asked him.
Andre patted the pistol under his jacket.
“The rifle, I mean.”
“I’ll require a rifle?”
Smoker walked into Andre’s apartment and returned with Andre’s Model 70 and a shell box. He slid them behind the seat.
“It’ll be a concealed weapon now,” Andre said.
“Good thing it’s hid, then.”
Past town, Andre tuned the radio to an old country station that played Conway Twitty then Sammi Smith. Smoker switched it to news.
“You don’t want to do that,” Andre said, though his eyes were closed.
“Thought you were asleep.”
“I sound asleep?”
Smoker drove on. He guided the wheel with his right hand and, with the thumb and forefinger of his left, tapped a rhythm audible only in his head. He’d always trusted intuition and instinct and dumb luck, the latter of which he seemed to possess in heaps.
Whiskey Page 3