Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  “What happens when we find her?” Andre asked.

  “We bring her home.”

  “To what?”

  “I know how to take care of her,” Smoker told him.

  Andre drank his lukewarm coffee. “Why’d you lose her then?”

  “Her mother is responsible.”

  Andre chuckled. Smoker stayed quiet.

  “You want Bird back because she’s yours,” Andre said. “You ought to want to look after her and if you can’t you should hunt for someone who will.”

  “You don’t know. Having children changes you,” Smoker said.

  “I don’t believe it’s changed you at all.”

  Smoker remained quiet a long while.

  “I’m going to change,” he said. “Once we get her home. Remember when she was a baby. I hauled her everywhere with me.”

  “Same can be said about a puppy,” Andre replied.

  Smoker declined to argue more. Men are homeless in this world, Andre thought. Bibles and legends try to make them into heroes but their repetition just emphasizes a man’s impermanence. Last names, most times that’s all a man leaves. Women, on the other hand, are steady as earth. A woman, her home is inside her. Wherever Smoker lit was separate from who he was and where he wanted to be. It’s why he kept moving, Andre realized. His biggest fear was being found out, especially by himself.

  Andre uncapped Smoker’s thermos and freshened his coffee. Above the coulee, the brothers watched the sky come up on the wheat flats. Farmers loaded grain into semis, their cargo worth more than some houses. Stubbled wheat traced the arc of the seed drills that planted it, waiting to be burned or plowed for next year’s crop.

  Highway 2 sped them through little towns, each with a grocery, a tavern for the hands, a bank for the farmers, a crosswalk and a school with a basketball team to argue over, along with gas, which everyone needed so the price was a dollar higher than in cities.

  “I always thought I was better than you,” Andre said.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Smoker replied. “You set your sights mighty high.”

  An hour later, the freeway dropped over Sunset Hill toward the city of Spokane. Maple was the first downtown exit and Smoker signaled for it. They crossed the toll bridge and paid a quarter in the basket. Andre pointed at the far bank. “That’s a big damned dog.”

  Smoker replied, “That’s a bear.”

  Sirens approached and three police cruisers, lights tumbling, rushed over the bridge the opposite direction.

  “They might know shoplifters but they got bears wrong,” Smoker said.

  “How’s that, Wild Kingdom?”

  “Bears don’t like heights,” Smoker said.

  “They climb trees.”

  “Because they got something to hang on to. I can’t imagine why he’d try a bridge once, but he ain’t doubling back.”

  Smoker directed the truck onto a gravel service road that switched back twice then stopped where the bank bent steep as a blade. Their boot edges skidded as they scrambled the incline and clawed at weeds and rocks to avert falling. At the riverbank, basalt blocks, mossy from the falls’ spray, formed a shelf that led to the water. Andre whacked an ankle and hobbled behind Smoker, who loped toward a locust copse. Halfway up one of the trees, a yearling black bear stared at them. The cops’ blue lights lit a park on the river’s other side where they searched the arcade and food trucks.

  A wind gust bent the gaunt tree. The bear scrambled for balance.

  “Stay put,” Smoker said.

  “Me or the bear.”

  “Just watch him,” Smoker said.

  Smoker hiked from the canyon, ten minutes later reappearing with a picnic ham, his rifle, a skinning knife, and a hundred feet of nylon rope. Smoker sawed a tunnel under the ham bone, strung one rope end through, and knotted the loop. He lobbed the ham at the bear and missed. The bear sniffed. Smoker tried again but threw low.

  “Quit throwing like a girl,” Andre said.

  Smoker handed Andre the ham. “Jim Thorpe it up there then.”

  Andre clocked the bear in the head. It roared and batted the air. Andre flung the rope again and once more clouted the bear. It clung tighter to the tree.

  Smoker demanded the rope back.

  “Go over that way a little and hoot,” he ordered Andre.

  “What?”

  “Hoot,” Smoker said.

  “Distract him, you mean?”

  “Hoot. Maybe it’ll remind him he ain’t an owl.”

  “He forgot and flapped up there, you figure?”

  Andre circled the tree toward the river. He cupped his hands and called. After a while, the bear gazed at him, querulous. Smoker sneaked closer and tossed the ham over a near branch. Andre slowly replaced himself next to Smoker. The bear’s eyes tracked him. When the rope entered the animal’s sightline, Smoker tugged enough to rattle the leaves. The ham moved and the bear sniffed it and leaned forward. Smoker jerked the rope again. The bear tipped then tumbled from the tree. The ham landed nearby and the bear bit into it. Smoker tugged the meat from his mouth. It bellowed. Smoker shoved the rope at Andre then scurried ahead. “Lead him.”

  Andre ascended slowly, not interested in antagonizing the animal.

  “Don’t let him catch hold of the food,” Smoker hollered.

  “Better it than me,” Andre replied.

  Smoker hurried farther up then traversed the steepest grade on all fours much like the bear might have. He extended his hand for the rope. Andre threw it to him and followed, as did the bear, which managed better traction than the two men. It encircled both paws around the ham and nearly took Smoker off his feet. Smoker yanked back and tore the meat from the bear’s embrace. It sniffed again. Its rib bones expanded, then faded under its loose skin. It rocked its woolly head. Wind rattled and clacked the ditch weeds. Above, passing cars sounded like the ocean in a seashell. The bear reversed himself for the river. Smoker poked his fingers between his lips and whistled. The bear’s ears pricked. It plopped down, breathing heavy.

  Smoker unholstered the revolver looped onto his belt. “I was hoping to lead him to the rig and save us dragging.”

  A few feet beneath him on the hill, Andre stood between the two. “You aren’t going to shoot this bear.”

  “Them cops give him better odds?” Smoker asked. “Besides, I ain’t slew a bear in three years.”

  Smoker drew from a cigarette and exhaled. Andre scooted the meat down the grade to the bear. The bear flopped the ham, then rolled to his side and licked the salty fat.

  “We could haul him,” Andre told him.

  Smoker laughed.

  “In the camper. Fool him up there just like we were doing.”

  “He’d tear it up and us with it.”

  Andre shook his head. “We’d keep him in feed. He’d just eat and shit and sleep.”

  The bear ripped some meat from the bone and rolled like a dog.

  Smoker blew a breath into the sky. “I didn’t set out to rescue no bear.”

  “You’re the one steered the rig here.”

  “I was just hoping for a little amusement.”

  “Well, I ain’t leaving that bear for them to shoot and I ain’t allowing you to shoot him. That don’t leave much.”

  “Jesus,” Smoker said. “You think we ought to get him laid, too?”

  LAMENTATIONS

  December 1983–February 1984

  Before she accepted her teaching position, Claire had researched the coulee environs. The town bordered a reservation. Unlike the surrounding communities, whose economic and social lives orbited wheat ranches, steady for more than a hundred years, Grand Coulee was a construction town. Erected to build the great dam, the place boomed and busted depending on the whims of government contracts. The uncertainty transformed crisis into the commonplace, so much so most of the residents mounted little energy to deter it. Between jobs, they subsisted on one another’s generosity until they themselves found work and turned benefactors.
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  The other portion worked the dam or union somewhere or taught school or served as bank employees or linemen or read meters with county utilities. They escaped the chaos by avoiding those who had not.

  The reservation, though, she’d had no notion what to expect. Her exposure to things Indian ranged from a grade-school book report on Chief Joseph to a Monument Valley vacation, where she bought a Hopi blanket. What surprised her most was the little difference the reservation seemed to make. She heard nothing of police profiling. No one noted interracial dating.

  The tribe, twelve tribes mashed together for practicality by the government on one reservation loosely governed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, operated a pole plant and attempted to market a uranium mine at Mount Tolman until the details gummed the bureaucracy gears and the project collapsed.

  Many did well. They managed ranches and hired neighbors, some the best cowboys in the country, to work stock. Some rarely left the reservation except their four years of high school. They neither joined clubs nor played sports; they attended no school dances and found the bus home at the end of school every day as soon as possible. The girls, though, often turned into stars of powwows or rodeo queens; others looked after younger siblings.

  Just as many ended up in the coulee. They played basketball, football, ran track. The boys were beautiful, she thought, dark complexions, sleek black hair. Others were blocks of stone, linemen, strong forwards, shot-putters. The girls were just as pretty and just as athletic. And meaner.

  Andre was the exception who went to college and stuck. Many kids possessed the intellect, but though the coulee was not too far from the anchor of the reservation, most university towns were. Even Andre, who stuck out college four years, eventually returned.

  The towns—Nespelem, Keller, Inchelium—were somber and occasionally dangerous. People recounted to her tavern killings initiated by slights that few would notice sober. But the reservation families, despite their troubles, kept one another stitched close.

  Indian beer was Lucky Lager; white people laughed at it but drank it, too. Indian time was a standing joke. Indian kids habitually arrived tardy for class. Claire once inquired of a portly girl as to why. The girl told her she was talking to Sandra and the bell rang. Sandra hadn’t finished. Should I leave her hanging for a bell? I don’t know the bell. I know Sandra.

  * * *

  After a week, Claire visited Andre’s classroom at the last bell to borrow construction paper. As for his exit from the market, she pretended it had not occurred. Most afternoons following, she feigned a need for commiseration or materials or advice.

  A former student often joined him, as well. Carl, a senior, was applying to universities. The counselors had ignored him because he’d suffered mononucleosis freshman year and had to retake classes in summer school; his health still came and went so he only managed Bs in the make-up courses. He didn’t sit for the SAT until fall as a senior. Andre had sprung for the fee. Carl missed only one math question and only half a dozen on the language portion. He made the paper and his school mail delivered applications from Harvard, MIT, and Caltech. The principal summoned him from class once a week to press him toward Stanford, but Carl didn’t trust the sudden interest, so he enlisted Andre to collect recommendations and navigate his forms.

  The boy carried bags at the Safeway, so he excused himself before four. Claire always found her way to Andre’s classroom at a quarter till. At the end of the first week, after the boy exited she kissed Andre, then after each visit, the first few times on the cheek, then on his lips. Finally she asked him to dinner at her apartment, which turned into a habit. He didn’t drink there and remained late enough that alcohol afterward made little sense. Soon he was seeing her every night and rarely drinking at all.

  * * *

  It was following one of these pleasant evenings that Andre’s father, Pork, phoned him at half past two in the morning.

  “You drunk?” Pork asked.

  “I am not,” Andre said.

  Pork ignored him. “That Model 70? You got it still?”

  “Sounds like you’re mid-bender yourself,” Andre said. “The gun’s in the closet.”

  “Thought you might’ve pawned it.” He paused. “You never could shoot much.”

  “If you called to insult me, you might’ve waited till it was light out.”

  “There a window faces the street in your place?”

  “Bedroom does.”

  “Streetlights around?”

  “One or two. You’d get caught stealing something.”

  “I don’t intend any theft.” Pork’s end rattled as he rearranged the phone. “I’ll set up under them lights then you go ahead and shoot me. Left is the heart, remember. My left not yours, goddamnit.”

  “Depends on how you’re facing.”

  “I don’t want to see it,” Pork said. “I’ll face away. West from your building.”

  “That’s south.”

  “South?” Pork said.

  “So where’ll your heart be again?”

  Pork spent a second calculating. Andre could hear him shift inside a phone booth. “I’m facing south now, looking at them blinking towers.”

  “From where?”

  “Safeway parking lot. Across from that video place that won’t sell pornos.”

  “You’re looking east.”

  “Why the hell they call it Main South then.”

  “It ain’t south of everywhere.”

  “Give me a minute,” Pork said.

  Andre listened to him light a cigarette and draw.

  “Seems to me it don’t matter what direction I’m faced.”

  “Sure as hell does. Bullet makes a bigger hole leaving than heading in.”

  “You mean facing you or looking away?”

  “Both.”

  “I’m talking north-south. Compass-type.”

  “That, too,” Andre told him.

  “You’re worse than a woman.”

  “Maybe. But I’m not going to shoot you no matter how early in the morning it is.”

  “I’m coming anyhow.”

  “You want me to make coffee?”

  “I want you to shoot me, goddamnit.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the civil thing to do.”

  Andre perked coffee anyway. Sleep now was out of the question. He marked math problems and examined the rows of hesitant, jotted numerals, attempts by his students to abandon calculations for hope. Unlike other math teachers, Andre refused to identify these as flaws of logic. Too many ways existed to conceive a thing and shape it into sense. He weighed only a capacity to create order on a piece of paper.

  Outside, a taxi’s brakes wheezed and Pork stepped into the streetlight’s halo. He turned toward the apartments, not recalling where Andre resided. He raised his hands and sang out “Now, now, now.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Andre phoned Smoker at Crazy Eddie’s, the only number he consistently answered.

  “Now he wants to be shot,” Andre said.

  “He should have called me,” Smoker told him.

  “That would have solved his problem, but then you’d have one.”

  “No court would convict as long as the jury knew Pork.” The line went quiet while Smoker chewed some sausage. “We could hang him from a tree,” Smoker said finally. “Save a bullet and the noise. Be like recycling.”

  “Might hurt the tree,” Andre said.

  “Find a big old bough and a soft hemp rope. None of that nylon shit. Tree will grow a hundred more rings and not be bothered.”

  “Maybe you misunderstood. The old man requires some redirection.”

  “I heard fine. My way helps you, helps me, helps him, definitely helps anyone in the future that encounters the bastard.”

  “There’s the law to consider. Patricide.”

  “Law’s just a blind lady with dope scales.”

  “Cops, then.”

  Smoker paused. “You’re right, they’re a handful.�
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  “And the Bible. Respect thy father.”

  “Moses couldn’t have predicted Pork.”

  “No, not likely,” Andre said. “Still, we’re his sons.”

  “Sons of bitches,” Smoker said.

  “Now you’re bringing mother up,” Andre said.

  “Mother delivered us into this mess. Pork worst of all.”

  “Well, I am not going to shoot the old man, so he’ll come to you and you’re too damned lazy to shoot anything that you don’t eat, so we’ll be here again, except with a three hundred dollar bar tab and I’ve tired of drinking and mustering bail for those still at it. Might as well save the money and the hangover.”

  * * *

  Smoker agreed to meet Andre the next evening, though he was irritated by the venue: a local public greenhouse. Opening the door wet Smoker’s face. He undid his jacket. He passed hydrangeas bigger than fists and women coddling them. Andre rested on a bench that circled a small tree. A woman next to him read a plant-food bag.

  “She why you’re sober?” Smoker asked him.

  “Maybe I’ll be reason to drink later on,” Claire said.

  “You’re bolder than I figured,” Smoker told her. “My brother usually likes his women quiet.”

  “Usually.” Andre shook his head.

  Claire spoke over him. “I prefer sassy,” she said.

  “Sassy. Now there’s a word you don’t hear much.”

  “It’s on loan from my grandmother. It’s perfectly acceptable in a woman.”

  Claire carried a basket and removed a thermos and poured a third coffee. She had specks for blue eyes and short, darkish hair that eased the blunt lines of her long jaw. Her thin lips seemed as inclined to argument as kindness. Under, she looked to him like a child’s drawing of a stick girl—nothing to quit alcohol over. She’d keep Andre in steady work, Smoker thought, but lead to an uninteresting life.

  “Well, word is Eddie’s closing down,” Smoker said.

  “What in hell for?” Andre asked.

  “You were half his take-home.”

  “Maybe he’ll become a florist,” Claire said.

  “All those bartenders tending flower beds instead of drunks.” Andre chuckled. “I might like that.”