Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

“Make the next morning more tolerable,” Smoker allowed.

  Claire twined her hand in Andre’s, which encouraged him.

  “Maybe I’ll try dieting next and close Safeway.”

  “They deserve it, charging what they do for a pound of hamburger.”

  “Another penny saved,” Claire said.

  She was sharp, Smoker could see, reining Andre like a horse but allowing him to feel in the lead. Too much bridle or too little and Andre would spit the bit and she and Smoker might be stuck talking to each other.

  “How’s Bird?” Andre inquired. Andre loved his niece dearly and monitored Smoker’s parenting. He knew Dede could not find the straight and narrow on her own, even if she had an interest, and he knew, too, his brother, though he loved his daughter without reservation, was subject to distraction.

  “She’s smart as a whip,” Smoker said. “Gets As in everything without kissing the teacher’s patootie.” Smoker paused. “Speaking of, how goes school and corrupting taxpayers’ children?”

  “School bus driver shook them up last week. District is down to hiring kids fresh out of high school again, and one, well, his buddy squealed his tires enough the gravel rattled the bus fenders. The driver didn’t like to see government property mistreated, I guess, because once he hit the grade he got that yellow dog loping fast enough to keep respectable. Fourth graders said the speedometer passed eighty and apparently he swapped some paint with a guardrail.” Andre pointed at Smoker. “Kind of story they’d tell about him.”

  “You’d not catch me in that predicament,” Smoker said.

  “You stole one once.”

  “I just hid the thing. Somebody else got it out of the yard.”

  None of them spoke.

  “So you’re scraping roads still?” Andre asked finally.

  “The country no longer needs my services according to management,” Smoker told him.

  “It’s winter still. They figure it will stop storming?”

  “What they think is all that matters,” Smoker said.

  “You get enough time in to collect rocking chair?”

  “Not according to the unemployment woman.”

  “She’s a stickler.” Andre hauled his checkbook from his pocket.

  “If you ain’t buying something put that away.” All his brother understood of belittling was from the other end, Smoker knew, and if a woman hadn’t been present, Smoker would have found the pen himself. He felt sullen not enduring his brother’s kindness or sorting a better way through it. “I’ll remember you before I miss a meal,” Smoker told him.

  Claire bent and sorted her basket for three thick sandwiches wrapped in butcher paper. She offered Smoker one. “As long as the subject is food,” she said.

  Smoker unwrapped the paper. Inside was a bakery poor boy bun, thin cold cuts carved from whole meats, unlike the processed slices Smoker piled onto his own lunch sandwiches. A bite required his full attention; Smoker tasted mustard and jalapeños along with fresh lettuce and tomatoes. Andre and Claire laughed out loud at his effort. Andre opened his pocketknife and Smoker divided the sandwich into manageable portions.

  “I can see why you keep her on,” Smoker said.

  “Your brother is the architect of this fine repast,” Claire told him.

  “She turn you deli man, too?”

  “You used to eat my food, if you recall.”

  Nights their parents closed the bars, Andre had concocted meals large enough he and Smoker couldn’t finish them, which guaranteed fodder for their parents’ bellies. Pepper steak with rice. Roasts with any available vegetable or tuber in the broth. Crock-pot chickens and dough dumplings the size of fists.

  After their sandwiches, Claire deposited their trash into a metal wastebasket then walked toward a low-ceilinged portion of the greenhouse where a bare bulb lit the rose blooms. Her dark hair reflected the light. Her shoulders remained straight, like good posture might offset being ordinary. Through the opaque glass, Smoker could make out smoky shapes where the county prisoners had shoveled sawdust to insulate the dormant perennials outside and dipped the gunnysacks in concrete to anchor them. The light flattened under low clouds and the dropping temperature.

  “The flowers don’t smell,” Smoker said.

  “They’ve got to be outside to be perfumey,” Andre told him.

  Claire spooned nitrogen pellets into a plastic cup and spread them below a sickly rose.

  “So, you’re gardening in winter,” Smoker said.

  “Good trick, ain’t it?”

  “For those that way inclined,” Smoker said. “Maybe flowers aren’t the point.”

  “What is, then?”

  Smoker chuckled. “I do believe I’ll have me a smoke, if I can beg your pardon.”

  Outside, the clouds smudged the moon yellow. Falling snow collected on Smoker’s jacket. There wasn’t much profit in determining which weather approached if you had no power to will it forward or ward it off. Like predicting a hangover, knowing it’s pending didn’t make it any less due. Smoker searched his jacket for cigarettes and matches but had no luck. After a time, Andre joined him. He hauled a weathered pack of Marlboros from an inside pocket. One slid free when Andre tapped the top. He directed the package to his brother then struck a match and watched Smoker pull the cigarette’s end to an ember. “Thought you might have given these up, too.”

  “I have,” Andre said.

  Smoker laughed. “You’re oddly equipped then.”

  “You remember the last time you bought cigarettes?”

  Smoker examined the package. The cellophane caught the light. He shoved it and the matches into his coat.

  “So what do you want to do with Pork?” Smoker asked.

  “Detox.”

  “Again?”

  “Hard to convert a believer,” Andre said. He shifted his legs against the cold.

  “I suppose you enjoy a steady cook,” Smoker said.

  Andre buried his hands in his jacket and straightened his arms.

  “Breakfasts in particular,” Smoker went on.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Andre told him.

  “Got to keep up schoolteacher appearances, I suppose.”

  “That’s not it,” Andre said.

  “You tell me what would drive you out of her warm bed then?”

  “Not residing in it in the first place,” Andre said.

  Smoker smoked awhile. They both studied the snowfall. Smoker said finally, “She’s a little shy likely.” He inhaled his cigarette ash red then watched it darken. “Women are supposed to be reluctant. Keeps them from thinking badly of themselves.” He threw his cigarette onto the gravel and ground the ash out, then lit a second one and flicked the burning match at Andre. “You need a ruse,” Smoker said. “In football when they fake a handoff and throw the bomb. Keeps the defense occupied. You know the plumbing, don’t you?”

  “I graduated college. They did require you pass a science class or two.”

  Smoker tapped his cigarette and watched the falling ash pock the snow.

  “Getting her drunk is out of the question, I suppose.”

  “Seems unlikely,” Andre said.

  “You never inquired with her. Just asked, I mean?”

  “No, and I never asked NASA to put me on the moon, neither.”

  “That’s too bad,” Smoker said. “I’d like to be brother of a man that stepped on the moon. Might get me laid sometime if I was to meet a woman who liked planets and such.”

  “Moon isn’t a planet. It’s a satellite.”

  “And you ain’t sleeping with your woman, no matter what we call the lights in the sky.”

  The snow carpeted the pavement and the grass walk to the arboretum. Smoker breathed a deep breath. “She ain’t a math problem,” he said. “Six and six will make twelve all day long, but a woman turns fourteen or fifteen or eleven depending on what time of day you do the figuring.”

  Andre took the cigarette pack from Smoker’s jacket and struck a match. Sm
oker watched him draw one lit.

  Andre said, “We shouldn’t speak about her like schoolwork.” He returned the cigarette package to Smoker.

  “You stubborn bastard. You’re already goddamn calculus; you just dress up like two plus two.” Snow collected on his boots. He moved a toe and snowflakes slid into the gravel. “She’s no magazine model,” Smoker said. “She’s likely as skittish as you.”

  “Not good enough for you to look twice, you mean.”

  “I never said that.”

  “It doesn’t matter how common we are.”

  “I never said you was common,” Smoker told him.

  Smoker watched Andre lift his foot and press his cigarette into the sole of his tennis shoe. His brother was not inclined to bend, not even in elementary school. He did not look for fights, but he was uninclined to give ground if someone crossed him. On the playground, children often turned to fists. The crazy ones you never knew what would make them laugh one minute and have them throwing hands the next. Andre had boundaries. His rules were like those of a knight, though of what order no one knew, including Andre himself.

  “You’ll be at Eddie’s later?” Andre asked.

  Smoker glanced up. “This ain’t reason to drink.”

  Andre disappeared through the hothouse door. Through the fogged glass, Smoker watched him unhook an apron from a peg. Claire knotted it behind him. They selected tools from a rack then tilled the shining, damp earth. Andre opened a faucet and settled its hose in a box, alternating sides to prevent water gullying the dirt. Claire pruned another flower with shears, determining which branches to let bud and which were too tired to merit going on.

  Smoker finished his cigarette in the cold then another. His mind searched but he could figure nothing to do but follow inside. There, he heard Andre question Claire about fertilizer. Claire hunted a spray bottle for the blossoms. She adjusted the nozzle and aimed it and a place in Andre’s T-shirt dampened. His face remained still despite the assault, and she put the next stream between his eyes. He blinked. She laughed and kissed him and Smoker worried Andre might cease being at all if she dropped her gaze. When they saw Smoker, they shied awhile then returned to misting the rose petals, and Smoker realized the only happiness he himself knew was the absence of worry. He plucked a claw from an open drawer and drew it through a flower box. The dirt parted into rows. The clean lines pleased him and he repeated them. A gray-haired woman finished with a watering can. He accepted it and the water blackened the dirt over the root mass in the box. The soil inundated, Smoker scooped fertilizer from a bag with his hands. The nitrogen stung, and after he scattered it onto the dirt, he plunged his fingers into the water to soothe them. Across the room Andre worked the lilies, which apparently kept their perfume indoors; he passed one off the bloom to Claire, who cupped the flower, then closed her eyes and inhaled and suddenly turned nothing plain at all.

  An hour later, the three exited the greenhouse. Half a foot of snow had piled against the building’s windward wall. Claire’s duplex was a mile away. She and Andre had walked the gravel road to the park, but considering the weather, they accepted Smoker’s offer to deliver them home. His unstudded tires couldn’t keep to the grade, however, and the pickup skated broadside into a cross street, them laughing.

  Behind them, a patrolman hit his lights and stopped. He chatted with Smoker about other storms, in December of ’68 and January of ’79. The cop had radioed the incident so was required to run Smoker’s license. The snow climbed the windshield while the defrost fan cleared their breath fog. Smoker hit the wipers. Through the glass he could see the cop withdraw his radio receiver and speak into it, then write, then wait for a return call, which seemed a long time in coming.

  “Give me your billfold, brother,” Smoker said.

  Andre handed his wallet to Smoker, who removed the cash and a credit card and gave them to Claire.

  “I could just run a tab,” Andre said.

  “Nope,” Smoker said. “I used your credit up. Eddie won’t take anything but green money or good plastic from either of us.”

  The streetlights turned vague and seemed to hover in the snow-crowded air. Tomorrow, following the storm, the temperature would drop near zero. Smoker liked the cold. It numbed his skin but put a skitter in his chest the same as a whiff of fresh tobacco or the first card in a poker hand. The patrolman opened the squad car’s door.

  “Claire,” Smoker said, “you tend to my brother, now. See he wakes up with the alarm and makes you coffee before he leaves for work and such. And he needs to be put to bed early.”

  Claire stared at Smoker. The cop rapped the window and Smoker cranked it open. Someone Smoker’s description had torn the tire stems from four county graders.

  “I heard that, too,” Smoker said.

  Outside, the squad car radio squawked, and the cop read Smoker his rights and applied the handcuffs.

  “You all got a King James?” Smoker asked.

  The cop said as far as he knew.

  “Good, them New Internationals read like school board minutes.”

  Andre and Claire stepped outside the car and huddled. Claire turned toward Smoker and the cop. Her eyes glistened, but she wasn’t crying. She uncrossed Andre’s arms so that she could get herself inside them.

  Andre said, loud, “Morning, I’ll go your bail.”

  The cop replied, “The judge has already been to town this week. Be another at least before he comes back.”

  “Told you I’d make meals,” Smoker said.

  Andre nodded. “You want me to fetch Bird?”

  “If Dede slips up. You see her in the tavern check Vera. Dede usually has enough sense to leave her there. You can offer to spell Vera but I’d wear a helmet when you inquire.”

  Claire laughed and Andre did, too. Smoker was glad to bring it from them. Snow the consistency of flower petals stuck in his hair. It gathered on his shoulders and arms and covered the cop’s uniform. It had turned relief, getting caught, part of the whole of the country going white and fair.

  GENESIS

  September 1950–November 1957

  As a teenager, Pork did not appear to pine for girls’ sweet faces and private parts. Despite this, his cousin Delbert felt compelled to educate him on such matters and saw Sophie Andrews as the cure. She had bloomed to a pear-shape after middle school and remained only middling in the face, but Pork was no prize himself so Delbert did not aim higher. He convinced Pork to meet at the reservoir. The beach was cold and deserted.

  Delbert beckoned, whiskey bottle in his fist. Sophie demanded the whiskey then after a long draft set the bottle in the sand. Delbert lifted it and strolled for the spindly locusts out of the wind. Sophie clamped Pork’s hand and dragged him along the beach. Half a moon smeared with clouds was all that lit them. Sophie plopped onto the sand, but Pork kept upright; his eyes tracked the mile of lights where the dam held the river. Beside him, Sophie’s dark hair was long and straight; her face brooded under its swooping shadow, her eyes, a little white crowded the brown in the middle. Sitting would reduce Pork’s heart to coupled plumbing while not would leave him stupid about what everybody wanted to know.

  Delbert had built a fire with driftwood, and Sophie, finally bored, rose and began for it. A few minutes later, Pork followed. Closer, he saw another girl had joined Delbert: Pam. Her auburn hair was tugged back with a comb; it yellowed in the light. Her face was as delicate and smooth as museum sculptures.

  Opposite her, Delbert drew circles in the sand with his boot. Sophie took the whiskey and disappeared. Delbert chased after.

  “You ever beat anyone up?” Peg asked him.

  Smoke tufts undid against the cold. Pork recognized a blinking beacon, unsure if it was a satellite or airliner. He had been in two fights in his life, both the same day. In a pickup basketball game, Jasper Hart flung an elbow into Pork’s throat. Jasper was a minor nuisance, but he had been throwing himself into people like he was Rocky Marciano. Pork’s patience finally thinned. He dislocated
Jasper’s jaw with a single blow then kicked in two ribs. Jasper’s partner hauled him to the emergency room and an hour later arrived with Jasper’s older brother, Arlo, a wrestler who graduated two years before. The brother was only half out of the car when Pork threw his shoulder into the door and pinned his leg. Arlo hollered. Pork grabbed a handful of scalp with one hand then collected the ball, still bouncing, with the other, and shoved it into Arlo’s face. Blood pocked their shirts, the car window and door. The boy driving hit the accelerator and cranked the wheel while Arlo clutched the open door, ankles dragging.

  “Maybe they got a dog you could whip, too,” an onlooker said.

  The girl in front of him shifted her legs. Each step loaded her sandals until she unloosed it with the next one.

  “Some girls like that,” she said. “I wish I could beat someone up.”

  “Find somebody littler’s all the trick to it.”

  Her lips, neither thick nor thin but some pretty and animated place cut between, parted and her teeth looked to have been straightened by braces; they weren’t perfect but looked better for not being. A dimple pooled beside her mouth. Pork rotated the fire’s top stick to the bottom. Her shadow crossed his like a weight and she bent to peer into the flame while the fresh wood snapped and took. The fire spat a coal into the wind. It smoldered and Pork scooped a handful of sand over the cinder. He piled more until he had built a hill and thought nothing at all, which, beside a beautiful girl, seemed quite a trick.

  * * *

  Pork was not altogether surprised when Peg applied for a ride the week after. When he was thirteen, he spent his harvest wages on a ’55 Chevy Bel Air and devoted three years to scrapheap it past cherry.

  Pork had no delusions when the rides became habit. The car and avoiding a long walk led her to him at the school day’s end, and her beauty paid the fare, nothing more. She operated the heater and he the radio. They both scraped if the windows frosted. The first time he hit the filling station, she offered to share gas, but Pork declined. Afterward, he topped off outside town to spare her the awkwardness.

  Pork saw her only on school days and never after dropping her off. Occasionally, evenings, he’d circle her block but never caught her as much as peeking from the window. She told him she suffered bad dreams and that was why she drew her curtains. Younger, a series of his own nightmares had set Pork back in a similar manner. He’d filled his bottom lip with coffee grounds like a tobacco chaw, which kept off sleep altogether until his vision went lacy and time was only a skinny stick chasing a fat one. The school found him out when he spelled “Kentucky” aloud instead of solving the multiplication problem the teacher had proffered.