Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  Rumors put Peg as born-and-bred Wenatchee, but Wenatchee had not fit her and she departed in a haste that appeared beyond choice. The law didn’t permit newspapers to print juvenile cases, so, outside that, her past remained conjecture. Pork allotted it to the gossips. Peg was no assistance regarding them. When foolhardy boys risked advances, she wagged her chin at them like a man would. They felt more likely to end up in a fistfight with her than survive long enough for a kiss. To the girls, she was beauty multiplied by boldness, and evil was the product of that sort of math every time. In class she was as mouthy as the worst hellions. She’d been kicked out of American Literature three times, the last for composing an essay on Don Quixote—which she hadn’t bothered to read—in Spanish and then arguing for extra credit.

  Just before Christmas, she arrived at the car with ice in her hair. Pork hurried her into the backseat and closed his eyes while she stripped to underclothes and covered herself with a wool blanket he kept beneath the seat. The next day, she threatened her Home Ec teacher over a dinner-roll recipe and was suspended. After school, she ordered Pork to trail the woman home. Peg saw she kept cats and proceeded to scheme.

  “Those animals don’t know dinner rolls from toilet bowls,” Pork told her. “You want to bust on them, you’re on your own.”

  He carted her to the uncle with whom she resided and retrieved her each morning of her punishment so as not to give her up. During school hours she hid in the car with sack lunches and read novels, then rewarded him the next week with a dozen cookies so salty they threw them to the dogs across the street.

  “Maybe that teacher had a point,” Peg said.

  Valentine’s Day, Pork detected Sophie and Delbert climbing an eave above the parking-lot double doors armed with water balloons. Peg’s class was nearest the exit and first out.

  “Let off, or I’ll crease you good.” Pork glared at Sophie. “I ain’t above hitting girls,” he said.

  The two released their balloons. They skidded across the frozen shingles and broke on the gutter. The school bell clanged. Peg walked past Pork into the parking lot then recognized Delbert and Sophie above. In her uncle’s driveway, she kissed his forehead before exiting the car.

  * * *

  March, Peg offered his taxi service to others: girls, usually pudgy or beany or funny-toothed. Some chattered as they had since third grade, aiming their jabber at him or Peg or both or neither, others thanked him, then rode mute, like quiet kept off looking peculiar.

  May Day, Peg invited him on a picnic. Pork collected her late morning along with another girl, Ruth. The wind gusted Peg’s hair; she laid the backseat blanket on the sand. Pork anchored it with four stones and they ate their sandwiches and fruit. Ruth huddled against Pork for a windbreak. Seeing it, Peg made for the swing set and outbuildings across the park. Ruth entwined her pinkie finger with his. In grade school, her blond hair had reached her waist but frayed most of the way. She’d pruned it as a freshman, which softened her cheeks and she became prettier. Now she tipped her face toward Pork’s and kissed him. Far off, Pork heard Peg’s swing squawk.

  The trip home, Pork hiked the radio volume to avoid speaking or listening to either of them. After he let off Ruth, Peg moved up front.

  “She likes you,” Peg told him.

  Pork didn’t reply; instead he planted his hand onto hers. Her eyes gathered him in without a crumb of malice or ardor. He did not retreat, however, and after a time, she tipped herself across the shifter and inclined her head into his shoulder.

  “Get a six-pack,” she told him.

  Pork’s youngest uncle agreed to bootleg and, after, they parked in a hidden maintenance road atop Almira hill. Peg uncovered her basket. Inside lay a whiskey pint. She cracked the seal and drank. Pork sipped a little, too, though he was not yet inclined. He occupied himself with his beer. The coulee bottom darkened and the town lights came up. Pork examined his hand in Peg’s, square and scarred from the beating work required. Her ring finger tapped him nervously. He glanced up and her dry lips whispered. He bent to hear. She stroked the fleshy underpart of his jaw, then his throat. His blood circled beneath her fingers; air passed, too. She was making herself like them.

  Pork slanted his face to accommodate hers and, as her mouth descended, he shut his eyes. She kissed him tenderly and for a good while, then took a breath and clobbered him with her mouth hard enough to split his lip, which was little price to pay for such a kiss.

  Peg drew back, her lips rosy with his blood.

  “You take it, but you won’t dish it out,” she told him. “That’s your problem.”

  “Thought the other way was what you had to watch for.”

  “Well, it’s not,” she said.

  Pork daubed his lip with a jacket sleeve. Peg looked through the windshield at the silver sky.

  “A boy,” Peg said. “It’s why I moved here. It’s why I’m not interested.”

  “I doubt any guy could chase you.”

  “He hurt me.”

  “How?”

  “You’re dingy as a woman sometimes.” Peg sighed. “He took me when I wouldn’t permit it. Okay?”

  “Who?” Pork asked her.

  “Raymond Charles.”

  “Like the singer? Ray Charles.”

  “Yes.”

  “He black?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  * * *

  Peg spoke no more of Ray Charles, but a week later, he left a note for his parents that he’d gone bear hunting. That night, he arrived at Wenatchee’s high school. His driver’s license failed to trip the door bolts, disillusioning him with TV spies. He jimmied a classroom window and wedged his legs through the opening, but the bulk of him flopped outside like a fish on a stringer. He finally abandoned subtlety and smashed a bathroom window with a construction block. Lurching through, he tore his forehead.

  In the building, he carved Peg’s name into anything that took a blade then ripped a blanket from his trunk into bandages and stitched himself with fishing line. Morning, he registered for classes using Elston Howard as a moniker. For parents, he penciled none and when queried informed the secretary they’d been assassinated by thieves mad on reefer. The secretary offered him a cookie.

  Wenatchee’s school could hold ten of Pork’s. A few boys snickered at him; one hummed “Yankee Doodle.” Pork shoved him into a locker. Peg’s name was in the girls’ bathrooms, too, and passing time, a dozen assembled and fussed over a beauty named Sharon.

  “If she was coming back, she’d cut your name into the wall, not hers,” one of them said. “Then you’d be in trouble.”

  “She doesn’t make sense,” Sharon said. “That’s not how she does it.” Even agitated, part of the girl’s face looked as placid as a glass pane.

  Pissing the first afternoon, Pork asked a towheaded boy about the hoo-ha. Some girl, he said. The next day, Pork learned Peg had lived south where the houses gave up to double-wides. Her grades were Cs. She refused homework and relied on test scores to pass.

  Afternoon, the principal, a gaunt man with pinched eyes and a patchy goatee, summoned him inside a windowless room. He shoved Pork into a chair and stood over him.

  “How’d you acquire your injury?” he asked.

  Pork recounted his murder story, adding his assailants had creased him, but he’d managed to chase them off with a samurai sword his father had stolen from his captors while in a Japanese prison camp.

  The principal swooped his face into Pork’s. “They didn’t allow Indians in World War II. Not in the Pacific.”

  “You not heard of Drunken Ira Hayes?”

  “I have not.”

  “You don’t listen to Johnny Cash?”

  “No.”

  Pork resolved to say no more, believing a man who shirked country music couldn’t hold much moral authority in his community.

  * * *

  That night, Pork eased his car to an empty park and let the radio play. Sleeping on the seat crooked his back and the single blanket
was all he owned for warmth. He saw no clear end to his chore, indeed had no notion whether he’d initiated anything other than a criminal record and a bent for prevarication. But the other half of his head argued with slivered moans and cries and images of Peg’s fear-contorted face like victims’ black-and-white photographs in detective magazines. Envy quickened Pork’s heart though he realized it shouldn’t because where he stirred most was south of there.

  He discovered Ray Charles the next day. In the locker room, Charles traced the carved letters under the mirror.

  “You cut that?” Pork asked.

  Ray Charles tried to scoff but sounded only like he was losing air.

  Afternoon, the principal met Pork in the cafeteria. “I’ve notified the police. They’re looking into you.”

  Pork followed Ray Charles throughout the day. He played baseball and, judging from practice, was neither star nor bucket hauler. He’d enrolled in the hard math classes and squinted at his notebook’s polynomials, writing and erasing equal time. In the hall, he strode as if firm of conviction. Students parted for him, but it had nothing to do with fear. The girl, Sharon, appeared and vanished at his side, looking puzzled.

  With a phone book, it was simple enough to find Sharon’s house. The Chevy drew attention, so he parked several blocks away. Her street neighbored a park. There, Pork scaled a substantial basalt rock beyond the swing sets and monkey bars. Through the kitchen window, he could observe Sharon spray and dust a kitchen table. She set no plates and, when her parents arrived ten minutes later, then dressed for the evening and exited, she loaded cereal into a bowl, added a little milk, and carefully spooned it into her mouth. Half an hour later, Ray Charles cut across three house lawns to her door packing an armload of books.

  They appeared again in her bedroom window, which was open despite the cold. Pork heard them check each other’s answers. The bandage tightened; Pork felt himself feverish. He considered hunting some aspirin then heard them again. It began as roughhousing, but soon Sharon was crying. Pork scrambled the rock for a cleaner look.

  Both were naked. Charles reclined against the bed’s headboard, legs extended, face tipped back; Sharon, cross-legged over him, coaxed his lifeless organ. Without clothes, she looked milky and thin and fragile.

  Charles halted her hands with his own. He patted hers gently. Her sobs didn’t cease and didn’t turn hysterical, just continued.

  The next day, a cop met Pork at his homeroom. “You Elston Howard?” he asked.

  “You listen to Johnny Cash?” Pork replied.

  “Every day,” the cop said.

  “Name’s just something I saw in a baseball mitt.”

  The cop wore a heavy mustache that disguised his smile. “Going to give me your real one?”

  “I better not,” Pork said.

  “You got until that last bell to be gone or come clean,” the policeman replied.

  “Yes, sir,” Pork told him.

  The next period, Pork slipped off with a bathroom pass and stationed himself in front of Sharon’s locker until the bell. A green ribbon held her blond hair. Her eyes hit his, then one dropped and one did not.

  “You put her name all over the place,” she said.

  “Your eye?” Pork nodded. “Peg did that?”

  “Yes.”

  Sharon patted the books in her crossed arms.

  “With a hammer,” she said. “The claw side. In English we were reading Oedipus.”

  Pork didn’t speak.

  “Are you in love with her?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She blew out a breath. “You all are.”

  The rest he ascertained from straight-out inquiry. Ray Charles and Sharon Brouilette dated since grammar-school play days. Peg turned Charles’s head. He’d promised to wean Sharon from him, but the pace didn’t suit Peg. She’d come at them both on some lover’s lane and would be in the juvenile hall except Ray Charles refused to point her out from the witness box.

  Baseball practice, Charles took extra cuts. He was the last to leave, which simplified matters. Pork hemmed him against the gym wall with a bat.

  “Give me that jacket,” Pork said.

  “What do you want with it?”

  “Evidence,” Pork said.

  “Of what?”

  “You know.”

  “No,” Charles said. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, me neither, but she wants a pound of flesh and seems inclined to get her way.”

  “It cost me seventy dollars.”

  “I could beat seventy dollars from you and take the jacket anyhow,” Pork said.

  Charles removed the coat. Pork tucked it under his arm. He scanned the empty gym.

  “Just say I stole it,” Pork told him.

  That night, Pork opened his own arm with a pocketknife and bloodied the coat. The next day he drove to Peg’s uncle’s and knocked.

  “Here, goddamnit.” He threw the jacket at her.

  She stood openmouthed then touched the blood. “You pig,” she cried. “You stupid pig.”

  Later that day he checked himself into the emergency clinic where they treated his infected forehead wound for staph. When his parents inquired, he informed them he’d gashed his head on barbed wire. No one argued and he decided he enjoyed lying and resolved to embrace it whenever the truth became burdensome.

  Two weeks later, reclined beneath his Chevy, he greased the universal joint and wheel bearings until the shop door banged and Peg entered. He recognized her through the engine well but determined to complete his grimy task. Then her blouse and bra and pants and her balled-up underpants settled on the cement floor. He crawled from beneath the chassis and, together, they took the wrong turn that was each other.

  After, he stared at her hymen blood dotting them.

  “It felt like rape,” she said. “It felt like it.”

  3

  EXODUS

  August 1991

  The bear had food enough in his belly to hope for more. Andre lifted the rope end and pulled. The ham twisted like a needlefish lure in a current. The bear followed. At the truck, Andre scrambled into the cab and accepted the rope from Smoker through the sliding back window. Coming out, Smoker met the bear full-on. For a moment they eyed each other, but the ham was inside the camper and the bear lowered his head and shuffled up the tailgate.

  “Well now we got a bear to trade,” Andre said.

  Smoker halted the truck at a deli up the hill where they purchased a pound of salami then hit the liquor store and a grocery. In the parking lot, they combined Quaker Oats, milk, and bourbon in a mop bucket then added Alka-Seltzer, worried over the animal’s humor with a hangover.

  Soon after, they discovered the block and address provided by the biker. No one answered their knock. The houses that lined the street were small but well cared for, flowers bracketing the foundations and aloe plants and doodads on the windowsills. Smoker pissed behind a shrub. The bear rifled the cabinets and grunted.

  “Think we ought to get him another ham?” Andre asked.

  “He’ll just eat it.”

  “That’d be the point.”

  “No it’s not,” Smoker said. “We need something that’ll occupy him. Any of these yards got a dog or cat?”

  “I doubt he requires a pet.”

  “Something he’d have to kill,” Smoker said. “Then there’s tearing skin and pulling meat from bone. Hell, it’d keep him till morning sucking the marrow loose.”

  In the camper the bucket clanged.

  “We’re not doing that,” Andre said.

  “What’d you figure he’d do on his own?”

  “He isn’t on his own.”

  “Goddamnit, how’d you come to be straw boss on this excursion?”

  “I ain’t bossing.”

  “What do you call it, then?”

  “Saying no.”

  Smoker kicked at a rosebush. Leaves and petals scattered. He stormed toward the truck. “You think rescuing this bear makes you better
than me?”

  “No,” Andre said.

  “You think it will help find Bird?” Smoker shouted.

  “Will killing it?”

  “No,” Smoker said.

  “Did going off to chase it?”

  Andre began for the truck himself then stopped. “What if we got it wrong,” he said. “What if it was a boulevard or place or court? We just hunted street.”

  Smoker shoved his hand through his hair. Bump appeared capable of that kind of error, he admitted.

  * * *

  Andre asked the Albertsons meat department to slice five pounds of salami thin then package it in plastic then brown paper then white. He purchased duct tape and kite string and encased the package as thoroughly as a mummy. At the camper, Smoker cracked the door and flung the bundle inside. They listened while the bear licked and sucked and whined and bit the wrapping. Having no luck, the animal lifted and dropped the package on the floor. Andre peeked through the window. The bear looked stumped.

  Smoker drove them past North Market Street into blocks where just dirt and chain-link fences separated the lots. One porch, an old man sat in a refrigerator plugged into a porch outlet. Clouds lifted around him in the afternoon heat. Dogs serious with intent yapped and scuffed the hardpan. Smoker stuffed his Luger in his belt and Andre packed a sawed-short two-by-four behind his leg to the stoop of one house then another until a lady fatter than the doorway pointed them to a neighbor with the windows painted shut.

  Andre put himself out of sight behind the door, while Smoker knocked. A barefoot woman in a dress that looked like a sack answered.

  “I heard you all are running a dope business,” Smoker said.

  The woman hurried off and a man limped to the door. He wore pants and a Raiders cap but no shirt. His short torso was roped with the muscle cons acquired lifting iron.