Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  The man said, “I’ll bet you’re drunk. I never seen a sober Indian.”

  Smoker smiled. “And I’ll bargain you ain’t enjoyed real sex since you quit dating them brothers in the hoosegow.”

  The con punched Smoker over the eye. The blow backed him from the steps. Smoker touched his brow and recognized blood just in time to get cracked in the mouth. Andre whacked the con mid-back with his board. The man howled and Andre dropped the board hard onto his collarbone twice. The air left his chest. Andre thumped the con’s kidneys then wrestled him full nelson to the ground. Smoker lifted the board and walloped the con across the kneecaps twice, the third he clobbered Andre, who wailed for him to stop and Smoker did.

  The woman with the con shouted from the porch and threw an open Pepsi can at him.

  “Shut up,” the man told her. “The law’ll come for sure.” He panted. Andre cinched his wrestling hold tighter. Smoker’s lip had fattened and his teeth smeared with blood. He stood, shaking. He looked from the man to Andre then back. The man had quit struggling but Andre pressed his face into the grass, worried it was a ruse.

  “You wouldn’t let a brother stand awhile, would you?” the man asked.

  “Nope.”

  The con slanted his eyes so he could see Smoker. “Don’t say much, does he?” the convict said.

  “Didn’t bring him for conversation,” Smoker told him.

  The man said his name was Calvin. He extended what he could of a hand. Moles starred his arms and tattoos spelled something across his knuckles. “No hard feelings?”

  Smoker took it. “My child’s missing,” he told him.

  “And his wife,” Andre added.

  “She a looker?”

  Andre jerked Calvin’s arm toward the sky. Calvin sucked a breath through his teeth.

  “I admit she don’t act too wifely most of the time,” Smoker said.

  “I’m in no position to comment here.”

  “He lets you up, you tell me how to find them?” Smoker asked.

  Calvin nodded. Andre stood and allowed him to do the same. Calvin gave Andre a hard look. “Damn, my legs are going to ache.”

  “Fifty enough to soothe you?” Smoker asked.

  “Be a start,” Calvin said. He stretched the bill between his thumbs.

  “Where are they?”

  “The child is on the mountain with my pop. The reverend. Harold. He’s God-fearing but not right since Mom died.”

  “Which mountain?”

  “One in Idaho. Bonners is the closest town. He won’t come down for love nor money.”

  “What about Dede?” Andre asked.

  Calvin shrugged. “I run dry of what kept her entertained,” he said.

  “She lit out without Bird?” Andre asked.

  “No,” Calvin said. “She wanted the girl with Harold. Thinks he’s saintly, I guess.”

  “You got directions to this Harold’s place?” Smoker asked.

  Calvin nodded. “I can write you a map.”

  Smoker pointed toward the camper. “Paper and pencil in the back. Cold beer there, too. Help yourself.”

  Calvin strode to the truck. When he opened the door, the bear stared at him and grunted.

  “He gets out you’re putting him back,” Smoker hollered.

  Calvin slammed the door. “You boys ain’t run-of-the-mill crazy, are you?”

  He disappeared inside his house and returned with an address and a paper and sketched a map.

  “That Bump said you came looking for Peg.”

  “Bump Rasker’s dumber than a twenty-year-old fourth grader.”

  “Special needs,” Andre said.

  “Needing ain’t special.”

  “What did you want with Peg?” Smoker asked.

  Calvin looked at his scarred, off-kilter ankle. “Old score,” he said.

  “Well she’s got more of that kind of debt than Mexico,” Smoker told him. “And she’s too broke to pay attention.”

  “Besides that, she’s passed,” Andre said.

  “I heard,” Calvin said. “Happy hunting ground and all.”

  Smoker shook his head. “I doubt she’s happy and I know she ain’t hunting.”

  Calvin glanced at Smoker. “Lip hurt?”

  “Be something wrong with me if it didn’t,” Smoker said.

  “I ain’t been out but two months,” Calvin replied. “Still a little jumpy.”

  Neither Smoker nor Andre spoke.

  “I’ll give you your fifty back and two hundred cash for the animal,” Calvin said. “I could turn a bill or two matching him with these dogs.”

  “No, sir,” Smoker said. “That bear’s particular. He won’t eat nothing that doesn’t come from the butcher and my brother here doesn’t permit him to indulge in violence.”

  LAMENTATIONS

  February–March 1984

  The judge sentenced Smoker to time served and restitution for the tires, which Andre bartered to five hundred dollars then squared. In exchange, Smoker conceded to deliver Pork to the Yakima alcohol center. Andre phoned Pork and ordered him to pack. Pork refused. Andre advocated loading the truck despite Pork’s obstinance; Smoker agreed, with the caveat they drink Pork through the weekend out of sympathy. Overruled, Andre accompanied them. They closed Crazy Eddie’s both nights, Andre sipping Pepsi and settling bills. Smoke, caffeine, bad food, and sleep deprivation finally wrenched his stomach, and Sunday morning he languished in bed, hungover from a sober bender, which seemed a mean joke.

  Drunk he could at least have avoided philosophy and dread and instead focused on simplicities like showering and arriving at school before the second bell clanged. Sober, he was forced to gaze into the chipped ceiling and stare at the faces in swirling panels’ wood grain expecting them any moment to scold him. He saw no sleep for him past death, which, if the retrieval of his pistol from the pickup didn’t require such effort, he would have seriously considered.

  Three times, he heard raps against the cheap front door. He answered none. Gravel clicked the window glass and he finally mustered his energy and lifted the window.

  Claire hollered from the street below, “Are you all right in there?”

  Andre waved her into the building then opened his door.

  “Are you hungover?” Claire asked.

  Andre rubbed his temples. “I didn’t get drunk.”

  “You smell like you did,” she said.

  “We got to detox the old man,” Andre said. “Smoker thought he needed a runner to get it out of his system first.”

  “You agreed.”

  “I bankrolled it and chauffeured them so they wouldn’t put a crease in anyone.”

  Andre tipped himself through the open window into the weather. Rain soaked the roof and rapped the concrete below. Claire leaned into him and rested her face against his back. Her profile blued in the window reflection. She hitched her arm around him and snaked it under his shirt. She circled her palm over where his heart was.

  “Me and Smoker have to usher him to rehab.”

  “You didn’t drink?”

  Andre shook his head. “I never realized how dull a tavern was.”

  Claire directed Andre to sit and he did. She rifled his dresser for fresh socks then twisted them onto his feet. His tennis shoes were under the bed. Claire untied the laces and shod him, then secured them with double knots. She collected her jacket, then his. He looked at her quizzically.

  “It’s raining,” Claire said. “You want pneumonia?”

  * * *

  Andre drove. Claire, squeezed between him and Smoker, sensed her isolation. Smoker and Andre and even Pork and, on occasion, her students, too, had recounted odd stories about Coyote, or, in Salish, the local native language, Sinkalip. She loved the name: It tickled her though she couldn’t say why.

  Winter, Sinkalip must starve until his stories are told. Sinkalip’s acts must be spoken, not only committed to paper; words written and divided from a tongue allow neither Sinkalip’s absence or his presence b
ecause words turn liquid and spill from the page. When the people speak or the wolf bays or the elk bugles, Sinkalip doesn’t consider order or chaos. He only seeks its distance and direction so he can deceive Mole and copulate with his cousins or defeat Dog Monster. He forgets the stones are the bones of his mother and, instead, employs them to construct huts that hide himself when he masturbates. If perplexed, he calls his turd sisters to cramp his belly and he shits them into scat for their advice. If they offend him, he threatens to piss them into oblivion.

  Sinkalip taught the people how to trap the salmon and what roots to eat and how to make a good lodge. He told everyone he was a great warrior, but he was not. Who knows why the Animal People chose to step across his carcass the appropriate number of times and resurrect him. Perhaps it was rebellion, rescuing their last contradiction and returning it to flesh and blood and bone. Or perhaps it is simply Coyote’s boldness that redeemed him. Or maybe he was just too entertaining to do without.

  Claire was not certain why people would pick such a hero, but, she realized, she was uncertain, too, why she was drawn to Andre and through him Smoker and the rest of them. Yet she remained apart. Race was not the cause; Smoker and Andre, half white and half Indian, seemed unable to see or uninterested in the border in themselves where those two met. They were halves of all things and wholes of none, but it was not race or a culture that divided each, she understood. It was what they were not, not what they were.

  “My whole life we ate on paper plates with plastic forks and knives,” Andre said.

  “Why’s that?” Claire asked.

  “Because the folks kept breaking the good ones on each other. And us on occasion.”

  “They hit you with plates?” she asked.

  “Only if you lacked the sense to duck,” Smoker replied. “It wasn’t personal, like calisthenics in PE. Sometimes the person next to you kicks you or whacks. Just part of being in PE.”

  “I hated PE,” Claire said.

  “One thing about growing up in my house,” Andre said, “I learned how to take a punch from a man and a woman.”

  “How about Smoker?”

  “They were scared of him. He didn’t fight fair. Once he stabbed Pork with scissors then drove them into Peg’s thigh to mix the blood. He figured their poison would counteract each other.” Andre chuckled.

  “This is funny?”

  Smoker shrugged.

  “I hated PE, too,” Andre said.

  They were quiet awhile.

  Andre tapped a finger to his temple. “I remember something made me feel weird,” Andre said. “High school sometimes I bunked with classmates in town. You know. Two away games on Friday and Saturday. Hardly time to drive home before it was time to drive back. What amazed me was breakfast. I’d wake up and the first thing I smelled was food. One by one everyone in the house would stumble into the kitchen. Except the mom or pop who would be flipping eggs and hotcakes and sausages or bacon or ham in separate skillets. And pretty soon, the kids would assume pancake duty or the eggs and another would line dishes and silverware on the table. And then they would pile plateloads of food and set them in the table’s center where the group would trade the dishes, and split the morning paper into sections, swapping until they’d examined the whole of the thing. I was almost afraid to eat.”

  “Why’s that?” Claire asked.

  “It was not my country. Unless I’d busted an egg or something I didn’t know the language.”

  “And now you cook breakfast for us on the weekends.”

  Andre shrugged. “I like to eat.”

  * * *

  At the lip of the coulee, a fenced yard corralled hive-like cable insulators bigger than rooms. Others, attached to the hundred-foot towers, shuttled electricity from the dam generators beneath. Between them, swooping power lines spanned the coulee wall then dipped several hundred feet below to the powerhouses.

  Claire said to Andre, “I remember the first time I came out here. You showed me how to milk the cows.”

  “To the rest of us that was a chore,” Smoker said.

  “Well, for me it wasn’t,” Claire told him.

  Andre veered left on the road named for his family. Gray snow remained in the shaded depressions; the rest was drab and tawny dirt and dormant flora. Andre’s first kill was not a quarter mile from here. Pork and he had gutted and dragged a two-point along a cattle trail to the barn where Andre sawed the hooves below the shin and permitted the dogs their share while Pork separated hide from meat and fat with his knife blade. The deer skinned, they cut the bullet from its ribs. The impact on bone flattened the lead. Pork drilled a hole in it and threaded a rawhide strap through, then draped it around Andre’s neck. The next morning, at dawn, up to feed cattle, Andre gazed at the barbed-wire fences and the first tinge of green wheat and half a dozen deer scattered against the horizon light, indicting him for their loss.

  Ten miles of washboarded gravel and they met the driveway gate: three boxed logs with the family brand burned into a flat piece of driftwood that dangled from the center pole. A bird trilled. A lark of some kind, Andre guessed though he wasn’t sure. Smoker spent most autumns at the place getting his venison and a freezer full of birds to feed him and Dede through winter. Andre, though, visited the place only holidays. His father was more stubborn than most men, but he wasn’t a god. Pork would die and the place would fall to Andre and Smoker and they would lease the ground to a bigger rancher who would farm it and leave the house to collapse on its concrete foundation. Someone would scrounge the good in it—the stove, some clean timber—then set a fire. Springs, the grass would renew itself and the locusts would green up and the foundation would turn one more concrete crypt visited by crows and wandering cattle. Outside, the bird spoke again and Andre listened. Separating a lark’s song from a sparrow’s cheep was something he might have managed once. Though he’d never been taught the difference, he should have had it in him to know.

  King, Pork’s ancient malamute, limped down the house steps and coughed out a couple of short barks. Behind him, Pork perched on the porch swing he’d built for Smoker and Andre years before. Andre bent and rubbed the dog’s ears.

  “You’re supposed to keep out the riffraff,” Pork hollered at the dog.

  “Coffee inside?” Andre asked.

  Pork nodded.

  “It poisoned?” Smoker asked him.

  “I considered it,” Pork admitted. He smelled gamey as an elk and his breath made an awful racket. Smoker offered him a cigarette and lit it. In the kitchen, Andre topped Pork’s cup with coffee and filled three others for Smoker and Claire and himself and delivered them to the porch.

  “How’s your mother?” Pork asked.

  “Meaner than a rattlesnake on fire,” Smoker said.

  Pork stared at them from the swing then let out a sigh. He gazed into his coffee cup like the black liquid there that was supposed to rescue him had failed. Then he dumped it on the porch floor. The gaps between slats drained the puddle.

  “Jail’d be kinder than the dry house,” he said.

  “Cheaper, too,” Smoker told him.

  “Save your goddamn money, then.”

  “You ought to talk nicer to them trying to keep you with the living,” Smoker replied.

  “You ain’t got no say,” Pork told Smoker; then he turned to Andre, “And you’re too much like your mother.”

  “Hush, you old bastard,” Andre said.

  “Why do you speak to him that way?” Claire whispered.

  “Because there isn’t any other way to,” Andre said.

  Pork wheezed. “You’re a pitiful pair. Motherfucked, both of you.” He stopped. “I apologize. I forgot the lady.”

  “Listen to me,” Smoker told him. “You’re going to dry out or I will shoot you in the ass sure as I am standing upright breathing air.”

  Pork said, “You ain’t got it in you.”

  Smoker stormed to his truck and withdrew his pistol from under the driver’s seat then put a round between
Pork’s feet.

  “Told you,” Pork said.

  They all stood on the ancient porch. King limped to the old man and Pork patted his haunches.

  “He’ll need fed.”

  Andre nodded. “We aren’t going to watch a friend starve.”

  Smoker packed Pork’s suitcase with fresh underwear and jeans and the plaid shirts he favored then lugged it from the house to the driveway. Pork, though, had found a gas can in the shop. He soaked the suitcase then dropped his cigarette and the clothes went up quick as tinder. He unbuttoned his Western shirt and added it, then stepped out of his pants and skivvies and tossed them to the blaze, which left him naked aside from wool socks. Pork glanced up at Claire but didn’t cover himself. She didn’t know where to put her eyes and finally turned her back altogether. Andre covered him with a bedspread, then pressed him into the passenger side of his trap wagon.

  Smoker climbed under the wheel.

  “Watch him,” Andre said. “He might pull loose the wires just to get you pulled over and he’s hard enough to explain dressed.”

  * * *

  Andre and Claire watched them go then left, too. The pickup ascended the canyon above the ranch until Andre spied an open gate. He slowed to shut it then recognized tire tracks in the wet dirt.

  “Somebody’s drove up on top.”

  “A neighbor person?” Claire asked.

  “A lot shorter ways here from their places.”

  Andre reached under the seat for his pistol and examined the cylinder. He left the hammer over the empty chamber then eased past the gate and halted and hooked it behind him. The truck slid in the mud until its tires found the old feed ruts. It crawled through the dips and they lost the tracks, but Andre knew even a four-wheel drive would have to keep to this fence line.

  He discovered the Chevy pickup on a ridge that straddled the ranch and the neighbor’s, Broke Hole. In the truck’s rear window, a gun rack held two rifles. Two high-school boys hooded themselves in sweatshirts against the rear quarter panel. Andre wedged his truck perpendicular to the front bumper and switched the ignition off. They stashed their beer cans beneath the back tires.