Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  Andre cranked his window open.

  One of the boys laughed nervously. They both stood.

  “You’re a teacher,” one said.

  “Not today,” Andre replied. “You left the gate open down the canyon.”

  The taller one spoke. “We weren’t going to be but an hour or so.”

  “Don’t take that long for a cow to wander.”

  “We didn’t see any cows.”

  The other one nodded.

  Andre fished for a sawed-off baseball bat behind the seat. He tapped it on his palm.

  “I built that goddamn fence,” he said.

  Claire patted his arm. “They’re just kids.”

  “They are where they hadn’t ought to be.”

  Andre stepped from the cab. “Stay where I can see you,” he warned the boys. On the dash he found their ammunition boxes then unbolted their rifles and ejected the shells. “Empty your pockets.” The boys did. Andre threw the lot over the bluff’s edge. He listened to them clink in the rocks.

  “You hightail it,” Andre told them. “I don’t see you aimed east on the pavement in three minutes, you won’t need to look for me. And close the goddamned gate behind you.”

  The truck disappeared then bobbed below in the draw. The clouds feathered a gray, low ceiling over the river. Long bars of sunlight shone in the breaks. Most of the hole below dropped into the shadows. The boys paused for the gate then sped Black Lake Road toward town. Andre dropped the bat. Claire hit him with it. The blow caught his hip clean and something electrical fluttered his leg. Before she could swing again, Andre stepped close and covered her arms. She spun away but remained in his embrace.

  “You can’t do that,” she told him.

  “I know it,” Andre said. “I do.”

  They were quiet a long while. Andre surveyed the country below. As a more hopeful child, he’d looked in the encyclopedia at sextants and constructed one with staples and scrap wood from behind the shop, believing if he could get the lay of that great country above, he might pilot himself through his days on earth like the sailors of old navigated the oceans.

  Examining the country with Claire beside him, he recalled the last time he and Smoker ran away as children. Out a basement window the two of them escaped. They trekked a dry creek bed. Smoker discovered where a deer had bedded and rolled himself in the hair and matted grass, then, beneath an owl’s roost, busted up the pellets and dug loose mice bones.

  Andre wandered, eventually encountering day-old deer tracks, lazy steps, not the four boxed hooves of a hurried bounce. Later, a coyote broke brush at the draw’s bottom, head up, tongue lolling out of his mouth. The scent of burned and disked fields rested over him.

  At the river, he lay over a flat rock. He held his breath and dropped his head between his arms. Blood-sound beat through his ears and quieted his thoughts. He opened his eyes. The river’s current, hurried by the dam’s generators, pulled tiny sticks across the rocky bottom. He splashed his cheeks and his chest and bowled out more with his hands and soaked himself. The sun burned high and the shadows of the coulee commenced their slow incline eastward.

  Any knack for the manly arts related to nature had fallen to Smoker. Andre envied his brother’s ease in all things and its seed seemed to have sprouted from the certainty of instinct. Andre understood his lack was some of his own doing. He had little interest in the workings of a weapon or the habits of deer.

  He did, however, have an affinity for the river. As a child, he liked to swim and wade and throw rocks or float bark barges. Older, he loved boats and skiing or riding an inner tube. Returning from college, he only felt home when he broke past the rocky wall separating the farm country from the coulee and spied the river. He read in Classics that Heraclitus claimed you could never step into the same river twice, but Andre thought of it differently. When you put yourself in a river you were everywhere the river was, and the thought of such constancy and permanence comforted him.

  Downriver, a hundred yards or so, Andre discovered a lightning-shattered tamarack. It drooped from a ten-foot ledge that delineated the historic flood line. The lightning left half the meat intact. A termite wandered from beneath the torn bark, then another. In the draw above the bank, Andre found two rocks he could barely lift. With the first, he labored onto the tree until the termite’s nest was below him and let it loose. The boulder bounced. Shattered pine and bark peppered the beach and the panicked termites scattered.

  The second stone weighed more. Andre could barely waddle it the length of the log. He grunted and shoved the stone higher. His arms quaked and swelled. The rock hovered over his head a moment then crashed down. The tree folded and straightened, then swung past straight, popping the last veins that strung it together. The rock slid off and so did Andre, dropping on all fours in the gravel.

  Andre rolled the log to the river. The work slashed his hands with slivers. Balled sap clung to his skin. He doctored himself in the water. The current tugged at the tree. This part of the river, the dams spun the water into a maze of eddies and whirlpools impossible to guess with. Andre shoved the log into the main current. He floated with it. Rocks and trees dotted the banks, shapes so large they dwarfed him. Birds circled. He grasped a branch stub and shouldered himself onto the log. His feet dangled below; they seemed numb ghosts that belonged to someone else. He lifted them and they ached with the cold of the river, but he felt inside as if he’d swallowed knotted string but undone the worst tangle. Soon Smoker whistled from a hilltop and beckoned and Andre kicked for the shore.

  Evening, Pork appeared aboard his old bay. Smoker and Andre prepared for a whipping. The old man, though, undid his bedroll and put it between theirs. He stirred the fire, complimenting the good coals. He unwrapped a deer liver and set it on the grass and sliced it into three pieces, then cut some sticks.

  Smoker and Pork and Andre cooked and listened to the coyotes yip.

  “I’d hoped to be good-looking,” Pork said. “And rich.” He nodded to himself. “We got what we got, boys. Though roasting a hunk of good venison over a good fire ain’t all thorns and briars, even if I am compelled to share with a couple of criminals.”

  They watched the meat sear in the pink light. Grease and blood spat and blackened against the coals.

  Suddenly Andre recalled a time before the drinking too, Peg pampering bilious rosebushes and daffodils with peat. He and Smoker, little boys, trailed her to grade dirt and harvest dandelion hair. Evenings, Pork, still in his work clothes, would saunter across the cool grass, lift them by the ankles and hose the garden from their legs while their mother gathered her implements. Often those nights, they ate on a picnic table while the shadows stretched and the crickets sawed at the cool night.

  * * *

  The detox orderlies collected Pork and told Smoker to wait.

  “Name?” the desk nurse asked.

  “Pork White.”

  The nurse nodded. “Name of patient?”

  “That is his name,” Smoker said.

  Her white-capped head popped up and her mouth tightened.

  Smoker finished the form himself. Eventually a doctor, not much older than Smoker, called him into his office. He motioned to a battered leather sofa.

  “Your father put up quite a fight,” the doctor said. “We had to sedate him.”

  “He hurt anyone?” Smoker asked.

  “No, but the orderlies got some exercise.” The doctor tried to laugh, then, looking at Smoker, gave up. “We had to restrain him. He’ll have some bruises.” The doctor passed Smoker several pamphlets.

  “Can I see him?”

  “Just remember, he’s sedated. Don’t let that scare you.”

  “I think I seen him sedated before,” Smoker said.

  Smoker followed the doctor into a darker room. Noisy breath clacked in the chest of each man they passed and a bitter odor haunted them. In another bunk row, a thin man in fatigues slept in a fetal ball. Below him a fat Mexican rested, his open eyes staring into the board that
held the bed above him. Pork was in the last section, near the nurse’s station, strapped down.

  Smoker leaned over the old man. Pork’s long black hair sprawled around his head, broadening his face and showing his smooth temple. Smoker stroked the wrinkles in his father’s forehead then placed his open palm on his father’s bare chest, feeling his heart at work.

  * * *

  At his apartment, Andre excused himself to shower, something he hadn’t done in four days. The spray beat his scalp and the water’s hush surrounded him. He twisted the knob hotter and huddled underneath. He didn’t hear Claire enter the room and drop out of her clothes. She stepped into the shower with him. She was hot and damp as breath. Claire turned her body and let the shower spray hit him full-on. It ached but he let it beat him. She steered his back to the water so it could thaw him, then began with soap and a washrag. The room clouded with steam. Andre studied the squarish outline of Claire’s feet and knew he would never see another woman this way.

  GENESIS

  Autumn 1958

  According to the Catholics, Andre came into existence several weeks before Pork found himself in his Chevy studying a medical clinic’s glass door. Suddenly Peg’s shape grew in the entry, her face dark with thought until the glass pane flattened it. Stunned, she stepped away and swore then pulled instead of pushed and successfully exited the building.

  “You laughing at me?” she asked, inside the car.

  Pork shook his head. “Funny story on the radio.”

  “Do I have a black eye?”

  Pork lifted her chin. “You’ll play piano again,” he said.

  Peg blew a sigh into the windshield. “Well it’ll be a nursery tune.”

  “So I guess we should marry,” Pork said.

  “You sure this baby is yours? I’ve screwed most of the football team and might be with child from the defense. I’m not sure which player. Their plumbing all looked the same after I got to the linebackers.”

  “They well put together?” he asked.

  “Like bulls.”

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting to marry one of them instead. He’ll support you well. Just needs people to tackle all his life and someone to pay him for it.”

  Peg slapped his forehead like in the Three Stooges. “You really believe I’d open my legs to those barbarians.”

  “Nothing here but barbarians. You included.”

  She laughed. “I’m the worst.”

  “I ain’t one to argue.”

  She patted his thigh. “That’s because you like it. Doesn’t mean you’re the one made this baby.”

  “Seems to me you’re making it. Farmer don’t grow the wheat.”

  “Just plants the seed and moves on,” Peg said.

  “Not if it’s his farm. You got to weed and fertilize and worry about weather. Then maybe you’ll have a crop.”

  “You think I’m a field to sow.”

  “I expect you’ll be harder to put a fence around than forty acres or four thousand and I don’t figure a ring and a notarized paper will do the trick any better than barbed wire.”

  “How will you tell what’s yours, then?” Peg asked.

  “I figure I’ll brand you.”

  She laughed. “Like hell, you will.”

  “Only hurt awhile. You seen. Those steers get right back to their business.”

  “What would you put on me?”

  “Probably a devil with a pointy tail.”

  “Where?” She held his hand when he offered it.

  “Inside of your thigh or your belly button. Somewhere near a rustler’s intent.”

  “And where would I mark you?” she asked.

  “You already did,” Pork said.

  Peg kissed his cheek. “You’re sweet. In the city, though, they got doctors that can erase this.”

  “They tear you up like a chainsaw, what I hear.”

  “That would make farming tough,” Peg replied. “Well, I’m not deciding this minute.”

  “If I’d expected a direct answer I would have brought a pistol and shot you till you agreed.”

  Pork arrived at her uncle’s the next morning to gather Peg for school, but the door didn’t open and the lights didn’t flicker as was their code when Peg took ill. The next morning the same occurred, so he parked and knocked. “She’s not here,” the uncle told him. “And I don’t know where she’s gone.” He laced his work boots. “We been calling hospitals and listening to the police scanner for her.”

  * * *

  Peg retraced a path to an old cave in the reservation country where Pork had brought her to hunt and make love. She organized a green-wood fire to clear out the porcupine that resided there. The place was gamey but open to the east and the sun’s rise. Morning light painted the country below her and shimmered on the dark water and Peg was, for the first time she could recall, calm. The sensation felt like she had imagined penetration might as a young girl, a sort of painful, weeping pleasure. In the cave’s mouth, she pondered why anyone chose house living. She stirred the fire and for hours watched it wrinkle the air and light.

  She’d packed fishing gear and a gun, but her appetite had vanished. The first day her bowels and bladder protested, but the second they calmed themselves into near retirement. Her blood thinned but her head felt alert. The work to exist seemed too much like prayer, stupid diligence.

  It was not Pork twisting inside her, she understood; it was a thing her own. She at first feared she had too little to nurture Pork or the infant, but upon more consideration, her apprehension became the opposite, that she would overwhelm them with the tornado that was herself. As she drifted through her starved, liquid consciousness, she waited for her guilt to rise and pass judgment and, finally, the relief of penance. That ritual, however, wasn’t in her; she felt nothing akin to sad or culpable. Pork would do what he ought, but he was not seasoned enough to determine if it was what he wanted or the costs. He’d require from her more than even a child might.

  The fourth morning, she heard clattering in the rocks above. She fired a shot toward the sound.

  “It’s me, goddamnit,” Pork shouted.

  “I wouldn’t be shooting at nobody else,” she hollered.

  He ducked behind a rise. She studied the place recognizing full well he’d turn up somewhere she couldn’t guess and by then he’d be too close to shoot without seeing his face. Twenty minutes later, he tapped her with a stick from behind. She had placed the gun between her feet and made no attempt for it. Instead, she trailed him to the fire pit at the cave’s maw, where he stirred her fire until the coals awoke then added a length from a nearby deadfall. When that snuffled and burned, he fetched two more. Soon a blaze lit the darkening evening and the cave’s deeper portions. Once it ebbed, Pork formed a spit with rocks and a green stick and roasted two pheasants he’d killed on the walk in. He coaxed Peg to eat a drumstick, then a thigh, and then to sip the cold broth in his canteen.

  Full night, Pork stared at the moon and stars like words misspelled. He pored over them to find a vowel he’d heard wrong or a tricky letter like the f sound ph made. Peg was a word he’d write and write and misplace letters all the while, never learning them, let alone what the sounds added up meant.

  Peg recognized an abrasion dried between Pork’s knuckles. Likely he had clobbered a rock hiking in. She bent and attached her mouth to the wound. Her tongue wavered like a bee hunting pollen and she tasted his metallic blood. Pork’s head quieted then filled with other sounds: birds calling and insects crawling and plants growing and flowers opening and hoofed animals browsing and the clawed killing for their meat.

  They went to sleep, Peg with her head upon Pork’s stomach, listening to his insides work.

  The next morning he told her, “I’ll find some work. I’m a good hand.”

  4

  EXODUS

  August 1991

  At the Chewelah city park, Andre and Smoker hooked the bear’s leash with a fishing pole and led him from the camper for a walk. The bear re
mained docile even when Andre hosed it off with a sprinkler. That evening they rented an RV spot at a gambling hall and restaurant housed in a long metal structure resembling a warehouse. Behind it loggers had thinned the forest and developers were shaping a golf course. Smoker purchased half a dozen chicken sandwiches in the restaurant.

  In the truck cab, Andre unwrapped one. “I should’ve let Calvin beat on you a few more minutes.”

  “Tide’d turned quick enough.”

  Andre laughed. “You were finished from the first blow.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Andre took a bite and chewed. “Because he landed the second.”

  Smoker opened a soft drink.

  “You don’t ever calculate past talk,” Andre told him. “That’s what you’re good at. Well, Calvin’s good at hitting.”

  “We got along in the end.”

  “How many times I whack him with that board?”

  “Three or four.”

  “Six. And he was still froggy. Most would be finished with the first. Calvin, he was just loose enough for conversation. That ought to tell you something about him.”

  “Tells me good thing we whipped him,” Smoker said.

  Andre finished a sandwich. The bear fussed and Smoker opened the slider and tossed it the last one, paper and all.

  “You’re just looking at it how you want it to be,” Andre told him.

  “How else is there?”

  Smoker would persevere because the endeavor involved Bird, but he would rely as always on foolishness with style, which passed for bravery and good sense under a beer light.

  “You don’t have any idea what you’re up to, do you?” Andre asked.

  “Nope.”

  “That’s likely to become a damned problem,” he told his brother.

  They slept late and treated themselves to a country breakfast and delivered their scraps to the bear. The luxury meant they were late on the highway, though Smoker seemed neither in a rush to arrive nor in the mood to travel the most efficient direction. Andre examined the county map and Calvin’s hen scratch. Smoker had abandoned the route. Andre inquired and Smoker informed him there were lots of ways to get to a place and only the narrow-minded relied on maps.