Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  The highway paralleled the Pend Oreille River’s wide valley into the gap between granite cliffs. Metaline Falls, the town, was crammed between. The falls itself was drowned by Boundary Dam.

  Higher, Smoker angled onto a dirt road bisected by others that wound through meadows or between twilight-draped fir and pine, country occasionally dotted with trailer houses with rusted carports or hand-built plywood-sided hovels. The truck traversed a grassy meadow and rounded a knoll to a double-wide that overlooked a grassy creek bed. Dede’s car was next to the front steps.

  The bear lurched into the camper wall when Smoker halted the truck. Andre waited while Smoker walked stiffly to the door and knocked. Dede answered. It appeared he and Dede were flirting until Dede frowned and spat a word at him. Smoker appeared to disarm her and she smiled. But soon another cloud darkened her face and before Smoker could manage more sweet talk she slammed the trailer door on his hand.

  Smoker yowled and hopped and thrust his left hand back and forth. His pinkie finger, clearly broken, dangled beneath the others, but he hooked a cigarette from his pocket and struck a match one-handed like a broken finger was nothing new to him.

  He waved Andre from the truck.

  “Getting dark,” Smoker said. “We might as well bunk indoors. I doubt that bear will share his abode.”

  “Might be safer with him than her,” Andre said.

  “She’s spit her venom,” Smoker said.

  Inside the trailer, Dede emerged from the bathroom along with the smell of lavender soap and hair spray, her black jeans and cowboy shirt arced by her hips and breasts, turquoise stitched across the latter. Her dark hair parted in the middle and crescented around both sides of her face allowed her almond eyes and delicate nose an audience.

  She tipped her whiskey glass at him. Andre waved his hand.

  “Again?” Dede asked.

  “Again,” Andre said.

  Dede rattled the fridge for an orange. She drove her thumb into the peel and sheared it like pencil shavings then divided the sections. She flicked one in Andre’s mouth. When he finished, she fed him another.

  “Go on and tell him,” she coaxed Smoker. “Explain it like you told me.”

  “You’re not being polite,” Smoker replied.

  “I’m past courtesy.” Dede tipped her head and drank her whiskey, graceful as a bird.

  “Long time past.” Smoker held up his useless left hand. “How’s it going to look getting this broke in a door?”

  “Just say you were drunk and fell,” Dede told him.

  “Nobody ever seen me fall drunk. They aren’t likely to believe I started just now.”

  “Suit yourself,” Dede said.

  “You left my child on a mountain with strangers.”

  “Might not be yours,” Dede told him.

  One look at Bird and Smoker left little doubt about her bloodline, but Smoker stalked the room and lowered his face to Dede’s.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  Dede rose to her tiptoes and kissed Smoker’s nose. “Not for a while.”

  “I’m not liable to wait.”

  “Me neither,” Dede told him. “Let your brother here take the baby and we’ll fuck the whole country, you and me. Everyone except each other. See who holds out longest.”

  Smoker blew some smoke into the ceiling.

  “Maybe you best go on and bunk in your truck,” she said to him.

  “You want to treat us that cold?”

  “Just you,” she said. “Your brother can have the couch.”

  Smoker lifted his cap from the chair back, eased it over his head with his good hand. He disappeared out the door.

  Dede poured herself more whiskey then banged ice from a tray. The soda was outside with the beer and she retrieved a cola and filled a glass with it.

  “You’re not off caffeine, I hope.”

  Andre shook his head.

  Dede delivered him a soda.

  “On the mountain they’re batshit crazy, but Harold, he reads to Bird every night. He has building blocks and spirographs and a workbook where she does long division. Her math is better than an accountant’s. And she reads the Bible. King James with the thous and thees,” Dede said. “I love her.” She nodded toward the door and truck outside. “I love her as much as that rat bastard.” She drank. “I just don’t have much to teach her.” She perched next to Andre like a ball, as if she wanted to keep small. “The only time I got with her was the time he’d gone off. Otherwise, it’s always him and me or him and her.”

  Dede picked at a cuticle then lifted her hand to her mouth and chewed the dangling skin.

  “I gave her a locket from my grandmother,” she said. “You know what your brother did? He stuck a picture of himself in it. You think I’d leave her with him?”

  Dede drank then stared at the whiskey bottle; her empty glass shifted in her hand. “I wish I could quit like you,” she said.

  “Drinking?”

  “Everything.”

  “Smoker?”

  She nodded.

  “You two went that way before.”

  “You quit liquor a time or two, didn’t you?” Dede closed her eyes and a muscle in her jaw tightened. She sucked air between her teeth. “He’s a rat bastard,” she said.

  “He’s my brother,” Andre told her.

  “And you know best.”

  Neither spoke for a long while.

  “You hear from Claire?” she asked him finally.

  Andre closed his eyes. Growing up, he had prided himself on distance. It was all he possessed Smoker didn’t, but he was not any more able to hear or speak to a person’s heart than rock was to keep seed.

  “Mentioning her was mean of me,” Dede said. Andre rubbed at the ache in his neck. When he looked up, Dede had undone her shirt. He peered at the white bra that kept her in and smelled again the hair spray and the liquor and lavender on her. She undid her jeans and, in her skivvies, kissed him as if she were trying to inject her sour tongue into him or, maybe, suck the poison in him out.

  “You’re after revenge is all,” Andre said.

  “Don’t you think he needs getting back at?” she asked. All the boldness was off her. He said nothing and after what must have seemed long enough for him to answer, she undid his pants and helped him from them.

  LAMENTATIONS

  March–June 1984

  Andre and Claire didn’t speak of Pork or his troubles. Conversation between them concerned mostly schoolwork and students and grocery lists and recipes and ingredients as together they concocted their meals and school lunches. She aided Andre with Carl’s essays. He applied to local schools: Eastern, Western, and Central Washington Universities, low-profile but less than a day’s drive. Together Claire and Andre determined Carl should discuss the effect of his illness on his grade point. Andre did the same in his recommendation, adding that the boy’s mother was single and on disability.

  Smoker visited a week into Pork’s rehab stint, and he and Andre addressed a pornographic card to Pork, care of the clinic. A week later Andre received a return letter protesting the cafeteria’s hamburger gravy and processed potatoes. From the newspaper circular Andre snipped a coupon for rib eye and Smoker attached a Post-it note: “Stick it out, you picky bastard.” Pork’s next correspondence was the yellow-stained ad and no words at all.

  A week or so later, a neophyte orderly informed Pork he was voluntary and Pork beat feet for the door. He panhandled bus fare and the next day arrived at Corrigan Auto Body Repair, which doubled as Grand Coulee’s depot. There, he phoned Andre who transported him to the ranch without argument. If the old man remained sharp enough to jailbreak the hospital, alcohol had not completely undone him.

  The next evening, though, Andre and Smoker brought him iced tea, a box of fried chicken, and a Hawaiian pizza along with four boxes of groceries. They devoured a meal together, with no drink other than soda pop, then hiked into the poplars behind the corral to hunt a coyote harassing Pork’s calves. They got off
no shots but heard the criminal yipping up the canyon.

  Eventually Andre abandoned Claire twice a week to tend Pork. Late those nights, he entered their bedroom reeking of cigarette smoke and men. She suspected he was drinking; Andre knew but he was unsure how to soothe her. The truth seemed inadequate.

  They chose the Melody Café because none of Pork’s cronies frequented the place. Entering town, they took the back road past the Methodist Church. Smoker pointed at a Pinto in front of them. A woman’s blouse fluttered from the window along with her socks and bra. They passed and through the rear window, they saw her wrestling off her jeans. The male driver shifted to kiss her. She appeared to laugh and finished with her drawers. The car stopped entirely. Smoker passed then circled back and found the Pinto’s door open and the naked woman dancing on the pavement. She had black hair and beige nipples. Mostly, though, she was an abundance of pale skin.

  Smoker blasted the horn. The woman glanced at her pubic hair then loped into a vacant lot. Rocks and thistles reduced her to hopping. The driver rifled his trunk for a blanket then hurried into the field and wrapped the woman tightly.

  “I remember naked women,” Pork said. “I forgot I liked them.”

  * * *

  Smoker stopped at the bar after he had returned Andre to Claire’s. Eddie toweled dry glasses and a few construction workers shot pool in the back.

  “Seen a naked woman today, Eddie,” Smoker said.

  “You looked at your share, I hear.”

  “This one was in the middle of the road and in plain day.”

  Eddie halted his towel and examined Smoker. He appeared skeptical.

  “Pork will testify and he’s sober,” Smoker told him.

  “Till he remembers what he was drinking for,” Peg said.

  At the end of the bar, she sat in the shadow of the television: Smoker’s mother, Pork’s wife. Her eyes remained an animal’s—portals through which to observe the world. In them was not the spark of charm or even passion but the lunacy of an arsonist’s torch. Peg was not a modern beauty: She didn’t possess Botoxed lips or a starved, boney face; no pointed chin nor straight-angled jaw, the kind of look a geometry teacher or perhaps child molester might appreciate. Neither anorexia nor bulimia, nor silicone nor saline contorted her figure into some cartoon you wanted to fuck.

  She turned and her face pulsed in a blinking beer sign. It was full, without flaw, like Ingrid Bergman when the cameras shot close. Her butterscotch hair could hold together in a breeze, but parted and mussed stylishly when she raked her hand through it, and she was well put together, tall enough to have the pins of a dancer but curved more like the Vargas girls in Esquire or Playboy in their salad days. In her countenance resided a siren on a perch that coaxed men to smash themselves against her rocky shores.

  “Where’s your brother?” she asked.

  “He’s domesticated and good for him.”

  Peg had taken Andre’s most recent run at sobriety as a hard slap. She did not care for Claire and complained she thought college put herself above them. When Smoker pointed out Andre had earned his sheepskin, too, it did no good, as she suspected the same of Andre.

  “You’re happy here. I’m happy here,” Peg said. “Eddie, you’re happy, aren’t you?”

  Eddie shrugged. “If you say so, my dear. I’d say we don’t want much. Doesn’t strike me as the same thing.” He passed his gritty hands across his apron, leaving streaks.

  “Andre aspires to more than us,” Peg said.

  Smoker shook his head. “Different is all. He wants different.”

  “Still an insult,” Peg said. She sipped her beer.

  “If you’re set on pouting, do it quietly,” Smoker told her. “I’m trying to tell a story here.” He turned to Eddie.

  “Was this naked woman on her own?” Eddie asked.

  “Pour me a cold one and I’ll tell you,” Smoker replied.

  Eddie did.

  “Some bald guy chased her out of his car. That’s how we happened upon her. They were stopped in the car in front of us,” Smoker replied. “None of us knew him from Adam. Peculiar, too, because he’s not the kind strikes you as forgettable. Dressed like a cowboy going to the high-school prom. Bolo tie with a silver dollar hasp. Turquoise buttons on his shirt. No hat, though.”

  “Big ears and John Lennon glasses?” Peg asked.

  Smoker nodded.

  “The Reverend Harold Mansell.”

  “Preacher ought to be in uniform,” Smoker said. “He didn’t wear a frock or a collar.”

  “I believe his religion is inclined toward the casual,” Peg said.

  Smoker shrugged. He encountered few faces he didn’t recognize in the coulee, but it was possible Peg was ahead of him on this Harold. Peg was famous throughout the county for both her beauty and her antics, and she met all sorts in her preferred line of work. No friend to hourly wages, which interfered with her self-destruction, she rarely kept jobs longer than it took for her employers to file W-2s. After, she would politely resign. Her employers could rely on her stint doubling the male patronage so they endured her intermittent leaves without complaint.

  In the hiatus between legal jobs, Peg earned the income that fueled her vices under the table.

  Eddie refilled both their schooner glasses.

  “How’d you meet up with a man of the cloth?” Smoker asked Peg.

  Peg grinned and drank and refused to answer.

  “Well, I doubt it was church,” Smoker told her.

  * * *

  That evening, Andre returned to Claire perched on the kitchen table in her terry cloth robe. In front of her was a bottle of whiskey and two glasses.

  Andre eyed the bottle hard.

  “Don’t mistake mean looks for strength and don’t think I do,” Claire said.

  “You see it like that?”

  “That’s all those boys you harassed know of you.”

  “One instance all it takes to make it the rule?”

  Claire intertwined her fingers and put them in her lap. Andre switched off the radio.

  “No,” she said finally.

  “Then the argument you’re in is with someone else, not me.”

  Claire opened the bottle and filled two tumblers.

  “Those are hefty shots,” Andre told her.

  She lifted a glass, drank, grimaced, then drank again and ordered Andre to do the same.

  “I’m on the wagon.”

  Claire drank again and swallowed, her face a clenched fist.

  “Your inexperience is showing,” Andre said.

  “I used to drink before you,” she told him.

  “Didn’t have you pegged for a lush.”

  “I had a glass of wine every other day and both days on the weekends,” Claire said. “Now drink up.”

  Andre declined.

  “You don’t want to drink with me?”

  “It was mean of you to bring it into the house,” Andre said.

  “I want to understand,” Claire told him.

  “Understand what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Well ask, goddamnit.”

  “You won’t tell me.”

  “That’s only because I don’t know either.”

  She stared into Andre’s face.

  “What?” he said.

  “I believe you,” she said. “You don’t lie.”

  Andre emptied the second glass into the sink.

  “What’s it feel like? To drink, I mean for you?” Claire asked.

  “Giving up. Losing.”

  “How about when you stop?”

  He considered the question. “The same,” he said.

  “How about scaring those boys?”

  “The same. Like I got beat by something.”

  “Everything feels that way to you, doesn’t it?”

  “Mostly,” Andre said. “Except you.”

  She touched her glass with her finger and circled its rim, then she smiled. Andre placed the bourbon bottle in the high cabi
net. “Maybe give that to the Senior Citizens Center. They’re due to stir things up.”

  Claire said, “I’m going to feel terrible tomorrow, aren’t I?”

  “I’d bet your paycheck on it,” Andre replied.

  * * *

  It turned out Reverend Harold had owned a patchwork of alfalfa fields quilted in the flats between the rock and forests of the Selkirk Mountains. He fed most to his beeves to augment their summer grazing and sold the rest to neighbors with less ground or more cattle. Three years earlier a hoof-and-mouth outbreak had scared the FDA off Midwest stock and prices doubled. Cash happy, the reverend bought a fancy wheel tractor for which he could no longer manage payments. Selling was out of the question, as it would leave him upside down on the loan.

  He approached Peg at a barter fair in Tonasket, a homemade wooden cross looped around his neck.

  He poked Peg’s inoculation scar.

  “You’re marked,” he said.

  The Christians in the woods didn’t care for shots, or for science in general. It posed problems they already possessed the solution to, and when the scientists’ answers differed from theirs, they determined someone somewhere had pulled a fast one and these Christians loathed fast ones more than they did science, government, modern poetry, and abstract art put together.

  Peg had to admit they didn’t completely lack sense. The oxymoronic concept that to avoid biological scourges doctors ought to isolate the disease in a petri dish and then inject it into the public’s bloodstream through schoolchildren seemed strange magic even to her.

  Peg withdrew a pint of bourbon from her basket of possibles. She studied the brown liquid in the afternoon and drank, then tipped the bottle at Harold.

  “I’m guessing you don’t imbibe.”

  “No,” Harold said. “Thank you. You have kids?”

  Peg nodded.

  “You look after them and they still go off the rails.”

  She laughed. “They would debate that.”

  “Which?”

  “That I looked after them.”

  “Mothers can’t help but look after their kids, can they?” the reverend asked. “I mean, it’s nature and it’s in the Bible.”

  “Now you’re a goddamned philosopher. You don’t know my life or my children’s. You don’t know how I wounded them.”