Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  “Did they wound you?”

  “Only by existing.” She paused. “You’re a retard and I think our business is done.”

  Harold laughed. “They’re right. You’re perfect for this work.”

  The rocking-horse economy pitched from bear to bull, but money in the country had divorced itself from actual labor years ago. In the mountains, tapped-out loggers and long-haul truckers abandoned their rigs, lifts, or skidders on remote forest service roads rather than surrender them to the banks in town. The banks preferred equipment on paper, and rather than retrieve their assets, they simply printed another ledger with red numbers instead of black.

  So Peg hired crews and parted out the rigs to shade-tree mechanics or fly-by-night boneyards. In this endeavor, she was unlike herself, cautious enough never to hire the same person twice, and she refused to recruit anyone she couldn’t ruin with a phone call.

  “How’s that?”

  He pointed at her scar once more. “Inoculated, like I said.”

  “It doesn’t cure everything.”

  Harold laughed. He recounted his predicament and they made medicine easily enough. The reverend’s son soon appeared and Peg insisted he drink with her to seal the contract. He was not as reluctant as Harold would have preferred.

  Peg hunted a crew that evening at the Elkhorn Saloon: hippies, but sociable, and strong enough to lift what she could not. The work took two days and another to deliver, but the money was better than she had expected, and she and Harold both took enough from the endeavor to feel like good fortune may be attached to the other, though Peg would later curse herself for her optimism.

  * * *

  Spring settled them all. Peg was occupied with business, which forced her into low gear. At the ranch, Pork planted and tended his small cattle herd. One weekend, Smoker and Andre helped him nut his steers.

  “I just read Marty Robbins is dead,” Pork said.

  “Passed several years back,” Andre told him.

  “Well why in hell didn’t you tell me.”

  “I figured it would go hard on you.”

  He paused. “You figured right.”

  “At least we still got George,” Andre said.

  George Jones’s voice was past even art, it seemed to Andre.

  “I heard he stopped drinking,” Andre said.

  “He’s taking a sabbatical is all,” Pork replied. “Like me.”

  They continued: Pork heated the brand and Andre and Smoker tossed calves and steers. Pork cut the males and they all sang “Streets of Laredo” and “Cool Water.” The work went quickly. Labor and a month clean left Pork ropy with sinew. His stamina had rebounded and so did his preference for solitude. As the three washed up, he thanked them for looking after him and told them now they could knock it off.

  Released from duty, Smoker took work logging near Loomis. Andre applied his attention to Claire and closing the school year. One afternoon not long after the weather broke, the high-school principal visited Andre’s classroom. Claire allowed him in. He remained in the doorway in a three hundred dollar suit.

  The man said to her, “You should hear this, too.”

  “I suppose she’ll do as she pleases,” Andre said.

  Claire sat in a desk at the rear of the room.

  “That boy has gifts,” the principal said.

  Andre nodded. “He’s got a name, too.”

  “Well, he could be at Stanford or Cal,” the man said.

  “His mother has emphysema, can’t work. The father left for Alaska ten years ago. Her kin is all in Wisconsin.”

  “He worries about his mother and it will hold him back. I talked to her. She understands,” the principal replied.

  “No, you bullied her,” Andre said. “He told me. If you go there again I’ll help him file a restraining order and deliver the paper to the school board myself with the family in tow.”

  The man glanced at Claire. “Living in sin can besmirch a teacher’s reputation.”

  “You ought to address yourself to me if you want this to remain civil,” Andre said. “How long you been in this place?”

  The man shrugged. “Nine months.”

  “Well, I’d suggest you inquire around.” Andre laughed. “One of them school board members humps his secretaries and another bumps uglies with his wife’s cousin. Both are barely secret.”

  The man straightened his tie like that could prop up his argument.

  “You’re trying to put the boy into a big-time school,” Andre said. “He wants one he’ll finish. He’s got too much in him to abandon a sick mother six months at a time. He goes to California, he’ll be back here bagging groceries at Safeway before Halloween. In-state, he can visit when he gets the notion and his mother can ride the bus to get to him. Corrigan at the garage, he operates the Trailways bus desk. He’s got my credit card. She calls him. He sends a boy to chauffer her to the store and she hops the bus. The boy, I got him another card for her hotel.”

  “And you pay?” the principal asked.

  “It won’t cost much.”

  “What’s this to you?”

  “I had the boy in class, seventh grade. Once he raked my yard without me even asking. Wouldn’t take a dollar for his troubles. His mother—when I was a pup and she was well—patched me after a bicycle wreck and drove me to the nurse.”

  The principal was silent.

  “You aren’t likely to pick that kind of news up in nine months,” Andre said.

  The principal glanced at Claire. “I shouldn’t have been personal.”

  Claire nodded.

  “Is there anything I can do? Other than keep out of the way, I mean.”

  Andre laughed.

  “Maybe could help him transfer to someplace later, if it suits him,” Claire suggested.

  “That’s country you know better than the rest of us,” Andre added.

  “Be happy to.” The principal bowed.

  Andre rose and shook his hand. “Was all you wanted some public relations on him?” Andre said.

  “Well, it started out that way, I admit.”

  * * *

  The Reverend Harold’s son, Calvin, was in the deep end without a paddle.

  “He didn’t appear a chip off the old block?” Peg said.

  Harold shook his head.

  “Takes after his mother, I assume.”

  “She was a saint.”

  “Was?”

  “She passed.”

  Peg’s contract required her to retrieve Calvin when he crossed the Mexican border and transport him to the Idaho mountains. Harold slid an envelope across a booth in the tavern. “It’s five thousand dollars, all I have, so don’t bother bargaining.”

  “He wanted?”

  “In Mexico.”

  “The law?”

  “There’s worse things than a Mexican cop, I’m coming to learn.”

  “I’ve heard,” Peg said.

  “He’s in Riverside. You won’t have to cross the border.”

  “But his friends, they have no compunctions about coming this direction. Otherwise why spend your money.”

  “Now you know as much as I do,” Harold said.

  “That doesn’t comfort me much.”

  “Nor me,” he said. “But there it is.”

  “Will you bless me?”

  “Of course,” the reverend replied.

  She crossed herself then laughed at him. Ticking away in every life was anarchy and she enjoyed seeing others unraveling.

  “I want a beef to boot,” Peg said finally. “Butchered and wrapped.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Harold said.

  * * *

  Driving, Peg drummed the steering wheel, tapping a rhythm that outran anything on the radio. Occasionally she halted the beat and flattened her hand like she might to divert someone attempting to refill her coffee.

  She could rationalize the crime easily enough, and in her conscience she remained acquitted and reminded herself how right and wrong, good and evil, and
moral compunction were beyond her concern, and though she saw them twinkle in others’ skies, they were light with no warmth for her. Which did not mean she was without an ethic. Hers was, in fact, shared with every life, plant or animal: self-preservation. Such motive was not shocking; its lack of adornment was the scandal.

  She enjoyed travel, though only alone. A highway encouraged one’s thinking to unravel in loops and knots where you could unsnarl it like fishing line. Late nights, she listened to the radio stations. The generation preceding Peg played Lefty Frizzell or George Jones and drove drunk into telephone poles and tried to recall a train whistle’s moan. Peg’s era, the young scorned such music, though, in muscle cars and four-by-fours, their cassette and eight-track decks reincarnated such music and their fiddles and steel slides in rock and roll. Peg and her peers whispered the lyrics like prayers and drove in circles and drank beer and shot road signs and thought they were plowing new ground, which was, in fact, dirt that had played out long ago.

  Midnight, Peg maneuvered the Impala behind a cluster of long-haulers at a California truck stop. The clattering diesel engines soothed her thoughts and she snoozed until disturbed by an ambulance whine. It turned out a fat trucker’s bladder had determined to pass a kidney stone. The trucker’s pain drove him to the bathroom’s tile floor, which broke his hip, and he screamed like an Indian until the EMTs hit him with Demerol. Peg’s eyes shut until dawn’s light yellowed the flat horizon and Mount Shasta loomed over the reservoir. She turned the ignition key and the motor knocked until the spark fired the cylinders and the pistons chugged into their ordered rhythm.

  Fourteen hours later, Peg bought a liter of Pepsi and cigarettes at a Circle K to make change then dialed the numbers Harold had scribbled on a grocery bag.

  “Five minutes,” she said.

  Peg circled the block in her Impala, and on the second pass, Calvin stood at the curb in front of the run-down ranch-style house. Peg slowed, shoved open the door, and he and his knapsack dropped into the seat next to her. He was a bony kid with stick arms in a white T-shirt, no muscle or gut punctuating the cotton. He appeared as if he were made of angles pointing several directions at once. His face was similar, a narrow chin with a square above it that was his cheeks and forehead. Only his nose varied from the pattern, slightly misdirected from a past mishap, Peg assumed.

  He closed his eyes and allowed his head to sink into the rest and was asleep before they left the city. He had no beard, which meant he had not encountered steady pussy. Religion and awkwardness likely were culprits. He imagined he’d escaped, Peg figured, and all he had left was a long ride. He was a child and, like a child, thought running would unloose him from a hornet’s nest he’d bumbled into when likely it would just hurry him into the next until hornets were all he knew. Still, she let him sleep.

  * * *

  Andre moved in with Claire on the first weekend in April. Two pickup loads—one for furniture, another for boxes—were all the chore required. Carl helped pack. He had decided on Western Washington University. He was curious about the ocean. The math department offered him the works and Safeway agreed to transfer his job.

  In Claire’s house, Andre was at first uncomfortable. She cooked the first three nights and did the dishes and he felt of no use. She recognized this the fourth evening and arrived with supermarket chicken and coleslaw she knew he’d grown accustomed to. Andre shoved the coffee table back from the couch and he and Claire propped their heads with the same cushion and their legs with another and bent in the middle to leave room for their meal. They watched the news, then part of a basketball game, then a half-hour comedy. She felt for the first time like she imagined her parents, married thirty-two years, might have.

  What Claire thought refreshing about Andre was that he refused to speak drivel. In fact, he rarely talked aside from responding to her questions or posing one if necessary. But he was in attendance with others more than anyone she knew. When he corrected homework problems, he drummed a green pen against his temple, which pocked his skin. If he glanced up from his work and recognized Claire’s attention, a shadow rolled from beneath his eyes and surfaced as if waking, and he smiled a smile that nearly drew her tears.

  GENESIS

  Autumn 1964

  Pork supported his family two years working at the seed plant in town. Wendell, their second son, who would be called Smoker because he melted his candy cigarettes with a lighter, soon shared the second bedroom with Andre. Eighteen months older, Andre tended his brother like a shepherd. The two jabbered steadily. The older comprehended the younger’s gibberish well before Pork or Peg. Too young yet for grudges and running feuds, they hollered at each other one minute then turned partners the next, plotting havoc against the cat or dog or arranging soldiers on the coffee table.

  When Pork’s father, weakened by a congested heart, accepted a move to the Senior Citizens Center, Pork planted his family into the much-neglected ranch house. Throughout fall, he remodeled the bathroom for Peg and jerry-rigged two bed frames into the boys’ bunk bed, while his father swallowed handfuls of nitroglycerine that did little good. He passed in November. Several signatures and a thousand dollars to a shyster and Pork owned the place.

  Some evenings, he and Peg would prepare an early dinner, hire a girl for the boys, then travel to the town taverns. There, the locals gossiped against one another or complained over jobs or a lack of them. A couple of hours of this closed Pork’s days nicely, as he felt above such gripes, but its monotony agitated Peg to the point she lit firecrackers and flicked them under the pool tables for excitement or threw ice at the juke when she found the music objectionable. One day a week satisfied Pork’s inclination to socialize, but Peg champed at the bit for more people and neon. Eventually Pork wearied of town and Peg’s pyrotechnics and surrendered town to drink beer on the porch, fortified with more whiskey than he admitted. This did not deter Peg, who trundled the feed truck to the tavern four nights a week and found no trouble attracting company.

  Some nights Pork awoke in the morning dark clammy, heart whomping, arms numb, thoughts hurtling so fast words couldn’t match the pace. In his head a hiss leaked the seconds away like air exiting a tire. The town doctor pronounced him fit, but Pork told Peg he felt smothered in bed and moved to the couch.

  Peg remained absent three days to spite him. The fourth, Pork awoke to her stroking his forehead like a feverish child. She unbuttoned her shirt and loosened the sweat pants he wore, then dragged his rigging to ready and slipped over him. He heard her heave at the air while she threw herself against his pelvis. Together they made a clopping sound. The muscles in her face squeezed against one another as if she was in great concentration or attempting to read a faraway sign. She did not cry out, as was her wont, or speak or pull at his muscled chest and back. Instead, when she reached her place, she clamped her legs and hips onto him then blew out a long broken breath. After, she kneeled beside the couch, her breathing slackened and her eyes shut. With one finger, she tracked through his hair, over his forehead and then his nose. Her nail tapped his front teeth, clicking. She drew the C shape of his jaw over and over. The TV light flowed across the both of them like they were pebbles scattered by the same stream.

  She returned to their bed alone. On the television the morning cartoons soon flickered. Pork fried an egg and a length of German sausage, then showered and dressed in jeans and a fresh T-shirt. At the ranch tank, he topped off the pickup and aimed it for town where he withdrew seventeen hundred dollars from the savings, then at the liquor store bought a pint of bourbon. At the hardware, he added a rose starter, the roots in a plastic bag along with a shovel full of peat moss, a farewell for his oldest son, who favored flowers, a fact that might cause some fathers trauma, though Pork recognized the boy was just stricken with growing things.

  By the time he exited town, cars had switched on headlights. A steady rain rattled the cab; Pork’s worn wipers streaked the window. Dry months the whole country prayed for this weather: honest-to-God-get-do
wn-on-your-knees-and-call-Christ-by-his-first-name prayers. Rain was more than good luck; it was payment for being in the right life.

  As Pork neared a county-mile marker white light flooded cockeyed into the sky. A wadded Pontiac lay in the ditch bank against a broken road sign. In silhouette, a boy labored through the driver-side window. His left forearm changed course between his elbow and wrist. Rain pasted his hair to his head and his soaked shirt hung like hound skin. Behind, another set of headlights approached and halted. A man hurried past, his hair combed backward and his sideburns cut wide: folks called him Elvis.

  “You call an ambulance?” Elvis asked him.

  “I just got here,” Pork said.

  “My sister’s in there,” the boy told them.

  Elvis directed Pork to press a handful of rags from his trunk to a nasty leg wound. Pork felt the girl shift under his hands. The boy looked in through the open window. He was praying. Her eyes fluttered and she sighed deeply, a death rattle, Pork worried.

  Elvis rushed to a nearby ranch house and back. Not long after, an ambulance strobed the sky. Two EMTs hoisted the girl from the wreck and belted her to a gurney. A cop joined them. Pork and Elvis watched the boy climb in with the EMTs and the ambulance door shut. They listened as the siren whirred. Red lights beat against the low sky.

  “We saved her,” Elvis said.

  Pork stared into the pavement. “I don’t know.”

  “We did,” Elvis said. “We saved her.”

  “Okay,” Pork replied. “We saved her.”

  * * *

  His house, Pork navigated the darkness to his bedroom. At the dresser, he unsnapped a suitcase and began to fill it. Andre startled him in the doorway. Three feet tall, the boy shifted from one leg to the other and peered at Pork. He tugged a dresser drawer and unpacked what Pork had packed, neatly stacking underwear, socks, and the rest. When one drawer was filled, he pulled loose the next, certain and full of the grace that accompanied good work. Pork’s coat pocket was heavy with his emptied savings, but all his son knew about it was that clothes belonged in drawers.

  On top of the dresser was a small wicker basket that held a pocket watch and a silver dollar, a gift from Pork’s father when he graduated high school. Pork raised the dollar and contemplated its weight. His son wrestled up the mattress and buried himself next to Peg. Pork had no past before Peg and the children. He’d existed instead in the blissful blank of the present. Peg had not delivered him into calamity; he went willingly, full steam.