Pork undressed and dipped beneath the sheets. Andre shivered against Pork’s cold skin, then dug into him. Peg shifted toward Pork. She put her palm against his chest.
“So, you’re staying?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said.
* * *
After the divorce, the boys resided on Pork’s ranch summers and vacations. The school year, Peg dragged them to various addresses and took on men like middle schoolers adopt insects, to ignore or torture them. Andre and Smoker cottoned to few, though their opinions were of little matter. Those who played cards with the boys or invited them to shoot bottles at the dump Peg soon lost affection for. The bad ones who busted up the house when she talked back stuck.
Andre responded by squandering hours shooting a basketball. Often, Smoker tagged along. Sometimes he rebounded for his brother, but mostly he roamed with children in similar straits, smoking cigarettes and stealing soda pop from the grocery. Andre, though, remained engrossed in the backboard’s thump when it directed the ball through the rim—bank shooters didn’t require touch, just geometry. The lack of elegance turned the shot strangely his own and the breach in the world he would later identify as self widened enough to consume not just him but his surroundings. Smoker, meanwhile, graduated to wrestling the drawers from the prettiest middle-school girls in a nearby thicket.
Andre may have disappeared into himself entirely if he had not broken his ankle on a court’s concrete edge. The incident eventually trapped him in his mother’s house with her most persistent suitor, Merlin Archer, who not long after clouted Andre’s ear with a liter of Pepsi. Rather than bolt, Andre drove his head into the man’s nuts then pounded his kidneys with his fists. Meanwhile, Smoker found an X-ACTO knife and attacked the man’s hair like he meant to take the scalp.
Peg, suddenly out of the bathroom, laughed. “Merlin, get your ass out of this house before the children butcher you.”
He scrambled through the back door.
“Boys,” she said, “I’m going to Eddie’s to get you a bucket of chicken. You’re better than mean dogs.”
* * *
They moved to Pork’s for good. Like most ranchers, Pork maintained a barnload of cats to kill rats but he had no patience for them. He kicked any within the reach of his legs and in return they ambushed him from the barn trusses or under the wagon seats, biting fingers and thumbs to the bone. Pork mocked Andre, who treated the cats to fresh milk and tripe when they cut up a beef.
One day, out of the blue, Andre planted a cur-colored yellow kitten onto the table and let it lick the gravy boat. Pork nearly spilled his meal when he bolted up. Smoker worried he’d clobber them both. But he knew Andre was born with blood in him and a death wish, too, and Smoker’s brother looked at the old man in a manner that halted Pork like nothing Smoker had seen stop the man, and Pork argued no more.
That cat—Andre refused to name him—turned into Andre’s shadow. It commandeered his saddle horn when they worked cattle and hunted the field’s edge while they plowed, supplying Andre a portion of any kill. The barn cats once tore his ball sack for his housecat standing, but Andre didn’t consider dehorning the animal like a steer or gelding. Instead, he cajoled Smoker from his bed. They knocked the cat out with horse dope, then sawed a chunk from Andre’s own arm with a skinning knife and sewed it into a tent over the cat’s rigging. The next morning, Pork woke to Smoker asleep on the floor and Andre bandaged and patched in the armchair, the cat next to him.
5
EXODUS
August 1991
Andre escaped through the back door of Dede’s trailer afterward to get his head right. In the grassless yard, an orange cigarette ember went red and lit Smoker’s face. He hunkered on a cedar chopping block. Andre could hear a nearby creek hurry through the dark landscape.
“It’s cooling off,” Smoker said. “I’ll start a fire.”
Finding no suitable fuel, he unloosened the wooden steps with a crowbar. He hauled a portion to the crude fire pit and splashed it with gasoline from the shed. When he struck the match, the blast shriveled his eyebrows and consumed his arm hair altogether. The sheepskin coat took a spark. Andre whacked it.
Smoker wheeled, fists doubled. “I’m out already!”
A wedge of light from the trailer blanched them. Dede stepped over the porch’s ruins. She wore a long duster and a hunter-orange stocking cap and rubbed her bare legs together like a cricket.
“What’re you going to do?” Smoker asked her.
“Take a shower. Go to the tavern in town.”
“Then what?”
She scratched at her hair underneath the hat. “Stay drunk awhile.”
“You leave Bird to me then. I’m not putting lunatics in charge of my child.”
“Lunatics have been doing the job all her life.”
“Well at least I’m a crazy she is familiar with.”
Dede glanced at Andre. “Maybe your brother would do better than them or me or you.”
“I’d be the last person he’d let tend his child,” Andre told her.
Dede smiled at him. “You aren’t so bad,” she said. “Not near as awful as you’re worrying.” She aimed her chin at Smoker. “He’s no victim.”
Smoker added a long two-by-six to the blaze. The dry wood caught and burned hard. The heat backed them into the darkness.
“You best get on if you’re going,” Smoker said.
“How about your hand?” Dede lifted an aspirin bottle from her pocket and began counting them out.
“Don’t pile your car up worrying over it.”
“Don’t make this about me,” Dede said.
Smoker squinted and cocked his head.
“What?” Dede said.
“I’m looking for stretch marks on your arm from being twisted,” he told her.
“You’re a rat bastard,” she said quietly.
Andre found a woodpile on the other side of the shed and toted an armload of tamarack to the fire pit. Smoker put the chopping block on to burn. The fire roared. Andre glanced up into an empty window. He and Smoker had pressed their faces in similar instances keeping vigil for Peg or Pork, two days absent, winter, on ice-slick roads, sure one or the other or both were dead and they were just waiting the night through to hike to the neighbors.
Andre glanced at Dede.
“You broke his hand. You never broke bones before,” Andre said. “What were you wound up over?”
“I don’t remember,” Dede said.
“He put you up to it,” Andre said. He turned and glared at Smoker. “This don’t make us square, goddamnit.”
Andre hurried past Dede inside to take a piss. A puny .410 rested in the mudroom corner for nuisance crows. He collected it, cleared the bolt, then pressed a round into the chamber. Outside, he fired a load of bird shot into Smoker’s ass.
Smoker collapsed to all fours, groaned, then scurried for the dark.
Dede, beside Andre, shouted, “I hope he creases you again, you rat bastard.”
The pickup door opened. The 30.06 Smoker stowed beneath the seat put out the porch light. Andre heard the bear batting the camper’s paneling.
“Knock it off, goddamnit,” Dede shouted.
A bullet snapped her flapping duster below the knee. With a wounded hand, he would need a rest for such shots, but Andre could see no rock outcropping or deadhead pine. Dede hissed and rounded the front of the house. Andre heard her car’s ignition turn and the tires bust the gravel.
“You thought I had it so good,” Smoker shouted. “Jesus. Well, I guess now you know.”
“I don’t know nothing of the kind,” Andre yelled back.
Andre set the .410 on the steps and stared into the dying fire. He considered adding more fuel though it would make him a target in the light. He sat. A minute later, he heard a rifle safety click in the doorway behind him.
“You going to shoot me anymore?” Smoker asked.
Andre shook his head.
Blood blackened Smoker’s jeans
pocket. It followed the seam’s path then ticked on the linoleum.
“All right, then,” Smoker said.
He hobbled in the truck’s direction. His broken finger dangled on his left side and his shot-up buttock forced a limp from his right. Andre followed. Smoker had taken the passenger side so Andre hit the ignition and let the motor warm. The fire glowed in the rear mirrors and cast its light up the hill.
* * *
Andre and Smoker found an open grocery in town where Andre purchased all the gauze and medical tape he could carry along with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and another ham for the bear. Outside of town, they hunted a turnout. There, Smoker bent over the tailgate while Andre determined how to doctor him. The shot peppered his skin but had not got to muscle or bone. Still, digging it out seemed past Andre’s knowledge and Smoker’s patience.
“Ain’t all that bad,” Andre told him.
“You know what would be better?” Smoker asked.
“What?”
“Not being shot in the ass.”
“Maybe that will learn you.”
“Learn me what?”
“If you don’t know, I guess I’ll have to shoot you again.”
Smoker eyed him.
Andre found his buck knife and prodded a lump and extracted a BB and then several more.
A pickup slowed. Its headlights floated over them then remained. A man opened the door. He wore a graying beard that hung to his chest and carried a shotgun in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
He waved the flashlight at Smoker. “He hurting you?”
Smoker nor Andre replied.
“I ain’t inclined to intrude into others’ personal business,” the man said. “Just don’t believe anyone ought to force themselves on the other.”
“He’s my brother,” Andre said.
“Well, that’s against everything I know. Maybe you boys ought to think it over.”
“He shot me in the ass,” Smoker said.
“That’s true,” Andre replied. “I’m just trying to patch him.”
“It an accident?” the man asked.
“Nope,” Andre said. “He deserved it.”
“You say,” Smoker replied.
The man extended his hand. Andre shook it. “I am Rufus R. Jones and I have a brother I wish I’d shot in the ass a hundred times. It’s a pleasure to meet a man who followed through.”
“What about me?” Smoker asked.
“Seems to me you’re lucky he is taking the time to fix you.”
He returned to his pickup and delivered a whiskey pint to Smoker.
Smoker drank. “You don’t even know the story.”
Rufus took a pull from the bottle. “Story’s as old as the Bible,” he said. He returned the bottle to Smoker and left them in the darkness. Smoker aimed a flashlight at his ass. Andre dug some more.
“There’s one deeper,” he said.
“Go on,” Smoker told him.
Andre poured the last of the old man’s whiskey over the knife blade. He lit a match and slid the steel over the flame. It flickered blue. He thrust the knife in Smoker’s glute. Smoker roared. Andre rotated the blade then felt the shot come undone. Andre held it in the light.
“Not as big as a jujube,” Smoker said.
LAMENTATIONS
June 1984
Peg scanned rest areas and emergency turnouts for nondescript cars or trucks carrying two or more men and scratched the details on a notepad beneath her seat. A seedy-looking pickup sauntered onto the highway in front of them. Four men lay in back under a canopy, but four exits later they departed into thirty square miles of strawberries.
Peg paused to top off the radiator and add an equal amount of antifreeze then filled the gas tank. Another pickup pulled through the pump beside her, but its noisy occupants ended up only being high-school boys loading up on beer and ice. Peg retrieved her floppy hat from the trunk and donned sunglasses then strolled inside for mustard and bread and lunch meat.
The boy awoke. Distance or boredom along with a Big Gulp coffee loosened his tongue and he began a makeshift biography. He hailed from the north country, Stevens County. He had attended community college, toiled at a discount clothing store, and served senior citizens dinners on trays at a local buffet. Recently, he had seen the tiger smile, he said, and watched a man’s last breath leave him.
Peg said nothing. The boy was ridiculous but amusing.
“Scientists, they pluck the first flower of spring, just to see how it works,” he said. “Science. Space and time, spinning planets orbiting stars. Big words to make whoppers against Providence when we are just thoughts bobbing and sinking in God’s mind.” He paused. “It ruins the flowers,” he said, finally.
Evening, she stopped for gas again and used the restroom, then let the boy have his turn. He vanished into the 7-Eleven and reappeared with a grin on his face and a long-stemmed yellow rose in cellophane. He extended it to her. They traveled on. The flower between them rocked on the seat. He’d paid likely ten times its worth.
Midnight, they parked in an abandoned gravel quarry Peg had scouted on the trip down. Together they built sandwiches and ate, then drank bottled water. Peg swallowed a sleeping pill, but the boy didn’t require one.
Morning, they continued, pausing occasionally for coffee and gasoline or a dozen donuts. Then he began a homily against words. He put no stock in them or their symbols. Lying was as old as Adam. If it was a miracle for near-apes to separate their grunts into chains that made sense beyond onomatopoeia then it was just as significant a miracle to undo such matters and close the circle. The pages of every book were only white space and ink scratches and, though the marks had multiplied into a torrent that made Noah’s deluge appear a summer squall, their slashes and dots and intersecting lines could not construct the truth.
He broke from his monologue to build them each another sandwich. Peg watched him devour his and the other half of hers. She had forgotten how much she enjoyed watching men eat. Women let each bite teeter on their forks, balancing the pleasure of taste and a sated appetite against the monster in the mirror they would encounter afterward. Men had no such compunctions. They ate like children, as if there were nothing but joy in it.
The boy picked up his one-sided conversation. Everyone gave too much credence to the story in their heads, Peg knew. The physical world and those who peopled it often reduced themselves to little more than dull television characters, and that included the artists and craftspeople at barter fairs hawking their work, clear-eyed, too sedate to be fully present and the rest, persecuted by their furies, scarcely capable of harnessing themselves and their tempers.
Most managed to discount their poisonous narratives with work or drink. Others countered with their own tune and argued themselves into school detention as youths or got two-checked at work. The doctors diagnosed them and pharmacists filled the appropriate prescriptions and the poor souls swallowed the medicine according to the directions, but it did little to soothe their angst. And the few who heard nothing owned it all.
“Who knew once upon a time could be so much trouble?” Peg replied.
“Don’t make fun of me,” Calvin said.
“I guess I’ll laugh at what I want to,” Peg replied.
The boy turned sullen. She ignored him and drove on.
She obeyed the speed limits and double-stopped at every sign indicating even a yield. Traveling the highways rather than the interstates checked their progress, but time was outside her concern. She noted more makes and models and license plates and scanned for repeats but recognized none. She encountered three police cruisers from differing counties and tucked herself behind semi rigs to govern her speed and avoid the overcautious behavior that appeared as guilty as driving a hundred.
Calvin said, “You have children, my father says.”
Peg nodded.
“They must hate you,” Calvin said.
“There’s a good chance of that.”
“That would mean they love
you, too, then.”
“I doubt the latter.”
“You can’t feel one without the other,” Calvin responded.
“Mine would say different.”
Calvin drank from his soda. “What would you say?”
“I just told you.”
Peg drove two miles without speaking.
“I mean about love and hate.”
“I know what you mean,” Peg said.
“Then why aren’t you answering?”
“Fuck you. That’s my answer.”
“Fuck you, too,” Calvin said.
“Good,” Peg said. “Now we understand each other.”
* * *
In the Sierras, thunderheads fixed on the sheer peaks, white ethereal columns miles high. Pasty, glowing light sifted through them except where their underbellies blackened and hot air collided with cold to sculpt dramatic ridges and troughs pregnant with storm. Beneath, cloud tendrils drooped through gaps and passes and darkened the ground with squalls.
Evening, the dying sun threw the mountains’ shadows across the valleys and sprayed the horizon orange and pink. Peg found an unused state gravel pit and changed license plates before entering the desert. In the few small towns streetlights and mini-mart neon played on the windshield like blurry old cartoons, yellows, watery blues and reds, and plain light.
The music stations thinned to static, and she hit buttons but found only talk programs or news or sports. It reminded her of a time during summer vacations when she and Pork had put Andre, Smoker, and Penny in back of an Oldsmobile station wagon with sandwiches, potato chips, and a mattress. Jim Bohannon and Larry King came through the speakers now like a couple of stoned intellectuals, interested in fingernail cuticles if that was what mattered to callers.
The next morning, they trekked through Oregon, swam on a green-black gloom of cedar and fir and spruce, vanished in shadows between mountain troughs and rose in the sunlit meadows. They avoided Portland with a bypass that spilled them into the Columbia Gorge, then, at the Hood River, crossed a bridge for Washington State, the river’s less-traveled side, though the two-lane highway hurt their time. The road swept up the dry canyons into irrigated farms that dotted the flat above in the concentric arcs the rotating sprinkler pipes necessitated.
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