Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  She slowed the Impala in the manner one might pull a hill under cruise control. Behind her, lights closed in the rearview mirror then disappeared, then appeared next to her across the center line. The car was gray or silver with a male driver and another on the passenger side. It passed. The red taillights bobbed the pavement ahead. Another car approached, dissimilar to the last. The light fixtures sat higher, orange fog lights beneath them. It did not close in on her, which led her to believe it had come from the ranches. She determined to allow it to follow rather than slow and force it to pass.

  She alternated speeds for fifty miles and encountered nothing unordinary. Still, her neck ached even after she stretched and popped the vertebra. She watched Calvin’s cigarette rest on a soda can spiraling smoke toward the roof. The ash grew until it tipped filter and all into the can’s opening.

  On a highway, twenty miles from Goldendale, the pavement banked for a hard curve through the rock, then straightened, then bent the opposite direction. Between was a dirt road that led past a knoll big enough to hide the Impala. She exited and switched off the lights.

  Stopped, she cranked down her window after the dust passed, then unlatched her car door and stepped out to breathe the early-morning air. East, the horizon purpled. Birds prattled at the dawn. Another car passed and slipped off. Peg closed her eyes and rubbed at the burning lids. A deer rustled in a field or a coyote hunting late. No coursing wind traveled from the river channel this far from the gorge. Instead a hospitable morning breeze raked the grass and rock like a broad, gentle hand. You could hear it in the trees and draws and thickets.

  And then a dull, thick pain in the back of her skull halted the pastoral with a sound so loud and close and intimate that she would recall it later almost tenderly. When she regathered herself, Calvin had torn her shirtfront and cut the elastic in her bra with a pocketknife. Presently, he attempted to drag her pants below her knees. He had not yet considered her panties.

  “Hey,” she said. “Let’s go back to the car.”

  He halted.

  “It’s softer,” Peg said. “We might as well be comfortable.”

  “Okay,” Calvin said.

  Peg squirmed herself to all fours, then pulled her pants over her shoes and stood and stepped out of her panties. The flashlight that Calvin employed to clout her lay in the gravel. He’d discovered it in the glove box, she guessed. Nude, she aimed herself to the Impala. Still woozy, she staggered then caught herself. By the car door she had her bearings. She lay on her back on the benched front seat, lifting one leg over the steering wheel and hooking the other on the driver’s-side headrest.

  Calvin undressed hesitantly. When he’d finished, he tipped himself over her like a falling tree. She allowed him forty-five degrees, then smiled and grabbed his cock and balls savagely with one hand and meanwhile unloosed the .45 stashed between the seats with the other. She drove the barrel into his chest.

  The boy was wild-eyed. Peg twisted his genitals like she was cranking sausage. Calvin’s face turned ashen. She let go and let him vomit on the gravel. He glanced up, the sandwich remnants and silver drool puddled beneath him. She busted him in the mouth with the gun barrel and he lay useless in the sand.

  She checked the pistol cylinder, then cocked the hammer and allowed the chamber to roll onto a live round. She put the barrel to his Achilles tendon and then tugged the trigger. Calvin screamed and bled and writhed like a worm. In the trunk, Peg found her bungee cords and a tire iron and twisted them into tourniquets.

  Peg ordered him to crawl into the passenger seat, where she tied his wrists behind him with nylon rope then tethered him to the door handle. She used the last bungee cord to anchor him to his seat, then wrapped it under the seat mounts to his ruined ankle, so if he moved, it would cost him. She dressed herself and threw a wool blanket across him.

  Finished, she engaged the ignition and aimed them toward his father and Selkirk county, but stopped instead at Metaline Falls where the Pend Oreille county sheriff operated an office. It was past dark. She dragged Calvin from his seat and chained him to the police cruiser with a logging chain and a padlock then fired a shot into the night and sped away.

  GENESIS

  July 1984

  Peg remembered Penny on the floor in front of her bed, cross-legged with a coloring book and a blue crayon, scribbling the entire page. The picture tore then tore again, until finally it was a few blue streaks hanging from the stapled binding. The other books on her shelf had been wrecked the same way, even the ones meant just for reading. When she grew excited or frightened, her coloring left the pages and she rubbed the hard floor with the crayon, which turned it into shards of paper and wax. The boys coddled her like a puppy. Pork, too. He insisted on delivering her lollipops once a week that were bigger than her head. No matter their squabbles and arguments and plain disgust with each other, they agreed on Penny.

  Already capable of steering the men in her life to surrender candy or juice or crackers at her whim, she now pouted or giggled and examined their responses to employ the information later if the necessity arose. Occasionally in such instances, her eyes found Peg’s and her face turned sober and uncertain. Her separateness from the boys and her father left them at her mercy and herself alone. It was Peg she looked to for reassurance, and in those glances passed that silent and vital woman’s code for which men have no equal.

  * * *

  For a year after Penny’s death, Peg stuffed her house with candles and painted the walls soft colors. She learned calligraphy and wrote inspirational verses and scripture on art paper and taped them to the appliances.

  * * *

  Smoker rose from the lake with Penny in his arms instead of the block. Pork joined the boys breathing into her mouth and pressing her chest, but Peg knew better. The police and ambulance raced toward the dock, their lights painting the water. The boys shivered in their wet shorts. Peg still recalled the hard look she put on them and the bruised one they returned.

  “Ain’t their fault,” Pork said.

  She put her face into his. “You,” she howled. “You!”

  * * *

  In the vacation cabin’s kitchen, Peg had boiled potatoes for the only salad the boys would eat. The radio played a sentimental country song that Pork favored. She glanced at him and winked, then bent for a decent-size bowl. He put himself behind her. She stretched her arm backward. He was near ready. Outside, the boys splashed beneath the dock. Penny, on the wood decking, watched them. Peg blinked and coupled herself to Pork.

  Finished, she could see through the window Smoker and Andre alternate dives from a rowboat anchored with a mason’s block.

  “Where’s the baby?” Peg asked.

  * * *

  Smoker would recall Penny on the dock, a few minutes earlier. “Lucky Penny,” he coaxed. “Come in the water. You can ride my stomach and I’ll be your boat.”

  She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m too little,” she said.

  “I’ll carry you,” Smoker said.

  Again, she shook her head. “That water is deep,” she said. “I hate it.”

  * * *

  Twelve months to the day from Penny’s death, Peg bought a fifth of the best bourbon in the jar store and forced Pork to wolf it down with her, then they undressed and quit quitting.

  6

  EXODUS

  August 1991

  Andre bought the bear a pair of chickens at the last grocery, but the bear groused in the camper for more. Smoker took a turn at the wheel. Andre rolled down his window while they drove and allowed in the cooling night. A hundred miles north, the stars spattered the sky and blued the high ridges and treetops. The moon was halved, the dark hemisphere remained, a shadow of the other. Andre tipped his cap bill over his eyes. They drove into the mountains until pavement surrendered to gravel, which turned to sloppy dirt logging tracks and passed gutted rigs, rusted in the long winters, and solitary houses built from whatever the denizens could muster
. Deer and elk dotted clearings. Smoker drank his coffee.

  “How come you know so much about animals?” Andre asked him.

  “Listened when folks talked and read the old man’s Field & Stream till the staples came out.”

  “I didn’t see no girl magazines in the house.”

  “They were under the bed.”

  “I don’t recall them containing directions.”

  * * *

  They slept in the truck cab. The next morning the roads coiled and unraveled through the Selkirk Mountains and on to the Kettle River Range. The miles were slow; the air cooled. The pickup descended onto a stretch of fresh pavement and entered a town of a hundred. A beer light flashed over the only restaurant. Next to it, a metal corral held a shaggy bison humped at a water trough. Smoker limped into the tavern to inquire about fuel. The bartender directed him to a pump on the corner, then took his twenty and followed to watch the dial.

  Next to the bar, Andre found a rickety phone booth.

  “Are you in jail?” Claire asked.

  “No.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m lonely.”

  “Me, too.”

  Andre studied the locals gawking from the tavern window.

  “I ought to just come back.”

  Claire blew out a sigh.

  “Well if it suits you.”

  “That just sounds like something you’d say to make me feel better or worse.”

  “It does,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Andre nodded though she couldn’t see him. “I got to go,” he told her.

  “You really don’t need anything?”

  “Just to come home,” Andre said.

  “Well, do.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You sure do a lot of things you don’t want to,” she said.

  He listened to her hang up and, afterward, cradled the phone.

  LAMENTATIONS

  June 1984

  Outside Smoker’s house, Bird shot baskets in the driveway. Andre had lowered the rim to five feet to keep her from learning bad habits. It was bent from her use. He found a wrench and pliers in his truck’s toolbox. The backboard bolts were rusted, but when he twisted them the rim tightened.

  Bird dribbled the ball on the hard-packed dirt. It got loose from her and Andre passed it back. Bird lifted the ball like a pumpkin over her head then threw it back to Andre. Andre shot from twenty feet. The ball fell through the bottom of the net.

  “Wow, that was lucky,” Bird said.

  “You think so?”

  “I bet you a pop you can’t do it again,” Bird said.

  Andre did. The bet went double or nothing up to sixty-four cans of Coke before he missed.

  Bird tried a shot from her chest. The ball clattered the backboard hard.

  “Easier. Shoot it, don’t throw it.”

  Andre cupped the girl’s hands then set the ball in them. She held it a second then banged a shot against the rim front.

  “Here, let me show you.” Andre manipulated her wrists so she could balance the ball with her left hand and push with her right. “Just use one hand to shoot; the other steers,” Andre told her. The shot dropped through.

  “Now pretend your hand is reaching inside the basket.”

  Bird tried again.

  “Better,” Andre told her. “When you finish, your arm and hand should look like a gooseneck.”

  Her next shot fell. She ran for the ball and set herself. The tip of her tongue circled her upper lip. “Gooseneck,” Andre whispered.

  He glanced up to find Dede on the porch in a worn blue bathrobe. When the ball rolled her direction, she kicked it Bird’s direction.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Bird said.

  Andre looked to her. “We wake you up?”

  She nodded and put her hand into her hair. “Why are you playing with her?”

  “Because I like Bird and I like basketball.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because she’ll get used to it.”

  Smoker appeared from behind. “Maybe some of him will erase some of you.”

  “Fuck you,” Dede told Smoker. She turned inside. Andre collected his tools. Bird looked at him, then the doorway that had held her mother a minute ago. Her face was smooth and as indifferent as the pavement.

  Andre wagged his chin at Smoker’s truck. “Kennel up, Birdy. We’ll fetch the horses.”

  Andre delivered them to a mountain turnout almost to Twisp. He assisted Smoker unloading the trailer, then saddled and fitted Bird’s horse for travel. She watched him seriously so she could repeat the chore on her own when she and her father made camp. Smoker withdrew a map from his pocket that identified where he intended to be each night. Attached were emergency numbers and the weather service so Andre could organize a search if events turned sideways somehow.

  Andre put his cap on Bird’s head as she had forgotten one and returned the truck and trailer to the ranch. In a week, he’d collect them at the first camping area you could get a vehicle to.

  Saddled and bridled, the horses packed Bird and Smoker onto the broad trail that meandered into pine and birch. For Bird, Smoker had selected steady, congenial Ike, a gelding mature enough he didn’t feel compelled to prove himself, and for his own mount, Cassandra, who had a hellish bent but could run for miles without rest if they met difficulty.

  The day cooled and the sky cleared and the air thinned. Red Indian paintbrush claimed several fields, bluebells another. Purple coned lupine dotted it all. Mottled snow resisted summer in the shadowy canyons and tree wells. Mule deer browsed the meadows.

  Cassie walked him into a low limb. A yellow pollen fog clouded him. Bird laughed. She was going to be pretty. In the old myths, beauty was often a curse; maybe those heathens had it right. It made Peg a desert: cactus, sand, cold nights, seething days. Pork, once there, could find no path out, and it would leave him just bleached bones.

  The first night, Smoker shot a grouse with his twelve-gauge and skewered it on a green stick and let it bake. They ate then opened their mummy bags and stared into the sky.

  “Mom didn’t want to come?” Bird asked.

  “Just didn’t work out,” Smoker told her.

  Dede had hoped to join them, but Smoker wouldn’t permit it. Bird fell silent. Smoker roughed her hair. His mind did not ordinarily weigh such matters, but he found himself studying his hand and Bird’s hair and the scalp it sprang from. He wondered how his hands spoke through all that and what they might say to her and if it was what he intended. And then he wondered what, indeed, he did intend.

  The next morning, they stewed coffee and cobbled breakfast from dinner’s scraps then set out. The dense forest abated, replaced with low grass and rock. Most anything else alive was sheltered beneath thin jackstraw. Soon ridges and sheer granite-faced mountains stacked their path, too steep to hold vegetation, just hard lines against the sky. The trail ahead narrowed to a switchbacked ribbon. Ike snorted then warily went on. A mile past, several blind creeks had gouged the path and the horses stepped gingerly through the mud.

  Smoker and Bird halted at Bing Creek to drop a line. In the clear water, they could see brook trout study the baited hooks. Finally, an eighteen-incher rushed one. Smoker landed the fish. Bird reeled another to the bank. Smoker stowed them in a burlap sack.

  The trail squeezed into a defile. Smoker took the lead. They crested a granite fin. On the other side, a long, ramparted ridge feathered the blue sky. Shale shingles roofed the inclines. At their foot, a bowl a thousand feet deep looked like a moonscape: nothing green except lichen and moss in the shadows.

  “What happened?” Bird asked.

  “Big ice,” Smoker replied.

  They backtracked to a dirt hollow protected by three enormous root wads, the remnants of two-hundred-year-old fir trees. A good deal of light remained. Smoker hunted a sharp rock then set out toward the sound of rushing water. Bird followed. Smoker halted at a
long stalked plant with tiny yellow flowers. He dug the tubers beneath and deposited them in the gunnysack. “Kouse,” he said. “We’ll have it for breakfast.”

  They came upon a huckleberry bush past the bloom. Huckleberries meant bears, so they hurried on. A couple hundred yards later, Smoker dug a balsamroot, then plucked miner’s lettuce, and found mushrooms he determined healthy. He warned Bird that plants with colored spines or thorns or fine hair meant poison, same for three-leaf bunches and stalks that bleed white and anything inside a pod.

  They ate the fish and Bird fell asleep. Smoker recalled Pork hauling the boys to the July Fourth Circle Celebration. Andre and Smoker tepee-creeped for unattended whiskey bottles and cigarettes while the drums took up. Eventually the boys, like the rest, headed toward the dancers. In a rotating circle, the participants chanted in high, children’s voices. The drums, hidden from the light, beat fast, first thunder, then later, rattling rain. The dancers leapt and landed, painted feathers and buckskin turning deer and elk alive.

  Later, they found Pork at the stick games. In the firelight, the old man’s face turned gold, round and ripe for creases, his large nose bent from some unrecalled scrape. It could’ve been a hundred years ago. He could’ve been weathered by battle. The gambling songs bluffed and called. Neither Smoker nor Andre understood the words, but the song, skinned of meaning, was like seeing inside an animal, the bones and all that moves it through a place.

  A few threw money on the blankets. Pork’s eyes were wild. The elders nodded toward him, waiting on his portion of the song. Pork tried his voice, but all it could croak was a sound no one had heard before. When Pork opened his mouth again, just breath followed. He unclenched his fists and let the sticks loose.