Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  * * *

  The next morning, Smoker awoke to an inch of snow mantling the country outside the tent. He removed the tubers from beneath last night’s cook fire, piled them on pie plates, and slathered maple syrup over them. He added huckleberries and inside the tent stirred them into a tasty mess that Bird approved of. The morning sunlight made short work of the snow. Single file, they rounded through the rubble and scree. A turquoise cirque reflected like a gem in the sun. Smoker put a ball cap on his head and Andre’s hat on Bird’s.

  At the cirque, the horses drank, but Bird and Smoker took no lunch. In the open rubble a storm would blast their tent to confetti and Smoker worried the morning snow augured more weather. The trail paralleled a rock-flour creek the color of old snow. A mile later they settled on a pine copse to stake their tent and ate a cold dinner of jerked deer and raw carrots and drank water from the canteen. Wind and rain and hail and then more snow hammered the tent. Bedtime, Bird scooted her bag next to Smoker’s.

  “Could we call Mom?” she asked.

  “No phone.”

  “When we get to where there’s one can we?”

  “We’ll see,” Smoker said.

  “Can I write her a letter?”

  “If we had paper and pencil, maybe, but then we’d need a mailbox.”

  Bird closed her eyes to sleep, but Smoker heard her whimper and opened his mummy sack. He arranged hers inside his and made a nest where she could comfort herself. Despite Dede’s suspicions, he didn’t compete for Bird’s affection. He enjoyed Bird and was inclined to partake in what he enjoyed. He knew it cut into her mother’s plans but it was of little concern to him. It divided Bird, too, and that he found disconcerting.

  “You won’t die for a long time, right?” Bird asked.

  “Not in my plans, baby girl.”

  “Will you ever just go away?”

  “No,” Smoker said. “I’m staying. Except if you’re going somewhere, then I’ll be right behind.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay,” Smoker replied. He listened to her settle then her breaths whistle as she dropped to sleep.

  * * *

  Morning, they topped Canuck Ridge. Smoker directed Bird’s attention to the braided streams that broke at the canyon rim and collapsed into a misty horsetail falls. The water doesn’t know where it’s going yet, he told her. Bird asked questions and he described where each creek divided or circled the humps and buttes and crags, ending on one that divided Storm King Mountain.

  “Agnes Gorge,” Smoker said. “The water comes so hard off the glacier it gouges solid rock. A hundred foot deep, sometimes straight down. You got to walk in the creek the whole of it. Daylight can’t even find you.”

  “Are we going that way?” Bird asked.

  Smoker shook his head. “Nothing there but water and rock and trees.”

  “But you did?”

  “Someone told me I couldn’t,” Smoker said. “All I got was wet and tired.” He looked at her. “That’s why I brung you. To keep me out of trouble.”

  She smiled a wry smile that belonged to neither Smoker nor Dede. Smoker clucked the horses and they descended. Twilight, they camped at High Bridge where Bridge Creek met the Stehekin River at a dead-ended Forest Service road.

  A turkey flock had spread itself across a ferny hillock. Smoker and Bird stalked them with the shotgun. Smoker fired and the flock gobbled and tottered off. Some took flight and managed a few feet before their weight grounded them. Smoker hoisted the dead bird and the two walked back to camp.

  Bird and Smoker plucked and cut the bird then he fried the drumsticks in the skillet.

  “This kind of food is best if you ask me, Bird.”

  “How come?”

  “Because we killed it.”

  Bird stared into the fire. The turkey’s grease hissed over the cooking coals.

  “The Bible says not to kill, but it don’t mean animals,” Smoker told her. “How else would those Jews get their corn beef?”

  “Maybe at the store,” Bird said.

  “Somebody killed the cow. You eat a McDonald’s hamburger it’s something someone killed.”

  Smoker cut into a drumstick. Still too pink, he raised the spit to finish the bird slower.

  “You get all your food at Safeway and pretty soon you forget a steak was a cow and the cow was alive and it walked around and chewed its cud and considered what it could of the pasture. There ought to be a little guilt in eating. Not like dollars at the store. Not to pay and square the bill. Killing is too big a bill to square, let alone eating.”

  “What will we leave for the turkey?” Bird asked.

  Smoker considered a minute then unpocketed his cigarettes. With a rawhide strap from his saddle, he tied feathers to the box then hid it under a rock.

  “Turkeys don’t smoke,” Bird said.

  “No,” Smoker replied. “But they can trade them with the buffalo.”

  “Buffalos like cigarettes?”

  “Yep. It’s why most all of them died. They learned though. You hardly ever see a buffalo with a cigarette nowadays.”

  * * *

  The next morning rose bright and clear. The road tracking the river’s berm turned gentle, diverting only when the water’s course hurried into a falls or series of cascades. An hour after lunch, Cassie’s ears pricked. She reared, but Smoker soothed her back to all fours. Smoker retrieved the shotgun and a box of shells from his scabbard along with his 30.06. He handed the shotgun to Bird.

  Bird shook her head. “I don’t want it,” she said.

  “It’s no time for a debate,” he said, but Bird appeared adamant, so he scabbarded the weapon then slung his 30.06 onto his shoulder. He swung into his saddle and put Bird and Ike behind him. A hundred yards and Cassie halted them. A cougar and two cubs padded onto the path. The big cat growled. Her haunches rose. Cassie whinnied and backstepped. Smoker bit her ear enough to draw blood. She settled. He hoisted the rifle to his shoulder. One kitten chased the other across the packed dirt; both rolled into the bar ditch. The mother’s tail switched. Her glare alternated from the horses back to the kittens. Smoker eased the safety off.

  “Go away!” Bird shouted.

  The startled cat looked at her and blinked.

  “Shoo,” Bird hollered. She waved her arms.

  “Yeah,” Smoker growled. “Shoo. And sock. And pants and a hat.”

  The cat turned leisurely toward her kittens. She butted each with her forehead and they trailed her up a game path into a copse of quaking aspen.

  Smoker glanced at Bird. She looked back, stoic.

  “That’ll work, too,” he said.

  Beside them, the river was blue and clear. They could see its bottom shift and bugs struggle in the current and others, dragonflies and gnats, hovering the banks. Finally they arrived at Stehekin, a small town only ferries could reach. Smoker bought hay for the horses and rented a cabin with a shower. Cleaned up, the two ate a restaurant dinner with the tourists and slept like stones in the earth until well after light, when they took another restaurant meal and coffee for breakfast. Bird inquired about a phone, but the place possessed only an old military receiver the proprietors used to contact police or the Park Service for emergencies.

  The horses bore them onto a bench between the mountains and the lake. One more day and they wandered into abandoned logging treks and slash piles and discovered a rusted skidder the coyotes seemed to have converted to a den. Deer and cattle took turns at a salt lick. Ranch houses appeared at the orchards’ edges. Occasionally propellered contraptions loomed above the stunted fruit trees. They were designed to stir the air when the temperature neared freezing.

  “What if the wind is already blowing?” Bird asked.

  “Then they eat a lot of applesauce.”

  A mile later they followed a gradual path to the lake and allowed the horses to drink. Bird dismounted and pulled her pants up past her knees then waded.

  “It’s freezing,” she said.

 
; “It comes from all them streams we saw. Might have been ice a month ago.”

  “I like it,” she said. “It feels awake.”

  Bird returned to the bank. On the gravel beach, water beaded and slid from her calves. Smoker tossed her a sweatshirt and she dried herself.

  “Do you think Mom’s sad?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s not here.”

  “I doubt she’s too put out.”

  “We left her.”

  “Well, we’re on our way back now.”

  “She told me you didn’t want her to come.”

  “That’s right, I didn’t.”

  They passed another orchard and, later, an enormous plantation house and matching outbuildings that served it.

  “She will come next time,” Smoker said.

  “No, she won’t.”

  “Why’s that?” Smoker said.

  “Because you don’t do things you don’t want to do.”

  They were quiet for a while.

  “Why didn’t you shoot it?”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  “It might have ate me.”

  “But it didn’t. I thought you decided against guns.”

  “Me shooting. I like when you do it. It’s fun.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Are you mad?”

  “No,” Smoker said. “I just couldn’t figure why.”

  Bird grinned suddenly. “I don’t do what I don’t want to either.”

  Another hour and they arrived at a parking lot, where Andre enjoyed the end of a drive-in hamburger in the truck and trailer that would cart them home.

  GENESIS

  May 1971

  In general, Andre remained an agreeable child until he reached twelve. Soon after his birthday that year, he discovered himself pitted against a cloudy fury behind his eyes. The doctors pronounced him twenty-twenty, but he squinted at objects far and near and the muscle below his jaw cramped like iron. He unloosed it by battering Smoker. He’d had some reason. Though two grades behind, his brother whipped him regularly in footraces, which got him elected captain and quarterback during recesses. Smoker picked Andre first and let him hike, but one day Andre centered the ball into Smoker’s throat, which collapsed his brother to all fours. Andre arrived not long after the ball. He bent and boxed his brother’s ears then headed to foursquare with the girls, right where Smoker had put him. Soon he folded his hands to fists and blindsided even kindergartners to hear them wail. Violence was new math—a logic he’d acquired with no place to apply it. The school expelled him the final three weeks, hoping summer would provide a difference. However, Peg wasn’t waiting on a season. She directed Pork to the pickup and dragged Andre behind him by the ear and ordered Pork not to come back with a goddamned criminal. The two loaded the pickup, Smoker watched, disappointed because he was stuck with school and Peg’s whims.

  The War Bonnet Tavern was their first stop. Pork hoisted an ice chest from the truck bed and hauled it inside. The sun dragged the clouds out of the sky and beat through the windshield. A new one-ton, freshly washed, parked in the space beside Pork’s rig. A man barely past high school locked and windowed the rig. Inside, a boy, maybe three years old, fooled with a windup toy.

  Through the rearview mirror Andre could see across the street. There Francis Timens had tucked himself inside a wrecked Chrysler. He lobbed bottles over his head while his older brothers blasted shotguns at them. Bird shot and tinkling glass rained onto the Chrysler. Francis deflected it with a garbage-can lid. Andre had attacked the boy twice in the last month.

  By noon, the sun swallowed the tavern’s shadow. In the one-ton truck, the boy cried and pinked. Andre climbed from Pork’s pickup to rescue the boy. When Francis Timens recognized him, he howled and balled himself under the Chrysler’s dash. His brothers approached the pickup, still armed. Andre fetched Pork’s .357 from the glove box and put a round over their heads and they hightailed back to the yard.

  Meanwhile, the boy in the cab gasped and cried behind the closed windows. Andre rapped the glass and pointed to the door latch. The boy did not understand. Andre considered the windowless tavern door. Entering meant a beating.

  Across the gravel, the Timenses’ father, Red Archie, in his underwear lumbered through the yard onto the pavement, twirling a walking stick for an equalizer. When he was within a few feet, Andre lifted the pistol and fired past the man’s ear. Archie halted. Andre pressed forward and put the gun into Archie’s belly; his skin swirled like a cyclone beneath the barrel. Archie elevated his hands with great caution. Behind them, Andre heard the tavern empty of men drunk before lunch. The new truck’s owner hurried to his rig and retrieved the boy who sucked the cool air and shuddered and sobbed. Andre felt holier than the church choir. If Archie’d twitched, Andre would have tugged the trigger and become altogether saint.

  “I got my packages, son,” Pork said quietly. Andre retreated to the pickup then lowered the pistol. The rest of the regulars retired into the cool tavern. In the hauling mirrors, Andre watched Archie lope for his house. His children gathered under him at the gate like slaughterhouse chicks to a hen.

  Pork paused at the grocery and fished a twenty-dollar bill from his billfold. He ordered Andre to go in and get what he wanted. Andre bought steak and eggs and lettuce, bread, a carton of milk, and cans of Campbell Soup and pears and peaches: enough to fill two bags. Looks like what an old lady would get, Pork told him. Take it back. The second time through Andre loaded twelve bucks’ worth of penny candy into a basket and a Playboy magazine. He packed it to the truck and dumped the bag on the seat.

  “That don’t look like enough candy to me,” Pork said.

  Andre put the magazine under the seat. Pork uncapped the whiskey and had a snort, looked both ways at a stop sign, then drank again to congratulate himself on a clear highway. He aimed them west toward the river, then north, then west again until Andre had no notion where they might end up and doubted the old man did, either. Pork’s talk wandered with their travels. Without whiskey, he was vague. With it, everything turned obvious, but only to him. It don’t matter what kills you if it makes you strong, he would say, or, heaven’s hard to get to and hell ain’t nothing but a long hangover.

  Three hours later, they happened upon Lake Roosevelt, the stopped-up Columbia River. Forty miles later, where the Spokane River fed the reservoir was a cavalry fort and an enormous picnic area and campground that brimmed with campers on ten-by-twenty-foot grass rectangles. A table and firebox chained to fir trees accompanied each. Pork had to talk fast to get one. He arranged two lawn chairs around a concrete fire pit and hunted the cooler for another beer. In the other camps, radios played, few agreeing on a station.

  “Get yourself a beer,” Pork said.

  Andre shook his head. Pork waved a hand to dismiss him and proceeded to nap in his lounge chair. Andre snuck a cigarette and smoked it. He wandered the park until he encountered a trail that wound alongside the Spokane River’s western bank on a dusty ridge that overlooked the water. One or two pleasure boats had anchored near the bank in the first mile, but after that heat and trees and sagebrush seemed to own the place.

  The trail thinned to a slim game track that forked and forked again as the deer diverged near the water. Ticking insects that as a younger child Andre mistook for rattlesnakes tittered the air. Ahead, the bluff bent hard where the river met a seasonal creek. Under its lip a mud bank shot with swallow nests fell off to a sandy spit below. At his approach the birds retreated into the tiny pocks or set their wings and darted for gnats.

  On the opposite shore was a canoe on a cutbank beach. Three small children pursued one another around the boat. Their parents rested in a drooping pine’s shade. The kids switched to slinging wet sand until the youngest bawled and the father hollered and they emptied their hands. The mother—brunette, thin, and pretty as far as Andre could make out—hurried to the crying child and cupped her hands to bathe his face with water.

 
The sun dropped behind the rocky horizon; the air cooled. The father pitched a plastic football in arcing passes while the boys streaked along the water’s edge under it. Before dark, he shoveled a hole with a folding military spade and the children scurried for what would burn. Over their fire the children browned franks on green sticks then marshmallows. Their shadows grew in the fluid light, exaggerating the length of a chin or brow like totem heads. After a time, the woman coerced the little one into pajamas and ordered the other two to do for themselves. The father secured the canoe’s bowline with the anchor then bent the boat seats into beds. The wife spread a wide blanket on the beach and mummy bags for herself and her husband. The moon had ascended the sky before they quit hushing their children. The couple talked awhile, then cooed, and finally discarded their clothes at the edge of the firelight. Their skin flittered in the coals’ pink light while they whispered and sang out.

  After, they slept spooned. Their neglected fire waned. Andre hunted a path to the water. He halted at its edge and studied the tiny camp, then stepped in and ducked quietly under. He held his breath and swam the distance between underwater. He rose behind the boat. He touched its gunwale; the canoe tipped like a cradle. Inside, the girl had burrowed beneath her brother’s shoulder.

  On the beach, a picnic basket lay near the dying coals. Andre lifted the lid and ate half a sandwich, which tasted so good he ate the rest. The husband dozed heavily. He had swung one leg over the other to free it from the sleeping bag, which uncovered his wife’s breasts and legs. One of the children muttered. Andre turned and when he glanced back, the woman was in front of him, naked. She walloped him in the side with a shovel.

  Andre teetered and regained his balance. She stared into his face. Her eyes held thoughts he didn’t recognize, like the faces of paintings in library art books. She swung again and caught him on the chin. His skin opened and he felt blood drip from the wound. Two steps and he was under the water again.

  “There,” the woman cried out. “He’s out there!”

  * * *

  At their camp, Pork fried boloney on a stick and struggled to eat it without burning his hands. The emptied whiskey bottle lay on its side in the grass.