Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  “Have you a beer, goddamnit,” he said.

  When Andre didn’t reply, Pork threw a half-full can into his chest, then, spent, went back to his cooking.

  “Get me another,” Pork said after a while.

  Andre fished the last can from the ice and set it on the picnic table. The tab broke, so he whacked the lip with a hammer. The blow exploded the can. Beer foamed and soaked them both and puddled on the table and ground beneath.

  Pork lumbered up. “You ruined my beer.”

  Andre hurled the hammer and it caught Pork in the chest and backed him into his lawn chair. The toolbox remained on the picnic table. Andre dug into it and threw a crescent wrench and the wire snippers at Pork. Pork protected his face so Andre took a ratchet to his belly, then pelted him with sockets. The remaining tools were smaller, so he threw them in handfuls. Pork grunted. The toolbox emptied, Andre flung gravel and wood and empty beer cans, then the box itself, which opened a gash on Pork’s arm. Pork sucked for wind and gasped.

  “Uncle,” he whispered. “Uncle, goddamnit.”

  Andre hid in the truck cab and locked both doors and slept. Dawn, he woke and climbed into his swim shorts then wandered to the boat launch. Fishermen unloaded for the morning bite. Their boats’ oily smoke draped the outboard motors and the water reflected the sound of the chugging engines. The lake split for the hulls, easy as a bird cut wind.

  Andre waded into the water. It was colder than he recalled. He didn’t take off his shirt and the material felt like loose skin that he could shed. He bent and washed the gash beneath his chin. He wondered about the woman: if he had haunted her like bad medicine or if her husband convinced her Andre had been nothing but a nightmare in a wild place.

  Water splashed behind him where Pork, on the sand, was attempting to skip pebbles. Scabbed blood blocked one of his nostrils. He put his finger over the other and snorted it clear, then got on all fours and washed himself. Pork pressed as far as his rolled-up pants would allow, then went deeper, soaking his clothes. Andre’s hand trailed in the water and Pork’s passed it like a fish, then plucked it up awkwardly. The skin was callused, a man’s.

  “I’m sorry,” Pork said. “I shouldn’t have left you in the truck. Most of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  7

  EXODUS

  August 1991

  The road rose again through a string of switchbacks. The speedometer needle barely cleared zero. This deep into the woods the loggers had quit; the path was little more than a pair of ruts evened by a four-wheel drive pushing a blade. From each loop, Andre could gaze into the canyons, empty of people and light.

  Andre stopped the truck to change Smoker’s bandages and adjust the finger splint they had fashioned from a cotter pin and electrical tape.

  “You remember the first time you saw Pork’s dick?”

  Smoker laughed.

  “Do you?” Andre asked.

  “Well, I saw it, but I don’t recall the date or place.”

  “I walked into the bathroom and he was pissing. He had one of those morning hard-ons.”

  Smoker nodded. “Those are my favorites.”

  “It scared the shit out of me.”

  “You seen your own hadn’t you?”

  Andre nodded. “And I’d seen yours, too. Little tiny thing, I recall. Like someone cut off a pinkie at the first knuckle.”

  “Yours wasn’t much either at that age.”

  “No, likely not. But the old man, I remember it like it hung to his knees.”

  “I seen Peg’s bush once,” Smoker said. “It was just a blank though.”

  Andre nodded. “I seen that, too, and thought the same thing. It scared me, too.”

  “Why’s that.”

  “I didn’t know what was under there.”

  “And with Pork you did, but it scared you, too.”

  Andre nodded. “I guess so.”

  “I never thought about it,” Smoker said. “I’m inclined to not want to know. Thanks for bringing it up.”

  They drove awhile longer.

  “Pork’s dick isn’t any bigger than normal, anyway,” Andre said. “I pissed next to him in Eddie’s plenty of times.”

  “What’s your obsession with all this talk of uglies?”

  “They were normal,” Andre said.

  “Well normal is damned strange, then.”

  Andre shook his head. “What if we made them up?”

  As night came on, the ground below gathered in the shadows and lost its form, until all that held them up was darkness and all that was in front of them was more of it except what the lights could cut and those shapes appeared and disappeared so quick they felt dreamt. Above, the sky was scattered with lights so that it seemed they were on some planet closer to it. Andre worked through the gears. The engine wound and relaxed with the degree of grade.

  Smoker turned off the radio; no stations reached this high. He stared at himself in the glass and then he began to laugh, at first a chuckle, then whole hog.

  “What?” Andre asked him.

  “I’m shot in the ass,” Smoker said.

  “It doesn’t hurt?”

  “Hell yes, it hurts. It’s the situation that’s funny. Not the hurting.”

  “I doubt I’d find bird shot in my butt so amusing.”

  “That’s because nothing amuses you.”

  “I laugh.”

  “Name a time.”

  Andre drove for a mile then another.

  “You can’t,” Smoker said.

  “I laugh all the time.”

  “No, you pretend to laugh. Like a dog, you bark at the mail truck when it passes, but you don’t know why.”

  “Maybe I’m polite.”

  “You shot me in the ass, Miss Manners.”

  Andre nodded. “I did, that’s true. On that we agree.”

  “Yet I’m the one laughing.”

  “Maybe funny to you isn’t to me.”

  “You think that old man coming up on you cutting my ass wasn’t worth a laugh?”

  “I felt bad for him. He thought something and it wasn’t so. Not his fault. He’s trying to help and it turns him the butt of a joke.”

  “Hell, he’ll tell the story till the day he dies,” Smoker said.

  “I don’t make sport of others. It’s one-sided,” Andre said.

  “You got brains to graduate from college. You got a woman who only strayed once and for someone so like you he was kin. You got good fortune. Now you’re going to fuck that up because you don’t have a sense of humor. Good God, you’re a worse sinner than me.”

  LAMENTATIONS

  July 1984

  Throughout spring, Claire hoarded their change. Early summer, she booked a vacation cabin on Lake Chelan, an hour into the mountains. Andre resisted, but she promised he would not have to be a tourist. They read two poems a day and occasionally dined in the restaurants lining the water. Mostly, though, they slow-cooked ribs or bratwurst or brisket and constructed coleslaw according to a recipe book left in the cabin’s tiny library. Evenings, too dark to gawk at scenery or meander the shops, they gambled small stakes in the Indian casino with retirees and later commandeered the resort’s hot tub and whispered into the morning hours.

  Andre recounted high school when he calculated others’ needs and responded, never considering his own. He appeared unselfish but such a demeanor swapped honest selfishness for a dishonest brand. Andre manufactured a self others found amicable by winnowing out most everything in him that wasn’t. It made tolerating him easy and knowing him impossible. He’d left no room to love or hate him. His generosity was never as natural as Smoker’s self-interest and he appeared disingenuous at best.

  On the last afternoon of their holiday, Claire and Andre entered an ancient hotel to peruse its antique silver collection. Inside, the place smelled like laundry and closed windows. A man Andre’s age dealt canasta to a gray-haired woman who tallied scores on a napkin. Claire slowed. The man’s eyes peeked from beneath his bro
w. Claire’s hips shifted as if accepting his weight.

  “Of all the gin joints in all the towns,” he said. The two hugged. Claire introduced him as Marlon. He shuffled the cards then plopped the deck on the table and excused himself and led them to the bar. Behind it, he filled a plastic cup for Claire—tonic and lime—without asking.

  “You?” he asked Andre.

  “Bourbon,” Andre replied.

  Claire crossed her eyes at him. Andre ignored her. He gentled the glass to his mouth and sipped the top, then reached into his pocket and deposited a ten on the bar.

  “Your money’s no good here,” the man replied.

  “How’s your mother?” Claire asked. “I’d heard she died.”

  “I’ve been playing cards with a ghost, then.”

  Claire laughed. “I don’t know how some news gets to be.”

  “Well, I’m glad it got to you before me.” Marlon patted her hand on the bar. “I’m pleased you stopped.”

  He glanced at Andre. “The both of you. It’s nice to know what became of her.”

  “We’re teachers in the same high school,” Claire said.

  “Didn’t we play you in softball one time?” Marlon asked.

  “No,” Andre replied.

  More whiskey and Andre could hit him. He unpocketed his wallet and deposited a twenty on the bar.

  “I said I got it,” Marlon told him.

  Andre let the bill lie. Marlon shrugged then filled Andre’s shot glass. Andre drank it and signaled for another.

  “How many you plan on putting down?”

  “Many as you fill,” Andre said.

  Marlon lined four glasses and poured. The bourbon was piss-colored. It lacked bite and the good going-gold that follows the genuine article. It would leave him only weary and dejected. Tequila tasted so harsh even a teetotaler would note it was thinned. Andre made short work of the line and ordered Two Fingers. Marlon poured him two.

  “He forgot how to count,” Andre said to Claire. On one end of the bar was a stack of plastic Solo cups. Andre poured the shots into one. “Excuse me,” he said.

  At their cabin, he switched clothes and sank into the hot tub. He sipped the tequila. The sky purpled and the clouds cleared and the night rose, a black blanket salted with light. Steamy threads lifted from the water, looking vague. He did not know how long afterward he opened his eyes and recognized Claire idling next to him in her red one-piece. The material shimmered on the clear water. Her black hair clung to her neck in tendrils.

  He laughed. “Goddamnit.”

  She floated next to him and touched a spot on his chest. “If I met your old flame, I might do the same.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You tell me you’d drink over me like that.”

  “That doesn’t mean what you think it does.”

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  Claire nodded.

  “When?”

  “At night.”

  Andre didn’t laugh.

  “We’d dated for three weeks, I think. I was a virgin then.”

  “Did he know?”

  Claire glanced up. “He told me before that he thought I was.”

  “That must’ve tickled him.”

  “I’d like to think what tickled him was me.”

  Andre gazed into the night above. Claire extended her hand to his face and traced the shape of his jaw.

  “It was three months for us,” he said.

  Claire’s finger tapped at his Adam’s apple. “I can stop this talk right here, if I just press.”

  “How did you know him?”

  “We had a class together. One day he inquired about the time, though there was a clock above the professor’s lectern. Past that, I spoke to him at a dorm mixer. We danced a couple of times, then stood by the door where it was cool and we could hear each other. He asked if I’d go to a movie with him.”

  “You worked with me,” Andre said. “We had conversations.”

  “That was a good thing.”

  “It took you a long while to cozy up to me.”

  “Maybe if you had asked earlier, this argument wouldn’t be necessary.”

  “Maybe I might’ve if I’d been better convinced.”

  “Darling, you require more persuasion than most men.”

  “I require more whiskey than them, too.”

  Claire closed her eyes and massaged them with her wet hands. The muscles of her face clenched then let go.

  “Who are most men?” Andre asked.

  “I have a male harem. I abandoned them all for you. They castrated themselves with rusty knives out of frustration.”

  Andre slapped the water. A wave flooded the other side of the tub. He watched it break and return to his chest, then calm until the surface was broken only by the pumps. He ducked his head under and listened to their hum until his lungs ached. He surfaced.

  “Did he come inside you?”

  “You’re feeling awfully holy aren’t you?” she said.

  “Did he?”

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “Probably not.”

  “You really want me to answer?”

  “I asked.”

  “Yes, you asked. Do you want me to answer?”

  “No,” he said. “Did you come?”

  “Achieve orgasm. Sexual bliss. Did he find my G-spot?”

  “Yes,” Andre replied. “No,” he said then. “I don’t want to know.”

  Claire tipped backward and floated until all he could see of her face was the point of her chin and her eyelashes if she blinked. Her voice turned flat. “Not at first.”

  “I said no,” Andre told her.

  “I got pills,” she said.

  “For him?” Andre asked. He ducked under the water.

  She spoke again when he emerged. “Because, it quit hurting.”

  “He hurt you?”

  “It hurt me.”

  “Then it didn’t?”

  “I got wetter,” she explained.

  “Salt for my wounds.”

  “Your wounds?” she asked.

  Andre tapped on the empty cup’s rim. Tequila often blacked him out, but he thought that unlikely; in his experience, God was not that generous.

  “You liked him better after a while, then?”

  “Yes. And it.”

  “Better than me.”

  “Than us, you mean,” she said.

  “Than us.” Andre laughed. He lifted himself out of the tub and sat on its rim. Steam clouded him.

  “It was just sex,” Claire said. “Not religion. Just something that happened.” She swam to him and set a hand on each thigh.

  “Never happened to me. Till you, I mean.” He looked at her wet hair and damp skin. She had started to cry.

  “That for him?” Andre asked.

  Claire shook her head. “Maybe you could marry me,” she said. “You’d be the only one that ever did that.”

  8

  EXODUS

  August 1991

  The fork that wound them toward the house was half a mile. A dog bayed and then two more. Their long bodies paled in the woods as they tracked the rig. The nervous bear lumbered from window to window in the camper. Light from a fixture halfway up a bull pine bounced off the hard dirt driveway like day. Farther, gas generators clattered and a bald man appeared in the light. He lifted his hand and the dogs halted.

  “They’ll let you alone,” he shouted to the truck. Closer, Andre recognized Calvin next to him, carrying a gas lantern.

  Smoker extended his uninjured hand to open the truck door and labored out of the cab on his good leg then dragged the other behind it. He limped toward them. Andre followed. The reverend wasn’t all bald, just his crown. He looked intelligent and odd, like a professor. He grinned an avuncular grin and directed them toward the cabin.

  “You hurt bad?” Harold asked.

  Smoker lifted his bent finger and glanced
at his bloody jeans. “Which time?”

  Harold shrugged. “Either?”

  “I don’t want to discuss it.”

  Inside was a fire and Calvin posted the lantern above it, then struck a match and lit one more and after that, half a dozen candles. The room turned orange and friendly, even the shadows. A Bible filled with marks lay open on a threadbare couch. Another sat on the kitchen table. Above the fireplace was a watercolor of Christ and next to it an elk rack bearing two rifles. Harold lugged several home-brew quarts from a root cellar.

  “Dede warned me you’d come,” Harold said.

  “Well, she’s a prophetess,” Smoker replied.

  Harold settled into his chair. “You here for business or pleasure?”

  “My daughter,” Smoker said. “And she’s neither.”

  “That’s not true. She’s a good girl. Makes herself handy.”

  Smoker nodded. “She’s a help, I agree.” He unholstered his pistol and placed it between them on the table. Calvin rose and Andre with him, but Harold motioned for them to stand down.

  “You don’t need to educate me on my own child,” Smoker said.

  “You were right,” Harold nodded to Calvin, “they’re not subtle.”

  Smoker pointed to the Bible. “What part encourages kidnapping?”

  “Her mother left her willingly. She was reckless. That’s a bad trait in a parent.”

  “Judgment is supposed to be a sin in your line of work.”

  “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto the Lord what is the Lord’s.”

  “Well, render unto me what is mine,” Smoker said.

  Harold stared at the gun. “That little girl has two parents.”

  “Then say it’s my turn on custody.”

  “That’s for the law to decide.”

  “I got me a lawyer named Reynolds,” Smoker said. “He packs a shotgun in one hand and a summons in the other.”

  “That costs money,” Harold said. “And you don’t look like a member of the high-income bracket.”

  “Cop’s cheaper,” Andre said. The others looked at him. “We give the county you and that girl’s got nowhere to go but my brother.”

  “He does talk,” Calvin said.

  “Thinks, too,” Smoker replied. “I’d just as soon pay you straight out and get it done. Cops take a while.” Smoker looked to Harold. “A thousand dollars is what I got. Firm. Take it or don’t.”