“Where’d an Indian get a thousand dollars?” Calvin asked him.
“You got a problem with definition, white boy. I’m no more Indian than I am white. You look to be divided by twelve and I bet you don’t know half your DNA,” Smoker said. He turned to Harold. “What about it? She’s coming one way or another.”
Calvin said, “Not if you ain’t leaving.”
“I wrote directions and give a time to my wife,” Andre said. “She doesn’t see me in the flesh day after tomorrow, she gives them to the first cop she finds.”
“Cash?” Harold asked.
Smoker nodded.
“Calvin will have to run down the hill. She’s playing with the neighbor children.”
“I didn’t see no other lights coming in.”
“They shutter the windows. Separatists. Afraid of the government. You’re lucky you didn’t land there. They’d shoot you.”
“Why’s that?”
“You come from heathens. Mud people. I don’t hold with that.”
“Glad to hear it,” Smoker said.
LAMENTATIONS
December 1984
The day before his brother’s wedding, Smoker’s first whiff of trouble was Pork sitting on his pickup’s tailgate in insulated coveralls and an orange hunting cap, half a case of Olympia Beer under one arm. Smoker eased into Crazy Eddie’s gravel parking lot and dismounted his truck cab. He waved a hand toward his father. The old man nodded then fished a second can from the box. Smoker told him he wouldn’t drink elk piss and sauntered into Crazy Eddie’s for a quart of Lucky Lager, which Eddie was short of even in the cans. Flummoxed, Smoker helped himself to the house whiskey bottle. The new barmaid, Myrna, winked at him.
Outside, Pork commandeered the whiskey and measured it in the remaining sunlight.
“Apt to be short if we’re to give your brother the send-off,” Pork said.
“He doesn’t want any stag party,” Smoker replied. “I asked him.”
“Not up to him to want. Up to us to give.”
Pork insisted they drive his rig. At the package store, the old man purchased a half gallon of Canadian whiskey and a pint of peppermint schnapps. He no longer cared for whiskey plain, but found soda too thin a cut. Back under the wheel, he uncapped both jugs. His brow pinched over his eyes, leaving him all forehead in the stretching shadows.
“We could get double-drunk and run you down some splittail,” Smoker said. “Just let Andre be.” Whiskey would shut Pork like a door to a black room. This was the last opportunity for reason.
“I’ll grant he’d prefer that.”
“Let him be, then.”
“He’s holing up at the one place we’re sure to find him,” Pork said.
“Because he’s expecting us. Not because he enjoys the prospect.”
Pork blinked at the streetlights oranging. “We’re obligated. So’s he.”
Pork’s driving was none too good sober, but drunk he grew mindful and Smoker abandoned hope they might be arrested before they could do harm. The truck exited the pavement for a gravel road. The federal government had surrendered damages to the Colville tribes for what they lost to the dam and the reservoir; it was no mean sum; Smoker had attended the meeting. They’d have put a teacher like Andre into a fine home, interest thin as a communion wafer, but Andre wanted only the rooms in which Claire had lived.
Andre answered Smoker’s knock and glanced past him at Pork’s idling truck.
“He was set to come with or without me,” Smoker told him.
Andre allowed Smoker inside. Pork, they knew, would not leave the truck.
“Where is the bride off to?” Smoker asked.
“Somewhere and won’t come back till I leave. She says you’re not to see your wife on the wedding day until the vows.”
“I know a few who make a habit of not seeing them after,” Smoker said.
“Not me,” Andre said.
“No, not you,” Smoker agreed. “You can bunk with me.”
“I’m set up already,” Andre told him. “Though I’ll spruce at your place in the morning if you don’t care.”
Smoker nodded.
“How’s Bird?”
“At the hairdresser with Dede. She’s taking this ring-bearer job as serious as rent.”
“Sounds like you all got civilized,” Andre said.
Smoker had kept near a season of steady work and hadn’t provoked Dede in six weeks. His best-man tuxedo, for which he paid cash rent, hung in the trailer-house closet with new shoes under it, a worthy accounting until he’d surrendered whiskey to the orneriest drunk within a hundred miles and picked as poor a day as there was to do it.
“You think we could stall old Porkchop till the jar store closes?” Andre asked.
“He’s been. Anyways he’d only drag us to a cocktail lounge.”
“We could run him out of money there.”
“Us, too,” Smoker said. “And he’d just write bad checks.”
Smoker retrieved a soda from the fridge. Photographs checkered the appliance’s door. Bird’s school picture occupied the highest point, pinned with a drugstore magnet. Claire and Andre populated the bulk of those below. They had managed a thorough record. Summer, the couple vacationed on a lake and buried each other in the sand; a month or so after, Andre stood downtown in front of the new grocery for a photo; in another Claire read or weeded a garden. Occasionally a photo of Smoker made the door for a week or so before it was replaced by more of themselves.
* * *
Pork chauffeured them through Grand Coulee, then Electric City. The frozen lake was as white as the ground, though flatter. Yellow fires dappled the surface where the Russians had sawed holes to fish.
Andre sipped a Pepsi. Smoker drank from the whiskey bottle. Alcohol greased a zerk for Smoker, just proper maintenance. He’d nurse a beer all day and not feel shorted or down eight and want only a nap. Likely as not he’d choose lemonade. For Smoker, the comfort in drinking was the solace that kept the army manned—you enlist by yourself, you come out the same as the others. Andre, though, alcohol stranded. Even clean, anticipating liquor sawed him off from others. Claire seemed the only way he could tolerate sobriety.
“You think married’s easy?” Pork asked Andre.
“Easier,” Andre said.
“Than what?”
“Calculus.”
Smoker laughed.
“One drink and you’re goofy as women,” Pork said.
“You been married,” Smoker told him. “You do hard math?”
“Jesus.”
“Anybody you know do it?” Smoker asked.
“This ain’t about adding and subtracting.”
“No, there’s division and geometry. What’s 472 divided by 128?”
“You don’t know, neither,” Pork said.
“Ain’t me giving advice. You got to be qualified.”
Pork thumped his chest with his thumb. “I’m married,” he said. “Was, at least.” Pork surrendered the wheel to Smoker then bent across him to Andre. “You got a heart, goddamnit,” Pork said. “That’ll work against you.”
“Turn,” Smoker said.
Pork raised himself to permit the wheel to spin. “I had me a heart once,” he said.
“You don’t know heart from kidneys,” Smoker told him.
“I know enough to figure I ain’t the only one ever felt something,” Pork replied. Pork fisted Andre’s coat lapels and shook him. “You might not like it, but I got things to tell you.”
Andre leaned on the window and closed his eyes. “You don’t listen no better than you ever did,” Pork said. Pork retook the wheel and the whiskey. They progressed beyond the town’s glow, where the high coulee walls blackened both sides of the water and the moon shone like a blister on the ice.
“Maybe I’m considering the source,” Andre said.
“You got no right to say that to me,” Pork muttered.
“No?” Andre asked.
“Well, maybe you do,” Pork ad
mitted. “But it isn’t kind.” Pork extended the bottle across Smoker to Andre, several months dry. Andre undid the cap and swallowed until Smoker wrenched the jug from him.
“Let him be,” Pork told Smoker.
“Seems like I said the same thing an hour ago, you goofy bastard,” Smoker replied.
“Well that was then and you were wrong and this is now and I am correct. You don’t know half of what you do and none of what you think you do.”
“You saying you do?” Smoker said.
Pork shook his head. “I’m saying I don’t. But I know I don’t.”
Andre laughed. “You come damned late to philosophy.”
“Least it ain’t religion,” Pork said.
They drove a mile in silence.
“Say,” Smoker asked the old man. “How you figure I’d do married?”
“Not good,” Pork answered.
“I make them stick, sometimes two or three at once.”
“Many are easier to manage than one.”
“Dede,” he said. “We been steady awhile.”
“I doubt you’d give up fishing just because you landed a keeper.”
“Andre did.”
“He was being skunked.”
Pork wheeled through a turnout and looped the truck back toward town. “Switch up the heat,” he said.
“I’m too hot already,” Smoker told him. Sitting in the middle left Smoker accountable for the fan.
“You ain’t the only sheep in the herd.”
“But I’m the only one that can reach the heater.”
Pork bent for the button and twisted it. The truck swerved then hot air swam into Smoker’s lap. The old man grinned a toothy grin. It wasn’t a minute later the engine wheezed. Pork tapped the dash gauges like they might correct themselves.
“Should’ve kept the fan off,” Smoker told him.
“Heater don’t use gas,” Pork said.
They limped the pickup to the road shoulder. From under the seat, Pork ferreted a plastic jug, the top sawed to the handle. He marched toward town and the filling station without a word, clouds of breath steaming behind him.
Smoker and Andre let him go and huddled in the cab to keep from the wind. The fan blew cold air and Smoker clicked off the ignition to keep the battery fresh. Soon the window glass frosted and Andre drew a bear print then a peace sign in the white rime. Just a hen’s track in a circle, Pork had told them growing up. Andre hunted the whiskey then opened the truck door and set off toward the highway.
“It don’t take but one for the gas,” Smoker shouted.
Andre ignored him. Smoker caught up at a half run. Andre drank like he had a bet on it. Cars passed, none carrying Pork nor anyone generous enough to offer them rescue from the weather. Andre and Smoker labored half an hour then encountered the grade to Claire’s street. Together they circled the duplex through an alley. Andre halted beneath a tall spruce and indicated Smoker to do the same. The dense tree stunk like gin. Under it the ground was frozen and bare. Andre shoved his arm through the canopy of branches until a long lawn chair and mummy bag fell from inside.
“You’re going to be frosty by morning,” Smoker told him.
“That’s a fact,” Andre said. From this vantage, they could observe the apartment without being seen. Smoker recognized Claire in the big front window, bent as she hemmed a bridesmaid gown at her machine. Andre pulled from the bottle and Smoker had another turn himself to back up the chill. After a while, Claire stood and ambled to the window and stretched her arms. She raised one hand and one foot like a setter on point if the bird were straight up. Her hip thrust forward suddenly and the other back and she spun. Her circles slowed and her hand fell from above her head like slow water, and when it met the other she let them both spread about her waist as if they were pooling. On her face was an expression Smoker had only seen in children.
Then Dede rose from the couch, which faced away from the window. She lay her own dress down. Smoker had no idea she would be there, though it seemed natural enough. He watched her laugh and try to whirl, too. She could muster only half a revolution. Dede was as pretty as a wildcat and about as hard to get along with. Her snug jeans and tightly tucked shirt directed a person’s attention to where it ought to be, but she seemed wanting as she labored to make a circle until Claire cupped her elbow and steered her into a wobbly spiral.
“Claire’s the only girl I’ve ever seen naked,” Andre said.
Smoker shook his head. “That yell leader I brought back to your dorm room. She was naked.”
“That was because you grabbed her blanket and made her chase you.”
“I was sharing,” Smoker said.
Andre drank again. “You were lording it over me.”
Smoker guffawed. “You really never seen another woman undressed?” he asked. The purpled sky had surrendered to black. Smoker gathered a handful of pebbles and lobbed them into the gray snow, which swallowed each without a sound. Andre inhaled a breath and kept it until he hacked from his own exhaust, then took another and did the same. His face swelled and eyes emptied. In the park, as children, he and Smoker had entertained each other by hyperventilating into blackouts and now Smoker recognized Andre’s thoughts were swirling.
“She’s worried I want someone enough to take anyone,” he said.
“That so?”
“It’s her worry. She’s putting it on me to get a good look,” Andre said.
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re right,” Andre said. “It’s an uneducated guess. I don’t have much practice with love.”
“Hell, you’re the only one of us with any training at all,” Smoker told him. “You got all the goddamn feelings.”
“And you got all the stabbings.”
“They’re overrated.”
“Many a night I’d liked to have found out.”
“How about we trade?” Smoker replied.
Andre shook his head. “Not now.”
He drank again, sighed, then choked down more alcohol. Smoker watched him coil on the chair and study the twisted tree root and decaying needles encircling it, as if he might bore all his attention onto the tiny strip of earth and shed drink like a drill’s shavings.
“Why didn’t you just gargle the bottle or take little sips. The old man’d never have known.”
“You’d know,” Andre said. His heavy brow hooded his eyes and he fell asleep. Smoker considered himself and his talent for undoing a woman. He possessed no bent for healing, though, and no appetite to acquire it. Tenderness irritated him and he allowed every woman he’d bedded to dress, then fester like an open sore until she forsook him for some other, believing the lacking resided in herself. He closed his eyes then tipped his head back and let them open. The sky was a starry liquid, blowing in waves above him as if he were a fish at the bottom of a lake studying the boundaries of his world.
An hour after, Smoker heard Pork’s truck cough. The old man had guessed right. Smoker motioned him toward the alley to protect Andre’s camp. Pork let the pickup idle and stepped out.
“That Myrna woman has a shine for you,” Pork told him. “I figure you can parlay that into some goodwill for your brother. I bought her a couple of highballs to grease the skids. She’s most of the way drunk already.”
“So’s the groom,” Smoker replied.
“We’ll stir him.”
Together, they propped Andre against the dumpster. He slid off the metal onto the cold gravel.
Pork stood over him. “You hungry for a woman, son?”
Andre laughed and flapped his arms and legs. “Gravel angel,” he said. They were quiet awhile. “Where’s Claire?” Andre asked.
“She don’t require you tonight,” Pork told him.
“I got to piss,” Andre said.
Smoker parted Andre’s feet for balance and pulled his shoulders up the dumpster’s white metal.
“Piss,” Smoker told him.
Andre worked at his pants. He had no luck.
> “Good Christ. He’s going to piss himself,” Pork said.
Smoker bent and unbuttoned Andre’s jeans and dragged the zipper and tugged on his brother’s underwear until he freed him. A piss stream arced into the light and splattered the gravel.
Pork shook his head. “Fruits,” he mumbled. “I raised me a couple of fruits.”
Smoker broke a knuckle on Pork’s bridgework. The old man collapsed to all fours. Smoker stood over him, rubbing his aching hand. Blood from Pork’s mouth puddled the snow.
“You once told me whoever gets the first blow is likely to land the second,” Smoker warned him.
“Only thing I taught you that stuck seems to me.”
“Everything stuck, goddamnit.”
Andre laughed and slid down the dumpster again, his penis dripping.
“You going to belt me again?” Pork asked.
“I might.”
“I don’t guess you’d hit a man down.”
Pork crawled to Andre and lifted his chin in his hand. He tipped Andre’s face toward him. Sleeping people were supposed to look pure as the young, but Andre appeared only himself. Pork brushed the hair out of Andre’s eyes. Smoker saw the mess he’d made of the old man’s face. Together they hauled Andre to the lawn chair and rolled him into his sleeping bag, then zipped and buttoned it, so only his face was exposed to the cold. Smoker found a halved tamarack round and propped Andre sideways like parents kept babies from choking on their stomachs.
“You know, you can get some strange whenever you please. Your brother isn’t so lucky.”
“Myrna medicine for that, is she?”
“I ain’t saying it’s a cure. Us being good to him is all.”
“It’s you and me making him a present of what we’d want.”
“We? You standing there looking like a goddamn prince saying we!” Pork spat. Cold light sprang from the gravel.
Pork struck a match and lit a cigarette, then put another to the burning end and passed it to Smoker. They both smoked awhile. Smoker made for the car and heat. Pork opted to remain with Andre. In the pickup, Smoker warmed his hands until they didn’t ache. A pair of cars whispered past then faded and Smoker understood he was a selfish man and a poor brother and was prepared to do little about either. He dropped the clutch and backed away. The truck light poured over Pork’s back and head and Andre asleep, then slid off them. Smoker wondered if Dede would sleep at his place. Him there first would be a shock to her. He imagined her shutting the door and blinking at the lump in the bed. The room would be cool, and she would undress quickly then crawl under the sheets and trace his shape with hers to redraw him for the warmth of it. She’d sleep and he’d wake, alone, with nothing but her breaths and the wind’s sighs and walls’ creaks as if a casket lid were set to close over him.
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