* * *
“What do you want me to say?” Andre asked.
“Uncle,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you can’t find a way to take her part.”
Smoker gazed at the sparkling lemony lights below. It was March, Andre realized, and there remained a chance of snow.
“Uncle,” Andre said.
The road wound half a mile along the ridge then switchbacked for the house. Andre started them slowly straight down the bald hill. He shifted gears to manage the speed. They barreled past a cattle path. Smoker opened the window and fired his Luger into the sky. Andre’s window was open, too, and the cold seared his face. His eyes teared and his teeth froze cold as rocks.
They passed the house and flattened the wood corral gate. The truck’s headlights spilled onto the little barn, then left it. A few seconds and the truck’s nose dipped then bucked, and they were midair. Smoker, green in the dash light, grinned, and above the cab, their mother rose like a pagan goddess.
The impact with the water shoved Andre out of the cab. He surfaced and found footing on the hood. He extended his arm toward his mother but could reach only the blanket’s edge, and the current towed her away.
Next to him, Smoker tread water. A gash sliced one cheek. Andre tugged him to the truck hood.
“Miss the brake?” Smoker asked.
“Just forgot,” Andre told him. He pointed out the drifting body.
“So long, Mother,” Smoker said.
He ducked into the water and swam and Andre did, too. They clambered over the bank and emptied their boots. Andre had never been so cold. His clothes stuck to him. He watched Smoker strip to his skivvies and did the same. They raced to the house and the faint orange light in the window upstairs. There were other lights now and Dede silhouetted the porch. They were too numb to feel the rocks and thistles slashing their feet, too numb to feel the wind. They ran flat out, while the dog barked his warning.
* * *
There was another way to recall their mother, Andre knew. Winters, as boys, Andre and Smoker split wood and cleared driveways then hoarded their pay in a half-gallon whiskey jug. Peg added her tips and cut back on cigarettes, though she remained gaunt as a blade. Once a week, she stole home early, stopping at the market for whipping cream and powdered chocolate. Andre and Smoker dumped the change on the table and counted while she heated milk. Spring vacations, they spun a nail on a road map and headed where it pointed until the money ran out, then turned back and employed her charge card to return home.
10
EXODUS
August 1991
Andre sat in a chair across the room from Smoker. The fire remained in his head so that even when he shut his eyes its light still glowed on his closed lids.
He heard a scooter outside kick-start and the engine whir. He and Smoker said nothing. Harold returned. He informed them he’d sent Calvin to fetch Bird. Harold joined Smoker at the table and began a cribbage game. They asked Andre to take a hand, but he declined.
The room was poorly lit and the walls thin. Winters in the place would be a drafty affair. A generator hummed somewhere. Two oscillating fans were the only cooling outside of a forest full of shade.
Under one window was a long bookcase, one lamp flickering above it. Coloring books, a few books from the Boxcar Children series—stories of abandoned children living in a train car—a set of children’s encyclopedia, The Berenstain Bears, and The Cat in the Hat. A cigar box filled with crayons served as a bookend. Several colored pictures torn from their books lay in a pile next to it. Andre rose and leafed through them: dinosaurs, panda bears, a wolf, the lobster from Disney’s The Little Mermaid cartoon. He could not tell if they were the products of several children or one, and if one, whether Bird was the artist or not.
The hours of driving and, Andre guessed, the disruption of his life by love and its attendant demons teamed up to disconnect him. He felt like he’d smoked a pipeful of marijuana and the air was clearing, but the fog in his mind had only just started. Andre hated marijuana. It pressed him to turn over the rocks in his memory, hunting the lichen and grit for even the most miniscule evidence against himself.
He despised memory as well. Every generation has its nostalgic touchstones. TV shows, music, documentaries about decades that seem to have just entered his rearview mirror and he later discovered were twenty years past. Andre enjoyed the music, though had no use for the rest. They offered nothing he didn’t already know, and they delivered it in a package that romanticized years that are far from romantic.
Still, as he aged some, he expected to revisit the past and share amusing stories with others at reunions or happenstance encounters. Andre participated in those dutifully enough, but felt nothing like nostalgia. His first and strongest response to the revelry was shame. He mostly recalled confusion, drunkenness, and behaving as if in a play, acting parts written for others, but ones he desperately needed to master. So almost before recollections entered his head, he shut the spigot. But in instances like these—long drives, tedium—his mind escaped him and he couldn’t corral it quick enough.
Peg downing a drink suddenly entered his head and he was too stupefied to deflect it. Eddie collecting her glass and washing it and mopping the bar top to occupy himself. He glances at Peg and then at Andre and Smoker at the other end of the bar.
Eddie patted Peg’s hand and pressed her money back at her. Later he turned to Andre and Smoker. “Your Ma and Pop. They’ve been good business to me for more years than you two have been alive. You don’t treat them right.”
Smoker nodded toward Peg. “There’s some reason for that.”
“I suppose,” Eddie allowed.
He washed another glass. “I do recall several instances Pork in here prouder than a three-balled rooster about some feat one of you two managed.”
“I doubt that’s so lately.”
“Might be reason for that, too,” Eddie said.
Peg rose. She left her money on the bar. “They aren’t wrong,” she said and disappeared through the door.
Smoker drank. He figured Eddie would leave it.
“Your mother, too,” Eddie went on. “One of you’d get sick, she’d fight the doctor until he gave you medicine. Boxed his ears once. Whatever it took.”
Smoker told Eddie, “Spit or swallow.”
Eddie lifted the good bourbon, fifty bucks a bottle, from under the cash register and filled himself half a tumbler. He admired the alcohol in the light. He offered the boys none.
“Well,” Eddie said and then drank and paused. The air escaped him, like a lover’s might. “Those stories got me asking one question.”
“Yeah,” Andre said.
“How old does a person have to be before he’s his own damned fault?”
In the cribbage game with Harold, Smoker yipped over a sixteen hand and pegged each at the annoying pace of a home-run hitter jogging the bases. The hoots roused Andre. He glanced toward the game. Behind the two hung more coloring-book art. Andre approached the wall. Smoker and Harold ignored him. These pictures had names written in a man’s sketchy hand. A few bore Bird’s birth name. Andre required a long moment to add the two up.
LAMENTATIONS
March 1985
The last morning of her life, Peg ordered two eggs scrambled with bacon, cut Kansas City. Wilma, the stand-in cook mornings when Eddie performed his errands, offered her the dice cup. Peg shook four deuces and won her coffee, though what Wilma deposited in the cup resembled thirty-weight motor oil, three thousand miles past the window sticker.
Peg drank then toothpicked the dregs from her front teeth. “Thought you preferred it strong, Peg,” Wilma said.
“Just like my men,” Peg told her. Peg had enlisted Wilma’s husband to join her for the short drive to the reservoir some years back, when Wilma cooked nights and shorted Peg on fries. The gossip drummed on Wilma just as Peg had foreseen. Her husband suffered, but not so much that he considered confession, which would ha
ve been no solution anyway.
Peg left Wilma no doubt she was watching her eggs from the shells to the plate, and when Wilma shoved the dish in front of her with the ticket and salsa in a cup, Peg ate greedily.
“I’m not likely to get a better meal,” Peg said when she finished. “I think I’ll kill myself and save the disappointment.”
“Good day for it,” Wilma told her. “If you’re satisfied with all us outliving you.”
“Not with a cat’s lives will you outlive me,” Peg said.
Peg could put a year’s living into a long weekend. But she’d grown tired of fucking. Since the trip south, she could not find that second pulse, the one between her legs that pressed at her since she was twelve. The few instances she’d attempted, her head had jammed with cotton and she felt as if she were screwing a one-boned hand. Amphetamines nor quaaludes nor drink nor smoke could hound the numbness from her. Food was sustenance, water slaked no thirst, and cigarettes made her cough. She enjoyed nothing. She had not anticipated the condition, but after a time it turned to relief; she’d have lived forever otherwise.
Peg rattled some change onto the bar then placed a couple of singles beside the coins.
“Cremation,” Peg said. “Tell them I told you so.”
Outside, the hard sunlight blinded her and she drove the stringed towns in the coulee bottom with the shade tipped. Half of Coulee Dam lay on the reservation and the tribe had thrown enough cinderblock together to house a couple hundred slot machines and a few blackjack tables. The casino twisted the government’s tail but drew a crowd all hours. Peg circled the building until she recognized Smoker’s pickup. Inside it, Peg unholstered his Luger beneath the driver’s seat. She rotated the gun barrel toward her. The metal gleamed where it reflected light. She poked her little finger into the barrel then tucked the gun under her sweatshirt.
In the casino, Smoker slid quarters into a silver notch in the machine and hit some buttons then tapped the spinner. He broke even on credits.
“What kind of mess would this make up close?” Peg showed him the pistol.
“Jesus Christ, put that away,” Smoker said. “They’ll eighty-six me for good.” He looked closer. “That mine?”
“It is.”
“You aren’t hawking it, I don’t care what’s your straits.”
“I got money in the bank and more coming. They re-upped my unemployment.”
Smoker’s hand scooped his quarters then let them click into a cup, his long fingers almost tender with the coins.
“Who you going to murder?”
“Myself,” she said.
“Well, that’ll bore a tunnel through you.”
“Ordinary person, you’d call 9-1-1,” Peg said.
“Let me know when you turn ordinary and I’ll find the phone.” Smoker returned to his machine. “And put my gun back where you found it.” She left and he ignored her as he had most of his life.
* * *
In the teacher’s parking lot, Peg put her car next to Andre’s pickup. His open classroom window darkened then lit when her son’s heavy shape passed. She caught blades of his voice; it hummed like a radio played low. She crept beneath the window and listened. Laughter marked his conversation with his students as it did nowhere else. His wit, sharper than any in the family, slackened with his students and his mind went graceful with purpose. The students loved him; she heard talk of it everywhere. She hadn’t the heart to come inside, and he carried a .357, which would make as awful a hole as the Luger.
* * *
Pork’s ranch house was empty. The sideboards had surrendered their paint and the lee side was reduced to splinters. Winters, frost collected inside and Pork fired the stove without letup to maintain a tolerable temperature. Not eighty years ago, his grandfather had put the place in the creek bottom because that’s where the county wanted the only road and his wife had tired of being far from people. The bottom flooded every thaw, as he’d foreseen, and the house might’ve been ruined if he had not put river gravel beneath the foundation along with metal culverts. Spring, the floor trembled while the runoff passed, but not a stick of the house got damp. Pork lacked such ingenuity. Neither he nor the boys could match his father, separate or together. In two generations, his blood had thinned to a trickle and she’d been the one to dilute it.
Peg passed the rocker Pork had purchased to ease the children’s colic. He had paid an old woman to engrave the back rail with their names. You steered your children through the day safely for the peace of seeing them sleep, Pork had once said, and though she doubted the accuracy of the sentiment, she recognized Pork did not. She’d taken a job once at the grocery in town early in their marriage, but the hours returned her home late. In a week, Pork’s nerves broke and he told her to quit. When she wouldn’t, he blacked her eye.
Peg traipsed the basement stairs and forced the gun-case door with a screwdriver. Pork’s .22 revolver lay on its floor. Dust clung to the grip and leather holster, but when she unpinned the cylinder, it clicked and rolled nicely. She short-loaded the powder on a couple of rounds so her kin might remember the best of her. She had read of a beautiful poet who gassed herself in an oven, but Peg’s appliances ran on electric. She’d considered piling her car into Rebecca Rock, too. The noise would be dramatic, but no one would hear it and the result might not finish her and she’d be in a worse fix than she was now.
Driving out from the ranch, she stopped and gazed back. Dormant larkspur, cheat grass, and Russian thistle on the bluff tipped forward to catch five minutes of sun they might lose had they sprouted straight. West, the creek fell from a wheat ditch, muddy and foamed with farm chemicals. She heard a horse clop, and soon Pork and his mare appeared on the road in front of her.
She said nothing. He didn’t speak either, though he did dismount to be cordial. She’d spent two-thirds of her life on him, off and on though it was. Once, she could figure his thoughts with some accuracy. But now they stood together, each knowing nothing of the other.
“I got a roast in a pot, if you’re hungry,” Pork said.
When she didn’t answer he mounted his horse and headed that direction, not knowing whether she would follow or not. Pork had once tracked her a week straight in his old blue trap wagon. By then she had taken up with the butcher. An air compressor and fertilizer barrels filled the flatbed along with a toolbox the size of a closet. He was hard to miss but had no interest in stealth anyway. He had not desired Peg in the manner a man does a woman; he wanted her as some want to be devoured by their God. It is why she married him and why she divorced him, too.
* * *
Eddie hunkered at the tavern griddle and stirred his house delicacy, chicken and homemade noodles. The tavern clientele pooled for a pasta machine a Christmas before and Eddie thanked them but swapped the crank-ended machine for a blender at the hardware. He trusted his own methods.
“Hello, my dear,” he said. He was alone the slow hours between breakfast and dinner, having never courted much of a lunch crowd, hoping to encourage his patrons to remain employed. “You getting an early start on the night or closing yesterday late?”
“Neither, Eddie,” she said. He filled a schooner three-quarters and topped it with an open V8 can from the walk-in. Peg shook a bit of salt into the glass and drank. The locals did not comprehend that rising mornings to accept the yoke of debauchery required more energy from Peg than selling car parts or keeping books or operating machines did from ordinary souls, and for her efforts she could expect no pension, no weekends off, no paid vacation. Her life required a will as profound as an epic hero’s. All she lacked was the purpose.
“Eddie, would you miss me if I was gone?” she asked.
“Well, you haven’t ever been gone, my dear, so it’s hard to tell. I’d grant I’d notice,” he told her.
“A fair answer, fairly spoken.”
“You’re starting to sound poetic,” he told her.
“And you’re reminding me of a politician.”
Eddie n
odded. “Operating a business means kissing everyone’s babies.” He turned from his soup, his apron soiled with broth and grease from boning the chicken. Peg smoked a cigarette and watched Eddie through the cloud it made.
“Come here a minute,” she told him. He crossed the tile to the hinged opening of the bar.
“Farther,” she said. He flipped the gate and stepped through. Peg winked at him. She rose and locked the front door and pulled the shades, then bent and undid his fly and fished out his bean. His flaccid workings stirred, then did not. She tugged at them.
She bent and hooped her mouth over the cool flesh, swirling the end with her tongue as she had rock candy as a girl. She heard Eddie breathe, but nothing below stirred. She tugged her T-shirt over her head and rubbed her nipples against his skinny, bare legs, then slapped his rigging between her breasts. She glanced up. Eddie’s face was wet with tears and he looked off like maybe this was a movie someone else was in.
* * *
“I don’t hate them,” she said, the bullet inside her aching like she swallowed an anvil.
“Who?” Andre asked.
“Any of them,” Peg said. “But I don’t like them much, either.”
She was tired and closed her eyes. She felt she was watching herself from the ceiling, a goddamned cliché.
11
EXODUS
August 1991
Andre stared at the crude colored pictures on the wall. Smoker and Harold pegged and counted and exchanged cribbages. Andre pressed his finger against a picture. The crayon residue was slick and somewhat fragrant, though the smell had no relationship to the color.
He continued to drift. He recalled fishing as a child, line and lure slapping the water and fighting their slow drop. Smoker, six or so, cast a baited hook into a current strong enough to bend his fiberglass rod into a U. Ten minutes or so, Andre’s pole jumped. Andre jerked and cranked the reel. An enormous trout leaped above the surface and attempted to spit the hook. Andre allowed it line enough to clear the snags and riffles then slowly retrieved what he’d given with a little less each run.
Whiskey Page 17