Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  The exhausted fish surfaced a few yards beneath Andre’s perch; the head and fin barely cut the water. Andre lifted the played-out fish from the deep water below to the rock edge toward him; the fish weighed eight pounds, easy. When he’d hauled it close, Andre leaned over the ledge and put his fingers into its gills, but the trout snapped itself against his arm. Andre lost his balance. The fish was still in his hand when they both hit the water.

  The water and the fall stunned him. When he moved, his legs felt dead. He pushed his arms above the water, but they sank and he ducked under, thinking he was there a long time, a cloudy minute before his legs kicked him ahead again. He couldn’t remember why he was in the water until the river threw the trout to the surface, still hooked to his lure. He grabbed the fish. Smoker scurried to the rod and began to reel them both, but the line snarled.

  Andre paddled with his free arm, just attempting to move. The river towed him under once more, but he twisted and rose for a deep breath. His father stood on a jetty; Andre caught a look on his face. Pork’s hair hung to one side of his head. His eyes skipped across the water, calm, measuring the distance. His skin was smooth. The water’s reflection made it shine. Suddenly, a deeper pull towed Andre beneath the surface. He opened his eyes; it was dark and quiet. His heart crashed against his ribs, his lungs burned then breathed water. A small quiet welled like wet sky behind his forehead and a smell like old socks rushed in through his nose and mouth.

  Then Pork’s hand clamped Andre’s limp neck. Andre hacked out a lungful of water and sputtered and gasped until he was breathing. Andre’s fist still held the fish’s gills. He let loose and Smoker collected the fish as if it were his own.

  Pork hustled Andre to the truck and blankets. He started the engine and set the heat on high then worked off his own wet clothes. The motor in the heater whined and the hot air enveloped Andre like the river before. He stretched his hands and toes, testing for their good, dull ache. He set his fingers on the dashboard, weighing his senses, relieved and disappointed the world felt the same. He guessed at how long it took a second to pass or a minute, counting a thousand one, a thousand two, weighing it against the time in the water.

  * * *

  After Peg’s passing, Pork locked himself up on the ranch. He neither smoked nor drank. Smoker and Andre delivered him groceries and Louis L’Amour Westerns, and though they kept his body working, his mind hacked itself to kindling.

  Andre arrived once on his own, Smoker having found part-time work limbing trees for the city. Pork was on his knees scratching at a vegetable garden. King observed him from the shade. The dog’s hearing was suspect, but he sensed the vibrations of Andre’s truck motor and the cab door shutting and he rose arthritically and sniffed, then his tail began to wag. Together they went to Pork.

  “Good year for the tomatoes,” Pork said. “We’ll have baskets of them.”

  “And the squash in fall,” Andre said.

  Pork nodded. “You got time for a drive?”

  Andre had become accustomed to short visits and at the first awkward gap in their conversation began to hunt an exit plan. In a vehicle, escape was impossible. He agreed finally when he could not come up with anything legitimate to argue. They passed through the agency and Nespelem; outside of town there are few paved roads. Ancient foundations dotted the fields, their siding and studs dust in mounds next to them sometimes. The place looked postapocalyptic. For Andre, the country was still more idea than physical place and without a map he’d be hard put. Pork’s memory was failing, but here he recalled property lines and low spots that filled once every ten years with enough water for cattle.

  A sign indicated an abandoned church that had commenced in 1902 and closed in 1959. Pork exited the cab for the adjacent graveyard, fenced with barbed wire to dissuade cattle, though badgers and groundhogs had burrowed plenty.

  “Here,” he said.

  It was Andre’s grandfather’s stone, not extravagant in the manner of giant icons or family markers but fine white marble and etched with his name and dates.

  “Figured you might be interested,” Pork said.

  “You sure it’s him?”

  “I’m not shoveling to check.”

  * * *

  Three months later, Smoker discovered Pork ensnared in a barbed-wire fence, gaunt and hallucinating. They hurried him to the emergency room, and the doctors stitched his wounds but had no thread to patch his mind. Pork ended up in the county nursing home where he mumbled day and night and refused visitors. Most there had thirty years on him, but it wasn’t years that had chased the sense from their heads; they added differently: rheumatism left by a stack of snows and Chinook thaws; a logged-out mountain; the dead, in general; sometimes just the liquor store closed Sunday.

  Pork quit eating two months into his stint and a couple of weeks later died. The service was in the longhouse. The minister chanted medicine songs, then read from Matthew. At the town cemetery, well-groomed and minded by a caretaker—unlike the portion of dirt and weeds where Pork’s father lay—the mourners, cousins and uncles and nephews and nieces neither Smoker nor Andre had seen since childhood, lined in rows three deep.

  The pallbearers hoisted the casket onto straps suspended over the open grave. The minister offered one last prayer.

  “This concludes the service,” the minister said. “There will be a dinner following at the church.”

  A squat man in a blue suit cranked a wheel. The crowd stared as the casket descended. The pallbearers tossed their boutonnieres into the open grave. Another man climbed onto the tractor. It coughed and started. But Smoker was already spading dirt into the grave. Two more shovels leaned against a caretaker’s shed. Andre took one and a cousin another. Some families returned from the parking lot to the grave site. A few hunted trucks or car trunks for more tools. Soon six were undoing the pile, then eight, swapping shovels with one another. They finished the mound and bladed it smooth. Andre propped the flowers against the dirt.

  Returning to the community center for the wake, Andre caught the smell of the kitchens as they drove through Nespelem for the church. TVs blared from open windows. High schoolers passed each other in their cars, the air-conditioning and music on high, nodding their heads like junkies.

  Smoker paused for half a rack of beer at the Ketch Pen. From the tavern’s rear porch came gunshots. An early goose hit like a sack of flour atop the roof. The truck turned left and Smoker saw two locals in lawn chairs armed with shotguns. A boy lifted himself up the eave to fetch the goose.

  LAMENTATIONS

  June 1986

  The second time Andre and Claire traded vows was in front of the middle school. The newspaperwoman Claire hired steered Andre to one knee and deposited Claire’s hand in his to kiss, an act he’d never considered but once instructed he gentled her ringed finger to his lips so Claire would recognize it was imagination not tenderness that he lacked.

  Determined on a fairer start this time, Claire towed Andre to a desolate line shack half up Bonaparte Mountain to honeymoon. They packed in food and drank water from a spring. The first day lay close and humid, but the night sky cleared. In their doubled mummy bags, Andre pointed out landmarks and silhouetted shapes and stars and planets. One dot in the sky, off-color, Claire claimed was Mars. It was in the wrong quadrant, Andre knew, but accuracy seemed a tiresome constriction. He began to pretend for her random myths of this rock or that animal, stretching Indian stories for evidence, and when he ran short of those, he called upon Hans Christian Andersen. She was asleep before he wearied of lying, and alone in the quiet, he congratulated himself on taking marriage into a second day.

  * * *

  Smoker had witnessed the newly married surrender friends and family for recliners and TV sets, and it concerned him enough to insist Claire and Andre break bread with him Wednesdays. Smoker selected a café that boasted lacy tablecloths and the right forks but served only passable chow. They would have feasted better and cheaper on tavern fare, but Smoker insisted on a res
taurant that accepted reservations and paid the bill. At first Dede joined them. She ordered a salad and drank red beer to back her bourbon and said little. Soon Smoker arrived alone.

  “I’m shed of her,” he announced.

  Andre laughed.

  “I got good reason.”

  “So does she.”

  Smoker lit a cigarette then looked at his surroundings and stabbed it into a saucer. The food arrived. Andre requested a lukewarm ham slice be warmed. It returned black. Smoker pitched plate and all through the order window. The kitchen cooks hollered. Smoker wielded a table knife. “I’ll skin the bastards.”

  “Not with that,” Andre said.

  Smoker advanced on the kitchen anyway until he reached water glasses on a tray and changed tactics, hurling them into the order wheel where they shattered and rained on the cooks underneath. The manager scrambled for the check stand. Smoker put a plate between him and the phone.

  “Cops ate here, they’d rain all over you, too, goddamnit,” Smoker shouted.

  Andre looked to reassure Claire his brother was only taking a joke on a wide loop, but she was busy emptying a salt shaker onto the floor.

  Drinking glasses depleted, the three of them broke for the door. Half a mile toward Claire and Andre’s apartment, they encountered a police car, which had neglected the lights. The three of them concluded the kitchen packed little weight with the authorities.

  Inside the apartment, Andre tore lettuce, Smoker cut tomatoes and a sweet onion, and Claire boiled eggs and sliced lunch meat into squares. They ate chef salads in their jackets on the duplex balcony. When Smoker excused himself for home, an hour after, Andre and Claire cleaned the dishes, then she constructed an ice-cream dessert to treat Andre. He asked her reason. Needing one was part of his silliness, she told him.

  “Your brother’s thoughtful,” Claire said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He knows we have to work in the morning. He leaves at nine. You didn’t notice?”

  * * *

  At the beginning of the new year, Claire began studying the ads for a house. She thought Andre was uninterested until he purchased one without consulting her as a surprise. The house occupied the butt end of a dirt street that held three similar abodes and an apartment development for the indigent. Diapers that roaming dogs had rooted from their contents scattered the gravel. The hard-packed lot rebuffed even dandelions. The stoop sagged. On the exterior walls tongues of pink paint unlicked the wood siding. Inside, nicotine pasted the walls except where the summer heat had sweated it into long brown beads.

  The first night, in the vacant lot behind, Claire heard children swear like sailors and dogs bark and whine and howl. Claire wadded cotton into her ears. One child’s howl, however, could not be suppressed, a four- or five-year-old girl, Rose, with ratty blond hair. She wandered all hours, face blank as a white sky, a doll as unkempt as herself in one hand to clobber the troublesome dogs.

  The next day, Claire purchased paint and rollers and unpacked old bedding for drop cloths. She primed and enameled the rooms. Andre assisted when she required him, but possessed only a menial commitment to the project. By the end of a month, Claire edged the last wall and unmasked the switches and baseboards and reapplied the outlet covers. She tapped the walls for studs and drove nails for their photographs, then mounted shelves to hold the knickknacks of her childhood and was pleased it was hers.

  * * *

  When trouble between Smoker and Dede thickened, Smoker occasionally took nights with them. He would arrive late and sleep on the couch, fully clothed. If Andre was awake, he’d roust Claire and press her to love him. He became hungrier, knowing Smoker might hear, and roughed her a little. Instead of shrinking, Claire met him in the same place, drawing quick breaths and making hissing sounds. Mornings, she would leave an afghan over Smoker and a spare towel in the bathroom and reset the coffee timer for noon.

  October, Claire informed Andre she was pregnant. The next day, she had cedar slats delivered and began to fortress the house with a tall board fence. To her surprise, the sawmill made a second stop that evening and unloaded planks and two-by-fours. Andre and Smoker constructed forms and mixed and poured concrete for deck footings. Andre toiled on the structure until dark each evening after.

  Bedtime Claire tended a list on her nightstand notepad and nights she and Andre swapped names and she let Andre touch the shifting baby through her skin but Claire recognized the conjuring sensation that turned women to mothers was her own.

  Andre continued on the deck, though Smoker abandoned him for elk season in the Blue Mountains. Not long after, Claire discovered the child, Rose, clasping a measuring tape while Andre marked his next cut. Andre fed her what was left from dinner and at evening’s end paid her with his pocket change. She became steady help and Andre propped the fence gate open for her after work each day.

  “What’s a fence worth if you keep the gate open?” Claire asked him.

  A week later, Smoker loaded their deep freeze with an elk’s hindquarter. The first roast was sweet as beef, not gamey and about as good as food got. Claire took a few minutes in the evenings following to assemble meals with meat, rice, and vegetables on paper plates that Smoker could heat when he was inclined. The Wednesday following Smoker exited the house with two heaped boxes.

  “She tired of feeding me?” Smoker asked.

  “You bringing meat mean you didn’t like what she’s cooking?”

  “Meant I was thanking you all.”

  “Maybe it’s like that, then,” Andre said.

  Andre carried on with the deck flooring. Rose hammered short nails and delivered the tools. One Saturday afternoon, he took her ice fishing where they caught perch and drank hot cider. He’d asked Claire to join them, but she demurred, busy with baby clothes and a cross-stitched facsimile of the birth announcement in a neutral color, awaiting name and date.

  He and Claire started Lamaze classes twice a week after school. Andre was habitually late, as he felt compelled to deliver Rose a sandwich and some pocket change on the days he couldn’t work. Claire practiced with the instructor until Andre arrived and turned short with him when he did.

  Andre accompanied Claire to her doctor appointments. He read the alpha-fetoprotein test results that declared the child’s spine had developed correctly and that Claire was clear of gestational diabetes. Together they listened to the child’s squishy heart thump. The nurse bathed Claire’s belly in warm jelly and put something akin to a magic wand on it until the child’s shadowy image floated in a monitor. She inquired whether Andre and Claire wanted to know the gender. They could not choose. They did not disagree; they simply did not know, had no resource for determination. The question troubled Andre deeply. To him it was his first act as a parent and he feared stepping wrong from the onset and not being able to walk himself or the child back from it.

  Mid-March, an early thaw melted the last of the winter’s ice and snow over a long week. Andre continued the deck with Rose. One afternoon, Claire complained about Andre’s cooking and pressed him for a dinner in town. Andre set a sandwich on the wood piling with fifty cents for Rose, but Claire latched the gate behind them. It was a slight cruelty, not directed at the urchin but at Andre for dividing his attentions.

  The dinner was the most enjoyable evening they’d had in months. They sat on the same side of the booth and held hands. Afterward, she directed him to stop in a darkened parking lot, where they kissed and hugged and whispered to each other like the early days.

  The car lights illuminated their driveway then the house and fence. When he eased up the garage pad, a shape lay heaped against the metal door. Andre recognized the bloody jacket shredded by the dogs. He lifted Rose and carried her to the car then delivered her to the hospital emergency room.

  The next morning, Andre returned to the hospital but only family was permitted to visit. Afterward, he saw her when he passed the bus stop while she waited with the other children. Scars wandered her face and she st
ared past him with stone eyes, and if Andre lived to a hundred he knew he could not outlast the silence she meant for him, a silence that seeped into his house and marriage, though neither Claire nor he spoke of it.

  12

  EXODUS

  August 1991

  Andre continued to examine the picture. He understood he’d become fixated on it, wandering through its simple lines and colors like he had been his own thoughts. He desired to know the difference between Bird’s work and the others on the wall. He recognized it was different. What troubled him was naming it.

  The dogs scratched and Harold let them in. They circled the fire. One came to Andre and he rubbed its ears. Another rolled by the fire and began licking its scrotum, reminding Andre of an old joke that he was too tired to recall completely.

  “Goddamned Calvin,” Harold said. “Excuse me. I’ll see about him.”

  Harold was gone. Smoker examined Andre closely.

  * * *

  In one of his last lucid moments, Pork had signed the ranch’s deed over to the boys. Smoker and Andre both considered transplanting the dog to town, but he was a farm dog. A fenced yard would be foreign country. Those leasing the farmland promised to watch him, which was the best proposition they could manage. Not long after, Smoker’s pickup threw a rod and he traded his stake for Andre’s four-wheel drive, just a year old.

  Hunting season, Andre met Smoker at the place in a truck new off the lot.

  Andre shouldered his rifle and started for the rocks. He never brought home much meat. It wasn’t that he lacked the stomach for blood; he lacked a mind for it; hunting made you unlearn yourself; and Andre could not back out the screws.

  Half a mile and they hiked out of the wheat into a streambed busted wide by spring thaws. They rested on the cliffs above the ranch. Below, a pickup stopped in a wide spot on the gravel road. A man got out one side and two boys tumbled from the other. One walked with his feet straight, taking long goose steps like the Nazis in old high-school documentaries.