Everything in the room’s red. The carpet, the wallpaper, even the drapes on the bay window that opens down on Main Street. Red and stifling, thick with womblike air. Rory walks to the window and opens it.
Bogie looks nervous. He scratches his stomach. “Y’all mind if I watch television?”
“Go for it,” Pike says, sitting on the bed and hauling off his boots.
Bogie punches the power button. The nightly news, Reagan standing at a podium. “That’s the motherfucker right there,” Bogie says, “that’s the man.”
“Reagan?” Rory asks.
“Yeah, Reagan. You got a problem with that?”
Rory shrugs. “I didn’t figure you for the political type.”
“I ain’t political, but him right there, he’s the motherfucker. He sticks up for the little guy. All over the place, too. Like them ragheads over in Afghanistan, trying to fight off the Russians. They want to be free, he’s for freedom. He don’t give a shit if they’re a bunch of sandniggers living in caves.”
“F.D.R.,” Rory muses. “That’s what my dad used to call him.”
“F.D.R.? That don’t make no sense.”
“Fuckin’ Dogshit Reagan.”
Bogie stares at him. “I swear to God, you ever say anything like that around me again I’ll kick your head in.”
Rory laughs out loud.
Pike hurls one of his cowboy boots across the room, hitting the television’s power button. The screen goes black.
“What the fuck?” Bogie says. “I wasn’t saying nothing wrong.”
“Find a way to keep yourself occupied,” Pike growls. “Get a drink of water or something.”
“I don’t drink water,” Bogie says. “Fish fuck in it.”
The door to the next room bangs open, bangs shut. There’s shouting in Spanish that sounds less than tender. Furniture moves, slams against the wall. Then the bedsprings pound and scream like they’re being tapdanced by a rhinoceros. It seems like it goes on forever, ending finally with two loud groans. Rory starts as if from a dream, realizing that they’ve each been listening in perfect silence.
“They do like to fuck, don’t they,” Bogie says, licking his lips.
There’s a knock at the door. Rory opens it to a hotel maid with flawless brown skin. She stands in the doorway, haloed by the light from the hall.
“Come on in,” Pike says.
“Did you need towels?” she asks in a hollow North African accent, the door swinging shut behind her.
Pike chucks his head at Bogie, skulking in a shadowed corner of the room. “Heya, Melinda,” Bogie says.
The corners of her mouth turn up coldly. Pike crumples up a bill, throws it at Bogie. “Take it in the bathroom.”
They do. And a minute later, Melinda returns alone.
Pike holds out a bill to her. “You better give me another. He’ll need more.”
“Not for a while, he won’t.” She reaches into her smock and swaps the bill for a small plastic bag of heroin. “Are you the police?” She stares unblinking into Pike’s eyes. She looks a mouse to his mountain, her oval brown face no bigger than one of his biceps.
“Do we look like cops?”
“You have a junky with you, but aren’t junkies yourself. There are only two kinds of people that need junkies, and if you were dealers you wouldn’t need me.”
Pike lights a cigarette. “Doing our patriotic duty to keep the lowlifes doped. Same as yourself.” He stares at the poor lady like she’s an insect. Whatever they’ve spent the day doing, it’s changing Pike. He’s growing leaner, quicker. He’s shedding the years like a snake sheds its skin.
Melinda doesn’t look scared of him though. She looks like she’sbeen seeing one of him all her life. “I don’t mind at all making money off the likes of him.” She smiles a sad smile that twists cruel. “Sooner or later I’ll give him what it takes to kill him.”
“You and Bogie go back a ways?” Rory asks, peeling the maroon bedspread back to the foot of the bed.
“He was a friend of my son. My son who is dead now. Do you need towels?”
Rory shakes his head.
“I’ll be here all week.” She opens the door. “You need more, you come to me.” She closes the door.
Rory fingers two pills out of his pocket and dry-swallows them. The neighbors start up again. From dead silence to the bedsprings pounding like the mattress is on fire and they’re trying to stomp it out. Then it’s over, and there’s just the short pop of air as Pike pulls his cigarette from his lips. “I should have found a way to get her out of it.”
“You don’t need to tell me anything,” Rory says. It’s like he’s been standing in the face of a hurricane all day. Now he just wants to curl up behind something and be left alone.
Pike’s voice drops a gear. “The only thing I’m telling you is that if I think Derrick’s likely to be any threat to Wendy, he ain’t gonna get the chance. Ever.” Pike ashes on the carpet.
Wendy’s face flashes in front of Rory. He smiles grimly. “I sure as shit didn’t come on this trip for you.”
The bathroom doorknob rattles and the door opens. Bogie’s eyes are shot with red veins, his cheeks are sunken. There’s still a trace of heroin around his nostrils. “What are y’all talking about?” he slurs.
Pike squashes his cigarette on the iron bed frame, lets the butt fall onto the floor. “Stay in the bathroom and keep the door closed.”
“I’m fixing to go to sleep. I can’t sleep in the bathtub.”
Before he finishes the last syllable, Pike’s at the bathroom door, slamming a palm into his chest, flattening him backwards into the tub. “If I see your face again tonight,” he growls, “I just might put a bullet in it.”
Rory closes his eyes. He thinks of Wendy again. It doesn’t help much. He thinks of the hooker in long underwear instead, that helps even less.
CHAPTER 31
~ Like she was made combustible.~
Cold night. Home in the cabin on the edge of the Monongahela.
Their parents away, in town. She was skipping between her room and the great room, dancing to a song on the radio. Townes Van Zandt. She wore a dress their mother had made, red and white gingham. Rory sat at the dining room table, a current of cold air running down the middle of the room. Doing homework? Her breath smelled like kerosene. That’s how he remembers her, but he knows it ain’t right.
She had blonde hair, but not much of it. Like Rory’s, when he lets it grow out, so fine it might as well be air. She had hazel eyes, flecked with the same blonde, like it’d drifted down into them. She had six teeth on the bottom, five and a half on top. They were like glass shards in her mouth. Her tiny hips pivoted side to side when she ran. She barreled over the wood floor with her belly thrust out like it was her stomach’s momentum that carried her along behind it.
Their parents were in town. AA meeting? AA meeting. They were two years quit by this time, slowly losing the hatred they’d simmered up for each other over a thousand boozy nights. Of course, they both started drinking again after.
Rory was at the dining room table. Listening to the radio? Writing a letter? Cold night, the wood stove was burning. She must’ve opened the hatch. He wouldn’t have left it open. She stuck her arm in? When the fire hit her dress, it took to it like it was made of tissue paper. Like she was made combustible. Rory jumped up, grabbed the first thing he could find, a throw blanket. Jumped on her and wrapped her in it. He could smell her cooking, just meat, he could hear her trying to scream. The screaming didn’t last long, but the cooking lasted all night. Couldn’t get the smell out of the house.
She knew the word for her teeth. Most of what she knew revolved around her teeth. When she was teething she’d bite holes in her hands and flick blood up and down the walls. She gnawed on everything. You’d be sitting, concentrating on something, and she’d sneak up on you, and when she sunk those teeth into you you’d jump a mile. It’d make you furious.
CHAPTER 32
~ Either y
ou’re a cop or you ain’t.~
The room’s spattered with shadows that the dust-dimmed bulb hanging from the ceiling doesn’t have a chance of cutting through. Derrick’s on a cot against the wall, wearing a pair of jeans that look to have been used as a gearshop rag. Cotton’s offered him the couch in his Airstream trailer, parked out behind the roadhouse in a grove of sugar maples, but Derrick chose the storeroom. He can’t imagine himself with a bunkmate. Not at 3 AM, burning holes in his corneas staring down a cigarette, his hands twitching from lack of sleep.
Nothing to it, another night. A couple more hours, then donuts, coffee, and then out on the road. Somewhere. His exhausted brain slips with a chunk he can almost hear, like a car missing a gear. He sits up on the cot, his feet hitting the cold cement, his black hair roping down his neck. He lights a Marlboro, staring dumbly at a titty calendar on the wall. Then he pulls his .45 from under his pillow and exits the storeroom to the bar. Three quick shots of Beam in a row. Doubles. He’s sweating as he lowers the last glassful. He runs his hand over his clammy stomach, the scar on his chest that runs straight down to his heart. He chases the whiskey with cigarette smoke.
It’s one of those nights. He knows exactly where it’s heading, the way a drunk knows the exact end of a binge before he even gets the first clumsy drink to his lips. He waits it out.
Cotton walks in a little after first light. He bites the finger of one of his leather gloves, tugging it off with his teeth. “What’s up, hoss?”
Derrick’s still shirtless, the Colt .45 and a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam on the table in front of him, the left side of his abdomen pulsing unnervingly in time with the pacemaker. He drags on his cigarette like to damp down the sensation. “No sleep tonight.”
Cotton tosses his gloves on Derrick’s table. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you sleep.”
“Two or three hours a night. If I’m lucky.”
Cotton steps behind the bar. “The heart?”
“The cure. When I’m supposed to be awake, it paces my heartbeat up. When I’m supposed to be asleep, it’s supposed to pace me down. Only this motherfucker never paces down.”
Cotton turns on the tap behind the bar, runs water into a coffee pot. “I didn’t know it worked like that.”
“The doctors tell me it doesn’t.” Derrick takes a last heavy drag, the cigarette filter heating between his fingers. He stamps it out in the ashtray. “But it is what it is.”
The coffee maker hisses, sputters. “You ever get the urge to take it out?”
“Yep. With a dull knife and a pair of pliers.”
Cotton lights a filterless cigarette with a death’s head Zippo, spits a piece of loose tobacco on the floor. “There’s times I worry about you, hoss.”
“You’d be the first.”
Cotton opens his mouth to say something else, but someone bangs on the door. Cotton closes his mouth. “Expecting company?” Derrick shakes his head, reaches for his .45. The foyer’s dark. Cotton pulls a pump shotgun from under the bar, rests it in the crook of his arm, then buzzes the door open.
Jack Nolan walks in, the morning smell of highway diesel and dirty exhaust trailing with him. “Cotton,” he says, nodding.
“Sheriff,” Cotton returns, setting the shotgun on the bar. “What brings you out here?”
“I need a word with Derrick.”
“Go ahead,” Derrick says, not bothering to take his feet off the table.
Jack turns to face him. “I’m doing a favor for a friend on the Cincinnati Police Department. He gave me a message for you.”
Derrick lights another cigarette.
“He did some digging. Your boy Fleischer’s in cahoots with one of the black community groups working to take your shield. He gavea name. Reverend something.” Jack fingers a scrap of paper out of his coat’s breast pocket, tosses it on the table at Derrick’s bare feet. “There’s a number.”
It’s Klaus’s number. Derrick folds it into his jeans, reminding himself to speak to Klaus about his powers of discretion. Then he looks up at the sheriff, who’s still standing at the table, disgust simmering in the lines around his eyes. “You got something you want from me, sheriff?” he asks.
“I know things are different in Cincinnati,” Jack says slowly. “But you’re still dirty. It’s all over you like a film of shit.”
“How many murderers you get running around here, sheriff?” Derrick draws lazily on his cigarette. “How many child rapists?”
Jack nods slowly, like this is an argument he’s had with himself before. “You’re still dirty.”
Derrick lets smoke filter out of his nostrils. “And you’re a country dipshit who might want to stick to running down cowtippers.”
Jack’s already turned on his boot heel. He’s halfway to the door.
“Pick a fucking side, sheriff,” Derrick says after his back. “That’s what it means to be a cop. You can’t be more than one thing. Either you’re a cop or you ain’t.”
CHAPTER 33
~ Still alive, curled up in the bathtub in his boxers.~
Dreaming of Mexico again. Of border crossing. Of shedding his American skin like a snake. Then waking into the cold morning, pummeled by the stifling feeling that he has no life of his own to speak of, not here. There’s laws here that Mexicans have yet to find words for. Zoning laws, decency laws, walking laws, speeding laws. Laws that proliferate like cancer cells, and behind those laws, prisons that never seem to empty, that blossom out of American small towns like tumors. Pike remembers the first breath he took the first time he crossed the Rio Grande. The air was big and clean, and it left him the same way.
He wakes and smokes a cigarette in bed, thinking. Then he checks on Bogie. Still alive. Curled up in the bathtub in his boxers, his gnarled body covered with sweat, his skin pale and twitching. He looks to have been tortured, more than once. His sparrow torso is crossed with scars, and one of his elbows is knobbed, deformed, and there’s a mottled burn scar in the shape of the letter T on his left shoulder blade, splayed and crooked like the brand was put down while the kid was fighting like hell to keep it off. And he snores with the rattling whistle that comes of a nose that’s been set badly. And, spreading across the kid’s chest, there’s a bruise. Purple-black with the force of Pike’s shove.
Pike flips on the bathroom fan, lights a cigarette, staring down at it. He’s had bruises like that. They ache like a fresh blow with every breath and they don’t heal for a long time. They feel like they’re rotting back through the breastbone, into the internal organs. He thinks hard about smothering the little shit in his sleep. He sets his cigarette on the back of the toilet and walks to his bed. He strips the blanket off
and palms a pillow, returns to the bathroom. He lifts Bogie’s greasy head gently and slides the pillow under it and covers him with the blanket. Then he sits down on the toilet, looking at him.
CHAPTER 34
~ He danced with one of the local girls.~
Pike didn’t make it far from Nanticonte before his money ran out. East St. Louis, an alley outside a bar, holding a tire iron. The victim got lucky, had his wallet out before Pike could get a swing off. And it was full of bills, over two hundred dollars. It was a payday that took Pike to Kansas City, where he got a job bouncing at a blues bar. Six days in, he was dealing heroin for the owner, a midget named Chuckie. She ran all the biker smack in town, funneling it from the Hell’s Angels straight into the colored bars. There was an irony there that neither Chuckie nor the Angels misunderstood.
Pike was a good dealer. He was better at breaking heads. Chuckie started giving him muscle work. Pressing out the competition, clearing up debts, backing her up with the Angels. He was good at it. Then Chuckie started to notice smack missing. She hired three bikers to take it out of him, in her bar after closing. None of them left walking, and she ended up in a hospital that she never came out of, her face beat with a pair of brass-knuckles until her skin was running free with her bones.
Then Denver. He dealt the
smack and bought coke to kick the smack with, planning to sell the surplus. It was a hell of a plan, but he ran out of surplus. So he got a room above a pool hall on Larimer Street, made himself available for work. All it took to know who he was you could get by looking at him, and he scored gigs using all the same talents he’d honed in Kansas City. His face was a cocaine death’s head, he was on fire with knowing exactly who he was.
This was one of those nights. Dancing with one of the local girls in a honkytonk on Colfax. Dancing close. She was young, too young, all cowtown muscle and lean hunger, and she decided to pretend tomind his dancing. A cowboy stepped between them, took the girl by the arm. He was slim, his skin clear and tan. There was a thin sheen of perspiration on his upper lip, as if he knew what would come next. Pike shoved the girl away without speaking. She stumbled, recovered her feet. “Nothing’s happening,” she said to the cowboy. “We’re just dancing.”
The boy said nothing. His eyes were cavernous with pain. Pike grinned at him. The boy slipped his knife out of his pocket before Pike even saw his hand move, the thin blade slivering through the air, crossing his stomach. Those nights were bad. Pike didn’t feel much on any of them. He grabbed the boy’s knife hand, cranked the wrist until he heard it crunch. Then slipped his hand into his brass knuckles and hammered the boy’s oval face until his legs crumbled like sandstone. Then yanked him up by his broken wrist, feeling the play in his separated bones. Pike worked on his teeth, smashing them into roughs, jerking the boy into his fist until his broken wrist had separated entirely.
Then Pike stopped. The bar was a vacuum of light and sound, sucked somewhere out into the street, the locals gaping, their dark eyes focused on him like sinkholes into their brains. The girl had collapsed into a crouch. She was sobbing slowly to herself, saying something too low for him to pick up the meaning. Pike dropped the boy’s hand, let him crumple on the floor. Broken tooth fragments oozed out of his mouth, his mangled hand flopped meaninglessly at his side.
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