PIKE

by Benjamin Whitmer

  Derrick sits down on a stool. The bartender looks at him out of the corner of his eye, rolls the toothpick in his mouth and looks back at the television. “Beam,” Derrick says, “and a Miller Lite.” The bartender fetches the drinks, his eyes never leaving the television. There’s a lit-up Budweiser display over the bar, quarter horses pulling a beer wagon. The horse’s feet move when you look at it right, dragging the beer cart in a Sisyphean arc. Derrick drinks the beer and drinks the shot, thinking about his life as little as possible.

  Commercial break. The bartender divines Derrick’s ready for another and opens a can for him. Derrick nods by way of thanks.

  “You just start?” the bartender says.

  “Start?”

  He jerks his head in the direction of factory. “I ain’t never seen you in here before.”

  “I was driving by and needed a drink,” Derrick says. “You was the only place around.”

  The bartender wipes the leathery counter down and tosses his rag under the bar. “Most of our customers are over at the factory.” The commercials run off, and his attention wanders back to the television.

  “I retired,” the old man says, out of nowhere.

  Derrick looks at him, but the old man doesn’t return his gaze, he’s staring at the television.

  “Good place to retire from,” Derrick says.

  “Yep,” the old guy says. “Good benefits.” He doesn’t say anything else. He lifts the little beer glass to his mouth in quiet twenty-second intervals, he fills it every eight drinks. His elbow and hands work like they’re running on an engine, and the bartender never lets him go dry. It’s a machine that can run forever without stalling. Retired, hell.

  The bartender pulls about thirty shot glasses and sets them up on the counter, starts to filling them with bourbon. “They’ve got a fifteen-minute break coming up,” he explains to Derrick. He finishes with the bourbon shots, starts to popping beer tabs on Budweiser cans. “They’re gonna want them set up.”

  Derrick stands, drops a five on the counter. He leaves the bar without looking back at the old man, still lifting his glass of beer in twenty-second intervals like he’s on a spring. Derrick cracks his knuckles as he steps out of the bar.

  BOOK III

  You are the moderate man, the invaluable

  understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man,

  may be used for wrong, but are useless for right.

  — Herman Melville

  CHAPTER 54

  ~ Pike is sad for the dumb thing.~

  Pike can’t take the stand for more than an hour. He’s never been able to. He never was much of a hunter, even as a kid. He had no quiet. His mind was a riot and he missed as often as he hit, guts-hooting more than one buck. Luckily, his father had quiet in spades, and no hard words for him ever. He’d simply take the lead, tracking the gutshot buck with the boy and showing him the signs, and then when they found it, which they always did, shooting it cleanly to put it out of its misery. He moved with that same quiet deliberation in everything he did, and he never missed, not when it was food on the table.

  The hunts brought them together. As did the butchering, in the cold tent made of sheet plastic in the back yard, listening to country and western music and laughing at each other over the meat. That they were poaching Pike didn’t learn until later. There was land and it was open and they needed the food. If anything, Pike considered the land as theirs. They’d taken deer in every hollow and on every hill and he figured they’d marked it out with every buck they’d brought down. Land wasn’t something you could own by virtue of a piece of paper.

  Now the deer are all but hunted out. You’re lucky to see one in an entire season. But Pike doesn’t hunt for food anymore. He just gets a need to walk in the woods, carrying his father’s lever-action Winchester 30-30, remembering the old steadiness he got from watching the old man work. It brings him back to the man he wanted to be when he was a boy. It makes him forget what he blundered into being later.

  Pike left his father’s home hard. He knew the way the people in town looked at the old man, and he didn’t want it to be anything theycould hang on him. There was a girl Pike had brought home and she had a mouth on her. The old man tried to get between them. Pike threw him through the front window. Then found him outside and punched him in the jaw until his jawbone cracked like an old piece of dry wood, the girl hanging from his back, spitting and screaming for him to stop. That was the last time Pike and the old man spoke.

  In a long life of regrets that may be the greatest. But, then, when you get to a certain measure, there’s no point in weighing one against the others. It’s enough that when Pike hunts he can still feel the old man with him. Steady and quiet. His impossible measure of deliberation and kindness shown in the smallest of his movements.

  Pike catches a spot of brown at the tree line of a small glade and crosses the meadow to it. He stops and focuses. Can’t be. But it is. A buck, sunk into the snow, not moving. Pike steps closer. The buck’s ribs and spine show and the thing’s eyes are hollowed into his head. He’s dead. Pike hunkers down about ten feet from him and rests the rifle across his knees. He’s the first buck of his size that Pike’s seen in decades. Twelve points and not less than 250 pounds. Pike takes in a reverential breath and lets it out slowly.

  The quiet in the old man is what Pike needs now. To pass it on to Rory. The kid’s burning up from the inside and anyone can see it. He comes from a people that had no quiet whatsoever. They were all over the place, running on hostility like an engine runs on gasoline, rolling around their house and taking each other out in series of small hatreds and collisions. The kid does what he can to damp down the noise they’ve filled him with, their burnings and their suicides, but they ain’t made that drug yet.

  But that’s only half the story. Pike runs his right hand over the riflestock, the wood worn glasslike by his father’s hands and his. What’s ripping around in the back of Rory’s head right now ain’t got anything to do with his family life. Pike finds a cigarette in the breast pocket of his coat and looks into the shrunken eyes of the buck and lights it.

  The buck’s nostrils flare at the smoke. His head rises up, huge and antlered and terrible, and he paws at the ground for footing. Pike stands and lets the cigarette fall out of his mouth and brings the rifleto his shoulder. The animal’s eyes are suddenly alive, round and black as they cling to Pike’s. He snorts a barrage of frost and turns to limp away, but stumbles almost to his knees.

  Then Pike sees the blood in the snow and the hole in his side that leaks black blood. Some stupid asshole has shot him and let him wander away to suffer. He was playing possum.

  Pike’s sad for the dumb thing. He puts a bullet in it.

  CHAPTER 55

  ~ The beating has taken his bowel control.~

  Evidently Christmas means something to Dick Fleischer. His Blue Ash Tudor home is choked with colored lights and icicle trim and he has a full-sized Santa on his lawn, stepping into a chimney that throbs red and releases timed chugs of smoke. Not to mention a set of reindeer strapped to a sleigh that’s bigger than Derrick’s Monte Carlo, and more minor pieces and nativity scenes then Derrick has the time or inclination to count.

  Christmas isn’t much of anything to Derrick. All he has is a five gallon can of gasoline and a pair of brass knuckles. He looks up and down the street. Nothing moving. He lifts the gasoline can and pours the contents over Santa and tosses the can to the side. Then sparks a match and watches the plastic monstrosity whoosh into the winter sky, a pillar of fire. He starts a cigarette and leans back against his Monte Carlo to wait. His heart’s pounding steady, he feels relaxed and even.

  Derrick’s not a particularly good fist fighter. He’s never boxed and he doesn’t take a punch any better than any other cop who’s better used to giving beatings than receiving them. But his heart gives him the edge. He can always count on the other guy’s to beat too fast, to fill his head with wobbly giddiness, to spark his nerves with twi
tchy adrenaline. Derrick’s stays as cool and even as an engine.

  It doesn’t take long. The lights in the house flick on and Fleischer bursts out the front door. An aluminum baseball bat cocked back over his shoulder. His satin pajamas ballooning in the winter wind. Panic, in the way he’s sweating.

  Derrick waits for him to get within five feet and flicks his cigarette at his eyes. Fleischer ticks his head to the side, it flashes by his cheek. He should have taken it. Derrick’s in close. Fleischer jerks thebat in an awkward loop and Derrick blocks the downswing with his forearm, hooking a right into the side of Fleischer’s head, landing the brass with a solid thud.

  Fleischer pulls the bat back for another swing. Derrick pounds him again, this time on the side of the head. There’s a sick crunch and Derrick hits him one, two, three more times in the same spot. Fleischer’s ears bubble blood and he sags, slipping sideways onto the lawn, all his rage and forward momentum disintegrating.

  Derrick doesn’t let him fall easy. He’s good with the knuckles. He lands three more rights into the side of Fleischer’s mouth before he makes it to the ground. Fleischer’s molars crumble like candy corn and he collapses in the snow, his mouth open and running with blood and teeth.

  Derrick crouches in front of the fat man’s face. “The thing is, I doubt you could stop what you started even if you wanted to,” he says. “I’ll probably lose my badge and I’ll probably get sent up on charges and there probably ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.”

  Fleischer makes a gurgling sound in his throat, as if he’s trying to speak and vomit at the same time. Blood and puke trickles out of his mouth.

  “I’VE CALLED THE POLICE!” a fat blonde woman yells from the door. She’s standing with two fat children at her sides, holding her hands over their eyes. They’re all three wailing, their bodies jiggling like pudding.

  “This is just the beginning. When they pull my badge, I’ll take you somewhere I can spend some real time with you.” Derrick pulls the brass knuckles off his hand, examines his fingers. Already shadowing with purple bruises. Derrick slides the brass knuckles in his back pocket. “The best part? You were right. The nigger kid was my dealer. I sponsored him because he ran a clean business, for the kind of business it was. He didn’t start wars that got kids shot up and he didn’t work on getting new customers hooked. He provided a service that was more decent than most. If he hadn’t been a pedophile he’d have been the perfect nigger.”

  Fleischer’s eyes glisten with hate and pain. A new stink rises off him. The beating has taken his bowel control.

  The woman starts to scream something else, but her voice is cut off by a sob.

  “I want you to think about all the dealers I know,” Derrick continues. “I want you to lay here until the ambulance comes, guessing how much heroin I have my hands around. Then, on the way to the hospital, while you’re trying to spit my name out through your broken jaw, I want you to calculate up how many junkies there are in this city who’d rape your wife, even as fucking ugly as she is, for a five-dollar fix.”

  CHAPTER 56

  ~ It’s a slight miserable thing of a nod, like a half-dead swallow trying to find its wings.~

  The winter moon hangs low and cold, flickering streaks of moonlight over the black forest. Rory’s dark cabin fits snugly into the snow, a wisp of wood smoke trailing out of the stainless steel chimney. It’s late and the fire in the pot-bellied stove has long since burned down to embers. Rory’s awake in his bed, his smooth-worn quilt lying on his bare legs like the touch of a young girl. He’s been waking by degrees for awhile now.

  The doorknob rattles, gently. Rory’s breath catches in his throat. He’s suddenly all the way awake. Something moves around the house and the window clatters. Then a hand thrusts through it and taps up the latch and the window creaks open. Rory lays motionless, his right hand snaking out from the covers, reaching under the bed. Small logs clamber down the woodpile and a figure sticks a foot through the window, finds the table. Then hops noiselessly down and reaches back to latch the window.

  Rory sits upright, lifting a sawed-off sledgehammer handle. “Stand right where you are.”

  “It’s just me,” she says.

  “Wendy?”

  She nods. It’s a slight miserable thing of a nod, like a half-dead swallow trying to find its wings. “I need a place to sleep.”

  “Everything all right?”

  She nods again.

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Walked. It ain’t far.”

  Rory sets the stick back under his bed. “Pike know you’re here?”

  She shakes her head. “He’s hunting.”

  “Hunting? Where?”

  “I don’t know. Out in the mountains somewhere. He’s been hunting since y’all came back. He don’t sleep anymore. Can I stay?”

  “I guess so.” Rory finds his jeans beside the bed and pulls them on under his covers. “You don’t think Pike’ll get mad when he gets in, do you?”

  “No.” She pulls off her gloves. “I left him a note. Besides he told me to come over here if I ever needed to.”

  “All right. Sit tight and I’ll stoke up the fire and get you some blankets or something.”

  She sits on the floor and unbundles Monster from somewhere in her clothes. Rory pulls an extra blanket from under his bed and sets her up a pallet three or four feet off from the stove. He opens the stove and throws a log in and stokes up the fire. “Do you roll around a lot in your sleep?”

  She turns her face up to him. Monster curled in her lap, licking the tips of her fingers.

  “I don’t want you accidentally running up against the stove. If you roll around in your sleep, I’ll take the floor and you can have the bed. I’d let you have the bed anyway, but the sheets ain’t clean and I only got the one set.”

  “I’ll be fine. Thank you.”

  “Okay.”

  Rory sits on his bed, watching her and Monster snuggle into the bedding, making sure she doesn’t move any closer to the fire. It never occurring to him it might be impolite to watch. When he sees her situated, he finds his pills on the windowsill and leans against the wall with his knobby legs pulled up to shield the bottom half of his face and dryswallows four of them.

  “What are those for?”

  He holds up his bruised hand, flexing it so she can see the uneven bones. He raises his left arm, displaying four long finger welts down his bicep. He turns his torso to show a set of fist sized bruises splotching his back like tumors. He forcibly straightens his left leg, the gristle and bone popping like cherry bombs.

  “Can I have one?”

  “Not without Pike’s say-so.”

  She strokes Monster. He’s nestled into her thin chest, already asleep and shuddering slightly, his fur blanched and silvery in the moonlight. “It’s a strange hobby. The fighting.”

  “It won’t always be a hobby.”

  “What’ll it be?”

  “There’s a contest in Toledo. You fight everyone who shows up and the last one standing wins ten thousand dollars. I’m gonna win that and find a boxing trainer somewhere.”

  “I believe you will.” She closes her eyes. “Thank you, Rory.”

  “Anytime.”

  She’s asleep in minutes. Rory finds his glass of water and drinks it. Then he stands and finds his dumbbells in the dark, and places them between her and the stove. He looks down at her and her face is like a piece of polished bone in the bleak moonlight. Monster’s eyes open, sparking, and his jaw yawns, exposing his vicious little pricks.

  CHAPTER 57

  ~ As though it has to pass through a very dirty windowpane to reach him.~

  Later that night, the meadow across from Rory’s cabin. The night air chill and dangerous, as sharp as a cat’s tooth. The stars bursting like frozen collisions against the black of the night, and the moon full and brittle white, like a disk of ice, as though you could breathe on it and melt it into the dark. Rory lies in the middle of the meadow, his head
propped on a log, his eyes drifting across the firmament. It’s all blending together again in his memory. A man lying face down in the mud and dust, his back a grisly hole of bone shards and meat. The chemical heroin and cum stench that ran off Dana. And his sister. There’s still the same feeling he’s ever had for her, but it’s dimmed, as though it has to pass through a very dirty windowpane to reach him.

  Exhaustion. Tired of fighting in the bar and tired of working out. Ready to lose and be done with this car-crash of a dream. Ready to ask a girl out. It’s been years since he had a girl, it sticks in him like a cancer. It’s why he’s out here in the meadow, instead of inside. It’s been so long since he was in the same room alone with a girl, he couldn’t find anyway to get to sleep. Rory closes his eyes, let’s his mind drift. It doesn’t drift far from familiar ground.

  There was a barn with the honeysuckle vines growing up the side, bare in the winter. The piercing voices of his parents, drinking hard after his sister died. The nightly chores, emptying the slop bucket into the pig trough. Then hunkering down in his work jacket like a turtle hunkering into its shell, breathing warm air into his hands, waiting for their shrill hatred to thin out of the house.

  It never did seem to. Not all the way. It hung in the air like smoke from a wood stove fire started with the flue closed.

  Then his mother. Then his father.

  CHAPTER 58

  ~ There are some things AA doesn’t cover.~

  Rory dug the key out from under the rock and opened the door. The late summer sunlight was still strong, flooding over the great room in buckets of light and warmth. His father sat at the table, a whiskey bottle by his elbow. He’d been drinking every night after Rory went to bed. There are some things AA doesn’t cover. Fire being one.

  “The Sawyers will be here in about an hour,” his father said. “You can wait out front.”