PIKE

by Benjamin Whitmer

  “Why?”

  “To pick you up. For the weekend.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I know it. But I need time to gather my thoughts.”

  “I won’t bother you.”

  His father pulled a filterless cigarette out of the pack on the table and tapped it on his lighter to settle the tobacco. Then he stuck it in his mouth.

  “I’ll stay in my room.”

  “Sorry, bud.”

  Rory looked at the old man. His face was thin and worked over. He lit the cigarette, his cigarette hand missing the two fingers from a chainsaw accident. Smoke curled around his face like a query mark as he puffed it to life. “I miss them as bad as you do,” Rory said.

  His father’s eyes were hazel and flecked with dead light. “I know

  it.”

  Rory never had nothing to say to that. His father touched his hand then chucked his chin towards the door for him to wait outside. So he did.

  All of them, they’re like people somebody told him about. A dream is a sausage mill you feed your life into. The night as chill as a little girl’s teeth. Nothing changes. Ever.

  CHAPTER 59

  ~ That’s various of you.~

  Pike trades half the meat to a local pig farmer in exchange for doing the butchering and drives home. For the first time in weeks he feels steady on his feet, like he’s regained his sea legs after too long a period ashore. Then he opens the door to his apartment and finds Wendy, cross-legged on the floor, smoking a cigarette, reading Poe, and his steadiness doesn’t feel so steady. He fakes it.

  She closes the book. “Rory says you’re such the reader. How come you don’t own no books?”

  Pike shuts the door and walks to the window and cracks it, letting her smoke escape. “I get them out of the library.”

  “What’s the last book you read then?”

  “It was about Sand Creek.” He sits on the bed.

  “What’s Sand Creek?”

  “It’s a place in Colorado.”

  “What about before that?”

  “Beowulf.”

  “That’s various of you.”

  “Not really.”

  She wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “I need to ask you a question.” Her voice is hard.

  A loose stream of cold air from the window slicks along the floorboards and slithers up his legs. “I didn’t find out anything you don’t know,” he answers.

  Her sharp chin bobs up and down. “I’m sorry I spit on you,” she says. “And I’m sorry I haven’t been talking to you.”

  “You’re under no obligation to talk to anybody you don’t want to. That includes me.”

  “I know what kind of mom she was. But.” Her chin furrows unsteadily. “I don’t know how to say it.”

  Pike leans forward and puts his hands together in a double fist in front of his mouth. “I let your mom down when she was even younger than you. I had to know how bad.”

  She looks down at the floor and he can’t see anything but the top of her head. “Why did you let her down?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that. Anything I told you would be a lie.”

  “You didn’t want her? As a kid?”

  “That wasn’t it,” Pike says. “I always loved her as much as I was able. I just wasn’t very able.”

  Another cold stream of air. And it seems to touch Wendy. She shudders, and then sets her muscles to stop herself from shuddering. “I’m sick of it. I’m so sick of the whole thing it makes me want to walk through a window.”

  “I know it.” The air in the room hangs over them like a wet canvas. He stands. “Will you take a drive with me?”

  She nods. And makes it all the way down to the truck without letting him see her face.

  CHAPTER 60

  ~ As though they’re surfacing from the black depths of an ocean.~

  They drive back into the mountains. And they keep driving.

  The day darkens with winter clouds and the sun falls and the clouds clear and there’s the purple twilight, falling down on them like a new kind of snow. The truck winds through the mountains like an undercurrent through the ocean. Pike talks while they drive, pointing out the mountains and hollows that he knows the names of, telling every story he can think of about the people that live in them. He tells her what the land will look like when spring comes. How green it’ll get. Then he tells her how when he was out west he thought he’d forgotten the color of green altogether. He doesn’t tell her that he didn’t mind in the least.

  Then they stop at a store and buy two Cokes and a fresh pack of cigarettes and they continue driving. Smoking silently and drinking the Cokes. Listening to country music on the radio and watching the stars appear, one by one, across the vault. Pike turns off the headlights and they drive mountaintop to mountaintop by starlight. The low clouds wisping beneath the stars above them, then over the ravines below as they climb. At times the mountains are no longer there at all. Nor the truck, nor even each other. Nothing but the sky and the stars glinting coldly, then growing and warming as they rise up to meet them, as though they’re surfacing from the black depths of an ocean. And then they’re within them, the stars whirling around them as though they’re the lynchpin on which the firmament revolves.

  And then they descend again. Diving into the blackness of the gorge below again.

  CHAPTER 61

  ~ That kind ends up dead every time.~

  The reverend leaves the house twice every Saturday. Once in the morning for groceries at a boutique market with his oldest daughter, once in the afternoon for a cigar and coffee at a corner tobacco shop. He doesn’t live with his constituents, this spokesman for his oppressed brothers. There ain’t no boutique grocery stores downtown. You can’t even see Over-the-Rhine from his oversized Victorian in Mount Adams.

  It’s Saturday afternoon. The sun’s thin and washed out behind the clouds. Derrick won’t do what he’s going to do in front of the man’s daughter. The reverend walks with his shoulders back and his head erect, his round brown face like a polished black walnut bust above his immaculate suit. It’s never just a walk, never just a cigar. It’s a visitation.

  Derrick pulls alongside him and reaches over and pops the passenger side door. “Get in.”

  The reverend raises an eyebrow, continues walking. “This is not one of your wiser moves, son,” he says without looking at Derrick.

  “Maybe. But it wasn’t a fucking request. Get in.”

  The reverend stops walking. Stands, looking up at the sky. Then he eases his large frame into the car, smoothing down his overcoat. Derrick stomps the gas and the Monte Carlo waffles out into the street, peels down the hill. “You ever call me son again I’ll shoot you in the face,” Derrick says.

  “Am I to expect anything different?”

  “We’ll see how you behave. Boy.”

  The reverend laughs out loud. “You’ve come to deal?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You didn’t seem so interested in dealing the other night, when you met with Dick Fleischer.”

  “Fleischer’s a sack of shit. I don’t deal with shit.”

  “I see.”

  Derrick slips the car off the road, into a small lot by the Ohio, at the foot of Mount Adams. “I’m a good cop.”

  “You and I have different ideas of what it means to be a good cop, I think.”

  “Drug wars don’t happen where I am. Kids don’t get shot.”

  “Unless you shoot them. You’re a thug, Kreiger. And you’re corrupt.”

  “Hell, at least the people I get, they’ve done something worth being got for. That little nigger I shot with his six-year-old sister in the hospital. Thirteen hours of surgery. That shit doesn’t happen, not on my watch.”

  “It’s an obsession with you?”

  “The rest we can compromise on. You can have a say in how cop work is done in Over-the-Rhine.”

  “So we are dealing?”

  “You won’t ever get this kind of deal aga
in.”

  “But only on your say-so, Derrick. Am I right? You reserve the right to pass judgment as you see fit?”

  “Just with that one thing. That kind ends up dead every time. I don’t compromise on that.”

  The reverend looks Derrick over. “Lord, what I wouldn’t give to be a fly on your therapist’s wall.”

  “We got a deal?”

  “Perhaps.” The reverend nods to himself, thinking. “What exactly am I supposed to gain from the arrangement?”

  “I done told you. You get a say in how the neighborhood’s policed.”

  “A say?”

  “A say. I’m a damn sight better than the helicopters and the SWAT teams. That’s what’s next, an occupation.”

  “I’m not sure you’re better.”

  “You know I am. I live in Over-the-Rhine. It matters to me. Your alternative is mass arrests and submachine guns. The kind of shitthat’s starting in L.A. and New York. I’m corrupt, you say, but I’m a hell of a lot better than what’s clean.”

  The reverend stares out the window. “I obviously can’t support you. Not publicly.”

  “You don’t have to. You don’t even have to quit condemning me, not immediately. You just have to let the chief know you’re thinking about finding other shit to focus on, and find something.”

  “There can’t be any way of it blowing back on me. You can’t be crooked, Kreiger. Not in any way that matters.”

  “There won’t be no loose ends, not when I’m done.” Derrick sticks his hand out. “Shake it.”

  The reverend shakes his hand. And laughs. First in a long slow rumble, then in a full guffaw. Then he wipes his eyes. “I’m dealing with the devil.”

  Derrick shifts the car into drive. “You won’t get a better deal anywhere else.”

  CHAPTER 62

  ~ There are places you can still be what you are.~

  The sun sets with a final bath of light that runs like warm water down the Nanticote street, rinsing the row of houses in shadow and resting on the last, a two story Colonial. Inside the four of them eat beneath a huge and dusty chandelier. Pike finishes first and crosses his knife and fork on his plate and looks around the table. It’s a hell of a meal. Venison roast and venison strips and fried liver and onions, all of which he and Iris spent the better part of the day preparing.

  He watches Wendy. She chews delicately, her left hand folded demurely in her lap. She’s wearing the first dress Pike has ever seen her in. She got it from the thrift store. It’s black and high-necked and patched all over, but it fits her. Perfectly. She’s only been a couple months in Nanticonte but it looks like years on her. She’s shedding her girlishness, her pretty white face leaning out, her thin hands losing the awkwardness she carried from Cincinnati.

  Then there’s Rory. Slumped back in his chair, hunched to one side like his body’s been thrown off kilter and he can’t muster the strength to regain his equilibrium. Picking at his food like an automaton, his effortless grace having fled him, left him a lumbering shell of his former self. He needs out of here. Somewhere he can flex and move, where the locals can’t keep you pinned down with their shitty little renditions of you. There are places you can still be what you are.

  After dinner, Pike stands outside the back door, smoking and watching the kitchen light spill out the windows, burnishing the snow banks a fluttering bronze. Listening to Wendy and Rory bicker over the cleanup.

  The door opens and Iris steps out. “Sorry to make you smoke outside.”

  “It’s your house.”

  “Jack wouldn’t let me smoke inside.” She pulls a Marlboro Light out of her flannel shirt pocket and lights it with a match, her hands shaking in the cold. “Even in my own house I keep on coming out in the cold. Stupid, ain’t it?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  She draws on her cigarette and folds her arms across her breast. Then shudders as if suddenly struck by the chill air.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “You know. I’m lonesome. But I’ve been lonesome for a long time.”

  “It ain’t none of my business. But he wants you to come back.”

  “You’re right, it ain’t none of your business. And it wouldn’t matter if I went back or not.” Iris shakes her head, smoke spilling out of her mouth like water from a shaken glass. “He’s not sheriff because he needs the job. He’s got plenty of money from the real estate. He’s sheriff for the lousiest reason I can think of. His grandfather was sheriff before his father, and he thinks he’d be betraying his father’s memory if he was anything else. It’s nothing but second-rate family history. Makes me mad enough to twist his little prick off"

  “I never expected it would be any other way.”

  “Yeah. Well. Jack never wanted to be a cop, and I never wanted to be married to a cop. Cops turn strange. They end up spending most of their energy hammering their personalities into cop molds. Jack used to have plans for his life.”

  “Most of us did,” Pike says. “Before we became what we are.”

  “Well. There you go, then. It’s a fucking tragedy all over, ain’t it?”

  CHAPTER 63

  ~ I earn twenty-five dollars a day. And expenses.~

  Black snow and exhaust fumes. A gang of lanky-haired children picking like magpies through the oily rocks for anything that shines. Derrick strolls from his car to the first fire pit under the train bridge. He doesn’t bother to zip up his leather jacket, letting his Colt .45 hang out. He’s spent the whole day running down pimps and dealers, wising them up to his ability to be in all places at once. He doesn’t want anyone thinking he’s out of touch. Sooner or later somebody will be asking questions. He ain’t planning on leaving a single motherfucker in town who doesn’t understand the consequences if they answer. And he’s almost done. Dana’s the last name on his list.

  Two men just under the bridge. One a scruffy black junky with red eyes and a shoulder length Jheri curl, the other a wiry white kid with sandy blonde hair. Derrick gets within two paces of them and pulls his .45 and holds it at his side.

  “There really ain’t no need for you to pull your piece.” The junky’s voice is even and chastising, like he’s hipping Derrick to some piece of etiquette he might not have known about.

  “I’m looking for a hooker named Dana,” Derrick says. “Point me at whatever nigger she’s under.”

  “Whatever nigger?” The junky’s eyes fire black with hatred. “I don’t know any niggers.”

  Derrick reaches in his back pocket, flips out his shield, lets them ogle it. “Get smart with me again and I’ll put two in your nigger ass.”

  “I know you.” A flush shades the corners of the blonde kid’s raw-boned face, excited with himself at the thought of knowing anything.

  “How the fuck do you know me, boy?”

  “I seen your picture. Seen you in the papers.” He slaps out his hand. “Name’s Bogie.”

  “Put your fucking hand away, boy, before I stuff it down your throat.”

  Bogie shrugs like that’s happened before and doesn’t scare him in the least. “Dana ain’t been here in days. You was right, though. The last time anyone saw her she got dragged out from under a nigger. Want to know what happened to him?”

  “Boy, you are testing my patience.”

  “Shot.” Bogie nods his head at one of the campfires staggered around the shantytown. “Right there. Real big gun too. Blew a hole in his chest I could have stuck my head in.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Fuck no. I got here late. His body was still there, though. Ass naked from the waist down. These ratty motherfuckers had already stoled his pants. Underwear too, if he was wearing any.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “That’s a negotiating question. You got to throw an offer out with

  it.”

  The .45 roars in Derrick’s hand, the slug ripping past Bogie’s ear, clanging off an iron beam five foot behind his head. Bogie doesn’t even look at the gun. “You got a cigarette o
n you?”

  Derrick can’t help but grin. He drops the muzzle of the .45 and fingers a Marlboro red out of his shirt pocket and tosses it to Bogie. “You’re a cool little fucker.”

  Bogie cups a hand around the cigarette and lights it with a grimy book of matches. “Ain’t cool at all. I just seen too much of your horse-shit lately for it to bother me much.”

  Derrick palms a five out of his billfold, drops it fluttering at the kid’s feet. “That’s it for negotiations.”

  “That’ll do.” Bogie crouches to pick up the bill. “He was a big briar. Called himself Pike. Had a boy wonder with him that went by Rory.”

  Derrick’s head swarms with blood, a thick heart pump surging like a swollen river over a low dam. “Why?”

  Bogie clears his throat meaningfully, his eyes flit down to the bill in his hand.

  Derrick lifts the .45, one-handed. Puts the front sight on Bogie’s forehead. “Don’t make me tell you again. We’re done negotiating.”

  “They was looking for Dana. Like you.”

  “Where is she?” Derrick’s voice sounds like ashes being scraped out of a metal bucket.

  “Don’t know. But if you’re still in a negotiating mood, I bet I can find out.”

  Derrick pulls the trigger back. Just a little, to the point where it catches before breaking.

  “I’ll bet they damn near scared her clean. And I know where she goes when she wants to get clean.” Bogie grins a loose grin. “I’m a regular motherfucking gumshoe, though. I earn twenty-five dollars a day. And expenses.”

  CHAPTER 64

  ~ Rory folds his hands in front of his face, tries a chuckle.~

  Rory stands in his doorway, toweling sweat off his shaved neck.

  “It’s a beautiful morning, Pike. What the hell’re you doing

  in it?”

  Pike hands him a Styrofoam cup. “Brought coffee.” Rory watches him take a seat at the writing table and pull his gloves off in a soft Vicodin blur. Pike gestures at the bed. “Take a seat.”

  Rory obeys, dabbing at his shoulders with the towel.