PIKE

by Benjamin Whitmer

  Jessie’s body. They ain’t yet made the shotgun load that can penetrate a three-hundred-pound Kentucky redneck, though. Pike checks his arm. Three or four pellets in the tricep, probably 3 buck. Nothing.

  “I count you got three rounds left,” Cotton calls from behind the bar, his voice even and languid, muffled by the ringing in Pike’s ears.

  “I count the same for you,” Pike returns. He’s laying flat against Jessie’s side, Jessie’s left arm flapped out above his head, his blood puddling up, lapping against him.

  “Might have a whole box of shells back here. You never know.”

  “Might have a pocketful, myself,” Pike says. He blinks, his eyes burning with sweat and cordite.

  “Looks like we got a stand-off, outlaw.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “I don’t believe I ever done anything to you,” Cotton says. “I even liked the kid.”

  “You knew exactly what Derrick was. You put him up.”

  “Well. He and I have been friends a long time.”

  “Sure you have.” Pike thumbs open the wheel on the .357, reloads it from his pocket. Then scans the floor, doesn’t see the 30-30. Must be on the other side of the body.

  “You done any thinking on how you’re fixing to get out of this?” Cotton says. “Even if you manage to kill me, you’re sure to be suspect number one.”

  “Don’t worry about me managing to kill you.”

  “And don’t forget about that little girl. I make a lot of people money. None of them are gonna be happy to see me dead. Revenge killings always seem to spiral that way.”

  “This ain’t a revenge killing,” Pike says. “This is a drug deal gone wrong. What do you think the cops’ll find when they search this place?”

  “Jack’ll know better.”

  “Jack won’t give a shit.” Pike puts his left toe to the heel of his right cowboy boot, slowly works his foot out.

  “Maybe not. But it won’t be him alone. You’re after Derrick, I’m betting. Cincinnati PD won’t take that lying down. They’ll come down on this town like a hammer.”

  “Derrick’s crooked. If they investigate too hard they might suck in half the force.” Pike’s got the right boot off, starts working on the left. “You ain’t never gonna lose money counting on crooked cops.”

  “Fair enough. But you still gotta get past me.”

  “Sure. But first I’m gonna wait for your buddy to get back. To step into that foyer yonder with the one-way glass. First I’m gonna put him down like a fucking dog. Then I’ll hop this bar and put a bullet in you.”

  “Have it your own way. Got any cigarettes, while we wait?”

  Pike fingers a Pall Mall out of his coat pocket and lobs it over the bar. “You get it?”

  “I got it.”

  “Need a light?”

  “Got my own.”

  Pike hears the snick of Cotton’s lighter. He slips another cigarette out of his pack and lights it. Then sticks the lit cigarette in Jesse’s hand and scoots, as flat as he can, out past Jessie’s feet. He swings himself to his feet and pads around the bar.

  Cotton’s empty boots, a smoking cigarette stuck planted in a shot glass. Cotton down at the other end of the bar, climbing over it barefoot, his back to Pike. Pike cocks the .357. “Looks like we had the same idea,” he says.

  “Shit,” Cotton says. “Well. It was a good one.”

  “Lay down the shotgun and come on down here.”

  Cotton does. Sheepishly. “You’re gonna ask me where Derrick is, ain’t you?”

  Pike nods. “Walk over by the pool table.”

  “Probably wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t know, would you?”

  “Probably not,” Pike says. “Wanna finish your cigarette?”

  “I’m all right.”

  Pike squeezes the trigger. The room explodes with the boom and Cotton crashes sideways on the floor, his face wild, his hands clutching at the smoking mess that was his left foot. “Stand up,” Pike says, his grin as tight as a child-sized coffin.

  Cotton huffs air. The bones of his face straining against the skin like it’s an elastic mask. He reaches down to his good leg, pulls himselfup. He bites a hole all the way through his lip with the effort, a long rivulet of blood dripping from his chin, spattering on the floorboards.

  “Walk to the wall and back again.”

  Cotton does, slathering for air, blowing saliva bubbles, seeming to move by will alone. The shattered bones in his foot scraping the floorboards like fingernails.

  “We’ll keep on doing laps until you’re ready to tell me where Derrick is,” Pike says. “If it takes more than three, we’ll try it with both your feet blown off.”

  It takes two.

  CHAPTER 75

  ~ It won’t last long.~

  The snow came out of nowhere. Starting light, a flutter of movement crossing the mountains, but now driving through the pass, swirling out in the blackness over the valley. Derrick’s spent the last two hours up on Devil’s Elbow, sitting in his car with the engine idling, watching the town lights slowly wink out behind the snow-white mask, the darkness. His last night in Nanticonte. He’d meant to say good bye to Cotton, but he didn’t. Just told him he needed to sit and think awhile, that he’d back soon. He opens another beer, lights another cigarette.

  No sleep. Again. Making up your mind doesn’t buy rest. There are no decisions that don’t lead to new ones, that don’t branch out to others, that don’t multiply until they consume your life. Derrick watches the swirling snow. For a long time. Then he stuffs the cigarette butt in his empty beer can, drops it on the floorboard, and opens the car door.

  The wind needles his face when he steps out, tearing at his nose. Derrick walks to the edge of the drop-off, stands with his knees against the guard rail. He unzips his pants, pisses an insignificant arc out into the void, zips his pants. He stands for awhile, staring out at the blankness that’s taken the place of his home town. Then turns back to his car.

  Something punches Derrick in the stomach, a rifle’s crack barely audible in the howling wind. It takes Derrick a second or two to make the connection. Then he looks down, sees the hole in his stomach. His knees already sagging, his body a weight beyond his control. He sinks to the ground like a man sinking underwater, reaching for his .45. He can’t hold it up. His hand falls on his leg.

  Shadows in the snow. Then one shadow detaching from the others, flitting dimly across the expanse. At first indistinct, then taking a human form. Then more than human, stalking towards him, great and shaggy, appearing out of the snow like some kind of elemental the storm’s discharging into the world. Then slowly diminishing in size, taking again the shape of a man. Then Pike bends over and takes his .45 out of his hand.

  “This is gonna hurt like hell, ain’t it?” Derrick says.

  Pike hunkers down next to him, holding his father’s rifle. “We’ll wait for it together.”

  Derrick nods. Or tries to. There’s a pulsing in his ears. Less a sound than a feeling, like the bullet is pounding around his chest cavity in some strangely familiar rhythm. “You know the hell of it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I was leaving tonight. Heading back to Cincinnati.”

  Pike runs his hand over the stock of his rifle, looking at it. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”

  The pulse grows, keeps growing. Deafens Derrick so that he can’t answer. Then he grins, recognizing it. His heartbeat. He listens to it for a long time. Pike watches over him. Derrick starts counting seconds between the beats. He grins again. “It’s pacing down.”

  Pike lights a cigarette. “What is?”

  Derrick holds his shaking hand up for Pike to be silent and listens some more.

  Then the pain hits him in a monstrous nauseating wave. Derrick’s hand drops, he feels the blood drain out of face, he can’t hear his heartbeat at all anymore. “Jesus.”

  “That it?” Pike asks, blowing smoke.

  “I think so,” Derrick grunts.
“Can we talk about something?”

  Pike nods, stubbing the cigarette out in the snow. “Talk to me about my daughter.”

  So he does. Until he can’t anymore.

  CHAPTER 76

  ~ The high hard sun above it all, burning holes into your brain.~

  Pike drives the backroads all through the night. And then drives through the next day. First through Tennessee, then through Arkansas, until he can barely take anymore. These rolling hills with a slave quarters out back of every farmhouse, where you can’t take two steps without grinding an Indian arrowhead under your boot. And not a small town to drive through that he can bring himself to stop in.

  But then the land starts to clear. And then it is clear. And finally he’s on the West Texas plains. The road opening through the tallgrass like a black flag unfurling in the wind, the sunlight spilling over the truck like a warm wash of water. He lights a cigarette and cracks the window. The desert air circles through the cab of the truck, dry and clean. It breaks over Pike’s face like a stream breaking over a stone outcropping.

  He’s been driving for twenty-three hours straight. But when he ashes in the Styrofoam cup between his legs, his movements are easy and his eyes are alert and relaxed. The lack of sleep has loosened his joints, lightened the weight of his muscles. He lets the smoke float out of him like some wild bird he’s released from his cupped hands. He doesn’t think he’s ever been more tired. And he doesn’t think he’s ever been less likely to sleep.

  West Texas can seem like it runs on forever. It’s a landscape Pike knows and loves. Lean and bleak, populated with blasted trees, it’s hard to imagine anywhere else on earth as desolate. For the melancholy feeling, maybe an abandoned cemetery, especially if you’ve known someone buried there. Or a city crumbling into ruin, decimated by centuries of neglect and the kind of hatred that rots youfrom the inside out. For the solitude, maybe the crags and forests of the Great Divide, or the blue frozen wastes of the Poles. But you won’t find anything like West Texas for the combination of the two. It never changes, it never will. Any crop planted begins to wither off from the moment the soil’s turned, and there’s a lonesomeness that stalks through the tallgrass like a predator. It’s a landscape meant to remind you that everyone has a hollow feeling they can’t handle. That the only trick to living your life is not to destroy yourself trying to shake it.

  The sky lowers as he drives, and he watches a black cloudbank form, miles ahead. The air crackles and sparks and lightning splinters a lone tree standing up out of the bowed grass. Then the looming horizon cracks violently in two and rain breaks out, washing over the plains in a great deluge. They drive into it.

  Pike finishes his cigarette and drops the butt into his coffee. Then his hand moves across the seat, past Wendy’s tossed black hair, to pull his work coat up on her shoulder. Monster lays with his proud little face rested against her chin. They drive through the rain, then come out on the other side of it, back into the burning sun.

  She wakes long enough to stop for a bathroom break alongside the highway. Pike lifts a garbage sack with the clothes he’d been wearing and a five-gallon can of gasoline out of the truck and walks back on the plains while she pisses in the dirt. He kicks through the dust and the sand sage, the high hard sun burning down into the back of his neck. When he finds a clear patch of ground, he scuffs out a shallow indentation with his boot, tosses the garbage bag in, and empties the can of gasoline over it. Then he lights a dead mesquite twig with his Zippo and tosses it on the heap. Flame whooshes up and a cloud of black oily smoke plumes skyward.

  Pike walks back a little further into the desert while it burns. In a mesquite tree clearing he finds a mother pig and a drift of sucklings. He hunkers down on his heels and watches them suckle. Then, when the smoke has died down and the fire played out, he returns to his pit, makes sure everything has burnt, and scatters the ashes. Then he turns back to his truck, where Wendy is already asleep again.

  And the West Texas plains keep rolling out in front of him. And they keep unwinding out into the horizon, like the consequencesof his younger self, like the concussions of his own past that keep reverberating back to him. He’s let them rip at his mind until he can’t tell the monsters he’s invented from the monsters that walked in and out of his youth, and it’s only on these plains that he realizes it doesn’t matter. Time slips away, and he lets it.

  What lives here lives in the sun. There’s nothing you can hide under and no way to escape it. There’s no shade and no cover on these plains, and when storms hit you don’t hide, you just stand still and hope the lightning doesn’t blast you out of your skin. And though the plains seem like they’ll never end, they do. They cross a wide, cool river, and they roll right on into Mexico.

  EPILOGUE

  A kitchen. An exhausted blonde woman sitting at a Formica kitchen table that’s marred all over with cigarette burns. She’s wearing a pair of jeans and a white Myrtle Beach T-shirt, smoking a cigarette. In the bedroom, the twins are down for the night. For now. She’s got her bed made up on the couch and the dishes done. The cigarette is her last for the night.

  And tomorrow she has to take the bus to Kroger’s with the twins and make it back with enough groceries to last the week. Enough for her brothers, too, who stop in for breakfast every morning and expect it ready. And the bathroom needs cleaning. The twins play in there and her brothers have pissed a halo around the toilet.

  The exhaustion feels like a bone cancer eating at her skeleton. Like the day-to-day thinness of her life has rotted out her marrow. When she moves, her joints grind against each other.

  Outside, above the crumbling redbricks and smokestacks of Cincinnati, a sliver of the moon is there. Thin, silvery, wavering in the night air. There are stars, too, but they’re invisible in the glare and the smog that lies cracked over the city like a jigsaw puzzle of varying shades of gray. She stares out into the night, smoking, her eyes wavering with pain. For a minute she thinks of her Bogie and she misses him terribly. To have someone on her side.

  Holding the cigarette in her thin claw like hand, she punches it out on her forearm just for thinking it. Her skin sizzles and burns.

  Outside nothing changes. Inside too.

  THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Benjamin Whitmer was born in 1972 and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he has been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer, and a petty thief. He has also published fiction and non-fiction in a number of magazines, anthologies, and essay collections. Pike is his first novel.

  PM PRESS was founded at the end of 2007 by a small collection of folks with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience. PM co-founder Ramsey Kanaan started AK Press as a young teenager in Scotland almost 30 years ago and, together with his fellow PM Press co-conspirators, has published and distributed hundreds of books, pamphlets, CDs, and DVDs. Members of PM have founded enduring book fairs, spearheaded victorious tenant organizing campaigns, and worked closely with bookstores, academic conferences, and even rock bands to deliver political and challenging ideas to all walks of life. We’re old enough to know what we’re doing and young enough to know what’s at stake.

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