PIKE (16 page)

Pike takes a curve too fast, easing his hands on the wheel, letting the tires slip on the wet blacktop, then find their own way back to traction. “Nothing.”

“We don’t tell nobody? About him dealing drugs and shooting up black kids?”

Another curve. Pike grips and slams the wheel around it like the truck’s a part of himself he’s trying to beat into shape.

“That’s something you tell somebody about. You sure as hell don’t sit on it and wait for him to kill somebody else.”

“Who are you planning to tell?”

“Somebody. The newspapers.”

“When we get back give a call to the
Enquirer
. I’m guessing they ain’t gonna move real quick on a story that could restart the riots. On your say-so alone.”

“Then I’ll try the black papers. I know there’s got to be at least one black paper.”

“There’s plenty of them. And you ain’t gonna win any Pulitzers telling blacks in Cincinnati the cops are corrupt. It’ll dissipate into the air like every other story that comes out of the black papers.”

“What happened to all that shit you were saying about oceans without water or what the fuck ever?”

“The particular shit covering this state won’t be purged by us. I guarantee you of it.”

“You don’t think he killed her anymore, do you?”

Pike shakes his head. “If anybody killed her, it wasn’t him.”

“Well.” Rory nestles back in the seat. He closes his eyes. “Shit,” he says. He goes to sleep.

Pike cracks his window, lets a cool slip of air run in over his face. He watches the hills run past and forces his mind to empty, to concentrate on the road ahead of him. He could clear out. Back to Texas, or maybe Colorado. There couldn’t be anyone left alive he knew. The way the people he ran with lived, they had to be dead by now. But just in case, he could try the Black Hills or head up to Montana. His days out west had never carried him that far north. Or he could make it through Texas and cross the border, like he’d done a thousand times before. Mexico is freedom. Mexico is washing yourself of all the shit that comes from making it in the North. Mexico is shaking Sarah, Alice and Derrick in one clean move. And this time he’d be crossing clean. Nothing illegal.

It sounds good. It sounds like the best idea he’s ever had. He gets tight in his chest as if he’s already on the road, already driving all night. Sucking down a Styrofoam cup of coffee, watching the snow melt off and the land empty. Clean highway air, with a hint of his exhaust on it, drifting to him through his cracked window.

Then his eyes water. He thinks of Sarah’s corpse lying alone in the abandoned house. Of the junkies scuttling over her and mauling her and ejaculating into her. His backbone jolts and his eyes twitch. He thumbs his glasses up his nose and he knows he ain’t going anywhere.

A
tin-roofed roadhouse across from a gasket factory in Cincinnati, the building facing sideways into an abandoned lot, like a piece of debris that’s blown out of the factory’s orbit and spun to rest at a cockeyed angle. Inside it’s a dim-lit tunnel with a high Formica bar and a pockmarked Hispanic bartender, leaning on the bar and watching news on the television, a toothpick hanging from his thin lips. The only patron is a gray-bearded man in a dirty Reds ballcap.

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.

P
ike 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.

E
vidently 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 twitchy 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.