PIKE (14 page)

“Gentlemen,” Pike says, and waits for an answer that doesn’t come.

“Fuck this.” Bogie picks up a rock and tosses it into the fire. Sparks and ash shower the two men and Fu Manchu looks up languidly. His eyes are brilliantly blue over his dirty mustache and his face is oddly flat and sparse, like its been sanded off and recreated with a shortage of tissue.

“I’m looking for someone,” Pike says. “One of you.”

“One of us?” Fu Manchu asks in a wondering voice.

Pike nods. “A vet. His name’s Rondell.”

The bearded man looks up. His face is as long as the other’s is flat, his nose peaking and twitching like a river rat’s. “I know Rondell,” he says. “What do you want with him?”

“We’re looking for a girl he runs around with. Her name’s Dana.” Pike flashes her picture. “You know her?”

Beard deliberates, resting his elbow on his knee. “What’s my stake in answering?”

“Motherfucker!” Bogie yells, excited to have found someone lower on the food chain than himself. He leaps across the fire and kicks

Beard in the hip, toppling him into the snow. Fu Manchu squeals and waves his hands in the air. Bogie whips around to face him, raising his bow and fumbling for an arrow.

Pike slams the barrel of his .357 into the side of Bogie’s head. Bogie howls and drops, clutching his scalp, driving his head into the snow. Pike raises his boot to stomp his skull in, but Rory hooks him under the arm and bodily leverages him away. “Easy, big man,” Rory says. Pike shakes Rory off and stares blackly down at Bogie. He’s still squealing, his scalp spritzing red blood over the white snow.

Rory helps Beard to his feet. “You all right?”

“I’m okay.” Beard clears his throat and retakes his seat. “Where’d that kid get that bow?”

“We took it off an old boy down by the creek,” Pike answers. “He’s wandering around somewhere, mostly blind.”

Beard cackles, showing a set of black teeth that look like rotten stumps in sick wet soil. “He ain’t even a veteran,” he says. “Just Rambo crazy. We let him keep the perimeter.”

Pike holsters his .357 and peels a bill out of his billfold. He tosses it on Beard’s leg. “That buy an answer?”

Beard nods, secreting the bill into his boot. “Rondell’s finding food. He’ll be back in an hour or two. You can wait here if you want.”

“Thank you,” Pike says.

Beard shrugs. He fumbles a crumpled cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lights it with a match.

Bogie’s calm now. Hunched on his heels, smoking a cigarette and holding his hand over the coagulating wound on his head. His eyes narrowed on Pike, like a lizard looking at a fly.

“You gonna make it?” Pike asks.

Bogie sneers. “I’m gonna make it all right. You’re the motherfucker we’re gonna be worrying about.”

“Here.” Pike lofts a baggie of heroin at Bogie. “And here.” He crumples up a bill and lets it fly after the smack. “We’re leaving you here.”

Bogie’s sneer disappears, the heroin turning him servile again. He holds the baggie up at the fire, examining it. “Y’all sure you don’t need my help no more?”

“We’re sure. We’ll let Rondell take it from here.” “Well I’ll wait here for a little while. See if you need me.” Bogie reaches to the cooler for the filthy syringe.

“We’ll give you a ride back to your house as soon as I talk to Rondell,” Pike offers. “Your fat buddy’s probably getting a little stir crazy.” “I can get back myself,” Bogie says. “I’ll wait here for a little while.”

P
ike doesn’t even hear Rondell approach. He just appears out of the trees, a clean-shaven black man in work boots and an army field jacket, his hooded eyes hiding behind their own darkness. He places a bag of groceries by the fire, glancing warily at Pike. “I know you, boss?” A Vietnam veteran all right. Desperate restraint around the corners of his eyes and mouth, like he’s known freedom and horror in their absolute forms.

“I doubt that,” Pike says.

“What’re you doing here?”

“I’m here to talk to you. About a girl named Dana.”

The firelight plays shadows across Rondell’s dark face. “And if I was to say I didn’t know her?”

“I’d say I’ve waded through two days of every kind of shit you can imagine to talk to her. And I’m not gonna be put off now by her pimp.”

Rondell pulls a tall can of malt liquor out of the grocery bag. “I never was her pimp. I was her dealer.”

“That a fact?”

“It is. And I’m retired now.”

“You’d be the first.”

Rondell pulls the tab on his beer can and holds it out from him, letting the beer foam drizzle into the snow. “My drug of choice was heroin.” He drinks and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “I’ve been without for forty-seven days. But I can smell it.” Rondell’s nostrils flare and his eyes rake all over the two vets and Bogie. “I could smell it walking all the way up here. Even on the edge of the forest.”

“I’ve got money and I want to give you some to tell me where Danais,” Pike says. “I don’t give a shit if you spend it on malt liquor, heroin, or twelve-year-old boys.”

Rondell looks long at Pike. “I don’t know as I’d tell you anything, even if I could. I owe Dana a favor or two.” His dark eyes darken, intensifying like maple sap thickening over heat. “And I don’t like being called a liar.”

“I didn’t call you a liar.” Pike taps a cigarette out of his pack and lights it, then taps out another and offers it to Rondell. “You picked a hell of a place to get clean, though.”

Rondell takes the cigarette and lets Pike light it for him. “I’m a grown man and I don’t like house rules.” He pulls another can of beer out of the sack and offers it to Pike. “And I don’t plan on being here forever.”

Pike takes the beer and cracks it. “Where are you going?”

“Out west. I’ve got a cousin in Colorado.” Rondell breathes in steadily and looks around at the woods as if he’s already gone. “Anywhere but here. I can’t take it here anymore. I’ve lived out west and you can still be left alone out there. At least some. It’s disappearing fast, but at least every little motherfucker in the world isn’t breathing down your neck every minute of every day.” He burps silently into his hand. “We’re too close around here.”

“You talk like an ex-con.”

Rondell nods. “I’ve found all kinds of ways to get institutionalized.” A shadow crosses his face that isn’t from the firelight.

“I made it west for a while,” Pike says. “To feel what you’re talking about. I made it further, too, into Mexico. You really can be left alone there. All the time and without having to beg for it.” Pike drinks, and the malt liquor slicks down his throat, leaving an oily aftertaste. “Or at least you could. I don’t know how it is now. We spread fast.”

“Like cancer.” Rondell stares into the fire. “What in the hell did you come back for?”

Pike hesitates. It’s a question he asks himself no more than four or five hundred times a day. “I’ve done things here that created a kind of gravity,” he says slowly. “Having the right to move away would be like having the right to claim not to have done them in the first place.” He’s conscious of Rory watching him carefully, taking in every word.

“Take it from an ex-con, the market in redemption is running low.” Rondell chuckles with the resonate boom of a thunderhead. “Hell, there’s history everywhere. Get out as quick as you can. That’s my advice.”

Pike’s smile garrotes his face. “You’re probably right.” He wants to say more. There’s something about Rondell that tugs at him to keep talking. But he forces it down. “I need to find Dana.”

Rondell nods. “So you said. But I need to know why before I tell you where.”

“I need to talk to her about my daughter.”

“Your daughter.” Rondell’s eyes hold steady on Pike. “Is your daughter in some kind of trouble?”

“No trouble at all. She’s dead.”

“Ah.” Rondell takes a last swig out of his can of malt liquor and empties the backwash out in the snow. “What was her name? I used to know some of Dana’s friends.”

Pike nods, having already thought of that. “You might have been my daughter’s dealer, too. If you were I’m gonna have to ask you other questions.”

“If I was, I owe you other answers.”

“Her name was Sarah. She had blue eyes.”

Rondell sits with his empty beer can in his hand, groping through the underbrush of his memory. Then shakes his head. “No. I didn’t know her.”

“Good,” Pike says, and he means it. “Back to Dana, then. Do you know where she is?”

“You need to talk to her mother.”

“I have. She’s done with her.”

“She’s never done with her. She knows where she is. She wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire, but she knows where she is.” Rondell watches Pike deliberately. “She gets off on watching her fuck up her life. It’s the only thing she gets off on. It’s the same feeling we used to get watching the country girls in Vietnam turn to hooking in Saigon. After we’d napalmed their villages.”

A
plantation farmhouse sitting a ways off the highway, the driveway paved and winding through the forest into the hollow, past a snowy field and stables. There’s a detached garage, the door lifted open a few feet. Light and heat spill out onto the blacktop, a stereo inside blares Springsteen.

Derrick pulls to the side of the driveway fifty yards back from the house and jogs to the garage. He hunches down, checks under the door. Two flat-topped boys with the hood lifted on a Chevy, staring down into the engine like engaged in a kind of haruspicy.

Derrick boots the garage door down behind him. It hits home with a heavy chunk. Both boys look up in unison, Derrick meets the first with his brass knuckles, tearing his nose into a cartilage smear across his cheek, all but swiping it off his face. The boy crumbles in a wash of blood, Derrick pulls his .45 with his free hand, plants the muzzle on the second boy’s forehead. “Kick him.”

The boy stands still.

“I said kick him.” Derrick thumbs the hammer back. “Kick him, honey.”

The boy kicks his friend in the ribs, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Too busy fumbling at the mangled thing that used to be his face.

“Now unbuckle his belt and pull down his pants.”

“Did we do something to you, mister?” the boy quavers.

“Nothing I can think of. But if you don’t do what I tell you, I’ll put holes in your head.”

The boy doesn’t move. “I’m scared.”

“Sure you are. But as of right now you both get out of this alive. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

The boy finds his friend’s belt buckle. He unbuckles it, pulls his jeans down to his knees. His friend whimpers, blows bubbles in the pool of blood haloing his head. His legs are white. His underwear is streaked with shit.

Derrick steps back. Takes a seat on a toolbox and picks up a monkey wrench. He holds it up against the light, then hands it to the boy. “You can use this.” He lights a Marlboro, ready to watch. Already making plans to keep what is his.

“I don’t want to,” the boy says, his chin trembling.

“This ain’t about desire,” Derrick says. “It’s about power. Ain’t anybody taught you anything, you dumb cracker?”

S
he opens the door on the first knock, holding a large gin fizz that barely fizzes, her breath a wash of alcohol that makes Pike’s eyes water. “Mr. Pike,” she slurs.

Pike pushes past her into the living room, takes a calm appraisal. Poodles and more poodles in gold gilt frames. “What did you say your husband’s name was?”

“I didn’t.” She waves her glass angrily, sloshing gin on the carpet. “You will leave now, Mr. Pike.”

“You will tell me where Dana is, Mrs. Jennings, or you will be seriously fucked.”

“I told you, Mr. Pike. My daughter’s a junky whore. I don’t keep track of junky whores.”

“Sure.” Pike slivers a cigarette between his thin lips and bends to touch it to his Zippo’s flame. “Where’s your husband?”

She flinches as if he’d raised his fist to hit her. “Leave. Now. I don’t care what you’ve heard. It doesn’t give you the right to come into my house and level accusations at me.”

“I can understand you not having any pictures of your daughter,” Pike continues. “But where’s the rest of the family photos? You and your husband never took a picture together? Never went on vacation?”

Her lips are a gray line carved out of a chunk of lifeless clay that just happens to look like her face. “My husband was a pathetic man. He cut his own throat with a steak knife.”

“Couldn’t have been too pathetic,” Pike saya. “A steak knife would mean you’d have to saw.” He looks her over. “What you said last time about your daughter never being molested. That ain’t entirely true, is it?”

She sits down, her face changing and rearranging, as if her hatred is an iron cast that Pike’s managed to crumble, and she’s working to rebuild it as quickly as she can. “Frank never touched her. Never. That was put into her head by a graduate school therapist.”

“What was she in therapy for?”

“She was having trouble sleeping. By the time we understood what was happening, the therapist had convinced her that it came from a fear of sexual attack by her father. He invented a history, and when we disproved the events he constructed, he altered the details to fit new events.”

“And you didn’t believe her?”

“I don’t believe her, Mr. Pike. My husband was a devoted father. He was other things, too, of course, many of which I know nothing of. But the one thing I know for certain he wasn’t is a child molester.”

“Then why’d he gouge his windpipe out with a serrated knife?”

Mrs. Jennings looks at Pike. “You had a daughter, Mr. Pike. Devoted fathers are always in love with their daughters. They sneak kisses on them. Sometimes they even get a visceral thrill out of their wriggling bodies. They always wonder where the line is, and they’re always fearful they might have crossed it. We’ve taught them to be.” She sips her gin, restoring a hint of color to her face, but only a hint. “You should know all of this, Mr. Pike, I’m sure Sarah was a lovely young lady.” There’s a small note of triumph in her voice that makes Pike think of doing things to her that he hasn’t thought of doing to a woman in a long time.