PIKE (17 page)

“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.”

T
he 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.

L
ater 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.

R
ory 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.”

“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.

P
ike 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.

T
hey 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.

T
he 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.”