PIKE (22 page)
Authors: Benjamin Whitmer
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.
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
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.
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