The Drifter

by Nick Petrie

  Breathing deeply, Peter took the piece of oak and banged it on the wood frame of the porch. It rang like a primitive musical instrument.

  Despite everything, he was smiling.

  “Hey, dog,” he called into the darkness. “Watch your ass, I’m coming in!”

  And in he went, headfirst on his elbows and knees, the stick in one hand and the trouble light in the other.

  What, you want to live forever?

  —

  It was dark and musty under the porch, the smell of weeds and forgotten things, with an animal stink on top. Not a dog smell, but something wilder. Something feral. The smell of the monsters in the oldest of fairy tales, the ones where the monsters sometimes won.

  Narrow bars of late-autumn sunshine slanted through the gaps and made it hard to read the space. The dim yellow pool cast by his trouble light wasn’t much help. The debris pile in the back corner looked more substantial from this vantage point. There was all kinds of crap in there. Carpet scraps, boxes, old lumber. The splintered bones of missing mailmen.

  The growl might have come from anywhere. It seemed to vibrate up through the soil. Peter’s little piece of handrail and a few thin ropes didn’t seem like much. It would be smart to beat a tactical retreat, get the hell out of there, and return with a shotgun. Or a grenade launcher.

  But he didn’t.

  He kept moving forward on his elbows and knees, white sparks flaring high. Stick in one hand, light in the other. Alive, alive. I am alive.

  “Here, doggy. Who’s a good doggy?”

  —

  The animal waited until Peter was most of the way inside.

  Then it came out of hiding in a snarling hurry, teeth flashing white in the darkness. It was big.

  Fuck, it was huge and fast and coming right for Peter’s head.

  When those big jaws opened to tear his face off, Peter reached forward at speed and got that piece of hard oak jammed in there tight, ropes trailing. Now the jaws couldn’t snap shut, and couldn’t open farther.

  The dog, confused, reversed course and tried to spit out the stick. It would use its paws in a moment. Peter went sideways quick and crablike, releasing the stick with one hand long enough to get his arm wrapped around the dog’s heavy neck. Caught up the other end of the stick again and trapped it hard in the dog’s jaw. Then with the stick as a lever and his arm as the fulcrum, he threw the dog onto its side and laid his weight on its chest, holding the animal to the ground.

  Big dang dog is right, Charlie.

  Hundred and forty, hundred and fifty pounds. At least.

  The dog went silent. Conserving its energy to escape, to get rid of this weight, white eyes rolled back, thrashing and fighting with all of its considerable muscle and will.

  But Peter weighed almost two hundred pounds himself, and he was smarter than the dog. He hoped.

  His initial plan, if you want to call it that, had been to tie the ropes around the dog’s neck to keep the stick in place while holding the dog down with his body.

  Not much of a plan, he had to admit now. The dog didn’t seem to care much for it, either, still throwing around its big bullet-shaped head, lips curled in a silent snarl, spit flying everywhere.

  And it stank like holy hell. Like fear and rage and shit and death, all wrapped up into one horrible reek that made Peter’s eyes water and his sinuses clear.

  The stink wouldn’t eat his face the way this dog wanted to.

  What Peter needed was a third hand.

  But Charlie was just twelve. And he was wearing his school clothes. And he was Jimmy’s oldest boy. That family had enough damage done.

  So Peter was on his own under that porch.

  He moved his leg up slowly, carefully, until his knee was on the dog’s shoulder, then its neck. He bore down. He didn’t want to hurt the animal, but he sure as hell didn’t want those bone-cracking teeth to get free, either. The dog’s back legs scrabbled in the dirt, trying to get itself out of the situation, but Peter was too heavy.

  “Hey, dog,” said Peter in a calm voice. “What’s your name?”

  The dog scrabbled with its long nails, but its big bullet-shaped head was caught now between the pressure of the stick and the weight of the man’s knee.

  “Somebody probably called you Fang or Spike or something, didn’t they?” asked Peter gently, remembering how his father had talked to the horses. A nice calm, conversational tone. The way Jimmy had talked to any in-country local who didn’t speak English. “But you’re not a mean dog, are you? No, you’re a nice puppy. A good puppy. Your name should be Daisy. Or Cupcake.”

  The dog’s eyes showed white in the semidark of the crawl space, and it was panting hard, its great chest heaving. Its legs slowed their scrabbling in the dirt as the man’s deep voice worked its way through the fury and panic. Finally it stopped struggling, and the long tongue lolled out between the murderous teeth. Man and beast lay in the dirt together and caught their breath.

  “Uh, sir, you okay in there?” Charlie’s voice floated under the porch.

  “Never better,” said Peter, keeping his voice low and even. The dog panted, but the eye was staring at Peter’s face.

  “So . . .” said Charlie.

  “Kid. Give me a minute, okay?”

  Peter still held the ends of the stick in his hands. Focused despite the static. He had a few minutes, no more. He worked his hands out to the ropes and slid the knots in close to the dog’s jaws.

  The dog began to growl again.

  Peter could feel the vibrations in his own chest, that tank engine revving slow. It was like lying on a vibrating bed in a cheap motel, but with teeth.

  The eye stared at him, waiting.

  Waiting for the man to make a mistake.

  With the ropes in his hands, Peter carefully crossed them over the bone-crushing jaws, then wrapped them under, over and under, again and again. Snug but not tight, trapping that stick in there like some kind of hillbilly art project. Then he carefully tied the ends in a series of half hitches, ending in a square knot. Super-duper-double-extra-secure.

  The remaining long and short ropes were still tucked into his belt. He tied the long rope around the dog’s neck as a collar and leash. He shifted his weight, turned to the hind end with the short rope, and tied its back legs together.

  Without allowing himself to think about it, he rolled off the dog and grabbed the rope at the hind legs, then reversed out of the crawl space, pulling the scrabbling dog behind him.

  “Sweet holy Jesus,” said Charlie, dancing backward in his polished shoes as Peter and the snarling hog-tied animal emerged from the crawl space and into the light. “That’s one damn Jesus big goddamn dog.”

  Peter felt the open air and high blue sky like a balm.

  —

  It took a few minutes to get Charlie to put down the baseball bat, but he was fine by the time Peter tied the leash off to a tree, double-checking the knots, then checking them again. Finally he cut the rope from the rear legs and stood away while the dog leaped, trembling, to its feet, ran to the ten-foot limit of the leash, and turned to growl at the humans.

  “He sure is ugly,” said Charlie. “And he smells real bad, too.”

  Peter had to agree.

  It wasn’t a pit bull, actually. Those dogs bred for fighting were beautiful, in their own way. Like cruise missiles were beautiful, or a combat knife, if you didn’t stop to consider what they were made to do.

  This dog, on the other hand, was a mix of so many breeds you’d have to go back to the caveman era to sort it out.

  The result was an animal of unsurpassed hideousness.

  It had the bullet-shaped head of a pit bull, but the lean muscled body and long legs of an animal built for chasing down its prey over long distances. Tall upright ears, a long wolfish muzzle. Its matted fur was mostly a kind of deep orang
e, with brown polka dots.

  And the animal was enormous.

  Like a timber wolf run through the wash with a pit bull, a Great Dane, and a fuzzy orange sweatshirt.

  Seen out in the open like that, even at a hundred and fifty–plus pounds with murderous teeth, it was hard to take the animal too seriously.

  What would you name a dog like that?

  Maybe Daisy. Or Cupcake.

  The thought made him smile.

  He got out his water bottle and walked the growling dog down to the end of its rope. Taking hold of the stick, he poured a little water into that deadly mouth. The dog glared at him, the intelligence vivid in those pale blue eyes. But after a moment, its throat began to work as it swallowed. Peter poured until the bottle was empty.

  “Sir, what the heck are you doing?” asked Charlie.

  Peter shrugged. “Dog’s thirsty.”

  Charlie just looked at him. It was a good look. It said the kid had thought he’d seen all the crazy there was in the world until that very moment, but he had been very, very wrong.

  All he said was, “I got to go, sir. I miss first period, Father Lehane says I’m on the bench on Friday.” Then he left.

  And with the dog growling behind him, Peter went to the truck to unpack his tools and get to work.

  2

  The porch was sinking into the ground. The bottoms of the original pine posts were turning to mush, and there were no concrete pilings underneath, just a few bricks stacked in the dirt. Fairly typical back in the day. But now the only thing holding up the structure was habit. The porch was used to being there, so it hadn’t collapsed.

  It wasn’t the kind of work Peter had imagined while he was studying econ at Northwestern. Or when he turned down Goldman Sachs for the Marines’ Officer Candidates School. It had seemed like a higher calling then, and it still did. Everything else was entirely too theoretical.

  But he liked fixing old houses. He’d done it with his dad in northern Wisconsin since he was eight. The job today was simple, a battle he could win using only his mind, his muscles, and a few basic tools. Nobody was likely to die. He could get lost in the challenge and let the war years fade. And at the end of the day, he could see what he’d accomplished, in wood and concrete, right there in front of him.

  He braced up the main beam with some two-by-fours he’d brought, removed the rotted posts, and set about digging holes for new footings. The holes had to be at least forty-two inches deep to get below the frost line, so they wouldn’t move every winter. In that hard Milwaukee clay, forty-two inches seemed deeper than it ought to be. But Peter’s shoulders didn’t mind the effort. He liked the fight, how the wood-handled shovel became an extension of his hands. And the white static faded back to a pale hush.

  After cutting the rebar and placing it in the bottom of the hole, Peter mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow and poured it into the forms. The dog sat watching, ears up and alert, looking ridiculous with the stick tied into its mouth. When Peter walked past, it fled to the end of its leash and growled at him, that tank engine rumbling as strong as ever. When Peter returned to work, the dog sat down to watch again.

  It was like a foreman who didn’t make small talk.

  But uglier than any foreman Peter had ever met.

  Not as ugly as some sergeants, though. Sergeants had the ugly all over that dog.

  Lunch was last night’s beef stew, reheated on the little backpacking stove and eaten with crusty wheat bread and cold coffee left over from breakfast. Peter sat in his camp chair on the sidewalk, knee bobbing unconsciously to that ceaseless interior metronome, wondering how he’d feed the dog without offering up a piece of himself. No way he was going to take out that stick.

  But the animal had to be hungry. Peter left some of the thick stew broth in the pan to cool. He’d pour it past those teeth in another hour.

  After lunch, with the concrete hardened but not yet cured, he started cutting out the rotten sections of the deck. When he was done, there was almost nothing left. The supporting joists were sagging, half of them rotted or cracked, and all of them undersized to begin with. It would be easier to replace everything. The only wood worth saving was the main beam and the porch roof overhead. And he might as well replace the beam with something rot-proof, anyway.

  It was never simple.

  But wasn’t that part of the fun?

  When it was time for a trip to the lumberyard, Peter put his tools back in the truck. Valuable stuff had a way of walking away when you weren’t around, in a working-class neighborhood and every other kind.

  He considered the dog for a minute, and decided to leave it where it was.

  Who’d want to steal a dog that ugly?

  Maybe he’d get lucky and it would escape while he was gone.

  But when Peter pulled up in his truck an hour later, there was the dog, as ugly as ever, and smelling just as bad. He chased the growling animal to the end of its rope to check the knots, and found that the rope had frayed a little on one side. He found the spot on the tree where faint blue strands showed on the bark, and smiled.

  “Good luck, dog,” he said. “That’s climbing rope. Kevlar core.”

  When he reached out to pat the dog’s head, the dog shied away. Peter shrugged and went back to work.

  He supported the porch roof with long two-by-sixes braced against the ground, then cut out the rest of the deck frame with a Sawzall and hauled the pieces to the street. The dog had taken to rubbing its rope-wrapped chin on the front walk. A pretty good strategy, actually. It kept its eyes on Peter the whole time. He could feel the weight of its stare, a hundred and fifty pounds of dog planning to tear his throat out.

  It was better than all those Iraqi freedom fighters. Hell, this was just one dog.

  What Peter didn’t want to admit was that he almost liked the feeling.

  It kept him on his toes. Like old times.

  Like the white static was there for a reason.

  —

  He unloaded the lumber and stacked it on sawhorses. But before he started putting things together again, he had to clear out all the crap that had accumulated under the porch. He stuffed disintegrating cardboard boxes and trash into construction-grade garbage bags. Broken bricks and scrap lumber he carried to the street. At the very back, tucked against the house, behind a stinking dog bed, was an old black hard-sided suitcase. It was heavier than it looked.

  There was a little white mold growing on the side, but it didn’t look too bad. There might be some use left in it. Peter didn’t believe in throwing stuff away just because it had a little wear.

  He set the suitcase by the side door and turned away to finish cleaning up. The stoop was cracked, and the suitcase fell over, then bounced down the four steps to the concrete walk. When it hit bottom, it popped open.

  And money fell out.

  Crisp hundred-dollar bills. In plain banded ten-thousand-dollar packets. Forty packets, each about a half-inch tall.

  Four hundred thousand dollars.

  Under Jimmy’s broken-down porch.

  —

  Peter went back to the suitcase.

  It was a smaller Samsonite, about the size of a modern airline carry-on, probably expensive when it was new. But it definitely wasn’t new. They didn’t make suitcases like this anymore.

  Despite its time under that porch, it was in decent shape. Hard to tell if it had been there for thirty years or was bought at Goodwill the month before. Peter picked up one of the stacks of hundreds he’d found inside and flipped through the bills. Mostly newer, with the big Ben Franklin head.

  So the suitcase hadn’t been there too long.

  There were no identifying marks on the Samsonite’s outside shell, nothing inside to tell where it had come from. But there were four little elastic pockets on the interior.

  Inside each pocket was a small brown paper ba
g, wrinkled and worn with handling. Peter opened one bag and shook the contents out into his hand. A pale rectangular slab stared up at him. A bit smaller than a paperback book, soft and pliable like modeling clay, smelling slightly of chemicals, with clear plastic sheeting adhered to its faces.

  Interesting.

  He was pretty sure it wasn’t modeling clay.

  3

  Peter sat on Dinah Johnson’s back stoop, waiting for her to come home from work. The suitcase stood closed in the shadow of the steps. On his leg, his restless fingertips kept time to that endless interior metronome. Charlie and his little brother, Miles, were inside, doing whatever boys did in the odd, lonely freedom before their mothers came home from work.

  The wind blew hard, another big autumn storm system moving across the continent. No rain, not yet. Early November in Wisconsin, Veterans Day next week. It was dark before suppertime, and getting colder. Frost on the windshield at night. Charlie had already offered Peter hot chocolate twice. He was a good kid. Both concerned and maybe a little relieved that Lieutenant Ash the crazy dog tamer wouldn’t come inside.

  Peter preferred the outdoors.

  After mustering out at Pendleton sixteen months before, he drove north to Washington, where Manny Martinez, another of his former sergeants, was roofing houses outside of Seattle. He left his truck in Manny’s driveway, dropped the keys and a note into his mailbox, then hitched a ride northeast, past Marblemount, into the North Cascades. Shouldered the heavy pack and headed uphill alone into the open. Staying off the main trails, above the tree line, away from people, away from everything. He planned to be out for twelve months.

  It was an experiment.

  —

  He was fine overseas. No, not fine. The war sucked, especially for the infantry. A lot of people were trying to kill him and most of his friends. But it was also exhilarating, a series of challenges to overcome, and Peter was very good at it. Did his job, did it well, took care of his people. Even if it cost. And it did.

  Leaving aside the dead, the injured. There were plenty of those. Peter’s friends among them.