The Drifter

by Nick Petrie

  He had the dog in his arms, carrying it to the truck. It was struggling, but at least he didn’t have to tie its legs this time.

  Dinah watched silently, an unreadable look on her face.

  “What?” he said. It wasn’t easy to carry a hundred and fifty pounds of unhappy dog. It tossed its head back and forth, bashing Peter in the head with the stick still tied in its mouth. “Argh. Stop it.” The dog definitely needed a bath. Another night and Peter wouldn’t be able to get the stink out of his truck. Or his clothes.

  The ugly, unfortunately, was permanent.

  She smiled at him for the first time. It was a small smile, like a patch of sun on an overcast day, but it was a smile. “For some reason,” she said, “I can’t quite believe you will take that dog to the pound.”

  Peter put the dog down in the truck and had to give it a push to get it away from the door. It stood looking at him, whining softly, when he closed the door.

  “Sure I am,” he said. “A big, smelly, mean, ugly dog will always find a good home.”

  She laughed softly, a brief musical sound. “I can see why James liked you, Lieutenant.”

  Peter walked around and opened her door. An officer and a gentleman. It wasn’t that she expected it, but something about her seemed to encourage that kind of behavior in Peter. In all men, he suspected.

  She was tall enough that she didn’t have to hitch herself up onto the bench seat. She’d left her enormous purse inside, but had put the money in a brown paper grocery sack, folded the top, and tied it up with string. The money filled less than half the bag. She held it on her lap with both hands.

  “Are you sure you want to bring that along?” Peter asked. “We can always come back and get it.”

  Dinah shook her head. “I’ll leave it in the truck until I’m certain. But I don’t want to have to make a second trip.” There was something there she didn’t want to talk about, and he didn’t push her.

  He turned the key and let the engine warm up for a minute. She sat with her spine perfectly straight, looking around. “This truck is an antique, isn’t it?”

  Peter gave her a look of mock outrage. “The word is ‘classic,’” he said. “Nineteen sixty-eight Chevy C20 pickup, at your service. Very few original parts.”

  She looked at the polished green metal door covers and instrument panel. The floor mats were clean and the seat covers new. The slot for the old AM radio was filled with a piece of fine-grained walnut carefully fitted in place and varnished to a high gloss. The shifter knob was a glass ball with a hula dancer trapped inside. Peter couldn’t take credit for the shifter knob. The hula dancer had come with the truck.

  “I didn’t think it would be so orderly,” she said. “Or quite so clean.”

  “It’s easier to get stuff done if you know where your tools are.” Although Peter had to admit it had been a few days since he’d showered. And he was starting to smell of dog. With Dinah sitting beside him, he was acutely aware of it.

  Now she was looking at him with those glacier-blue eyes.

  “How did you become a Marine? Jimmy said you studied economics in college.”

  “When I was in high school, my dad was building a giant vacation house for a bond trader from Chicago. He told me that economics explained how the world really worked. I liked that idea, that I could learn how the world really worked.”

  He laughed softly at himself.

  “It seems pretty naïve now. Anyway, I got a scholarship to Northwestern, and dove into economic theory headfirst. But after a summer internship on Wall Street, I got to see modern finance in practice and didn’t like what I saw. Everybody was out to make as much money as possible, and it didn’t matter how they did it.”

  He shrugged.

  “I wanted to do some good in the world. Be a part of something bigger. Maybe learn something else about how the world worked. So I joined the Marines.”

  “Was it a good choice?” She seemed genuinely interested.

  “It was a long time ago.” He put the truck in gear. “Where are we going?”

  “Can you get to Martin Luther King Drive?” He nodded. It was the quickest way to the worst part of town. She said, “Head south on MLK and I’ll give you directions from there.”

  He pulled smoothly into traffic, drove to the end of the block, and turned the corner.

  Looking in the rearview mirror, he said, “I’m guessing you’re the jazz fan of the family. Maybe you caught it from your parents?”

  Dinah looked at Peter sideways. “What was your clue?”

  “Not many Dinahs out there,” he said. “I’m figuring you were named for Dinah Washington. And your boys, maybe Charlie Parker and Miles Davis?”

  “I’m impressed,” she said. “Yes, my father loved jazz. There was always music in the house when I was growing up. I suppose I caught it from him.”

  She smiled to herself. “James, though. James was more of an old-time R-and-B guy. Ray Charles, Sam and Dave, the Staple Singers. Maybe that was why I fell in love with him in tenth grade. He loved to sing. We were in the church choir together.”

  Peter thought of Jimmy in Iraq. He wasn’t singing. He was doing push-ups, or checking his gear, or studying maps. Mostly he was talking to his guys. Getting their heads straight. Keeping them right.

  Dinah said, “When the boys were little, and James was home on leave, he’d sing them to sleep. He’d lie on the couch with them on his chest, his big arms around them, and sing so softly I could barely hear him. But that deep voice of his, it would go right through them. ‘Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me hooome . . .’” Her voice was smoky and low.

  Peter didn’t even know that Jimmy had a music player. Some guys were like that, especially when they were fire team or squad leaders. They sort of put themselves aside. Submerged themselves in the squad. The war wasn’t about them. It was about the men they were charged with leading. With protecting, as much as possible, from the war. While still doing their best to win it.

  Maybe if Jimmy had kept singing, he wouldn’t have killed himself.

  Peter checked the mirror again. There was a black SUV a half-block behind them. A big Ford. Peter couldn’t see the driver’s face. But he thought there would be a starburst of scars marking the right side of his face, and his right earlobe would be missing.

  —

  He said, “So what happened? With Jimmy, I mean.”

  Dinah said, “We got married out of high school. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea, but we just couldn’t wait. We wanted to eat each other up.” She gave Peter a sly look. “Do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt like that for someone, that kind of hunger?”

  Peter looked at Dinah, at her cool blue eyes. He knew what she meant.

  Dinah said, “Well, that’s how it was for us. James went to work as an apprentice plumber, and I went to nursing school. We had a plan. When I graduated and got a job, it would be his turn for college. Then the towers fell.”

  She looked out the window. “Once they had him, they wouldn’t let him go. They said he had essential expertise. He did three tours and kept getting extended. Can you believe that?” She shook her head. “He had to get blown up to get sent home.”

  Peter nodded. That’s how it was for a lot of guys. If you didn’t take the re-up bonus, they would keep you anyway. And maybe that was the story Jimmy told his wife. But Peter knew the real deal. They had talked about it. Jimmy stayed in for the same reason Peter did. He was good at war. And someone had to take care of his guys. To get them out alive.

  The truck bumped along. The roads were getting worse as the neighborhood changed. More storefronts were vacant on each block. On the side streets, house after house with the shingles slipping from their roofs. Broken car windows covered with plastic sheeting and duct tape. The black Ford bounced in their wake.

  “His physical injuries heal
ed well enough,” she said. “But once he came home from the hospital, he seemed like a different person. He became angry at the slightest thing. Sometimes at nothing at all, as if he were looking for an excuse to explode. Then he was just angry all the time.”

  Peter nodded. All those years of war had changed him, too. It was the white static, but also something else. He had become a vast reserve of energy kept at bay only with exercise and work. It was a physical need to keep moving, keep doing, to solve whatever problem he had set for himself. If he let his engine idle too long, the white static would rise up inside him until he stood and got back to the job at hand. Maybe it was the war. Maybe it was just who he was now.

  Dinah kept talking. “He couldn’t find work because the economy had crashed. He was a Marine Corps veteran with an honorable discharge and years of service, but he only had a high school degree, and he couldn’t find a job. I tried to get him to start his own business, fixing people’s plumbing. But James just couldn’t get started. I’d nag him and he’d kick a hole in the wall.”

  She glared out the windshield like she was angry at the world. “He had veterans’ benefits, and they were good benefits. There was money for college. But he wouldn’t even apply. He said he didn’t want to spend his life sitting at a desk.” She shook her head. “James never had trouble with motivation in his life. There was something wrong with him. I wanted him to talk to the VA, but he wouldn’t do that, either. He definitely wouldn’t talk to a therapist. He wouldn’t do anything. He slept all the time. I’d get home after working a double shift to find James asleep on the couch, a sink full of dirty dishes, and the boys glued to the Xbox without their supper. It went on for almost a year.”

  Fatigue, anger, depression. These were classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress. And a traumatic brain injury, too. Peter knew it. Dinah knew it. Jimmy probably knew it, too. But that didn’t mean she could help him, or that he could help himself.

  If Peter had been there, instead of up in the mountains, could he have helped?

  Maybe that was just ego, Peter thinking he would have made the crucial difference. But he wasn’t there. He’d never know. He’d let Jimmy down. And now the man was dead.

  Something in Dinah had deflated. The breath just gone out of her. Peter didn’t say anything. He knew she wasn’t really talking to him. She was talking to the empty air, to the cold world outside the glass.

  She took a breath and straightened up again.

  “Finally, I sat him down. I told him that I loved him, but I wasn’t going to carry him. It was hard enough to live without him when he was away. But I couldn’t live without him in our own house. I just couldn’t, not like that. I told him that he had to go to school, get a job, or get out of the house. I gave him a month to develop a plan and get himself together. I thought it would work. I really did.”

  Peter knew what had happened after that.

  Peter wasn’t the only one living with guilt.

  He waited while Dinah collected herself. “Two days later,” she said, “I came home from work and he was gone. That was four months ago.” She shook her head. “I asked him over and over to show me where he was staying, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said he’d invite me over when he got a better place. I never did see it.” She kept shaking her head as she talked, as if it would undo the past. “He found a job, tending bar. He came to the boys’ games, and to the last teacher conferences. He never missed an event. He came over for dinner once a week. I thought he was getting better.”

  She took a long breath and let it carefully out.

  “Then the police knocked on my door.”

  She didn’t cry.

  But Peter could see what it cost her not to.

  Her voice like wood.

  “They found him in an alley.”

  —

  Peter knew the rest. He had called the Milwaukee Police Department for the details when he came down from the mountains. The cheap street pistol that Jimmy had pressed into the soft flesh beneath his chin. The back of his head blown clean off. There was no autopsy. The city was too broke for autopsies on open-and-shut suicides.

  Peter checked the mirror again. The SUV was still there, peeking out from behind a utility truck.

  “Dinah,” he said, “I have to ask. How could he have come up with that kind of money?”

  Dinah shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t.” She turned the paper bag in her hands. “But I can tell you it surely wasn’t from tending bar three afternoons a week.”

  Following Dinah’s directions, Peter turned left, then right. She kept them off the main roads, and Peter watched while the tough neighborhood turned to true ghetto. Abandoned cars, shops boarded up, holes in the streetscape where houses had burned down or been torn down by the city. Out the side window he saw two little kids without coats, the soles falling off their laceless shoes, running around in the cold when they should have been in school. Dinah watched them, the smile fallen from her face.

  “Dinah?” said Peter. “Where are we going?”

  “To see a man I knew once,” she said. “A long time ago.”

  7

  Expensive condos lined the river two miles away, but development had stalled out at MLK Drive and hadn’t even been imagined on Center Street, where the blocks of peeling-frame storefronts leaned on one another like worn-out drunks sharing a skin disease.

  Dinah pointed at a three-story corner building, maybe ninety years old but in better shape than the rest of the block with freshly painted trim and new tuckpointing on the brick. “There,” she said. “That’s Lewis’s place.”

  Apartments filled the top floors. The ground floor was divided in half. The front had a tavern called Shorty’s, the name spelled out in dim neon letters over a faded Pabst Blue Ribbon logo. The big tavern windows were covered with heavy steel security grates. The rear was a storefront with a sign, black with flaking white letters, reading CENTER CITY REAL ESTATE. It looked vacant now, the storefront windows replaced with neatly painted plywood. Except for the small modern security camera mounted high with a view of the whole street.

  A gleaming black Escalade was parked on the side street, ahead of a crisp silver Jeep with polished chrome trim and an older but immaculate tan GMC Yukon with a tubular steel bumper.

  Nice cars for the neighborhood, he thought. Nobody was out there watching them. Just the security camera.

  “This Lewis guy—do you know what he drives?” asked Peter.

  “I haven’t spoken with him in years,” she said. “But I have seen him in that tan truck with the big bumper.”

  Peter cruised past without slowing. The black Ford was two cars back.

  “You missed it,” said Dinah.

  “Just checking out the area,” said Peter, his head on a swivel as he took in the building layout, the alleys and exits. “Old habit.” One that he wasn’t going to break. Especially not when a man with a gun was watching Dinah’s house.

  He drove in an outward spiral, checking the surrounding area. The neighborhood was seriously beaten down. More businesses were closed than open. Graffiti was everywhere, from basic tags on the crumbling houses and bullet-pocked road signs to elaborate multicolor displays on boarded-up corner stores. But Lewis’s building, whose neat brick and clean paint should have been prime canvas, was oddly pristine.

  He looked in the rearview. The Ford had disappeared.

  Peter swung around the block and parked at the curb.

  Before Dinah could open the door, Peter put a hand on her arm.

  “Wait,” he said. “Tell me about this Lewis.”

  “We were friends once,” she said. “Lewis and James and I. But things ended badly.” She didn’t elaborate.

  “Okay,” said Peter. “But why do you think the money is his?”

  “Lewis has his fingers in a lot of things,” said Dinah. “They’re all
about money.” She angled her head toward Shorty’s. “And James worked at his bar.”

  She pulled her arm away, set the paper bag on the floor, and slipped out of the truck. She walked not toward the bar entrance but toward the side door, the boarded-up section with the security camera.

  Peter took the Army .45 from under the seat, tucked it into the back of his pants where his coat would hide it, and jogged after her. The heavy steel door was already closing behind her when he got there.

  He felt the flare of the white static as he reached for the knob.

  The space inside was bigger than Peter had expected, a big rectangular room. The outer walls were brick, probably a foot thick, and still showed pale patches where stubborn plaster remained. It looked like someone had taken out most of the interior walls. The oak floor was patched in places, the old finish turned orange with age. Once it had been an office. Now it was something else that wasn’t quite clear.

  The jittery pressure of the static reminded him to look for the exits. The windows were covered with plywood, so that was no help. There was a door in the back that likely led to another way out, along with a bathroom and maybe stairs to the basement.

  In the center of the room stood a walnut trestle table, at least ten feet long and probably custom-made, but only three rickety mismatched chairs. At the head of the table, atop an oil-stained towel, a shotgun lay in its component pieces, broken down for cleaning. It looked like a 10-gauge autoloader, with a fat bore and a shortened barrel. It would clear a room like a hand grenade.

  Behind the table was a secondhand bar, worn smooth by thousands of hands. Peter could see the severed end where it had been torn from the wall of some defunct tavern or hotel. A bank of four small security monitors was set on top, and a stainless-steel fridge stood in the corner. At the far end of the room, a U-shaped formation of black leather couches faced an enormous television tuned to ESPN with the sound off.

  Two men sat on the couches, feet up, newspapers spread open in their hands, staring at Dinah like they’d never seen a woman before. Dinah fixed them with a regal look that carried all the natural authority of an ER nurse and the mother of willful boys. Now Peter understood why she had changed her clothes.