Whiskey

by Bruce Holbert

  Andre extinguished the match and pocketed the rest.

  * * *

  They returned to the tavern where Eddie phoned Reynolds’s wife.

  When Reynolds’s wife arrived, she wore white, which left her tanned skin darker. She was fully aware of the effect. Her short hair was practical. She did little with it, maybe because she wasn’t required to. Reynolds kissed her hand like a sailor long at sea might. She laughed. A man could go a hundred years without hearing a sound so pleasant.

  Smoker and Andre watched their lights go. A grassy strip lay between the curb and sidewalk. He walked to it and sat. The cool of the earth swirled around him like water. He wanted to slump into it and sleep. Smoker kicked him in the shin, hard. Andre rolled but Smoker booted him once more, then grabbed Desdemona and lobbed her at him. The dog yipped and her claws drew blood through Andre’s shirt. Smoker dodged backward but Andre caught his shoulder and thrust him to the pavement.

  Smoker glared up at him. Andre punched his belly.

  “That hurt?” Andre asked.

  “Not as much as you want it to.”

  Andre rose and kicked Smoker between the shoulders.

  Smoker grunted. “Want to go for a ride?” he asked.

  “Sure, why in hell not?” Andre replied.

  * * *

  Smoker navigated the truck through Grand Coulee’s Main Street. The place was a coupling of Colville Confederated Indians, construction men hard-hatting at the dam, and locals between jobs or disability checks. The coulee towns lost a kid every other year to poor driving and poorer drinking. The high school had exhausted athletic fields to name for them, so the last funeral paved the student parking lot.

  They crossed the lit dam’s mile span then steered for a road few remembered existed. The truck wound between the riprap, stones bigger than the vehicle. Andre felt like a child in a dream of dinosaurs. Farther, a boneyard retired the contractors’ ten-foot cable spools, bent and rusted crane booms, and a scrapped loader minus tires, the Bureau emblem barely visible on the door. Another hundred yards, fifteen years of Christmas trees lay against an ancient retaining wall, their dead needles still piped with tinsel.

  Smoker maneuvered them along a wide trail to an abandoned park on the water. The government had let the place go after the third powerhouse. Water-blackened pylons held a log boom the drawdowns had stacked against a half-sunk swimming dock. Smoker and Andre listened to the water lap the park’s pebbled beach.

  “You ain’t Jesus Christ, you know,” Smoker said.

  Twenty feet upriver, a deadheaded tree lay sideways in the sand, its dry roots spread like a gray star against the water’s darkness. Andre chucked a stone at it and missed. Smoker tried with the same result. Andre lobbed another, closer.

  “You got to turn everything around, don’t you?” Andre said.

  Smoker sorted through a handful of gravel for the rocks that would fly best. He hit the deadhead on the bounce.

  “Don’t count,” Andre told him.

  “I know it,” Smoker said. He threw another, shorter still.

  Andre plunked it his next try. Smoker emptied his hands.

  “You’d have found someone else to drive the nails,” Smoker said.

  “You saved me looking.”

  Smoker lit two cigarettes and offered Andre one. Smoker exhaled. The smoke broke up around him. He was quiet awhile.

  “Zebra can’t change its stripes, can it?” Andre said.

  “Don’t make it right,” Smoker replied.

  “No,” Andre said. “But it keeps it from being a surprise.”

  A typical summer haze, wheat-harvest chaff and dirt trucks and combines in the fields smeared the halved moon. Its light winked in the reservoir waves.

  “Don’t change the matter at hand,” Smoker said. “I can’t leave Bird in the wind. Dede alone, I’d not ask.”

  Andre nodded.

  “But this lunatic is religious to boot.”

  “That’s troubling,” Andre agreed. Lately religions had become unruly. Most had organized into megachurches where hucksters suckled from the masses’ fears and otherwise normal people crowded into warehouses to shut their eyes and lift their quaking hands toward heaven as if their football team had just scored a touchdown. At the other end of the trough, a north Idaho sect was rumored to have eaten a wayward cross-country runner a few summers ago.

  Andre listened to the wind press the reservoir waves into the bank.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Need,” Smoker said.

  “Need, then.”

  “Someone to ride shotgun.”

  “What else?”

  “Money. Couple thousand probably.” Smoker lit a cigarette. “I won’t pay it back.” He dragged from his smoke. “Even if I scraped that much together, I mean, something will keep me from getting it from me to you.”

  “That ain’t news.”

  “I’m tired of lying to you.”

  “Maybe you ought to keep the truth easier to tell,” Andre told him.

  * * *

  Before light, Andre woke to eggs snapping on his stovetop. His head ached from the whiskey and too little sleep. The coffee had already perked when he discovered Claire at his stove at a quarter to four.

  “Bacon’s in the oven,” she said.

  “Smoker has visited you.”

  She leveled her gaze at him from the stove. Andre sipped his coffee. She brewed it better than he could, though they had employed the same blend and kettle.

  “You corrupted my lawyer,” Claire said.

  “Only a little.”

  “I told him you had a stubborn streak.”

  She carried the pan to the table and slid two basted eggs onto his plate. “Can you get the bacon?”

  Andre retrieved it with an oven mitt. He set two strips on his plate and left her the same.

  “It doesn’t make any kind of sense,” Claire said.

  “Keeping married?”

  She nodded.

  “You got prospects?”

  “No,” she replied.

  He drank his coffee.

  “Do you see us together somewhere ahead?” Claire asked.

  Andre peered into his cup.

  “That would require too much, wouldn’t it?” Claire said.

  “Too much?”

  “I don’t know. Forgiveness. Optimism. Faith.”

  “All words I can’t comprehend, you figure.”

  Her brown eyes reflected the light, and the breakfast grease made her skin shine. “I don’t want to fight.”

  “But you want to put me in the skillet then blame me for cooking.”

  “No,” she said. Andre thought she might cry and if she did maybe he would, too, and if that happened, this moment might be the one to lift them past history, both recent and ancient. He heard the clock; waiting had become his lot and the rest was just supposing. He finished his coffee and Claire refilled the cup then poured more for herself. She sipped it then set the cup down and blew on the surface.

  “Don’t let Smoker twist you into something you don’t want to do,” she said.

  “There’s a child involved. My niece, in particular,” Andre replied.

  “That child’s in trouble whether Dede or Smoker raises her.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Anyone with eyes knows it,” Claire said. She sighed. “Look at you.”

  “I had a chance once.”

  Claire surveyed their plates. “She’s not your daughter.”

  “Child don’t need to belong to you to require your help,” Andre said. “I’d thought you might have considered that.”

  Claire winced. “That is a mean thing to say.”

  “It is,” Andre agreed.

  “I suppose I deserve whatever hurt you mete out.” Claire rose and dumped her coffee in the sink then rinsed the cup. “I don’t guess there’s anything I can do to talk you out of it.”

  “I been trying to talk myself out of it all night,” And
re said. “Part of me isn’t listening.”

  “You need anything? I have some money.”

  “No, I got enough. Smoker tell you different?”

  “No,” she said. “He never told me as much as you thought.”

  “Wasn’t about that, was it? Telling, I mean.”

  “It wasn’t about that, no,” she said.

  Andre nodded. “Have Reynolds make another paper. I’ll sign it if that’s what you want.”

  A passing car’s light stretched their shadows on the wall. In it, Claire’s tight jaw and the tired corners of her mouth came clear then the light slid from her and she became the yellow of old paper. She bent and kissed his forehead.

  LAMENTATIONS

  September–December 1983

  Andre met Claire when he was, of all things, sober. She accepted a teaching position in the middle school adjacent to the high school where Andre taught math. Her first day, she lurched into him in the yearly orientation. On her binder spine she’d scrawled her name. He had never known a female with such poor handwriting.

  Their classrooms were opposite each other, and early on she inquired about attendance reports and lunch-money accounting. October, they sorted through a playground row together. At lunch that afternoon, Claire sat at Andre’s table and attempted a conversation. Behind her, in a long window, was Andre’s reflection: He was a homely man; it left him little to say. He lumbered through his life’s social burdens as someone might morning traffic, acknowledging the red and green lights and free right turns, distracted and polite. Occasionally, though, Claire observed students enter Andre’s classroom after the last bell, sometimes in pairs or groups of three. They conversed about personal concerns: parents who hollered too much, boyfriends too needy or inattentive. He countered with pragmatic suggestions they thought wise or comic but avoided judgments, which put them at ease. The other teachers knew Andre as broken; to his students, however, his wounds were noble and his suffering added gravity and comfort to his advice.

  Faculty meetings, Andre tarried until Claire entered the room and then hunted a seat behind or across from her. Making notes, she employed a pencil but didn’t erase, instead slashed through words and scribbled on. She whispered as she perused handouts, a habit common to reading teachers. Her high cheekbones and narrow jaw pinched her mouth in a pretty way when she spoke and her nose remained out of matters, which was the best that could be said of a nose. Her chestnut hair was cut to her shoulders. It curled when she rose early enough to use an iron and lay straight when she did not. She was appealing either way; Andre longed to say so and save her the trouble.

  Nights when he’d climbed far enough into the bag, Andre would press his hands together as if in prayer, then undo them until his palms separated and he could conjure her face between. He had encountered prettier women, but none that made him ache so clearly for a life other than his own.

  * * *

  After the time change, the evenings grayed early and, from a quarter mile behind, distance enough to argue denial or coincidence, Andre began to trail Claire to her duplex two hills behind the school. She marked themes while she hiked the incline, chewing a red pencil between notes, and didn’t divert her attention, even while she unlocked her door.

  Soon, despite cold winds or spitting snow, Andre lingered in an alley’s shadows where he could view Claire’s front window. Evenings she often halted before the glass to gaze at passing cars or her neighbors exercising their terrier. She typically changed to a T-shirt and sweat pants. Her hands clawed her hair like she’d had a nap or been stirred from a book. Seeing her embarrassed him and he pitched his eyes away, down the hill where the house roofs below collided geometries.

  A month into his vigil, he unwrapped a meat-loaf sandwich for his dinner and ate, comfortable, until Claire gulley-whomped him from behind with a two-foot icicle. His stunned skull sang like a tuning fork as Claire’s soap smell passed, so simple it seemed impossible. He lay bleeding until police tumblers approached. A cop’s flashlight wand striped the dumpster where he’d taken refuge. Andre stood and hoisted his hands.

  “What are you surrendering over?” the cop asked. His name was Marcus Popp and he was two years behind Andre in high school. Answering to him seemed one more injustice.

  “You decide,” Andre said.

  The cop wagged his light at Andre’s cleft scalp. “You know the woman in that building?”

  “Yes.”

  “You going to have a go at me?” the cop asked.

  A minor tavern legend to regulars, in a scrap Andre accepted blows without regard and offered his own until he grew too tired to lift his hands. Recently, he’d pinned an ironworker’s ears to his skull with a stapler. While the man attempted to claw the staples out, Andre splattered his nose and uprooted his front teeth with the handle. The honyocker was new to town. No one local or sober had tried Andre for years.

  “I’m inclined not to.”

  “Okay,” the cop said. By then Claire had pulled open her door. Oily light from inside spread across the snow-blanched yard. She proceeded in slippers toward them.

  “You,” she said.

  Andre nodded.

  “You deserved to be hit.”

  “I know it.”

  The cop didn’t move. He was enjoying himself.

  Claire’s brow creased and she blinked. The blood bank took a pint and Andre guessed he’d leaked nothing less. It warmed his cheek but froze in his hair.

  “I did that?”

  Andre shrugged. “Head wound,” he said. “They always bleed worse than they are.”

  * * *

  The cop signed Andre in at the hospital emergency desk then suggested he review his manners. He saw no need to cuff him or offer him Miranda. Andre had not even made a successful crime of it, which demoralized him further.

  Despite much study, Andre had not acquired the element most necessary for romance in this world: the capacity to appear detached in the tragic and compelling manner that presses a woman to discover why. Instead, women saw Andre as plain country, a flat lot on a town road, like any other. An abundance of heart and a scarcity of self-regard served him poorly, but a man suffering such who hadn’t swallowed a gun barrel was likely not just dirt and rock and scrub.

  An hour later the doctor knit Andre’s eyebrow with fifteen stitches then sheared half his scalp so he could add twenty more. Andre listened to the scissors snip and contemplated the four miles home. He could phone Smoker but only after assembling a tale that justified his injuries. He’d narrowed the possibilities to brawling Californians or a slow-moving four-by-four on the icy streets by the time the hospital released him and he found the exit. Local urchins had shot out the parking-lot lights with pellet guns so Andre didn’t recognize Claire’s approach until she was too close for escape.

  “Should I be flattered?” Claire asked him. “Or were you just in it for an eyeful?”

  “I hope you’re not armed,” Andre replied.

  She reversed her jeans pockets to demonstrate she was no danger. But there was still the jacket so Andre steadied his feet and loped for town. Twenty yards and the frozen sidewalk spilled him to all fours. Claire’s hand hooked his elbow and steered him up.

  “I’ll see you home,” she said.

  In her car, Andre pointed toward the trailer court, but Claire traveled another direction and parked at a Stop-N-Go. Inside, she bought tall coffees, which left Andre the prospect of bearing his embarrassment both awake and sober.

  Claire dipped her face into her cup, while Andre waited for the cream to cool his own.

  “Our first date,” she said.

  “This isn’t a date,” he told her.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if it was I’d be worried about getting kissed at the end.”

  Claire arched her eyebrow, then bent across the emergency brake; their lips clobbered bluntly and Andre lost a good share of his coffee in his lap. Scalded, he gasped and his legs straightened, which scuffed his scalp against the
roof. He put his hand to the wounds, but the stitches seemed to hold.

  Claire retreated to her seat. She tipped herself over the steering wheel and her hands latched her knees. A long hair clung to her ring finger; the other end twisted in the heater’s exhaust. Light through the window flickered in the strand. Andre extended his finger to touch it. Claire hurried her hand away then changed horses and plunked it in his.

  “I’m sorry,” Andre said. “I’m not accustomed.”

  “Me neither,” Claire told him. “Please, don’t think I am.”

  Claire fit a straw through her coffee top. The radio played a commercial, though Andre couldn’t make out what for.

  “I never saw you close to naked,” he said.

  Claire gazed out the windshield. The market lights made the snow more starry than the sky.

  “I went home early. Before eight always.”

  “You scared me is all.” Claire unjoined their hands and stroked a finger on his split hairline. He winced.

  “I used to pinch my brothers until they’d bleed,” she said quietly. “I guess I have a mean streak.” She returned her hand to the shifter ball. Her fingers tapped the enamel. He wanted them to doctor him.

  “You spied on me in school,” she said.

  “I guess I’m none too sly.”

  “Someone else pointed it out to me. Stack.” Stack Edwards was in charge of PE and wore T-shirts, even in winter. Andre hadn’t seen them as much as sit together.

  Claire took Andre’s hand in hers then raised them both.

  “He didn’t like public displays of affection.”

  Their coffee depleted, Andre excused himself to refill the cups. A Williams girl tended the till; she had a gabby bent and the line went three deep, and when Andre returned, Claire’s eyes were closed and her head rested on the window. The temperature had dropped near zero, a hard freeze that would require ranchers like his father to ax creek beds to water stock.

  A yellow mongrel crept from beneath the streetlight; her steps rasped the still air like a sawyer’s saw. She paused to sniff an empty can and her ribs fluttered. For a moment she eyed Andre, then vanished in the dark. Andre perched the coffees on the car top. Back in the grocery, he paid for a handful of jerky then fished five straps from the jar. He exited through the back door and sat on the concrete steps.