PIKE

by Benjamin Whitmer

  Iris looks at Pike like she’d prefer to run him through a wood chipper. Wendy stands with her hands folded around the kitten, tears and snot dripping off her pointed chin and landing in small sharp splats on her boots.

  “Come on, Rory,” Pike says, shouldering past Iris, his eyes blank and fixed straight on the door.

  CHAPTER 3

  ~ It don’t mean I like you. ~

  Rory cups his hands to blow heat in them, his lungs contracting in the cold. “You don’t think she’s a little young to be put on the spot like that?” he says to Pike.

  Pike hocks phlegm past a fresh Pall Mall he’s about to stick in his mouth. “I wasn’t any younger’n her when I started out on my own.”

  “I look at you and I see a man who could’ve used a little more love in his early years.”

  Pike lights the cigarette, the flame glinting off the gray in his beard. “When men thus weep their courage grows the less.”

  “Sure. That, and you’re a weird motherfucker.”

  The door opens and Wendy glowers through it, her kitten burrowed down in her sweatshirt, its tiny street-crazed face peeking out over the zipper.

  “I was hoping you’d come,” Pike says.

  “It don’t mean I like you.” Wendy looks up at him like he’s a huge oak tree, stroking the kitten between the eyes. “I’ve heard my mother talk about you.”

  Pike smoothes down his beard, his scarred hand the size of her head. “Never doubted it for a minute.”

  They walk back towards Pike’s apartment. It’s one room in a brick industrial building that looms like a palisade over the small valley town. It once officed Anaconda and still carries their name in fading ten foot letters. The first flicker of Appalachian sunlight cracks over it like an egg. “So what’s the kitten’s name?” Rory asks.

  “Monster.”

  “He don’t look so monstrous to me.” Rory reaches out to pat thekitten on the head. It hisses, its fangs flashing in the cold air. “Jesus,” Rory yelps, yanking his hand back.

  “Monster,” Wendy repeats.

  Rory shakes his hand as if to make sure it’s still attached. “Does he get more friendly?”

  “With some people.” Wendy kisses the top of the kitten’s head. “Not inbred rednecks.”

  Rory elbows Pike. “I think she insulted me.” He’s silent for a little while. Then he tries again. “So what grade are you in?”

  “Seventh.”

  “Seventh,” he repeats, as though impressed. “Seventh grade’s a good grade.”

  “That about when you dropped out?”

  Pike flicks his spent Pall Mall at an iced-over elm. “Stop setting yourself up, Rory,” he says. “It hurts to watch.”

  Wendy snorts. Her face is thin and white, her limbs are starting to tremble with exhaustion. She appears to need all the venom she can muster just to stay upright. “You might as well tell the sun to stop rising.”

  “That’s it,” Rory says, veering off the sidewalk. “I’m heading home.” He turns, walking backwards. “You coming to see me tomorrow?” he asks Pike.

  “Depends on Wendy,” Pike says.

  “Bring her,” Rory says. “She might enjoy it. There’s always a chance I might get my head stove in.”

  Wendy doesn’t answer. She looks like a flower in the middle of wilting.

  CHAPTER 4

  ~ Dingy and smoking and a lot smaller than it looked last night. ~

  Three nights of rioting, there’s no winding down. Derrick stands at the window of his fifth floor apartment, holding a glass of Jim Beam. Below the street’s licked with the flames of a burning car, a pack of boys warming themselves before it, drinking beer and beating their good cheer on each other’s arms and chests. Firelight and shadows flicker behind them, over the spires and ironwork of the Queen Anne storefronts, the arched windows winking at the rising sparks as if gleeful at seeing the city on fire. Given the cold, Derrick didn’t think the riots would make it past the first night, but the mob just made its own sources of heat. He raises his glass to his mouth, drains the contents in one long swallow, washing away the taste of burning plastic with bourbon.

  When he first joined the department he thought of the city as a river, as the big muddy Ohio that separated Cincinnati from Kentucky. Of each citizen as a tributary running into a common body of law, of order. He saw his talents as to channel it by force. He should have known better. There’s always been different currents at work than he thought. Stored up in the ghettos until it bursts in an electric blossom like what’s burning below. And whatever’s to contain it, it ain’t law and it ain’t order. Derrick’s learned that as a cop. The first time he found a six-year-old girl with her intestines hanging out her asshole, and her mother unwilling to finger her boyfriend. Him leaning on the wall grinning, the smell of shit still on his dick. Then picking up a kid for dealing pot the same day. The law’s never enough and it’s always too much.

  Something moves in the hallway, scuffling, shouting, banging on doors. Derrick snaps out of his thoughts and picks his Colt off the leather couch, the metal and wood cold in his hand. He crosses thecarpet silently, flicking off the lights. It scratches at his front door. Derrick yanks it open, drops his barrel. An olive-skinned girl wearing a pea coat, holding a baby. Derrick pulls her in by the back of the neck, locks the door after her.

  “Behind me,” she whispers, her eyes quivering.

  Derrick nods at the couch. “Sit.” He opens the closet beside the door, slings out a Remington 870 police model with a fourteen-inch barrel. He racks the slide halfway, loaded. He slides the .45 in his belt holster, then stands in front of the door, holding the shotgun in the crook of his arm.

  And he waits.

  The door to the stairs chunks open. Loud footsteps, three pair. Two of them built slight, the third bigger. They bang on doors, they shout out. Derrick cuts the woman a glance, she’s on the couch huddled over her baby. He puts a finger to his lips. Then the hollow crack of a small-caliber gunshot, .25 probably, and the sharp peck of the bullet smacking cement. Derrick rests his finger along the shotgun’s trigger-guard.

  Then the door to the stairs opens and closes. And there’s no more noise at all.

  Derrick sets the shotgun down, turns to the girl. She’s already on her feet, making for the exit. Derrick steps to the side to let her pass, but she steps with him. “Please,” she says, her face blotched red with fear and recognition. “No trouble.” She’s figured out who he is. Seen his face in the papers, probably.

  “No trouble,” Derrick says. “Stay here. Wait for it to pass.”

  “Please,” she says again, and she bolts past him, holding the baby like a football. Derrick doesn’t try to stop her.

  He stares at the open door. Then at the small puddle of urine where she’d been standing. Something cold and slick rises in the back of his throat. He takes his shotgun, walks back to the window, pours himself another drink. He leaves the door open all night, but nobody tries to come in. He wishes like hell somebody would.

  Morning finally arrives. Cold, gray, quiet. The last of the rioters have moved off to better pickings, stumbled home to wait for the next nightfall. The car’s laid out on the street like a carcass. Dingy and smoking and a lot smaller than it looked last night.

  CHAPTER 5

  ~ Set himself afire? ~

  Pike steps off the courthouse sidewalk to avoid two pinch-mouthed women coming out of city hall. And he almost grins, feeling the hatred roiling off their bodies. It’s as natural to them as breathing, the way their kind hates him. They have ever since he was a dirty kid, greased to the elbows, tearing down engines in the front yard with his father. And it’s sure as shit reciprocal, he’s hated them right back ever since he was old enough to know what hate was. He even got one of their daughters pregnant, almost purely out of hatred. One who looked just like her mother and had all the same complaints. That really pissed them off. Must have. More than three decades since hasn’t cooled them off. They’ve got long minds, th
ese doddering old cunts.

  He walks into Jack’s office without knocking. Jack has a sheriff’s head. A block of granite with the barest etching of a face chipped out of it. Just like Jack’s father, posed in Jack’s same uniform for a framed photograph that hangs over Jack’s head. Pike sits down in one of the nail-studded leather chairs. “You got anything for me?”

  Jack shuffles papers on his desk. “How’s a few months of inside work hit you?” he says, his voice a practiced Kentucky drawl. He finds a slip of paper, flips it to Pike. “I bought it off the bank. I need you to wall it off for apartments.”

  “How big?”

  “Big. Ten thousand square foot, give or take.”

  Pike folds the address into his pocket. “Got plans?”

  “You figure it out. Make ‘em all one bedroom. I’ll get somebody in to figure out the wiring and plumbing.” He goes back to shuffling papers. “How come your sidekick never comes in with you?” he asks after a minute.

  “Gets nervous around cops. Somebody raised him right.”

  Jack chuckles. “What’s his story?”

  “He’s a West Virginia boy. Hitchhiked out here when he turned eighteen.”

  “What made him decide on here?”

  “He didn’t. He was set on Cincinnati to make it as a boxer, but he ran out of money. I found him flat busted in the Oxbow, trying to beg a lunch. He’s been working with me since, fighting the college boys by way of training.”

  “I hear he’s good.”

  “It’s hard to tell against these shitkickers,” Pike says. “I sure as hell hope so. He ain’t got a backup plan.”

  “What was he running from? When he left West Virginia?”

  “Family trouble.”

  “Family trouble? Like he didn’t get along with his daddy?”

  “Like he was watching his kid sister and she caught herself afire on the wood stove. By the time he found a way to put her out she was burnt so bad she didn’t survive the night.”

  “Blames himself?”

  Pike nods. “A year later his mother set herself afire, too. Emptied a can of gasoline over her head and lit herself with a match. They got her put out, but she’s in an asylum. Then there was his old man.”

  “Set himself afire?”

  “Shot himself in the face with a ten-gauge.”

  Jack whistles. “I’d ask if he ain’t got any grandparents, but I’m about scared to.” He shuffles more paper. They both know there’s more coming. “I hear you have company.”

  “Sarah’s dead. The kid’s got no one else to live with.”

  “You capable of taking care of a little girl?”

  “I’m capable of anything I need to be capable of.”

  “I hope so.” Jack looks squarely at him. “Don’t fuck this one up.”

  Pike grins and his grin goes wrong. He pulls a Pall Mall out of his breast pocket, lights it and snaps his lighter shut, squashing the flame. “Did you know Alice was dead?”

  “It was none of your business.” There’s something like satisfaction in Jack’s voice. “You need anything for the girl?”

  “As a matter of fact.” Pike exhales a drizzle of smoke, looking at the photograph of Jack’s father. “I need the official word on Sarah’s death.” Jack looks at him. “You know something I don’t?” “I don’t know anything at all,” Pike says. “That’s the problem.” “Why?”

  “Knowing’s the only thing I can do.”

  Jack strokes his mustache. Then he nods. “I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  CHAPTER 6

  ~ I woke up on the floor two days later, with a

  headache like I’d been smacked with a tire jack.~

  It’s a big uppercut. It catches Rory on the tip of his chin and snaps his head back like he’s been shot in the forehead. The kid who threw it claps his gloves together and bull-shrugs his shoulders. He’s a big specimen, wearing a T-shirt with the symbol from an agricultural fraternity on the front. He’s cockwalking for his brothers. He’s got no doubt but that Rory’s going down.

  It ain’t a bad uppercut, but it sure as hell ain’t a showstopper. Rory’s plugs the big shitkicker straight in the nose, crunching it like a bug run through with a sewing needle. Then he follows with an uppercut, jacking Symbol’s head back, splaying blood in an arc over his body. Symbol collapses in a crouch, his face sagging like a sail short of wind. Rory lets him catch his breath. Outside the ring, one of his fraternity brothers whistles through his fingers. Rory hides his mouth behind his glove. “Don’t get up,” he says, in a low voice. “I do a lot of this.”

  Symbol shoves off his knee, stands. “Fuck you, redneck.” He rotates his jaw back into place.

  “Okay.” Rory steps back a couple paces. “But fall anytime you want. Not one of them is in the ring with you.”

  Symbol rushes at Rory with all the grace of a fire truck. He throws a wild right lead, more of a grasp than a punch. Rory ducks it, shoots a hook into his rib cage. Symbol gives up on boxing altogether, brings his elbow down for Rory’s head. Rory slips it and hooks the other side of his rib cage. “I’m gonna hit you with a flashy one,” he whispers, clinching Symbol in the middle of the ring. “It’s gonna sound good, but it won’t hurt a bit. Drop when it hits.”

  Symbol grunts hate, blinking.

  “Here it comes.” Rory shoves Symbol back and throws a bigstraight right with none of his body behind it. It catches Symbol cold on the jaw with a nightmarish pop. Symbol looks at Rory dumbly and blinks once. Then he collapses like a great big tower exploded from the inside. Three of his fraternity brothers jump in the ring and run to him.

  Rory bites off his right glove, watching the big dipshit fake a return to consciousness. A mop-headed kid in a faded Kiss T-shirt lifts Rory’s arm, does his best impression of a boxing announcer. Rory unwraps his hands while he talks, standing in the middle of the ring in knee-length gym shorts, feeling ridiculous. The ring’s a cheap rental, set up on a stage that’s used the rest of the week for country-rock cover bands. Nanticote doesn’t have a college, but it’s the only town in the county that ain’t dry, so it has a college bar.

  When the announcer’s finished, Rory lifts the top rope and blinks out into the smoke. The open floor’s crowded with folding tables and college kids. Four pool tables and a jukebox down one side of the hall, the bar and a few booths down the other. He skinnies through the crowd and catches the black T-shirt Pike tosses him and sits, sliding it over his torso. “How’d I do?” he yells over the college bustle and the Rolling Stones.

  Pike’s voice rumbles through the commotion like a bulldozer through corn. “You were kicking the holy shit out of him until he fainted.”

  Rory grimaces. “I was hoping nobody’d notice.”

  “Probably nobody else did. I’ve had my head kicked in enough times to know what it should look like.”

  Rory runs his hand down his face and shakes his head, shedding the adrenaline the way a dog sheds water. Wendy’s sucking a Coke through a straw, reading from a large purple book. There’s a full Coke sitting between her and Pike. Staring off at nothing, she slides it over to Rory.

  “Thanks,” Rory says. “That’s just what I need.”

  Wendy shrugs without taking her eyes off the book. “I didn’t buy it for you, I’m just passing it on.”

  Pike lights a cigarette. “Now, that ain’t entirely true.”

  Wendy shoots him a look like she’ll cut him into fist-sized chunksand feed him to a something rabid if he doesn’t shut the fuck up. Pike closes his mouth around his cigarette and pulls smoke.

  “Did you have a good time?” Rory asks her.

  “I had cheese fries,” she says, pointing at an empty fry basket. “They were pretty good.”

  “You’re a tough nut,” Rory says. He rubs the back of his right hand. It’s starting to hurt, but not with the usual sharp twinge that comes after a good punch. It’s duller, running down the bones in his hands like something cancerous. “What’s the book?”


  Wendy tilts it so he can see the spine. The Collected Stories of Edgar Allen Poe.

  “You’re as bad as your grandfather,” Rory says.

  She reburies her face. “How so?”

  “You can’t dig him out of a book, either. That’s why he doesn’t have any friends. Spends all his time reading weird books. Or insulting people that ain’t read them.”

  Wendy’s eyes slink over to Pike. “I doubt we read the same books,” she says.

  “I doubt it too,” Rory says. “Nobody reads the same books Pike reads. I made the mistake of opening one once. Woke up on the floor two days later with a headache like I’d been smacked with a tire jack. Don’t even remember what the hell it was about.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Wendy says. “You being struck senseless by the sight of the printed word.”

  CHAPTER 7

  ~ Lost in one of the short, cold patches of sleep that sneak up and sap him from behind.~

  On a Cincinnati side street, a downtown diner. Outside, a few salt-ravaged cars reeling though the slush, but no one on the sidewalks. The riots have been over for days, but people are sticking to the main roads. Derrick’s hand shakes as he brings a cigarette to his lips. He inhales the smoke, chases it with burnt diner coffee. His eyes creaking in their sockets like they’ve been soaked in brine, his heart pounding its alien hammer-rhythm against his ribs. He can’t take winter. He needs the heat created by people rubbing together on the streets. If he ain’t hustling, he’s got the stifled feeling he’s dying. It’s the mechanical cadence of his pacemaker. He’s either on the go or he’s passed out, lost in one of the short cold patches of sleep that sneak up and sap him from behind.

  A taxi skids in the snow, turning sideways. The cabbie whips the wheel, straightens the car, drives on. In the booth across from Derrick a ground down redhead in a skirt eats dinner with a boy. He’s a retard, a mini male version of herself that looks to have warped in the sun.

  The waitress refills Derrick’s coffee. She’s a skinny black woman with ashy elbows. Derrick drinks, the coffee burns his mouth, he doesn’t notice. He watches the retard. He has a walk-man on. Derrick can hear the song, Bruce Springsteen’s “Working on the Highway,” even over the dishes clanking and the griddle sizzling. The tune rolls around to the chorus and the retard’s head weaves back and forth, his fingers tapping out the tune, his feet struggling not to pound into motion. His mother smokes a Winston, looking tired, looking like the varicose veins are the only thing keeping her upright.