Then the chorus hits, and the retard goes nuts. He belts out the words, his feet slap out the rhythm on the floor. Then he catches agust of smoke in the face from his mother that means shut the fuck up. He trails off, his head shrinking into his shoulders. He doesn’t seem sure what he’s been caught for, but he knows he’s been caught. But after a minute he forgets again. His fingers started dancing again, he’s waiting on the chorus again.
Derrick watches the cycle through. Watches it again. The kid in anticipation, the kid bubbling over, the kid cowed and confused, the kid hurt. Derrick thinks about shooting them both in the top of the head. The song ends. When the retard thinks his mother isn’t looking, he rewinds the tape. She looks like she’s going to start crying from frustration. She pummels out her cigarette, lights a new one. The retard starts his cycle again like some kind of automaton.
Derrick’s head pounds to the rhythm of his pacemaker. He quits looking at the kid, stares down at the green-flecked table top. Being suspended is worse than Derrick’s superiors could have imagined. It’s left his days brutal and thin. He can barely eat. His brain misfires like a rusty engine.
“You look like shit,” Dick Fleischer says, gripping the table and pulling his gut into the booth.
Derrick blinks, brings him into focus. “I look like I always look.”
“True. But you used to get paid to look like a shitbag, now you’re doing it on your own time. Go home and take a fucking shower.”
“You wanted me here. Say what you got to say before I shoot you in the neck.”
Dick laughs out loud, his jowls jiggling. “Man, you ought to feel like you’re coming up aces. The niggers have died down in the streets and as soon as we can get you cleared you’ll be back out there running hookers and smack.” He raises a hand to the waitress. “Pie and coffee,” he calls to her. “Key lime.”
“It was a clean kill.”
“Sure it was. They’re all clean kills.” He puckers his fat face in thought. “Got busted sucking a neighbor boy’s dick?”
“Raped his sister.”
Dick takes a pie plate from the waitress, still chuckling. “I dig that you’ve got a moral streak, man, no matter how thin. But you’re a walking cliché. You should try developing a conscience about something alittle more challenging. Like wife beaters, maybe. Or pimps.” He winks at Derrick and crams a forkful of green pie into his mouth, swallows it without chewing. “You know what one of the theories going around is? That the nigger was one of your dealers.” His eyes scrape all over Derrick’s face. “That he shorted you money.”
“Say what you’ve got to say,” Derrick repeats. “Then take a walk. You might think I’m joking about shooting you, but it’s a point you don’t want to press.”
Dick snorts, blowing green chunks of pie on his shit-colored tie. “Don’t threaten me, boy. Me and the union’s the only thing keeping you in a job.”
“What’s keeping me in a job is I make arrests.”
Dick wipes his mouth on his paper napkin. “And someday we’re gonna have a discussion as to your methods.”
Derrick rubs his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “For the last time, what was it you wanted to tell me?”
Dick grips the edge of the table and pulls himself out of the booth. “Get out of town,” he says. “We’re trying to salvage what little reputation you got left. The real you ain’t oughtta be here to collide with the you we’re trying to create.”
Derrick watches him squeeze through the door. Then turns his eyes back on the window. A brick parking structure across the street, behind it the backside of the new Proctor & Gamble building, its twin stubs like missile silos. Or a pair of fake tits. The rendering of pig’s fat into soap. Exhaustion. Then a sudden rush of darkness from behind the building, starting from a pinpoint spot over the left stub and expanding to fill the sky. It’s a cloud. Like darkness itself, like the sky lowering. Like South Dakota, when he couldn’t stop driving. Cooking baloney sandwiches in a skillet over a fire by the side of the road, sleeping in the car. Spending the days staring into the prairie tallgrass, watching the mule deer and the pronghorn graze. Listening to the coyotes call at night. The morning sun rising like a flood up the spires, rushing through the ravines like bloody water. The clay and mudstone pulsating, the sun pumping aloft. Hell with the flames put out, a landscape that washed away every time it rained. Everything changing with every storm, nothing changed ever. Driving the same
highway loops until every pinnacle and every ravine was burned into his brain.
“You can’t sleep here,” the waitress says.
Derrick turns to her and tries to open his eyes. But they’re open. “I was just leaving.”
Her eyes glitter blackly in her head. “Don’t let me stop you.”
CHAPTER 8
~ The bulb of some purple black fruit in his palm.~
A cabin on the outskirts of town, in a small wooded clearing just off a winding logging trail. It was once a hunting shack, years ago, before the deer were all hunted out. Across the trail and past a rusty barbwire fence, a snow-blanketed meadow opens out of the woods. The sun’s falling over the horizon and it’s almost dark, the early winter evening coming on. The smudges of light escaping the cabin’s windows flit like summer insects over the snowbanks and the tarp covered woodpile.
The floor of the cabin is open. A pot-bellied stove, a writing desk and an iron bed the only furniture. A kerosene lantern sputtering on the windowsill. Rory’s just finished with the dumbbells, and is looking his hand over, the back of it bruised a rich purple like it’s been pounded with a ball peen hammer. He clenches it gently and lets a warm wave of pain wash up his arm. Please don’t be broken. At least a hundred dollars to get an x-ray, probably twice that to get it fixed.
He clenches his fist again, hard this time. The bruise darkens, he feels his forehead burst with sweat. He rotates the hand, he doesn’t feel anything shifting that shouldn’t shift. So, he relaxes, swallowing away a wave of nausea. Probably just fractured. I’ll take it easy next fight. Let my left do most of the work. He pulls on a gray hooded sweatshirt and a pair of Redwing Loggers, and he’s out the door, loping easily down the trail. It’s dark and wild, overgrown, but he knows it by heart. The stars above flicker like knife holes of light punched through a black curtain.
Then he’s out of the woods, cutting left on the highway, trudging the ditch towards the Green Frog Café, squatting on Highway 29 like a malignant toad a quarter mile before you enter the yellow spill ofthe town’s lights. It’s a cement bunker of a building, flat roofed with a gravel parking lot, and a front door that lets into a dimly lit foyer. Rory waves into the one-way mirror, the steel door buzzes open, and the bartender raises his right hand by way of greeting. He’s leaning on the bar, his left arm in a sling, his ravaged face under-lit by the sink’s light. “Howdy Leroy,” Rory says, nodding at the sling. “What in the hell’d you do?”
Leroy grins woefully. “Everything I could.”
Rory chuckles and keeps walking, past a table of longhaired rednecks playing seven card stud. “Boys,” he says by way of greeting. The man he’s looking for leans over the pool table at the back of the bar. He’s tall and thick-built with gearhead muscle, his light blonde hair flowing down his leather Harley vest and ending at his belt. A hard case biker type sits next to him, tilted back in his chair with his boots up on the edge of the table, his stringy hair slicking down his face like black water running down the slope of a mountain.
Cotton turns to meet him, stroking his Fu Manchu mustache. “Hello Rory,” he says in a genial roadhouse drawl. His handshake is long and compelling. “What can I do for you?”
“Just jogging by.” Rory shrugs as though his being in the bar was an afterthought. “Thought I’d stop in and pick up something for my hand.”
Cotton nods agreeably. “Sure. What do you need?”
Hard Case kicks his feet off the table and walks past them to the bar, clapping Cotton on the back. His face looks like its
been banged out of rough flint with a sledgehammer. “Need a drink?” His voice is the same Kentucky drawl as Cotton’s, but thinner, harder, with all the warmth gone.
“Maker’s Mark,” Cotton says. “And two Cokes.”
Rory waits for Hard Case to make it out of earshot. “Say, thirty Vikes. Forties.”
“Can do.” Cotton hooks his road-scarred leather jacket off a stool and picks a plastic bag out of the inside pocket. He tosses it on the pool table. “Get what you need.”
Rory counts the pills out carefully, making a show of it for Cotton. It takes him too long. The yellow light in the joint slows everythingdown. It’s murky, specked with dark spots, the bodies of insects stuck in the hanging lamps. It’s like living in a beerglass. Rory loses count. Starts again. Finally finishes, and hands his money to Cotton.
Cotton passes Rory a Coke from Hard Case, just returned from the bar. “What happened to your hand?” he asks.
Rory holds it up to show the bruise. “Threw a stupid punch.”
“Rory’s our neighborhood fight night champion,” Cotton says to Hard Case. “One of these days he’s going on to be the next Rocky Marciano, but right now he keeps the college boys in line.”
“Heard all about it,” Hard Case says. “You ever fight anybody that fights back?”
Rory chases two pills with Coke. “I fight anybody that shows up.”
“I might show up some day.”
“I ain’t lost yet.”
“Settle down,” Cotton says to Hard Case. “This kid’s one of the good guys.” He winks at Rory. “Scary motherfucker ain’t he?”
“Sure.” Rory chucks his chin at Leroy. “What’s that all about?”
“Arnold Kaplin. Stuck him in the arm with a screwdriver.”
“Right here? In the bar?”
Cotton nods.
“Why?”
“No reason at all. He was drinking at the bar and Leroy came by to empty his ashtray. Just jumped up and stabbed him.”
“Damn. What’d Leroy do?”
“Bled,” Hard Case says.
Cotton ignores that. “He didn’t have time to do anything,” he says. He flicks his eyes at Hard Case. “This motherfucker had already taken the screwdriver and stuck Arnold through his left eye.”
Rory winces. “Arnold all right?”
“He’s a little pissed off, I’ll bet,” Hard Case says.
Rory nods. “That’s too bad,” he says to Cotton, “he ain’t a bad sort.”
“If he’s got any sense, he’ll be appreciating that I left him his right eye,” Hard Case says. “And that I didn’t stir around in his brains a little.”
Rory nods again, without looking at him.
“You get everything you need?” Cotton says.
“Yessir. I think so.”
“Vicodin’s more powerful than it gets credit for. You be careful. I’m not gonna be the one to put the brakes on your boxing career.”
“I take them for the pain now and then. And maybe a couple on the weekends. I don’t drink or nothing, it’s the only thing I do.”
Cotton sets his bourbon glass down, empty, his eyes locking on Rory’s as though estimating the truthfulness of that statement. “Then have a good weekend,” he says.
CHAPTER 9
~ Nothing worse than it already is.~
The afternoon sun shines in streaks through the parlor’s yellow windows, blossoming on the drywall dust that drifts like ragweed through the air. Rory lifts off his dust-mask and sags against one of the walls, slapping the dust off his arms and chest, then plugging his left nostril with his thumb and blowing a clot of snot and drywall paste on the floor.
Pike’s already sitting, his back against one of the water-damaged walls they haven’t got to yet. He lobs a bottle of Coke to Rory and follows it with a sandwich wrapped in cellophane.
Rory looks the sandwich over.
“Roast beef.” Pike holds his up. “Wendy made the mustard.”
Rory thumbs for the edge of the cling wrap. “She made the mustard?”
Pike sets his sandwich on his lunch pail and lights a cigarette. “She said condiments were the only thing she was gonna learn how to make.” He snaps his lighter shut on his knee, sending up a puff of drywall dust. “Got a real kick out of it too.”
“The kid’s weird.” Rory sniffs the sandwich, takes a bite. “Pretty good mustard though,” he says through a full mouth.
Pike smokes his cigarette, his eyes like still gray water.
“What?” Rory says.
Pike shakes his head. “I can’t figure out a couple of things. About Wendy’s mother.”
“Like?” Rory sucks mustard off his filthy thumb, takes another bite.
“Yeah. Like?” Jack says, standing in the doorway all of a sudden. The sandwich turns into a lump of clay in Rory’s mouth.
“What do you need, Jack?” Pike asks.
Jack leans in the doorway, his .38 slung low on his hip, cowboy style. “Stopped by to see how the work was going.”
“It’s going. Most of the drywall’s in pisspoor shape, but the crossbeams are fine.”
Jack looks around, nodding. “Good to hear.”
Pike leaks smoke out of his tight mouth. “What do you need?”
“I got the answer to that question you asked me.” Jack nods at Rory. “Think he can handle himself alone for a couple minutes?”
“You can talk in front of him,” Pike says.
“Your call.” Jack crosses his arms. “It was a heroin overdose, no doubt about it. They found her in the kitchen of her house, the needle still in her hand.”
“Who found her?”
“A homicide cop by the name of Christopher Vollmann. He got word about a dead woman. A local junky told him, I couldn’t get his name.” Jack opens his mouth to continue, then shuts it.
“Go ahead,” Pike says.
“They found semen.” Jack spits on the floor. “They’re pretty sure all of it came post mortem.”
Pike thumbs his glasses up his nose, his face unchanged. “That’s how word got out? The bums were taking turns on her body?”
“That’s my best guess. Nothing worse than it already is.” Jack clears his throat, and pauses for a minute. “Now, I got a question for you,” he says.
“Go ahead.”
Jack’s voice roughens slightly. “Iris left me.”
“I know it.”
“The whole goddamn town knows it. Any idea where she’s living?”
“How would I know?”
Jack looks him in the face. “I know you two talk.”
Pike stubs his cigarette out on his boot heel and picks up his sandwich. “I say hello to her over breakfast, like you.”
“Well. Next time you talk to her, tell her to come on back whenever she likes.”
“Whatever you say.”
Jack turns and leaves, sagging a little like his backbone’s missing a vertebra or two at the base of his spine.
Rory waits for the outside door to slam shut. “You know where she’s at, don’t you?”
Pike chews his sandwich thoughtfully, trying to get the hang of the taste. “She came up with a dead aunt. Took over her place. I hung a reinforced door on it for her last week. It ain’t a goddamn bit of his business, though.”
“You and him got something weird going on.”
“He knew my wife.”
“Yeah? Well he’s got me beat. I didn’t even know you had a wife.”
“Well.” Pike watches the dust drift in the sunfilled air. “That was a long time ago.”
“You know it’s like a local legend where you went to when you run off. I’ve heard all kind of guesses.”
“I’ve heard them too.”
“How long was it you was gone? Ten years? Fifteen?”
Pike finishes his sandwich and balls up the plastic wrap. “Keep pumping me, you might get to disappear yourself.”
Rory laughs.
CHAPTER 10
~ His eyes like gasoline on o
il and his thin lips drawn tight.~
Derrick’s driving, and when Derrick’s driving, he’s plotting. His hand taking part with the wheel and his blood revving like it’s driven by an engine, the alternator in his chest joining with the cold mechanical cadence of the Monte Carlo’s pistons. It was the driving that kept him being a cop long after he knew better. Wheeling his car around Cincinnati, owning the town. Knowing every back alley and side street, every shadow he’s heaped a body in. You can’t own a city by living in it, just like you can’t own a mountain by building a house on it. No matter what the coal-rich assholes around here think, with their McMansions plugged back in our hollows, sucking the coal out of the Appalachians. Anything you own around here, you own by putting blood in it.
Then he’s on Nanticote’s Main Street. And he sees Rory through the front window of the Oxbow, sitting in a booth across from a grizzled old man wearing glasses, a girl perched like a cat next to him, reading from a book as big as her torso. Derrick careens the Monte Carlo to the curb and kicks out the door, the big December moon standing above him like a great frigid eye.
Rory turns his head to look at him as he opens the door. Derrick walks to the counter, stands as though waiting for service. The haggard blonde waitress is cooking. She flips a pat of butter skittering, burning across the grill, cracks an egg over it, lets it settle and scorch. Breakfast all day. The air over the grill thickens and warps like a living amoeba.
“You fight tonight?” Derrick asks, standing with his hands on the counter, not looking at the kid.
“Yep,” the kid answers.
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