PIKE

by Benjamin Whitmer

  “He any good?”

  “Golden gloves.”

  “Did you win?”

  “I ain’t never lost.”

  Derrick turns to face him, hitching his thumbs in his belt. He knows he’s gonna take the little fucker apart someday. It’s a thought that cracks his face in a rictus-like grin. “How’s the hand?”

  Rory shows it to him, wrapped tight in an Ace bandage. “Never had to use it once.”

  “That a fact?” Derrick notices the old man staring at him, his eyes like gasoline on oil, his thin lips drawn tight. He’s bigger up close. “You got something to say?”

  Pike smokes his cigarette. “I know you?”

  “Derrick Krieger. I grew up in this little shithole. I heard about you all my life.”

  Pike’s eyes skim off of him like a fly off a shit puddle. He ashes his cigarette, blue smoke streaming out of his nose. “You want something with Rory, Derrick?”

  Derrick reaches under his leather jacket, quick, and tosses a bag of pills on Rory’s chest. “A congratulations gift,” he says, grinning around the table. Then his eyes land on the girl. And for the first time, he sees her face clearly. “Well,” he says softly. “What’s your name?”

  A kitten pokes its head out from the girl’s sweatshirt, as if checking to see what all the commotion’s about. The girl strokes its head gently. “None of your fucking business, pedophile,” she says sweetly.

  “You look familiar,” Derrick says.

  Rory tosses the pills back at Derrick. The bag hits him in the arm, falls on the floor. “Time for you to go,” Rory says, starting to stand.

  Derrick nods, still staring at the girl. There’s something he can’t put his finger on, something dredging through the murk of his memory, gliding towards the surface. “Maybe it is,” he says. He turns and walks to the door.

  CHAPTER 11

  ~ These memories contain their own engines.~

  Pike’s ‘64 Ford pickup chugs smoke, rumbling over the rutted logging road away from Rory’s shack, the fiberglass cap rocking and pinging on the bed. He gears up onto Highway 29, slugging out through the slush and gray salt towards Cincinnati. He gave Rory money, told him to take Wendy out to a movie at the little theater on Main Street. He doesn’t want the girl left alone. He knows how much she cries at night when she thinks he’s asleep, and he knows sometimes the crying gets enough that she thinks she’s gonna wake him. So she sneaks out of the one-room apartment they share and holes up in the bathroom, sobbing and smoking Pike’s cigarettes in shuddering puffs. She’s tough in the day, but misses her mother so much at night it makes Pike want to take a maul to his own bones.

  Pike has no idea what to say to her. Just like her mother. And her mother’s mother. She’d come from coal money, her whole life angling towards her education. Pike was just a senior year diversion, somebody to fuck around with on her way out of Nanticote. Then she got pregnant, and what with her mother being one of the pinch-mouthed local women, had to beg him for a place to stay.

  Pike still can’t think of a single good reason he had for agreeing. He knew better. And she sure as shit should have. Wasn’t six months after Sarah was born before he started in on her. Shutting her eyes, blacking them into blood puddles in her head, beating on them until they were swollen closed, nothing but lumps of purple blood. Sarah screaming through every fight. Her mouth gaping like her jaw was swinging on a broken hinge, her eyes jumping around the room like horses leaping for the exit of a burning barn. But Alice never made a noise,just drug herself into the corner, letting Sarah do all the witnessing that needed done.

  There are some things you can learn to live with. Most things you can’t. Pike turns on the radio and Waylon Jennings is there, his voice rumbling through the cab like a surrogate engine. He lights a cigarette, thinking this is probably enough. That he shouldn’t run this train of thought down, not right now. He knows better. These memories contain their own engines. You don’t stop them until they’re ready to be stopped.

  Sarah’s mother ended the fights, convincing Pike it was time to leave with the claw end of a hammer. She swung with both hands, all the way back from the shoulders like a baseball batter. Pike fingers the scars through his beard, smoking his cigarette, suddenly wishing very much that Alice were still alive. That he could have one last word with her.

  CHAPTER 12

  ~ She said you were a real hard case.~

  Pike cruises Mulberry Street in slow motion, one hand draped over the steering wheel, his thin gray eyes scratching at the crumpled Over-the-Rhine street. The cracks yawning up out of the earth, through the foundations of the narrow Victorians. The small lawns wasted with broken glass and leaking garbage. The snow streaked yellow with piss. He passes a gang of boys standing on a corner, their hot black eyes sticking to him like tar. He drives another block, finds the address he’s looking for.

  His revolver in the glove compartment. A Ruger .357 with a four-inch barrel, standard but for the black walnut grips etched with eagles. Pike bought it in Juárez, thinking of weird John Brown. He slides it in his shoulder holster and steps down from the cab of his truck, booting the door shut with a bitter clank. It’s the kind of neighborhood he’s known well. There’s only one reason you live in it if you’re white. Meaning you always carry a gun. Pike steps out of the truck.

  Number 400’s a ruined brick pillar over the street. Just as he’s about to knock, a reedy voice calls out, “there ain’t nobody in there,” and a prunish black woman steps off her stoop into her yard. She’s wrapped in a tattered maroon housecoat, a filterless cigarette wisping smoke between her grisly fingers. “They’re all gone. You looking for anybody in particular?”

  “My daughter used to live here,” Pike says.

  “I’m Maude.” The old woman slivers her cigarette between her thin lips, squints at him. “I’ve lived in this neighborhood for more’n seventy years. When’d she leave?”

  “About a week ago.”

  “You mean little Wendy?” Maude cackles smoke. “I remember herfine, she used to come over to my house about every day and watch TV with me. I watched TV anyway. She read. Read near every book in my house.”

  Pike shakes his head. “I have Wendy. Sarah was my daughter.”

  The sky above them is gray and impenetrable, the thin winter clouds fused into the firmament and set like cement. Maude looks at it. “You already know?” she says.

  “I already know.”

  Maude rolls her crimped cigarette in her fingers until the coal drops out and fizzles in the snow, then she stuffs the spent butt in her housecoat pocket. “Sarah used to talk about you. She said you were a real hard case.”

  “I was.”

  “How long since you’d seen her?”

  “She was six.”

  “That’s a long time. Did you have a reason?”

  “I had a few good ones.”

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “I have things that need to get done today.”

  “Do you?” Maude peers at him. “What is it you need to get done?”

  “I need to see her grave. If you’ll tell me where it is.”

  Maude chucks her head up the street. “Take a left at the first light, go on about a quarter of a mile. It’ll be on your left, McCulloch Hill Cemetery. The curator’ll tell you where to find her plot.”

  Pike turns to his truck.

  “You come back sometime and I’ll tell you why I had her buried there,” Maude says after him. Although it isn’t until he’s already in the truck and driving away that he remembers her saying it.

  CHAPTER 13

  ~ They reburied the one and carted the other off in crates.~

  It’s a small cement marker, plugged into the frozen ground. There’s no epitaph, only her name. Pike flips his spent cigarette into the snow and lights another, the gravestone darkening to inscrutable under a passing cloud, then lightening in the raspy winter sun. Dead tree branches knob up out of the snow like black fossilized elbows poki
ng from under a white sheet, and the hill’s littered with other gravestones that look exactly like Sarah’s. Haphazard slabs, stuck crookedly in the hillside. Each a terse acknowledgement that someone who wouldn’t be missed much died abruptly.

  The curator, a septuagenarian with cheeks that cling like curtains around his crumbling teeth, had apologized for the condition of the grounds. He brought a broom out of his shack at the gate to sweep the snow off, explaining that not many people visited anymore. He discoursed on the graveyard’s history while he swept. That it was found to be a Hopewell mound thirty years ago. That the city had buried people in it for over a century and it took the anthropologists ten years to separate the white corpses from the Indian corpses. That they reburied the one and carted the other off in crates. That they then reopened the graves for transients.

  “Figured it needed restocking?” Pike asked.

  The old man had chuckled. “That’s about the long and the short of it.”

  A sputtering of snowflakes collects in Pike’s hair and beard. He drops his cigarette and turns up the collar of his work jacket and lights another. It’s good there aren’t any visitors. If there were, he’d shorten his visit. He knows the image he makes against the gravestones and the blanket of white snow. He couldn’t stand being ondisplay, paralyzed by the memory of a woman he barely knew, who had just happened be his daughter.

  There ought to be an epitaph. Any epitaph. Pike dredges through his memory for one and comes as close as he can. “Here grow no damned drugs. Here are no storms,” he says aloud. It’s inadequate. He smokes his cigarette until there’s nothing but a smoldering scrap of paper between his fingers, staring at the tombstone as though some kind of answer might bloom out of it.

  None does. He doesn’t even have a good question.

  CHAPTER 14

  ~ I get lucky now and then.~

  Wendy walks the ditch towards town, cigarette smoke pluming out of her clothes with every brisk little step. Mostly it’s Pike’s. Its sunk into her the way it sinks into everything he comes in contact with. She’s used to chemical smells, bitter aspirin smells, smells that wrack bodies and ruin minds, that consume and flatten people you love. She likes the smell of his tobacco smoke.

  After the movie she and Rory had caught a ride with Iris to Rory’s shack and she read to him while he worked out with his dumbbells. It took him two hours, moving from large muscles to small muscles with backbreaking precision, scar tissue grinding around his battered bones like shopwelded machine parts. She read him Poe and he liked the stories fine. It’d given her a little hope for him after all.

  Wendy talks to herself while she walks. Mutters, more like, a nonsensical string of half formed words that pick at her until they pop compulsively out of her mouth. Her gloved hands clenching, smacking at each other, Monster squirming against her belly, mewling for mercy. She doesn’t have a choice but to sputter and flail. There are words she has to throw away in hopes of not saying the ones she wants to most.

  “Don’t tell me you’re walking all the way into town.”

  Wendy’s eyes swing up like a pair of twin pistols. The creep from the bar, slushing along next to her in his black Monte Carlo. Jesus, she hadn’t even noticed. “What the fuck do you want?” she snarls.

  He grins the kind of grin that drops the temperature ten degrees. “It’s a hell of a mouth you’ve got on you,” he says.

  Wendy’s walking the left side of the road, his car idling alongside her in the oncoming lane. “You better get on your own side of the road,” Wendy says.

  “Why don’t you hop in? I’ll give you a ride.”

  “Ha! Why don’t you suck a bullet, cocksucker?”

  Derrick laughs out loud. “Who taught you to talk like that?”

  “Here comes a truck,” Wendy says. It’s a full size pickup, coming around a bend in the road about an eighth of a mile ahead, barreling straight on at Derrick’s Monte Carlo.

  “He’ll move,” Derrick says nonchalantly.

  “Maybe not. I get lucky now and then.”

  The truck blares its horn and swerves around the Monte Carlo, cutting and dragging a swathe of bitter winter air over Wendy. “I like this,” she says. “Let’s keep it up until that bend in the road yonder. Ain’t nobody’ll be able to see you coming around it.”

  “You’re a hard case,” he says. “You sure you don’t want a ride?”

  “No thanks, you fucking pervert. You fucking rapist.”

  A cream colored Cadillac slithers around the bend, narrowly dodges the Monte Carlo. The driver skipping the horn, signaling with his finger.

  “Where are you coming from anyways?” he asks.

  Wendy raises her eyes to the sky. “One semi truck, right now. Please.”

  “I remembered where I knowed you from.”

  Wendy snorts derision, keeps walking. “I think I’d remember if I knew you. Creepy pedophile shitlicker like you are.” They’re within fifty feet of the bend. Wendy thinks she hears a truck engine rumbling around it.

  Derrick chuckles. “I doubt that, Wendy.”

  Her face shoots up at his like he’s thrown ice water on her. But he’s no longer there. He’s gunned the gas and jerked the wheel, slipping into his own lane just in time, a blue Mack Granite hauling a load of coal waffling on the blacktop, the driver spinning the wheel to avoid him.

  CHAPTER 15

  ~ They meet downtown, like a hammer and an anvil, flattening everything between them in the process.~

  Derrick drives for three hours flat before he even realizes he’s driving, pulling smoke out of a pack of Marlboros until the hair on his fingers crisps. Driving too fast, barely hanging onto the icy road. His brain hopping, skittering. He didn’t remember who she was until he said her name. He dragged it out of some ditch in his memory he didn’t even remember being there.

  He’s on I-75 now, five miles outside of Cincinnati on the Kentucky side. Whipping down the empty interstate and winging over the last Kentucky hill into the Ohio valley. The skyline unfurling and the Carew Tower rocketing over the city, its spotlights skimming up its base like ignition towards the already come and gone, and next to it, the pyramidal PNC building, a garish red and green sputtering like exhaust from its pillars. Below, the light from the lamps strung along the diagonal stays of the Roebling Suspension Bridge, muddying with the cacophony of multicolored beacons awash in the Ohio, blending so that the world tilts on its axis, so that the city lights drop around him like low hung stars. Then he’s flying through them like through raindrops, careening across the trusses of the Brent Spence Bridge, curving away to the I-74 exit.

  Cincinnati’s hundreds of cities, thousands, but its inhabitants usually narrow it down to two. One of them the west side, the affluent side, rolling hills and quaint neighborhoods where police rookies pull guard duty on the demarcation lines. The other, the east side, the product of slaves and German immigrants and the hatred they’ve fostered between them. Cincinnati’s cops live on the east side, Cincinnati’s governors live on the west side. They meet downtown, like a hammer and an anvil, flattening everything between them in the process.

  Derrick catches the Cheviot exit, cruises the burger joints and neighborhood bars, then spins the wheel down a side street, through a long stretch of two story Tudors. He sees the one he’s looking for, checks the lit windows, pulls to the curb.

  Klaus’s wife answers the door, drying a cast iron skillet with a hand towel, her blonde hair pulled back in a severe bun. She doesn’t smile at Derrick. East side German women never smile. It’s rough work shouldering back the blacks, making sure they don’t overrun your neighborhood. She chucks her chin at a footpath leading around back of their house. “Go around back. We don’t need trouble.”

  Trouble. Derrick sure as hell feels like trouble. Around back, Klaus slides the glass door open with his elbow, carrying two beer bottles in one meaty hand, a thick cigar in the other. He’s square-jawed, big, with a bushy black mustache that makes him look like a nineteenth cent
ury bare-knuckle boxer. He hands one of the beer bottles to Derrick. “I thought you’d split town.”

  “Just visiting.”

  “You caught me in time for a cigar.” Klaus uses his forearm to clear snow off one of the deck chairs and sits, facing his dark yard. “Sit,” he says, gesturing at the other deck chair, digging a pack of matches out of his breast pocket.

  Derrick rocks on his heels, finishes half the beer in one ravenous gulp.

  “I quit cigarettes for the kids, but I ain’t quitting cigars.” Klaus bends his face over a lit match, puffs the cigar to life. “I’ll do anything for my kids twenty-three and a half hours a day. But I get a half an hour a day to sit out here and look at my yard.” He looks fondly at the cigar and rotates it in his hand, blowing on the coal. “I take it you’re after news?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, everybody’s pulling for you. There ain’t a cop in the city doesn’t know what kind of piece of shit that nigger was. Even the chief wants it to die down, to get you back on.”

  “But?”

  “But the one guy who should be in your corner is finding new ways to fuck you. You can’t turn on the television without hearinghim make some backhanded comment about your record, firing up the natives.”

  “Fleischer.”

  Klaus nods, his heavy cigar hand draped over one huge knee. “What’d you do to him anyway?”

  “I found his daughter at her place of employment.”

  Klaus chuckles. “How’d you figure out who she was?”

  “They get blotchy in the same places when they get excited.”

  Klaus guffaws cigar smoke. “So what’re you gonna do now?”

  Derrick sends his cigarette sparking into the blackness. “I’ll figure something out.” He sticks his hands in his pockets, stares densely out at nothing.

  CHAPTER 16

  ~ Wendy’s eyes fire familiarly in her head.~

  “You can’t tell Pike,” Wendy says. They sit on a bench on the courthouse lawn, huddled over steaming Styrofoam cups of coffee. Her face looks like a scrimshaw broach bundled in a black scarf, her lips blood red in the cold.