PIKE

by Benjamin Whitmer

  “Why?” Rory doesn’t even want to think about holding out on Pike.

  “Because I said so.” She kicks at the snow. “I don’t have a reason. I don’t want him to know.”

  Rory winces as the coffee hits a loose tooth. He clears his throat. “I think I have to.”

  Wendy’s eyes fire familiarly in her head.

  Rory shrugs helplessly. “Say what you want, but he’s as smart as they come. He’ll know what to do.”

  “He’ll make things worse,” Wendy says. “He doesn’t make any sense even when he wants to.” She bites her lip. “You could talk to the creep yourself. You could find out what he wants.”

  Rory shakes his head. “He’s scared of Pike. You could tell that by looking at him. He ain’t scared of me.”

  Wendy hurtles her coffee. The top pops and the watery coffee spins in an arc over the lawn, steaming and browning the clean white snow. She stands up and snorts frost.

  “Sorry, kid,” Rory says after her.

  CHAPTER 17

  ~ Without any of the strangled hatred that turned it all bad.~

  The gray sun gasps once, dies behind the Green Frog Café.

  Dark coming on. The truck’s engine idling in rough snorts, the dashlights flickering an alien green. Pike spins the wheel on his .357, and thumbs it back into the frame. Then rests his thick arms on the steering wheel, the big revolver’s muzzle draping down at the steering column. “I ain’t sure I like this.”

  “It’s a damn sight better than what you came up with,” Rory says. “Cotton and him are friends. You walk in there and start pistol-whipping him, Cotton’s liable to blow your head off.”

  Pike’s eyes run down the cars in The Green Frog’s gravel lot, rest on the black Monte Carlo parked next to the entrance. “Not likely.”

  Rory grins. “Someday you’re gonna meet up with somebody that ain’t impressed with you.”

  Pike lifts a Pall Mall out of the pack on his dashboard and lights it.

  Rory opens the truck door, still grinning. “And when you do, I want to be there to see it.”

  Pike watches Rory’s broad back sway towards the bar, running with a bloody current of muscle under his sweatshirt. There are times he reminds Pike of all the good things Pike was when he was Rory’s age. Only about a hundred times better. And without any of the strangled hatred that turned it all bad.

  CHAPTER 18

  ~ Six hundred pounds of grisly fat, with slick infantile faces and girlish pale blue eyes.~

  “Cotton ain’t here,” Leroy says, shifting a case of Budweiser long-necks into the cooler behind the bar.

  Rory takes a stool. Derrick’s sitting at a table across from two fat rednecks, holding a hand of cards. One of the rednecks is wearing a Bengals ball cap, the other a Reds cap, but other than that they’re a duplicate six hundred pounds of grisly fat, with slick infantile faces and girlish blue eyes. They’re locals. Identical twins, one named Jesse and the other Jessie, both after Elvis’s stillborn twin brother. Their mother a bit on the liquor-addled side. “Guess I’ll have a drink and wait until he shows up.”

  “He probably ain’t gonna be in today.” Leroy tips one of the long-necks at Rory. “And, anyway, you don’t drink.”

  “I drink Coke.”

  “The only way I sell Coke is with bourbon in it. If you just want Coke, I gotta charge you for both.”

  “Just Coke.”

  Leroy shrugs and sprays out a Coke, then pours himself the bourbon. Rory sips his Coke and watches Leroy toss off the bourbon and get back to moving beer place to place. Rory doesn’t try to strike up conversation with him. Talking while working ain’t an option for the poor bastard.

  Derrick, over his cards, “ … he made her eat shit. I saw it crusted around her mouth when I was untying her.”

  Jesse, sorrowfully, clucking his tongue, “The poor child.”

  Jessie, enraged, “That’s nigger work. You can’t tell me anybody but a nigger would do a little girl like that.”

  Derrick, “I did him like a nigger, too. Tied him up with her ropesand took my Buck knife to him. Cut around about a silver dollar out of the top of his head, dug an elbow in and gave his mangy afro a good yank. Took a whole nugget of his scalp right off. Then stuffed it in his mouth.”

  Jesse, remorsefully, “I can’t imagine what that poor child must have endured.”

  Jessie, choked with hatred, “The coon got what he deserved. You should have tarred and feathered him, too. Set him on fire and strung him up from the highest tree.”

  Derrick, “Bet I’m the first man to scalp anybody in these parts for a long time, anyway.”

  Jesse, “I hope you didn’t leave him in pain.”

  Jessie, “I hope he didn’t leave that room alive.”

  Derrick’s laugh is a raspy explosion, a chainsaw hitting rebar. “You two dumb motherfuckers say the same goddamn thing every time you open your mouths.” There’s a long silence, then the sound of Derrick patting his pockets down. Then, “I’ll be damned, boys. Look who we got at the bar.”

  Rory relaxes his stiffening back by force of will.

  A shuffle, a chair falling on all fours, footsteps. Then a hand on Rory’s shoulder and Derrick’s stinking bourbon breath. “Cotton ain’t here, boy.”

  “I know it.”

  Derrick reaches over Rory’s shoulder and drops a bill on the bar. “Bourbon,” he says to Leroy. “And get him another one, on me.”

  Leroy pours Derrick’s bourbon, then sprays out Rory’s Coke.

  “Coke?” Derrick’s laugh shotguns out again. “You scared to drink liquor around me?”

  Rory eyes Derrick’s face in the mirror behind the bar. “I ain’t scared of you.”

  “That’s gonna be your mistake.” Derrick’s jagged jawline sets like its been hammered straight on an anvil. “There something you want to know about me, boy?”

  “Yeah,” Rory says. He watches Derrick’s shoulders in the mirror, his own loose and ready to move. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Derrick’s good humor returns, dropping over his face like a

  guillotine. He guffaws and slaps the bar. “Ain’t you been hearing me talk? You want to know who I am, you just ask any nigger in Cincinnati.”

  CHAPTER 19

  ~ Pike’d already have his .357 out, pistol whipping him until the skin hung off his face in bloody sheets.~

  It snows during the night, all night. Pike dreams of Mexico. He always does. Days, he doesn’t let himself think past the borders, nights he still has his room in Juarez over the bookseller’s shop, with the flower box on the window and the bathroom that never has hot water and always smells of urine. He dreams of the hot dusty sun wavering over the city, the plumes of exhaust that roll off the street through his glassless window. He dreams of waking each morning without the weight of where he’s from sitting on his chest like an animal.

  There was a bar across the street that ebbed and flowed with the changing shifts at the GE maquiladora. It had a real name, but it has a different dream name every time Pike revisits it. In between runs for Joaquin, Pike spent his time in that bar, sitting, reading, drinking. The bartender was a thin gray man who spoke English and shared his books with Pike. Some nights they argued about them long after the bar closed.

  Those were Pike’s good nights. On his bad nights he crossed the border into El Paso, trolling the honkeytonks, scoring cocaine, settling in some dive where he could blow lines off the bar. Those nights he drank too much, his eyes smoking in their sockets, his greasy black hair whipping around his head. Then he ran out of coke, every time. So he wanted to fight, every time. He insulted the local shitkickers, and if one made the mistake of protesting, he drove his head into a wall. Sometimes one’d pull a knife, but he was always too slow. Pike’d already have his .357 out, pistol-whipping him until the skin hung off him face in bloody sheets. Those nights he woke in a ditch.

  When Pike dreams of Mexico he always dreams of a girl. Tonightis no exception. Her name was Guillermin
a, and Pike dreams of a slow tourist train ride into the Sierra Madres where she never left his side. What a woman can talk you into. He dreams she’s in the bed next to him still.

  She’s not. He wakes to the one-room apartment he shares with Wendy, lying alone on the pallet he’s made himself on the floor. Snowflakes churn in the streetlights, the streetlamps splaying nickels of light through the frost on his window, over the floor and up the six-column radiator that sits against the wall, trickling runny heat out into the room.

  Wendy’s sleeping in his bed. She’s barely spoken to him since seeing Derrick, as though she’s found some connection between the two that she can’t disentangle from her mother’s death. Not that there’s any doubt but she’s right. The night before, they ate dinner at the Oxbow and Pike told her she’d be staying with Iris while he and Rory were in Cincinnati. She took it bad. Stood up from the booth, spat full in Rory’s face, walked out without looking back. She was in bed when Pike came in.

  He wants to raise himself up to look at her sleeping face, but he doesn’t. Instead, he turns on the police scanner he keeps by his pallet and smokes cigarettes quietly, listening to dead air, watching the morning light split like a wound through his window.

  She wakes finally, blinking her way into the cool morning air, her hand automatically roving over the threadbare quilt for Monster. His bony ribcage shudders and his eyes flutter open at her touch. He yawns sharp teeth and brushes his tongue across her hand.

  Neither of them bothers to look at Pike.

  BOOK II

  It’s a long ol’ road that never ends

  It’s a long ol’ road that never ends

  It’s a long ol’ trail that never ends

  It’s a bad wind that never changes.

  — Blind Lemon Jefferson

  CHAPTER 20

  ~ It makes it easier that way.~

  The truck rocks and sways down the two-lane highway like a sick lion running down an antelope. Pike sits with one hand on the wheel, the other smoothing down his beard. “How’d you know Derrick, anyway?” he asks.

  Rory doesn’t look at him. “Seen him at the Green Frog.”

  “I never seen you drink.”

  “I don’t. I go there to see Cotton.”

  Pike cracks his window, lights a Pall Mall with his Zippo. Snaps it shut. “That part of your plan to become a boxer?”

  “Maybe. Sometimes. Probably not.”

  It makes you heavy all over just thinking about being Rory’s age. “Try to remember there are other things in the world but fighting.”

  “I know it.”

  “Just in case it doesn’t work out.”

  Rory stares out the window over one of his fists. “The Toughman contest coming up. That’s it. Then if I’m done, I’m done. I’ll be the best carpenter you ever saw.”

  “Koreans call it bone rank,” Pike says. “That’s the difference between those who can and those who can’t. You don’t get where you are by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s something built into your bones. It makes it easier that way. You understand?”

  “Not a word.”

  Pike sticks the tip of his cigarette out of the window and lets the winter air whip the ashes off it. “Just this. I never knew anyone who fucked up their life good who didn’t think they were special. The holes they dug themselves into were exactly the shape of their dreams.”

  “That the wisdom you brought back from your years on the road?”

  “You are what you are. The best way to fuck up your life good is to try to be something else.”

  “Let’s leave it alone.” Rory sucks air through his fist. “Why don’t you tell me what we’re supposed to be doing instead?”

  “Krieger says he knows Wendy. I want to know from where.” Pike uses his index finger to resettle his glasses on his nose. “I’m guessing it was through her mother. I figure if I run down enough people who knew Wendy’s mother, sooner or later I’ll find the connection.”

  “Did you know her well enough to do that? I never even knew you had a daughter until Wendy showed up.”

  “I barely knew her at all. I’ll pay you the same as I pay you at work. And you can quit anytime. No hard feelings. Say the word and I’ll have you on the next bus out of Cincinnati.”

  “I told you last night I’m in. Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That’ll teach you to keep your damn mouth shut.”

  Pike looks at him, cigarette smoke wafting out of his beard as if exhaled by the pores in his face.

  “That’s a Hemingway quote.” Rory grins. “I got it from Wendy. It kind of fits, don’t it, even if I wasn’t drunk?”

  CHAPTER 21

  ~ Niggertown.~

  “Hell of a neighborhood,” Rory says, watching a scabrous dog sniff at a shitstained patch of snow under a long row of disintegrating brick homes, each of them leaning precariously at a different dilapidated angle.

  “Niggertown.” Pike feeds a cigarette butt through his cracked window.

  Rory winces. “I just meant it looks kind of rough. Like there’s some drug action, for sure.”

  “Niggertown,” Pike repeats, as if they were again saying the same thing. “Pop the glove box.”

  Rory swings the lid down with a clank. “Think we need them?” he asks, eyeing the compartment.

  “Give me the big one,” Pike says, “the one underneath is yours.”

  Rory hands Pike the stainless steel .357, holding it by the barrel like it’s something distasteful. Pike takes it by the grip and wipes the barrel on his jeans to take off Rory’s fingerprints, then slides it in his shoulder holster. “Take yours.”

  Rory pulls a Glock 19 out of the glove compartment. He cradles it in both hands, holstered.

  “You know how to use it?”

  Rory shakes his head.

  Pike takes the pistol from him and shakes the holster off. He jacks the slide, reholsters it, hands it back to Rory. “You pull the thing that sticks out on the bottom. We call it a trigger.”

  Rory loosens his belt with one hand. The gun’s heavier than he thinks it should be. Strange, square, cumbersome, he can’t seem to hold it any way that isn’t awkward. He threads the holster throughhis belt, smoothes his sweatshirt over the bulge. “I’m not sure a gun’s the way I want to go.”

  “Then don’t pull it. But it’s a damn sight better to have it and not need it, than the other way around.”

  CHAPTER 22

  ~ Her eyes like black nailheads hammered into hard black wood.~

  Maude opens the door wearing a frayed purple housecoat, looking smaller, more shriveled in, like a pomegranate going old. “Well,” she says, “you must have known I was making coffee.”

  “I’ve got questions,” Pike says.

  “Come on in.” She turns and shuffles creakily down the dimly lit entrance hall towards the bright kitchen at the end. Pike follows, stepping around the stacks of books that line the hallway. There are hundreds of them, angled up the walls in reckless piles. Everything from leatherbound tomes on the settling of Kentucky to paperback bestsellers with titles like Dead Yellow Women. Rory tiptoes behind him like he’s scared to disturb the air, like any foreign current might start the books dominoing to the floor. Then they’re in the kitchen. The floor tiled white with green, the green walls paled with nicotine.

  “Sit down,” Maude says, gesturing at the vinyl-topped kitchen table. They do. She fumbles three mugs out of a cabinet and pours coffee out of a steel stovetop coffee maker, then sinks into a chair, letting out a hoarse sigh. She breathes heavily for a minute or two before she asks, “cream or sugar?”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” Pike says, and he means it. He ain’t entirely sure she’d survive having to stand up again. “Black’s fine.”

  “For me too,” Rory says, taking up his cup. “Thank you, ma’am,"

  “You’re welcome.” She eyes him. “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Rory, ma’am.”

  “Ma’am, he says.” She chu
ckles. “Were you in the military?”

  “No, ma’am. Just habit.”

  Maude flicks her eyes over at Pike. “Not one you picked up from him, I’ll bet.”

  “No, ma’am,” Rory says, grinning, “not from him. From my dad. He always told me it didn’t cost nothing to be polite.”

  “I’ve got questions,” Pike says.

  “You said that.”

  “I’m looking for a girl named Dana. Sarah used to run around with her.”

  Maude pulls the long stub of a Camel out of a heavy glass ashtray filled with long stubs and shakes her head. “I never learned much about Sarah’s friends.”

  “She was a hooker,” Pike says, as though that might jog her memory. “Same as Sarah.” He sees Rory start.

  Maude nods, sparking a kitchen match on the chrome edge of the table and lighting her cigarette. “I figured that. But Sarah and I traveled in different circles.”

  Pike watches her wrinkled face tighten and warp around her cigarette. She watches him back, her eyes like black nailheads hammered into black wood. “How about a man named Krieger?” he tries, “Derrick Krieger?”

  “Derrick Krieger?” Maude blows smoke at the ceiling. “What in God’s name are y’all looking for him for?”

  Pike doesn’t know well enough what he’d be lying about to bother. “He says he knows Wendy.”

  “Well. Don’t let him get ahold of her.”

  Rory’s tan forehead wrinkles in confusion and his eyes flit from Maude to Pike, then back. “How come you know Krieger?” he asks.

  “Krieger’s the policeman that caused the riots.” She looks at their blank faces for a long minute. Then for another like they might be fooling her. Then she shrugs. “I guess it ain’t news everywhere. He was setting a boy up for a drug bust and when the boy figured out he was being set up, he ran. Krieger shot him twice in the back. Then once more in the head, so close it set his hair on fire. You couldn’t leave your house for almost a week. He’s on leave while the department investigates. Him and his partner.”