PIKE (6 page)

“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.

D
errick 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 century 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.

“Y
ou 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.

“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.

T
he 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.

“C
otton 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.”

I
t 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 Guillermina, 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.