PIKE (7 page)

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.

T
he 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?”

“H
ell 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.”

M
aude 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 chuckles. “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.”

“What’s his partner’s name?” Pike asks.

“I don’t know anything about that. The papers barely bother with him.”

Pike smoothes down his beard, thinking.

Maude eyes him, letting smoke drift out of her wizened nose. “That what you were looking for?”

“Partly.” Pike nods for a minute. “I think I owe you thanks,” he begins again slowly. “Last time I saw you, you told me to come back and you’d tell me why you buried my daughter.”

“You don’t owe me nothing,” Maude says. “I didn’t really bury your daughter, I just told the folks from the county where to do it. That’s what I told you. To come back and I’d tell you why I had her buried her where I had her buried.”

Pike looks at her.

“Cincinnati’s an old city, Mr. Pike, older than most people know. It was founded by a band of ex-slaves, poor whites and Indians. They called themselves the Ben Ishmael Tribe. They were wandering tinkers and minstrels, and Cincinnati was one of the stops on their route. It was only after they’d cleared the land for themselves that the white settlers moved in to claim it. Did you know that?”

“There’s a whole pile of things I don’t know,” Pike says.

Maude doesn’t look surprised. “They used to caravan between here and Indianapolis. Even after Cincinnati was civilized they still used it as a stopping point, but they were made to camp down on the shore of the Ohio with the boatmen and the dockworkers. My grandfather used to take his pots down to their camp for mending. He said there was everything in the world down there. The dirty rich smell of the plants the Indians and Africans burnt to keep themselves clean, the creeping sound of Scotch Irish fiddles, the dirge-like cant of the Muslims intoning back to Mecca, everything. He said they kept fires burning, too, all around the edge of the camp. Fires burning with some kind of grimy wood smeared in pitch. He said walking through that greasy smoke was like walking into some other world. Time ran backwards when you stepped into that smoke.”

“They still around?” Rory asks.

She shakes her head. “That was at the beginning of the century, and there was plenty of talk about putting mongrel races out of existence.

As I read, they were penned up in roughcut forts on the bank of the Ohio and army doctors were sent in to hack out the women’s uteruses.”

“A nation only regenerates itself on a heap of corpses,” Pike says.

“Saint Just,” Maude says.

Pike raises his eyebrows.

“I’d forgot about them for years. But I was reading a book on them when Sarah died. And I remembered how she showed up in Over-the-Rhine like she had some kind of claim on it. She had a Scotch Irish fiddle she played, too. So when the men came to take her body I asked them to bury her on McCulloch Hill. With the way names get set on things around here, I figured it had to have something to do with the Ishmael tribe.” She shrugs. “It was a whim.”

“I didn’t know she played the fiddle,” Pike says.

“She used to say it reminded her of you.” Maude looks at him. “But then most things in her mind circled back to you if you followed them long enough.”

Rory rocks back and forth on the hind legs of his chair, off somewhere else completely. “How come I never heard of them? The Ben Ishmaels.”

“Places swallow stories,” Maude says. “Especially stories that nail it down as what it doesn’t want to be.”

“You said you never saw Krieger coming around,” Pike says. “Do you know anybody who might have? Anybody in the neighborhood who might’ve kept an eye out?”

Maude sticks a fresh cigarette in her mouth and fingers a piece of tobacco off her lips and wipes it on the rim of the ashtray. “You might try those two boys who live in the house on the other side of hers. Number 402, I think. They look to be a little of her type.”

Pike raps the table twice and stands abruptly. “Thank you.” When she starts to rise to show them the door, he raises his hand for her to stay seated. “We can find our own way out.”

N
umber 402’s brick is going green with mold and the lopsided porch rambles away from its pillars, one corner of it propped up with cement blocks. A tattered chain link dog kennel runs down the side, the cement floor smeared all over with fresh dog shit and dirt. Pike raps three times on the door.

“What do you make of her story?” Rory asks. “About the Ben Ishmaels?”

“You stick your arm into any of these local histories, you’ll come out shit up to your elbow.”

“I could tell you didn’t think much of it.”

“It was her using my daughter as a bookmark I didn’t think much of.” Pike raps on the door again to no more response than he got the first time. He thumbs his glasses up his nose and unholsters his .357.

“We’re starting with the guns out?”

Pike holds a hand up for him to be silent. Movement inside. A scuffle, a crash and the quick harsh rasp of a dog barking. Pike rears back and kicks the door in.

“Should’ve figured that was coming,” Rory says.

The house is a double of Maude’s. Pike takes the dingy hallway in three strides. Rory follows, kicking through mounds of garbage, fumbling the Glock clear of his pants. A huge bald man huddles in a wheelchair at the kitchen table, his eyes wobbling in his head like bulbs of fat. Next to him, a kid with a wispy blonde goatee scratches through a pile of cigarette packs and Black Label cans. Pike plants the muzzle of his .357 about two inches from the kid’s head, but he keeps scrabbling through the trash, oblivious, his brow furrowed in concentration. Then he finds what he’s looking for and spins, holdingan electric stun gun at Pike, electricity arcing blue between the metal prongs.