PIKE (8 page)

Pike thumbs the .357’s hammer back, unimpressed.

“I’d drop it,” Rory says. “He’s been looking for somebody to shoot all day.” The stun gun clatters on the tile floor and Rory winks at the kid. “Good choice.”

“What do y’all want with us?” The kid’s wearing faded blue jeans and a filthy white T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. “We ain’t got nothing to rob.”

“Nothing?” Pike picks a syringe off the table and tosses it on the floor.

“We ain’t got none left.”

“We ain’t here for your smack.” Pike raps the kid’s forehead with the muzzle of his gun. “We’re here to talk.” He cracks the kid on the forehead again, raising a welt. “Now.”

The kid throws his hands up between the gun and his face. “Jesus, man,” he squawks. “What the fuck do you want to talk about?”

“Start with your name.”

“Bogey.”

“Suits you.” Pike flicks his eyes at the idiot. His wheelchair fidgets back and forth in short jerks and a spit bubble wavers on his mouth like a water puddle in an earthquake. “You?”

“His name’s Wood,” Bogey says. “He don’t talk.”

Wood nods his fat head violently, the fat under his chin jiggling like pudding.

“Where’s the dog?” Pike asks.

“Dog?” Bogey says innocently.

Pike barrel-raps him on top of the head again, spotting the welt with blood. “Jesus!” Bogey shrieks and points across the kitchen. “She’s right there.”

Pike looks. Rory looks. The room stands still.

She’s a smallish black pit bull, a year or so from being a pup. She cowers in a narrow alley between the refrigerator and the grease-crusted stove, whimpering and rasping at the air with her tongue. One of her front legs is twisted impossibly back and she’s bleeding from a ragged gash on top of her head, the floor around her layered withdog blood and shit. Whatever they’ve been doing to the poor bitch, they’ve been doing it a long time.

Rory tosses his Glock into his left hand and slaps Wood across the face with a hard right palm. Wood’s head rollicks furiously on his fat plug of a torso and tears spring into his eyes.

Pike flashes him an appreciative grin. “You’re picking up on this.”

Rory stares Wood in the face. Wood snuffles and chokes, trying to hold back his tears, but he can’t. His jaw drops, his eyes squint shut and he cuts loose with a long wet wail. Rory reaches back to let him have another palm.

“Hold up,” Bogey screams hysterically. “Hold up.”

Rory looks at him.

“That ain’t right. He ain’t but a kid, man. Up here.” Bogie taps his temple. “He’s retarded. He don’t know no better.”

Rory turns to him. “You do?”

“Hey, man, we was only having fun.” Bogie’s face is pinched and cringing. “No big deal.”

“Let’s see it.”

“All right, man.” Bogie shuffles on the floor for the stun gun, his eyes fixed on Rory. “Watch the dog,” he says, and crawls to her on all fours through the shit and the blood. Rory watches the dog. Bogie punches a button and jams the probes into the dog’s ribs.

Her jaw gapes and her head vibrates, flinging dog blood and spit in stringy arcs across the kitchen. Her eyes roll in her sockets, her broken paws pound an electrified tap dance on the kitchen tile. Wood’s round face explodes in a huge smile and he bangs on the arm of his wheelchair, erupting in a high-pitched screech of joy.

Bogie pulls the stun gun back. The dog collapses on the floor like her bones have disintegrated under her skin. “See, it ain’t no big deal.” Bogies stands and his eyes flinch up at Rory’s hand. “I kind of think she likes it.”

Rory swallows thickly and his gun hand drops limply to his side, the way a man run through in a duel might drop his sword.

“You knew my daughter.” Pike’s voice is low and level. “Her name was Sarah, and we know you knew her.”

Bogie scratches the back of his head. “No, I don’t believe I do.”

Pike swings his .357 on the dog and pulls the trigger. The muzzle blast haloes his fist in fire and the bitch’s head sprays blood vapor and bone chunks. Woods shrieks wildly and smacks at his ears as though the boom of the handgun is an insect swarm he can slap away. Pike levels the .357 at his chest. “Your friend’s next,” he says to Bogie. “Then you. I’m looking forward to you.”

Bogie’s chin bobs up and down frantically. “She was a hooker. Used to live across the street. We had some of the same friends. She come over a couple times and partied with us. She’s dead now.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else. I barely knew her.”

“You said you had mutual friends. Who?”

“Bitch named Dana.”

“I know Dana. Where do we find her?”

Bogie hesitates, weighing his answer. Rory takes the stun gun out of his hand. He turns it over and finds the power button. “Hey, man,” Bogie says, eyeing him. “There ain’t no need for that. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

Rory grabs the top of Bogie’s head in one hand and rams the probes against his throat with the other, crushing in his windpipe. “I know where her mom lives,” Bogie coughs out. “We broke in once, stole her TV. I can take you there.”

Pike holsters his .357 and pulls a cigarette out of his pocket. He lights it with his brass lighter and snaps his lighter shut. Then nods at Rory.

Rory punches the power button. Bogie’s head lurches forward, then back. The tendons in his neck hop and squirm to the tune of the juice and he tries to scream, but he can’t. He gurgles on his saliva for a second or two. Then collapses on the shit-covered floor, pawing his neck and coughing, his face the color of a bruise.

“You’re coming with us to Dana’s mother’s,” Pike says. “If she ain’t there I’m gonna shoot you in the face and dump you in a ditch.”

Bogie hacks at the saliva in his windpipe, his face blotched all over with vicious red patches and all sickly white underneath. He tries to talk, can’t.

“You understand?” Pike kicks him in the ribs with the point of his cowboy boot. Not lightly.

Bogie yelps and claws his side. “I can’t leave Woods. He can’t take care of himself.”

“Sure he can.” Pike boots the dog’s food bowl across the room. It knocks up against Wood’s wheelchair, sloshing runny shitlike dog food onto the floor. “Some food for you, you dumb motherfucker.”

Wood’s big face splits with sobs like a canvas awning splitting under the weight of a rainstorm.

D
errick parks on the side of the mountain road on a turnaround overlooking Nanticonte. Devil’s Elbow, they call the spot, but Derrick doesn’t know why. It’s where he comes to think. Always has been, ever since he was old enough to drive. He gets out and leans on the car and looks down on the small town, the town’s buildings little more than darkened smudges in the swirling snow and the coal smoke, the power cables drawing out into the mountains like a map grid, and then lost in the trees, as though looking at an old photograph. He cracks a beer and drinks. The town looks to have been stuck down in these mountains since the mountains got stuck here, to have become a part of the landscape. And it has, in a way. Nothing changes. Fifteen years from the end of the twentieth century, but you sure as hell can’t tell it here. The women with their hive hairdos, the men with their buzzcuts, the kids growing theirs long, wearing Rolling Stones shirts, smoking reefer.

You can get so far away from where you’re from you can’t ever come back. Not entirely. You can break all ties with your past, you only have to be willing to carve a chunk out of yourself you won’t mind missing the rest of your life. And you have to be ready to deal with whatever kind of shit the holes’ll fill up with. The old lady long dead now, and the old man in a home, struck stupid with senility. Drooling and shitting on himself, completely shed of the only thing he ever had to brag about, his son the war hero. Derrick finishes his beer, tosses the can in the ditch. He was a good father. Well. You can get away from a good upraising. You can get away from most anything if you work at it hard enough.

Derrick reaches through the side window of the Monte Carlo tobreak out another beer. Half drunk already. What now? Buy a little house in this shithole town and settle down? Get fat on beer until the heart gives out altogether?

Well, why not?

He opens the beer and looks out on the town and spits. Then closes his eyes, as if exhausted from the exertion.

P
ike’s smelled a few things in his life he could’ve gone without smelling. Shithouses in August, busted refrigerators full of meat, junkies with a year-long skim of filth on their skin to keep the heroin from escaping through their pores. And a roomful of broiled Mexicans, stuffed together and decaying, the stench rising like a great filthy bear and wrapping Pike in its greasy paws. He doesn’t like to think of that one, and anyway, stuffed into the cab of his truck with Bogie anything you try to think gets run out of your mind by the stench. Pike lights a cigarette and tries to burn it out by inhaling the smoke through his mouth and nose at the same time. It doesn’t work. He turns on the radio as if that might help.

“Nice place you had there,” Rory says to Bogie, rolling down the window.

“Shit, it ain’t mine,” Bogie says. “That’s all Woods. I’m just nursing the motherfucker ‘cause his daughter’s off getting married.”

“Bet she’ll be impressed with the job you’re doing too.”

“Hey, I take care of the motherfucker. Anyway, I got my own problems. I got a place on the West side. Got a woman, too.”

“And she let you go to take care of your friend? Being the loving type you are.”

“Shit, I’m loving. I keep her grass trim. Keep her lawn wet.”

Rory looks at him.

“I plow her land. I know how to clean out her backyard.”

“One more,” Rory says, “and I’ll shoot you.” Pike thinks he’s joking until he sees Rory’s hand on the Glock.

Bogie doesn’t notice. “Yeah, sure. Anyway, she set my trunk outdoors a couple weeks ago.” His voice turns woeful. “Her family puther up to it. Bunch of backwards hillbilly motherfuckers. They don’t like me being with her neither, saying I ain’t good enough. Ain’t that some shit? Bunch of shitass rednecks straight out of the hollow like some kind of apes crawling out of the mud. And I ain’t good enough.”

“Hard to see what they might have against you,” Pike says.

“Fuck you. Anyway, one of them cocksuckers, her brother, came up on me, started talking shit about this and that and how I wasn’t fit for his sister. Pissed me off, so I knocked about half his teeth out with a length of pipe. She got all salty over it. Said me being around wasn’t good for the kids. I ain’t seen none of them for almost a month.” His eyes water and he puts his hand up to them. “Shit,” he says. “I hate crying in front of motherfuckers.”

“How many kids you got?” Rory asks.

“Two. Girls. I’m telling you, I can’t live without them. When I’m asleep I’m dreaming about them. When I’m awake I get no rest.”

“Get a job,” Pike says. “Clean up.”

Bogie shakes his head mournfully. “I got habits, man. There ain’t no getting away from it. I can only be what I am. If I could be something else I would.”

“Well, it’s a hard row to hoe,” Rory says.

“It is that. Sixty miles through rock, forty more through sand.”

“Whyn’t you two shut the fuck up before I start crying?” Pike says.

Bogie clutches his stomach and farts loudly, filling the cab with a sick rumble. “I been drinking beer all day. I need food,” he whines.

Rory sticks his whole head out the window, his Adam’s apple spasming. Pike brakes the truck at a cross street. “Which way?”

“Left. Then take a right at the light. Dana’s old lady lives over in Hyde Park, we got a ways to go.” Bogie’s stomach makes a sound like a bull elephant being garroted. “I was so hungry once I ate a robin.” He farts again. “Oh Jesus.”

“Please stop,” Rory croaks.

Pike wheels the truck into a restaurant parking lot. The building’s whitewashed and stained all over with black snow-water and dirt. The sign says Bar & Grill, nothing else. “One burger,” Pike says. “But I swear to God, if you fart one more time I’ll beat you to death with my bare hands.”

T
he door rings open into a dark, dingy, windowless room with no grill to be seen. Nor customers. Behind the bar, a bone-thin, balding and bespectacled bartender in a Motley Crue T-shirt watches them. “You got any food?” Pike says.

“We got food.” He nods at a door at the back of the bar. “Got three Mexicans in the kitchen.”

“We don’t eat Mexicans.”

The bartender looks at him. “They do the cooking. That’s what I meant.”

“Well, give me three burgers. And some fries. Can I get it to go?”

The bartender’s writing his order down. He looks up. “Sure.”

Pike turns to Rory. “Take this little fucker to the bathroom and don’t let him out until he’s clean.”

“I’m right here,” Bogie says. “You ain’t got to talk about me in the third person. Motherfucker.”

Rory grips him by the back of his neck and shoves him down the bar towards the sign at the back of the bar. “Them bathrooms are for customers only,” the bartender says in a creaky voice, peering at Pike over his hooknose, his eyes watery behind his glasses.

Pike drops a bill on the counter. “One of the burgers is his.”

The bartender purses his lips and picks up the bill. “I’ll tell the Mexicans to get on your order.”

“Fine. You got a payphone?”

The bartender returns Pike’s change, his lips squirming like night-crawlers in the hot sun. “Outside the front door.”

Pike steps outside and stands in front of the pay phone. He stands for a minute, lighting a cigarette and watching traffic waffle throughthe dirty snow. Then he rolls his shoulders and grins a lean grin, the cigarette smoke playing in the winter wind, rising like a dissipating halo over his head. He picks up the pay phone and dials. A one-eared cat slinks around the side of the restaurant and sidles up to Pike, mewling. Pike gives it the toe of his cowboy boot.