The Drifter (4 page)

She called after him, “And will you please take that awful dog to the pound?”

Peter smiled.

He’d wondered when she would bring up the dog.

P
eter woke at first light and checked the clock stuck to the dashboard. He put the Army .45 back under the bench seat and stretched in his sleeping bag. He could see his breath in the air, and Dinah Johnson’s half-built porch on its temporary supports, just across the parking strip.

He found that he liked the neighborhood. It was in the heart of the city, old houses built close together, and more than a little funky. There was a bungalow on the way to the lumberyard that had planted the tail end of a pink Cadillac in its yard as sculpture. The locals were a mix of black, white, and all shades of brown. College students and working-class people, freshly minted hipsters over their heads in old fixer-uppers, and artists and hippie holdouts turning their homes into giant art projects.

Nobody bothered a guy sleeping in his truck.

He’d tried to rent a hotel room on his first night on the road. It was a test of the experiment. The static, not even a hum when he was on foot in the Cascades, and barely a whisper when driving on narrow back roads, began to fizz in the back of his head as he rolled into the parking lot.

The sparks flared in the lobby, and turned to lightning bolts as
he walked the long mazelike hallway to his room. It was the enclosure of the walls, but also the fluorescent lights and the chemical smell of the cheap carpet. The room’s tiny window didn’t even open. He managed a quick shower with his heart racing, his whole body clenched like a fist, somehow resisting the urge to hurl the TV out the window and burn the place down. He got outside fast, still dripping, barely dressed, head aching like it was split open.

Maybe he was just allergic to the modern world.

After that, he slept in the truck.

It was the big glass of the windshield, he thought, that kept the static low. Not as good as a canopy of stars in the Cascades, but he didn’t mind it, even as autumn slid downhill toward winter. And he could roll down his window whenever he wanted.

He was used to waking up cold and hungry in the mountains.

In fact, he liked it.

It made him feel strong, ready. Like his motor was running.

Like he could do almost anything.

—

The big dog whined softly in the back. When it changed position the whole vehicle rocked on its springs. Even after Peter had poured the cooled broth into its mouth the night before, it hadn’t wanted to get into that dark, unfamiliar box full of strange smells. He had to knock it over and climb inside carrying the damn thing in his arms like a giant growling baby.

What would it cost to feed a dog like that?

When he bought the truck in California on an early stateside rotation, the pickup bed was rusted out. He’d replaced it with a mahogany cargo box, five feet wide, nine feet long, with a marine plywood roof high enough for Peter to walk under, as long as he hunched over a little. It was also, Peter had to admit, sort of an art
project. There were windows on both sides of the cargo box, and a skylight in the roof, all salvaged from a wrecked sailboat. The interior was finished with custom maple cabinets, neatly organized. Places for his tools, a cooler for groceries, a hook for a lantern, room to roll out his sleeping bag if he had to. Home for a wandering jack-of-all-trades.

Of course, as it turned out, he couldn’t actually sleep back there. The walls were too close.

The dog whined again.

His jeans were stuffed into the bottom of his sleeping bag to keep them warm. He pulled them up before shucking the sleeping bag. The last thing he needed was a neighbor calling the police because of the naked guy. With bare feet stuffed into his unlaced combat boots, he got out of the truck and walked around back in a cold November wind.

He opened the cargo-box door carefully, in case the dog had gotten loose. It shied away from him, but at least it wasn’t growling. Peter stepped up and checked the rope holding the stick in its jaws. The rope was fine, but the dog had chewed the shit out of the stick. White oak, one of the hardest woods out there. Almost two inches thick yesterday, there was a lot less of it today where those teeth had done their work.

It was hard to tie the leash to a tree while the hundred-fifty-pound animal was trying like hell to get away from him.

He was going to have to do something about the dog, and soon.

But first, coffee.

He pulled out the backpacking stove, set it on the parking strip with his camp chair, and fired up the old tin percolator. With real cream from his cooler, it tasted pretty good. Real cream was a luxury he didn’t have in the mountains, where he’d stirred instant cocoa into instant Folgers, although he’d learned to love the sugary
rush. Anything would be better than battlefield coffee, made by pouring a single-serve packet of instant in your mouth dry, then chasing it with plastic-tasting water from a sun-heated bottle. He wasn’t ever going to drink that again.

He wasn’t going to eat another MRE, either. Only real food.

After cooking up eggs scrambled with sausage and sliced jalapeños and leftover rice in his battered frypan, he set aside half the food to cool and wrapped the rest in a tortilla. Then sat and ate and watched Dinah’s house and thought about the four hundred thousand dollars and pale pliable rectangles found in a suitcase.

It wasn’t modeling clay. It was plastic explosive. Peter could tell by the chemical smell. His platoon had used it for everything from breaching doors to blowing up enemy ordnance. Four bricks wasn’t a huge amount. But he was hard-pressed to think of a good reason for having it in Milwaukee. When it got dark, he’d hide it under the frame of the truck.

When the coffee was gone, he cleaned up his temporary kitchen, then cornered the dog with the pan of cooled eggs and sausage. He’d picked out the jalapeños. The animal calmed down when Peter started pushing the food past the stick and those outrageous teeth into the side of the dog’s mouth with his finger. The dog worked its tongue to swallow, not really resisting, and not growling at all.

Hard to growl while you’re eating, Peter figured.

Then he took the dog for a walk, trying not to feel too silly as the dog pulled him down the sidewalk, sniffing at every tree and bush. He was a little worried that someone would confront him and complain about the stick in the dog’s mouth, but everyone they approached crossed the street to avoid them. The dog hadn’t gotten any better looking overnight. It hadn’t gotten any smaller, either. And it still stank.

Maybe Dinah had a hose.

Maybe later. It was seven thirty and time for work.

—

The wood posts went in quickly on the concrete footings he’d poured the day before. Charlie and Miles left for school, waving cautiously but giving the dog a wide berth. Dinah went out the side door toward the garage on the back alley, avoiding conversation. She waved, then lifted her wrist to tap her watch, reminding him of their afternoon appointment.

By late morning the new beam and floor joists were in and the frame was pleasingly square and straight and true. Peter stopped to reheat the coffee. He was sitting on a sawhorse with the cup warming his hands when a black SUV drove past. It was a Ford, one of the big ones, and fairly new.

A few minutes later it drove past again, this time more slowly, the driver peering out the window. He paused a few houses down, then backed up and stopped in front of the house. The window rolled down. A wide-shouldered black guy peered out at Peter, the porch, and the dog, tied again to the tree in the yard.

Peter waited.

The driver got out, left his door open and the SUV still running, and sauntered over. He wore a gleaming hip-length black leather coat and a black Kangol cap backward on his bald head. In his late thirties or early forties, he was a big guy and he thought that meant something, walking with a distinct strut. A starburst of scars marked the right side of his face, and his right earlobe was missing.

He stopped on the sidewalk, well away from the dog, which was suddenly growling again. “What’s with that crazy-looking dog, mouth all tied up?”

Dinah had thought her house was being watched. She hadn’t said it, but she was scared.

“You must be from the pound,” said Peter, “come for the dog. It was living under the old porch. Hang on a minute and let me get that rope.”

“Naw, man, that’s not me,” said the scarred man, taking a step back. “I’m just a friend of the lady lives here.”

Peter kept talking as he stood and walked to the tree. “I’ll tell you, that dog’s been nothing but trouble. I’ll be glad when it’s gone.” The dog still shied away from him but no longer ran to the end of its leash. “Creeps me out,” said Peter, “that animal staring at me all day.” He untied the rope and held it out to the man. “You wouldn’t believe what I had to do to get that stick in there.” The dog stood behind the protection of Peter’s legs, peering out at the man and growling louder.

It hadn’t growled at young Charlie or his brother when they left for school.

It hadn’t growled when Peter took it for a walk.

All morning, it had watched people walking down the street, and it hadn’t growled at any of them.

The scarred man took another step back, unbuttoning his leather coat, saying, “I told you, that’s not my fuckin’ dog.” The scars flushed pink on his face as he pulled his coat open and put his hand on the butt of the shiny chrome automatic pistol tucked into the front of his pants. “Now tie that ugly motherfucker up again before I got to do something.”

The pistol was smaller, maybe a .32, and sized for concealment. Big Jimmy Johnson, artist of the swivel-mounted .50, would have called it a girlie gun. But it would still put a hole in you.

Clearly this guy was not worried about the cops. The newer gun laws sometimes made it hard to distinguish between armed thugs
and citizens exercising their rights, but Peter had some idea which of the two he was talking to.

“Okay, sure,” said Peter, nodding. “Hey, it’s not your dog.” He went to tie it up again.

The scarred man made a show of closing his coat and adjusting it on his shoulders. Not what Peter would have done. It just made the gun harder for the man to get at.

“So. Where’d you find that dog, Mister Fixit Man?”

The tone always changed when someone showed a weapon, thought Peter. This was no longer a friendly conversation. The Army .45 was inside Peter’s tool bag, three steps away. But taking it out wouldn’t get him any new information.

“It was under the old porch,” said Peter, watching the scarred man from the corner of his eye. “I’m just doing some work on the house. I guess the husband died.”

The man shook his head. “Damn shame,” he said without any feeling at all. He pointed at the porch with his chin. “How much you charge for this? Must be expensive, huh?”

Now we’re getting to it, thought Peter. “No charge,” he said. “U.S. Marine Corps is picking up the tab. Death benefit.”

“No shit?” said the man. “I always thought the lady was rich.”

“Can’t tell by me,” Peter said. “She didn’t even offer me a glass of water.”

“You find anything else under there?” asked the man.

“Sure,” said Peter. “Scrap lumber, garbage, old carpet. It’s all on the curb.”

“That all? Nothing worth anything?”

“In this neighborhood?” Peter laughed. “Most of these people are just trying to stay ahead of their bills. They’re not hiding gold bars under the front porch. Especially not with this ugly dog living there.”

“No shit?” said the man. “Dog was living there? Under the porch? Not no owner?”

“Yeah,” said Peter. “Eating all the neighborhood cats. They were afraid it was going to start on the kids. What’d you say your name was?”

“I didn’t,” said the man. “And I wasn’t here. You never saw me. Understand?” He patted the coat at his waistband, where the chrome .32 menaced his nuts.

“Sure,” said Peter. “I have to get back to work. I need to get on to my next project.”

“You just fuckin’ do that,” said the scarred man.

And he climbed into the big black SUV and left.

The man hadn’t told Peter much. But Peter had learned a few things anyway.

A man with a gun was watching the house.

A man who knew about the money. Probably knew about the plastic explosive. But didn’t know where they might be.

And the dog didn’t like him.

It would be interesting to see where this thing went next.

T
he porch floor was laid and Peter was packing up his tools when Dinah came home from work, right on time.

Peter got the feeling she was the kind of woman who was always on time. Had her bills in a little accordion folder, kept her checkbook balanced, and flossed her teeth every night. But not uptight about it. Just organized. Knew what she wanted. Working to make it happen.

She parked her old Toyota on the street and went up the front steps with her enormous handbag, bouncing a little on her toes, testing the strength of the deck. She peered at the skirting, at the dog-proof padlock on the sturdy new hatch cover.

She looked at Peter. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“Please,” he said. “Call me Peter. Have you changed your mind about the money?”

She sighed. “No. But I’ll need a few minutes to change. I won’t be long.”

When she came out, she wore tailored black pants and a severe, elegant cream-colored blouse under a gorgeous long black wool coat. The nurse’s scrubs had made her seem capable and strong. The change of clothes made her look entirely different. Full of
authority, but also slightly removed. Like the VP at Goldman Sachs who had met the interns on their first day.

He had the dog in his arms, carrying it to the truck. It was struggling, but at least he didn’t have to tie its legs this time.

Dinah watched silently, an unreadable look on her face.

“What?” he said. It wasn’t easy to carry a hundred and fifty pounds of unhappy dog. It tossed its head back and forth, bashing Peter in the head with the stick still tied in its mouth. “Argh. Stop it.” The dog definitely needed a bath. Another night and Peter wouldn’t be able to get the stink out of his truck. Or his clothes.

The ugly, unfortunately, was permanent.

She smiled at him for the first time. It was a small smile, like a patch of sun on an overcast day, but it was a smile. “For some reason,” she said, “I can’t quite believe you will take that dog to the pound.”

Peter put the dog down in the truck and had to give it a push to get it away from the door. It stood looking at him, whining softly, when he closed the door.

“Sure I am,” he said. “A big, smelly, mean, ugly dog will always find a good home.”

She laughed softly, a brief musical sound. “I can see why James liked you, Lieutenant.”

Peter walked around and opened her door. An officer and a gentleman. It wasn’t that she expected it, but something about her seemed to encourage that kind of behavior in Peter. In all men, he suspected.

She was tall enough that she didn’t have to hitch herself up onto the bench seat. She’d left her enormous purse inside, but had put the money in a brown paper grocery sack, folded the top, and tied it up with string. The money filled less than half the bag. She held it on her lap with both hands.

“Are you sure you want to bring that along?” Peter asked. “We can always come back and get it.”

Dinah shook her head. “I’ll leave it in the truck until I’m certain. But I don’t want to have to make a second trip.” There was something there she didn’t want to talk about, and he didn’t push her.

He turned the key and let the engine warm up for a minute. She sat with her spine perfectly straight, looking around. “This truck is an antique, isn’t it?”

Peter gave her a look of mock outrage. “The word is ‘classic,’” he said. “Nineteen sixty-eight Chevy C20 pickup, at your service. Very few original parts.”

She looked at the polished green metal door covers and instrument panel. The floor mats were clean and the seat covers new. The slot for the old AM radio was filled with a piece of fine-grained walnut carefully fitted in place and varnished to a high gloss. The shifter knob was a glass ball with a hula dancer trapped inside. Peter couldn’t take credit for the shifter knob. The hula dancer had come with the truck.

“I didn’t think it would be so orderly,” she said. “Or quite so clean.”

“It’s easier to get stuff done if you know where your tools are.” Although Peter had to admit it had been a few days since he’d showered. And he was starting to smell of dog. With Dinah sitting beside him, he was acutely aware of it.

Now she was looking at him with those glacier-blue eyes.

“How did you become a Marine? Jimmy said you studied economics in college.”

“When I was in high school, my dad was building a giant vacation house for a bond trader from Chicago. He told me that economics explained how the world really worked. I liked that idea, that I could learn how the world really worked.”

He laughed softly at himself.

“It seems pretty naïve now. Anyway, I got a scholarship to Northwestern, and dove into economic theory headfirst. But after a summer internship on Wall Street, I got to see modern finance in practice and didn’t like what I saw. Everybody was out to make as much money as possible, and it didn’t matter how they did it.”

He shrugged.

“I wanted to do some good in the world. Be a part of something bigger. Maybe learn something else about how the world worked. So I joined the Marines.”

“Was it a good choice?” She seemed genuinely interested.

“It was a long time ago.” He put the truck in gear. “Where are we going?”

“Can you get to Martin Luther King Drive?” He nodded. It was the quickest way to the worst part of town. She said, “Head south on MLK and I’ll give you directions from there.”

He pulled smoothly into traffic, drove to the end of the block, and turned the corner.

Looking in the rearview mirror, he said, “I’m guessing you’re the jazz fan of the family. Maybe you caught it from your parents?”

Dinah looked at Peter sideways. “What was your clue?”

“Not many Dinahs out there,” he said. “I’m figuring you were named for Dinah Washington. And your boys, maybe Charlie Parker and Miles Davis?”

“I’m impressed,” she said. “Yes, my father loved jazz. There was always music in the house when I was growing up. I suppose I caught it from him.”

She smiled to herself. “James, though. James was more of an old-time R-and-B guy. Ray Charles, Sam and Dave, the Staple Singers. Maybe that was why I fell in love with him in tenth grade. He loved to sing. We were in the church choir together.”

Peter thought of Jimmy in Iraq. He wasn’t singing. He was doing push-ups, or checking his gear, or studying maps. Mostly he was talking to his guys. Getting their heads straight. Keeping them right.

Dinah said, “When the boys were little, and James was home on leave, he’d sing them to sleep. He’d lie on the couch with them on his chest, his big arms around them, and sing so softly I could barely hear him. But that deep voice of his, it would go right through them. ‘Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me hooome . . .’” Her voice was smoky and low.

Peter didn’t even know that Jimmy had a music player. Some guys were like that, especially when they were fire team or squad leaders. They sort of put themselves aside. Submerged themselves in the squad. The war wasn’t about them. It was about the men they were charged with leading. With protecting, as much as possible, from the war. While still doing their best to win it.

Maybe if Jimmy had kept singing, he wouldn’t have killed himself.

Peter checked the mirror again. There was a black SUV a half-block behind them. A big Ford. Peter couldn’t see the driver’s face. But he thought there would be a starburst of scars marking the right side of his face, and his right earlobe would be missing.

—

He said, “So what happened? With Jimmy, I mean.”

Dinah said, “We got married out of high school. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea, but we just couldn’t wait. We wanted to eat each other up.” She gave Peter a sly look. “Do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt like that for someone, that kind of hunger?”

Peter looked at Dinah, at her cool blue eyes. He knew what she meant.

Dinah said, “Well, that’s how it was for us. James went to work as an apprentice plumber, and I went to nursing school. We had a plan. When I graduated and got a job, it would be his turn for college. Then the towers fell.”

She looked out the window. “Once they had him, they wouldn’t let him go. They said he had essential expertise. He did three tours and kept getting extended. Can you believe that?” She shook her head. “He had to get blown up to get sent home.”

Peter nodded. That’s how it was for a lot of guys. If you didn’t take the re-up bonus, they would keep you anyway. And maybe that was the story Jimmy told his wife. But Peter knew the real deal. They had talked about it. Jimmy stayed in for the same reason Peter did. He was good at war. And someone had to take care of his guys. To get them out alive.

The truck bumped along. The roads were getting worse as the neighborhood changed. More storefronts were vacant on each block. On the side streets, house after house with the shingles slipping from their roofs. Broken car windows covered with plastic sheeting and duct tape. The black Ford bounced in their wake.

“His physical injuries healed well enough,” she said. “But once he came home from the hospital, he seemed like a different person. He became angry at the slightest thing. Sometimes at nothing at all, as if he were looking for an excuse to explode. Then he was just angry all the time.”

Peter nodded. All those years of war had changed him, too. It was the white static, but also something else. He had become a vast reserve of energy kept at bay only with exercise and work. It was a physical need to keep moving, keep doing, to solve whatever
problem he had set for himself. If he let his engine idle too long, the white static would rise up inside him until he stood and got back to the job at hand. Maybe it was the war. Maybe it was just who he was now.

Dinah kept talking. “He couldn’t find work because the economy had crashed. He was a Marine Corps veteran with an honorable discharge and years of service, but he only had a high school degree, and he couldn’t find a job. I tried to get him to start his own business, fixing people’s plumbing. But James just couldn’t get started. I’d nag him and he’d kick a hole in the wall.”

She glared out the windshield like she was angry at the world. “He had veterans’ benefits, and they were good benefits. There was money for college. But he wouldn’t even apply. He said he didn’t want to spend his life sitting at a desk.” She shook her head. “James never had trouble with motivation in his life. There was something wrong with him. I wanted him to talk to the VA, but he wouldn’t do that, either. He
definitely
wouldn’t talk to a therapist. He wouldn’t do anything. He slept all the time. I’d get home after working a double shift to find James asleep on the couch, a sink full of dirty dishes, and the boys glued to the Xbox without their supper. It went on for almost a year.”

Fatigue, anger, depression. These were classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress. And a traumatic brain injury, too. Peter knew it. Dinah knew it. Jimmy probably knew it, too. But that didn’t mean she could help him, or that he could help himself.

If Peter had been there, instead of up in the mountains, could he have helped?

Maybe that was just ego, Peter thinking he would have made the crucial difference. But he wasn’t there. He’d never know. He’d let Jimmy down. And now the man was dead.

Something in Dinah had deflated. The breath just gone out of
her. Peter didn’t say anything. He knew she wasn’t really talking to him. She was talking to the empty air, to the cold world outside the glass.

She took a breath and straightened up again.

“Finally, I sat him down. I told him that I loved him, but I wasn’t going to carry him. It was hard enough to live without him when he was away. But I couldn’t live without him in our own house. I just couldn’t, not like that. I told him that he had to go to school, get a job, or get out of the house. I gave him a month to develop a plan and get himself together. I thought it would work. I really did.”

Peter knew what had happened after that.

Peter wasn’t the only one living with guilt.

He waited while Dinah collected herself. “Two days later,” she said, “I came home from work and he was gone. That was four months ago.” She shook her head. “I asked him over and over to show me where he was staying, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said he’d invite me over when he got a better place. I never did see it.” She kept shaking her head as she talked, as if it would undo the past. “He found a job, tending bar. He came to the boys’ games, and to the last teacher conferences. He never missed an event. He came over for dinner once a week. I thought he was getting better.”

She took a long breath and let it carefully out.

“Then the police knocked on my door.”

She didn’t cry.

But Peter could see what it cost her not to.

Her voice like wood.

“They found him in an alley.”

—

Peter knew the rest. He had called the Milwaukee Police Department for the details when he came down from the mountains. The
cheap street pistol that Jimmy had pressed into the soft flesh beneath his chin. The back of his head blown clean off. There was no autopsy. The city was too broke for autopsies on open-and-shut suicides.

Peter checked the mirror again. The SUV was still there, peeking out from behind a utility truck.

“Dinah,” he said, “I have to ask. How could he have come up with that kind of money?”

Dinah shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t.” She turned the paper bag in her hands. “But I can tell you it surely wasn’t from tending bar three afternoons a week.”

Following Dinah’s directions, Peter turned left, then right. She kept them off the main roads, and Peter watched while the tough neighborhood turned to true ghetto. Abandoned cars, shops boarded up, holes in the streetscape where houses had burned down or been torn down by the city. Out the side window he saw two little kids without coats, the soles falling off their laceless shoes, running around in the cold when they should have been in school. Dinah watched them, the smile fallen from her face.

“Dinah?” said Peter. “Where are we going?”

“To see a man I knew once,” she said. “A long time ago.”