Free PIKE by Benjamin Whitmer

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.

CHAPTER 24
~ You can get away from a good upraising.~
    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.

CHAPTER 25
~ Like some kind of apes crawling out of the mud.~
    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