GREY-DARK, AND LIT HAD already pulled on the headlights when a spotted hog scooted across the road, traveling low to the ground at desperate speed, streaming black blood from a head wound. At the white line on the far side of the pavement, its joints buckled and it fell forward in a long skid into the weeds.
Bud said, The hell?
Lit braked and got out. Off in the distance, men whooped like greyboys before Pickett’s Charge and other epic misjudgments.
Lit looked at the slumped animal. An escapee from a slaughtering. Had to be. No longer hog, but not yet transformed into pork.
Bud opened his door to get out, but Lit said, Sit still. This won’t take but a minute.
Lit reached through the open door and cut the lights to the black-and-white but left the engine idling. Set his beer on the roof and rattled in a box of rusty tools in the trunk and drew out a hand axe. He went to the hog and prodded it with his foot. Nothing but dead flab.
Drunks off in the woods hollered nearer, saying, They damn, and other expressions of utter amazement.
Lit worked with the axe like limbing a felled tree to section and split. But only so far as to free the hams. Fuck that other peasant food. Tripe, ears, fatback, and snout. And all that headcheese mess. He carried the hams by their two feet and swung them and the dripping maniac axe into the trunk and drove on with the lights out, leaving the hillbillies to sort out the mystery for themselves when they arrived momentarily to claim their runaway hog.
Around the first curve, Lit hit the gas, and the forgotten half-full bottle fell back across the trunk and to the pavement, shattering with spewing concussion. Bud held his empty out the window and lofted it back over the car to join its fellow in festive breakage.
NIGHT DRIVING. THIS NIGHT, like so many lately, drinking long-necks and listening to the radio, sharing their dope and their hopes and dreams. The dashboard lights casting green shadows on their faces and Luckies drooping from their lips, except when they flicked ash out the windows.
They rode a long way from town. Way out. Not a light to be seen in the indigo night but their own yellow headlights and the tiny white orbs of the heavens, which, because of a fortunate mixture of pills, took on a slight pinwheel effect when they looked up through the windshield for longer than a glance. Lit drove quick, steering with the wrist of his right hand over the wheel and his left elbow resting on the windowsill. Chill damp mountain air streaming in, but balanced by the blast of heat from the firewall. The first fallen yellow poplar leaves resting like upturned hands on the dark pavement.
The narrow road climbed alongside a white-water creek toward a gap, twisting in correspondence with the path of the water. One turn coming hard after the other in a rhythm of shifting car weight, the performance springs and shocks of the cruiser crouching only slightly on the inside and hardly lifting on the outside. No more than a shoulder shrug one way or the other. They crossed narrow one-lane wooden bridges, the timbers painted metallic silver to give the reassuring impression of steel girders. Passed through tunnels of trees vaulting overhead, and the road so slim that two cars meeting would have to scoot over with their right wheels into the grass. But at this time of night, that was mostly theoretical.
Two turns more, and what they had been driving toward stretched in front of them out of the twisty mountain roads. An anomalous straight, longer than the reach of the headlights. Some philanthropist with a paintbrush had measured a quarter mile and swiped a messy slash of white across the pavement at beginning and end. Barely enough space left over at the end for braking before the next hard left-hand curve.
Lit stopped at the line, downshifted, and floored it. The cruiser squatted on its hind wheels and howled, laying two long trails of rubber in first and again at the upshift to second. Even chirping going into fourth, at which point the red speedometer needle quivered past a hundred. Neither of the men said anything during the run.
When they passed the second stripe, Bud said, I counted thirteen. Lit said, It was twelve.
FOGGY AND CHILLY, midnight, they discovered a dozen high school kids drinking beer and dancing to music from a car radio, warming themselves with a roaring fire of burning truck tires on the tenth green of the golf course, the fire centered on the cup. Bud stayed in the car, waiting to observe an epic ass-kicking. But Lit walked to the fire and warmed his hands, said hello to a tall slim blond girl like he knew her. Then pulled a couple of beers out of the kids’ cooler and informed them that what they were doing was all kinds of illegal. Guessing at the charges, he’d say trespassing and vandalism, if not arson. Also public consumption and, for most of them, underage drinking. And that’s before anybody gets mouthy or breaks to run down the fairway, which would add some version of resisting arrest. Oh, what deep shit they have fallen into.
Lit asked, Does anybody know what the term mitigating circumstances means? Raise your hand if you think you know the answer.
Nobody said anything, and Lit said, Right this minute, it means every grey-headed golfer that ever played this hole would trade everything he has if he could swap places with you right now. So I’ll just say good night. I ought, at least, to add, tomorrow’s a school day, but what the fuck.
Lit got in the cruiser and handed Bud the second beer and rolled on.
LATER, THEY SAT BEHIND the Roadhouse, finishing their current beers before going inside to order a couple more. Before Lit saw him coming, a big drunk with a face like one of the raw hams in the trunk had his head stuck all the way inside Lit’s open window, yelling proclamations of anger.
—You remember me? You blackjacked me, you fuck. For nothing but back-talking when you tried to arrest me for breaking and entering. All I stole was a worn-out TV.
—I didn’t try to arrest you, Lit said. I did arrest you.
—I still can’t feel my fingers sometimes. But now you ain’t got your uniform on. You’re off duty and that means you’re not different from any other citizen, you little shit. I’m gonna drag your ass out of that car and kick you all over the parking lot.
Real quick, so that it was done before Bud could take it in, Lit cranked the window up to trap the man’s neck, and then hit him in the mouth over and over, so fast Bud couldn’t count the blows. Lit rolled the window down, and the drunk’s face slid below the windowsill.
Lit shoved his door open and got out. The man rose to his feet, blood dripping off his chin, but ready to go again. He acted like he was in a boxing match and squared up for right crosses and uppercuts, old sporting shit. Like maybe a ref in a white shirt and bow tie stood at his elbow to call infractions.
Not nearly so romantic, Lit grabbed a tire iron from under the front seat and with one hard swing, parallel to the ground, ended the thing.
The man lay in the gravel, trying to coil his body around his shattered knee. Cursing Lit and God equally.
—Nobody to blame but yourself, Lit said. You didn’t have to bring that down on you, but you did. Free will’s a bitch.
Fights came with the job. Bud had witnessed a half dozen already. Some idiot with a load on starts believing he can fight the law, exactly like his Rebel great-granddaddy. Always instructive for Bud to watch the outcome.
Wet from a dunking in the lake, Lit might go one thirty-five. But wiry and high-strung for the express purpose of amazing quickness. When he went man-to-man, he worked his little keen fists in a deeply destructive fashion, probing toward a spleen that needed rupturing bad. The actions of Lit’s hands had no common internal wiring to his face, which stayed as blank as the bottom of an empty bucket. He’d be sweating all over during a fight, but his expression remained mild as Jesus in his sunbeam amid the youngster animals. Drunks and criminals could be trying to head-butt him or shove up close, nose-to-nose, spitting out vile epithets, yet the look in Lit’s eye remained as if he were peering into another green and peaceful world entirely.