Cry Father (15 page)

40

mason jars

“I
was coming back from Denver last fall,” Carmichael begins. “It was a weekend trip, and my wife had taken the kids to her parents. I didn’t have much to get back to El Paso for, and you know how it is once you start driving up there. So I made it to Fort Garland and decided, fuck it, I’ll keep driving. And I did, right through Alamosa, into the Rio Grande National Forest, then up into the San Juan Mountains. I figured I’d find a cabin and rent it for the weekend. It had been a good trip to Denver, but it’d almost gone wrong. I was in need of a little time away.

“But what I didn’t count on was how dark it gets up there. That’s what got me. There’s no kind of cell phone signal, neither, not once you get in the mountains. So I started to get a little weirded out. Which meant I started making turns. Like there has to be a house up here somewhere, right? Somebody I can ask where I can get a room for the night? Then the side roads were dirt, and I was getting really
worried now. I couldn’t see shit. And I looked down and I only had a quarter tank of gas left.

“That did it. I made it up to the top of this rise, and there was a place to stop, like a pull-off. So I stopped. Fuck it. I can wait until daylight when I can see something, I figured. Try to make my way back then.”

“I’ve been lost up there,” Patterson says.

“Not me,” says Junior. “I ain’t been lost once in my whole life.”

“Right,” says Carmichael. “So anyway, when I came awake the sun was up. So I looked around, kind of like you will when you wake up in a strange place, trying to figure things out. You know how it is.

“And then I almost shit myself.

“There was somebody standing outside my car. Just the shadow of a man, standing there haloed in the light through the passenger’s-side window.

“I sat up, put my hand on my gun, and rolled the window down.

“ ‘This is where I come to watch the sunrise, too,’ the man said. He was a big one, wearing a Carhartt jacket with a beard down to the bib of his overalls.

“Well, I hadn’t really noticed the sunrise at the time. Just the goddamn sun. So I suppose I blinked around some.

“ ‘Life is a great sunrise,’ the man said. ‘I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. Nabokov said that.’ ”

“What book’s that from?” Patterson asks.

“You read enough Nabokov to know the difference?” Carmichael asks.

“I read,” Patterson says.

“You gotta do something at his age,” Junior says.

Carmichael chuckles. “I asked him the same thing. And you know what he said? He said, ‘I don’t know. I found it on the internet.’
Then he reached in the front pocket of his overalls, took out a bag of tobacco, and began to roll a cigarette. ‘Are you lost?’

“ ‘I was trying real hard to be, I guess,’ I said. I looked up and down the road. None of it looked even remotely familiar. ‘I think I might have made it.’

“ ‘Where are you coming from?’

“ ‘I need to get back to the San Luis Valley. If I can get there, I can figure out the rest.’

“The man shook his head. ‘I stay away from the valley,’ ” he said. “ ‘Too much happens there. Do you know where you are?’

“ ‘I don’t have the slightest fucking idea.’

“ ‘You can give me a ride to my house,’ the man said. ‘I can give you directions.’ ”

“You saw his house?” Junior says. “Brother Joe’s house? Henry’d have an aneurism.”

“Who’s Henry?”

“He’s a fucking groupie, that’s what he is,” Junior says. “Don’t worry about it. Keep going.”

“All right.” Carmichael nods. “I did see it. And I don’t know what I expected. Probably something like a tar-paper shack. Definitely not the log cabin we ended up at. It was beat up, for sure, but it had levels and gables and decks and all kinds of shit. Like one of the McMansions you find down south of Denver, in Castle Rock or Lonetree.

“But when we got out of the car, Jesus. Just at the edge of the stone walkway from the turnaround up to the house’s front door there was this heap of something covered by a blue tarp. And the smell coming off it, it was like nothing I ever smelled in my life.

“ ‘It’s coyotes,’ the man said. ‘I cover them up so none of the helicopters that’ll fly over will see them. When they stink bad enough that I can smell them in the house, I burn them.’

“ ‘I think you’re about there,’ I said.”

“ ‘We’ll see,’ he said, and he led me up onto the deck, where there were three mangy dogs sleeping by a porch swing and shriveled rattlesnake skins nailed to the posts. Then he opened the door, and I got exactly what he meant. There were all these Mason jars filled up with all this disgusting shit. Shit that looked like baby thumbs and little fetuses suspended in some kind of fluid. And the lids on the jars were all bulging up like they were gonna blow. I felt my whole body heave.

“It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen or smelled, and I’ve dragged hundreds of dead Mexicans out of the desert. ‘Jesus. Holy. Fucking. Christ,’ I choked out, doing everything I could not to vomit.

“ ‘Told you that you wouldn’t smell the dead ones,’ he said. ‘That’s their anal glands you’re smelling now. And vaginas and reproductive organs. Soaking in their own urine.’

“ ‘I got it,’ I said. I pulled my shirt up over my nose. ‘What in the holy fuck for?’

“ ‘Trapping.’ The man nodded at a box of rusty No. 3 traps in the corner of the kitchen. ‘You want a drink?’

“ ‘Jesus, yes.’

“ ‘This way.’ Now, the living room was lined with books and more animal parts. Shit that I swear to God I ain’t never seen walking or flying on this planet. I knew better than to ask, though.

“He pulled off his jacket and tossed it on a chair. He wasn’t wearing any kind of shirt under his bib overalls, and he had all these tattoos. Not your normal ones either. Eagles and swastikas and Celtic crosses, all in blue ink. He walked over to a drink cart against one wall and poured us each a glass of bourbon, then sat down in a leather armchair, gesturing me to take the couch.

“ ‘It used to smell worse,’ he said. ‘For a while I was experimenting with skunk essence and tonquin musk. That was almost unlivable.’

“ ‘I might think about keeping the shit outside,’ I said. ‘But that’s just me.’

“ ‘This is what life is,’ he said. ‘You gotta let it in.’

“ ‘I’m already neck-deep in anal glands and pussy,’ I said. ‘Any more might kill me.’

“ ‘You close the doors on the outside world, you close the doors on your soul,’ he said.

“I couldn’t help it. ‘I know who you are,’ I said.

“He sat his bourbon glass on an end table and took out this little laptop from somewhere under all the open books and full ashtrays. ‘You do?’

“ ‘You’re Brother Joe.’

“ ‘You’re a listener,’ Brother Joe said, opening the laptop.

“ ‘Not regular. Just when I’m driving through.’

“ ‘Half the people who listen to my show say that. They all do a lot of driving.’ He pecked at the computer. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Directions to Alamosa, printing.’ He pressed another button.

“ ‘Do you believe all that shit?’ I asked.”

“That’s it,” Junior says. “That’s the question I want to know.”

Patterson leans forward. The last time he listened to anything this carefully it was to a doctor.

“Of course I asked it,” Carmichael says. “His answer was, ‘What shit.’

“ ‘Space platforms,’ I said. ‘Aliens. The government blew up the World Trade Center. All that shit.’

“ ‘See all those?’ Brother Joe waved his hand around at the books.

“I see them.

“ ‘There’s more. I have a whole basement full of them.’ He chucked his head at a door. ‘In there’s my study. And in my study are two robotic backup tape libraries, each of which holds thirty terabytes of
data. They’re almost full with pictures, video, books. Even the largest book is no larger than a megabyte, and each terabyte is one million megabytes. You follow me?’

“ ‘Not in the slightest.’

“He nodded. ‘There’s too much information in this house, this house alone, to believe anything. I don’t believe, I assemble. And what I assemble is what you hear on my show.’

“ ‘So you don’t believe any of it?’

“He pulled on his beard, and then smiled. ‘Are there nights I can’t sleep? There are nights I’m so fucking scared I can’t breathe.’

“ ‘So you believe it.’

“ ‘Let’s try this,” he said. ‘You ever heard of Seven World Trade Center?’

“ ‘Sure. It’s the building y’all say is proof of a controlled demolition.’

“ ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘One of those terabytes of data in that room consists of video, pictures, and reports that prove it was exactly that, a controlled demolition. Another terabyte consists of video, pictures, and reports proving that it was not.’

“ ‘And which do you believe?’

“He laughed out loud. ‘Have you ever tried to absorb one terabyte of data? To hold it in your head at one time, let alone weigh it against another?’

“ ‘Other people do. That’s how they write those reports.’

“ ‘They foreclose on new information. They make a guess, and call it final.’ He got up and walked into the study. When he came back, he handed me directions back to Alamosa. ‘Remember,’ he said. ‘These directions are for planning your route only. Conditions may differ from what’s shown on the map.’ ”

41

cops

“T
hat’s it?” Junior asks. “That’s the whole fucking story?”

Carmichael shrugs. “That’s the whole story.”

Junior shakes his head. “I listened to that whole fucking thing and that was it,” he says to himself.

“What about the tattoos?” Patterson asks. “You remember anything specific about them? Those mean something. More so if he’s going to put them on his body.”

“I don’t remember anything specific,” Carmichael says. “The swastikas threw me. All’s I remember besides them are the eagles and weird Celtic shit.”

“You’re like a bitch, Patterson,” Junior says. “You gotta find something that’s got to do with you in every story.”

“Could you get back there?” Patterson asks Carmichael. “Son of a bitch,” he says, in awe of his own idea.

“Not a chance,” Carmichael says. “I mean I could if I had those directions he printed me, but those are long gone.”

“Well, I’m fucking disgusted,” Junior says. “Most pointless story I ever heard. Except for that line about being neck-deep in anal glands. That was quality.” He looks around the bar. “She’s gonna have to make it up to me,” he says. It’s the girl in the blue blouse he’s talking about.

Carmichael’s leaning back in his chair, one foot up on the chair across from him. Patterson can tell that he’s had enough of playing second to Junior, especially in the eyes of the brown-skinned girls. “What’s it look like under there?” he asks Junior.

“What’s what look like?”

“Under there.” Carmichael points at Junior’s bad eye. “Under the patch.”

Junior’s good eye looks at him in a way that Patterson’s seen before. The clip knife Junior’s using to chop his cocaine has a drop-point blade that comes in over three inches, and Patterson knows that he’s also carrying his Glock. “What do you see?” Junior asks. He waves the knife in a circle toward Carmichael’s face. “Under there.”

Carmichael tilts his head. “Not sure I follow you, son.”

“No,” Junior says. “I’m not sure you do.” That girl in the blue blouse, she’s circled back near them. Her face is so impenetrably young that Patterson looks at his feet. “Come here,” Junior says to her. But as she’s making her way to the table, he tries to throw his foot up on the chair across from him like Carmichael, and spills sideways out of his chair. “Goddamn it,” he mutters.

Carmichael pounds the table, laughing.

“Goddamn it,” Junior says again. He rights himself in his chair. Then he looks down at the small pile of cocaine in front of him. “That’s all that’s left,” he says, very, very sadly.

I
t’s exactly the night they deserve. And as Carmichael has been saying all night, being Anglo in a Mexican bar means never having to say you’re sorry. And so, Carmichael suggests they take a walk. He leads them a couple of blocks over to another saloon, this one with no sign at all, just a peeling red storefront and a heavy steel door through which they can hear the sounds of pool balls clicking.

“Stay here,” Carmichael says, and he leaves Junior and Patterson to wait on the sidewalk. The night runs low and hot and dark, eddying around them. With the cocaine running out of his system, Patterson’s starting to have doubts about the wisdom of this trip again. These are doubts he’ll have several more times.

Then Carmichael’s back, behind some teenage Mexican boy he shoves out through the bar door and sends crashing to his knees on the sidewalk with a hard kidney punch.

“Who the hell’s he?” Patterson says. But Junior reaches over and slaps him on the chest, shakes his head not to say anything more.

“I got nothing for you,” the boy says in flawless English to Carmichael. He spits blood and tries to stand upright, his legs wobbling rubberlike under him. Carmichael wipes a loose lock of hair out of his eyes, grabs the front of the boy’s shirt, and drags him around the corner of the bar.

Patterson watches the corner wall. Thinks that he needs to go around that corner. That whatever’s happening back there is something he needs to stop.

“Don’t even think about it, partner,” Junior says.

Then it’s over, and Carmichael returns holding a baggie of cocaine in his teeth and wiping blood off his arms and hands with the kid’s white T-shirt. He wads it up into a ball and tosses it in the gutter.

I
nside another bar there’s nobody but a fat lady bartender and a dog. There seems to be a dog in every bar. “Ain’t you got any girls?” Carmichael asks the bartender.

She shakes her head. “Cops,” she says. “They took all the girls. The local business owners, they want to clean up the area. You want girls, you go to Juárez.”

“Cops,” Carmichael repeats with some disgust. He digs the coke out of his pocket and tosses it on the table.

“That’s what they call being hoisted by your own petard, partner,” Junior says.

“Cut yourself a line,” Carmichael says. “One big enough to shut your fucking mouth.”

Junior does. But when he raises up off the line, he keeps sniffing, like he’s trying to snort the oxygen out of the air. “Goddamn it,” he says. His voice is thick and hoarse. He pulls up his boot and looks at the sole.

“What is it?” Patterson asks.

“Dog shit. I knew I been smelling it.”

“Probably that goddamn mutt right there,” Carmichael says.

Junior stands. The bartender is out of sight, in the back somewhere. Junior walks over to where the dog is sleeping under a bar stool, and very carefully, so as not to wake it, he moves the bar stool away. Then he kicks the animal in the ribs so hard that it lifts off the ground and slams into the bar. He rears back and kicks it again, then pulls his gun.

Carmichael throws his arm around Junior’s neck and Patterson grabs his gun hand, and the three of them fall together on the floor. The dog stays where it is, twitching and whining. Then it begins to puke blood in frothing waves. Patterson gets the gun out of Junior’s
hand. He sees himself jamming the muzzle into Junior’s forehead and shooting him. He throws the gun off to the side before he does it.

“You bastards,” the fat lady says, looking over the bar at them. “You get the fuck out of here.”

“Watch your mouth, bitch,” Carmichael says to her, standing.

“No.” She’s crying now. Big tears squeezing out of the corners of her eyes. “You get out of here. I don’t care who you are.”