Cry Father (6 page)

Justin

I still needed to make the trip to Walmart. If I’d had any sense at all I’d have just stopped in Taos after meeting your mother. But the last thing I could deal with right then was more people, and I wasn’t up to facing any this morning, either. When I can find anything else to do besides going into town, I do it. So I packed the truck and drove down to the reservoir.

It was well before sunrise. I took my first drink out of the Evan Williams bottle when I climbed in the canoe, the second while waiting for Sancho’s wild swim and scrabble as he clambered aboard, and a third watching the quick twittering of a foreclosure of bank swallows as they fluttered over the water to escape his splashing.

There’s places all around the reservoir you can’t get to easily without a canoe. I paddled for one of those places, keeping the light of the mesa’s lodge and boathouse directly behind me. It was impossible to judge my progress or speed in the early morning darkness, the canoe skimming
along, trying to slip right out from under me. I didn’t have any idea we were to the other side until I grated to a hard stop on the bank.

I’d judged right, though, and there was the stump. It was like some half-sunken body trying to wrestle free of its own burial, covered in fresh hoof marks. I’m always surprised there are any minerals left, given how little I refresh it. I pulled the two fifty-pound sacks of mineral salt out of the canoe and emptied them over what was left of the stump. Then I hunkered down and had another drink of whiskey. Sancho shivering against my leg, still wet from climbing in and out of the canoe.

Most years I take at least one deer. Some summers I don’t buy meat at all. Henry keeps it in the lodge’s freezer, eating as much as he wants by way of payment. I sat and watched the morning break on that old rotted stump, half-annihilated by the hooves of deer. The sun slipped over it like morning clothes, making its old shadows and gnarls fresh and bright. I pulled from the bottle of Evan Williams and just watched. Beyond the stump, the reservoir water shimmered in slivers of ink and new-risen light. I was still nipping on the bottle. It was a beautiful morning, and it’s human nature to try to improve on beauty when you can.

Besides which, I still wasn’t over the work season. It used to be I’d get a night or two’s worth of sleep and I’d be good to go after it was done, but these days it’s a couple of weeks letting the torn muscles and stretched tendons repair. It’ll build up in you, what my kind of work does to your body. I can only wonder if I’ll be able to move at all in another ten years. And Avrilla, they don’t bother with amenities like health insurance. Unless you need to get a hand sewn on after a chain-saw mishap, you might never see a doctor. But drinking helps. So I try not to worry about how much I’m drinking while I wait out the worst of it.

I took lunch with Sancho curled up at my feet, eating jerky out of my hand. It was exactly what I needed, sitting there, and there was no hint of your mother in the brush or in my head.

There was you. You’re always there. But for at least a minute or two your mother was completely and blessedly gone.

15

scabs

P
atterson drives the long way back from the Walmart in Alamosa, his truck bed full of supplies. After salting the stump, he hadn’t been able to think of anything left to avoid town with this morning. He drives past side roads flicking away to bleak little clusters of trailers. Over a cattle guard into ranchland, through ranging beef cows as alien in the greasewood and sagebrush as water buffalo. Smoking cigarettes and watching a bank of clouds form in the gray sky, long streaks of rain striking down on the western rim of the valley. Watching those clouds darken from gray to black.

It’s about two miles outside of San Luis that he runs across the Wild Mustang Mesa four-wheeler, abandoned by the side of the road, smoke pouring out of it. Patterson parks the truck and is walking back to take a look when Emma pulls up in the Wild Mesa Mustang truck behind him. “Is he here?” she asks, running to him.

“Not as far as I can tell,” Patterson says.

“Did you come from San Luis or from the mesa?”

“From Alamosa, through San Luis.”

Her face fell. “He must’ve already been to town then.”

“What’s going on?”

She hands Patterson a piece of paper. In a childlike scrawl, Henry’s handwriting, is a note. “Gone to San Luis for beer. Start work without me.” Patterson laughs once, folds it back up, and gives it back to her.

“What are you laughing at?” she snaps.

“That he left you a note,” Patterson says. “That he couldn’t just go get beer, but had to tell you that’s what he was doing.”

“You know how he gets when he drinks,” she says. “He doesn’t have any business going after beer.”

“Hop in my truck,” Patterson says. “Between the both of us, we can probably wrestle a Budweiser away from a cripple.”

She gives him a dirty look, but opens the door.

T
hey find him about a mile on, caning his way toward the mesa with a twelve-pack of beer under his arm, road dust drifting up his scuffed cowboy boots. Patterson gestures for Emma to roll down her window. “Want a ride?” he asks.

Henry’s head burrows into his shoulders. He starts caning faster.

Patterson touches the gas, keeping pace with him.

“You could smoke cigarettes if you got in the truck,” Emma pleads.

“I can smoke while I’m walking,” Henry says.

Emma starts to say something else, but Patterson puts his finger to his lips and winks at her. “Your choice,” Patterson says. They idle along next to him.

It takes a hundred yards or so, but Henry finally stops. “Goddamn it.”

Patterson touches the brakes. “You ain’t got to stop, I got all the time in the world.”

“Goddamn it,” Henry says again. His hair is windswept and gritty, hovering in the coming storm. Rain begins to pock the dirt.

Emma gets out and walks toward him. “Let me help you.”

He turns toward her. Congealed blood cakes the right side of his face, dull and black.

Emma stops so quick that she skids on the soles of her shoes. “Henry,” she says, stepping back from him.

“Emma,” he mimics her.

Emma swallows. And instead of saying whatever she’d been going to, she takes him by the arm and helps him into the truck. The clouds bulge overhead and off in the distance the sun suddenly cuts through in guillotines of light. Then the rain hits them in a torrent.

T
hey drive Henry back to the barn, where they sit in the loft around the tack trunk that he uses for a table, twilight falling, the rain gone just as quick as it had come. Lights from the lakehouses mottle the banks of the reservoir through the window. Up at Patterson’s cabin, it’s like living on some deserted crater on the moon. But from Henry’s loft, the mesa actually looks like the vacation spot it claims to be.

“Well,” Patterson says. He wants a cigarette but is holding off on lighting one, taking in the smell of pine chips and alfalfa.

“Well,” Henry mocks. He tips his beer can up over his mouth and empties it. He looks like he’s been beat with a fence post. There’s coagulated blood all over the side of his face, and some kind of yellow
scab on his cheekbone, like a portion of his skin has been removed with a cheese grater. Still, he seems to be enjoying the attention, the smile lines around his eyes deepening.

“All right,” Patterson says. “Any reason I shouldn’t run up to Denver and stomp a mudhole in his ass?”

Emma starts in her chair. “Stomp a mudhole in what?” She turns to Henry. “You didn’t fall off the four-wheeler?”

Henry grins blood and scabs. It would look grotesque on anyone else, but on him it manages to look a little dashing. “Do you know what he does for a living?” he says to Patterson. “My boy?”

“I got a guess,” Patterson says.

Emma looks from Patterson to Henry and back again. She can’t close her mouth. “It was your son?”

Henry looks out the window as if only just managing to maintain control of his emotions. He presents them with his profile.

“Why didn’t you stop him?” Emma asks him.

His lower jaw works back and forth like it’s slightly dislocated from the top and he’s trying to reset it. “I owe him money.”

“You owe him money,” she repeats.

Henry drinks and then wipes beer out of his mustache. “Thanks for giving me a ride home,” he says.

“But now you want us to leave you here,” Emma says. “Well, I’m not leaving. I’m not going back to my trailer and leaving you here like this.” She crosses her arms. And then she stuffs one fist in her mouth and stares at the window.

Patterson stands. “We’ll check on you tomorrow,” he says. “Come on, Emma.”

16

debts

J
unior’s out in his backyard, cutting treated pine boards to size with a circular saw. He’s hired two local alcoholic rednecks to help him with the deck, and he’s regretting it already. The frame is many things, but true isn’t one of them. Alcoholic number one, Daryl, is drilling holes in the planks, most of them crooked or missing the nailers entirely. Alcoholic number two, Steve, is coming behind him, shooting the heads of the deck screws a quarter of an inch into the boards, the solution from the treated pine bubbling up in the holes.

Then one of the planks splits. “Goddamn it,” Daryl says. “Goddamn it.” He flings his hands up, swiping his baseball cap sideways. “That’s enough, goddamn it. I need some lunch.”

Junior lets off the circular saw. “It ain’t even eleven o’clock.”

“Horseshit it ain’t.” Daryl straightens his ball cap. “Besides, eleven o’clock means we been working for more’n an hour. I need a break.”

“You been breaking. Every ten fucking minutes for beer and cigarettes.”

“Bullshit.” Daryl digs a beer out of the cooler. “Beer and a cigarette then.” He sits down on the edge of the deck frame.

Steve looks up from his drill. “We breaking?”

“We’re breaking.” Daryl fishes his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “Fuck this slave driver. We ain’t niggers. We’re breaking for a goddamn cigarette.”

Junior spits in the dirt and squats down on his heels beside the sawhorse. “Y’all won’t never drown in sweat, will you?”

Daryl lifts his shirt and wipes his face, his hairless gut like an albino watermelon streaked with purple stretch marks. “Fuck you.”

“Fuck you?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Let’s not start this shit,” Steve says.

Junior pulls his handkerchief out of his pocket very slowly and dabs at his bad eye with it. “Fuck you?” he says again.

“You hard of hearing?” Daryl asks him. “You treat us like we’re a couple of niggers. You can’t treat us however you want. Yeah, fuck you.”

Junior stuffs his handkerchief in his pocket and starts to respond. But then a truck door slams closed out on the street. Junior looks over. “I’ll be damned,” he says.

“Who’s that?” asks Steve.

Junior walks through his gate, out on the sidewalk. Patterson Wells stands leaning against the door of his truck. His left thumb is hooked in his belt, his right hand resting behind his hip, next to the butt of his not-very-well-concealed .45. He’s compact and sunburnt, wearing a greasy Avrilla ball cap and a week or two of stubble. He
looks older than Junior thought he was. Maybe forty-five, and a hard forty-five at that. One of those who’s always short on sleep and lives mostly in his own head.

Junior stops a few feet back of him, and Patterson unhooks his thumb from his belt and slides a wad of cash out of his pocket. He tosses it in the dirt at Junior’s feet. “What’s that?” Junior asks, without looking at it.

“That’s the money Henry owes you,” Patterson says. “Two hundred dollars.”

“You don’t pay Henry’s debts.”

“I’m paying this one,” Patterson says. “I don’t want to see you down there no more.”

“Whyn’t you toss that gun in the dirt and we’ll talk about it?” Junior says. “We’ll discuss it right here.”

“I ain’t looking for trouble.”

“Sure you ain’t looking for trouble. Take that gun out and throw it on the ground right there,” Junior says. “Then we’ll talk about my old man.”

“I ain’t here to fight.”

“No you ain’t. You sure as hell ain’t here to fight.” Junior licks his lips. “You don’t know a fucking thing. You got no idea who that old man is. There ain’t a goddamn thing I could do to him that he don’t deserve.”

“That’s his opinion, too,” Patterson says. “I’m choosing to disagree.”

“Horseshit. He’s an old cunt. If I gave him half a chance he’d shoot me in the face. You think he’s changed ’cause he got sober. He ain’t changed.”

“Goddamn,” Darryl chortles behind Junior. “You talk like that about your own daddy, Junior?” He shakes his head at the very idea,
a strand of saliva between his cigarette and his bottom lip waffling in the lean breeze.

Junior turns and leans down, scooping up a handful of rocks. “Get back to work,” he says to Daryl.

“I’m almost done with my cigarette,” Daryl says. “I done told you about treating me like a nigger.”

Junior wings a rock sidehand at him, catching him right above his left eye.

Daryl jumps to his feet. “What the fuck?” His swollen face sets with a kind of alcoholic grandeur. The second rock catches him on the bridge of the nose. He sets his hands on his hips, eyeing Junior.

“Get back to work.” Junior lets the rest of the rocks fall out of his hand.

“Fuck you.”

Junior gives him a short left hook to the side of the head. Daryl jumps back to dodge a follow-up right and his ankle turns in the dirt with a knuckle pop. His leg crumbles inward under him and he falls back on his ass. “You son of a bitch.” He pulls his ankle up into his lap, tears welling in his eyes.

Junior kicks him in the thigh. “You’re fired, you sorry motherfucker.”

“You’re an asshole,” Steve says. He starts gathering his tools into a cheap plastic toolbox.

“Get your ass back to work,” says Junior.

“I ain’t getting back to work,” Steve says. “I’m done.”

“You ain’t getting no pay.”

“Yeah. Fuck you and your pay.” He bends down and takes Daryl by the elbow, helping him up. “You need to learn how to work with people,” he says to Junior. They limp out of the yard.

Junior stands, staring at the ground and letting the adrenaline trickle off down his spine. It takes him a few minutes.

“You’re hard on your friends,” Patterson says.

Junior looks over as if just remembering he’s there, all the anger run out of him. “You want to make some money?” he asks.