Cry Father (9 page)

21

mousegun

T
he Hi-U Inn sits on a nearly dead highway running out of Commerce City, an industrial suburb north of Denver. It’s a jumble of tacked-up felt paper and plywood, with a dilapidated sign in the shape of a cowboy waving motorists off the road and into the parking lot. Junior parks by a small common area under a sagging second-story porch. Dogshit-stained outdoor carpeting, a couple of plastic garden chairs, a deck table with a crooked sun umbrella.

The door to one of the units whips open. “Goddamn, you’re a speedy motherfucker,” Chase says. He’s wired, tweaking, addict scrawny. “You got here quick.”

Junior slides his keys into his pocket. “Can I come in?” he asks.

“Yeah. Hell, yeah.” Chase moves out of the way. “You want a beer or something?”

Junior steps into the narrow kitchenette. It reeks of iodine and burning plastic.

“Sit. Sit down.” Chase motions to a cigarette-pocked Formica table. “I was thinking about having some ramen.” He sticks the fingers of his right hand into his left armpit and digs furiously. “You want some?”

“I’m all right.” Junior takes a seat.

“I was just thinking about it. I hadn’t started making it or anything.”

“Sit down,” Junior says. “You’re making me nervous.”

“Yeah, I can do that.” Chase pulls out a chair across from Junior and sits in it. Fidgeting with the scabs on his hands.

“How do you know Patterson Wells?” Junior asks.

“We used to work together,” Chase says.

“You two worked together?”

“I wasn’t always like I am,” Chase says. “I’ve had a lot of shit go wrong in my life.”

“I ain’t judging you, partner.”

“Good.” His chin quivers. “He fucked me up. It tears me up, but he did.”

“What’d he do?”

“He took my wife. He stole from me, too. But he took my wife, that’s the main thing.”

“You got a picture?” Junior asks.

Chase lifts a duffel bag off the floor. He roots around for a minute and comes up with a crumpled photograph. He tries to smooth it out on his thigh, fails, and hands it to Junior, still crumpled. Then reaches for it as if to try to smooth it out again, but Junior is already holding it. “She’s a good-looking woman,” Junior says.

Chase’s face reddens sharply and his top lip skins back over his canines. “I’ll kill him when I find him,” he hisses. “I mean it, too.”

“She’s got to be at least ten years younger’n you,” Junior says.

“Eight,” says Chase. “Maybe nine.”

“She a tweaker, too?”

“You said you wasn’t going to judge me,” Chase whines. His chin starts bobbing up and down. At first Junior thinks it means he’s going to start crying. Then the bobbing increases, and takes on a weird elliptical motion. “That’s what you said.”

“Will you hold your fucking head still?” Junior says. Then, “Is she?”

“She does a little bit. Weekends and shit. She’s a businesswoman.” Chase’s brow furrows in concentration and his hands still. He holds them on his thighs. His head keeps moving, though.

“So not like you,” Junior says. “Not a complete fucking burnout.”

“What are you getting at?” Chase says. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to figure out what a girl like that would be doing with an ugly little tweaker like you,” Junior says. “I’d have thought the question was obvious.”

“Fuck you,” Chase says. His right hand trembles again. He sticks it in between his legs. Then he concentrates again, and even his head stills. But his left foot shoots out, kicking into the table. “Do you know where he is or not? I don’t need this shit.”

“If he ain’t fucking her, somebody is,” Junior says. “Hell, if I find her, I’ll probably take a run at her.” He tosses the photograph on the table. “I’d give this one up, partner. There was no chance in hell she was going to stay with you once the crank ran out.”

Chase jumps to his feet, his left hand thrusting in his pocket. Junior grabs his forearm and closes his other hand on Chase’s throat, driving his thumb up under Chase’s jawbone. Chase rasps for breath and pisses himself. A little .380 mousegun drops on the floor. “There it is,” Junior says. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

22

pictures

P
atterson can’t stop thinking about Laney. Just like, he’s pretty sure, Henry meant him to. He starts out furious that Laney came up and wormed her way into his life, and then he just can’t stop thinking about her. And about her lawsuit. About what she said. Their duty to other children, to other parents. To himself. That he needs some kind of closure. It’s the kind of talk that sends him spinning straight off the road. He doesn’t have the kind of grip on the wheel necessary for duties anymore, and talk about closure is enough to drive him straight into a stump.

This morning, he knows he just needs to stop thinking about it. He needs to sit awhile in the cool recesses of a bar. Sit for a long while, thinking about nothing. A baseball game, maybe. There’s nothing that can still clear out his head like a baseball game.

So he loads up and drives down south into the flat scrubland of New Mexico. Through Questa, a patch of ad hoc restaurants and
bars that look like they were designed by a scatterbrained meth head with no depth perception, into the coyote fences and adobe houses of Taos, and to a sports bar in a low-slung shopping center right before the southern limit of the town.

It’s exactly as cool and dark as he wants. Reeking of perfume and lager, the lights dialed down to a low blue. And, sure enough, the large-screen television is tuned into a baseball game. But just when the bartender is pouring his first drink, his cell phone rings.

“Are you in town?” Laney asks.

“How did you know that?” Patterson says. “How in the hell’d you know that?”

“You drove through downtown. Three people called, one person emailed, and two more texted. You know how it is.”

“Yeah. I should have gone to Alamosa.”

“I thought if you were in town I’d meet you. I have something I want to give you.”

“I’m at the sports bar,” Patterson says, and hangs up. And then he wonders why he hadn’t gone to Alamosa, which has just as many bars as Taos. But he knows the answer, knew it already.

N
ot five minutes later, she slings her purse down on the bar. She’s wearing a banker’s blouse that Patterson already knows he’s going to spend most of their time together trying not to peek down. “Where’s the boy?” he asks.

“He’s in day care. I’m working.” She turns to the bartender. “Vodka and tonic.” Then, when he scampers off to fetch it for her, she bends to Patterson and kisses him on the cheek. Her drink comes, and she sips it through the cocktail straw. “I’ve got some pictures you haven’t seen,” she says. “That’s what I wanted to give you.”

The idiot in the mirror in front of Patterson looks like he might disintegrate. “I don’t need them,” Patterson says. He rearranges the idiot’s face, telling him that he better pull his shit together. Then he asks, “What are they of?”

“Camping on the Rio Grande Gorge. They were in one of those little disposable cameras you used to buy. I found it in the closet.” She unzips her purse and pulls out a packet of photographs. “You want to see them?”

Patterson shakes his head, his eyes locked on the baseball game. Not in front of her.

She slides the packet across the bar to him. “These are copies. You can take them with you.”

He takes a drink of his beer.

“Poor Patterson,” she says. “Everything’s still that hard for you, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t answer. He knows what she’s up to. And she knows that he knows what she’s up to. They were married too long.

She puts her hand on his arm and squeezes. “I’m sorry.”

“How’s about you take the rest of the day off work?” he says. “The rest of the week, maybe. How’s about we get a couple of bottles of bourbon and a hotel room. Hole up for a few days. Just the two of us.”

“There is no two of us,” she says, her hand still on his arm. “There’s no two of anybody if you’re one of them. I had to learn that the hard way.”

Patterson doesn’t bother arguing with her.

She lets go of his arm and sips her drink. “Do you still write to him?”

“All the time,” he answers without hesitation. Then he adds, “Sort of.”

“Sort of, meaning you don’t write to him all the time?”

“Sort of, meaning I’m not sure it’s him I’m writing to anymore.”

“I had the same problem,” she says. “It’s why I stopped. I was just writing down things that happened to me.”

“I’m talking about my life,” he says. “But I’m not sure who I’m talking to.”

“Part of me wishes I hadn’t stopped,” she says. “I didn’t understand it until I stopped.”

“Understand what?”

“That the conversation had two sides. That his answer was in my trying to see everything I was doing through his eyes. But there are things now that I don’t think it would be fair to share with him.”

“He wouldn’t care. I write shit all the time that no kid could understand.”

“That’s fine for you. He’s still the only thing in your life. That’s why you live up there on your mesa punishing yourself.” She smiles at him. “I need to get back to work.”

“That’s a no to the hotel room?”

“I’m too old to survive a hotel room with you,” she says.

“And here I’ve been feeling like I’m about the safest thing in my life,” he says.

She taps the packet of pictures and stands. “Then you probably need to change company,” she says.

Justin

I first met your mother in that sports bar. I don’t know if I ever told you that, but I did. I never meant to meet anyone like her, either. I didn’t have any interest in a wife. I know I haven’t told you that, and probably shouldn’t, but it’s true. The truth is I was plenty happy with things just the way they were.

With Avrilla, I made what I thought was big money, didn’t have any expenses but getting drunk, and traveled all over the country on their dime. Eighteen years old and I was walking the French Quarter in New Orleans, working my way through every bar on Rush Street in Chicago. Hitting the peep shows in North Beach, keeping company with some of the toughest men on the planet. It was a party. A party interrupted by backbreaking labor, the kind that you’re lucky to survive, but a party. Settling down wasn’t on my mind at all.

But then I was heading through Taos after a season of clearing power lines in Georgia, and I stopped for the night at the Super 8
next door to that sports bar. And when I walked over later, there she was, playing pool with two of her girlfriends. I had a couple of drinks at the bar and one of her friends asked me to join in on a game so’s they could play doubles. So I did. Standing back against the wall most of the time, watching them play. Watching her.

She was something else, your mother. Enough younger’n me that it hurt a little to look at. Brown eyes that tended black when she was excited or pissed off. A perfect little mouth made to be bemused. I had a pretty good line of shit at the time and I ran it on her. She didn’t mind so much that I didn’t spend the night at her house instead of the motel.

After that I passed through Taos as often as I could. And when Laney found out she was pregnant with you, I quit Avrilla and got a job on a local landscaping crew, moving in with her. We had all the usual fights new parents have when you were born, but it was easier on us than it is on a lot of people. We were pretty good at going without sleep, if nothing else. We’d had plenty of hangovers by way of practice. And then you were gone, and we had no way of working through that.

I still don’t.

It started as a rash on your leg. It was a Saturday morning, and the house was already steaming, startlingly hot for as early summer as it was. We didn’t have air-conditioning and I was cooking breakfast with the windows open, trying to get us all fed before the heat came on hard. That’s when Laney brought you in and showed it to me. You were a little man in Aquaman underwear. Your brown hair streaked your head, sweat beading at your temples. I told her there was nothing to worry about, that you’d be just fine as soon as we got some food in you.

But you wouldn’t eat. And then you wouldn’t talk. And then your temperature spiked, and your green eyes went flat. We drove you
straight to Dr. Court’s office, but he barely examined you. He glanced at your leg, cracked a couple of jokes, and told us it was heat rash, that you had heat exhaustion.

So we stopped by Walmart on the way home for an air conditioner. But it was less than an hour after I got it installed in your bedroom that you started having trouble breathing. And it was cardiac arrest by the time we got you to the hospital.

You never came out of the coma. You lasted two weeks. I was in the bathroom at the hospital when you died, and when I was stopped in the hallway on the way back, I didn’t believe them. Not until I saw you. I had no way of knowing how to conceive of a world without you. I guess I still don’t. It’s like there’s a notch that’s been taken out of me, and I’m walking around just waiting to collapse in on myself.

When Dr. Court told you something you believed it. It was the kind of doctor he was. Because he wore being a doctor well. There are things you have to take on faith, because you don’t know enough to even ask the right questions. And it’s easy to take a man on faith if he’s always joking with you like there’s nothing he can’t control. I used to say that anybody who argued with their doctor was an idiot. They don’t tell me how to climb a tree with a chain saw in hand, I don’t tell them how to do what they’re paid to do. Now I don’t pass one on the street without wanting to cut their face for pretending they know anything.

And I’ll admit this, I’d been working sixteen-hour days, and I wanted an air conditioner. I’d been after your mother to buy one for weeks, but she kept saying we didn’t have the money. I wanted Dr. Court to be right so I could spend the day with you in your room, in the cool air. So I trusted him on that, too.

23

jogging

P
atterson pulls off the side of the road outside of Questa and flips through the pictures. The fucking pictures. There are only six of them, and he doubts he could describe them even a minute after looking at them. Except for his son. In particular, one of the boy’s back as he stands staring across the Rio Grande Gorge, too near the edge. His brown hair is ruffled birdlike from the sleeping bag and, as young as he is, his shoulders are broad and square.

When he’s done looking at them Patterson has to smoke a cigarette before he can drive again. And it takes all the self-control he has not to put it out on the back of his hand.

Then his cell phone rings. He answers it quick. Figuring he can make it back to Taos and Laney inside of fifteen minutes. Figuring where he can buy a bottle of bourbon on the way. Figuring he needs that bourbon and hotel room like a white woman in a John Wayne movie needs a last bullet.

“You jogging?” Junior asks.

“Jogging?” Patterson says.

“You’re breathing hard, like you’re either jogging or fucking,” Junior says. “Jogging seemed likelier.”

“I was driving.”

“Driving. Well, good. You got a drive ahead of you.”

“I do?”

“To Denver,” he says. “I got something I need to show you.”

Patterson doesn’t have to think about it for long. Anything sounds better than sitting on his front porch. Whereas he started the spring planning his day around watching the sun set over the Blanca Massif, now he finds himself staring it down.

Patterson hadn’t expected to see Junior again anytime soon. As a matter of fact, he’d meant to make that a rule. There are many things a man of Patterson’s age shouldn’t be doing, and pulling guns on Mexicans in their own bars is probably at the top of that list. But sometimes events conspire against you. And after seeing those fucking pictures he figures he’s up for any trouble Junior can get them into.

He’s wrong.

J
unior’s sitting on his couch with his cowboy boots kicked up on the coffee table, holding a remote control. When Patterson walks in through the screen door, he can’t tell at first what the remote control is for. But then he follows Junior’s eyes to the television mounted on the wall. It’s the size of a small movie screen. “I got satellite hooked up,” Junior says. “You wouldn’t believe all the channels I can get.”

“It’s a nice set,” Patterson says.

“It’s a boring piece of shit,” Junior says. “I been sitting here for
three fucking hours trying to find something to watch that doesn’t make me wanna take a pipe wrench to my own fingers. The only thing it doesn’t have is
Wizard of Oz
, and that’s the reason I fucking bought it.”

Patterson takes a chair. “You get baseball games?”

“Yeah, I get baseball games. Everybody gets baseball games.”

“Let’s see a game.”

Junior flips channels, stopping on a Reds game. “You want a drink?” he asks.

“I can’t dance and it’s raining too hard to haul stone.”

“Is that a yes?”

“It means yes.”

“Then say what you fucking mean.” Junior fetches a couple of glasses and a bottle of bourbon out of the kitchen, hands one of the glasses to Patterson. “You don’t happen to know any ladies with black hair, do you? About twenty years younger’n you? Better looking than you’d ever have any right to think about?”

“Not interested.” Patterson takes the bottle and pours himself a drink. “And I hope that ain’t what you brought me here for.”

“Not hardly,” Junior says.

“Then what?”

“You’re going to want to finish your drink first,” he says. “I can promise you that.”