Take Me There (25 page)

I slam the lid shut, as if this will make the contents disappear. “He lied to me,” I say, shaking all the way down to my bones. “He told me the Colombian got away with the gun, but it’s been here all this time. What if …”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I can’t finish the thought out loud. What if the person my father has been trying to protect all these years is himself?

My head starts to spin, like I’m being sucked backward in time. I remember finding the gun in the peanut sack. I remember seeing Jack Golden dead on the floor. I remember seeing my father standing over Jack’s body, holding the gun in his hand. He put the gun in his back pocket and then picked me up and ran with me out of the trailer. “Everything’s going to be all right,” he told me. “Don’t you worry. Everything is going to be all right.” The next thing I knew, he was banging on the door of our neighbor’s house. A woman answered in a nightgown. A man was standing behind her. My father left me there and ran away into the darkness, and I could see the bulge of the gun in his back pocket.

“Dylan, are you okay?” Wade’s voice brings me back to reality.

“I can’t breathe,” I say. “I can’t …” I run out to the truck, start the engine, and drive as fast as I can, leaving behind Wade and the trailer full of memories. I don’t know where I’m going, or what I will do when I get there, but I have to put some distance between me and that place.

When I get out to the highway, I go south toward Brenham. I drive for over an hour before my head begins to clear and I start thinking straight again. I see a sign for Victoria, and that’s when I realize I’m on my way to La Puerta. To my mother. I pull over to the side of the road and try to figure out what I’m going to do.

It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. If my father killed Jack Golden, it doesn’t matter. It had to be an accident.

I bang my head on the steering wheel. My mother knew
that combination. She must know other things as well. I need to talk to her, but if I drive all the way down to La Puerta, I’ll never make it back to Livingston in time to visit my father. I can’t see him tomorrow because it’s Sunday, and they’re scheduled to kill him on Tuesday.

I stop at a gas station in Hope, fill up, and then call my uncle’s house from a pay phone.

“I need to talk to my mother,” I say when Mitch picks up the phone.

“Hello to you, too.”

“I don’t have time to jack around with you, Mitch. Put my mother on the phone.”

“She’s asleep.”

“Wake her up.”

“You’re not in a position to be orderin’ me around, boy.”

“I’m going to talk to her one way or another, so put her on the phone, or else I’m going to drive down there and talk to her face-to-face, and by the time I get there I’m gonna be pretty damn agitated, so maybe I’ll just mention how you’ve been weaseling her out of her money all these years.”

“Fine!” Uncle Mitch leaves, and a voice comes over the phone telling me to deposit more money. I search my pocket for quarters and just about decide Mitch has left me standing there, when I hear my mother’s voice.

“Dylan?”

“Mom, I found the gun.”

“What?” Her voice is a hairline crack in a sheet of glass about to shatter.

“Fourteen, thirty-eight, twenty-two. The combination to the lock. You knew it all this time. How did you know?”

There is a long silence, and I can’t be sure, but I think my mother is crying. “They won’t kill your father. It won’t come to that.”

“How can you be sure?”

“He promised me.”

“Who promised you?”

“Your father.”

“When?”

More silence.

“Mom?”

“D.J. had a box hidden in the barn. He told me about it right before—”

“Before you left,” I say, so she doesn’t have to.

“He told me the combination and said that if anything happened to him, I should find the box. There were certificates of deposit, stocks, bonds, numbers for foreign bank accounts. Enough money to take care of us, he said. I told him I didn’t want any of his drug money. Then I called your uncle Mitch to come get us. I took you away from that awful place and I left him.”

At least that part of my father’s story was true. I take a deep breath before I ask my next question. “Mom, what do you think really happened that night?”

It is a long time before she answers, and the voice comes on the line again.
“Your time is about to expire,”
it says. I search my pockets but I’m out of change. “Mom, I gotta go,” I tell her.

“He didn’t kill that cop,” she says.

“How can you be sure?”

“Your time is about to expire.”

“Just a minute,” I tell my mother, spotting a quarter lying on the ground. “Mom …”

“He said he wanted me to forget about him and go on with my life. If only I could have forgotten.” She’s crying again, and I realize that she may have left my father, but she has never stopped loving him.

“If I talk to him and get him to agree to see you, could you meet me there Monday morning?”

“He’ll never allow that.”

“Maybe I can get him to change his mind.”

“He won’t.”

“Please, Mom,” I beg.

“All right then,” she says with a sigh filled with regret and loss and a hundred other emotions I can’t begin to understand. “If you can get him to put my name on his list, I’ll meet you up there Monday morning.”

“Thank you.”

“Dylan.”

“Yes.”

“Happy birthday, honey,” she says right before my time elapses.

I get into the truck, turn around, and head to Livingston. By the time I get there, it’s already six o’clock and I’ve been driving for nearly five solid hours.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” my father says when I see him.

“I had some stuff to sort out.”

“Like what?”

“I figured out the combination to that box, and I found out what was inside.”

He studies me to see if I’m bluffing. So to prove my point I say,
“Fourteen, thirty-eight, twenty-two.”

His expression doesn’t change, and yet a total transformation comes over him. Like in those old Westerns where the cowboy’s face suddenly goes slack, and the camera angle widens to show that the Indian up on the mesa has just shot an arrow through his heart.

My father takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Well then,” he says.

“Stop jacking with me, Dad. All I ever wanted was the truth.”

“That’s the problem. People think if they can add up all the facts, they’ll end up with the truth, but that’s like sewin’ body parts together in the hopes you’ll get a man.”

“Mom is coming Monday morning to see you. You gotta put her name on the list.”

His whole body goes stiff. “You leave your mother out of this.” He lowers his voice to almost a whisper. “I won’t see her and she knows it.”

“Please,” I beg him. “Just talk to her. One time. She really wants to see you.”

“Did she say that?” he asks, softening ever so slightly.

“She still loves you.”

He shakes his head and runs his hands through his graying hair. “Why?” he asks, but not like he expects an answer.

“Please.”

He pounds his fist against his head. “Why, why, why? After everything I’ve done to …”

“Dad?”

He looks up at me as if suddenly realizing I’m sitting there. “I’ll think about it.”

“Come on …”

“That’s the best I can do,” he tells me in a voice that warns I shouldn’t push him too far.

“Okay.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll have Mr. Cartwright call you at Levida’s house and give you my answer.”

“I can live with that,” I say, realizing I don’t have any choice.

“Good.” He suddenly seems at peace, and I know he’s already decided what he’s going to do, though he won’t tell me.

I don’t ask him any more questions. Instead we talk about everything else, and it’s just like that first day I came to visit him. I tell him all about Levida and that stupid pig of hers. I describe how Jess found me, only to leave me again. I report how Wade has hooked up with the preacher’s daughter. And I forget, for a while, that I’m talking to a man on death row, until the guard’s voice comes over the speaker and says it’s almost time for me to leave.

“I started reading your book,” I say.

“That’s good.”

“There’s a letter in it to me.”

He smiles. “A teacher of mine once told me that when you write something, you should think about who you’re writing it for. Picture in your mind the one person you most want to read it and why.”

“Me?”

“Yes. She said if it means something to that one person, it will mean something to others as well.”

“Your time is up,” the guard says over the intercom.

I stand to leave, but my father says, “Wait!” over the red telephone. “Let me just look at you a minute.” He smiles at me proudly. “I know you been in some trouble, son, but you turned out good. That’s all I ever wanted,” he tells me. Then he puts his
hand against the glass and I put my hand against the glass. “I love you,” he says.

“I love you, too,” I say back.

And then I leave.

It’s nine o’clock at night before I get back to the farm. I walk into the house and smell apple pie baking. Wade is standing at the sink, washing the dirt off a huge zucchini squash from Levida’s garden. “Hey, you okay? You left kinda fast this afternoon.”

“I talked to my mom. She’s going to meet me in Livingston Monday morning.”

“That so?” Levida says, walking into the kitchen with an armload of zucchinis from the garden and Baby Face sniffing at her heels.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Your daddy said he’d see her?” she asks, plopping the long green vegetables on the counter next to Wade.

“He said he’d consider it.”

“Humph,” she replies, like she doesn’t believe it. She seems more irritated than usual, which I didn’t know was possible. Then she looks over at the dining table, and I understand why. The box holding the .22 is sitting open on the table. My grandmother glares at me, so angry that she’s shaking. “About time to get dinner on the table,” she tells Wade, then storms into her bedroom and slams the door.

I turn on Wade. “You showed her the gun?”

“Nah. She came up to the trailer after you left and saw the box.”

Levida storms back into the kitchen, having taken off her dirty overalls and slipped into a pair of jeans and a man’s white
cotton shirt. She opens and slams cupboards, setting various serving dishes on the counter with notable thuds. Taking a meat loaf out of the oven, she throws it onto a serving dish, then surrounds it with boiled potatoes she hasn’t bothered to mash. Next she pours green beans and gravy into bowls. She carries the dishes over to the table and sets them around the rusted metal box, like it isn’t even there. Then she walks past me over to the stove, like I’m not there either, fills a basket with rolls from the oven, and hands it to Wade. “Go put these next to the gravy,” she tells him. We all sit down, Wade and I sharing awkward glances while Levida passes the serving dishes.

We fill our plates and eat in silence with the strange centerpiece staring up at us. “Do you want to talk about the gun?” I ask.

“What gun?” she says, stabbing her dinner roll with a butter knife.

“I’m sorry. I was wrong not to tell you about finding the box.”

“What box?” It’s obvious she isn’t going to make this easy for me, but I guess I deserve that.

“I didn’t know what was in it until this morning.”

“More gravy, anyone?” she says, picking up a bowl.

“You haven’t been to see my father in eleven years. Why do you care what’s in that box when you don’t give a damn about him?” My anger and frustration are mounting. “Why haven’t you seen him in all this time? Why won’t you go to him? And don’t give me that bullshit about him destroying all your dreams. He’s your son!”

Levida places her fork on the edge of her plate, coolly and deliberately. Her voice is ice. “He asked me to do something that went against my nature.”

“What?”

“Keep my mouth shut. And I been keepin’ it shut for over a decade. So here’s what we’re gonna do,” Levida tells me, her voice beginning to rise. “We’ll keep this gun sitting here between us in the middle of the table for the next eleven years with the understanding that we will never, ever talk about it. The word will not pass our lips. What happened out there”—she jumps to her feet and points up the hill—“will never be spoken of again, and if it is … you will not see my face again.” She holds her fist up to her mouth to hide the fact that she’s crying, and then she runs out the back door.

And I realize: The silence and separation wasn’t her doing. It was my father’s. He has shut out everyone but me.

“Maybe you should go talk to her,” Wade says.

“I know,” I reply, even though I have no idea what to say or do. I didn’t even know the old bag was capable of tears.

I walk out the back door and don’t have to go far. Levida is standing out in the grass, hosing off Charlotte, whose pitiful face and entire right side is covered in mud.

I walk over and stand nearby, my hands in my pockets.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she says to the pig, as if she’s betrayed a child. “I didn’t realize you been standin’ outside in the heat for so long.” She rubs her hands across Charlotte’s body, wiping away the filth.

“You don’t have to keep quiet anymore,” I tell her.

Levida drops the hose, reaches me in three long strides, and starts to weep all over again.

I put my arms around her, and she feels tiny. She cries and cries and cries, and when she is all cried out, she takes a bandana out of her pocket and blows her nose into it. “Your daddy
and that ambulance chaser he calls a lawyer wouldn’t put me on the witness stand,” she says.

“What would you have said if they’d let you testify?” I ask.

“The truth. I would have told the jury that a man in a mask broke into my house, tied me up, and demanded to know where your father was. I would have said that shortly beforehand I’d been awoken by the headlights of a Cadillac making its way up the road to your trailer. I would have said that the masked man left as I saw your father coming toward the house from the workshop with your granddaddy’s shotgun. I would have said I heard gunshots from up on the hill and then your daddy turned and ran toward the trailer. But afterward I didn’t hear any more gunshots.”