Cry Father (17 page)

45

progress

P
atterson wakes up bundled up on the couch, a bandage on his hand and his nose taped up. Sancho is curled up on his legs, looking at him balefully. Worse, Laney is sitting at the table, drinking a cup of coffee and reading a book, Gabe next to her drawing something in a coloring book. Patterson opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. He clears his throat, drags up a mouse-sized hunk of mucus, and swallows it. The room swims in a nauseous yellow cloud. He gags.

“Hello,” Laney says. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m all right,” Patterson says.

“No,” she says. She holds her slightly red nose over her cup of coffee and inhales. “You’re not all right.”

“I’m not?”

“Do you remember the hospital?” she asks.

He shakes his head.

“You have two hairline fractures, a pulled muscle, and your wrist is sprained. I didn’t even know you could sprain a wrist, but you did it. You also have a broken nose, apparently from falling face-first into the floor about two steps after you made it into the cabin. And there was some talk about the amount of cocaine and alcohol in your system, both in quantities that probably should have killed you.”

“It felt worse,” Patterson says.

“Exhaustion, too, but Henry, Emma, and I had stopped listening at that point. That was who found you, by the way. Henry and Emma. If it wasn’t for them, you’d still be lying on your floor.”

“I was pretty tired,” Patterson agrees.

“Also,” she continues, “there was blood on you that the doctor said came from different sources. And at different times. Some on the cuffs of your pants and your shoes, and some more on your shirt.”

Patterson nods. “What was on my pants and shoes was dog’s blood. Most of it probably dog vomit, actually.”

“Good. That clears that up.”

“You’re being sarcastic.”

“Yes, I am. Is it safe to say that if the blood on your pants is from a dog, then the blood on your shirt isn’t?”

“That’s safe to say.”

“So the blood on your shirt, who is that from?”

“I didn’t catch her name.”

“Her?”

“She was a pedophile.”

“Good,” she says again. “As long as she deserved it.”

“You’re being sarcastic again.”

“Yes, I am. Do you think you’ll be seeing your friend again?
Henry’s son? Or do you think maybe Henry might have a point about his character?”

Patterson thinks about Henry. And about Junior. And about the girl on the road. “I don’t know,” he says.

“That’s progress,” she says. “I don’t know is actually great progress. I’m not trying to nag you. But I really, really, really do think that Junior might not be the best influence on you.”

46

scientists

T
he doctor from the hospital has written him a prescription for Vicodin, so Patterson eats pills by the fistful, pounding himself into a haze until his hand starts to look like a hand again. Vicodin’s something he got pretty well acquainted with from the time shortly after Justin died. The thing about grieving is how much you need to just sit still and stare, how little you need to try to figure things out. That’s what’s always made him like pills. It makes it easier to sit still and stare at things without trying to make sense of them.

Laney takes care of him while he recuperates from the El Paso trip. She cooks meals, cleans the cabin, feeds Sancho. She talks to him about books she’s reading, and even borrows Henry’s generator and television so he can watch Westerns. And she doesn’t once mention anything about a lawsuit or signing papers. She seems to understand how poorly that kind of talk is working out for Patterson.

Henry stops by on the third night of his recuperation. “How you doing, Patterson?” he asks, standing in the doorway.

“I’m good.” Patterson’s eating an apple and reading some of what he’d written leading up to his trip to El Paso, trying to figure out what the hell he’d been thinking. “I hear I owe you a thank-you.”

“You’d do the same for me if you found me half-dead and full of cocaine.” He still hasn’t entered the cabin. “I take it he’s not doing any better for himself?”

“He’s doing what he can,” Patterson says.

“Where’s Laney?”

“She’s got Gabe out in the outhouse.”

Henry walks a few steps in and knocks the door shut with his cane.

“Did I do something to piss you off?” Patterson asks.

“No.” He pinches his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Actually, yeah,” he says. “Paulson’s fit to be tied.”

“I figured he fired me.”

“He would have. I told him your mother died.”

“Thanks.”

“Fuck you.”

The door opens and Laney walks in, holding Gabe’s hand. “Are you fighting?” she asks.

“I don’t fight with drunks,” says Henry. “Nor druggies.”

Patterson grins genially. He’s having an easy time being genial with all the Vicodin floating through his system.

“Are you ready?” Henry asks Laney.

“Where are y’all headed?” Patterson asks.

“Henry bought a telescope,” Laney says. “He’s got it set up on the roof of the barn, and there’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight. He thought we might want to see it.”

“Not a shower,” Henry says. “Some activity.”

“It’d do you good for you to get out of the house,” Laney says. “I was hoping we could talk you into it.”

“I’ll sit here and thank my own stars, instead,” Patterson says. “Thank them for having the kind of friend who’ll lie to my boss for me. But y’all should go.”

“Wouldn’t hurt you to see a star or two you didn’t make up,” Henry says.

“Sure,” Patterson says. “When’d you get interested in astronomy?”

“Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest,” Henry quotes. “He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns. Not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand.”

“Well,” Patterson says. “Good luck.”

“Patterson’s morally opposed to any attempt to make meaning out of the world,” Henry explains to Laney. “If he was a serial killer he’d kill priests and scientists.”

“Not only priests and scientists,” Patterson corrects him. “Mostly priests and scientists.”

“It’s also why he never talks about politics,” Henry continues. “He doesn’t like to make sense out of anything.”

“Can we talk about something else?” Even as genial as the Vicodin is making Patterson, he’s done with this conversation.

Henry looks at him for a long time. “Another thing about you.”

“Don’t bother.”

“No, one more thing. Junior.”

“Not Junior,” Laney says. “Definitely not Junior.”

“Hold on,” Henry says to her. “This is what I’m getting at. Patterson and Junior, they’re circling. You know why?”

“No,” says Laney. “I don’t know why.”

“They’re two of a kind,” Henry says. “Junior, he can’t stand to make sense out of anything either. He’s another like Patterson. He can’t stand to believe in nothing.”

“Horseshit,” Patterson says. “He believes in you. And look at all the good it’s doing him.”

47

rope

A
fter they leave, Patterson realizes Laney is right, he does need to get out of the cabin. So he belts on his .45 and goes for a walk. The stars are thrown over the matte black sky like pebbles strewn across a creek bed, and seeing the night overhead makes him think a little clearer. He’s not sure what good it does, but when he gets back to the cabin he pours a drink and stretches out on the couch with a book. Thinking is good, but reading is good protection against thinking too much. As is drinking. Patterson gets the feeling he’s living out a kind of exercise to see which slips under his guard first.

They don’t bother knocking. The man swings the door open and sweeps inside, his movements clean and practiced. He’s taller than Patterson, gaunt, with long, gray-black hair that runs right down into his beard. There’s a tattoo on his arm of a winged skull and the words
Semper Fi
, and he’s holding a very mean-looking AR-15 on a single-point sling on his chest. Patterson’s known plenty of his kind on work
crews. Ruined by whichever Gulf War they were in, renting themselves out for muscle work wherever they can find it.

And the woman who follows the biker through the door, Patterson recognizes her immediately. Adrenaline hits him like a bucket of cold water, blood rushing into his ears like a dam bursting. He lays his book on the floor, carefully. “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” he says to her, his voice smearing in his ears.

“Where’s the dog?” the man asks. Patterson’s heard chain saws with more human feeling than his voice.

“He’s out. He stays out most nights. I can go three or four without seeing him.” Patterson speaks slowly, thinking his way through the words, letting his body recover from the shock.

“Stand up,” the man says. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

Patterson swings his feet off the couch and places his glass on the floor. He wills his hand not to shake, but it doesn’t do him much good. Then he puts his hands out at the man, showing there’s nothing in them. “You mind closing the door before the mosquitoes get in?”

The man doesn’t give any indication that he’s heard Patterson at all. He stands by the open door, his left hand resting on the AR-15’s grip, not even bothering to point it at him. “All right,” Patterson says. “We can sort this out.” He tries to look as scared as he can. It doesn’t take a whole hell of a lot of effort. “Close the door and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Mel says. “I need you to tell me where Chase is.”

Patterson doesn’t even bother thinking about cover. There’s nowhere in the cabin the biker can’t shoot him as easy as if he were standing a foot in front him. He knows that as well as Patterson does,
which is why he isn’t bothering to put his sights on him. “Jesus, you’re a badass,” Patterson says. “You do remember that I untied you out of that bathtub?”

Her eyes don’t waver.

“He didn’t mean you any good,” Patterson says. “In case you hadn’t figured that out.”

“Where is he?” she says.

Patterson knows there isn’t a lie in the world he can come up with that would satisfy her. So he does what he seems to do best. Plays stupid. “What makes you think I know?”

“He came down here looking for you,” she says.

“He did,” Patterson says. “And I told him I didn’t have you. Nor his dope, which is what he was really after.”

“Shut your mouth,” she says.

“This make a goddamn bit of sense to you?” Patterson asks the biker.

The man doesn’t answer and his gun hand doesn’t move, but Patterson thinks he sees something happen around his eyes.

Patterson tries a different tack. “I’ve got people who’ll be back any minute,” he says.

“We brought rope,” she says. “We’re not staying.”

“They’ll figure it out,” Patterson says. “Everybody knows everybody up here on the mesa, somebody’ll see your car.”

“Get your shoes on,” she says. “And we’ll give it a try.”

“Jesus,” Patterson says. “Over a fuckup like Chase.”

“Put your shoes on.”

“Okay,” Patterson says. “Okay. Close the door.”

This time the command seems to click in the biker’s head. Without even thinking, he reaches out with his gun hand and slaps the door shut.

As soon as his hand hits the door, Patterson sweeps back, pulls his .45 one-handed, and punches the pistol at the man’s chest, squeezing the trigger twice. The two-shot string is one solid boom like somebody set off a stick of dynamite between his eyes. It’s point shooting at that range, and Patterson’s scared he missed at first. Until the biker looks down at his chest, startled, and slumps to the floor.

Mel’s moving. “Don’t,” Patterson yells to her. He can’t hear himself over the sound of his eardrums splintering. He doubts she can either. She’s squatted down by the man, tugging at the AR-15. She probably thinks she’s moving quickly, and maybe she is, but to Patterson it’s all comically slow. She struggles with the sling, looking for a way to unfasten it.

“Don’t,” Patterson tries again, louder.

She gets the AR-15 loose, and that’s all the time Patterson can give her. He jerks the trigger and the bullet goes through her arm, blows into her chest cavity. Her eyes widen and the breath goes out of her as her legs give. She very slowly, almost graciously, collapses forward across the biker.

Patterson breathes out. “You bitch,” he says. And he sits down at the table and stares at the two bodies.

48

dirt

P
atterson doesn’t know how long he sits at the kitchen table. This is as close as he’s ever come to being killed, and he knows it. Mel’s face had made that clear, and the biker had been as smooth a professional as Patterson’s ever seen. Patterson knows he only survived by dumb luck. Dumb luck and spending way too much time working on his draw.

It probably isn’t five minutes he sits there, but it feels like hours. And he’s not sure what he’s waiting for. Maybe somebody to show up, maybe a police siren. But then he starts to realize that nobody’s coming. That unless somebody happened to be walking along the road right then, nobody could’ve heard the shots. And he also realizes that the last thing he wants to do is explain any of this to Laney, Gabe, and Henry. Let alone the police. So he bubbles his bottle of Evan Williams and chases the whiskey with Vicodin. He needs all the nerve he can get.

Moving fast, holding his breath that they don’t come through the door, he has the bodies wrapped in tarps and bound with duct tape within fifteen minutes. There isn’t much blood. A trickling, most of it absorbed by their clothes. As advertised, none of the hollow point rounds exited their bodies. In fifteen minutes more, he has his floor scrubbed down and rescuffed with San Luis Valley dirt.

Then he steps outside and sees their car around the corner. It’s a Corvette ZR1. Atomic orange, spotless down to its slick black tires, no more than a year old. Patterson’s never seen a ZR1 except in pictures in car magazines, and even with two bodies in his living room he can’t help but gawk a little as he realizes it’s his, at least for the night.

But he doesn’t gawk long before he’s back inside to get the bodies. Somehow he gets Mel’s folded into the trunk. The biker he has to kick into place in the passenger’s seat. He tosses a shovel and a bag of lime after them, and peels out down the mesa, toward Questa on CO-159.

It’s the opposite of how he felt when he found Chase’s body. He doesn’t feel bad at all. He feels better than he has in years. To have somebody show up at your house with a gun, to try to kill you, and then win out. Patterson doesn’t feel guilty or complicated or even sad. For the first time in a long time, he feels like he’s done exactly the right and necessary thing.

He turns on the radio and spins the dial slowly, leaning into it like a sonar operator plumbing the deep, short bursts of static flickering across the airwaves in the big radio-dead valley. Then he comes across Brother Joe. Knowing better, he keeps spinning the dial. Lucks on Willie Nelson singing “He Was a Friend of Mine” and leaves it right there. Which is probably a mistake, the way country music seeps into everything. But he does it anyway.

He crosses the New Mexico line and makes random turns toward the mountains. Off the blacktop and onto the dirt roads, anything he figures the undercarriage can handle, right up to an overgrown four-wheeling trail. Patterson drives it as far as he can with the lights off, and when it gets rough enough he can’t drive any farther, he parks and checks the time on his cell phone. Eleven fifteen.

He digs a four-foot-deep hole and rolls the bodies into it. And it breaks his heart, but he tosses the AR-15 in with them. Then he climbs down, slices the tarps with his clip knife, and empties the bag of lime over them. He’s a lot smarter this second time around.