Cry Father (18 page)

49

pop

T
wo o’clock in the morning, and Junior has no idea why he’s sitting in his car parked down the street from Jenny’s house. Especially since his own house is right there. But it is what he’s doing. And he’s been resisting the urge to go over and tap on her window. To sneak inside and crawl into her bed. To look in on Casey, to just sit and watch her, to put his hand on her forehead, on her cheek.

Junior remembers his own mother waking him with that gesture when he was a boy, and at about the same time in the morning. A hand on the forehead, then on the cheek, as if checking him for a fever. Which she may have been, given that he’d been with Henry while she was working second shift, waiting tables at an all-you-can-eat pancake house.

They’d lived in a double-wide outside of Longmont, Colorado, with room for a horse, though Junior doesn’t remember Henry ever actually being able to afford a horse. Most nights when Junior’s
mother was at work, he and Henry would go down to the only bar in walking distance.

There was barely room for fifty people in that bar, but that was never a problem. There were seldom more than ten at any one time, and most of them broken-down rodeo bums. There was a bartender, though, a redheaded girl in her early twenties, who would spend her nights standing at the end of the bar with Henry. Or, when she got a chance, and there was no one else in the place but she and Henry and Junior, would lock the front door and sneak back to the stockroom with him.

Junior tried not to notice it when they snuck off together. That was one of many betrayals of his mother. He loved that place, and he wasn’t about to fuck that up. There was a television, which they didn’t have the money for at their trailer, and when business was slow, the redhead would open up the pinball machine and let him play for free. And when the boy was tired, Henry’d make him a bed along the seat of one of the three booths that were used for weekly euchre games by a gang of half-crippled rough-stock riders.

Then there was Henry himself. The broken places hadn’t yet hardened, and he moved with a loose, looping grace that he wore as easily as his friendship. He was almost impossible not to love when he wasn’t at home, and here, in the bar, he was at his best. He let the boy steer the conversation, let him wander as far off topic as he wanted. Never pushing him in any direction, just rolling along on Junior’s trip. Joking and laughing, doing what he did that made him popular in every bar he’d ever set foot in, and bringing Junior into his world.

Most nights, after the smoke and the boozy talk and the television, the last thing Junior remembered was curling up exhausted in the booth, letting himself drift away on the warm tones of Henry’s voice. And then partially wakening as Henry picked him up and car
ried him all the way back to their trailer, where he tucked him into bed. And, later, waking again, for just a minute, as his mother put her hand on his forehead, on his cheek.

Only to come awake one more time to the sound of yelling, Henry and Connie hard after each other again.

And then, and Junior’s never quite sure of this memory, he was standing against the fence out back of their trailer, not much more than eight years old. One of Henry’s rodeo buddies was standing next to him, a sharp-faced man with a long, scraggly mustache. Neither of them talking, just watching what was happening on the other side of the fence about fifty feet away, watching as Henry dragged Connie backward by the hair. She was screaming and scratching over her head at his hands and arms, her legs scrabbling to keep up.

“Don’t you think we ought to do something?” Junior remembers asking. He looked at his father’s friend, who was smoking a lumpy hand-rolled cigarette.

“I ain’t getting in the middle of that,” the man said. He looked at the boy. “I got some pop in my truck. How’s about you and me go get one?”

Henry let go of Connie’s hair, and she fell flat on her back. He stood over her, looking down, his chin jutted out like a rooster’s. Then he turned and strutted toward the fence. He only made it four or five paces before she rose behind him and charged in a low, crablike run, her mane of dirty blond hair tangled with dry grass and clumps of dirt. She was fully airborne when she hit his back, and they dropped together, rolling through the tall grass in a flurry of blows and dust, screaming and hissing. And then the motion quieted, and there were only Henry’s grunts, and the solid smack of blows landing on undefended flesh.

“I think we’d better go get that pop,” Henry’s friend said.

Connie was in the hospital for two days, and it was another week before she could work again. She and Henry spent her time off in the kitchen, drinking black coffee and talking. They kept the shades drawn and the trailer was heavy and dark. They were pounding out some kind of deadly agreement that Junior neither understood nor cared to. Junior, out of school for the summer, listened to the radio and read comic books in his room. He hated both of them desperately. And when she finally did go back to work, Junior no longer went with Henry to the bar.

Most of the memories that gnaw at the edges of Junior’s brain are like that. They come in fragments. A conspiracy of whispered voices, crashes in the bedroom, pus and blood draining from his mother’s swollen eye the next morning. Henry sitting on the front step of the trailer, waiting for Junior to walk down the lane from school. Grabbing the boy into his arms, crying drunk into his neck.

And then there was when she died. And that, too, was the old man’s doing somehow, if for no other reason than it was her dying that stopped him from drinking. Junior knows that Henry’s sobriety was an acknowledgment of his complicity in her death, just as he knows that the minute Henry got sober, his mother’s death became just one more point in Henry’s story of Henry.

And Junior knows himself for what he is in Henry’s life. A terrorist, forcing himself into Henry’s story of himself, making himself relevant in something in which he has always been irrelevant. Henry’s story of himself is total, self-configuring, and self-healing. There is nothing that cannot be assimilated by it. Nothing except sudden force.

Still watching Jenny’s house, Junior lights a cigarette, sucking smoke past the hollow spot growing just behind his Adam’s apple. He doesn’t think about that quiet boy who’d sit in a chair all day with his
mother, nursing her hangovers and wounds. Nor of his mother, who tried with all her heart to give as good as she got, but was never quite able to. Junior rolls the window down, hacks up a chunk of nicotine-fused phlegm, and spits it out the window.

And then he freezes.

The front door of Jenny’s house cracks open and a man steps out. A young man with a goatee, wearing what looks like a mechanic’s shop pants.

Junior starts his car, and the man jumps a little, and then starts walking quicker down the sidewalk to a beat-up Honda Accord that Junior hadn’t even seen sitting there.

Then Junior’s cell phone rings.

50

joy

O
nce Patterson has the bodies out of the trunk he can’t stop grinning. He hits the highway and lets the Corvette open up, still shot through with Vicodin and adrenaline. He doesn’t even try not to speed. He’s pretty sure he can outrun any cop stupid enough to try to pull him over in the thing, anyway. The thought that he’ll probably end up facing a murder charge if he is pulled over does occur to him, but there’s no stopping it. Turns out there’s no better medicine for heartache than surviving a murder attempt and stealing a car.

He makes Fort Garland before pulling out his cell phone and dialing Junior. “What the fuck do you want?” Junior answers in a rough whisper.

“I’m on my way to see you.”

“I’m busy.”

“Get unbusy.”

“Does it really fucking need to be right now?”

“Yeah. It kind of does.”

There’s a long pause. “All right.” Junior’s voice sounds like chipped Sheetrock. “You coming by my house?”

Patterson hasn’t thought that far ahead. “I don’t think so. Anywhere else you can think of?”

“How far are you out?”

“At least three hours. Maybe four.”

“You know where the Bar Bar is?” Junior asks.

“Downtown’s probably not a good idea, either.”

“Whatever your problem is, it’s better in plain sight. You can trust me on that.”

“If you say so.” Patterson hangs up.

T
he Bar Bar is the one bar in Denver that opens at six o’clock in the morning, which is just about the time Patterson pulls up. It’s a stucco box, right on the edge of downtown where the abandoned warehouses and gearhead mechanics take over. It’s never had any name that anyone knows of, but there’s a neon sign out front that says Bar, which is where people get Bar Bar from. From noon to close it’s populated by homeless cart pushers and bitter Indians, but at six o’clock in the morning you’re liable to see anybody. A high-end stripper killing the smell of baby oil and perfume with gin, a television lawyer blowing his last line of cocaine in the men’s room, an overtime cop pounding bourbon before heading home to his impending divorce. Anybody.

Patterson takes a stool next to Junior, who is sitting by a homeless man with a beardful of coagulated blood. Junior looks at Patterson and shakes his head. “You’re gonna need to tone it down some,” he says. “I don’t think I can take you glowing.”

“It’s love of life,” Patterson says. “It’s joy.” He knocks back the shot of bourbon Junior has waiting for him. “Sorry to get you up in the middle of the night.”

“I wasn’t sleeping anyway.” Junior slaps his pockets for his cigarettes. He finds them and pulls out the pack.

“You can’t smoke in here,” Patterson says. “Can’t smoke in any of the bars in Denver. You’re the one who told me that.”

“True,” Junior says, lighting his cigarette. “I don’t give a shit.”

“Hey,” the bartender says. “Hey.”

Junior ignores him.

“I’m talking to you, motherfucker,” the bartender says. He’s in his early thirties, with a mustache and a Hawaiian shirt. He doesn’t look particularly tough, but he carries himself like someone who’s taken more than his fair share of shit in his chosen occupation, and knows how to handle it. “No smoking at the bar, motherfucker. If you want to smoke, move outside.”

“Call me motherfucker again and I’ll put it out in your ear,” Junior says.

“It’s a term of endearment,” the bartender says. “Put it out or go outside. I’m the one who gets the ticket, not you.”

Junior lets the cigarette fall out of his fingers and scuffs it out on the floor with the toe of his cowboy boot. Patterson almost falls off his stool seeing him comply. Then he looks at Junior hard for the first time since walking into the bar. Junior looks like Patterson imagines he did just about thirty seconds after he survived Mel and the biker. Shell-shocked.

“All right,” the bartender says. “You can get the hell out of here. I don’t need your shit.”

Patterson finds a twenty-dollar bill in his wallet. “How’s that?” He offers it to the bartender.

The bartender studies the bill and slides it in his pocket. “No more of that shit,” he says, pointing at Junior.

“No more of that shit,” Patterson agrees.

“All right.” The bartender walks away down the bar.

Patterson shakes his head and starts to say something to Junior. Then he starts to say something else. Then he decides on “Something wrong with you?”

“There ain’t a fucking thing wrong with me, partner. You’re the one who called me.”

So Patterson tells him. Tells him all about it, from the minute Chase’s woman and the biker show up at the cabin right to the hole he buried them in.

Junior looks near impressed. “You’re a fucking killer.”

“This is my last,” Patterson promises.

“I recommend it,” Junior says. “There’s only so many places to bury a body in the great state of Colorado.”

Patterson doesn’t answer.

“But this ain’t a problem, partner,” Junior says.

Patterson looks at him. “It ain’t?”

“Hell no,” he says, pulling his cell phone out of his pocket. “This is an opportunity.” He stands and takes his cell phone out the door to make a call.

51

idiot

T
hey pull into Vicente’s compound sometime in the midmorning. He waves them through the gate and around his junk barricades, to a parking spot by the garage. Junior and Patterson climb out of the car.

“How does it drive?” Vicente asks. “Does it drive well?”

“It does,” Patterson says. “It ain’t like nothing I’ve ever driven.”

Vicente’s fingers twitch open and closed. Behind his glasses his brown face is breaking all over in a grin and there’s a kind of excited ruffling of the air emanating from him. Patterson sees a smirk flash on Junior’s face, but it’s gone when Vicente cuts a look back at him.

“She’s beautiful,” Vicente says. He circles the car, touching it here and there. Then he just stops and stares at the supercharger. “Seven minutes twenty-six point four seconds at Nürburgring,” he says, in a hushed voice. “Did you know that? They call it the Green Hell. It’s the most dangerous track in the world. And that’s the fastest time ever
posted by a production automobile. Ever.” He turns to them, his eyes tearing up.

“Whatever the fuck you say,” Junior says. “This is Patterson, by the way. You’ve got him to thank for it.”

Vicente looks at Patterson for just a second, then says, “Thank you, Patterson. Come inside. Have a beer. I will pay you inside.”

The air in the garage is thick with oil, floating with motes of dust. Vicente counts out two stacks of bills, ten thousand dollars apiece, and hands each of them a bottle of imported beer out of a shop refrigerator. They drink the beer while Vicente drives the Corvette into the garage and opens the hood. He’s so excited it makes Patterson a little nervous.

After a little while, Patterson watches another man come into the garage. He is larger than Vicente, much larger, with a long, black ponytail and a face like an oncoming train. He says something to Vicente that Patterson can’t hear, and then leans against the wall and watches the other Mexican for a few minutes.

“He’s sociable, ain’t he?” Patterson says to Junior.

“Don’t worry about him,” Junior says. “He ain’t nothing but a big teddy bear.”

“I don’t think you mean that.”

Junior stands. “I don’t.” He walks over to the man and they stand together, talking. The man’s expression doesn’t change, not even a little. Patterson expects him to separate Junior’s head from his shoulders at any second. When he is done saying whatever needed to be said, Junior walks back over. “You can sleep on my floor,” he says.

“Up to you. I feel fine. We can head back to the mesa now.”

“I need sleep,” Junior says. “And food. I know a place. I’ll buy you a beer.”

Even as good as he’s feeling, Patterson opens his mouth to protest the idea of going into any establishment that serves alcohol with Junior. But before he can say anything, his phone rings. He looks at one of the walls for a second. Then he digs it out of his pocket. He holds it in his hand and lets it ring until it stops ringing.

But then it starts ringing again.

“Hello,” he answers.

“Are you with Henry’s son?” Laney says brightly.

“Just heading back now.”

“You’re an idiot,” she says.

“It was kind of an emergency.”

“One of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever met in my life,” she continues.

“I’ll be back this afternoon. Promise.”

“Will you do me this favor?” she asks. “Will you call me when you get to the cabin? Just so I know you’re alive. I don’t think it’s too much to ask, considering I’m the one who put you back together last time.”

“I’ll get some sleep and call you,” Patterson says. “Maybe I’ll buy a couple of chickens and pit-roast ’em.”

“You think you can dig your way out of this one?”

“Your boy, Gabe. Does he know how to play catch?”

“You’re really working,” she says.

“I’ll pick up a glove and a baseball,” he says.

“Call me when you get there.”

He hangs up.

“Henry?” Junior asks.

Patterson shakes his head, putting the phone back in his pocket.

“I didn’t know you had other friends,” Junior says.

“She ain’t friendly,” Patterson says.

“I got one of those, too.”