Cry Father (2 page)

2

maps

P
atterson sits in the parking lot of a cinder-block bar at the bottom of the I-70 ramp. Lit by the dome light of his Ford Ranger, staring at the ruled schoolboy notebook he writes to his son in. Then, nothing left to write, he puts the notebook in his Alice pack and pulls out a road atlas. East St. Louis. East St. Louis to where? There has to be somewhere else besides the mesa. Montana, maybe. Or the Black Hills. There’s nothing like the Black Hills in spring. It’d be chilly at night this time of year, but daytime’d be perfect. He and Sancho could live out of the tent for a couple of weeks. The dog could run around and chase all the animals he wanted.

But maps never do him any good, not when he’s already set on the mesa. So he folds the atlas closed and stares at the I-70 ramp. Then at the cinder-block bar, thinking about going inside and getting good and drunk. But he knows better than that, too. Knows that drunk’s just about the last thing he needs to be. The bar looks like it’s
undergone a disaster of its own, the cinder block pitted and blasted and the steel door slightly crumpled, as though it’s been ruffled by a minor hurricane. Patterson’s always surprised at how far gone everything is when he comes out of the rubble at the end of a season. The thing about working in disaster areas is that you expect that the rest of the country is doing better. And it could be that there are parts that are. Somewhere along the coasts, maybe, where the people who matter live. But the interior is perpetually rolling wreckage, and the ruin visited by hurricane isn’t even different in degree from the ruin found in your average midwestern city.

That shows in the bars like nowhere else. The bars are identical. You’d be surprised, but no matter how bad it is, there are always bars. Somebody was serving drinks in New Orleans the day after the levees broke, that’s a guarantee. All the hospitals were flooded, the churches closed, but there was some joint serving straight whiskey to disaster-addled drunks the next day, even if it was over a plywood and sawhorse counter. And those ad hoc bars you’ll find in disaster areas, they’re no more disheartening than your average rust-belt beer joint.

Which is why Patterson really doesn’t want to get up and go inside this one. But he can’t remember the last time he ate, and he knows that once he starts the drive for real, there’s no stopping for anything but gas. Besides, he’s twitching for a drink. Not a dozen, he tells himself, but one very stiff one. Maybe two. So he reaches behind his seat, scratches Sancho on the head, not even eliciting a whine from the sleeping dog, and opens the door of his truck.

It’s just as bad as he expected inside.

“What can I get you?” the bartender asks.

Patterson takes a stool, dumping his Alice pack on the floor next to him. “You serve food?”

The bartender nods at a snack machine by the door. Pork rinds and miniature donuts. “Got frozen pizzas in the back, too. But you’re going to have to order a drink.”

“Give me a beer. And a shot of Beam. A double.”

The bartender pours the bourbon and hands it to Patterson, the beer following. Patterson drinks the bourbon straight off.

It’s just then that he hears the door open behind him. And the rust-belt warriors who occupy the shadows of the bar all turn in a pack. Eyeballing what comes through the door with the kind of interest that wild dogs reserve for fresh meat. She sits down next to Patterson, wearing a hooded sweatshirt over her Steve Earle shirt and a pair of engineer boots that add an inch to her height. “Looking for food,” Mel says to the bartender.

The bartender sighs as if this line of inquiry is a calamity that just won’t end. His head makes the slightest movement toward the snack machine.

“They have frozen pizzas in back, too,” Patterson offers. “But you have to order a drink.”

“Good.” She drops a fresh pack of Marlboros and a new Bic lighter on the bar. “Beer?”

“Bud Select?” the bartender says.

She peels the cellophane from her cigarettes. “Why Bud Select?”

“A lot of the women who come in here like it.”

“That’s fine,” she says.

“It’s just one, really,” he says.

She lights her cigarette and blows smoke at him.

“The woman who comes in here. She lives next door and she’s almost blind. It’s the only place that serves alcohol that she can find.”

“Bud Select is fine,” she repeats.

The bartender pulls the tap handle and watches her. “Where you headed?”

“Just passing through.”

“I think I’ve seen you before.” He passes her the glass.

“You haven’t. What about the pizza?”

The bartender lifts his hands in surrender and moves down the bar toward the flap, heading for the back.

Mel rests her cigarette in an ashtray and blows her red nose in one of the cocktail napkins, then folds it in half and blows her nose again.

“I can drive you.” It’s a big man in a flannel shirt. A port-wine stain running from his forehead down into his bushy beard.

She crumples up the napkin and drops it in the ashtray, taking up her cigarette again.

“You’re walking, right?” He winks down the bar at a little man in the shadows. “I didn’t hear no car before you came in.”

“Easy,” Patterson says, without looking at him.

“Easy yourself, motherfucker,” he returns. “I was talking to the lady. Offering her a ride.”

She looks tired. Very tired. But not even a little scared. “If I decide to take you up on it, I’ll let you know,” she says.

“Whatever you say,” the man says. “Just trying to be friendly.”

Patterson lifts his Alice pack and takes out his road atlas again. Hoping there’s some magic route that he’s going to land on just by opening it. But knowing that once it’s time to start the trip back to the mesa, there’s no stopping it, that it’s like a runaway train rolling under its own inertia. And also knowing that he’s mostly trying to ignore Mel sitting there.

“You either got it all figured out or you’re starting all the way over,” Mel says, her voice close at hand. Her face leans in on his as she checks out the atlas, open to Colorado.

“I had it all figured out,” Patterson says.

She leans back from him. “And now?”

“And now the San Luis Valley.” Patterson closes the atlas. “Did Chase wake up?”

“Fuck Chase.” She lets the final hit from her cigarette float out of her mouth on a sigh. Then she lights a second cigarette with a kind of reckless gusto, only letting off the lighter after scorching it halfway to the filter. “Fuck Chase.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Patterson says, and does.

“You some kind of one percenter?” she asks.

“One percenter?”

“The tattoos.”

“I’m a tree trimmer,” Patterson says. “That’s how I know Chase. Worked with him. We were supposed to go fishing.”

“A tree trimmer.” She runs her fingers over his forearm, purple with ink. Patterson catches a glimpse of Port-Wine Stain, who looks likely to start gnawing chunks out of his beer glass. “So where’d you get them all?”

“That’s a long story,” Patterson says. “Most of them are cover-ups.”

Even her grin is crooked. “I know some guys covering up the same, I think.” She stands. “Would you do me a favor?”

“Probably.”

“I need to use the bathroom. Would you watch my cigarettes?”

“That I can do.”

When she’s gone, Port-Wine Stain lifts his beer at Patterson. “Looks like you got her all figured out.”

“I ain’t got anything figured out,” Patterson says.

“Sure you do.” His ruined face carries all the pride and guts that comes with living in a town full of crumbling factories. “This ain’t your bar, buddy. This ain’t even your fucking town.” He fumbles his
shirt up, his hand shaking with alcoholic palsy. A snub-nose .38, shelved in a white roll of fat.

“Settle down, Vince,” the bartender says to him. “You ain’t shooting anyone in here.”

The man lets his shirt fall over his gun. “I can wait until he walks out.”

When Mel returns from the bathroom, Patterson slings his Alice pack over his shoulder and stands.

“We ain’t got our pizza,” Mel protests.

“I don’t recommend waiting on it.”

“Suit yourself,” she says, sitting. “Make sure you don’t get too far down the road before you turn around.”

“I suggest you walk out with me,” Patterson says.

“I ain’t leaving without my pizza,” she says.

As Patterson pushes through the door, Port-Wine Stain laughs a rolling whiskey laugh that makes the point between his shoulder blades twitch. But you can’t tell anybody anything, and he can’t imagine anything good coming out of any time spent in the woman’s company.

3

implosion

T
he first three-quarters of the drive is interstate. It’s semis and vacationers, truck stops for coffee and cigarettes, whatever country music station flashes across the plains until it doesn’t anymore. The sun rising and traveling across the wide-open Missouri sky and then falling in Kansas and nowhere to be seen again in Colorado.

It’s a heavy drive, almost like falling. A drive like toward some planetary mass, with the broken plateau around Walsenburg, Colorado, being the bottom. And then it’s up again, through the La Veta Pass, where the sky lowers to ten feet off the ground and the temperature plummets by double digits. And Patterson’s up through the pass, and in an instant the clouds are gone and the sky is a sudden blue, and he’s looping through the Sangre de Cristos in easy arcs, through mountainsides dressed in lodgepole pine and the last rags of spring snow.

By the time he clears the pass into the San Luis Valley, entering the A-frames and manufactured homes of Fort Garland, Colorado,
population four hundred, Patterson’s almost excited to get to the cabin. He hasn’t slept in nearly two days, but he’s not tired, not even a little bit, spinning the truck south onto CO-159, aiming at a massive gray storm front ten miles down the road.

And he does the first thing he always does when he makes the San Luis Valley. He spins the radio dial until he finds Brother Joe’s voice. Brother Joe’s ranting about the group of international bankers who blew up the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and then blamed it on the Arabs. About the Israelis who got the warning and escaped. About implosion patterns.

Patterson drifts somewhere between his cigarette smoke and Brother Joe’s tinny voice. The radio man sounds like home. A patch of fresh rain, wet highway, then the storm. Heavy drops of rain bullet the windshield and Sancho wakes, making a pantherlike growl in the back of his throat. Patterson reaches around to stroke his shivering neck, and the dog whines for a minute or two, then falls asleep again as they exit the storm into a grayish spatter of sunlight and the village of San Luis.

It’s one gas station and three bars, all of which open sometime after four and close at eleven, the Sangre de Cristo church overlooking the town to make sure of it. Patterson parks on the main drag and cruises the short aisles of the R&R Market, pulling water, bacon, and canned goods into his cart. The woman behind the counter watches him with the same amount of interest she has for the insects let in by the warped screen door.

4

horses

T
he truck’s tires skew in the dirt as they switchback up the mesa onto a plateau of blue-gray rabbit brush and sage, skirting the small ponds left in the road from the short storm. Then Patterson has to brake as one of the bands of mustangs cross the road in front of him, the familiar chestnut stallion turning to warn the truck back with a look before following the boss mare along with the rest of them.

Patterson adjusts his ball cap on his head and watches them. There are eight total and all but the stallion are some variation of bay. After they’ve trotted all the way off the horizon, Patterson following them with his eyes the whole way, he catches notice of the other truck. It’s parked off the side of the road just past where the horses had crossed, a Wild Mustang Mesa logo on the door. And leaning against it, Henry and Emma, watching him.

Patterson spins up alongside them and rolls down the passenger’s-side window. “Was it a cold one?” he asks.

A flicker of a smile occurs somewhere in Henry’s beard. He’s gaunt, like the winter’s whittled away at him, but he still looks all the part of rakish rodeo bum. “Not the coldest we’ve ever had.” He tamps the ground with his cane. “But it was cold.”

“The horses look good,” Patterson says. “Almost wild.”

Emma grins at that. She’s young, just out of her teens, with a body that’s a little too long to be entirely gainly. Her face is broad, broken by light freckles, and now, in the morning light, there’s a blond tint to her dark red hair. She was raised on the mesa, and whatever her oddities, she’s put up with Henry for more than two years now, serving as his assistant. Together they take care of the stables used by the summer vacationers and tend to the wild horses, making sure they don’t get the urge to go get wild somewhere else or inconvenience anybody by dying in the middle of the road.

“Patterson’s ashamed of the horses,” Henry says to her. “Doesn’t have a reason in the world to be, he got a hell of a deal on his cabin. But he’s still ashamed of the horses.”

“I think they’re the best thing about living here,” Emma says. She’s not the kind who can hold two thoughts in her head at the same time. Who can be embarrassed at something she loves. She’ll have to grow into that.

“They are,” Henry says. “They’re goddamn beautiful. Some people won’t have nothing that ain’t authentic.”

“I’m gonna go open the place up,” Patterson says, before the lecture begins.

“I’ll be up before too long,” Henry says.

Patterson nods. “Do that.” He touches his hat. “Emma.”

She touches her forehead, mocking him. “Patterson.”

H
omecoming. A half dozen piñon pines circle the cabin, their trunks twisted as though they’ve been caught trying to scuttle off the mesa without being noticed. Patterson shoulders open the heavy door, cold dust and ash whirling across the firepitted floor. Sancho snakes his way through Patterson’s legs and curls up on the tattered rope rug between the small woodstove and the battered couch. You can tell he’s ready to move to the cabin full-time, Sancho. He’s a black and tan German shepherd mixed with something else big, a work dog, and it used to be he couldn’t wait for some new disaster-ruined city to explore. But now he spends most of his time curled up behind Patterson’s seat, moping for the mesa and waiting on his human to bring him food.

“Well,” Patterson says to Sancho. They look at each other for a minute, then Sancho throws his head to the side and slaps his tongue out at his nose. “You missed it, didn’t you?” Patterson says. Sancho snorts from somewhere deep down in his throat and puts his back to him. Sancho’s a smart dog. He knows Patterson wants to talk and he’s not interested.

“Fine,” Patterson says. He peels off his Avrilla ball cap and tosses it on the table, following with his keys. Then he makes a piñon fire in the woodstove, and walks the food he bought out to the root cellar he made last season by burying a refrigerator under the floor in the shed. He finds canned food already in the shed that he doesn’t remember buying. And a half-empty bottle of Evan Williams.

“You awake?” Patterson asks when he gets back in. Sancho doesn’t answer. So Patterson sits down at the table and starts a list of what he’ll need from the Walmart in Alamosa.

Then he stops writing and just sits. The last of the evening light filters in through the dusty windows. Cool valley air, the smell of
burning pine. Patterson lights the kerosene lantern, sending wick light and shadow rippling across the walls.

A wind builds over the mesa. The kind of wind that whistles right through him. Outside, the piñons crackle and the brush rustles. It’s a homecoming, all right. Patterson pulls out his box of pictures of his son and gets properly drunk.