Cry Father (5 page)

12

chess

I
t took Junior a while to recover, but he finally did. After a couple of days of not moving much at all, he took a bath in his big claw-foot tub, the water near to boiling. The muscles and tendons stretched out in the heat, and it looked like the only real injury he’d sustained was two broken molars. That and the loose canine. And the black eye and swollen nose. And the lips that could do decent work as sausage models. But nothing that wouldn’t heal given a little time. Junior remembers Henry coming home after rodeos looking worse. Sometimes after he’d won, even. And sometimes when he hadn’t ridden.

The real problem was that Junior couldn’t find another 1969 Charger anywhere. He and Jenny had looked all day, rolling from car lot to car lot, Casey tagging along, offering her input on the matter. That one’s pink, Daddy, get that one. Get that one, Daddy, it’s got fuzzy dice. If you get that one we can go camping, Daddy.
My friend Alicia went camping with her daddy, and they caught six fish. They had to let them all go, though. But if you buy that one I’ll bet we could catch twice as many, and I get sick of her bragging.

But nothing would do for Junior but to get something as close to his original car as he could find, and that turned out to be a 1972 Charger with a new engine. The only hitch being that it was lime green. So, after counting his cash into the salesman’s hand, Junior drove it straight off the lot to a Mexican body shop by his house to get it painted black.

He’s heard all the arguments against driving conspicuous vehicles in his line of work. He knows other drivers who make it a point to never drive anything but minivans and sedans. But Junior, he doesn’t figure there’s any point in being a drug runner if you can’t drive a cool car.

Of course, not an hour after he got home from picking the freshly painted car up from the body shop, he got a call from Vicente. It was the first of several, which is always the way it happens. Six trips down to El Paso in three days. I-25 both ways, the endless interstate blur. No time for sleep or even a sit-down meal.

Now that he’s back home on the couch and trying to nap through the morning sun, Junior’s lower back feels like some small animal’s made a nest in it and is trying to gnaw its way out. He’s not complaining, though. Sure as hell not to Vicente.

Before Vicente, Junior had no prospects at all. After his mother died, he’d been run straight into foster homes, Henry making no attempt to hang on to him at all. They weren’t the kind of foster homes you hear about, the bad ones. When Junior was younger and drunk in the Colfax bars he would tell people they were, but they weren’t. He just had to say something about the shit Henry had piled
up in his head, and none of what was real seemed like enough. Henry wasn’t the first father who wasn’t much of one, and Junior wasn’t the first boy to ever grow up in foster care. But it was the only childhood Junior’d ever had, and he needed it to sound as lonesome and dangerous as he felt it.

Still, life in a foster home hadn’t left him with a lot of preparation for the job market. And he’d never been very interested in the education side of school. So he left the last home when he was seventeen and started working day labor with Mexicans, falling in and out of weekly rooms on Colfax. Fistfighting the cowboys who stayed in those hotels when the rodeo was in town, getting drunk alone in his room or outside in the parks.

That’s where he met Vicente, in a park. He was setting up chess problems for himself at a picnic table and Junior was spread out on a bench, working off a hangover with the spring sun and a bottle of fortified wine. Chess was the only thing Henry’d ever taught Junior. On those warm afternoons he couldn’t afford a bar, which were many, Henry’d brown-bag a bottle of wine down to one of the picnic tables on the St. Vrain River that cuts through Longmont, carrying his pieces in a grocery sack and taking all comers, playing Junior in between money games.

Henry played a looping and erratic game that he learned from other rodeo riders, striking out and withdrawing in strange patterns that defied recognition, and he’d taught Junior the same. Their first game, Vicente checkmated Junior in eleven moves. They played six more games after that, all of which Vicente won easily. But when they were done Vicente asked Junior a few questions, then offered him a job driving. At the time, Junior was working twelve-hour days delivering sandstone to construction sites. He accepted on the spot.

T
he knocking hits like a midnight hailstorm, rattling Junior awake so abruptly that he falls off the couch in a flurry, striking out at the air to clutch anything that might stop his fall. “What?” he yells.

The knocking continues. Junior smoothes down his T-shirt, answers the door. It’s Jenny, in a clean pantsuit that has a worn Goodwill look to it. “Good morning,” she says brightly. “I need a favor.”

“We’ve all got needs,” Junior says. “I need some more fucking sleep.”

“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”

“I was driving all night. Didn’t get back until seven.”

“Casey’s in the car,” she says. “I need you to watch her.”

“I’m fucking tired.”

“Please,” she says. “I’ve got a job interview.”

“What do you mean, job interview?”

“Typing. Data entry.”

“If you need money, tell me you need money.”

“It’s at the Tech Center and Mom’s sick. Three hours tops. Please.”

Junior presses his bad eye against his shoulder. “All right. Send her in.”

“Thank you.” She kisses him quickly on the cheek and turns to run down the porch steps, but stops. “Do you need a couple of minutes to clean up anything? Put anything away?”

“I’ve been on the road,” Junior says. “Ain’t nothing she can get into.”

Jenny starts to say something else, standing on the top step. Then she bites her bottom lip.

“What?” Junior says.

“Can you put on your eye patch?” she says. “It scares her.”

13

stink

J
unior lives in the battered residential neighborhood of Elyria-Swansea, tucked away in the junkyards, body shops, and crumbling beer joints of Northeast Denver. It has the distinction of being within two miles of six Superfund sites, one of which happens to be the neighborhood itself. When the stink of oil and animal waste being processed rolls in on a hot afternoon it’s a little like being suffocated in sewage. They call it the big stink, and rumor has it that you can get used to it after a while. That third-generation residents have even been known to claim they can’t smell it at all. But there are very few third-generation residents left.

It does have a few advantages over the rest of Denver, though, and one of them is its lack of police presence, which Junior decidedly enjoys. In every city there are neighborhoods abandoned to industry. Wastelands and disaster zones sacrificed to the greater good. As long as you can stand to live in them, they’re one of the few places you can almost be free to be left alone.

Today the stink isn’t too bad, so Junior and his daughter sit on the front porch on kitchen chairs. They’d been inside, but she’d brought a DVD of
The Wizard of Oz
, and the absence of a television had set her crying. Junior’s pretty sure he used to have a television, a little color model, but it’s sure as hell gone. Somewhere.

“Do you know why they call the lion the Cowardly Lion?” Casey asks. Her feet don’t reach the ground. She swings them back and forth, banging her dirty pink tennis shoes on the chair legs.

Junior tries not to scowl. She doesn’t let anything go. “Because he’s a coward,” he answers her.

“Yeah,” she says, as if that was a stupid answer. Which, Junior knows, it was. “But do you know why he’s a coward?”

She’s a little woman, all right. There’s no answer that’ll satisfy her but exactly the one she’s looking for. “No idea,” Junior says. He picks at the cuticle on his thumb. He picks too hard and his thumb rims with blood, so he sticks it in his mouth and waits for her to say something else.

“It’s because he’s scared of everything,” she says.

“That’s what coward means,” Junior says. He wipes his thumb on his jeans and adjusts his eye patch. His eye sweats under it, which is part of why he doesn’t wear the goddamn thing.

“I know. That’s what I said.”

Too smart for her age. “We should do something,” Junior says. “Walk over to the park, maybe.”

“I know what we should do,” she says.

Junior opens his eyes. They’d closed by themselves. “What’s that?”

“Maybe, just maybe, we could go to Funtastic Fun.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay. It was maybe.”

“It’s too far for me to drive right now.”

“It’s okay. We can go to McDonald’s instead.”

Junior looks over at her. She grins at him. “You want a pop?” he asks.

“Am I allowed?”

“You’re allowed if I say you’re allowed.”

“As long as it doesn’t have caffeine. I don’t want caffeine.”

“I’ll check.”

In the kitchen, Junior opens the refrigerator and pulls a can of Big K orange soda. He lifts up his eye patch, wipes the sweat off his eye, and squints at the ingredient list. No caffeine. He sets it down, then taps a quick pile of cocaine out of his pocket vial onto the counter, and snorts it through a dollar bill, unchopped. When he raises up off the counter, he can hear her talking, faintly. “I’m going to be in first grade,” she’s saying. “That’s why. I was in kindergarten last year.”

Then a boy’s voice. “Yeah, well, I get tired of it. That’s all I’m saying. Fuck them.”

Junior leaves the cocaine and walks out on the porch. The boy’s maybe fourteen or fifteen, hunched on an idling neon-green pocket bike.

“How’s about you ride off my lawn and I don’t ever catch you talking to my daughter again,” Junior says to him.

“I ain’t on your lawn,” the boy says, his lip curling. “I’m on the sidewalk. You ain’t got shit to say about what I do on the sidewalk.”

Junior steps off the porch after him, his hand reaching for the Glock at the small of his back without his even having thought about it. The boy kicks the miniature motorcycle into gear and scoots away down the sidewalk, jumping the curb onto the street, flashing the finger over his shoulder. “Motherfucker,” Junior says under his breath. He walks back up the steps, picks up the can of soda, cracks it, and hands it to his daughter.

“He was saying some bad words,” Casey says.

“I need a fence.” Junior sits.

“You’ve got a fence out back.”

“There ain’t nowhere to sit out back.”

She’s holding the can of soda in both hands. She takes a drink. Her lips are wet and orange when she pulls the can away from her mouth. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“What’s that word?”

“What word?”

“The one you said.” She watches him intently. He doesn’t know how she ended up with blue eyes, but they’re as blue as the Blue Lakes under Mount Blanca, and about the same size. “Mudfucker.”

Junior coughs into his fist. Then lifts his eye patch and wipes his eye with his handkerchief. “Don’t say that.”

“What’s it mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s something people say when they get mad. But don’t you say it.”

“It’s a bad word?”

“It’s a bad word.”

“I know fucker is a bad word. I never heard mudfucker.”

“Shut up,” Junior says, but he can’t help grinning. “Your mother’s going to kill me.”

“That’s a bad word, too,” she says. “Shut up.”

14

recognition

L
ater, after Jenny has come and picked up Casey, Junior takes his chessboard over to Vicente’s and they play a game in his garage. It’s one of the battered brick warehouses that litter North Denver, waiting to be set on fire or turned into a Nazi-cold meth lab. It stands back a hundred yards from the road in a field of tall grass and scrub brush, more of a compound than a home, surrounded by a chain-link fence and a barricade of used tires and rusted-out cars.

Vicente bought it when he first emigrated from El Salvador with his wife and her brother. His plan was to start an auto body shop. It was a plan that died when his wife contracted lockjaw, scraping herself on a bolt while she and Vicente pulled the abandoned wreckage out of the garage. That’s as much as Junior knows. That, and that the irony of having escaped the death squads of El Salvador to lose his wife to a rusty nail did not escape Vicente.

Behind them, the brother of Vicente’s wife, Eduardo, is digging under the hood of Vicente’s Lexus RXH. His back is almost as wide as the chassis, his tattoos melting in and out of the shadows cast by the shop light and hood. Vicente has made comments once or twice as to how much Eduardo looks like his deceased wife. Junior is kind enough to never reflect on what that must have meant for the poor woman.

“Is that your move?” Vicente asks Junior.

Junior takes his hand off his bishop. “That’s it.”

“There are worse moves,” Vicente says.

“I know.”

“There are better moves as well.”

“I figured.” Junior’s stupefied with exhaustion, counting the hours until dusk, letting the cocaine run out of his system. He can barely track the game at all. He’s running on pattern recognition that doesn’t even register in his conscious mind.

Vicente removes his round glasses, breathes on them, and wipes them on his T-shirt. His small eyes twitch, blink. “I am thinking of going back to cocaine,” he says.

“No money in it,” Junior says. “That’s what you told me.”

“There’s money in it. There’s not as much money in it. Not as many people have the money to afford cocaine in these economic times. Crystal meth is a workingman’s drug.”

“Then why go back to cocaine?”

“I don’t like these methamphetamine dealers. I don’t trust them. They are not like the cocaine cartels. They are not interested in drugs, they are interested in movements. They build schools and roads.”

“I don’t give a shit what I’m driving,” Junior says.

“Can you quit snorting the cocaine?” Vicente asks.

“I have to quit snorting cocaine to drive it?”

“It is a good practice.”

“You mean don’t get high on your own supply?”

“Exactly.” Vicente nods. “From the movie. It is a good practice.”

“It’s a movie,” Junior says. “A Hollywood movie with Al Pacino in it. Who gives a shit what Al Pacino thinks?”

Vicente ponders that. Then he nods again. “True,” he says. “But it still seems like a good practice.”

Eduardo walks up behind Vicente and puts one of his huge hands on Vicente’s shoulder. He has a long ponytail, and even as old as he is, it’s still jet black. “Did you move?” he asks Junior.

“I moved,” Junior says.

“You could have forked him with your knight. There, and there.”

“I saw it.”

“You saw it when?”

“Right after I moved.”

Eduardo laughs out loud. “I have to make a parts run,” he says to Vicente, nodding back at the Lexus. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Food,” Vicente says. “Pick up some food. Chinese.”

Eduardo nods and leaves them to their game.

“So what do you have against building roads, anyway?” Junior asks. “Or schools? What’s wrong with schools?”

Vicente’s eyes are on the board. “I don’t trust movements. I’ve soured on movements. There is one cartel for methamphetamines now and it is a religious movement. They carry bibles of their own sayings.”

“What kind of sayings?”

“A man must get his heart back. We have been wounded so deeply, we don’t want our heart anymore. They have stripped us of our courage, they have destroyed our creativity, they have made intimacy with God impossible for us. We live in a love story in the midst of war. That kind. Gibberish.”

“You don’t believe in God?” Junior asks.

“Of course not,” Vicente says.

“All right.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah.”

“When you think about it, you mean.”

“Yeah. When I think about it.”

“Then you don’t believe in God.”

Junior shrugs. “All right.”

Vicente moves a pawn. “How is your daughter?”

“She’s all right.”

“All right, all right,” Vicente says. “Everything is all right with you.”

“Everything’s all right with me.”

Vicente’s cell phone rings. He takes it out of his pocket and looks at it. Then he opens it and puts it to his ear. He doesn’t talk, and after a minute he closes it.

“Can you make a drive?”

Junior looks at him.

J
unior doesn’t mean to pull off I-25 in Walsenburg. He’s snorting cocaine straight out of the vial now, drinking gas station coffee laced with bourbon. Anything to stay awake. He knows he shouldn’t be adding time to the trip. Least of all pulling his wheel toward the San Luis Valley. But when you go long enough without sleep, and you’re running on cocaine and fumes, your hands sort of do things of their own accord.