Cry Father (16 page)

42

truth or consequences

T
hey drive out of El Paso well before dawn. Patterson doesn’t think Junior can even talk. He’ll start to, but then he shuts down before he can get the first word out. Patterson can see him trying to make some kind of explanation of himself, but it’s like there are two of him. The first flesh and bone, a twitching mass of impulses spilling out all over the place, and the second some terrorist that sits in perpetual judgment on the first. There’s times, watching him, when Patterson half expects him to pull out his gun, stick it to his temple, and pull the trigger right there. Just to make it clear who he is.

They stop for food at an all-night diner in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. They don’t speak except for ordering. Patterson’s old enough that when the cocaine runs out of his system it takes most of his brains with it. But then the coffee comes, and, after a cup, he gives it a try. “It’s a hell of a name,” he says over a plate of huevos rancheros. “Truth or Consequences.”

“Sounds biblical, don’t it?” says Junior. His face looks like he’s just washed it in gasoline. Blotchy and swollen. Rubbed raw here, oily there.

“Sounds biblical all right. Sounds fucking terrifying.”

“It was named after a radio quiz show,” Junior says. “The host said he’d air it from the first American city to name itself after the show. This is the first one that bit.”

“Exactly how many times have you driven this route?”

Junior points with his butter knife at a family a couple of tables over. “See them?” It’s a man, a woman, and a teenage girl. The man’s jaw extends a half foot below his mouth and the woman is no less horse-faced, both of them with brown hair that sticks up here and there like straw in the mud. The girl is fifteen or sixteen, towheaded, with small, furtive features.

“I see them,” Patterson says.

“What’s the girl look like to you?”

Patterson squints at them, trying to see whatever it is that Junior sees. “Like a girl that’s tired of traveling? Like she’s sick of her family?”

“Think she looks like them? Like the couple?”

“She’s missing the lantern jaw?” Patterson tries.

“That’s what I think,” Junior says.

“What’s what you think?”

“That she doesn’t look like them.”

“Well,” Patterson says. “I’m glad we got that settled.”

Junior drops his knife and fork clattering on his plate and signals the waitress for the check.

Patterson stands, banging the table with his knee. “I’m gonna have to go puke before we leave,” he says.

“Get on it, partner.”

P
atterson wakes to the sound of Junior’s car door slamming shut. His eyes jolt open fast, too fast, spots of light and dark flickering across his vision. Junior’s moving around the car to the trunk. Patterson runs his hand down his face to make sure everything’s in place, then looks around. Rest stop by the highway, the sun rising. He must’ve fallen asleep while Junior drove.

Then he catches a glimpse of Junior, and where he’s heading. “Oh shit.” He hits the door handle, spilling out onto the blacktop just as Junior swings his tire iron into the driver’s window of a fifteen-year-old Ford station wagon three spaces down. The window shatters and the lantern-jawed redneck raises his arms to protect himself. Junior swings through his arms, the end of the tire iron smashing into the redneck’s forehead.

The horse-faced woman hurtles around the hood, waving a hawksbill knife, her eyes straining out of her skull. Patterson’s on his feet, running. He slams his fist square into her face, the blow jamming his knuckles up into his elbow. She drops in a heap at tire level and she doesn’t move anymore, not even a little.

“Get the girl out of there,” Junior growls. He reaches through the smashed window, pops the door open, and drags the motionless redneck free of the car, onto the blacktop, raising the tire iron again.

The girl is huddled on the floorboards, hissing at Patterson through her teeth. Patterson opens the door and, dodging her nails, pulls her out of the car by the arm.

43

cauliflower

S
he’s pissed herself sometime during the attack, so they pull off at an interstate Walmart. Junior parks back in the lot, by the semitrucks and RVs. Patterson is holding his punching hand in his lap. It’s swollen up like a cape cauliflower.

“That’s why I used the tire iron,” Junior says, turning the car off. “I don’t punch hardheaded rednecks in the face with my hand. Might as well go around punching salt blocks.”

“You were better prepared than I was,” Patterson says. He can no longer feel his fingers at all. His hand is a kind of throbbing club, the skin pulling, straining. “I feel like the fucking thing’s going to fall off.”

Junior turns his head toward the backseat. “You awake?”

“I’m awake,” she answers.

“We’re at Walmart. You got any money?”

She shakes her head in the rearview mirror. Her fine blond hair moves like mist with her face.

“I’m going to go get you some clothes and some kind of traveling kit,” Junior says. “Toothbrush, soap, that kind of shit?”

“Thanks,” she says in a low voice.

Junior nods for a second or two. Then he exits the car and walks toward the Walmart.

Patterson opens his door. “Fresh air,” he says thickly. She follows him, climbing out of the car between the backseat and the doorframe. Patterson leans against the side of the car, being careful not to accidentally look at his hand. They’re quiet for a few minutes. Smoking, watching cars pull in and out. Patterson’s hand is running wet with the pain like it’s bleeding. Patterson doesn’t let it trick him into looking at it. “Where are you from?” he asked her finally.

“San Antonio,” she says.

“We’re not kidnapping you.”

“Okay.”

Then he has to be quiet again and work on not vomiting, the thing on the end of his arm throbbing.

Junior finally comes out of the store. He has three plastic shopping bags slung around one hand, a cigarette in the other. “Change in the car,” he says to the girl, tossing the bags on the hood. She takes them and crawls into the backseat. Junior slaps the door shut after her. “Where’s she from?” he asks.

“San Antonio,” Patterson says.

He thinks for a minute. “We can’t drive her all the way to San Antonio.”

“Well. We can’t leave her here.”

The door opened and she climbs out of the car wearing cheap jeans, a One Direction T-shirt, and a pair of white tennis shoes. “Who were those assholes?” Junior asks her.

“They picked me up hitchhiking.”

“How long have they had you?”

“Since last night.”

“You need to go to the hospital?”

“They didn’t have time,” she says. “They drove all night, scared the police was going to get them.”

“All right,” says Junior.

“They didn’t,” she says again.

“All right,” says Junior. “We’re trying to figure out what to do with you.”

“You don’t have to do anything with me. You can leave me right here.”

“How’s about if we take you to the next bus station? Buy you a ticket to San Antonio?”

“You can take me to the bus station,” she says.

“But you ain’t going back to San Antonio,” Junior says.

“Never.” She shakes her head. Her eyes redden and her chin trembles. “Fuck him.”

Junior presses his bad eye into his shoulder. His eye patch having disappeared sometime during the night, there’s no telling where. “You got anywhere to go at all?”

“I got a cousin in Casper,” she says.

Justin

I don’t know how Junior knew what was happening. I’m not sure Junior even knows how Junior knew what was happening. Or if he even knew anything was really happening at all. It could be that he just needed something to recover him from our night in El Paso, and that was the first thing he spotted. That he just got lucky and there really was somebody who needed helping.

But that’s not what’s eating me up. It’s that there are men who would do that to children. To their own children. There’s times I don’t sleep for three or four nights. It’s like somebody stuffed a rag down my throat and parked a truck on my chest. I can’t think about anything else but sitting in the hospital with you. Or about him, Dr. Court. I go whole nights sitting awake thinking about beating him to death with my own hands. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to bring you back.

And then there’s his kind. Who’d run off his own daughter. Who probably raped her or beat her, but who definitely, and worse than
anything else he ever could have done, abandoned her. Who left her out there alone, easy pickings for any psychopath on the road. To starve, die, or smash herself against his absence for the rest of her life.

They put people in prison for taking drugs. They lock kids away for stealing money from gas stations, for joyriding in cars. But men who abandon their children, they float through life, as light as air.

44

more

J
unior cuts the engine in front of his house. Then he has to sit for a while, staring at his lap with his arms draped over the steering wheel. He feels like the world’s driving out from under him. Maybe Jenny’s got the right idea. Maybe he just needs to get the fuck out of Denver. Not Highlands Ranch, no way he could do that, but maybe Greeley. Get his CDL and drive a truck or something.

Then he raises his head and sees the man sitting on his stoop. The sheer size of him, somewhere between a bear and a mountain. When Eduardo’s not sitting next to the much smaller Vicente it’s not quite as striking how big he is. But it’s still enough to take your breath away.

Junior knows the day’s not yet done.

“A rough run?” Eduardo asks when Junior gets out of the car. Even the ruin that is his face is the size of Junior’s chest.

Junior eases himself down next to him on the cement stoop. “I was going to get cleaned up before I made the drop.”

“That is a good idea,” Eduardo says. “Vicente would worry if he saw you like this. He would think you had been in a fight.”

Junior looks down at his battered hands. And the dog blood and filth covering his clothes. “Not really.”

“Not really, like you weren’t in a fight?”

“Not really, like there wasn’t much fight to it.”

“Ah,” Eduardo says. He’s wearing a leather vest. He reaches into an inside pocket and pulls out a cigar, his brown arms tattooed so thickly and long ago it looks like a pattern of intricate bruising. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Knock yourself out,” Junior says.

“I was hoping to talk to you alone.” Eduardo incinerates the end of the cigar with a lighter that looks like a small jet engine. “Vicente is already worried about you,” he says. “More worried than he will show to me. Which means that I should be even more worried than he is. For him.”

“Ain’t a thing in the world to worry about me for,” Junior says.

“Is it the cocaine?” Eduardo asks. “Is that the problem?”

“No,” Junior says. “That ain’t the problem.”

“We can get you treatment if cocaine is the problem,” Eduardo says. “If cocaine is the problem it will be hard work for you, but there is help, and we will get it for you.”

“Cocaine ain’t the problem.”

“Well, then,” Eduardo says. He blows a stream of cigar smoke at the leaves of the cottonwood in front of Junior’s house. “What is?”

“Life, maybe,” Junior says. “Hell, I don’t know.”

“It’s hard to be young,” Eduardo says.

“Life’s a shit sandwich and sooner or later everybody takes a bite,” Junior says. “That’s how I’d put it.”

“Have you read that book?” Eduardo asks. “The one I gave you?
Brave of Heart
?”

Junior nods. “Just finished it.”

“There is some help in that book,” Eduardo says. “There is a reason La Familia uses it.”

“I thought the book was gibberish. Isn’t that what you said?”

Eduardo shakes his head. “Vicente said that. Vicente is quick to dismiss things.”

“But not you?”

“Not me. A man does need more. He needs a greater orbit than exists for him. He needs a life worthy of his heart. Of God’s heart. He needs a war, a crusade, a maiden to rescue.” Eduardo looks up and down the street. “If this was my life, the only life I had to live, I would choose not to live it. The life of the people in these houses. Useless work and more useless wives. That is no life.”

“That ain’t what my old lady’s telling me,” Junior says. “She’s telling me that the key to my life is to get me into a real job, not out of one. She’s of the opinion that drug running ain’t the best of all possible life choices.”

Eduardo reaches behind his head and adjusts his ponytail. Then he looks for a second or two too long at Junior. “It’s not the drug running. It’s the decisions you make and the things in your head. Decisions and thoughts worthy of a man, that’s what you need.”

“In fact, I done the rescuing of a maiden lately,” Junior says. “And if you know where the war is, you just point me at the motherfucker.”

“I cannot do that for you,” Eduardo says. “It’s your battle.” He claps his huge hand on Junior’s shoulder. “Another thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“Somebody else has been looking for your friend.”

Junior feels his whole body go tight. “What friend?”

“The gringo alcoholic.”

“Yeah, who?”

“It is a woman,” Eduardo says. “A woman with black hair.”

Junior laughs.

Eduardo looks at Junior for a long time. His eyes are black and limpid.

“Right,” Junior says.

“This woman is the head of a biker gang that runs most of the meth in St. Louis,” Eduardo says. “That is what she does.”

“Right,” Junior says again.

Eduardo squeezes his arm. “You cannot afford friends who attract this kind of attention. Even if they do not know what it is that you do. I know that you would not be stupid enough to expose yourself, but you cannot afford friends who expose you. And this friend of yours, that is what he does. He exposes people. He endangers people.”

“I understand,” Junior says.

“Good.” Eduardo stands. He stretches, his arms spanning horizon to horizon. “Read the book,” he says. “Try to think clear, straight thoughts, and read the book. It will help.”