Take Me There (17 page)

I walk outside to where the pickup is parked, leaving the artificial light of the prison. It hits me instantly, how hot and wet the air is as it hangs heavy in my lungs.

I’m anxious to put some distance between myself and the rolls of razor wire. I pull the keys out of my pocket, and the lawyer’s card falls to the ground. I pick it up.

I feel someone hit me hard across the back and spin around to see Buster Cartwright smiling. “C’mon, I’ll buy you lunch. Let’s get outta here. This place gives me the jitters.”

He heads for a Cadillac the color of a banana, parked nearby, but I make no move to get into the pickup or follow him. He turns to me and says, “You do want to know about your daddy, don’t you?”

I am ripped down the middle. On the one hand, I want nothing to do with this clown of a lawyer. But more than that, I want to know what he is trying to do to save my father.

“C’mon, I’ll take you to Bubba’s Smokehaus.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Best barbecue in three counties.”

At the mention of barbecue I realize how hungry I am, having left Levida’s place before breakfast. I figure it won’t hurt anything to talk to the man, so I get into the pickup and follow
the Cadillac to a place on the outskirts of town that I think at first is a dilapidated old barn, until I see the rusted sign for
BUBBA’S
.

Bubba’s isn’t much better on the inside. The tables look like something my grandmother might have made, and peanut shells cover the wooden floor, which creaks and crunches as we walk across it.

A waitress in jeans and a Bubba’s tank top leads us to a table with a bucket of peanuts sitting in the middle of it. Mr. Cartwright grabs a handful and tells the waitress, “Bring us a platter of beef ribs, Texas toast, slaw, and some calf fries as an appa-teaser.”

“What are calf fries?” I ask him, when the waitress leaves to give our order to a man in a greasy white T-shirt who is covered in tattoos.

“Texas oysters.”

“What’s that?”

“Bull nuts.”

I look at the pail of peanuts.

“You really are a city boy, aren’t you?” He laughs. “When they castrate a bull calf, they cut off its balls,” he explains. “Tenderest meat on the beast.”

The waitress returns with a platter of small round fried things.

“Try some,” Cartwright says, pushing the platter toward me.

“No thanks.” I’m starving, but there is no way I’m going to eat some animal’s private parts. “What are you doing to help my father?” I ask him. “Are you filing an appeal?”

“Filed eight of ’em. They all ran out,” he says, wiping his chin. “But don’t you worry. No way they can kill Dozer Dawson.”

“Dozer?”

“The Bulldozer. That’s what the governor calls your daddy. Old football nickname.”

“The governor of Texas knows my father?”

“Your daddy is a politician’s wet dream.”

“Excuse me?”

“Literacy, border control, drug trafficking; your daddy’s book covers the governor’s entire political campaign. Heck, he could be his speechwriter.”

“My father wrote a book?”

Cartwright puts down his napkin and stares at me like I just arrived from another planet. “You didn’t know your father wrote a book? Where you been all these years, boy?”

“California.”

The lawyer shakes his head as if I’ve confirmed his suspicions, opens his briefcase, and hands me a hardcover book. “
The Road to Huntsville
by D.J. Dawson. That there is an autographed copy.”

I look at the back of the book and see a mug shot of my father. “When did he write this?”

“In prison. Became a self-educated man. Just like Malcolm X.”

“Self-educated?”

“Couldn’t read beyond a third-grade level before he got locked up.”

My surprise must be obvious, because Cartwright says, “You don’t know anything about your daddy a’tall, do you?”

“No,” I admit. “Not much.”

“Your daddy’s book is read in every government class in Texas. Ten thousand high school students have already signed
a petition asking Governor Banks and the prison review board to grant him clemency, and the list is growing every day. It’s an election year. Billy Banks can’t let your father die. It would be political suicide.”

“You really think so?” I ask, as a great weight lifts from my chest.

“Your daddy is one of the state’s leading spokesmen on the war against drugs,” Cartwright explains as a huge platter of ribs arrives. “He was an illiterate drug addict when they sent him up.”

That’s not how I remember my father. I remember a man I thought was Santa Claus.

“Now look what he’s accomplished. You can’t kill a role model like that.” Mr. Cartwright tucks a napkin into his shirt collar and grabs a rib off the platter. I do the same.

I wonder if the poems and phrases floating around in my head could become a book someday. So what if I can’t read a textbook or a job application? If my father learned to write, I could do it.

“Do you believe my father is innocent?” I ask.

Cartwright shrugs. “I don’t work with many
innocent
folks, but all the evidence in the case against him was circumstantial,” he tells me between bites. “The cops never even found the murder weapon. If it wasn’t for the fact that your daddy’s friend, Travis Seagraves, copped a plea and took the stand against him, the DA would have had a hard time making a case. Seagraves’s testimony made your father sound like a hardened criminal. The guy had some kind of ax to grind.”

The ribs are huge and slathered in sauce so spicy I have to ask for my Pepsi to be refilled three times. These are the best ribs
I’ve ever eaten. I decide that this is the first place I will bring my father when he gets out of prison.

When we’re done eating, Cartwright sits back in his chair and lets out a huge belch. I have to wonder where my father found this backwoods lawyer. The waitress takes away our empty plates and returns with steaming hot towels we use to clean our faces and hands. They are soon covered in grease and sauce, and I try to imagine how the restaurant will ever get them white again. I know they will, though, just as I know the slate will be wiped clean for my father … and for me. What did the preacher say? “‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.’”

“Of course the governor may take it to the last possible minute,” Mr. Cartwright says. “Milk the case for all the free publicity he can get. And there is a growing contingency of people on the side of the dead cop’s family. But don’t you worry. I got the whole thing under control.”

By the time I get back to Quincy, it’s nearly four o’clock in the afternoon and I’m drenched in sweat. As I make my way down Main Street, I see a sign on a storefront I didn’t notice before. It says
SEAGRAVES FEED STORE
. I park out front, go inside, and walk up to the man at the counter.

“I’m looking for Travis Seagraves,” I say.

“He’s out back taking inventory,” the man tells me.

I walk out back and find a man about my father’s age, writing on a clipboard while two other men unload sacks of feed from a semi truck.

“Excuse me, are you Mr. Seagraves?” I say.

“Who’s askin’?” he says, without looking up from his work.

“Dylan Dawson.”

His head snaps up in my direction.

“Junior,” I add. I’ve never been Junior before, and it’s a little hard getting used to, but I’m realizing how important it is to make that distinction.

The two men unloading the truck share a look.

“T.J.!” Seagraves calls to a guy on the other side of the yard, who stops what he is doing to walk over to us. The resemblance between the two is unmistakable. This must be his son. Seagraves hands him the board and the pen. “Take over for me for a couple of minutes.”

T.J. looks at me like he recognizes me, and then nods at his father.

“Follow me,” Seagraves says. Then he leads me back through the store and up a flight of stairs to an air-conditioned office. He plops himself down in a chair behind a desk, opens a small refrigerator, and pulls out a bottle of Budweiser. “Want one?” he asks.

“I don’t drink.”

He takes half of the bottle in one swallow and then eyes me suspiciously, as if he doesn’t trust any man who doesn’t consume alcohol. “You sure you’re the Dozer’s kid? He never turned away from a beer.”

“I’m sure.”

“I hear they’re fixin’ to put him out of his misery.”

I tense up like I’ve been hit and instinctively ball my hand into a fist, but then I let it go, remembering what happened the last time I hit someone. I don’t like Travis Seagraves one bit. The man is hard and crude, which I can tell from his walls, covered in pictures of naked women. But I could forget all that
if he didn’t talk about my father dying as casually as Cartwright talks about castrated bulls.

As Seagraves finishes his beer, an old newspaper clipping, hanging among the centerfolds, catches my eye. It’s the same photo I saw at Levida’s house, with the three boys holding the state cup, but two of the boys have been cut out of this photo. The one who remains looks an awful lot like T.J. “You played football with my father.”

“I did a lot of things with your father, most of which landed me in a world of shit.”

“You testified against him,” I remind him.

“Didn’t have much choice, once your father led them out to the landing strip on my family’s ranch, but I didn’t tell the cops anything new. Just confirmed what they had already figured out.”

“Which was what?”

He tosses the bottle in the trash can and gets a fresh one out of the fridge, narrowing his eyes.

“It’s old history. Read the police report, or better yet, ask your daddy. Ask him what he and Jack Golden did with the money.”

“Jack Golden. You mean the policeman who got killed?”

“Jack Golden the dirty cop who was in knee-deep with your daddy.”

“Knee deep into what?” I say, wishing I’d asked more questions of Buster Cartwright.

“You seen Janie Golden’s big fancy house out on Farm Road 66? I think it just about says it all. You don’t buy a house like that on a widow’s pension.”

“What does that have to do with my father?”

“Jack was your daddy’s connection to the Colombians.”

And now I understand.

“After the shooting, I figured it out. Jack was on the border patrol. I think he found out Dozer was gonna double-cross him the way he was planning on double-crossin’ me. Your daddy controlled all the money. Wouldn’t tell me where he kept it. He liked keepin’ everything secret. His border connection set up the deal with the Colombians. We used an old landin’ strip on my family’s farm and hid the drugs in the sacks from the feed store. Dozer made the drug runs in his truck and collected our share of the money. Said he was keepin’ it safe until we were finished and then the three of us would square up. Said we’d do a few runs and then we’d all be rich, but that ain’t quite the way it worked out. I never saw a dime. Did you?”

“Me?”

He stands up so quickly his chair crashes to the floor. Then he walks around the desk toward me, fists clenched like he’s ready for a fight. I stand, ready to run, my own chair toppling backward.

“Jack Golden’s widow got her hands on that money somehow. What about your mama? She got her a big fancy house somewhere?”

“I don’t know anything about any money,” I say, backing toward the door.

“I was the smart one.” He spits out words like venom, taking one step toward me each time I take a step closer to the door. “I was the one who helped Dozer make it through high school. He may have been a good athlete, but he was as dumb as a doornail. ‘Do it for the team,’ the coach told me. ‘If we make it to state, the college scouts will see all of y’all, but it was only your stupid
daddy who got the scholarship. And what did he do with it? He pissed it away, while I got stuck here in Quincy shoveling horse feed.” The vein pulsing in his neck is a fire hose about to burst. I consider that this would be a good time to run, but I’m afraid to turn my back on him, so I just keep backing up, reaching my hand behind me, praying I find a doorknob.

“That money was supposed to be my ticket out of here. So the next time you’re over in Livingston, you can just tell Dozer Dawson he got what he deserved for double-crossin’ Travis Seagraves.”

I find the doorknob and I’m out the door, running out of that place as fast as I can. I get into the pickup and gun it down the brick-covered street, passing Red and Dakota, who are out in front of the Chevy dealership, painting big white letters on the windows of the cars. Big white letters that say
DIE DAWSON
.

It is hard to believe that a place this small can hold so much hate, and I have the terrible feeling I’ve only just seen the surface.
Oh Jess, why couldn’t I have stayed with you?
I’m in too deep now to ever go back.

When I turn off onto the dirt road to Levida’s farmhouse, two things catch my eye, or rather the absence of two things.

First off, my blue Mustang is no longer in the ditch; in fact, it’s nowhere in sight. Second, the entire roof of the barn is gone, along with most of the south wall. I pull up beside the barn, where boards and rusted nails lay in piles like bones waiting for the vultures. Wade greets me as he swings a sledgehammer against the wood. “What do ya think?” he asks, sunburned, covered in sweat, and beaming with pride as he points to the barn.

This is his one talent, tearing things apart. He is quick, efficient, and total when it comes to destruction. “Beautiful,” I tell him. “You might have a future in demolition. By the way, where’s my car?”

“Me and your grandma towed it up to the shop,” he says, nodding to a metal building behind the house. Wade takes a long drink from a thermos filled with water and then pours the remainder of the contents over his head, shaking his wet hair.

“Did you find anything interesting?” I ask.

“Yeah, sure. Lots of stuff.”

“Really?”

“C’mon. I’ll show you.”

I follow Wade to an old pigsty filled with rusted farm tools, old Sears catalogs, and a sheet of plastic that catches my eye because of its bright colors. I pick up the plastic and discover a bull’s-eye filled with bullet holes.