Cry Father

by Benjamin Whitmer

  I went and looked at a calf they found during the last round. Henry took me. It was in the shadow of this wind-twisted pine in the middle of a field of brown scrub. It’d been completely cored out, just a hole in the middle of the carcass where the organs had been, and its face had been cut off in laser-straight lines, not a drop of blood to be found.

  Of course, some believe that there ain’t really any cattle mutilations at all. Or, at least, that they aren’t caused by anything as exotic as aliens. The story runs that a man from Denver named John Baylor bought a hundred thousand acres in 1960 with the intent of clear-cutting it, only to find out that the land shouldn’t have been for sale. That it was communal-use land guaranteed by a Mexican land grant in 1863. Most descendants of the people who settled this valley under that original grant, they’re still here. They ranch and they farm, and they have about as much interest in newcomers as they have in mosquitoes. They’re transplanted Mexicans who never bothered to concern themselves with the English language or any legal niceties past what gave them their stake. Anyway, as you can imagine, they weren’t real happy about land that they considered theirs being fenced in and clear-cut. So they put up a fight. There were shootouts, fires set, fences cut, beatings, the whole bit. Baylor even hired a private army.

  It wasn’t too long after that Snippy was found and the cattle mutilations started, with a bunch of folks saying it was aliens. Not the folks who were fighting with Baylor, though. See, they couldn’t help but notice that the aliens seemed to mainly target his opponents. It drove a lot of them out of business, too. When you’re a small outfit, it doesn’t take the loss of too many five-thousand-dollar steers to put you under. And supposedly Brother Joe has evidence of helicopters taking off and landing at the Baylor Ranch. The fact that it would be a half century and running now, and that John Baylor’s long dead and his children would have to be the ones carrying on the cattle killings, that doesn’t even slow Brother Joe down. He’s the kind who believes in tradition.

  For my part, I don’t know which sounds more far-fetched, Black Op cattle killings or aliens. Brother Joe believes in both as far as I can tell. Only last night he was on about the lights over the mountains, which he says are aliens. He says he saw one trail that ran the whole San Juan range, which’d be the whole west side of the valley, then stopped in front of Mount Blanca, and shot around the Sangre de Cristo range on the east side. All in the time it took him to smoke a cigarette. Then he started in about underground government bases and some secret tribe of wandering Jews. Which is about when I turned the radio off.

  When I lived in New Mexico with you and your mother I used to drive up here a lot. Some of those trips were because I needed to get out of the house, but some were just because I needed a sunset. I read a lot about the valley before I moved here, too. One of the things about clearing power lines is that you spend a lot of time sitting in a bucket truck waiting for the work to start, and I’ve always spent that time reading. One thing I read is that if you ask a Navajo Indian about the valley, they’ll tell you it’s sacred. They’ll tell you that Blanca Peak is the Dawn Mountain, and that it’s strapped to the ground with lightning. Which, if you see it at sunrise, you’ll understand.

  6

  outlaws

  CO-159 is about as straight a piece of road as you can find, carving through the flat bottom of the San Luis Valley like it’s been dragged into the landscape with a machete. It’s the kind of highway that makes it hard not to speed, and when the gray sky’s about ten feet off the ground and the sun’s streaking bolts of yellow light through pinhole gaps in the firmament and raindrops are just beginning to pock your windshield, it makes it nearly impossible not to drink while you’re doing it.

  Not that Junior’s trying real hard not to do either, running a hundred miles an hour north toward Denver with a beer between his legs, his elbow hanging out the window, empty cans and Marlboro boxes rustling around on the floorboards like there’s a rat digging through them. The way he’s feeling, he knows that if he weren’t on a schedule, he’d end up driving loops through the valley, running himself dry of gas and beer, smoking until his lungs burned. That he’d probably find himself shivering awake into a San Luis Valley sunrise with his cowboy boots hanging out the window, the car pulled off to the side of some dirt road.

  He’s even thought to himself about buying some little patch of scrubland down here and building himself a cabin. But he knows better than to think he could live that close to Henry and both of them survive it. Not to mention Patterson, the sanctimonious prick.

  That’s the kind of fucking idiot who lives up on the mesa, Patterson. The kind who’d buy into a land scam, playing at living off the grid. Cheap plots for city fuckers who want a place in the country. They advertise it as a vacation resort, but it ain’t. The roads are dirt, and half the places don’t even have power. What they end up with are half-ass survivalists. Junior almost hopes that the apocalypse they’re hoping for comes, just so he can drive down from Denver and shoot every one of them. Henry first.

  On the north side of Denver, there’s a roadhouse bar with a creek running behind it. Red trim and a red door, no windows at all, sitting off a side street in a sparsely used warehouse park. Junior spins the Charger into the gravel lot, parks in the line of motorcycles and pickup trucks. He’s got the feeling full-on now. The same feeling that always shows up after visiting with his father.

  It’s something like trying to swallow a two-by-four. Or maybe waking up to find yourself falling out of a moving truck. It’s a feeling that comes when he remembers his mother, too. When he tries to remember her face, and can’t exactly. When he thinks about the days when she wasn’t working and Henry was on the rodeo circuit.

  She’d spend the whole day sitting in bed, smoking cigarettes. Staring at the wall like paralyzed while Junior did dishes, caught up on laundry, swept the floors. Then he’d bring her dinner, tomato soup from a can, and a seared grilled cheese sandwich, and set it down on the bed. And she’d look at the food and look at him and then her cigarette in the ashtray and pull him in for a hug, crying again. And all he could think of was how he couldn’t wait for Henry to walk through the door, crowing about whatever he’d won or lost.

  Inside the bar, Junior takes a stool next to a paunchy Indian woman in a leather vest and chaps. She’s with a bald black biker in his thick-muscled forties. He’s wearing some kind of bone hanging from his leather motorcycle jacket, a touch shared by every one of his comrades. And he’s smoking a cigar. Or not so much smoking it as conducting a love affair with it. Puffing it, blowing it, working its burn as sure and steady as some long-awaited one-night stand.

  Junior’s never met a single biker who didn’t consider himself an outlaw. Not one. And it doesn’t matter that ninety-nine percent of them pay their taxes, live in a cul-de-sac, and wouldn’t say boo to a cop if he was raping them with his nightstick. Granted, there’s the other one percent, and Junior’s even tangled with a few known to run a little crank, but they don’t impress him. The way he figures it, bikers are just about as much outlaws as rodeo riders are cowboys.

  “Bourbon. A big glass,” Junior says to the bartender. He looks at the Indian woman. “You got a name?”

  “Janet.” She doesn’t look at him.

  “An Indian name,” Junior says.

  Now she looks at him. “An Indian name?”

  Junior pulls out his handkerchief and dabs his bad eye with it. “Dances with Niggers, maybe?”

  7

  creek

  Junior drools blood into the creek. The middle of the creek where he’s standing. He tries to spit, but he drools instead. Shards of tooth slip out over his swollen lip with the blood. The middle of a creek. He’s got the feeling he’s coming awake out of a very hard sleep. The tendons in his left arm sing a strained and painful note, and there’s a hard chord of nausea that cuts through him when he breathes.

  It’s raining, he thinks very clearly. He can hear the raindrops pattering around him in
the creek water. But he can also see the stars and moon spinning over him, tilt-a-whirling. And there are the lights of Denver, orange through the cottonwoods and creek willows. He touches his head and realizes it’s not rain at all he’s hearing. It’s blood, pouring from his head down into the black water.

  He can hear something else, too. Something happening not too far down. It sounds like a party and there’s a kind of light wavering through the cottonwoods. A strange smoking yellow by the bank, ringed by shadowy figures. Some of them capering in the flame and smoke, and some just standing there seeming to smoke as if on fire themselves. He takes a step toward them.

  “I wouldn’t do that, motherfucker,” a voice calls out from the light.

  Junior’s not sure what it is he shouldn’t do. He takes another step, against the current, the creek sucking at his boot. Before he can find footing on the bottom, a rock plugs him directly on top of the head, dropping him to his knees like he’s been hit on the point of his skull with a ball-peen hammer. Another rock plunks down a foot to the left of him. A third splashes his face with creek water.

  He tries to stand, can’t make it. Another rock hits him in his shoulder, a repulsive jolt jamming up his arm like he’s grabbed on to an electric line. He scrabbles for the bank, his hands and feet slipping. His right hand goes out from under him, his elbow slamming down on a stone. Pain rips up his forearm, explodes in his fingertips. He scrambles up the creek bank, through a stand of creek willows, collapses.

  He does all he can to not pass out.

  It’s not enough.

  8

  bathtubs

  The sun sends yellow runners of light streaking across the creek’s surface like water bugs, and Junior sits up and vomits into his lap. Then, when he’s sure he’s done, he takes off his brand-new alligator-skin cowboy boots and dumps the filthy water. Then peels off his socks and squeezes them out. He has to do it one-handed, because he can’t raise his left arm, the shoulder useless. And every time he moves his head the vision in his good eye washes away and he has to force back another round of retching.

  He doesn’t know which looks worse, his feet or the boots. So he doesn’t think about it. He rinses his mouth out with creek water. Then somehow stands and hunches his way back toward the roadhouse. For some reason walking down the middle of the creek instead of along the bank, staggering out of the mud like some new species of amphibian monster, making his way through the empty parking lot.

  He passes the still-smoking corpse of his 1969 Charger. Thinking what a goddamn good thing it is that he made this particular trip down to the San Luis Valley on his own time. That he wasn’t stopped on his way back from a run down to El Paso for Vicente. That would not have been a loss he’s entirely sure he would have survived.

  It’s the same bartender as last night. A ruddy middle-aged man in a fringed buckskin shirt, reading a tabloid newspaper behind the bar. “I’ll be damned,” he says, when Junior takes a stool at the bar. “I thought you were dead.”

  “Give it a little time,” Junior says. “The matter ain’t entirely settled yet.”

  The bartender pours a beer glass half-full of bourbon and hands it to him. Then he leans on the bar, watching Junior as if he might do some new trick. Sprout flowers from his head, maybe. Or spontaneously combust. “Did they do that to your eye?” he asks.

  Junior shakes his head, holding the glass of whiskey. It’s not often he’s scared of a glass of whiskey, but he’s a little scared of this one. “What time is it?”

  “Four o’clock in the afternoon. You just now waking up?”

  Junior takes a drink of the whiskey and it hurts just as much as he thought it would. “Yep.”

  “Where you live?”

  “Forty-seventh and Vine.”

  “That’s got to be five miles. How you going to get home?”

  “I ain’t thought it through yet.”

  “You ain’t got anyone you can call?”

  “Who would you want to tell this story to?” Junior asks.

  The bartender nods at that, fingering a Camel cigarette out of a pack on the bar. “You know, I had a wife once,” he says. “I caught her with a nigger.”

  “I’d be careful who I commented on it to, partner.” Junior makes a point of not smiling when he says it.

  The bartender lights his cigarette. “They weren’t fucking neither. My wife and the nigger.”

  Junior takes another drink of the whiskey. It doesn’t hurt nearly as bad this time. “You got an extra one of those?”

  The bartender slides the pack to him. “Keep it.”

  Junior lights up, wincing at the pain that shoots through his head as he draws smoke. He pulls the cigarette out of his mouth. Blood on the filter.

  “He was pissing on her, is what he was doing.” The bartender clears his throat. “They’d been doing it for more’n a year before I caught on.”

  “Pissing on her?”

  “Pissing on her.”

  “Seems like that wouldn’t be a hard one to catch on to,” Junior says. “Seems like you’d notice the wet spots around the house. Maybe smell it.”

  The bartender nods his head. “They did it in the tub, mainly,” he says. “They met on the computer. Turns out there’s whole groups of people for that kind of shit.”

  “You can find most anything on computers these days,” Junior says.

  “It wasn’t just him, neither.” The bartender pours himself a bourbon. “I mean it was only niggers. Just not always the same one. That’s what she told me. She could only get off if the guy pissing on her was black.”

  “She told it to you?”

  “Yeah. I asked her why she didn’t just let me piss on her instead.”

  Junior folds a cocktail napkin into quarters and holds it on his dead eye. Then he barks out a single laugh.

  The bartender’s face reddens. He doesn’t look at Junior. “I just mean I can give you a ride home,” he says.

  Junior crumples up the napkin and drops it on the bar, then holds up his fist. “Solidarity, brother.”

  9

  drunk

  It’s only after the bartender pulls away that Junior realizes he doesn’t have his house key. And that he already knew that. That his house key has gone the same way as his wallet and cell phone. He stands on the porch cursing himself for a fucking idiot for maybe two minutes, then stumbles off, finds a hunk of blacktop in the gutter, and walks it back up to the door, his head plunked down in his shoulders like he’s been hit over the crown with a sledgehammer. But just before he chunks the asphalt through the window he stops, a rare moment of reflection passing over him. Knowing the last thing he wants to do is spend the next day caulking in new glass. So he drops it and walks up to Forty-seventh, toward Jenny’s. It’s ramshackle houses and chain-link fences and the occasional chicken coop, and it’s dark enough that it looks almost like any other working-class neighborhood in Denver. The houses a little smaller than most, sure, but at least you can’t see the way the vinyl siding’s peeling from the combined fumes of the oil refinery, rendering plant, and dog food factory. And it’s late enough that most everybody is off their porch. Or at least those that aren’t know Junior well enough to keep from doing anything that might get his attention at this time of night.

  Jenny opens her bedroom window right away when he taps, like she’s been sitting up waiting for him to stop by. Which, maybe she has. A smile takes ten years off her battered face, some of the bags and lumps disappearing as shadows, those still left unable to crowd out the weary good looks that remain. But the smile flashes away like heat lightning when she gets a better look at him. “I’ll meet you at the front door,” she says.

  She’s sitting on the stoop with two bottles of Budweiser in her lap when he comes around the house. “Do I even want to ask?” She lights a menthol cigarette and squints through the smoke at his face.

  He sits down next to her. “I went up to see Henry.”

  “Run into a rugby team on your way back?”
<
br />   He grunts something that isn’t quite a laugh.

  “You want to be careful with that face,” she says. “It’s pretty much all you got going for you.”

  “Except for the eye,” he says.

  “Nobody minds the eye but you.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t think anything’s broken. Maybe a tooth or two.”

  The smoke from her cigarette wisps into her eyes. She waves her hand at it. “So you know, I can’t fuck you,” she says. “I’m on my period.”

  Junior stands and walks around the side of her house.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “You got any plans tomorrow?” Junior asks, unzipping his pants.

  “No,” she says. “Tell me you’re not pissing against the side of my house.”

  Junior answers her by pissing against the side of her house.

  “I’ve got a bathroom. It’s about ten feet from you right now.”

  Junior returns to the stoop, standing. “Mind driving me to a car lot in the morning?”

  “I probably don’t want to ask, do I?”

  “Probably not,” he says. “Also, I lost my house key. I need yours.”

  “Am I getting it back?”

  He holds out his hand.

  She pulls her keys out of her pocket, strips his house key off the ring, and hands it to him. “You can stay for a little while if you want,” she says. “I got a joint.”

  “I’m drunk.” He sways a little when he says it.

  “That’s never stopped you from anything I ever heard of. You at least wanna look in on Casey?”

  “I don’t wanna wake her up.”

  “You won’t. She sleeps like me, not you.”

  “Not tonight.”

  She lowers her head a little to take another drag off her cigarette, and she doesn’t look back up at him. He knows it’s because she doesn’t want him to see whatever she’s thinking. And, as always, that makes him wish he was just about anywhere else. So he walks to the gate.