Cry Father

by Benjamin Whitmer

  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

  Later, 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.

  Junior 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.

  Justin

  I still needed to make the trip to Walmart. If I’d had any sense at all I’d have just stopped in Taos after meeting your mother. But the last thing I could deal with right then was more people, and I wasn’t up to facing any this morning, either. When I can find anything else to do besides going into town, I do it. So I packed the truck and drove down to the reservoir.

  It was well before sunrise. I took my first drink out of the Evan Williams bottle when I climbed in the canoe, the second while waiting for Sancho’s wild swim and scrabble as he clambered aboard, and a third watching the quick twittering of a foreclosure of bank swallows as they fluttered over the water to escape his splashing.

  There’s places all around the reservoir you can’t get to easily without a canoe. I paddled for one of those places, keeping the light of the mesa’s lodge and boathouse directly behind me. It was impossible to judge my progress or speed in the early morning darkness, the canoe skimming along, trying to slip right out from under me. I didn’t have any idea we were to the other side until I grated to a hard stop on the bank.

  I’d judged right, though, and there was the stump. It was like some half-sunken body trying to wrestle free of its own burial, covered in fresh hoof marks. I’m always surprised there are any minerals left, given how little I refresh it. I pulled the two fifty-pound sacks of mineral salt out of the canoe and emptied them over what was left of the stump. Then I hunkered down and had another drink of whiskey. Sancho shivering against my leg, still wet from climbing in and out of the canoe.

  Most years I take at least one deer. Some summers I don’t buy meat at all. Henry keeps it in the lodge’s freezer, eating as much as he wants by way of payment. I sat and watched the morning break on that old rotted stump, half-annihilated by the hooves of deer. The sun slipped over it like morning clothes, making its old shadows and gnarls fresh and bright. I pulled from the bottle of Evan Williams and just watched. Beyond the stump, the reservoir water shimmered in slivers of ink and new-risen light. I was still nipping on the bottle. It was a beautiful morning, and it’s human nature to try to improve on beauty when you can.

  Besides which, I still wasn’t over the work season. It used to be I’d get a night or two’s worth of sleep and I’d be good to go after it was done, but these days it’s a couple of weeks letting the torn muscles and stretched tendons repair. It’ll build up in you, what my kind of work does to your body. I can only wonder if I’ll be able to move at all in another ten years. And Avrilla, they don’t bother with amenities like health insurance. Unless you need to get a hand sewn on after a chain-saw mishap, you might never see a doctor. But drinking helps. So I try not to worry about how much I’m drinking while I wait out the worst of it.

  I took lunch with Sancho curled up at my feet, eating jerky out of my hand. It was exactly what I needed, sitting there, and there was no hint of your mother in the brush or in my head.

  There was you. You’re always there. But for at least a minute or two your mother was completely and blessedly gone.

  15

  scabs

  Patterson drives the long way back from the Walmart in Alamosa, his truck bed full of supplies. After salting the stump, he hadn’t been able to think of anything left to avoid town with this morning. He drives past side roads flicking away to bleak little clusters of trailers. Over a cattle guard into ranchland, through ranging beef cows as alien in the greasewood and sagebrush as water buffalo. Smoking cigarettes and watching a bank of clouds form in the gray sky, long streaks of rain striking down on the western rim of the valley. Watching those clouds darken from gray to black.

  It’s about two miles outside of San Luis that he runs across the Wild Mustang Mesa four-wheeler, abandoned by the side of the road, smoke pouring out of it. Patterson parks the truck and is walking back to take a look when Emma pulls up in the Wild Mesa Mustang truck behind him. “Is he here?” she asks, running to him.

  “Not as far as I can tell,” Patterson says.

  “Did you come from San Luis or from the mesa?”

  “From Alamosa, through San Luis.”

  Her face fell. “He must’ve already been to town then.”

  “What’s going on?”

  She hands Patterson a piece of paper. In a childlike scrawl, Henry’s handwriting, is a note. “Gone to San Luis for beer. Start work without me.” Patterson laughs once, folds it back up, and gives it back to her.

  “What are you laughing at?” she snaps.

  “That he left you a note,” Patterson says. “That he couldn’t just go get beer, but had to tell you that’s what he was doing.”

  “You know how he gets when he drinks,” she says. “He doesn’t have any business going after beer.”

  “Hop in my truck,” Patterson says. “Between the both of us, we can probably wrestle a Budweiser away from a cripple.”

  She gives him a dirty look, but opens the door.

  They find him about a mile on, caning his way toward the mesa with a twelve-pack of beer under his arm, road dust drifting up his scuffed cowboy boots. Patterson gestures for Emma to roll down her window. “Want a ride?” he asks.

  Henry’s head burrows into his shoulders. He starts caning faster.

  Patterson touches the gas, keeping pace with him.

  “You could smoke cigarettes if you got in the truck,” Emma pleads.

  “I can smoke while I’m walking,” Henry says.

  Emma starts to say something else, but Patterson puts his finger to his lips and winks at her. “Your choice,” Patterson says. They idle along next to him.

  It takes a hundred yards or so, but Henry finally stops. “Goddamn it.”

  Patterson touches the brakes. “You ain’t got to stop, I got all the time in the world.”

  “Goddamn it,” Henry says again. His hair is windswept and gritty, hovering in the coming storm. Rain begins to pock the dirt.

  Emma gets out and walks toward him. “Let me help you.”

  He turns toward her. Congealed blood cakes the right side of his face, dull and black.

  Emma stops so quick that she skids on the soles of her shoes. “Henry,” she says, stepping back from him.

  “Emma,” he mimics her.

  Emma swallows. And instead of saying whatever she’d been going to, she takes him by the arm and helps him into the truck. The clouds bulge overhead and off in the distance the sun suddenly cuts through in guillotines of light. Then the rain hits them in a torrent.

  They drive Henry back to the barn, where they sit in the loft around the tack trunk that he uses for a table, twilight falling, the rain gone just as quick as it had come. Lights from the lakehouses mottle the banks of the reservoir through the window. Up at Patterson’s cabin, it’s like living on some deserted crater on the moon. But from Henry’s loft, the mesa actually looks like the vacation spot it claims to be.

  “Well,” Patterson says. He wants a cigarette but is holding off on lighting one, taking in
the smell of pine chips and alfalfa.

  “Well,” Henry mocks. He tips his beer can up over his mouth and empties it. He looks like he’s been beat with a fence post. There’s coagulated blood all over the side of his face, and some kind of yellow scab on his cheekbone, like a portion of his skin has been removed with a cheese grater. Still, he seems to be enjoying the attention, the smile lines around his eyes deepening.

  “All right,” Patterson says. “Any reason I shouldn’t run up to Denver and stomp a mudhole in his ass?”

  Emma starts in her chair. “Stomp a mudhole in what?” She turns to Henry. “You didn’t fall off the four-wheeler?”

  Henry grins blood and scabs. It would look grotesque on anyone else, but on him it manages to look a little dashing. “Do you know what he does for a living?” he says to Patterson. “My boy?”

  “I got a guess,” Patterson says.

  Emma looks from Patterson to Henry and back again. She can’t close her mouth. “It was your son?”

  Henry looks out the window as if only just managing to maintain control of his emotions. He presents them with his profile.

  “Why didn’t you stop him?” Emma asks him.

  His lower jaw works back and forth like it’s slightly dislocated from the top and he’s trying to reset it. “I owe him money.”

  “You owe him money,” she repeats.

  Henry drinks and then wipes beer out of his mustache. “Thanks for giving me a ride home,” he says.

  “But now you want us to leave you here,” Emma says. “Well, I’m not leaving. I’m not going back to my trailer and leaving you here like this.” She crosses her arms. And then she stuffs one fist in her mouth and stares at the window.

  Patterson stands. “We’ll check on you tomorrow,” he says. “Come on, Emma.”

  16

  debts

  Junior’s out in his backyard, cutting treated pine boards to size with a circular saw. He’s hired two local alcoholic rednecks to help him with the deck, and he’s regretting it already. The frame is many things, but true isn’t one of them. Alcoholic number one, Daryl, is drilling holes in the planks, most of them crooked or missing the nailers entirely. Alcoholic number two, Steve, is coming behind him, shooting the heads of the deck screws a quarter of an inch into the boards, the solution from the treated pine bubbling up in the holes.