Cry Father

by Benjamin Whitmer

  Then one of the planks splits. “Goddamn it,” Daryl says. “Goddamn it.” He flings his hands up, swiping his baseball cap sideways. “That’s enough, goddamn it. I need some lunch.”

  Junior lets off the circular saw. “It ain’t even eleven o’clock.”

  “Horseshit it ain’t.” Daryl straightens his ball cap. “Besides, eleven o’clock means we been working for more’n an hour. I need a break.”

  “You been breaking. Every ten fucking minutes for beer and cigarettes.”

  “Bullshit.” Daryl digs a beer out of the cooler. “Beer and a cigarette then.” He sits down on the edge of the deck frame.

  Steve looks up from his drill. “We breaking?”

  “We’re breaking.” Daryl fishes his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “Fuck this slave driver. We ain’t niggers. We’re breaking for a goddamn cigarette.”

  Junior spits in the dirt and squats down on his heels beside the sawhorse. “Y’all won’t never drown in sweat, will you?”

  Daryl lifts his shirt and wipes his face, his hairless gut like an albino watermelon streaked with purple stretch marks. “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Let’s not start this shit,” Steve says.

  Junior pulls his handkerchief out of his pocket very slowly and dabs at his bad eye with it. “Fuck you?” he says again.

  “You hard of hearing?” Daryl asks him. “You treat us like we’re a couple of niggers. You can’t treat us however you want. Yeah, fuck you.”

  Junior stuffs his handkerchief in his pocket and starts to respond. But then a truck door slams closed out on the street. Junior looks over. “I’ll be damned,” he says.

  “Who’s that?” asks Steve.

  Junior walks through his gate, out on the sidewalk. Patterson Wells stands leaning against the door of his truck. His left thumb is hooked in his belt, his right hand resting behind his hip, next to the butt of his not-very-well-concealed .45. He’s compact and sunburnt, wearing a greasy Avrilla ball cap and a week or two of stubble. He looks older than Junior thought he was. Maybe forty-five, and a hard forty-five at that. One of those who’s always short on sleep and lives mostly in his own head.

  Junior stops a few feet back of him, and Patterson unhooks his thumb from his belt and slides a wad of cash out of his pocket. He tosses it in the dirt at Junior’s feet. “What’s that?” Junior asks, without looking at it.

  “That’s the money Henry owes you,” Patterson says. “Two hundred dollars.”

  “You don’t pay Henry’s debts.”

  “I’m paying this one,” Patterson says. “I don’t want to see you down there no more.”

  “Whyn’t you toss that gun in the dirt and we’ll talk about it?” Junior says. “We’ll discuss it right here.”

  “I ain’t looking for trouble.”

  “Sure you ain’t looking for trouble. Take that gun out and throw it on the ground right there,” Junior says. “Then we’ll talk about my old man.”

  “I ain’t here to fight.”

  “No you ain’t. You sure as hell ain’t here to fight.” Junior licks his lips. “You don’t know a fucking thing. You got no idea who that old man is. There ain’t a goddamn thing I could do to him that he don’t deserve.”

  “That’s his opinion, too,” Patterson says. “I’m choosing to disagree.”

  “Horseshit. He’s an old cunt. If I gave him half a chance he’d shoot me in the face. You think he’s changed ’cause he got sober. He ain’t changed.”

  “Goddamn,” Darryl chortles behind Junior. “You talk like that about your own daddy, Junior?” He shakes his head at the very idea, a strand of saliva between his cigarette and his bottom lip waffling in the lean breeze.

  Junior turns and leans down, scooping up a handful of rocks. “Get back to work,” he says to Daryl.

  “I’m almost done with my cigarette,” Daryl says. “I done told you about treating me like a nigger.”

  Junior wings a rock sidehand at him, catching him right above his left eye.

  Daryl jumps to his feet. “What the fuck?” His swollen face sets with a kind of alcoholic grandeur. The second rock catches him on the bridge of the nose. He sets his hands on his hips, eyeing Junior.

  “Get back to work.” Junior lets the rest of the rocks fall out of his hand.

  “Fuck you.”

  Junior gives him a short left hook to the side of the head. Daryl jumps back to dodge a follow-up right and his ankle turns in the dirt with a knuckle pop. His leg crumbles inward under him and he falls back on his ass. “You son of a bitch.” He pulls his ankle up into his lap, tears welling in his eyes.

  Junior kicks him in the thigh. “You’re fired, you sorry motherfucker.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Steve says. He starts gathering his tools into a cheap plastic toolbox.

  “Get your ass back to work,” says Junior.

  “I ain’t getting back to work,” Steve says. “I’m done.”

  “You ain’t getting no pay.”

  “Yeah. Fuck you and your pay.” He bends down and takes Daryl by the elbow, helping him up. “You need to learn how to work with people,” he says to Junior. They limp out of the yard.

  Junior stands, staring at the ground and letting the adrenaline trickle off down his spine. It takes him a few minutes.

  “You’re hard on your friends,” Patterson says.

  Junior looks over as if just remembering he’s there, all the anger run out of him. “You want to make some money?” he asks.

  17

  scope

  It was curiosity that had convinced Patterson to take Junior up on his offer. When Patterson had said Henry’s name, some small roughing had happened behind Junior’s face. It was like watching stone fall away from a sculpture, the way he revealed himself, and Patterson wanted to see more of it. Not to hear Junior’s story, Patterson knows enough to distrust stories. Just to see Junior operate a little. To see what he can of Henry in the way Junior moves.

  So they work together quietly. Neither of them knows shit for carpentry, but it turns out to be a fine little deck. And when they drive the last screw Junior pulls two hundred dollars out of his pocket, the same two hundred dollars Patterson had tossed at his feet that morning, and passes it to him. “How’d you find me?” he asks.

  “I ain’t gonna answer that,” Patterson says. The answer is easy enough, though. He’d had Emma look through Henry’s loft while the old man was outside throwing up his hungover guts. And sure enough, Henry’d had Junior’s address written down in a steno notebook by his phone.

  “It don’t matter,” Junior says. “I’m getting cleaned up and going for a beer. If you wanna come, I’ll buy you one.”

  They walk up the street to a little Mexican bar, a freestanding brick building next to a junkyard. One long room inside, with a few rickety booths and a clothes washer with a Post-it note on the door that reads “$57” at one end of the pitted wooden bar. There aren’t many other patrons. A pair of dark-skinned girls, exactly the kind of women Patterson doesn’t have any need to be looking at anymore. Lean bodies, eyes pleading boredom with everything Denver has to offer. They’re with two young men wearing tank top undershirts, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes, who’re talking to the bartender in Spanish. The bartender’s older and bigger, probably Junior’s age, dressed up in a Western shirt and black crocodile belly boots, a small glass of tequila in front of him.

  Junior slides into the first booth and fingers a cigarette out of his pack. “Where you from, Patterson?” he asks.

  “Right here,” Patterson answers, taking the other side of the booth, which squeals and shudders in protest.

  “Right here, meaning North Denver?”

  “Right here, meaning Denver. East Colfax.”

  “Do you smoke?”

  Patterson pulls out his cigarettes and holds them up.

  “Good man.” Junior points at Patterson with his cigarette. “Do you
know about the Sand Creek massacre?”

  “I’ve read about it.”

  “Did you know that afterward, Chivington and his boys rode through Denver with women’s cunts stretched over their saddle bows and pinned across their hats? Carrying Indian kid’s hearts and fetuses on sticks.”

  “I’ve read that, too,” Patterson says.

  “Friend of mine told me about it,” Junior says. “Vicente. All he does is read about shit like that.” He lights his cigarette. “The people of Denver threw them a ticker-tape parade, did you know that?”

  “Yep,” Patterson says.

  Junior nods. “That ain’t what gets me, though. The cunts on a stick and the ticker-tape parade, that ain’t it.”

  “It’s enough for me.”

  “The thing that gets me is that now you can’t even smoke a fucking cigarette in a bar. Back then you could walk down the street with a woman’s cunt on a stick, and now you get treated like a pedophile for smoking a cigarette.” He snorts in disgust.

  Patterson doesn’t point out that they’re both smoking cigarettes in the bar right there. Instead he looks over at the girls, can’t help it, and catches them looking right back at him. Or looking at Junior, anyway. And he can’t blame them. Junior’s showered and shaved, putting on fresh jeans and a Rockmount shirt and his eye patch, and he has all of Henry’s hard and boyish good looks on display. The little light that’s managed to struggle through the unwashed front window seems to hover around him, wavering when he moves to draw on his cigarette or kick his boots up on the bar chair across from him. Patterson knows just enough about cowboy boots to know that they’re handcrafted hornbacks, and that he’s owned cars that cost less.

  “You gonna lecture me about Henry?” Junior asks.

  Patterson pulls his attention away from the girls. By force. They’ve set a hole blossoming open in his chest that he knows he doesn’t have any hope of filling. “I can’t let you come up there and kick the shit out of him whenever you feel like it.”

  “You can’t let me,” Junior says scornfully. “He’s lucky I didn’t use a tire jack, the motherfucker. You wanna know what he said that set me off?”

  Patterson shakes his head. “Not even a little.”

  “All right,” Junior says. “Tell you what. As long as he doesn’t repeat it, I won’t whip his ass again.”

  “How’s about this,” Patterson says. “How’s about the next time you get the urge to start beating on him, you give me a call? How’s about we have a drink and talk it over.”

  Junior looks at him. “I’ll do my best,” he says.

  They stop talking for a minute. The girls aren’t even trying to hide their interest in Junior from their boyfriends anymore. One of them, the longer and prettier of the two, says something to the other, and they both smile. Their boyfriends are hunched on their elbows at the bar now, talking low to the bartender. The first thought that goes through Patterson’s head is that he’s way too old for this shit. The second is that he wouldn’t leave the bar now if you put a screwdriver to his temple.

  “That one there, she’s something,” Junior says.

  “The other one, too,” Patterson says. “Which one were you talking about?”

  “I don’t suppose it matters.”

  “I don’t suppose it does,” Patterson says. Then, “Do you know what scope lock means?”

  “Go ahead,” Junior says.

  “It’s a military term.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed you for the military.”

  “I wasn’t,” Patterson says. “I read it somewhere.”

  “You read a lot,” Junior says. “So it’s a secondhand military term?”

  “That’s right.”

  It could be the light, but it looks an awful lot like Junior winks at one of the girls. Though with the eye patch, he could have just been blinking.

  “So what’s it mean?” Junior asks.

  “It means when somebody only gets their information from one source, and it starts to affect their thinking.”

  “Like Henry and that fucking radio show he listens to? Brother Joe?”

  “Yeah,” Patterson says. “And other things.”

  Junior laughs out loud at that. “Go fuck yourself.” He draws a vial of cocaine out of his pocket and cuts two lines on the booth’s tabletop with his pocketknife. The bartender looks over at them and looks away. Junior snorts one of the lines and passes Patterson the straw. Patterson hesitates. “Go ahead,” Junior says. “They ain’t going to call the cops. Ain’t one of them legal.”

  Patterson takes the straw and snorts the other line while Junior cuts more. When he’s done there are twelve, each of which would kill a large child outright and drown most adults in postnasal drip. “I got enough for everybody,” Junior calls to the girls. The long one licks her lips and all the breath goes out of Patterson. But she doesn’t approach. “Calm down, Patterson,” Junior says. “We’re just fishing.” His good eye glitters like that of a child arsonist.

  I probably should shoot him right here, Patterson thinks. Instead he does another line.

  The main problem with cocaine is that you never really have enough of it. Even on a binge, you’ve usually got just enough to keep yourself in nosebleeds and self-hatred. But Junior cuts lines like other people serve beers, and inside of a half hour he and Patterson are falling-out-of-the-booth high. And Junior’s pitching the girls, calling to them every ten minutes or so that he has more cocaine back at his house, a whole lot more, and plenty of beer. It isn’t the kind of offer that’d work on every girl, probably. Just every girl Patterson’s ever known. Then Junior winks at Patterson across the booth. “Watch the coke,” he says. And he stands wobbling out of his chair and saunters down the bar, disappearing into the restroom hallway at the back of the bar.

  To their credit, the Mexican boys wait nearly thirty seconds before following him.

  Patterson picks up the vial of cocaine and slips it in his pocket. The bartender moves out from behind the bar, meeting him in front of the hallway. “They’re fine,” he says. “There is no trouble here.” He’s holding a little Raven .25 automatic in his right hand.

  “Sure,” Patterson says. “I just need to take a piss.” There’s a loud thump from the direction of the bathroom. Then a strangled high sound, like a pig’s squeal, that cuts off in the middle.

  “Piss in the alley,” the bartender says, grinning. “Your friend is fine.”

  Patterson turns and walks back toward the front door, ignoring the other sounds coming from the bathroom. Just thuds now, like somebody stomping on a pumpkin. The girls sit in the booth, ramrod straight, their eyes craterous, shell-shocked.

  But Patterson had one of those little Raven .25s in his younger days. Bought it for fifty bucks at an Ohio flea market. He got drunk the night he bought it and fired off an entire magazine at a tree that couldn’t have been seven feet in front of him, and managed to miss with every shot. When Patterson’s put four paces between himself and the bartender, he swings around, pulling out his .45, and puts his front sight right on the man’s chest.

  “You pussy,” the bartender says, but he doesn’t raise the .25. Patterson figures he’s probably shot it once or twice himself. “You are a fucking pussy.”

  “Put it down and turn around,” Patterson says.

  “You pussy,” the bartender says again. But he places the pistol on the bar and turns around.

  Patterson grabs him by his thin black hair and shoves him down the hallway, through the men’s room door.

  It’s over. Junior’s washing his hands in the sink. One of the boys’ legs are sticking out from the stall and the other is slumped against the wall, staring senseless through bloodred eyeballs, the capillaries exploded. The bartender’s breath hisses out between his teeth.

  Junior shakes water off his hands. “I was wondering if you were going to show,” he says to Patterson. Then he takes the bartender by the back of the neck, like you might take a friend to draw him in to tell him som
ething. Patterson lets go of the bartender and steps back.

  “You’re a pussy, too,” the bartender says into Junior’s ear.

  Junior shoots a rabbit punch into his gut, and when the bartender tries to hustle back to get some boxing room, Patterson grabs him by the cheek and slams his head into the wall. Patterson doesn’t like having guns pointed at him, and doesn’t particularly give a shit for the reason. The bartender doesn’t even try to resist after that, and Junior makes short work of him. First fists, then boots.

  “Now I got to wash my hands again,” Junior says when he’s done.

  Justin

  I didn’t keep a gun around the house when we had you. They make your mom nervous, for one thing. For another, there didn’t seem a whole lot of need when I was working Questa and Taos. I looked forward to teaching you how to shoot, though. I don’t hunt much, but I like skeet shooting. I figured that sooner or later I’d buy a little .410 single shot for your own. I had it in my mind. Just like teaching you how to throw a baseball. Or fishing. All of those father-and-son moments you see on television. But shooting was one of those many things I didn’t get around to when you were alive. It seems like my memory’s nothing but a series of holes where those moments should be. Moments I spent drinking beer, sitting on the front porch. Moments I spent wondering how the hell I ended up settled down in Questa, New Mexico.

  It was only after you died that I started carrying a gun full-time. I was in Louisiana, just after Hurricane Katrina. I’d never carried one up until then, even when I was working with the worst crews. Most of the men I was with aren’t exactly opposed to violence. That comes with the job. Hell, when you’re young, it’s part of the attraction. When you still give a shit about things like whether you can hold your own in a fight, you’re more than happy to work with those kind of men.