“It ain’t against the law,” Junior says.
Shawna lets the coins fall out of the pocketbook, cascading in a clatter on the bar. “What kind of person doesn’t have credit cards?”
“People who live off the grid,” Patterson says. He’s recovering a little with the help of the pain pills.
“What’s that mean?” Shawna says. “Off the grid?”
“Weird motherfuckers,” says Junior. “The kind who think aliens are out to get them. That 9/11 was an inside job. That the CIA invented crack-cocaine.”
“That one’s true,” Patterson says. “Freeway Ricky Ross.”
“I heard it the same place you did,” Junior says.
“Living without leaving a paper trail,” Patterson says. “No recorded address, no social security number, nothing the government can use to track you. Trying to be free.”
Shawna sneers at her cousin. “Does that cow look like she cares about being free?”
Patterson looks at Darlene. Then he shakes his head.
Shawna sighs. “No credit card,” she says. “Not fucking one. Not even a debit card.” She picks up the scuffed condom, turns it over in her hand. She’s biting her bottom lip, shaking her head to herself, like even she can’t believe what it is she’s about to do.
“You been looking at my tits,” she says to Junior.
“All night.” Junior nods agreeably. “They’s hard to miss.”
“You got money?”
“Yeah.” He nods. “I got money.”
“How much.”
Junior removes his eye patch, and Patterson can tell he doesn’t miss the way she winces, seeing his bad eye. “A couple of hundred bucks,” he says.
“All right.” She stands, holding the condom by the edge of the wrapper. “Women’s bathroom. Let’s go.”
Junior tosses the eye patch on the bar and follows her.
Patterson sits alone at the bar trying not to think about the two of them. She can’t be more than seventeen, and she’d buried her father that day. He knows that she said she didn’t care, but nobody who says that means it. Not even Junior. Especially not Junior. It’s like he considers something contemptible about a person who’d get abandoned by their own father. Like you’ve got to put people out of their misery when they have that kind of affliction. Patterson realizes he’s clenching his fist, the one attached to his injured arm. And he realizes how hard it’s throbbing, even through the Percocet. He relaxes it as slowly as he can.
Five minutes later, Junior’s back, retaking his stool next to Darlene. She’s still snoring, still drooling on the bar. Junior picks up his eye patch and strings it around his head. Patterson makes a pledge to himself to get back to Junior’s house, untie Chase, and get the hell out of Denver.
Shawna pushes the door of the bathroom open with her toe. She walks over and stands next to Junior’s stool, her face blanched but steady.
Junior finishes his beer. He doesn’t look at her.
“All right,” she says.
“All right,” Junior says.
“All right. Let’s have it.”
Junior pulls out his wallet, flips through the few bills so that everyone can see. One twenty, two fives, three ones. He removes the twenty and places it on the bar next to his beer. “Keep the change,” he says to the bartender. Then he tosses the rest of the bills on the bar for Shawna.
“Don’t say it,” she hisses, her free hand balled into a fist.
Junior turns back to his beer.
She walks around her cousin and sits down at the bar on the other side of her. “I knew it when I looked at you,” she says. She covers her mouth with a handful of chipped pink nails.
“Pay attention to first impressions,” Junior says, pulling one of Darlene’s menthol cigarettes out of her pack. “That’s my advice.”
“Pick your hand up,” the bartender says to Junior.
Junior lights his cigarette, the lighter flame haloing in the liquor fumes hanging in the air.
“Pick your hand up,” the bartender says. “Off the bar. You’ve got shit on your hand.”
Junior turns his arm and looks. Sure enough, a streak of shit down the flat of his hand. He stands, laughing, and heads back to the bathroom to wash it off.
Shawna waits until the bathroom door closes and then begins to cry.
Patterson opens his wallet and draws out two hundred dollars. “Here,” he says, handing it to the girl.
27
home
When they leave the bar Patterson can’t wait to be rid of Junior. To get back to the mesa, where he can open up his bandages and look at his wounds without Junior sitting over him. It’s all he can think of as they walk back to Junior’s, getting home. He figures to give Chase the best scare he can work up and cut him loose as quick as possible. That’s what he’s thinking.
But when they enter the basement Patterson stops thinking altogether.
Chase is slumped over in the chair, his head hung down on his chest and his body sagging against the ropes. Patterson stands and looks at him. If Junior wasn’t there behind him he thinks he’d probably vomit. But Junior is, so Patterson takes Chase’s chin in his hand and lifts his face. There’s no doubt but that he’s dead. His skin is yellowish, waxy, and the muscles droop lopsided so that his head slides a little, wobbling on top of his jaw.
“I’d say you hit him a little harder than maybe you meant to,” says Junior.
Patterson wants to respond, but he can’t. He thinks he makes some kind of grunt in the back of his throat, but he can’t be sure.
“I’ll get that bottle of bourbon,” Junior says.
28
unraveling
Patterson’s entire nervous system feels like it’s unraveling right underneath his skin. It’s the pain itself, and the Percocet for the pain, as Patterson lifts and tugs Chase’s body onto the tarp, Junior helping. It’s that Chase’s body seems to keep rubbing the bandage on Patterson’s arm, catching it and pulling it out of place. Patterson keeps trying to smooth it down, but that doesn’t work. So he just tries to keep it away from Chase, which is next to impossible. And the little tweaker is covered in his own bodily fluids. It’s like every orifice he has is trying to excrete all the crank at once. So it’s that, too.
But mostly it’s trying to locate what is now missing in Chase’s face. What had been there but no longer is. Patterson has done this before, watched the face of a person for what is now missing. And when he’s recovered bodies, which he has done often, that’s what he always wonders. What had been there that he never did see? You can’t know a person by what’s left after they’re dead.
He had done himself a disservice when Justin died. When he came back from the bathroom at the hospital and found him dead, he’d tried to commit the boy’s face to memory. He’d stared at the strange wax-colored ruin of his son, and he was so scared that he might forget something about him that he wouldn’t let himself blink. He stared at Justin’s face until he knew he wouldn’t forget him no matter what he did.
And he couldn’t. That was the problem. It took years before he could remember the boy’s face without it being in that hospital bed, wax-colored and strange. Photographs didn’t help. They never do. The only thing that brought his son back to him was time. Time and writing in the notebooks.
Then they have Chase wrapped up in the tarp. And Junior is sitting on the stairs, lighting a cigarette. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna start crying about the little fucker.”
Patterson’s heart swells. Swells with hatred. And then he realizes that Junior’s not talking about Justin, but about Chase. Which is, of course, the only thing he could be talking about. He thinks of Chase on the job, then. Working the chipper, singing along to the radio, but fucking up the lyrics. The first one to buy a beer, the first one to tell a joke on himself. He had the kind of loose way with his own self that Patterson never did.
“He probably deserves better than he got,” Patterson says.
“Nobody deser
ves better than they got,” Junior returns.
Patterson runs his hand over his bandage, carefully around the bite, thinking that he should get rid of it. That no good can come from wearing it after wrapping up the body. It’s brown and yellow and crusted all over with Chase. Patterson can only guess at the amount of forensic evidence on that bandage. And he tugs at a loose end of it, which pinches his wound. He grunts in pain. Then he remembers that the bandage is there because Chase has bitten him. And there’s nothing in that bandage that isn’t already in his wound.
This time he has to hold himself up against one of the walls of the basement. And he has to do that for a long time.
Right up until Junior says, “You want a quick bump?”
29
coyotes
The one thing unincorporated Adams County is not short of is places to bury a body. They find one of the many large and vacant lots in between the refinery and the rendering plant, and dig a hole in a grove of cottonwoods. They’ve been keeping their courage up with thick lines of cocaine, and are both a little twitchy and flushed. “Think that’s deep enough?” Junior asks finally, leaning on his shovel and spitting down into the hole.
“Hell if I know,” Patterson says. Between the cocaine and the Percocet, he’s feeling no pain now.
“Looks to me like we’re a good three to four feet down. That’s got to be deep enough.”
“There’s body-sniffing dogs,” Patterson says.
“Somebody has to think there’s a body out here to bring body-sniffing dogs.”
“There’s coyotes, too. Plenty of coyotes.”
“You ever known a coyote to dig down into four feet of dirt?”
“Still. I wish we’d thought to bring some quicklime.”
“It’ll be all over in a minute,” Junior says. “He’ll be in the ground and won’t nothing dig him up.”
Patterson looks at him.
“How’s about we toss the body in the hole?” Junior says. “How’s about we just bury the motherfucker?”
Patterson nods. He pulls the tarp-wrapped carcass out of the bed of the truck by the head, Junior takes it by the feet, and together they heave it at the hole. It lands tipping half in and half out and they kick it the rest of the way in. Then they fill the hole and cover it with enough grass, dirt, and cottonwood branches to disguise it, at least by their midnight account. “We should have brought clothes,” Patterson says, throwing his shovel in the back of the truck.
“Should have, would have, could have.”
“Clothes and some water to wash up with. We got mud all over us. My truck’s going to have evidence everywhere.”
“I can loan you some jeans and a T-shirt when we get back to my place. And bleach for the truck bed.” Junior lights a Marlboro, the flame illuminating his face in a sudden yellow and orange burn that collapses on itself as quick as it came, leaving nothing but a red imprint burned into Patterson’s retina. He passes him a cigarette and his lighter. “That the first grave you’ve ever dug?”
“I’ve dug bodies out before,” Patterson says. “Out of rubble.” He lights his cigarette. “How about you?”
Junior shakes his head.
Patterson sags against the truck. “Probably do it all the time. Meth dealer and all.”
“Just the once,” Junior says.
“Which once?”
“When I was a kid.”
The whole scene shifts sideways in front of Patterson’s eyes like a television flickering. He has to force himself to focus on Junior’s face. On his bad eye. He’s taken off the eye patch and liquid’s running out of it and through the caked dirt on his face. “All right,” Patterson says, against his own will. “Who?”
“It was an aneurysm that killed her, in her sleep,” he says, and Patterson lets his eyes drop off Junior, trying not to show the relief on his face. He doesn’t know what Junior was about to tell him, but he’s more than happy to take an aneurysm. “She woke up dead,” Junior continues. He looks around. “Where’d that bourbon go?”
“We drank it.”
“We drank it,” he repeats. “Henry lost his shit. He was coming off a weeklong whites and booze binge. He curled up in the corner, crying that he was the one who’d done it, cutting his arms all over with his Buck knife. Tells me I was an accomplice because I hadn’t called the police. So we drove the body out to a field and I dug a grave and rolled her in it while he lay passed out in the backseat of the car.”
Patterson doesn’t bother trying to think of anything to say to that. He just closes his eyes and pretends he’s somewhere else.
“The worst part was the next day when he’d figured out how fucking stupid he was. He made me dig her up again and clean her off, naked and everything. Then we took her back to the house and put her in bed.” Junior spits on the ground. “Of course the cops knew exactly what we’d done the minute they saw her. You don’t want to know the kind of mess that dumb fucker was after that, partner.”
“No,” Patterson says. “I don’t.”
“Let’s head back to my house and get cleaned up,” Junior says.
Justin
I drove through Denver yesterday, right through downtown. The last time I was up that way, I had you with me. I was taking you to a Rockie’s game at Coors Field. If I know myself, I told you about my teenage dreams of making the major leagues myself. Which for a little while looked almost possible. At least until I made varsity and saw what mediocre-to-good players actually looked like. It was about then that I gave up on baseball fantasies and started running with an entirely different crowd. As I recall, though, you weren’t exactly taken with the game, but you enjoyed the hell out of the play area and Dinger.
It’s been a long time since I saw downtown Denver. When I was a kid, people didn’t go downtown. It was flophouses and pool halls, half-destroyed brick industrial buildings taken over by addicts and bums. Now it’s boutique shops and high-end restaurants, all the winos and junkies having been truncheoned out of the shopping district and spread up and down Colfax Avenue, where there’s always room for more.
I spent a weekend in Las Vegas with a waitress once. She was one of maybe three women on Earth who could’ve talked me into spending a weekend in Vegas, and even so, we didn’t survive it. From the minute I stepped off the plane I felt like I was getting smothered with a pillowcase, one with a thousand thread count that had been soaked in hairspray. It could never exist naturally, that city. It’s like some kind of colony on the moon, only kept afloat by life support. If the food transport, climate control, or water pipelines were to fail, people would be dying in the streets in a matter of hours. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. And one you couldn’t pay me enough to work.
The thing is, Denver’s not really any different. It looks like it is because there’s grass on the plains, a couple of creeks running through town puffed up as rivers, and the occasional cottonwood or creek willow. But it’s still the high desert. The population’s exploding, the shopping districts are packed, every lawn has Kentucky bluegrass, and it’s only a matter of time before the water runs out. When the crash happens I just hope I’m back on the mesa.
I was passing through LoDo just as the bars were getting out on the way home, and it was even worse than I’d imagined. Women in short skirts, walking with their shoes in their hands, their eyes and noses swollen with booze and bar hysteria. Men sidling sideways next to them, falling over each other. The smell of unisex body wash and fruit-flavored martinis blowing out from the clubs. It was like they were somehow living about four inches off the ground.
I’ve made some very poor choices lately, but I made it a point not to think about those as I drove. I knew I had to hold off on those until I got home.
30
ghosts
The next day, after cleaning out the bites on his arm and shoulder, neither of which look infected, and burning the bandages, Patterson sets his galvanized tub up in the living room and takes a bath. A long one, letting the water soak the pain o
ut of the bites, watching the rumpled edges left by Chase’s teeth pucker and whiten. He leaves the windows open so he can hear the birds, and, still in the bathtub, he eats a three-pound bloody steak with his hands. Then he dresses the wounds and drinks a bottle of George Dickel whiskey, reading on the porch. Every time he thinks of Chase he reads another poem and takes another drink. He retreats into the dark woods and ghosts of Robert Frost. Sancho, he sits by Patterson’s side the whole time, like he’s protecting him.
Chase and Patterson hadn’t been great friends. Patterson knows he can’t really claim that. Chase was weird even before the meth. He’d long gone a little crazy from being too broke, from hustling too hard for what little he had, from the vague sense that there was an entire world out there, conspiring against him. The type’s easy to spot. The swagger, the chip on the shoulder, the rants about rich motherfuckers over here and stuck-up bitches over there.
But he had been some kind of friend, at least for the last season. He had the capability of being quiet. He wasn’t great at it, but he could do it. And if Patterson needed to talk about something he read in a book, Chase would listen. He was always a little awed by the fact that Patterson read books, and Patterson can’t say that he ever got the feeling Chase understood anything he was talking about, but he would listen. He sure as hell didn’t deserve to be buried in a dirt patch in unincorporated Adams County. That’s one thing Patterson knows.
Still, Patterson can’t say he feels bad exactly about what happened to Chase. He hadn’t gone looking for trouble, and Chase had been gnawing a chunk out of Patterson’s arm when Patterson hit him, so it’s hard to feel too guilty. But Patterson feels bad that they’d had to do that to him, just bury him out there.
Sitting there reading Robert Frost, Patterson makes himself some promises. Like to not get pulled into Junior’s bullshit anymore. Patterson still doesn’t know how in the hell he ended up as far in as he did. The first trip made sense, telling him to back off Henry. But then to get called back to scare Chase off, and then to have Chase end up dead, Patterson could have done without that. Junior could have left that one alone, could have let the little asshole go bowlegged and blind trying to hunt Patterson in Denver.
Cry Father Page 10
