Cry Father

by Benjamin Whitmer

  And, of course, Patterson could have left it alone himself. He could have left it alone all the way back to Chase’s house in St. Louis. All the way back to Chase’s wife. How the fuck do you chart choices that end up that bad?

  A few hours after he’s finished the bottle of bourbon, Patterson comes awake to the sound of a car pulling down the driveway. And when he lifts his Avrilla cap off his eyes, Laney is standing on the stairs of the porch, holding Gabe’s hand. Patterson starts coughing, coughing hard, hacking phlegm into his fist. When he’s done, he wipes his hand on the leg of his jeans and lights a cigarette. Then he holds the cigarette off to the side of his mouth to protect it while he coughs some more.

  “Long night?” Laney asks, looking at the bandage on his arm.

  “They’re all long.” Patterson grins a grin that he means to be rakish, but he’s pretty sure it just comes off as gutshot.

  “Looks like it,” she says, looking pointedly at the bandage on his arm. Looking pointedly at things is something she does very well.

  “It was a jackrabbit. Son of a bitch attacked me.”

  “Were you able to take care of it?”

  “I took care of it, all right. Don’t you worry about it.”

  She shakes her head. “We’re having a picnic dinner,” she says. “We’ve got fried chicken. I made it myself.”

  “Yeah?” Patterson has the feeling he’s supposed to remember something about her fried chicken, but he doesn’t. “How’d you know I was here?”

  “I didn’t,” she says. “We were on our way up to the Sand Dunes. Gabe wants to play in Medano Creek.”

  “Is there still water? I thought it was dried up by now.”

  “It’s still flowing. We checked on the internet.”

  “You checked on the internet?”

  “Poor Patterson,” she says. “Everything’s on the internet. I could probably see if you’re home on the internet. I could probably find a satellite image of your house and check if the truck’s in the driveway.”

  The idea doesn’t appeal to him. He looks up at the sky and winces as he catches sun in all that blue. “I could go with you,” he says.

  “Just a picnic,” she says.

  “Just a picnic.” Patterson looks at the boy. He’s small for his age, with black hair and a sharp face. A kind of strange and wary intelligence sunk deep down in his eyes. “You seen the horses?” Patterson asks him.

  The boy shakes his head.

  “There’s a herd of web-footed horses that hide in the dunes.”

  “Stop it,” Laney says.

  “It’s true,” Patterson says. “I heard it on the radio. Brother Joe.”

  “I said stop it.”

  “How’s about the gator farm?” Patterson says. “That’s my favorite. It started as a tilapia farm, but the owners decided they’d buy a gator to eat the tilapia remains. Then they thought that gator might be lonely, so they bought another to keep him company. And now they have a gator farm and no tilapia at all. They wrestle them.”

  “I mean it,” Laney says.

  “That one’s true,” Patterson says, chuckling. “All right, then. There’s another one. You can sled on the dunes. We’ll stop in Alamosa and pick one up at the Walmart.” He tries to stand, but his legs fail him on the first attempt. “And I’m going to need some beer.”

  Laney opens her mouth as if to say something to that. But she doesn’t.

  31

  water

  Patterson watches her ass as she walks from her bed to the bathroom. He can remember when he liked to watch her ass in the early days of their marriage. Turns out that given enough time even the most unlikely things’ll come back to you. She closes the bathroom door quietly, a strip of yellow light streaking across the bottom. Patterson stays in bed and smokes, ashing into a beer bottle on the nightstand. Then the door opens and she returns to bed, sliding under the blanket and skinnying backward against him, fish-cold against his bare legs. “It was nice watching you two sled this afternoon,” she says. “I didn’t even know you could do that on the dunes.”

  Patterson grunts noncommittally. Gabe is a strange boy. A daydreamer who doesn’t speak unless spoken to, and sometimes not even then. He isn’t anything like Justin at all. They’d only made it up the dunes twice with the sled before he wanted to go back to the creek and his mother.

  “All right,” she says. She leans across Patterson to the end table, takes one of his cigarettes, and lights it. Then she sinks back down on her pillow, exhaling smoke. “Did you hear about Antonio?”

  “Antonio who?”

  “Antonio, our neighbor. My neighbor. Who you got drunk with on his porch whenever you got mad at me.” She’s lisping a little. She has a slight lisp that only shows up after her fourth drink. It’s the sort of thing that was endearing in her twenties, less so now.

  “I’ve been gone awhile,” Patterson reminds her.

  “His wife had to have her kidney removed,” she says.

  “Hadn’t heard it.”

  She turns on her elbow, facing him. “You should stop by and say something to him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like offer to help out if he needs it. Like be a friend. His kids aren’t well either. The little one, his bones are, what do you call it, dissolving.”

  “Deteriorating.”

  “That’s it. Deteriorating.”

  “They shouldn’t be drinking the tap water.” Patterson drops the butt of his cigarette in the beer bottle he’d been ashing in.

  She stays on her elbow, watching him. Her eyes liquid red in the light of her cigarette coal. “They say you should drink eight glasses of water a day,” she says.

  “As close as you are to the molybdenum mine, you’d be dead in a year,” Patterson says. “I haven’t had a glass of water since we got divorced.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” She reaches out with her cigarette hand, strokes his arm for a minute. “It was nice, I mean really nice, to see you and him on the dunes.”

  Patterson grunts.

  “All right,” she says. She’s silent for a moment. “I’ve been thinking,” she says.

  Patterson has an urge to get up and leave right there. “About what?”

  “About leaving Questa. About moving someplace where you can drink the tap water.”

  “Well. Where would you go?”

  “Denver, maybe. It doesn’t have to be far. You can drink the tap water most places.”

  “You can’t drink the tap water anywhere,” Patterson says. “I was just in Denver and you can’t even breathe the air.”

  She finishes her cigarette and passes him the butt. He drops it in the empty beer bottle on his side of the bed. “Did you see Gabe’s hands?” she asks. “While you were sledding?”

  He grunts.

  “I mean it,” she says. “His hands shake. And he gets headaches.”

  “Don’t let him drink the tap water,” Patterson says.

  “That’s all you have to say?” she says. “Don’t let him drink the tap water?”

  Patterson folds the sheet off and swings out of the bed.

  “Oh, fuck you,” she says. “Get back in bed.”

  “I have to get up early.”

  “That’s bullshit,” she says. “Get back in bed. I’ll quit talking.”

  Patterson pulls his jeans on in the dark. “No you won’t.” He kisses her on the forehead. “I really do have to get up early.”

  It isn’t exactly true, but he does have to get out of that bedroom.

  32

  tattoos

  Patterson starts work for Paulson, clearing brush for home pads. He has no intention of following Henry’s plans for him, but he knows he could always use a little more money. Besides which, clearing brush is hard work, but it’s not dangerous in the way climbing trees is. And Patterson gets the feeling Paulson wouldn’t mind having someone to manage his Mexicans. It’s something about the way he turns his head away from them to spit in the dirt after he gives an ord
er. That could mean spending the summer sitting in the cab of his truck, getting paid to watch other people work.

  They can work, though. Patterson does everything he can to keep up with them and puts in a solid fourteen hours doing it. The wounds left him by Chase don’t bother him much anymore, but by the end of the day, all his old tree-trimming aches have returned. He can barely walk without clutching his lower back, his left hand is swollen to the size of a baseball glove, and there’s black patches smearing across his vision from the pain in his shoulder. He’s still paying for the things he did to his body ten years ago, and there’s times it threatens to all gang up together and cripple him completely.

  For his part, Sancho spends the entire day lying in the dirt and watching him work. Patterson gets the feeling Sancho would like nothing better than to move to the mesa full-time.

  Then, when he pulls up to the cabin, there she is again. Laney, sitting on the front porch reading. “I got a babysitter,” she says, shutting her book. “Where have you been? You’re supposed to take me out.”

  Patterson kicks the furniture around in his memory, but he can’t find any conversation that would indicate that.

  “Relax,” she says. “What I mean is that I drove up here hoping you would take me out.”

  “Got it.”

  Her eyes narrow. “So where have you been?”

  There doesn’t seem any point in trying to hide it now, so Patterson answers. “Working.”

  “Working?”

  “Henry got me a job,” Patterson says. “He’s trying to convince me to move onto the mesa full-time.”

  Her eyes widen. “Oh, Jesus,” she says. “Look at you.”

  “I’m fine,” Patterson says. And he doesn’t vomit blood when he says it, which is a kind of achievement in itself.

  She sets her book on the floor and comes down off the porch. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll help.”

  “It’ll be easier tomorrow,” Patterson says. “That’s the thing about getting old. It’s always easier tomorrow.”

  She takes him by the arm. “Here,” she says, leading him inside and to the couch. “Here. What do you usually do?”

  “Get drunk,” Patterson says.

  She looks at him.

  “There’s some Bengay under the sink,” Patterson says. “I ain’t asking, though.”

  Come dark, he’s laid out on the tattered blanket on the floor of the cabin and she’s giving him a Bengay rubdown by lamplight. “Did you know Henry talks to his wife?” she asks, prodding at his sunburnt flesh like she’s performing some kind of surgery with her fingers.

  “When did you and Henry get to be such good friends?”

  “We talk on the phone,” she says, simply.

  “About what?”

  “This and that. He’s interesting.”

  “Sure,” Patterson wheezes, all the strength in his lungs being drawn out by her hands. “And, no, he’s never told me he talks to his wife.”

  “He does, all the time. He’s got her ashes in his trailer. He says she answers him, too.”

  “Bet her voice sounds just like his,” Patterson says.

  She digs so hard into his shoulders that he almost whimpers. “Don’t make fun of him,” she says, and her voice isn’t entirely friendly.

  “I’m not,” Patterson says. Then he has a thought. “Did he tell you how she died? His wife?”

  “Some kind of cancer,” she says. “It took a long time, half a year. He sat with her in the hospital.”

  “That’s what he told me, too. I always thought it was from drinking the water.”

  This time she smacks the back of his head. “Why’d you ask?” she says.

  “I heard another story about it, too,” Patterson says.

  “You heard it from the asshole, his son,” she says. “Henry’s told me about him. Says that you and he have struck up quite a friendship.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” Patterson says.

  “Henry’s changed,” she says. “People change.”

  “Junior remains unconvinced.”

  She digs again. This time he does whimper. “Junior’s wrong,” she says.

  “I ain’t arguing with you,” Patterson says.

  “Did you thank Henry for getting you this job?” she asks.

  “I need to load my gun first.”

  “I’m done,” she says. But she doesn’t move. Her fingers skimming lightly over his back, then down his arms. “I can see them now,” she said. “The tattoos. The ones you tried to cover up. It’s funny that I couldn’t see them when we were married.”

  “Some people see them right away,” Patterson says. “It takes others longer.”

  “Why did you get them?”

  “They were free. And they scared people.”

  “Did you really beat up people? Just because of who they were?”

  “Sometimes. Less than we beat up each other.”

  She shudders. “What about this?” she asks, feeling a lump under his right shoulder blade.

  “Don’t know,” Patterson says. “I was pulling a hanger a couple of years ago and a branch speared me. Knocked me twenty feet down to the ground. That rose up about six months later.”

  “How don’t you know? Didn’t you go to the doctor?”

  “Yeah, I went. Broke three ribs. But my mind was on other things.”

  “You broke three ribs and your mind was on other things? What was your mind on?”

  “Every time you get injured on the job working for Avrilla you gotta get a drug test. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t pass, so I got a buddy on the crew to piss for me in an Elmer’s Glue bottle, and I taped it to my leg. The bottle leaked, and that’s all I could think about while the doctor was talking. This other dude’s piss dribbling down my leg.”

  She tries to say something, but she’s laughing too hard.

  “Get up,” Patterson says. “I need a drink.”

  She rolls off him and waves helplessly for him to get her one, too.

  As he lifts the whiskey bottle out from underneath the cabinet, there’s a knock on the door. Patterson sighs, sits the bottle down, and opens it.

  It’s Emma. Standing in the doorway with her hands in the pockets of her Carhartt jacket. Looking as miserable as only a girl of her age can look. It’s beginning to rain, droplets of water running down her hair and over her lightly freckled face, which is as washed-out as a farmhouse dishrag. Patterson takes her by the shoulder and guides her inside. “Come inside,” he says. “Come on in.”

  Laney’s already moving to them. She ushers Emma inside, removing her wet coat.

  Patterson begins to pull his boots on. “There’s some tea in the cupboard,” he says. “She might like some.”

  “Where are you going?” Laney asks.

  “I’ll be back shortly,” he says, belting on his holster.

  33

  cure

  The door to Henry’s cabin is unlocked. He’s at the tack trunk in the living room, a single-action .44 magnum revolver next to a bottle of Old Crow that’s three-quarters of the way empty, a glass in his left hand.

  “The Jim Harrison heartbreak cure,” Patterson says. “I had one of those earlier this week. The tub and the bloody steak, the whole bit.”

  “I’m the one who told you about it,” Henry says.

  “True enough. It’s been a hell of a summer for your drinking.”

  “It’s been a hell of a summer,” he says, without looking at Patterson.

  Patterson nods. “Why don’t you let me have the gun?”

  “Not yet.” His right hand moves over to the .44. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  “You called Emma to get me,” Patterson says. “That means you’ve made up your mind.”

  His eyes are bloodshot, a film of sweat over his face. “I called her to tell her I wasn’t gonna be worth a shit tomorrow. I didn’t call her to get me a babysitter.”

  “Well. She’s with Laney.”

  “Good.”
>
  Patterson pulls out his cigarettes. “You mind if I smoke?”

  “Go ahead,” he says.

  Patterson takes a saucer for an ashtray from one of his cabinets and sits down at the tack trunk. “You did everything you could,” he says. “Laney and I were just talking about it.”

  Henry clears his throat. He drinks.

  “She was sick.” Patterson lights his cigarette. He watches Henry over the smoke.

  “There was nothing I could do,” Henry says.

  “You can’t fight cancer.”

  Henry clears his throat again. “She tried. She put everything she had into it. And I sat with her right up until the end.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you do, Patterson?” Even as drunk as he is, his voice is deep and clear, seeming to emanate out of the cedar paneling on the walls. “What do you do when you miss your son?”

  “I write to him,” Patterson says. “I try to feel him around me. Sometimes I get drunk with a loaded gun nearby.”

  “I don’t want to talk anymore. And I don’t want to give you my gun.”

  “You don’t have to do either.”

  “I want to finish this bottle and then go to bed.”

  “You mind if I sit here with you?”

  Henry shakes his head.

  Patterson thinks of what Laney had said, about Henry talking to his wife. And Patterson can’t help but wonder why Henry never told him about it. But it doesn’t really matter. Patterson doesn’t know what Henry says when he talks to her, but he knows what happens when she stops talking back.

  Most of Henry’s bad nights are like that. Patterson’s not even sure anybody but Henry could call them bad. Come to think, Patterson’s not sure most people would call most of his own bad nights bad. At least up until when he met Junior. He’s broadened Patterson’s horizons some. And sitting there by Henry, Patterson realizes how ridiculous Junior’s story of his mother’s death sounds. His burying her and then digging her back up. Which leads Patterson to thinking how ridiculous Junior seems in his entirety.