Cry Father

by Benjamin Whitmer

  He sits with Henry until he finishes the bottle, and then he helps him get into bed. Henry’s long past drunk, and he mumbles something when Patterson closes the door to his bedroom. Patterson’s been his friend long enough that he doesn’t ask him to repeat himself when drunk, so he unloads the .44 and sets the rounds next to the gun on the top shelf of his writing desk where Henry keeps his cleaning rods and oil. And then he slips the whiskey bottle into the trash and washes out his glass.

  34

  late

  There’s times when Junior needs to be alone. It’s one of the reasons he doesn’t live with Jenny, that he pays rent on two houses on the same block instead. Most days he gets along with people as well as anybody, but there are some when his skin seems to crawl off his body altogether, exposing his nervous system to the outside world. On those days, he stays gone. He doesn’t do other people’s company. Or, at least, the company of people he knows.

  It’s been like that a lot lately.

  This morning he wakes up in the front seat of his car, his mouth hanging open, tasting something between a gravel quarry and a cotton gin. The last thing he remembers is I-25, coming back from his second run in a row down to the border. He knows he should remember more, but that’s it. Thoughts, they’re beginning to slip.

  It takes a few minutes for him to peel his eyelids open. And a few more for the morning sun to back off him enough that he can make anything out. Parking lot, back of a biker blues bar on Thirty-Eighth, near Federal. Must have been a hell of a night. Junior gets his hand into the breast pocket of his shirt, finds his cigarettes and lighter.

  He lights one, exhaling the smoke in a ragged stream. And he feels his stomach swell and tighten with guilt. Knowing that every run to the border he makes, every morning he wakes up unfit to see Casey, is one more thing he won’t be able to make up to her. And that makes him want to find Henry and stomp his head into the ground.

  Then he notices the girl beside him in the passenger’s seat. A denim skirt too short and a white T-shirt too thin, her pale face dented and stained like an old piece of drywall. She’s wearing Junior’s eye patch, but it’s been shoved over onto her nose in her sleep. Junior tugs it off her head, not entirely gently, but she doesn’t even stir. He puts it on and, thinking of Casey again, gives the girl’s shoulder a shove with his elbow. Her eyes flutter and consciousness comes to her body in jerks, like power returned to some ancient robotic toy. “Glad you’re alive,” Junior says.

  “Oh, fuck,” she says. And she sounds like she means it. Then her arms spasm, and her eyes go wide. “What time is it?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  Her hands flap around behind her, beside her. “Where’s my purse?” She finds it on the floorboard, flips it open. “Oh, fuck. He’s called seventeen times.”

  “Who?”

  “Lem.”

  “Your pimp?”

  “Fuck you.” She closes the cell phone. “Yes.”

  “Where’d I pick you up?”

  “Colfax. East Colfax.”

  “Do I owe you any money?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t think so.”

  “Good,” Junior says. “Let me finish this cigarette and I’ll drive you back. He’ll get over it.”

  She shakes her head, her bottom lip trembling. She looks for all the world like a little girl. Which she is. “He knows where I am,” she says miserably. “There’s a GPS transmitter in my phone. He tracks me on his laptop.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Junior says admiringly. “The things they can do with computers these days.”

  “Drive,” she says. “You’ve gotta drive. We’ve gotta get back. You don’t know what he’ll do if he has to come after me.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Junior says. “Hold on.” He pats at his pockets for his keys. Nothing. On the floorboards. He reaches down to fetch them.

  “Too late,” she says in a quavering voice, and Junior hears a car door slam.

  Lem’s at the window when Junior raises his head up. His chest is sunken and knotted with bone, his hooded sweatshirt hanging open, a red beard that looks more like shaggy dream than reality. Junior opens the door hard and Lem has to jump backward to avoid getting hit.

  “Sorry, partner,” Junior says, standing out of the car. “Didn’t see you there.”

  “Bitch,” Lem spits at the girl. His hand sweeps around to his back. Junior doesn’t wait to see what he has. He hurtles himself into Lem, and they fall back together into the blacktop, the back of Lem’s head thudding on the asphalt, teeth clattering. It’s a knife he’s trying to pull, a Buck with a six-inch blade. Junior clamps down on his wrist and punches him in the face. “Fuck you.” Lem spits blood and a piece of his tongue, bouncing off Junior’s cheek. Junior pounds him in the face. Things slip out of place under his fist. Lem grabs Junior by the back of the neck, yanks him down for a head butt. Junior obliges, driving his forehead into Lem’s nose, Lem’s head into the asphalt. Then he grabs Lem’s right ear and rips down and off.

  “Goddamn,” Junior says, holding the ear, skin hanging in tatters, blood draining from the fruitlike thing in his fist onto Lem’s face. Blood roars in Junior’s ears, the ground tilts.

  “Goddamn,” Junior says again, letting go of Lem’s knife hand, waffling to his feet. Lem stays where he is. Curled into himself, blood running out of the hole in his head.

  “Did you see that?” Junior says to the girl, who is out of the car, standing by the door, covering her mouth. She moves the hand covering her face away from her mouth, and, almost delicately, vomits down the front of her shirt.

  Which clues Junior that it might be time to leave.

  35

  highlands ranch

  Back home, it takes Junior a little time to get steady. But when he can, he takes a shower, changes into fresh clothes, and drags a kitchen chair out on his deck. He watches the thin clouds drift like gauze across the sun, doing nothing but not thinking about his life. There’s a bleak and blackeyed current washing under the exhaustion that he knows better than to think he can sleep off.

  Then Junior does something he does sometimes when he feels like this. He lifts the eye patch off his bad eye and moves it over so that it covers the good one. The bad eye fills with wincing pain at the light. But then that pain fades away, and there’s just those high, thin clouds and his patchy backyard.

  And, as always, Junior’s not sure there’s even a difference in the way he sees through the two. Except maybe things are a little softer through the bad eye. Like maybe the edges on things aren’t quite so sharp. But he can never tell for sure. Even moving the patch back and forth, or covering one eye with one hand and then the other.

  So he leaves the eye patch over his good eye and lets the day drift. Finally night falls, snuffing the hot sun. A few muggy stars swim around him in the smog. He doesn’t know what the hell it is, but there’s a knot in his chest like somebody’s driven a baseball bat down his throat, barrel first.

  Then Jenny opens the gate and comes into the backyard. “Hi,” she says. She’s carrying a six-pack of Budweiser longnecks. She hands him one.

  “Where’s Casey?” he asks.

  “Mom’s sitting with her. They’re watching a movie.” She sits down cross-legged on the deck floor and looks up at him. She tries not to look at his bad eye, but her lips tighten. “It looks good,” she says, looking away from him. “The deck.”

  “Nothing’s level,” he says. “Nor even.”

  “It looks good,” she says again. Her eyes are hooded in the semilight, she seems to be peering out at him through the mask of her own face. Then she says, “We need to talk.”

  “About what?”

  She pulls in a breath. Then lets it out slowly. “We’re moving.”

  Junior can’t talk for a minute. Something rises up in his diaphragm that closes off his ability to say anything. “Where?”

  “Highlands Ranch.”

  He removes the eye patch and restrings it over his bad eye. “What the
hell are you going to do in Highlands Ranch? The last time I drove through, I got pulled over three times for looking suspicious. Damn near came back the next day and set somebody’s gate on fire.”

  “You do look suspicious,” she says.

  “Well.”

  “I have a job,” she says. “A job and an apartment.”

  It occurs to him that Highlands Ranch is as far away from him as you could get and still be in Denver, and he feels a little like the earth’s moving out from under him.

  “Hey,” she says. She puts her hand on his arm. “Hey.”

  “All right.” He shakes her hand off his arm. “I’ll still give you money. The same money I give you now.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she says. “And you can come by as much as you want. You can see her whenever you have time.”

  He can’t talk for a little bit. The beer’s rising in his throat now, smothering his voice. Then, “What are they watching?” he asks. “Her and your mom?”

  “Wizard of Oz,” she answers. “Do you want to go sit with them?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I do.” He rises, a little too quickly. He has to step forward to keep from falling, the sole of his cowboy boot slapping on the deck. He rights himself.

  “Easy,” she says. She takes him by the arm, supports him. “Steady.”

  Justin

  I know I’ve never told you much about your grandparents. That’s mainly because there ain’t much to tell. They were pretty well crushed under their lives by the time I was born. Your grandmother, she had some idea of being a singer when she was younger. A folksinger, I think. She still had a guitar when I was a kid, and she’d play me songs. Probably the same songs I sang to you, old cowboy songs she learned from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott records.

  That’s how she met your grandfather, singing in a bar where she was pushing beer in between sets. He was straight off the plane from Vietnam, splintered all over with finally being free of it. I’ve always thought that’s what drew her to him. Disillusioned Vietnam veterans, they were in high demand toward the end of the war.

  It didn’t work out for either of them, of course. He found he wasn’t free of anything, and having your own Vietnam vet turned out to be inadequate for starting a career on the folksinger circuit. Especially when it wasn’t much of a circuit anymore. She was still trying to sing acoustic Dylan a decade after he’d gone electric.

  By the time I came along they were a couple of drunks. Not drinkers, drunks. Your grandmother was working as a nurse in a rest home and your grandfather a security guard. When they got home from work, they tried to do normal shit. Make dinner, help me with homework, straighten up the house. But the minute they felt they were done with it, they turned on the television and got drunk.

  They must’ve loved each other, though. They didn’t seem to need anybody else, at least. They didn’t have any friends at all that I recall. Of course, they fought all the time, and for no reason at all. I remember them nearly getting into a fistfight over a moon landing documentary on PBS one night. Your grandfather swearing up and down that the whole thing was faked, your grandmother yelling at him that she didn’t want him filling my head with that kind of bullshit.

  I didn’t understand them at all. I still don’t. They gave me a lot of room to move as a kid, and I took advantage of it. I made friends easy, and there always seemed to be something to do outside of the house. There was a gang of kids with similarly useless parents, and we’d spend all day smoking cigarettes, hustling around the alleyways of East Denver, raiding our neighbors’ garages for their beer. Then I started playing baseball and there was no reason to ever show up at home again. And I sure as hell wasn’t welcome after they saw what I’d turned into once I gave up on that.

  I don’t think I ever really thought about them as people until Dad shot himself. It was a little before you were born that he drove down by the river, trying to keep Mom from finding him, and put a bullet from his 1911 into his temple. I was in North Carolina and drove straight back for the funeral.

  Sitting out on the porch of their house with my mom, I tried to ask her about it. What there was that I didn’t know that would make him unhappy enough to do that. I was trying to be delicate, because I didn’t know if the answer was her, so I don’t think I asked the question very well. At least that’s what I got from her answer. You don’t have to be particularly unhappy to shoot yourself, was what she said. Your average life will do it. Which she followed by finishing her glass of wine and pouring herself another. And it was only a couple of years later that her memory started to go.

  Anyway, I finally visited her today. That had to be done. I was actually pretty proud of myself, in that it’s usually well into July before I make it over there. Of course, she didn’t know me from the janitor. She never does, anymore. Used to be she’d think I was your grandfather, but there’s not even that left in her. She just lays there in her bed, her mouth open like a fish, while I hold her hand and watch television.

  It was your mother, Laney, who insisted we put her in the home in Taos. I was for letting her stay in Denver, figuring there was a kind of justice in her spending her golden years in the same shithole where she’d worked. But your mother and I never have shared a sense of humor. She told me not to be an asshole, and I guess she was right. At least now I don’t have to drive all the way to Denver to visit her.

  It was your mother who reminded me to go see her today, if you want the truth. She called me this morning, right after sunrise. And she asked me to stop by her house afterward. That I owed her that, to see the paperwork, at least. That I wasn’t the only one working through this. That she couldn’t sleep nights for knowing what Dr. Court could do to somebody else’s child. That I could donate the money or do whatever I wanted with it. That I owed it to her, to sit down in her kitchen with the papers in front of me and make a decision.

  Of course, I promised to be there. Your mother can wear me down until I promise anything. She just never has figured out how to get me to keep them.

  36

  sunsets

  Patterson doesn’t stop to see Laney after visiting with his mother. He can’t. He knows that if Laney gets him in the same kitchen they used to sit in with Justin she could probably talk him into signing anything. She knows it, too. When Laney knows what she wants, she knows how to get it from him. And she always does if Patterson doesn’t plan the occasional strategic absence.

  He’s driving up the mesa, pulling around the last switchback before the dirt road tops out, when he sees Junior’s Charger pulled off by the side of the road. Junior’s stretched out on the hood of the car, his hands on his chest, the last of the sunlight scattering across the broken horizon created by the San Juans.

  “Visiting Henry?” Patterson asks, stepping out of his truck.

  A faint grin plays across Junior’s mouth. “You’d be late if I was.”

  Patterson reaches in his pocket for his cell phone.

  “Relax,” Junior says. “I’m passing through.”

  “Passing through?”

  “On my way south. El Paso.”

  “What’s in El Paso?”

  “The Mexican border. I detour past here when I get sick of I-25.” Junior looks sidelong at Patterson. “He’s a charmer, but most of the bitches who fall for his shit are broken-down rodeo groupies. You’re the first grown man.”

  “You don’t have to work to start a fight with me tonight. You can hop off the hood and I’ll kick your ass right here.”

  Junior chuckles.

  “You ain’t the only one that’s had a rough childhood,” Patterson says. “They’re writing books about it all the time.”

  Junior waits a minute. Then, “One of these days, I’m going to lead you right up and introduce you to that old asshole.”

  “That’s what you stopped by here for? To tell me that?”

  Junior shakes his head, eyes still closed. “I stopped by here to see the sunset. There ain’t a better sunset anywhere in all th
e world than right here on this mesa.”

  “And then you’re headed to El Paso?”

  “El Paso.” He opens his eyes as if Patterson had just reminded him that was where he was going. “You want to ride along?”

  “Ride along where?”

  “El Paso.”

  Patterson doesn’t even think about it. He opens his mouth to say “Hell, no.” But just before he can get the words out, his cell phone rings. He pulls it out of his pocket and looks at it. Then stands there for a beat or two holding it in his hand with his thumb ready to answer it while it rings. He slides it, still ringing, back in his pocket. “How long will it take?” Patterson asks. “I gotta be back to work on Monday.”

  “Shit, we’ll be back by noon tomorrow. There’s money in it, too. I ain’t slept in too goddamn long. I could use somebody to help me stay awake on the drive.”

  “How much money?”

  “Two hundred bucks.” Junior grins.

  They drive, listening to Brother Joe until they get out of range. The show is about the Branch Davidian raid in Waco. About the FBI and ATF’s solution for rumors of child abuse being to pump poison gas into the compound and set all the children on fire. How they claimed not to have fired into the compound at all, even though FLIR footage showed assault rifles and grenade launchers popping off. Brother Joe says that it’s the Waco siege that turned him from being a liberal. That he was a good Democrat right up until that day.

  “You know what gets me about this shit?” Junior asks, punching the power button on the car radio.

  “What shit?”

  “Waco. 9/11. All that shit Brother Joe and Henry go on about.”