Cry Father

by Benjamin Whitmer

  “It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen or smelled, and I’ve dragged hundreds of dead Mexicans out of the desert. ‘Jesus. Holy. Fucking. Christ,’ I choked out, doing everything I could not to vomit.

  “ ‘Told you that you wouldn’t smell the dead ones,’ he said. ‘That’s their anal glands you’re smelling now. And vaginas and reproductive organs. Soaking in their own urine.’

  “ ‘I got it,’ I said. I pulled my shirt up over my nose. ‘What in the holy fuck for?’

  “ ‘Trapping.’ The man nodded at a box of rusty No. 3 traps in the corner of the kitchen. ‘You want a drink?’

  “ ‘Jesus, yes.’

  “ ‘This way.’ Now, the living room was lined with books and more animal parts. Shit that I swear to God I ain’t never seen walking or flying on this planet. I knew better than to ask, though.

  “He pulled off his jacket and tossed it on a chair. He wasn’t wearing any kind of shirt under his bib overalls, and he had all these tattoos. Not your normal ones either. Eagles and swastikas and Celtic crosses, all in blue ink. He walked over to a drink cart against one wall and poured us each a glass of bourbon, then sat down in a leather armchair, gesturing me to take the couch.

  “ ‘It used to smell worse,’ he said. ‘For a while I was experimenting with skunk essence and tonquin musk. That was almost unlivable.’

  “ ‘I might think about keeping the shit outside,’ I said. ‘But that’s just me.’

  “ ‘This is what life is,’ he said. ‘You gotta let it in.’

  “ ‘I’m already neck-deep in anal glands and pussy,’ I said. ‘Any more might kill me.’

  “ ‘You close the doors on the outside world, you close the doors on your soul,’ he said.

  “I couldn’t help it. ‘I know who you are,’ I said.

  “He sat his bourbon glass on an end table and took out this little laptop from somewhere under all the open books and full ashtrays. ‘You do?’

  “ ‘You’re Brother Joe.’

  “ ‘You’re a listener,’ Brother Joe said, opening the laptop.

  “ ‘Not regular. Just when I’m driving through.’

  “ ‘Half the people who listen to my show say that. They all do a lot of driving.’ He pecked at the computer. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Directions to Alamosa, printing.’ He pressed another button.

  “ ‘Do you believe all that shit?’ I asked.”

  “That’s it,” Junior says. “That’s the question I want to know.”

  Patterson leans forward. The last time he listened to anything this carefully it was to a doctor.

  “Of course I asked it,” Carmichael says. “His answer was, ‘What shit.’

  “ ‘Space platforms,’ I said. ‘Aliens. The government blew up the World Trade Center. All that shit.’

  “ ‘See all those?’ Brother Joe waved his hand around at the books.

  “I see them.

  “ ‘There’s more. I have a whole basement full of them.’ He chucked his head at a door. ‘In there’s my study. And in my study are two robotic backup tape libraries, each of which holds thirty terabytes of data. They’re almost full with pictures, video, books. Even the largest book is no larger than a megabyte, and each terabyte is one million megabytes. You follow me?’

  “ ‘Not in the slightest.’

  “He nodded. ‘There’s too much information in this house, this house alone, to believe anything. I don’t believe, I assemble. And what I assemble is what you hear on my show.’

  “ ‘So you don’t believe any of it?’

  “He pulled on his beard, and then smiled. ‘Are there nights I can’t sleep? There are nights I’m so fucking scared I can’t breathe.’

  “ ‘So you believe it.’

  “ ‘Let’s try this,” he said. ‘You ever heard of Seven World Trade Center?’

  “ ‘Sure. It’s the building y’all say is proof of a controlled demolition.’

  “ ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘One of those terabytes of data in that room consists of video, pictures, and reports that prove it was exactly that, a controlled demolition. Another terabyte consists of video, pictures, and reports proving that it was not.’

  “ ‘And which do you believe?’

  “He laughed out loud. ‘Have you ever tried to absorb one terabyte of data? To hold it in your head at one time, let alone weigh it against another?’

  “ ‘Other people do. That’s how they write those reports.’

  “ ‘They foreclose on new information. They make a guess, and call it final.’ He got up and walked into the study. When he came back, he handed me directions back to Alamosa. ‘Remember,’ he said. ‘These directions are for planning your route only. Conditions may differ from what’s shown on the map.’ ”

  41

  cops

  “That’s it?” Junior asks. “That’s the whole fucking story?”

  Carmichael shrugs. “That’s the whole story.”

  Junior shakes his head. “I listened to that whole fucking thing and that was it,” he says to himself.

  “What about the tattoos?” Patterson asks. “You remember anything specific about them? Those mean something. More so if he’s going to put them on his body.”

  “I don’t remember anything specific,” Carmichael says. “The swastikas threw me. All’s I remember besides them are the eagles and weird Celtic shit.”

  “You’re like a bitch, Patterson,” Junior says. “You gotta find something that’s got to do with you in every story.”

  “Could you get back there?” Patterson asks Carmichael. “Son of a bitch,” he says, in awe of his own idea.

  “Not a chance,” Carmichael says. “I mean I could if I had those directions he printed me, but those are long gone.”

  “Well, I’m fucking disgusted,” Junior says. “Most pointless story I ever heard. Except for that line about being neck-deep in anal glands. That was quality.” He looks around the bar. “She’s gonna have to make it up to me,” he says. It’s the girl in the blue blouse he’s talking about.

  Carmichael’s leaning back in his chair, one foot up on the chair across from him. Patterson can tell that he’s had enough of playing second to Junior, especially in the eyes of the brown-skinned girls. “What’s it look like under there?” he asks Junior.

  “What’s what look like?”

  “Under there.” Carmichael points at Junior’s bad eye. “Under the patch.”

  Junior’s good eye looks at him in a way that Patterson’s seen before. The clip knife Junior’s using to chop his cocaine has a drop-point blade that comes in over three inches, and Patterson knows that he’s also carrying his Glock. “What do you see?” Junior asks. He waves the knife in a circle toward Carmichael’s face. “Under there.”

  Carmichael tilts his head. “Not sure I follow you, son.”

  “No,” Junior says. “I’m not sure you do.” That girl in the blue blouse, she’s circled back near them. Her face is so impenetrably young that Patterson looks at his feet. “Come here,” Junior says to her. But as she’s making her way to the table, he tries to throw his foot up on the chair across from him like Carmichael, and spills sideways out of his chair. “Goddamn it,” he mutters.

  Carmichael pounds the table, laughing.

  “Goddamn it,” Junior says again. He rights himself in his chair. Then he looks down at the small pile of cocaine in front of him. “That’s all that’s left,” he says, very, very sadly.

  It’s exactly the night they deserve. And as Carmichael has been saying all night, being Anglo in a Mexican bar means never having to say you’re sorry. And so, Carmichael suggests they take a walk. He leads them a couple of blocks over to another saloon, this one with no sign at all, just a peeling red storefront and a heavy steel door through which they can hear the sounds of pool balls clicking.

  “Stay here,” Carmichael says, and he leaves Junior and Patterson to wait on the sidewalk. The night runs low and hot and dark, eddying around them. With the cocaine runn
ing out of his system, Patterson’s starting to have doubts about the wisdom of this trip again. These are doubts he’ll have several more times.

  Then Carmichael’s back, behind some teenage Mexican boy he shoves out through the bar door and sends crashing to his knees on the sidewalk with a hard kidney punch.

  “Who the hell’s he?” Patterson says. But Junior reaches over and slaps him on the chest, shakes his head not to say anything more.

  “I got nothing for you,” the boy says in flawless English to Carmichael. He spits blood and tries to stand upright, his legs wobbling rubberlike under him. Carmichael wipes a loose lock of hair out of his eyes, grabs the front of the boy’s shirt, and drags him around the corner of the bar.

  Patterson watches the corner wall. Thinks that he needs to go around that corner. That whatever’s happening back there is something he needs to stop.

  “Don’t even think about it, partner,” Junior says.

  Then it’s over, and Carmichael returns holding a baggie of cocaine in his teeth and wiping blood off his arms and hands with the kid’s white T-shirt. He wads it up into a ball and tosses it in the gutter.

  Inside another bar there’s nobody but a fat lady bartender and a dog. There seems to be a dog in every bar. “Ain’t you got any girls?” Carmichael asks the bartender.

  She shakes her head. “Cops,” she says. “They took all the girls. The local business owners, they want to clean up the area. You want girls, you go to Juárez.”

  “Cops,” Carmichael repeats with some disgust. He digs the coke out of his pocket and tosses it on the table.

  “That’s what they call being hoisted by your own petard, partner,” Junior says.

  “Cut yourself a line,” Carmichael says. “One big enough to shut your fucking mouth.”

  Junior does. But when he raises up off the line, he keeps sniffing, like he’s trying to snort the oxygen out of the air. “Goddamn it,” he says. His voice is thick and hoarse. He pulls up his boot and looks at the sole.

  “What is it?” Patterson asks.

  “Dog shit. I knew I been smelling it.”

  “Probably that goddamn mutt right there,” Carmichael says.

  Junior stands. The bartender is out of sight, in the back somewhere. Junior walks over to where the dog is sleeping under a bar stool, and very carefully, so as not to wake it, he moves the bar stool away. Then he kicks the animal in the ribs so hard that it lifts off the ground and slams into the bar. He rears back and kicks it again, then pulls his gun.

  Carmichael throws his arm around Junior’s neck and Patterson grabs his gun hand, and the three of them fall together on the floor. The dog stays where it is, twitching and whining. Then it begins to puke blood in frothing waves. Patterson gets the gun out of Junior’s hand. He sees himself jamming the muzzle into Junior’s forehead and shooting him. He throws the gun off to the side before he does it.

  “You bastards,” the fat lady says, looking over the bar at them. “You get the fuck out of here.”

  “Watch your mouth, bitch,” Carmichael says to her, standing.

  “No.” She’s crying now. Big tears squeezing out of the corners of her eyes. “You get out of here. I don’t care who you are.”

  42

  truth or consequences

  They drive out of El Paso well before dawn. Patterson doesn’t think Junior can even talk. He’ll start to, but then he shuts down before he can get the first word out. Patterson can see him trying to make some kind of explanation of himself, but it’s like there are two of him. The first flesh and bone, a twitching mass of impulses spilling out all over the place, and the second some terrorist that sits in perpetual judgment on the first. There’s times, watching him, when Patterson half expects him to pull out his gun, stick it to his temple, and pull the trigger right there. Just to make it clear who he is.

  They stop for food at an all-night diner in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. They don’t speak except for ordering. Patterson’s old enough that when the cocaine runs out of his system it takes most of his brains with it. But then the coffee comes, and, after a cup, he gives it a try. “It’s a hell of a name,” he says over a plate of huevos rancheros. “Truth or Consequences.”

  “Sounds biblical, don’t it?” says Junior. His face looks like he’s just washed it in gasoline. Blotchy and swollen. Rubbed raw here, oily there.

  “Sounds biblical all right. Sounds fucking terrifying.”

  “It was named after a radio quiz show,” Junior says. “The host said he’d air it from the first American city to name itself after the show. This is the first one that bit.”

  “Exactly how many times have you driven this route?”

  Junior points with his butter knife at a family a couple of tables over. “See them?” It’s a man, a woman, and a teenage girl. The man’s jaw extends a half foot below his mouth and the woman is no less horse-faced, both of them with brown hair that sticks up here and there like straw in the mud. The girl is fifteen or sixteen, towheaded, with small, furtive features.

  “I see them,” Patterson says.

  “What’s the girl look like to you?”

  Patterson squints at them, trying to see whatever it is that Junior sees. “Like a girl that’s tired of traveling? Like she’s sick of her family?”

  “Think she looks like them? Like the couple?”

  “She’s missing the lantern jaw?” Patterson tries.

  “That’s what I think,” Junior says.

  “What’s what you think?”

  “That she doesn’t look like them.”

  “Well,” Patterson says. “I’m glad we got that settled.”

  Junior drops his knife and fork clattering on his plate and signals the waitress for the check.

  Patterson stands, banging the table with his knee. “I’m gonna have to go puke before we leave,” he says.

  “Get on it, partner.”

  Patterson wakes to the sound of Junior’s car door slamming shut. His eyes jolt open fast, too fast, spots of light and dark flickering across his vision. Junior’s moving around the car to the trunk. Patterson runs his hand down his face to make sure everything’s in place, then looks around. Rest stop by the highway, the sun rising. He must’ve fallen asleep while Junior drove.

  Then he catches a glimpse of Junior, and where he’s heading. “Oh shit.” He hits the door handle, spilling out onto the blacktop just as Junior swings his tire iron into the driver’s window of a fifteen-year-old Ford station wagon three spaces down. The window shatters and the lantern-jawed redneck raises his arms to protect himself. Junior swings through his arms, the end of the tire iron smashing into the redneck’s forehead.

  The horse-faced woman hurtles around the hood, waving a hawksbill knife, her eyes straining out of her skull. Patterson’s on his feet, running. He slams his fist square into her face, the blow jamming his knuckles up into his elbow. She drops in a heap at tire level and she doesn’t move anymore, not even a little.

  “Get the girl out of there,” Junior growls. He reaches through the smashed window, pops the door open, and drags the motionless redneck free of the car, onto the blacktop, raising the tire iron again.

  The girl is huddled on the floorboards, hissing at Patterson through her teeth. Patterson opens the door and, dodging her nails, pulls her out of the car by the arm.

  43

  cauliflower

  She’s pissed herself sometime during the attack, so they pull off at an interstate Walmart. Junior parks back in the lot, by the semitrucks and RVs. Patterson is holding his punching hand in his lap. It’s swollen up like a cape cauliflower.

  “That’s why I used the tire iron,” Junior says, turning the car off. “I don’t punch hardheaded rednecks in the face with my hand. Might as well go around punching salt blocks.”

  “You were better prepared than I was,” Patterson says. He can no longer feel his fingers at all. His hand is a kind of throbbing club, the skin pulling, straining. “I feel like the fucking thing’s g
oing to fall off.”

  Junior turns his head toward the backseat. “You awake?”

  “I’m awake,” she answers.

  “We’re at Walmart. You got any money?”

  She shakes her head in the rearview mirror. Her fine blond hair moves like mist with her face.

  “I’m going to go get you some clothes and some kind of traveling kit,” Junior says. “Toothbrush, soap, that kind of shit?”

  “Thanks,” she says in a low voice.

  Junior nods for a second or two. Then he exits the car and walks toward the Walmart.

  Patterson opens his door. “Fresh air,” he says thickly. She follows him, climbing out of the car between the backseat and the doorframe. Patterson leans against the side of the car, being careful not to accidentally look at his hand. They’re quiet for a few minutes. Smoking, watching cars pull in and out. Patterson’s hand is running wet with the pain like it’s bleeding. Patterson doesn’t let it trick him into looking at it. “Where are you from?” he asked her finally.

  “San Antonio,” she says.

  “We’re not kidnapping you.”

  “Okay.”

  Then he has to be quiet again and work on not vomiting, the thing on the end of his arm throbbing.

  Junior finally comes out of the store. He has three plastic shopping bags slung around one hand, a cigarette in the other. “Change in the car,” he says to the girl, tossing the bags on the hood. She takes them and crawls into the backseat. Junior slaps the door shut after her. “Where’s she from?” he asks.

  “San Antonio,” Patterson says.

  He thinks for a minute. “We can’t drive her all the way to San Antonio.”

  “Well. We can’t leave her here.”

  The door opened and she climbs out of the car wearing cheap jeans, a One Direction T-shirt, and a pair of white tennis shoes. “Who were those assholes?” Junior asks her.

  “They picked me up hitchhiking.”