Junior looks near impressed. “You’re a fucking killer.”
“This is my last,” Patterson promises.
“I recommend it,” Junior says. “There’s only so many places to bury a body in the great state of Colorado.”
Patterson doesn’t answer.
“But this ain’t a problem, partner,” Junior says.
Patterson looks at him. “It ain’t?”
“Hell no,” he says, pulling his cell phone out of his pocket. “This is an opportunity.” He stands and takes his cell phone out the door to make a call.
51
idiot
They pull into Vicente’s compound sometime in the midmorning. He waves them through the gate and around his junk barricades, to a parking spot by the garage. Junior and Patterson climb out of the car.
“How does it drive?” Vicente asks. “Does it drive well?”
“It does,” Patterson says. “It ain’t like nothing I’ve ever driven.”
Vicente’s fingers twitch open and closed. Behind his glasses his brown face is breaking all over in a grin and there’s a kind of excited ruffling of the air emanating from him. Patterson sees a smirk flash on Junior’s face, but it’s gone when Vicente cuts a look back at him.
“She’s beautiful,” Vicente says. He circles the car, touching it here and there. Then he just stops and stares at the supercharger. “Seven minutes twenty-six point four seconds at Nürburgring,” he says, in a hushed voice. “Did you know that? They call it the Green Hell. It’s the most dangerous track in the world. And that’s the fastest time ever posted by a production automobile. Ever.” He turns to them, his eyes tearing up.
“Whatever the fuck you say,” Junior says. “This is Patterson, by the way. You’ve got him to thank for it.”
Vicente looks at Patterson for just a second, then says, “Thank you, Patterson. Come inside. Have a beer. I will pay you inside.”
The air in the garage is thick with oil, floating with motes of dust. Vicente counts out two stacks of bills, ten thousand dollars apiece, and hands each of them a bottle of imported beer out of a shop refrigerator. They drink the beer while Vicente drives the Corvette into the garage and opens the hood. He’s so excited it makes Patterson a little nervous.
After a little while, Patterson watches another man come into the garage. He is larger than Vicente, much larger, with a long, black ponytail and a face like an oncoming train. He says something to Vicente that Patterson can’t hear, and then leans against the wall and watches the other Mexican for a few minutes.
“He’s sociable, ain’t he?” Patterson says to Junior.
“Don’t worry about him,” Junior says. “He ain’t nothing but a big teddy bear.”
“I don’t think you mean that.”
Junior stands. “I don’t.” He walks over to the man and they stand together, talking. The man’s expression doesn’t change, not even a little. Patterson expects him to separate Junior’s head from his shoulders at any second. When he is done saying whatever needed to be said, Junior walks back over. “You can sleep on my floor,” he says.
“Up to you. I feel fine. We can head back to the mesa now.”
“I need sleep,” Junior says. “And food. I know a place. I’ll buy you a beer.”
Even as good as he’s feeling, Patterson opens his mouth to protest the idea of going into any establishment that serves alcohol with Junior. But before he can say anything, his phone rings. He looks at one of the walls for a second. Then he digs it out of his pocket. He holds it in his hand and lets it ring until it stops ringing.
But then it starts ringing again.
“Hello,” he answers.
“Are you with Henry’s son?” Laney says brightly.
“Just heading back now.”
“You’re an idiot,” she says.
“It was kind of an emergency.”
“One of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever met in my life,” she continues.
“I’ll be back this afternoon. Promise.”
“Will you do me this favor?” she asks. “Will you call me when you get to the cabin? Just so I know you’re alive. I don’t think it’s too much to ask, considering I’m the one who put you back together last time.”
“I’ll get some sleep and call you,” Patterson says. “Maybe I’ll buy a couple of chickens and pit-roast ’em.”
“You think you can dig your way out of this one?”
“Your boy, Gabe. Does he know how to play catch?”
“You’re really working,” she says.
“I’ll pick up a glove and a baseball,” he says.
“Call me when you get there.”
He hangs up.
“Henry?” Junior asks.
Patterson shakes his head, putting the phone back in his pocket.
“I didn’t know you had other friends,” Junior says.
“She ain’t friendly,” Patterson says.
“I got one of those, too.”
52
visionary
Patterson and Junior don’t leave right away, though. They sit in their chairs at the chess table and drink the shop beer. Watching Eduardo and Vicente as they move around the car. Vicente has a notebook in hand, and he’s pointing things out to the other man. His excitement has calmed, and Patterson sees him now as he must be. Deliberate with whatever plans he’s making for the car, but, at the same time, obviously tasking his partner with the details. He’s the visionary of the two, Patterson realizes. And Eduardo, the one who looks like he’d win a fair fight with a dump truck, it’s his job to make sure those visions are realized.
Then Patterson looks at Junior, who is looking at nothing. He tries to imagine how Junior fits between the two of them. Or if he does. And then he wonders why exactly it is that he called Junior instead of just dumping the car in a ditch somewhere. He has a practical answer. An atomic-orange Corvette ZR1 would draw attention anywhere on earth, but in the San Luis Valley it would draw only a little less than a UFO landing. But there’s another answer, too, and he stops himself from thinking about it.
The adrenaline has dumped from him, and the good feeling he got from having survived Mel and the biker, it’s washing out quick. He tries to stop its full descent. He reminds himself how lucky he is again. How he really has no right to be sitting in this garage with a beer at all. But it doesn’t do any good. And the shoveled-out feeling left in its place is another thing he can’t think about.
“You’ve come around all the sudden,” Junior says.
Patterson realizes what must have been on his face. “It’s been a rough month,” he says.
“It has,” Junior agrees.
“It’s gonna get rougher.”
Junior nods. “It will.”
Eduardo is holding the notebook now, and Vicente is instructing him on what to write. They’re crouched down by one of the rear tires. “How the hell do they do it?” Patterson asks.
But Junior doesn’t answer.
Justin
I haven’t slept in more than a day, and I still can’t. Even here on the couch. I can’t stop thinking of you. And of a friend of mine, Chase. And his woman, Mel. It’s the thought that she can’t have possibly had any other reason for coming after Chase but that she missed him. Whatever he may have done to her, whatever he turned himself into, she missed him. It was a hole inside her that she couldn’t fill. Whatever operation she was running, whatever she had going on, she burnt it all down to find a man who hogtied her in a bathtub. But now they’re both gone, her and Chase. And there is no hole, nothing to miss. What they were to each other has disappeared as completely as if it never had been.
Junior’s Border Patrol dealer, Carmichael, was wrong about one thing. Americans do disappear. All the time. They fall off the earth. That’s something I’ve learned from working natural disasters. One sudden earthquake or flood and it’s all gone. All the contracts that prove you own the things you think you own, your whole lifetime of accumulated paperwork to prove w
ho you are. There were people who disappeared into FEMA prisons after Hurricane Katrina who weren’t heard from for weeks or months. There were others who disappeared into the water like they never existed at all.
When you work disasters, you work with bodies. Not every time, not all the time, but you find yourself on disposal duty now and then. And, they don’t tell you this when you sign up, but if you work clearing power lines long enough, you’ll see more accidents than you can count, and some of them will be fatal. When you play with chain saws at great heights, it ain’t hard to end up dead.
Sometimes I think Henry and Brother Joe have it exactly backward. The question isn’t how to live off the grid, it’s how to remain tied to it. Most of what you think is your life can be ruptured in an instant. If you don’t believe me, ask any prison inmate. Maybe the real question isn’t how to make the world forget you, maybe it’s how to make it recognize you. Even your parenthood, your right to your own children, can be stripped from you at the whim of a bureaucrat.
And some just die.
I wasn’t a very good father to you. I know that. I thought I had all the time in the world to become better than I was. I ripped through my time with you like I had it to burn. I drank most nights and told you to shut up when there was something on television I wanted to watch. I was worn down and hungover most days. Most of the time I was wishing I was doing anything other than playing with you.
But there was also story time. I did all right with story time, at least some nights. You huddled up under the covers and me stretched out on top of them. Usually with a beer in hand and my boots still on, which pissed your mother off to no end, but still I was there. In winters it’d get so cold that we could watch our breath while we talked, even with our old furnace clunking away. I’m a good storyteller. Or, at least, I like to tell stories. Most of them came from everyday shit I’d twist around for you until it was interesting.
I still feel like I’m telling you stories, like it’s the only thing between you being here and not being here. That’s something I have to hold on to, you being here. If I don’t tell you these stories, I got nothing. If I stop, you’re gone.
I was a good listener, too. At least I think I was. You had your Superman kick, where we had talks about whether or not he could fly without his cape. Then there was God. I don’t know where that came from, but I told you everything I knew about the subject, which wasn’t much. And then you told me everything you knew about the subject, which was considerably more, if not entirely canonical.
I can’t even talk about God anymore.
Some nights we’d drift off to sleep in midconversation right there on the bed. You curled up under the covers and me laid out on top. Laney’d have to come in and wake me up, looking for somebody to talk to herself.
I hope it matters for something, some of that. There’s times it’s hard not to feel like all of that time didn’t go down a hole with you when you died.
53
wickedest
It’s almost impossible to measure the damage that damaged young men can do to themselves. Spending their nights drinking, doing whatever drugs they can afford, fumbling through the kind of endless and circular conversations only damaged young men can tolerate. Conversations so full of self-pity and self-hatred they can only end by the sudden imposition of physical force. A beer bottle through a window, a kitchen table smashed to pieces on the floor, an unanticipated fistfight. They feed on themselves, they feed on each other.
Then there’s the next morning. The self-disgust from understanding that whatever it is that’s burning you up, whatever’s tearing you apart, it’s no more unique to you than the color of your hair. Rough childhoods ain’t mysteries, they’re the building blocks of life. The day-to-day hell as lived by most everybody. The only thing that feels more pathetic than that you let it happen to you is that you allow it to break you in half now that you’re free of it.
Junior doesn’t know that he’s really grown out of any of it. He’s just grown so disgusted by the company of other people that he can’t much abide being around anyone he could lie or complain to anymore. He’s one of those few people who’d rather drink in the company of his own memories. Unfortunately, it’s starting to seem like it’s the only thing he can do.
He’s not so far gone that he thinks he has any right to be angry with Jenny for getting herself a boyfriend. Fidelity has never been one of Junior’s strong points. Even when Casey was a baby and they were as happy as they were ever going to be, there were still the runs down to El Paso, the whores Carmichael scared up. It’s pretty hard to get mad at a woman for taking up with another man when you’ve given her no reason to stick with you. And Junior knows all of that. But it doesn’t stop him from cruising by Jenny’s house the next night, looking for that Honda Accord. Or the next night, either.
It’s the second night, around eleven o’clock, that he spots it. And just like the last time, around two o’clock, here he comes out of her house, the little goateed motherfucker, wearing the same pants. Junior waits for him to get the lights on and get his car started, and he pulls out after him. Following from a distance, up the exit ramp onto I-70, and then down onto I-25, across town to Colfax Avenue.
Junior figures he knows him, then. Colfax Avenue was once described as the longest and wickedest street in America by Playboy magazine, and even as much as it’s been tamed over the last decade, it still hosts enough prostitution and low-rent crime for any ten cities. Junior follows him down the run of cheap wino bars and flophouse motels, the kinds of places he used to stay before he began working for Vicente. The Motel Bar X. The Aristocrat. The Driftwood.
But the Accord doesn’t stop. It keeps going, and before you know it they’re in Lakewood. And now it’s Home Depot and King Soopers. And Junior realizes he’s never been this far down Colfax.
The Accord turns, driving back into a residential neighborhood, rows of the kind of cheap tract housing that has taken over every undeveloped acre around Denver. It stops in front of a shit-brown duplex, one with three or four other cars parked out front of it, and Junior realizes that the little son of a bitch lives with his parents. Junior parks a house or two down and almost laughs out loud. He almost calls Jenny on his cell phone just so he can laugh at her.
The man gets out and looks back at Junior’s car. Junior can tell he doesn’t know what to do. Whether to walk up on Junior or not. Junior lights a cigarette and lets him figure it out. And the man, for his part, finds a pack of cigarettes in one of the deep front pockets of his pants, and lights one of his own. Then he walks over to the stoop and sits down, smoking it, staring at Junior’s car, at the point of light that is Junior’s cigarette.
Then when he’s done, he stubs it out and goes inside.
Junior doesn’t leave right away. He sits there for a long time. He’s not exactly sure what he’s thinking, but he knows it’s not good. Some of it’s got to do with people he knows who’d set this house on fire for no more than he made selling the Corvette to Vicente. And some of it’s got to do with his just skipping the middleman and burning it down himself.
But he doesn’t. And when he’s stopped shaking, he drives home.
54
disaster
Patterson finally does call Laney. He finishes out the week working for Paulson first, though. But come Saturday, he buys chickens, and even a baseball and a glove. And he digs a pit out back of the cabin and lines it with flat rocks and builds a fire in it. He’s sitting on a rock by the fire with a can of Milwaukee’s Best, scratching behind Sancho’s ears, when he looks up and sees Henry standing next to him.
“What’re you thinking about,” Henry asks.
“I’m not thinking,” Patterson says. “I’m kind of making a point of it.”
Henry stands, leaning on his cane. “You going to tell me about it this time?”
“Probably not.”
“Happens just about every time this year, doesn’t it?” Henry says. “Not my son, but this exact pattern.�
��
Patterson moves from scratching behind Sancho’s ears to between his eyes. The old dog lets out a rumble of pleasure. “Just about.”
Henry looks up at the sky. It’s thin blue and there’s no moisture at all. You can smell the dust, the heat, you can almost hear the reservoir sludging around low and thick at the bottom of the other side of the mesa. “You ever wonder about whether we’ve got any business being here at all?” he asks.
“All the time.”
“White people, I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
“There’s whole towns just disappearing. Just gone. Maybe a couple of old-timers who ain’t got nowhere to go are staying, but that’s it. Even Denver’s looking more and more like an island. On the other side, Indians are buying the land up and running new herds of bison.”
Patterson’s no longer scratching Sancho. Just rubbing his side. Sancho’s eyes have closed and he’s falling away into sleep.
“Turns out we never did know shit about living here,” Henry continues.
“I’ve thought about it.”
“It hasn’t rained for shit in weeks,” he continues. “And there was next to no snowfall last winter. That’s a fact. People can’t live without water, and sooner or later this place is going bone dry. You can’t just make water out of nothing. We’re going the way of the dinosaur.”
“Good riddance,” Patterson says. A dry wind blows around them. Patterson closes his eyes against the dust and leaves them closed for a little while, letting his hand settle on his dog’s ribs, feeling him breathe. He’s floating.
“You know Emma spends the night with me sometimes? She comes over and we eat dinner, and then she goes to bed with me. I pay her for that.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“I can’t even fuck,” Henry continues. “Can’t even get it up most of the time, and it hurts too much when I can. I pay her just to sleep with me. We don’t call it that, paying for her to sleep with me, but I give her a hundred dollars every week and say it’s for housework, above and beyond her real job.”
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