Coronado

by Dennis Lehane

  LATE THE NEXT morning, your father wakes you, tells you he drove Mandy home and you’ve got things to do, people to see.

  Here’s what you know about your father above all else—people have a way of vanishing in his company.

  He’s a professional thief, consummate con man, expert in his field, and yet there’s something far beyond professionalism at his core, something unreasonably arbitrary. Something he keeps within himself like a story he heard once, laughed at maybe, yet swore never to repeat.

  “She was with you last night?” you say.

  “You didn’t want her. Somebody had to prop her ego back up. Poor girl like that.”

  “But you drove her home,” you say.

  “I’m speaking Czech?”

  You hold his eyes for a bit. They’re big and bland, with the heartless innocence of a newborn’s. Nothing moves in them, nothing breathes, and after a while you say, “Let me take a shower.”

  “Fuck the shower,” he says. “Throw on a baseball cap and let’s get.”

  You take the shower anyway, just to feel it, another of those things you would have realized you’d miss if you’d given it any thought ahead of time, standing under the spray, no one near you, all the hot water you want for as long as you want it, shampoo that doesn’t smell like factory smoke.

  Drying your hair and brushing your teeth, you can hear the old man flicking through channels, never pausing on one for more than thirty seconds: Home Shopping Network—zap. Springer—zap. Oprah—zap. Soap opera voices; soap opera music—zap. Monster truck show—pause. Commercial—zap, zap, zap.

  You come back into the room, steam trailing you, and pick your jeans up off the bed, put them on.

  The old man says, “Afraid you’d drowned. Worried I’d have to take a plunger to the drain, suck you back up.”

  You say, “Where we going?”

  “Take a drive,” your father says with a small shrug, flicks past a cartoon.

  “Last time you said that, I got shot twice.”

  Your father looks back over his shoulder at you, eyes big and soft like a six-year-old’s. “Wasn’t the car that shot you, was it?”

  YOU GO OUT to Gwen’s place, but she isn’t there anymore, a couple of black kids playing in the front yard, black mother coming out on the porch to look at the strange car idling in front of her house.

  “You didn’t leave it here?” your father says.

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Think.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “So you didn’t?”

  “I told you—not that I recall.”

  “So you’re sure.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You had a bullet in your head.”

  “Two.”

  “I thought one glanced off.”

  You say, “Two bullets hit your fucking head, old man, you don’t get hung up on the particulars.”

  “That how it works?” Your father pulls away from the curb as the woman comes down the steps.

  THE FIRST SHOT came through the back window, and Gentleman Pete flinched big-time, jammed the wheel to the right and drove the car straight into the highway exit barrier, air bags exploding, water barrels exploding, something in the back of your head exploding, glass pebbles filling your shirt, Gwen going, “What happened? Jesus. What happened?”

  You pulled her with you out the back door—Gwen, your Gwen—and you crossed the exit ramp and ran into the woods and the second shot hit you there but you kept going, not sure how, not sure why, the blood pouring down your face, your head on fire, burning so bright and so hard that not even the rain could cool it off.

  “AND YOU DON’T remember nothing else?” your father says. You’ve driven all over town, every street, every dirt road, every hollow there is to stumble across in Stuckley, West Virginia.

  “Not till she dropped me off at the hospital.”

  “Dumb fucking move if ever there was one.”

  “I seem to remember I was puking blood by that point, talking all funny.”

  “Oh, you remember that. Sure.”

  “You’re telling me, in all this time, you never talked to Gwen?”

  “Like I told you three years back, that girl got gone.”

  You know Gwen. You love Gwen. This part of it is hard to take. There was Gwen in your car and Gwen in the cornstalks and Gwen in her mother’s bed in the hour just before noon, naked and soft with tremors, and you watched a drop of sweat appear from her hairline and slide down the side of her neck as she snored against your shoulder blade and the top of her foot was pressed under the arch of yours and you watched her sleep, and you were so awake.

  “So it’s with her,” you say.

  “No,” the old man says, a bit of anger creeping into his puppy-fur voice. “You called me. That night.”

  “I did?”

  “Shit, boy. You called me from the pay phone outside the hospital.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “You said, ‘I hid it. It’s safe. No one knows where but me.’”

  “Wow,” you say. “I said all that? Then what’d I say?”

  The old man shakes his head. “Cops were pulling up by then, calling you motherfucker, telling you to drop the phone. You hung up.”

  The old man pulls up outside a low, redbrick building behind a tire dealership on Oak Street. He kills the engine and gets out of the car and you follow. The building is two stories. The businesses facing the street are a bail bondsman, a hardware store, a Chinese take-out place with greasy walls the color of an old dog’s teeth, a hair salon called Girlfriend Hooked Me Up that’s filled with black women. Around the back, past the whitewashed windows of what was once a dry cleaner, is a small black door with the words TRUE-LINE EFFICIENCY EXPERTS CORP. stenciled into the frosted glass.

  The old man unlocks the door and leads you into a ten-by-ten room that smells of roast chicken and varnish. He pulls the string of a bare lightbulb and you look around at a floor strewn with envelopes and paper, the only piece of furniture a broken-down desk probably left behind by the previous tenant.

  Your father crab-walks across the floor, picking up the envelopes that have come through the mail slot, kicking his way through the paper. You pick up one of the pieces of paper, read it:

  Dear Sirs,

  Please find enclosed my check for $50.00. I look forward to receiving the information packet we discussed as well as the sample test. I have enclosed a SASE to help facilitate this process. I hope to see you someday at the airport!

  Sincerely,

  Jackson A. Willis

  You let it drop to the floor, pick up another one:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  Two months ago, I sent a money order in the amount of fifty dollars to your company in order that I may receive an information packet and sample test so that I could take the US government test and become a security handler and fulfill my patriotic duty against them al Qadas. I have not received my information packet as yet and no one answers when I call your phone. Please send me that information packet so I can get that job.

  Yours truly,

  Edwin Voeguarde

  12 Hinckley Street

  Youngstown, OH 33415

  You drop this one to the floor too, watch your father sit on the corner of the desk and open his fresh pile of envelopes with a penknife. He reads some, pauses only long enough with others to shake the checks free and drop the rest to the floor.

  You let yourself out, go to the Chinese place and buy a cup of Coke, go into the hardware store and buy a knife with a quick-flick hinge in the hasp, buy a couple of tubes of Krazy Glue, go back into your father’s office.

  “What’re you selling this time?” you say.

  “Airport security jobs,” he says, still opening envelopes. “It’s a booming market. Everyone wants in. Stop them bad guys before they get on the plane, make the papers, serve your country, and maybe be lucky enough to get posted near one of them Starbucks kiosks. Hell.”


  “How much you made?”

  Your father shrugs even though you’re certain he knows the figure right down to the last penny.

  “I’ve done all right. Hell else am I going to do, back in this shit town for three months, waiting on you? ’Bout time to shut this down, though.” He holds up a stack of about sixty checks. “Deposit these and cash out the account. First two months, though? I was getting a thousand, fifteen hundred checks a week. Thank the good Lord for being selective with the brain tissue, you know?”

  “Why?” you say.

  “Why what?”

  “Why you been hanging around for three months?”

  Your father looks up from the stack of checks, squints. “To prepare a proper welcome for you.”

  “A bottle of whiskey and a hooker who gives shitty head? That took you three months?”

  Your father squints a little more and you see a shaft of gray between the two of you, not quite what you’d call light and it sure isn’t the sun, just a shaft of air or atmosphere or something, swimming with motes, your father on the other side of it looking at you like he can’t quite believe you’re related.

  After a minute or so, your father says, “Yeah.”

  YOUR FATHER TOLD you once you’d been born in New Jersey. Another time he said New Mexico. Then Idaho. Drunk as a skunk a few months before you got shot, he said, “No, no. I’ll tell you the truth. You were born in Las Vegas. That’s in Nevada.”

  You went on the Internet to look yourself up, never did find anything.

  YOUR MOTHER DIED when you were seven. You’ve sat up occasionally and tried to picture her face. Some nights, you can’t see her at all. Some nights, you’ll get a quick glimpse of her eyes or her jawline, see her standing by the foot of her bed, rolling her stockings on, and suddenly she’ll appear whole cloth, whole human, and you can smell her.

  Most times, though, it’s somewhere in between. You see a smile she gave you, and then she’ll vanish. See a spatula she held, dripping with pancake batter, her eyes burning for some reason, her mouth an O, and then her face is gone and all you can see is the wallpaper. And the spatula.

  You asked your father once why there were no pictures of her. Why hadn’t he taken a picture of her? Just one lousy picture?

  He said, “You think it’d bring her back? No, I mean, do you? Wow,” he said and rubbed his chin. “Wouldn’t that be cool.”

  You said, “Forget it.”

  “Maybe if we had a whole album of pictures?” your father said. “She’d like pop out from time to time, make us breakfast.”

  NOW THAT YOU’VE been in prison, there’s documentation on you, but even they’d had to make it up, take your name on as much faith as you. You have no Social Security number or birth certificate, no passport. You’ve never held a job.

  Gwen said to you once, “You don’t have anyone to tell you who you are, so you don’t need anyone to tell you. You just are who you are. You’re beautiful.”

  And with Gwen, that was usually enough. You didn’t need to be defined—by your father, your mother, by a place of birth, a name on a credit card, a driver’s license, the upper-left corner of a check. As long as her definition of you was something she could live with, then you could too.

  You find yourself standing in a Nebraska wheat field. You’re seventeen years old. You learned to drive five years ago. You were in school once, for two months when you were eight, but you read well and you can multiply three-digit numbers in your head faster than a calculator, and you’ve seen the country with the old man. You’ve learned people aren’t that smart. You’ve learned how to pull lottery ticket scams and asphalt paving scams and get free meals with a slight upturn of your brown eyes. You’ve learned that if you hold ten dollars in front of a stranger, he’ll pay twenty to get his hands on it if you play him right. You’ve learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks with lies.

  You’re seventeen years old in that wheat field. The night breeze smells of woodsmoke and feels like dry fingers as it lifts your bangs off your forehead. You remember everything about that night because it is the night you met Gwen. You are two years away from prison and you feel like someone has finally given you permission to live.

  THIS IS WHAT few people know about Stuckley, West Virginia—every now and then, someone finds a diamond. They were in a plane that went down in a storm in ’51, already blown well off course, flying a crate of Israeli stones down the eastern seaboard toward Miami. Plane went down in a coal mine, torched Shaft #3, took some swing-shift miners with it. The government showed up along with members of an international gem consortium, got the bodies out of there and went to work looking for the diamonds. Found most of them, or so they claimed, but for decades afterward there were rumors, given occasional credence by the sudden sight of a miner still grimed brown by the shafts, tooling around town in a Cadillac.

  You’d been here peddling hurricane insurance in trailer parks when word got around that someone had found one as big as a casino chip. Miner by the name of George Brunda suddenly buying drinks, talking to his travel agent. You and Gwen shot pool with him one night, and you could see it in the bulges under his eyes, the way his laughter exploded—too high, too fast, gone chalky with fear.

  He didn’t have much time, old George, and he knew it, but he had a mother in a rest home, and he was making the arrangements to get her transferred. George was a fleshy guy, triple-chinned, and dreams he’d probably forgotten he’d ever had were rediscovered and weighted in his face, jangling and pulling the flesh.

  “Probably hasn’t been laid in twenty years,” Gwen said when George went to the bathroom. “It’s sad. Poor sad George. Never knew love.”

  Her pool stick pressed against your chest as she kissed you and you could taste the tequila, the salt, and the lime on her tongue.

  “Never knew love,” she whispered in your ear, an ache in the whisper.

  “WHAT ABOUT THE fairground?” your father says as you leave the office of True-Line Efficiency Experts Corp. “Maybe you hid it there. You always had a fondness for that place.”

  You feel a small hitch. In your leg, let’s say. Just a tiny clutching sensation in the back of your right calf, but you walk through it, and it goes away.

  You say to your father as you reach the car. “You really drive her home this morning?”

  “Who?”

  “Mandy?”

  “Who’s…?” Your father opens his door, looks at you over it. “Oh, the whore?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did I drive her home?”

  “Yeah.”

  Your father pats the top of the door, his denim jacket flapping around his wrist, his eyes the blue of bullet casing. You feel, as you always have, reflected in them, even when you aren’t, couldn’t be, wouldn’t be.

  “Did I drive her home?” A smile bounces in the rubber of your father’s face.

  “Did you drive her home?” you say.

  That smile’s all over the place now, the eyebrows too. “Define home.”

  You say, “I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  “You’re still pissed at me because I killed Fat Fuck.”

  “George.”

  “What?”

  “His name was George.”

  “He would have ratted.”

  “To who? It wasn’t like he could file a claim. Wasn’t a fucking lottery ticket.”

  Your father shrugs, looks off down the street.

  “I just want to know if you drove her home.”

  “I drove her home,” your father says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Where’d she live?”

  “Home,” he says and gets behind the wheel, starts the ignition.

  YOU NEVER FIGURED George Brunda for smart, and it was only after a full day in his house, going through everything down to the point of removing the drywall and putting it back, touching up the paint, resealing it, that Gwen said:

  “Where’
s the mother stay again?”

  That took uniforms, Gwen as a nurse, you as an orderly, Gentleman Pete out in the car while your father kept watch on George’s mine adit and monitored police activity over a scanner.

  The old lady said, “You’re new here and quite pretty,” as Gwen shot her up with phenobarbital and Valium and you went to work on the room.

  This was the glitch—you’d watched George drive to work; watched him enter the mine. No one saw him come back out again, because no one was looking on the other side of the hill, the exit of a completely different shaft. So while your father watched the front, George took off out the back, drove over to check on his investment, walked in the room just as you pulled the rock from the back of the mother’s radio, George looking politely surprised, as if he’d stepped into the wrong room.

  He smiled at you and Gwen, held up a hand in apology, and backed out of the room.

  Gwen looked at the door, looked at you.

  You looked at Gwen, looked at the window, looked at the rock filling the center of your palm, the entire center of your palm.

  Looked at the door.

  Gwen said, “Maybe we—”

  And George came through the door again, nothing polite in his face, a gun in his hand. And not any regular gun, a motherfucking six-shooter, like they carried in westerns, long, thin barrel, a family heirloom maybe, passed down from a great-great-great-grandfather, not even a trigger guard, just the trigger, and crazy fat fucking George the lonely unloved pulling back on it and squeezing off two rounds, the first of which went out the window, the second of which hit metal somewhere in the room and then bounced off that and then the old lady went, “Ooof,” even though she was doped up and passed out, and it sounded to you like she’d eaten something that didn’t agree with her. You could picture her sitting in a restaurant, halfway through coffee, placing a hand to her belly, saying it: “Ooof.” And George would come around to her chair, say, “Is everything okay, Mama?”