“Easy girl,” he said, patting her head. “You know I’d never hurt you. When I leave here, I’m taking you with me.” He knelt to give her a hug and let her slobber on his face, then she lumbered back into the kitchen and lay down on her pillow as if nothing had ever gone wrong. Dogs have it made.
He opened the basement door and flipped on the wall switch, went down the narrow stairs and, stepping over to his workbench, grabbed the crowbar, the tempered steel gleaming in the fluorescent light. Strictly speaking, he guessed he didn’t really need it, since he’d just broken into his own house with no tools. But he wanted to use it. Certain kinds of damage only steel can do.
He was halfway up the stairs when he heard sounds from the front porch, someone stamping boots on the mat, a tentative tapping. He wouldn’t have cared, but given the fucking door, any fool would’ve assumed somebody had broken into his house. If he stayed where he was, whoever it was—most likely Vico, the worrywart—might go call the cops. And cops were the last people he wanted to see right now.
He stepped into the hallway, forgetting he was brandishing a crowbar, covered in rapidly melting snow, reeking of whiskey and probably looking like a madman.
Dave’s wife stood at the door, snowflakes speckling her red woolen cap and the shoulders of her dark down coat. Gloria looked from his face to the crowbar and the gouged door jamb. Cal watched her trying to add it all up and make it come out even.
“I didn’t know your phone number,” she said.
He was still standing about halfway down the hall, and she was outside on the porch. The storm door rocked in the wind, slamming against the clapboard, and snow was blowing in behind her, starting to accumulate on the floor. It occurred to him that he needed to invite her inside, so he did.
She stepped over the threshold. “I just had a doctor’s appointment,” she told him.
“I hope you’re all right.”
“It was routine. But my doctor’s in Montvale, and since I was nearby I wanted to ask you a question.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
“Maybe we ought to close the door, though? At least one of them?”
“I’ll close ’em both.” He propped the crowbar against the wall and then, when he passed by, saw her glance into the living room, where the walls were still unpainted and the furniture in disarray. He slipped the washer over and pulled the storm door closed, then shut the other one.
She was standing there with her back to him, looking down the hallway into the kitchen, where Suzy was stretched out watching her. “I’d like to buy Dave a better mandolin,” she said, turning toward him. “So I wanted to check with you and see if … Cal? Are you okay? Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
He towered over her, at least a foot taller and wreathed in whiskey fumes, and any woman in her position would’ve had a right to be afraid. After all, she’d met him only the other day and must have learned from her husband or the Cedar Park paper, if not both, that back in October he’d beaten a guy to within an inch of his life. Yet he knew, as surely as he’d ever known anything, that if he didn’t put some distance between them in the next few seconds, she would pull off her hat and gloves and drape her coat over the pineapple post and then, without any sign from him that he needed or welcomed closer contact, wrap her arms around him and invite him to tell her what was wrong. So he held his breath and waited.
“her name,” Gloria told Dave that night in the alcove off their bedroom, “was Jacinta.”
They were sitting on the love seat, and a candle was lit on the small wicker table in front of them. The storm had knocked the power out in their section of Cedar Park. Inside, the temperature was only about fifty degrees, but they’d wrapped themselves in wool blankets. Dave, who was sipping Irish whiskey laced with sugar and lemon juice, wore wool socks. His feet were almost always freezing, and she worried about his circulation. So far his blood pressure was no worse than borderline, but both of his brothers had already suffered strokes.
“He had a class with her his senior year in high school,” she said. “It was a big school in Bakersfield, a couple thousand students. He told me that these days the student body’s probably about fifty percent Hispanic, but back then it was more like twenty-five or thirty. The Latinas were excluded from student government, and they never got elected cheerleader or class favorite or most likely to succeed. He explained all of this to me patiently, as though he thought I might be disinclined to believe it. ‘Imagine that,’ I finally said, hoping to make him lighten up, ‘Latinas being discriminated against.’ He thought I was serious. ‘It happened,’ he tells me. ‘It really did.’
“Her family had bought a house that his father’s company built. He didn’t know this when he first got interested in her, and she didn’t know whose son he was, and by the time they figured it out neither one of them cared. When they started going together he kept it from his father, who he said was the worst man he ever knew, and he never told him anything that mattered. And she kept it from her whole family.”
“Why’d she do that?” Dave asked, pulling her closer until her head rested on his left shoulder.
“Because they were having problems with their house, and it was ruining their lives. Her people were second generation. Both her parents had decent jobs that kept them out of the fields, and they’d sunk everything they’d saved into the place. I don’t know what all the problems were—bad plumbing or ventilation or something like that, and the foundation was shifting and the walls were cracking. Her dad was angry all the time, and her mother was too, and apparently she blamed her husband for buying the house. They were fighting a lot, almost always about the same thing.
“Finally the girl’s father went to see a lawyer, and it turned out lots of people had been filing lawsuits but nobody ever won because the company had all the judges in their pocket. So that just made her dad even angrier. And along about this time, some friend of his spotted Cal with his daughter at a pizza place and realized whose son he was.
“So after hearing this, Jacinta’s father went home and confronted her, calling her a puta, and then his wife got into it, telling him that since he’d given away everything they had to Cal’s father, maybe their daughter thought she had no choice but to try to get it back. So he slapped his wife, which he’d never done before, and then his daughter came after him with a steam iron, and when he tried to wrestle it away, the iron hit her in the face and broke her nose. The next time Cal saw her, she looked like she’d gone a couple rounds with Teofilo Stevenson.”
She stopped then and asked if she could have a drop of Dave’s whiskey. He expressed surprise, because she’d always claimed that even the smell of it turned her stomach, but he handed the glass to her anyway, and she took a sip. It tasted about as bad as she’d expected, maybe a little worse, but at least it warmed her up. She could see why someone might drink it, especially if he’d been sitting outside in the snow like Cal had before she came over. He’d confessed that to her, along with so much else, and then he got choked up and asked if she would hold him again, just for a moment or two. According to the digital display on the DVR, she’d held him nearly ten minutes, occasionally patting his back, and the whole time she’d felt as if she had a giant child in her arms. That was one part she’d never tell Dave. Another part was that Cal said she reminded him of Jacinta. The third thing she hoped she wouldn’t have to tell him was that Cal had discovered Kristin was having an affair with a neighbor and he was afraid—that was the word he used—he might go down the street to the guy’s house and do what he’d already done twice in his life, and that this time the result might be even worse.
“The girl’s father managed a truck stop out on the edge of Bakersfield, not far from the new subdivision where they’d bought the house. He used to drive his pickup to work, but lately, according to the girl, he often walked. She didn’t know why, and Cal didn’t tell her that all the land between the subdivision and the truck stop belonged to his father and had no TRESPASSING signs everywhere.
“Her father usually went in around seven in the morning and worked until lunch, came back home and took a nap, then went back in around four in the afternoon and stayed until nine or ten. The truck stop never closed, and his hours weren’t always that regular, but he had to have his siesta and, when he got back up, immediately headed for work. That was one thing you could count on.
“This tract of land was bisected by a creek. For most of the year it was bone-dry, but in the spring runoff from the Sierras sometimes turned it into a river. Cal’s father was planning to build luxury homes on either side of it, thinking people would pay premium prices for the pleasure of saying they lived on a riverbank for a few weeks of the year. You couldn’t get from Jacinta’s subdivision to the truck stop without crossing the creek bed. It was deep enough that until you were in it you couldn’t see the bottom, which was littered with refuse. Old tires, paint cans, anything that washed down from the foothills and got stranded there when the water ran out.
“Cal said he didn’t tell Jacinta what he intended to do because he knew she’d tell him not to, and he didn’t really know what his intentions were anyway. Looking back, he thinks he just hoped to tell her father who he was, explain that he knew better than anybody that his father was a ruthless asshole and that the one thing he’d always promised himself was that he’d die before he turned into that kind of man himself. Then he’d ask her father not to lay a hand on his wife or daughter anymore. He’d make the request in a completely reasonable fashion, because he knew his girlfriend’s father was a decent man who worked hard for his family and deserved respect. He was actually thinking he might one day be his father-in-law and the grandfather of his children.
“He said he doesn’t even think he was angry when he stepped down into the creek bed to wait. He had on a pair of shorts and some hiking boots and a T-shirt, and he’d brought a canteen with him, because this was midsummer and it was over a hundred that afternoon. He got there about three and sat down near the bottom of the bank, where he spotted a couple of huge rats scurrying around looking for something to eat.
“He said he waited and waited, just sitting there in that baking heat. He was about to give up when her father appeared, a little guy in his late thirties who wore khaki workclothes and a Peterbilt cap. He had his head down, so he didn’t see Cal until he stood up and said, ‘Excuse me, Señor Garza.’
“He said he’d thought a lot about how to address him. He’d taken Spanish in junior high, but he wasn’t certain about degrees of formality. He was pretty sure Hola, Señor Garza would be unduly informal, and he thought Disculpame, por favor, Señor Garza might be the wrong idiom altogether, so he decided to split the difference, using English and Spanish, and he’s always thought that was what enraged the man—the notion that Cal might see him as half one thing, half another.
“It was clear Garza knew who he was. For one thing, there couldn’t be that many six-and-half-foot teenagers walking around Bakersfield at any given time, and anyway Cal had his father’s features. So his girlfriend’s father looked at him for a moment, then called him a motherfucker and told him that if he ever found out he’d so much as gotten near his daughter again, he’d kill him and piss on his corpse.
“Cal said something happened inside him then. He began to think in a completely rational manner about doing irrational things. The first was to take a couple steps toward the other man. It was late afternoon and the sun was behind him, and he wanted Garza to become aware of the shadow he cast on his face. He said that was the strangest thing when he thought back on it—that he was aware he was casting a shadow. He let Garza feel it for a few seconds, then told him that if he ever laid a hand on his daughter again, he would kill him. And just to make the experience a little more humiliating, he said that after killing him he’d call his father and tell him he needed help disposing of his remains, because his dad was great when it came to getting rid of a nuisance.”
Beside her, Dave shifted and took a big swallow of whiskey. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I don’t know if I want to hear the rest of this.”
“You probably don’t. But I’m afraid you have no choice.”
At first, Cal had told her, Garza didn’t react. His face got a little darker, maybe, but he didn’t say anything and didn’t do anything, so Cal thought the encounter was over. He was already starting to despise himself for what he’d said, but at the same time he was sorry that nothing more was going to happen. He’d never had a girlfriend before, and he was really in love with Jacinta, and now here was this guy who’d hit his wife and broken his daughter’s nose telling him he didn’t have the right to see her. They stood there looking at each other for a moment, and then Cal shrugged and turned to climb away, and that was when Garza made his move.
Cal’s knees buckled, and he pitched onto the creek bank. It was quite a kick, given the man’s size. He rolled over just as his girlfriend’s father brought his arm forward. Garza had found a stone as big as a shot put and intended to crush his skull. He took the blow on his left forearm. Within seconds he’d gotten out from under the other man, turned him onto his back and straddled him.
He hadn’t played sports, wasn’t particularly athletic and had never been in a fight. But it seemed to come naturally. To get started, he slapped Garza a few times. Slapping another man’s face, he’d heard his father say, was worse than hitting him with your fists. Garza cursed him, calling him names in Spanish, some of which Cal knew and others he didn’t. He began to pound away at him then, knocking a few teeth out, breaking his nose, busting his own knuckles. He didn’t know how long the beating lasted, but he kept it up long after Garza had quit cussing. It was only when he saw the pink Pepto-Bismol-like froth coating his lips that he decided it was time to stop.
He lifted his girlfriend’s father to his feet, whirled him around and threw him on the ground. He intended that to be his final statement—to show he could toss him aside like a piece of garbage—but Garza must have landed on a bottle or a jar, because he heard a crunching sound. When he turned him over, there was a gash in his forehead and glass shards embedded near his right eye.
The lesson to be learned from what had happened—as his father told him later on, after Cal declined to ask what it might be—was simple: if you mean to administer a beating, take care when choosing your spot.
He hadn’t taken care because he didn’t plan on beating the guy up. But he had anyway, and in the aftermath he realized that his position was almost as bad as Garza’s: he couldn’t leave him there. He had to get him away from the creek bed for fear that if his wounds weren’t treated he might die or go blind.
He’d borrowed his mom’s Mercedes, and it was parked at the truck stop. He could think of only one thing to do, so he hoisted the man’s body over his shoulder, Garza groaning once or twice as he stumbled across the parched ground. Fortunately, the Mercedes was in a corner of the lot, where a semi blocked it from view, and he deposited his load into the backseat.
The closest hospital was about four miles away. Originally founded by nuns in the twenties, it had recently moved north and was one of the reasons his father started building in that direction. People want to live close to medical care, he said. What Cal didn’t know was that about two years ago his father had wangled an appointment to the board of trustees. That accrued to Cal’s good fortune on a day when not much else had.
“He pulls up to the emergency entrance and there’s a wheelchair just sitting by the door, so he runs over, grabs it and rolls it back to the car. Garza’s still lying there, his face and torso covered in blood. Cal pulls him upright and shoves him into the chair. He rolls him inside and leaves him by the admissions window, then turns and starts to leave. ‘Hey,’ he hears someone holler, ‘wait a minute,’ but he’s already out the door. He jumps into his mother’s car, and as he peels away he looks in the rearview mirror and sees an orderly and a security guard run out of the emergency entrance. The orderly’s mouth is moving, and the guard’s writing something on a
pad, so he knows they’ve got the number off the license plate.”
She paused. During his days on the force, her husband almost never told her what had happened on his shift unless she asked, and even then she suspected she got an edited version. In thirty-five years he’d been involved in a handful of gun battles, and in one of them an officer was shot, but he didn’t mention it until after she saw it on WBZ. “The reason I’m telling you all of this,” she said, “is so you won’t be taken by surprise if he tells you himself. The thing is, he considers you his friend. And if ever a man needed friends, this one does.”
Dave sighed and shook his head. “So what happened next?” he asked. “I hope you’re not going to tell me his old man had this Garza bumped off?”
“No, he didn’t have him killed. He bought him.” She explained that because Cal was scared and couldn’t see any way around it, he went home and told his father what he’d done. His dad sat there for a minute, stone-faced, and Cal thought he was going to jump up and hit him or tell him to get out of his house and never come back. But instead he burst out laughing and slapped his knee and, for the first and only time in all their years together, enveloped his son in a bear hug. “ ‘Well, at least I know your mother’s not a whore,’ he said. ‘For eighteen years I’ve wondered if it was really possible you sprang from my loins. Now I’ve got my answer.’ He started making phone calls, and within a few days the whole thing was settled. Garza lost his sight in that eye and had blurred vision in the other for a long time—maybe forever, as far as Cal knows—but his hospital bills were covered, nobody filed a police report, and Jacinta’s family got a new house in a better subdivision.”
“What happened between him and the girl?”
“That was part of the arrangement. He had to promise not to see her again, but she didn’t want anything to do with him anyway. She wrote him a letter telling him she would hate him as long as she lived, that as bad a man as his father might be, he was even worse.”
The Realm of Last Chances Page 24