by Carolee Dean
“Not much to say,” I tell him over the red telephone. I still can’t believe I’m sitting here across from him, after all this time. It’s like we’ve never been apart.
“Do ya get good grades?” he asks. His Texas drawl isn’t harsh and crude like Levida’s, but smooth as apple butter.
“I quit school a while back,” I confess. He nods in understanding, but the lawyer, who has made no move to leave, raises a disapproving eyebrow.
“Do ya have a girl?” my father asks me.
“Yeah,” I say, thinking about Jess, picturing her sitting by the plate-glass window, looking out at the ocean, waiting for me. I know I should call her, but what would I say? She’s got to be steaming mad by now. Maybe that’s for the best, for her to hate me, and then forget me.
“Tell me about her,” my father says.
I tell him how I first met Jess in the church choir and how we were in school together at Downey High until I dropped out.
“Go on,” my father encourages.
Before long I’m telling him all about Jessica Jameson, describing her eyes, her smile, her incredible voice. I thought it would hurt, talking about her, but it actually helps ease the pain, as if, somehow, she’s not so far away anymore.
When I get to the part about Jess kissing me on the Fourth of July and taking me to her beach house, I look at my father and wonder what it is like, seeing people only through a wall of glass. Never touching them. I wonder if anyone besides his lawyer comes to see him, and I can’t even imagine how lonely he has been all these years.
“Well, don’t stop in the middle of the story, boy,” says the lawyer, who I’ve forgotten is still there. “Tell us what happened next.”
I look at my father. “Her boyfriend called to tell her he was coming over, and I left.”
“Damn!” says the lawyer.
“That’s too bad.” My father shakes his head.
“Tough break, kid,” says a third voice softly, over a microphone, and I turn to see the gray-haired guard, who has obviously listened to the entire conversation.
“Not much privacy in here,” my father says.
After that intrusion I stick to neutral topics that I don’t mind everyone overhearing. I talk about my friendship with Wade, my job at Gomez & Sons, my car—carefully avoiding subjects like the time I served in juvie, the fact I’m violating my probation, how I’ve become an accessory to armed robbery and accidentally killed someone.
“Mechanicking is a good trade and a respectable occupation,” my father tells me. “But what about the girl? That can’t be the end of the story.”
“She came by the shop last Thursday.”
“Yeah.”
“To tell me she broke up with her boyfriend.”
“Then what?” says the lawyer, who is really starting to annoy me. He’s wearing some kind of sweet cologne that smells like cheap wine, and as it mixes with his body sweat, the odor becomes nearly unbearable, like the rotting fruit from a distillery.
“She said she wants to be with me.”
“Attaboy,” the lawyer says, slapping me on the back.
“Good goin’,” the guard chimes in.
Only my father seems to notice I’m not smiling. He lowers his voice to almost a whisper. “Are you okay, son?”
Son . That single word turns me inside out. Why did you have to be here, Dad, I want to ask him, when I needed you so badly at home?
I bite my lip, hoping the tears I feel gathering behind my eyes will stay there and not spill all over my face. I want to tell my father everything. Know he’s the one person in all the world who would understand, but I can’t say anything with the guard listening to our every word. All I can do is shake my head ever so slightly and hope the gesture doesn’t reveal too much.
“Mr. Cartwright,” my father says to the lawyer, “why don’t you give my boy your number, in case he needs to contact you for any reason?”
“Contact me?” the lawyer replies, looking from me to my father. “Oh,” he says. “Yes, let me give you my card.” Mr. Cartwright opens his briefcase, pulls out a card, and hands it to me.
“I think I’ll make a couple of phone calls while the two of you catch up,” Mr. Cartwright tells us, closing his briefcase, and then he leaves. Finally.
“You’ve got ten more minutes,” the guard informs me over the microphone.
“Ten more minutes,” I say. “It’s hard to believe two hours have passed.”
“Where are you stayin’?” my father asks.
“Levida’s place.”
“With your grandmother?”
“Is that okay?”
“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?” He rubs his chin, avoiding my eyes.
“Why doesn’t she ever come to visit you?” I ask.
My father glances at the guard. “She has her reasons.”
I nod, knowing he can’t say any more, but wondering what reasons she could possibly have.
“She put you to work yet?”
“She has me and Wade tearing down the barn.”
“Tearin’ down the barn! Why?” he asks.
“She uses the wood to make signs she sells at the church.”
“Is that the reason?” His voice is tighter than a hangman’s knot.
“I think she might be looking for something,” I say.
My father takes a long, slow breath. “She won’t like it if she finds it.”
“In that case, if I find anything, I’ll just keep it to myself.”
“Good.”
“Time’s up,” says the guard.
“Promise me you’ll come back tomorrow,” says my father.
A tornado couldn’t stop me from being at the prison first thing in the morning, but all I can manage to say is, “I’ll try.” I’ve learned how easy it is for plans to turn out different from what you expect.
I walk outside to where the pickup is parked, leaving the artificial light of the prison. It hits me instantly, how hot and wet the air is as it hangs heavy in my lungs.
I’m anxious to put some distance between myself and the rolls of razor wire. I pull the keys out of my pocket, and the lawyer’s card falls to the ground. I pick it up.
I feel someone hit me hard across the back and spin around to see Buster Cartwright smiling. “C’mon, I’ll buy you lunch. Let’s get outta here. This place gives me the jitters.”
He heads for a Cadillac the color of a banana, parked nearby, but I make no move to get into the pickup or follow him. He turns to me and says, “You do want to know about your daddy, don’t you?”
I am ripped down the middle. On the one hand, I want nothing to do with this clown of a lawyer. But more than that, I want to know what he is trying to do to save my father.
“C’mon, I’ll take you to Bubba’s Smokehaus.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Best barbecue in three counties.”
At the mention of barbecue I realize how hungry I am, having left Levida’s place before breakfast. I figure it won’t hurt anything to talk to the man, so I get into the pickup and follow the Cadillac to a place on the outskirts of town that I think at first is a dilapidated old barn, until I see the rusted sign for BUBBA’S.
Bubba’s isn’t much better on the inside. The tables look like something my grandmother might have made, and peanut shells cover the wooden floor, which creaks and crunches as we walk across it.
A waitress in jeans and a Bubba’s tank top leads us to a table with a bucket of peanuts sitting in the middle of it. Mr. Cartwright grabs a handful and tells the waitress, “Bring us a platter of beef ribs, Texas toast, slaw, and some calf fries as an appa-teaser.”
“What are calf fries?” I ask him, when the waitress leaves to give our order to a man in a greasy white T-shirt who is covered in tattoos.
“Texas oysters.”
“What’s that?”
“Bull nuts.”
I look at the pail of peanuts.
“You really are a city boy, aren’t you?�
�� He laughs. “When they castrate a bull calf, they cut off its balls,” he explains. “Tenderest meat on the beast.”
The waitress returns with a platter of small round fried things.
“Try some,” Cartwright says, pushing the platter toward me.
“No thanks.” I’m starving, but there is no way I’m going to eat some animal’s private parts. “What are you doing to help my father?” I ask him. “Are you filing an appeal?”
“Filed eight of ’em. They all ran out,” he says, wiping his chin. “But don’t you worry. No way they can kill Dozer Dawson.”
“Dozer?”
“The Bulldozer. That’s what the governor calls your daddy. Old football nickname.”
“The governor of Texas knows my father?”
“Your daddy is a politician’s wet dream.”
“Excuse me?”
“Literacy, border control, drug trafficking; your daddy’s book covers the governor’s entire political campaign. Heck, he could be his speechwriter.”
“My father wrote a book?”
Cartwright puts down his napkin and stares at me like I just arrived from another planet. “You didn’t know your father wrote a book? Where you been all these years, boy?”
“California.”
The lawyer shakes his head as if I’ve confirmed his suspicions, opens his briefcase, and hands me a hardcover book. “ The Road to Huntsville by D.J. Dawson. That there is an autographed copy.”
I look at the back of the book and see a mug shot of my father. “When did he write this?”
“In prison. Became a self-educated man. Just like Malcolm X.”
“Self-educated?”
“Couldn’t read beyond a third-grade level before he got locked up.”
My surprise must be obvious, because Cartwright says, “You don’t know anything about your daddy a’tall, do you?”
“No,” I admit. “Not much.”
“Your daddy’s book is read in every government class in Texas. Ten thousand high school students have already signed a petition asking Governor Banks and the prison review board to grant him clemency, and the list is growing every day. It’s an election year. Billy Banks can’t let your father die. It would be political suicide.”
“You really think so?” I ask, as a great weight lifts from my chest.
“Your daddy is one of the state’s leading spokesmen on the war against drugs,” Cartwright explains as a huge platter of ribs arrives. “He was an illiterate drug addict when they sent him up.”
That’s not how I remember my father. I remember a man I thought was Santa Claus.
“Now look what he’s accomplished. You can’t kill a role model like that.” Mr. Cartwright tucks a napkin into his shirt collar and grabs a rib off the platter. I do the same.
I wonder if the poems and phrases floating around in my head could become a book someday. So what if I can’t read a textbook or a job application? If my father learned to write, I could do it.
“Do you believe my father is innocent?” I ask.
Cartwright shrugs. “I don’t work with many innocent folks, but all the evidence in the case against him was circumstantial,” he tells me between bites. “The cops never even found the murder weapon. If it wasn’t for the fact that your daddy’s friend, Travis Seagraves, copped a plea and took the stand against him, the DA would have had a hard time making a case. Seagraves’s testimony made your father sound like a hardened criminal. The guy had some kind of ax to grind.”
The ribs are huge and slathered in sauce so spicy I have to ask for my Pepsi to be refilled three times. These are the best ribs I’ve ever eaten. I decide that this is the first place I will bring my father when he gets out of prison.
When we’re done eating, Cartwright sits back in his chair and lets out a huge belch. I have to wonder where my father found this backwoods lawyer. The waitress takes away our empty plates and returns with steaming hot towels we use to clean our faces and hands. They are soon covered in grease and sauce, and I try to imagine how the restaurant will ever get them white again. I know they will, though, just as I know the slate will be wiped clean for my father … and for me. What did the preacher say? “‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.’”
“Of course the governor may take it to the last possible minute,” Mr. Cartwright says. “Milk the case for all the free publicity he can get. And there is a growing contingency of people on the side of the dead cop’s family. But don’t you worry. I got the whole thing under control.”
By the time I get back to Quincy, it’s nearly four o’clock in the afternoon and I’m drenched in sweat. As I make my way down Main Street, I see a sign on a storefront I didn’t notice before. It says SEAGRAVES FEED STORE . I park out front, go inside, and walk up to the man at the counter.
“I’m looking for Travis Seagraves,” I say.
“He’s out back taking inventory,” the man tells me.
I walk out back and find a man about my father’s age, writing on a clipboard while two other men unload sacks of feed from a semi truck.
“Excuse me, are you Mr. Seagraves?” I say.
“Who’s askin’?” he says, without looking up from his work.
“Dylan Dawson.”
His head snaps up in my direction.
“Junior,” I add. I’ve never been Junior before, and it’s a little hard getting used to, but I’m realizing how important it is to make that distinction.
The two men unloading the truck share a look.
“T.J.!” Seagraves calls to a guy on the other side of the yard, who stops what he is doing to walk over to us. The resemblance between the two is unmistakable. This must be his son. Seagraves hands him the board and the pen. “Take over for me for a couple of minutes.”
T.J. looks at me like he recognizes me, and then nods at his father.
“Follow me,” Seagraves says. Then he leads me back through the store and up a flight of stairs to an air-conditioned office. He plops himself down in a chair behind a desk, opens a small refrigerator, and pulls out a bottle of Budweiser. “Want one?” he asks.
“I don’t drink.”
He takes half of the bottle in one swallow and then eyes me suspiciously, as if he doesn’t trust any man who doesn’t consume alcohol. “You sure you’re the Dozer’s kid? He never turned away from a beer.”
“I’m sure.”
“I hear they’re fixin’ to put him out of his misery.”
I tense up like I’ve been hit and instinctively ball my hand into a fist, but then I let it go, remembering what happened the last time I hit someone. I don’t like Travis Seagraves one bit. The man is hard and crude, which I can tell from his walls, covered in pictures of naked women. But I could forget all that if he didn’t talk about my father dying as casually as Cartwright talks about castrated bulls.
As Seagraves finishes his beer, an old newspaper clipping, hanging among the centerfolds, catches my eye. It’s the same photo I saw at Levida’s house, with the three boys holding the state cup, but two of the boys have been cut out of this photo. The one who remains looks an awful lot like T.J. “You played football with my father.”
“I did a lot of things with your father, most of which landed me in a world of shit.”
“You testified against him,” I remind him.
“Didn’t have much choice, once your father led them out to the landing strip on my family’s ranch, but I didn’t tell the cops anything new. Just confirmed what they had already figured out.”
“Which was what?”
He tosses the bottle in the trash can and gets a fresh one out of the fridge, narrowing his eyes.
“It’s old history. Read the police report, or better yet, ask your daddy. Ask him what he and Jack Golden did with the money.”
“Jack Golden. You mean the policeman who got killed?”
“Jack Golden the dirty cop who was in knee-deep with your daddy.”
“Knee deep into what?” I say, wish
ing I’d asked more questions of Buster Cartwright.
“You seen Janie Golden’s big fancy house out on Farm Road 66? I think it just about says it all. You don’t buy a house like that on a widow’s pension.”
“What does that have to do with my father?”
“Jack was your daddy’s connection to the Colombians.”
And now I understand.
“After the shooting, I figured it out. Jack was on the border patrol. I think he found out Dozer was gonna double-cross him the way he was planning on double-crossin’ me. Your daddy controlled all the money. Wouldn’t tell me where he kept it. He liked keepin’ everything secret. His border connection set up the deal with the Colombians. We used an old landin’ strip on my family’s farm and hid the drugs in the sacks from the feed store. Dozer made the drug runs in his truck and collected our share of the money. Said he was keepin’ it safe until we were finished and then the three of us would square up. Said we’d do a few runs and then we’d all be rich, but that ain’t quite the way it worked out. I never saw a dime. Did you?”
“Me?”
He stands up so quickly his chair crashes to the floor. Then he walks around the desk toward me, fists clenched like he’s ready for a fight. I stand, ready to run, my own chair toppling backward.
“Jack Golden’s widow got her hands on that money somehow. What about your mama? She got her a big fancy house somewhere?”
“I don’t know anything about any money,” I say, backing toward the door.
“I was the smart one.” He spits out words like venom, taking one step toward me each time I take a step closer to the door. “I was the one who helped Dozer make it through high school. He may have been a good athlete, but he was as dumb as a doornail. ‘Do it for the team,’ the coach told me. ‘If we make it to state, the college scouts will see all of y’all, but it was only your stupid daddy who got the scholarship. And what did he do with it? He pissed it away, while I got stuck here in Quincy shoveling horse feed.” The vein pulsing in his neck is a fire hose about to burst. I consider that this would be a good time to run, but I’m afraid to turn my back on him, so I just keep backing up, reaching my hand behind me, praying I find a doorknob.