Pirata

by Patrick Hasburgh

  “Your mom and Uncle Steve hired some guy to shoot me in the head,” I said, as if he might have missed my point the first time.

  But the Marshman only nodded.

  “What do you think?” I didn’t want to start sounding like I was interrogating him—but I was. “I’m sure you have an opinion about this.”

  “I’m glad that the guy was a lousy shot, I guess,” he said.

  “Not about the guy who did the shooting,” I said. “About your mom.”

  Marshall reached over and turned the ignition key. Then he pulled it out so the steering column locked. I had to let the Suburban glide to a stop.

  He looked at me.

  “I don’t want this to be the first thing we talk about, okay,” he said, wiser than his father.

  Marshall handed me the photograph that he’d just taken out of his backpack. “Do you remember this?” It was a picture of Marshall and a lopsided chocolate cake.

  “It was your birthday. You were five,” I said.

  “And who made the cake?”

  “We did.”

  “You and me and Mom did,” Marshall said. “And I wished you were gonna come back for my birthday every year.”

  My lower lip was stiffening up. “Well,” I said. “Here I am.”

  We were both breathing in the exact same way. I began to bite my thumbnail.

  Marshall took the photograph back and delicately slipped it into his backpack.

  “So where are we going?” Marshall asked.

  “Well, I should probably go find a job.”

  “Oh—so we are staying up here.”

  I looked over at Marshall. I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.

  “What kind of job?” he asked.

  “Something that I am very good at,” I said, maybe a little too cocky.

  “Can I come?”

  “I got this,” I said. “Where can you hang until I close the deal?”

  “Anywhere but here,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “But you’re going to have to narrow it down.”

  I figured that what I had seen was disappointment. But then Marshall smiled just a little bit.

  “Go west on the 78 to the 5 and then go south.”

  54

  I was standing at the edge of a gigantic concrete skate bowl and watching my son throwing ridiculous air. I had dropped him off at the Encinitas YMCA skate park while I went to interview for a job at Jacobs Chevrolet, the same dealership where I’d been the new-car sales manager before getting shot.

  “The business has really changed,” said a twentysomething in a shiny suit that looked like it was about two sizes too small.

  He pointed to a chair in his office, and I sat down. His pants were flood-length, just like the Marshman wore his jeans, and he had a pink-and-black pocket square that matched his knit tie.

  It was a smart move that I’d swung by the Gap for a pair of black cotton pants and a crisp, gray rugby jersey with a white collar. Mr. Shiny didn’t seem like the Hawaiian-shirt type.

  “What was your best year, Mr. Lutz, when you worked here at Jacobs?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t like to brag.”

  “I can check,” he said. “But I’d rather you tell me.”

  “When I was in straight sales? Probably two hundred K, at least,” I said. “When I was the new-car manager, probably another fifty because I got a taste of everything that went over the curb. And I pushed hard.”

  “Our best man doesn’t make half that,” he said, like he was proud of it. “And I’m the new new-car manager. My salary is one hundred thousand dollars a year—no taste—counting a health-care buy-in and a take-with pension plan.”

  “Jesus. I thought Obama saved General Motors.” I laughed.

  Mr. Shiny didn’t.

  “Our customers search the Internet for the lowest possible price on the exact car they want to purchase. And if we don’t sell it to them at that price, they’ll go to a dealership that will.”

  “Jesus,” I said again.

  “We’re not salesmen anymore, Mr. Lutz. We’re automotive demonstrators. Vehicle introduction hosts. Product knowledgists.”

  “Knowledgists?” I said.

  “For lack of a better word,” he said.

  “Experts is a better word,” I suggested. “My guys knew every option combination and the gas mileage and available warranties on every vehicle in the entire GM line. They sent birthday cards to their old customers and a bottle of champagne to their new ones.”

  “That would be a waste of time and money in today’s market.”

  “Dude, it’s only been six years.”

  “Well, maybe I’m not a dude.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “And I’m afraid that considering your special circumstances, Jacobs Chevrolet won’t be able to employ you at this time,” Mr. Shiny said, with an obnoxious glint in his eye.

  “Special circumstances? You mean like how I was Salesman of the Year for three years?”

  “No. I mean the felony reckless you have on your revoked California driver’s license.”

  “I have a Mexican driver’s license now,” I said. “It’s valid here.”

  “For full-time Mexican residents in the US on tourist visas, yes,” he said, like a wannabe lawyer who never got past community college. “But if that’s the case, it means you’re not a California resident—so we can’t hire you, anyway.”

  “Do you know why I lost my license?” I asked, and not very nicely. “The guy you replaced was banging my wife. The two of them hired a hit man to assassinate me.”

  “I’m staying out of all that,” he said.

  “It’s how I got this fake eye, and why I had fits and ran my son into a tree.” I was starting to raise my voice.

  “Let’s leave that to the jury, Mr. Lutz,” he said, shifting in his seat.

  “The Machine was your buddy, wasn’t he?”

  “He was a mentor,” the shiny suit said. “I don’t mix business with buddies.”

  “Well, he was my buddy,” I said.

  “Which is why I don’t.”

  I wanted to kill this guy.

  “And despite how unfair this might be—and I think it is,” he said, “a car salesman who can’t take his customers for a demonstration drive wouldn’t be much of a salesman, would he?”

  The Marshman spotted me standing at the edge of the skate park. I waved and he skated over, impressively balancing on the two back wheels of his skateboard.

  “You want to try it?” Marsh asked, kicking up his skateboard and catching it in one hand.

  “I’m a surfer,” I said.

  “This is a concrete wave, dude—overhead every day.”

  “You don’t surf,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I’m a nine-oh-niner,” my son said, about as antiprecious as possible. “And we only go to the beach to wreak havoc and rage.”

  I wasn’t surprised that my kid had some smart-ass in him. I laughed and tweaked the back of his neck as we walked toward the Suburban.

  “Ow,” he said.

  Then with my index finger I traced the jagged scar at the center of Marshall’s forehead that ran down and around the back of his neck to where his upper spine had been fused back together.

  “Does that ever hurt?” I asked.

  “Now it tickles,” he said, and shrugged it off. “How did the job thing go?”

  “Not so good,” I said. “The car business has been taken over by an inefficient gang of efficiency experts.”

  The Marshman laughed. “Mom told me you were funny.”

  “As a hole in the head,” I said, and felt bad about it as soon as I did.

  “Don’t keep doing that,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  We got into the Suburban, and I pulled out onto Saxony Road.

  “Do you have a plan?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I plan to win the lottery.”
>
  “Let’s start with an easier one,” Marshall said. “Like where’re we gonna live.”

  “In the Suburban,” I said.

  There was no easier one. Three days ago I was an expatriate licking my wounds in Mexico, and today I was a single dad with a teenager. Life might not be a dress rehearsal, but it’s not supposed to be just an improv, either. I was clueless about the next step. I thought I’d get my old car sales job back—but that idea blew up before lunch.

  “We can panhandle at Huntington Beach,” I continued.

  “I hate Huntington Beach.” His disdain was palpable. “I’d rather live in Mexico.”

  “Mexico is not like here, Marsh.”

  “That’s why I would,” he said.

  I was actually hoping to bring up Mexico at some point—it was always my bailout strategy. The cut and run if I still hadn’t found a decent job when José’s front money was gone.

  “But you have school,” I said.

  “Our family shit was on the news, Dad. The kids in school all know.”

  I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to have to go back to the eighth grade after your mom had just been arrested for hiring a hit man to murder your dad.

  “You’d be willing to try Mexico?”

  “Nobody would be talking about me and pointing their fingers every ten feet.” He shrugged. “I mean, it’s not like I shot you.”

  I glanced at the middle seat and nodded at Marshall’s backpack and skateboard.

  “Do we have to go get any more of your stuff?”

  “No,” the Marshman said. “I’ve got everything I need.”

  55

  We entered Mexico a little after midnight at the Nogales border crossing where I had just exited the day before. My passport was still expired, and Marshall didn’t even have one. But it didn’t matter. I had slowed to a stop for the Mexican customs guy and rolled down my window, but when he saw the Jalisco license plates, he just waved us through.

  “That was easier than I thought it would be,” I said. “I had this whole story ready about how we were with the Census Bureau.”

  “They probably think we’re smuggling guns.”

  “Maybe.”

  The Marshman searched for something on the radio, eventually zeroing in on a Mexicali hip-hop station that blasted an obnoxious mix of white noise and profane Spanish slang. I turned it down.

  “Was I that bad?” I asked.

  “About what?” Marshall shifted in his seat and turned to look out the window.

  “At being a dad.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “But your mom did.”

  “I don’t know what Mom thought,” Marshall said. “We never talked about you.”

  He turned the radio back up. He didn’t want to talk. Or he wasn’t ready to. I couldn’t blame him. I was pretty speechless about this whole mess, myself. Like how I apparently had a weakness for women who wanted to kill their significant others—and maybe how that says as much about me as it does about them.

  It’s not the first thing I look for in a woman, but at the end of my last two relationships it’s the most obvious thing that’s left over. I had to face that. Meagan and my ex had different reasons for what they did, but they’d both intended to kill somebody. Which is different from being a good cook or fun in the sack—the first things I’d tell you I wanted in a partner.

  But at least Meagan was trying to protect her kid. My ex was just cashing in. There’s more to it, I know—and maybe the rage came from how I’d stolen her life. I had promised my wife everything and then wasted our future hustling low-hanging fruit on a car lot and surfing Swami’s while she obsessed over Marshall. My life was about paddling out with the local crew and happy hour with my sales guys, or sneaking off with some Betty who’d winked at me at the Seaside Market.

  By our fifth anniversary, my wife and I had perfected the marital art of unavailability. We were mainlining monotony, and, I am now ashamed to say, I only occasionally tugged at our son, to break the boredom or piss off my wife. It’s a wonder I didn’t shoot myself. Would have saved us both a lot of trouble.

  At least with Meagan and the boys I showed up, as if paying it backward could make up for abandoning my son and all the pain and suffering I was a part of.

  “Are you ever afraid, living down here?”

  Marshall had been looking out at the border town barrios as I drove south toward Hermosillo.

  “Not too much,” I said.

  “It looks pretty scary,” Marshall said.

  We were driving through a particularly desolate roadside village about two hundred miles below the border.

  “That’s what poverty looks like,” I said.

  In SoCal, being poor meant that you were the only kid on the block with an aboveground swimming pool.

  “But we’ll be okay?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “If a gringo is looking for trouble in Mexico, he’ll probably find some. But if you make it like the drug wars and that stuff are none of your business, you probably won’t run into it.”

  “Do you take drugs?”

  Marshall was maybe getting a little curious about his old man. Too bad it was this kind of curiosity.

  “I take Epilim for my seizures,” I said, hiding behind the truth-matters strategy. “It prevents me from having ones like I used to get, like when we hit that tree—when you broke your neck and we almost lost you.”

  “And you think that’s why Mom wanted to shoot you?” Marshall said softly—like he didn’t want to wake up that side of his heart.

  “Your mom was devastated over what happened to you, Marshall,” I said. “But by that time, I’d already been shot.”

  Marshall was struggling to put the parts of this nightmare into a straight line.

  “Before your mom and Uncle Steve hired some guy to shoot me, I was a fuckup. I’ll admit it. But I was a normal one,” I explained. “Getting shot was how I lost my eye and when my brain was traumatically injured.”

  “And why you got those seizures.”

  “Yup,” I said. “And a seizure is what caused the car accident.”

  “If that’s what they find out at Mom’s trial, I’ll be fine with it,” Marshall said. “But we don’t really know for sure yet.”

  I couldn’t blame my kid for trying to defuse the family bomb as slowly as possible.

  “Well, we do, actually,” I said. “If I hadn’t been shot, there’d be no seizures—no meds not to take. We never would’ve hit that tree, and you wouldn’t have spent a year in the hospital with a broken neck.”

  I looked over at Marshall to make sure I wasn’t drowning him—but it looked like he was holding his breath okay. Maybe this was all starting to make a little sense to him, in that same way it had finally started making some sense to me.

  “It’s going to take a while for me to figure this out,” he said.

  “Take your time,” I said.

  “But do you take real drugs, is what I meant before,” he said. “Like illegal ones.”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think you will?” I was trying to sound all open and honest and reasonable.

  “I could see trying it when I’m old enough, probably.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “I doubt it,” he said, tipping his seat back and closing his eyes.

  I clicked on the high beams, marveling at how life can take you by surprise—and how the trick is not to let it take you hostage.

  I’ve never believed in fate, but here was my son riding next to me again. I know things don’t happen for a reason—they just happen—but somehow I was taking Marshall home to live with me in Mexico.

  The universe wasn’t out to teach me a lesson, but Jade and Obsidian absolutely prepared me for this second chance. I dreaded missing them in the way I had missed Marsh—but I knew I could survive it.

  What doesn’t kill you actually does make you stro
nger.

  Holy shit, I thought, brilliantly grasping the obvious—the clichés are true.

  We made it to Culiacán around lunch the next day and blew through a McDonald’s drive-thru for a couple of cuartos de libras and Mexican Coca-Cola in tall paper cups. Then, for reasons probably known only to teenage boys, for the rest of the afternoon Marshall harped about getting another tattoo. He had started this campaign above Mazatlán.

  “My body is a road map, and I want to keep marking the journey.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where’d you get that one?”

  “From Johnny Depp,” Marshall said. “It’s what he does.”

  “Johnny Depp’s journey is chauffer-driven,” I said. “Don’t listen to him.”

  “I’ve already lost my tattoo virginity, Dad,” Marshall said, like a big shot.

  “Which is another thing your uncle Steve should be in jail for,” I said. “No.”

  “You have a tattoo.”

  “I do,” I said. “And it marks the part of my journey that was a wrong turn.”

  “Who’s Meagan, anyway?”

  “It’s Spanish,” I said. “For mistake.”

  “Then let me make my own mistakes,” he said.

  “There’ll be plenty of time for that,” I said.

  I could tell that Marshall was used to doing what he wanted to do—probably because nobody paid much attention to him. I should probably work on changing that.

  “How do you do in school?”

  “Pretty okay,” Marshall said. “Except I got suspended for falling asleep in yoga class.”

  I just looked at him.

  “You get to take it instead of gym,” he continued.

  “Only in California,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s yoga, right? You’re supposed to be relaxed. I should’ve gotten an A.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “And they say I have ADD.”

  “That’s hereditary,” I said. “I had it so bad, I thought it was called AD.”

  Marshall got the joke and laughed. He was quicker than I’d been at his age.

  “We’re alike,” he said, a little prouder than he probably should have been.

  “I hope too much hasn’t rubbed off.”

  “Not since I was seven.”