by Logan Miller
“No harm in that,” Sparks added. “No harm at all.”
“Along with some Viagra—you can fuck all night, party boy. Party Boy Jake.”
Gates bent to the hood and snorted the rail off the flag. He stood and gathered himself in the burning light and exhaled with brilliant satisfaction.
“I mean, c’mon, Jake, just a little?” Gates made a small measurement with his thumb and index finger. “You don’t like cocaine just a little? A little bit of coke?”
“What, you don’t think cops do drugs?” Sparks said. “You don’t think we like to party—Party Boy Jake?”
“You never answered my question, Jake,” Gates said. “Do you like cocaine?”
Jake could only mutter a frightened and timid, “I guess… Well, sometimes.”
“How about now-time?” Gates said.
“It’s go-time,” said Sparks. “Now-time. A little boom-boom time.”
“Step on up, Jake. You’ll feel better. I promise.”
“Go time. Now-time. Party Boy Jake.”
“Party Boy Jake. Go-time. Now-time. Yeah!”
Gates knocked a line on the hood and beckoned Jake to come over.
Jake took a step toward the cruiser and halted.
Gates slapped the hood and the force of his hand against the hollow metal scared Jake even more. The line of cocaine bounced up and lost its shape and scattered flat across the hood. There was a fierce intention behind the slap. An implication of violence.
“C’mon, Jake,” Gates said, straightening the scattered coke with his business card. “C’mon now.”
“It’s boom-time,” said Sparks.
“Now-time. Go-time.”
“Boom-time.”
“Now-time.”
Boom-time. Now-time. Go-time. Yeah!
Jake glanced at Gates for approval. Gates nodded with flaming hunger and a smile all teeth and wide-eyed and coke-charged.
Jake hesitated once more.
“C’mon, Jakey Snakey. Take a little boom-time honker. It won’t kill yah. It’ll just make you better.”
Jake took a deep breath and then leaned over and snorted the rail off the hood. He staggered backward, his nose stinging, eyes watering. It was a sloppy hit. His upper lip and nostrils were dusted with white powder as if he’d been pounded in the mouth with a dry snowball.
“You’re a monster,” Jake said.
“I suppose I am.”
Gates pulled his baton and clubbed Jake in the knee with a hideous crunch of cartilage and bone. Jake screamed and dropped in the same moment.
“Where is it, Jake?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said, writhing in the dirt and clutching his kneecap. “Why do you want the marijuana anyway? You’re a fucking cop. I’m gonna report you.”
“To who? The other cops? That’s probably not in the cards today. Hey Lester, what are the odds of that?”
“About a million to one.”
“I’d say you’re correct deputy. A million to one. We’re the only law for a hundred miles.” He thumped his baton against his palm and his eyes glanced over the wood yard and up to the sky and back down. “Goddamnit, Jake. God-fucking-damnit. All you need to do is turn over what you stole. Either that or the money you’ve made from it.”
“I told you,” Jake said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I swear.”
Gates and Sparks hooked Jake under his armpits and dragged him over to the log splitter.
“I’m gonna ask you one more time,” Gates said, “and if you don’t tell me the truth, you’re gonna be in a whole lot more pain. Now, where is it?”
“I burned it. I burned the fucking weed. It went bad. It was molding. So I burned it. I swear to God.”
“I guess you’re gonna have to learn to wipe your ass with your left hand.”
Gates and Sparks stretched Jake’s hand across the holding plate. But Jake struggled and wrestled his hand away from them. So Gates cudgeled him with furious swings that shattered forearms and shins and ribs until Jake crumpled to the earth in a broken heap.
Again they lifted Jake and set his dangling right hand on the holding plate. All Jake had left in him was a pleading scream.
“Please God—NO!”
The maul drove down and Jake’s bloody hand tumbled onto a pine log and then came to rest on the splintered ground with a shallow thud.
ᴥ
Doctor Sherry set the ultrasound wand on a blue medical towel atop the counter and removed her latex gloves and threw them in the trash. She washed her hands in the sink and soaped up to her elbows.
Lelah sat up on the examination table and wiped herself off with a sterile towel the doctor had given her. She pulled on her underwear and Caleb handed her jeans to her and she slid into them.
“You’re bringing a new life into the world,” Doctor Sherry said, drying off her hands. “Congratulations.”
Lelah forced a smile and then said, “Thank you, Doctor.”
Doctor Sherry looked at Caleb.
“Are you nervous?” she asked.
“I think I’m ready.” He paused and then nodded. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
“Just remember,” Doctor Sherry said, “and I tell all my young and older couples this, there’s never a perfect time to have a baby. As long as you two love each other and the child, you’ll do fine.” She smirked. “Reverse the order. Love the child first. Then yourselves.” She glanced absentmindedly in the mirror above the sink and brushed her bangs off her forehead and then returned to them. “Wow. Two generations. Does that make me old, Lelah?”
“Lucky, I guess.”
“Yes it does. Very lucky. I’ll see you back here in a month.”
She hugged Lelah and was about to shake Caleb’s hand when he moved in for a hug instead.
32.
They had lunch at Tomasita’s and picked up toothpaste and a few other things at Target before heading north into the wilder lands where the afternoon gusts yawed the backend of the truck across the lane as if they were traveling in a small boat on a whipped up lake. They climbed over the plateau and the flesh-colored badlands ran along the east and west of them beautiful in their bleakness that held its own tragic romance of barren cascades where rains once fell.
“I’d like to get married before we have the baby,” Lelah said.
“That’s probably best.”
Her head was resting in his lap.
“Once the baby comes,” she said, “I got a feeling that we’re not going to have time to plan a wedding. There’s a little adobe church up in Chama that I always had thoughts about getting married in. The scenic railroad train goes right past it, you know, the tourist one with the old smokestack.”
“The steam engine.”
“Yeah, the steam engine. Anyway, we could rent out the train so that people can drink and not have to think about driving.”
“Sounds good to me.”
He smiled down at her and she smiled up at him. He blew her a kiss and she blew one back.
“I’d ask my dad to help us out with the costs but he’s broke, I think. He’d never tell me he was broke but I opened a letter on accident a few months back from a mortgage company in Phoenix saying they were foreclosing on some houses he’d bought.”
“I got a few dollars saved. We’ll make it work.”
The truck tires thrummed against the asphalt and the wind hissed through the narrow gap in the driver’s side window.
“Did Jake sell the stuff?” she asked.
“We burned it.”
She sat up from his lap and faced him. “What?”
“We burned it.”
“When?”
“Last night. Before you came over.”
“Why?”
“It was nothing but trouble.”
“I thought the plan was to sell it? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just did.”
“What if I hadn’t asked?”
“I would’ve told y
ou.”
“We’ve been together all day and last night and you never mentioned it.”
“I didn’t want you to worry about it before seeing the doctor. I know how stressed out you’ve been and I didn’t want to get into an argument about it.”
“Yeah. Not telling me until later—that was a great idea. I can’t believe you, Caleb.”
Lelah’s phone started ringing in the console. She leaned over and checked the caller ID and then sat back against the seat without answering.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“My dad.”
“Why don’t you answer it?”
“I don’t feel like talking to him right now. Is that OK?”
“It might be important. Maybe they found something.”
Lelah glared at Caleb and then answered her phone.
“Hey, Dad.” She listened. “Just driving back from Santa Fe with Caleb.” She listened and then lied. “We were just looking at wedding locations.” She glared at Caleb again. “I’ll be home in a few hours. Why? What’s up?” A pause. “Sure. I’ll see you then.”
She ended the call and set her phone back in the console.
“Everything cool?” Caleb asked.
“He said he needed to talk to me about something when I got home.”
“He didn’t say why?”
“No.”
Lelah placed her hands on top of her head with her fingers laced together and stared at the road.
“When do you want to tell him you’re pregnant?” he asked.
“We could’ve used that money, Caleb. We really could’ve used it.”
“At what price, Lelah? We got a child on the way and you’re sounding like my brother.”
“I didn’t get us into it,” she shot back.
“Neither did I. But I was protecting us by getting rid of it. I was thinking of you. I was thinking of us. I was thinking about the family we’re making.” He turned and looked at her but she turned away. “You’ll thank me later. And you’ll be glad that I did what I did.”
They drove in silence for a few miles. Lelah stared out the window at the cloud shadows upon the sun-bright earth.
“It was self-defense, wasn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
There was another pause.
The tires thrummed and the truck cut through the crosswind.
“I just can’t believe it,” she said. “Why did I have to tell you guys about that tent? Why did I have to see it? I just don’t understand. We’re good people. I’m so stupid.”
“It’s not your fault, baby. Please don’t blame yourself. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I don’t want anyone to take our baby, Caleb.”
“Nobody is going to take our baby, sweetheart. Nobody.”
He reached out to her and rubbed the back of her neck and massaged with his fingertips the delicate strips of muscle that ran from her shoulder blades to the base of her hairline. She closed her eyes—and his touch was calming. It gave her conviction in what he was saying and she believed him now even more than before.
“It’s all right. Whatever you’re feeling is all right,” he said. “I’ll talk with my brother tonight. We should just come clean and tell your dad. I think that’s best. I think it’s the right thing to do.”
He could feel her muscles relax all at once and her face had brightened when she turned her eyes to him and said, “My dad will help us. He won’t let them take our child.”
And she believed it. They both did.
“Yeah, it was self-defense,” Caleb convinced himself. The more you said it, whether lies or the truth, the more you believed it. “The law is on our side.”
33.
Caleb pulled the truck down the dusty drive and stopped in front of Lelah’s house. It was long since dark and Lelah had fallen asleep on his lap.
For the last fifty miles his thoughts had drifted in and out of memories from long ago and the future that would forever be marred in a way that he could never have anticipated. He was hopeful though that Lelah’s father would be able to turn it all around or at least put them on the path to some sort of constructive resolution. They were the only witnesses and none of them had any prior offenses. Well, Jake had a couple of DUI’s but never any violent infraction, which he presumed would help in the final course of things.
He thought about the various outcomes and then his mind wandered in the darkness of the road and he remembered the day before he left for Iraq, swimming naked in the Chama with Lelah and how her skin glistened golden brown and how perfect she looked and how he remembered wishing—that if he’d had just one wish—that he would come back alive so that he could swim naked again with her in the summer river and hold her tight under the night sky afterward and make love to her trembling body.
And now they were bringing a child into the world.
It was sleeping right beside him. A tiny embryo. Growing every second. Crying soon enough. He wanted their world to be in harmony when their child came into it. He had nine months to make things right. Well, eight.
“We’re here, baby,” he said. He caressed her face with the back of his hand. She rose from his lap and rubbed her eyes. He kissed her. “I’ll be back in a few hours, after I talk to my brother.”
“What if your brother says no? That he doesn’t want to tell my dad?”
“He won’t. I’m not giving him any choice.”
“I love you so much,” she said.
“I love you too. See you in a few.”
The rumble from Caleb’s truck faded down the long dirt driveway into the night prairie as Lelah stepped inside and turned on the light. She startled and gasped. Her breathing eased when she recognized the two silhouettes. Her father and Sparks were sitting at the kitchen table in near darkness. She turned on a second light directly above the table and could see their features now, heavy with fatigue. They blinked and squinted as their bloodshot eyes adjusted.
“Hi, honey,” Gates said. He stood and kissed her on the cheek. She thought she smelled a trace of whiskey on his breath, fleeting and then gone.
“You really scared me, Dad,” she said. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“We were just resting for a bit. It’s been a long day.”
“Well, next time let me know. It’s creepy. You really scared me.”
“I’m sorry, honey. We just fell asleep and didn’t hear you drive up.”
She set her purse on the table and opened the refrigerator and took out a soda.
“Either of you want one?” she asked, holding up the can.
“No, thanks, honey.”
“Sparks, you want one?” she said.
“I’m fine, Lelah. Thanks for asking.”
She sat down across from them and opened the soda and took a sip.
“What did you want to talk about, Dad?”
“Is Caleb on his way home?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Just curious.”
“Do you want me to turn on the AC?” she asked.
“No, honey. It feels good in here. It’s just right.”
“You’re sweating.”
Gates wiped his brow with the back of his hand and smiled at her.
“I guess I am.”
He was slow in recognizing the sweat and he continued to smile at his sluggish perception. Like the drunkard who falls and only realizes after touching his bleeding skin that he has hit his head and is amused by it.
She sipped her drink and studied her father. She looked at Sparks and studied him.
“How was your day?” Gates asked.
“Good,” she said.
“You went looking for wedding locations, right? Did you find any you like?”
“Not really.”
“You were in Santa Fe?” Sparks said.
“Yeah.”
“I like it there.”
“Me too,” she said.
“It’s
one of my favorite places.”
She took another sip of her soda and she could hear the sound of the carbonation inside her mouth. She swallowed.
“How’s the soda?” her dad asked. “Nice and cold, huh?”
“Dad, are you using again?”
The question pierced the room and instigated a thrashing silence. To be sure, Darius Gates was coming down from the high, nose red with irritation, distant and remote, an oppressive muddle and depression setting in. He could feel that he was in a bad place but it wasn’t any bad place he hadn’t visited many times before. He was confident that he still possessed enough threads of psychic composure to convincingly lie and deceive, even if his appearance betrayed him. He knew above all else that he could always play on the heartstrings of a daughter’s love for her father and the denial that is born with it, the longing to believe only the best in a parent. No matter what.
“No, darling. Why would you even ask me that? I haven’t had anything in over three years,” he said in a wounded tone, a tone that he knew would inspire both pity and regret in his daughter. “You know that.”
“Do I?” she asked. “Have you been telling me the truth?”
“Of course I have, sweetheart. I would never lie to you.”
“We’ve just had a real long day, Lelah,” Sparks said, “that’s all. It can be a crap job sometimes. You gotta do things you don’t wanna do.”
“It’s a real downer, sweetheart. And it takes a toll on me sometimes.” Her father dropped his eyes to the table for effect. Like most addicts, he was a great actor. “Because I care and I’m human. Sometimes we see things that nobody should ever see. Horrible things. Unimaginable things. Things that you want to forget.”
“It’s a thankless job,” Sparks said. “Absolutely thankless. The only time people want to see us is when they need us. Sometimes I feel like I’m not even part of the community around here.”
Gates pushed himself out of his chair and grabbed his hat, his movements sluggish and weary. His breathing was labored.