by Urban Waite
“You ready to listen now?” Memo asked.
From his coat pocket Ray took out the small orange prescription bottle with the pills the doctor at the VA had given him. Meant to get him concentrated, to get his mind right and keep him in the present. To keep his mind off all the ghosts that followed him around. Only the pills didn’t seem to work, or maybe he’d just grown used to them, because nothing had felt right for a very long time. “Yeah,” Ray said. “I’m listening.”
It was early still when Tom crossed the Rio Grande on his way home, the passenger window open for Jeanie, and the clay smell of the water below as he passed.
Perhaps it had been the accident on the road, perhaps the newscast, perhaps Mark’s mention of the trouble years before. Tom didn’t know for sure. But there it was, rooted into him, and now spun loose, bobbing around through his insides. All of it heavy in his mind, big as a tree pulled green and full from the bank and strangely alive as it went on down the river.
The drive took him two hours. Not really aware of where he was going until he arrived. Turning off the highway ten miles outside of Coronado, he took the long dirt road west, watching the last of the sunlight close out the cattle fence. The house looked just as it always did, pitched somewhat crooked, with the wide frame of the place lit from within by lamplight. The old staff houses he’d known as a child, off a ways from the main house, melting little by little into the ground—boards rotted through, and the adobe walls crumbling.
His only real reason for coming simply that he didn’t want to go home. Tom rang the bell and waited. When the door opened Gus stood there looking him over. “You see the news tonight?” Tom said.
Gus stood there behind the screen door looking out at his nephew. “I saw it. I expect you want to come in and relive the good old days, is that it?” He pushed the screen door open and held it for Tom.
The house had the old familiar smell he’d grown up with—something of cooked meat and talcum powder—all of it bringing Tom back decades. The old green wallpaper, the split-wood furniture, dust-covered lampshades, and sun-stained curtains always pulled a quarter way across the windows.
“My father around?” Tom said, after he’d come in and sat in one of the armchairs in the living room.
“I haven’t seen him take off for the bar yet, so I expect he’s still out back in his place if you want to go get him,” Gus said. He was standing near the middle of the room, close to the fireplace, looking Tom over where he sat.
“No,” Tom said. “I just thought I should ask. I see enough of him now at work as it is.”
“Coffee?”
“If you have some.”
Waiting while Gus moved around in the kitchen, Tom rose and took in the old pictures of Ray up above the mantel. Ray in his army uniform, another of Tom and Ray as children out by one of the steel-framed oil wells up the valley, a picture of Gus and his wife thirty years before. At the end of the mantel, the most recent picture of Gus, Ray, and Marianne, twelve years ago, pregnant then with their boy.
“Where’s Billy?” Tom asked.
“Go on into his room, he’s back there.”
Tom walked to the back hallway leading off the living room and pushed open Billy’s door. The room had been Ray’s when they were kids and Tom looked in on the same bed and dresser that had always been there and the dioramas that now lined the walls, which Ray’s son, Billy, made of exotic places. Shoe boxes everywhere with jungle scenes, tropical islands, and remote villages built from bits of wire, painted newspaper, and construction paper.
Billy was sitting on the bed cutting cardboard with a pair of safety scissors, the half-made model of some new landscape taking shape inside an old shoe box. “It looks good,” Tom said, letting the boy read his lips, and then a moment later, using his hands, Tom signed, “You’re getting good at these.”
“Thanks,” Billy signed, and then went back to his cuttings. He was skinny and short for his age. A scar running up through his black hair where the doctors had gone in to relieve the bleeding and the lasting effect of the accident, a pair of hearing aids that Billy almost never wore.
Tom closed the door and went back out into the living room. He took down one of the pictures and looked at his cousin’s face. There had been days of discussions over what should be done with Billy, about how Ray couldn’t deal with Marianne being gone. Tom driving over to Ray’s house in those weeks after the accident and sitting around at the kitchen table, watching Ray drink. Billy sitting there in his high chair, trying constantly to take the bandage from his head, and the mute musings of a two-year-old boy that the doctors said would never be normal.
“I know it’s wrong,” Ray said. “But I just can’t go on like this anymore.” He was on his third beer and he gestured to the medications laid out on the table, some for Billy and some for him. Antidepressants and children’s antibiotics. “You know what I’m saying?”
Tom looked back at Billy where he sat, the plump little fists now given up on removing his bandage and gone on to reaching for a roll of medical tape on the table and a box of bandages.
“I want you to do something about this,” Ray said. “I need you to do something about this.”
“You know I won’t.” Tom shook his head. Ray always asking him the same thing every time they talked, wanting Tom to go by and scare that Lopez woman, to chase her off. Tom just sitting there listening to Ray and wanting out of there. The house smelling like antiseptic and rotting garbage. Ray just letting it all go.
“I’m giving Billy up,” Ray said. “I’m taking him over to my father’s for a little while. I can’t keep going on like this.”
“Going on like what?” Tom said. “You need to pull it together. You can’t just take off.”
“The man I work for now offered to help. He says he can help me with what happened to Marianne.”
“It’s a bad thing that happened to you, Ray. But we don’t have anywhere to go with that. I want to help you but I just can’t go knocking on the cartel’s door, pointing fingers. What happened to Marianne was horrible, but you leaving, giving Billy up, it isn’t the answer.”
“At one time there was me,” Ray said. “And then there was me, but there was a little less of me, you understand? I don’t know how to get that piece back.”
“Jesus, Ray. It might not seem like it, but people go through this stuff every day.”
“ ‘Every day it gets a little easier,’ ” Ray mimicked, making his voice low and cruel. “I’ve heard that enough from the doctors.”
“They’re telling it to you for a reason.”
“It doesn’t get easier, Tom. Not for me. What happened to Marianne, that’s on me, that’s my fault. You understand? I shouldn’t have started taking the work with this man, but I did and there’s no going back in time. The cartel knows who I am now and I’m just trying to do what’s best for everyone. What happened to Billy, that’s on me.” He finished the beer and put it down on the table, the sound loud in the kitchen but Billy not noticing. Ray picked up the bottle again and put it down hard, again and again, louder and louder. Beside Tom, Billy never looked up and Ray threw the bottle across the room, where it hit the wall and then fell to the floor without shattering. After a time, he said, “I’m fucking losing it, Tom.”
“He’s a special-needs kid. That’s all. He’s still yours. He’s still the same kid he was.”
“They’re telling me he’s going to need to go to a special school,” Ray said. He wouldn�
�t look up at Tom. “He’s retarded. He’s never going to be normal. You know that, Tom.”
Tom shook his head. The things Ray was saying weren’t right, they weren’t Ray, but it was no good trying to talk to him about it. They sat like that for a long time, till Tom picked the bottle off the floor and they went into the living room and watched television. Billy sitting on Tom’s lap and Ray drinking another beer.
The next day Tom would go over to Angela Lopez’s house and shoot her point-blank. Knowing the whole time—as he went up those stairs to her house—that what he was doing wouldn’t solve a thing. His own inability to help Ray with his problems, to bring Marianne back and make everything better. Tom had known it wouldn’t get any better, but he’d hoped all the same that it would. So many years gone by now. All that time spent thinking about what had happened and he’d never been able to figure out if he’d done it on purpose or, as everyone said, if it was an accident.
When he called over to Ray’s soon after, there was no response, and in the days that followed he’d learn that Ray had left Billy with Gus and gone north.
Holding the picture in his hand now, ten years later, Tom looked down on a face that hadn’t changed one bit from when he’d known his cousin all those years before. Before everything that had happened, before the Lamar wells had gone dry and the money had gone out of the family and Ray had left his son in Gus’s care.
“You hear anything from Ray lately?” Tom asked, raising his voice a little so it might carry into the kitchen.
“You know the answer to that just as sure as I do,” Gus said.
Tom carried the picture over to the kitchen doorway, where he watched Gus fill the pot with water, then walk back over and fill the machine. “You ever feel like you were meant to do something else, Gus?” Tom asked.
Gus waited, watching the coffee begin to percolate, then turned to look at Tom where he stood in the doorway. “I’m too old for you to be asking me something like that,” Gus said. “I’m stuck with whatever I’ve already done. There’s no going back.”
“I went up and saw Elena today,” Tom said.
“Banner day for you, isn’t it?”
“I guess you could say that. I’ve certainly been making my way down memory lane.”
“You want to go back?” Gus said, the water in the machine falling dark into the pot. “Is that it? Do it all over again, have yourself investigated again by the DEA because you took some advice from Ray that really didn’t pan out. Is that what you want?”
“Honestly? Yes, sometimes I do. Sometimes I think I could have come through this thing all right.”
Gus gave Tom a sad smile. “You only got off because the judge went easy on you, Tom. I’m not saying what happened deserved the punishments they were going after you for—I’m not saying that. But I do think you should consider yourself lucky.” Gus poured the coffee and led him into the living room again. “We have this conversation every couple years, don’t we? Sometimes I think you come over here and you want to talk it out, but other times, like tonight, I think I’m just standing in for Ray because he’s not here.”
Tom took a sip of the coffee, hot and bitter as it slid past his tongue. “Did I ever tell you I tried to track him down through a friend in the DEA?”
“I didn’t think you had any friends left in the DEA.”
“I don’t really,” Tom said. Telling Gus how Agent Tollville was an old acquaintance who’d helped him out with some work in the eighties, but whom he hadn’t talked much with since. When Tom called—a month after Tollville had come down to testify at Tom’s hearing—Tollville had been more than a little surprised.
“You want me to look into Raymond Lamar?” Tollville had said. Disbelief coated thick through his voice. “You think we haven’t already? There’s nothing there.” What Tollville did have was a roster of tours Ray had done all over Southeast Asia in the late fifties and early sixties, special ops, most of it before the war even officially started. Most just recently declassified. No current address or number for him. The only thing that came up a job working for some land company in Las Cruces that turned out to be bogus.
Gus finished his coffee. He looked over at Tom and waited, but then when nothing came, Gus said, “Your cousin was never a good man. Never was going to be and never will be.”
“Harsh words from his father.”
“I’m not saying I don’t love him, but I think you know he made some bad decisions after the wells went dry.” Gus got up from his chair and went into the kitchen. Ray had been gone for ten years now and there’d been nothing from him in all that time. The only things left of Ray his son, Billy, and his wife’s grave up the valley under the big oak, a little apart from that of Gus’s own wife. A place where Gus, nearly eighty years old, said he’d be buried someday as well. “You done?” Tom heard Gus say from the other room.
“With the coffee?”
“No,” Gus said, coming back to look in on Tom where he still sat in Gus’s living room chair.
“I’m sorry about this, Gus, I just thought—”
“I can’t keep going on with you about this. I just can’t. You understand?”
Tom stood and brought his coffee cup into the kitchen and put it in the sink. He sprayed water on his hands and then dried them on his pant legs. “I’ll go now,” he said. “I suppose it’s getting late.”
When he got home there were several messages waiting for him on the machine. One was from his father, giving him a start time for the day after next, the other two were from Claire. Tom rewound the tape and listened as Claire’s voice came on the machine again. “Tom? You there?” A long pause and then, “Call me when you get this message.” He pressed delete and then listened to the most recent message, left only twenty minutes before. “I know you must have seen the story tonight, Tom. They just replayed it on the ten o’clock news,” Claire said. “I know we didn’t leave things in the best light, but if you want to talk, I’m around.”
Tom deleted the message, then walked into the kitchen and took out a beer. He was standing with the door of the fridge open when the phone rang. The message clicked on and he listened for a while to the silence of the machine and then, “I’m getting worried about you, that’s all. I’ve left messages and you’re not calling me back. I’m just going to come by and check up on you, Tom. That’s all. I’d feel better about it if I did.”
Tom stared at the machine. The light of the open fridge on him as he stood in his kitchen, expecting the answering machine to click on any moment and keep talking to him. “Jesus, Claire,” he said under his breath, taking another long pull from the beer and then putting it down on the counter. He closed the fridge and then called to Jeanie, “You want to get out of here for a while?” watching the mutt where she lay on the cool tile floor at the far end of the kitchen.
Ray raised the apple to his mouth and took a bite. He was sitting in the Bronco, watching the front drive of the hospital. The hospital was three floors in total, built of a beige sandstone composite, with a side entrance for the emergency room and the bright gleam from the front glass emanating all down the block.
The air had turned cold with the night and with the windows up, he could see his own breath as he exhaled, the moisture in the air beginning to condense against the glass.
He set the apple down on the dash and took the white paper napkin out of his jacket pocket. The room number written there in blue ink. Memo had given him all there was to know about the
kid up there and the state of their affairs. Ray knew that if the kid lived, he was a liability to them. He didn’t need to hear it again from Memo, though Memo had been insistent on telling him.
From where he was parked, three-quarters of the way down the block and one block in from Main, he could see the two county cruisers sitting there in the drive. One had been there most of the day, and the other had appeared just a few minutes before.
At a distance of three or four hundred feet, Ray couldn’t be quite sure, but he thought the woman officer who had shown up was the same who had been Tom’s deputy all those years before. The one who had responded to his wife’s accident, telling Ray the news about his son, and the way the car had rolled after being broadsided.
Ray picked up the apple again. The flesh where he’d taken his first bite already stained brown from the air. It was the first thing he’d eaten since the diner, and he was staring at it like he might figure his future from the thing like a mystic would from a glass ball. He finished the apple and when he was done, took Sanchez’s pager off his hip and checked the time. He’d been sitting in the Bronco now for the past five hours, waiting.
The root of the problem, or at least what Ray had been able to get out of Sanchez after they’d gotten back to the Sullivan house from the Lucky Strike Diner, was that Sanchez just wasn’t built for the thing. He could talk a good game. He could tell Ray all the things he would do if he was given the chance, but Ray just couldn’t believe him.
Sanchez hadn’t done what he was supposed to. He hadn’t killed the boy and instead of making sure the boy was dead, tracking him down as Ray would have done, he’d simply run off.