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For Max Moody and Grace Roselee,
who had one of the best fathers I ever knew.
Therefore I say to son or daughter who has no pleasure in the name Father, “You must interpret the word by all that you have missed in life. Every time a man might have been to you a refuge from the wind, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, that was a time when a father might have been a father indeed.”
—George MacDonald
1
bottles
Patterson Wells walks through the front door to find Chase working on a heap of crystal meth the size of his shrunken head.
“Sit down, motherfucker,” Chase says, perched birdlike on the couch, his eyes smoking like he’s been shooting the shit straight into his tear ducts. Patterson eases down into the only other seat in the room, a white leather recliner that leans to the side like a heap of dirty laundry, while Chase chops a line of meth and waves at Patterson to fall to.
It’s only been two weeks since Patterson saw him last, but Chase has lost a good twenty pounds, and Patterson’s pretty sure he’s wearing the same soiled tank top that he’d been wearing when he rolled off the job site. “You got anything else?” he asks.
“Like what?” Chase asks.
Patterson rubs his eyes. It’s been a very long drive. “I wouldn’t say no to a beer.”
“I got pop if you want some.” There’s plastic bottles staggered all over the coffee table. At least one of them gone bulbous, some liquid that doesn’t look at all like pop leaking from under the cap. “You better let me check them first though,” he continues. “Some of them’s full of piss.”
“I’m all right,” Patterson says.
“Bet it smells like piss in here, too.” Chase sniffs the air. “Does it stink?”
Patterson nods, looking at the bottles. His eyes are watering at the smell. Then he shakes his head. “We still going fishing?” he asks.
Chase lights a cigarette and tosses the match into a heavy glass ashtray on the coffee table already overflowing with butts. He clutches up, giggling, smoke erupting out of his mouth and nose. “My fucking skin itches,” he sputters, scratching red welts down his arms.
“Well.” Patterson slaps his knees and stands.
“Hold on.” Chase stops laughing abruptly. “You ain’t got to leave. I got something else.” He pulls a fifth of Evan Williams out of the couch cushions, tosses it to Patterson. “I keep it around for when I’m coming off the shoulder.” He rattles out another laugh. “But mostly I’d rather get high again.”
Patterson takes a drink of the bourbon and sits back down. “When’d you start dealing meth?”
Chase’s eyes bulge in his head. The left eye more than the right. “You a fucking cop?”
“No, I ain’t a fucking cop,” Patterson says. “But I saw you two weeks ago and you didn’t have no meth empire.”
“My bitch set this up,” Chase says. “Goddamn, that itches. I come home and found my kitchen turned into a meth lab, her fucking some biker motherfucker on the floor. He’s out in the backyard.”
Patterson tightens the cap down on the bottle of whiskey.
“Shut the fuck up.” Chase lets out a machine gun burst of laughter, his cheekbones punching through his yellow skin. “You really think I stabbed some motherfucker in the neck and then buried him in the backyard? And then told you about it? Shut the fuck up.”
Patterson stands. “Bathroom?”
Chase jerks his head at a hallway by the entrance to the kitchen. “First door.”
Patterson pisses into the toilet. Leaning against the wall, his vision swimming. He’s so tired the back of his neck aches and his knees feel loose. He finishes pissing, pulls off his battered Avrilla ball cap, and runs water to wash his face. He looks worn-out in the mirror, he looks spent, he looks like he’s not too far off a meth bender himself. And the idea of maybe doing a line or two just to wake up does flash through his mind. Then he hears it. It sounds like breathing. And whatever it is, it’s coming from right behind him, from the tub.
Patterson puts his hand on the .45 he carries in an inside-the-waistband holster just behind his right hip, then shuts the water off.
It’s breathing, all right. And it’s coming harder. Thrashing. Grunting, snorting, like there’s some kind of miniature pig running back and forth, ramming its head into the sides of the tub.
Patterson slides the back of his hand onto the edge of the shower curtain. He tightens his fingers around the grip of his gun and pushes the curtain back just far enough to peek into the tub.
She’s naked, hogtied with thin nylon cord, a strip of black duct tape across her mouth. Her blue eyes pleading at Patterson, black mascara streaking down her face.
Patterson’s legs wobble, threaten to give altogether. He forces himself to kneel and pulls the duct tape free of her mouth. “Are you all right?”
She croaks something.
Patterson flips open his clip knife, cuts her hands free. Then leans across her bare body, white and flat and lined with blue veins, and cuts the rope around her feet. She sobs, stifles it. Patterson pulls a towel off the rack, wraps it around her shoulders. “I’ll be right back,” he says. “You stay here.”
She nods, rubbing her wrists.
Patterson rises, drawing his .45. Exhausted. He walks back out into the living room and stands by the hallway, holding the gun behind his right leg.
“Did you see my bitch in there?” Chase has the remote control, flipping channels on a little television set on a stand against the wall. “Her name’s Mel. Mel, Patterson. Patterson, Mel. That’s why I been pissing in these bottles. Every time I go in there she goes ape shit. And I can’t piss with somebody watching, especially if they’re making a bunch of noise.”
“She been in there since you found her with the biker?” Patterson asks.
Chase’s hand shoots into the pillows of the couch and stays there. Patterson’s elbow twitches, but he doesn’t raise the .45. “What the fuck do you know about the biker?” Chase says. His eyes are bulging again, threatening to bust like the pop bottles on the table.
“Easy,” Patterson says. “I only know what you told me.”
Chase draws his hand out from the couch, empty. “You want to fuck her?”
Patterson shakes his head. “Not even a little,” he says.
“Fifty dollars. You don’t even have to untie her.”
“I don’t want to fuck her.”
“Twenty dollars.”
Patterson doesn’t bother answering.
The volume on the television is muted, the shows flickering past. Sports, news, cartoons. It’s been a long time since Patterson has seen a television. “If you’d have said yes, I’d have shot you,” Chase says.
“I know it,” Patterson says. He steps back, putting some space between him and Chase. Then he brings his .45 up. “Don’t reach in the couch.”
Chase looks at him. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I can’t leave her like that.”
“You can’t leave her like that. You don’t know that cunt. Fuck you, you can’t leave her.”
“Come on,” Patterson says.
“Come on where?”
“Wherever you keep the rope,” Patterson says. “It’s your turn.”
Chase stands. “You ain’t going to make it out of here, you brave motherfucker.
” He licks his lips. “I’m going to cut that bitch’s throat and you’re going to watch. That’s what I’m going to do.” He struts into the hallway. “You’re a cunt, too.”
She rams him straight in the face with the barrel of a baseball bat. Chase stumbles back, blood flushing from his flattened nose. She’d been standing around the corner, just far enough back in the hallway that they couldn’t see her. Chase swats at her, his eyelids fluttering. She swings from her shoulders, the barrel of the bat thudding into the side of his skull. He falls prone, his eyeballs flickering back and forth behind his lids.
She stands over him, the baseball bat cocked. Still naked. Hairless and small-breasted, her skin loose on her frame like badly fit clothes. Chase’s left knee twitches. Then twitches again. Then starts to shake. She spits in his face and stalks back down the hall.
Patterson holsters his .45 and manages to get a cigarette out of his pack. And using both hands to steady the flame, to get it lit. Chase’s leg is still going, blood running out of his nose and ears, pooling under his head. Patterson smokes the cigarette, wishing more than a little that the leg would stop shaking.
She returns dressed in a pair of jeans and a Steve Earle T-shirt, her face scrubbed clean, her skin unhealthily translucent without makeup. She’s carrying a duffel bag.
“You need a ride anywhere?” Patterson asks.
“Where’d you get the cigarette?”
Patterson passes her one. She lights it and her eyes blank with pleasure. “Jesus, I needed that.”
“How long were you in there?” Patterson asks.
“A day. Maybe.” She steps forward and kicks Chase in the side, hard. Breath whistles out of him. “He’ll be fine.”
“Is there a dead biker in the backyard?” Patterson asks.
She snorts. “He got that off some dipshit TV show. He’s been up six fucking days.”
“Right,” Patterson says. “No ride?”
She shakes her head. “I’ll take his car. The motherfucker.”
Patterson closes the door behind him, quietly. Leaving her to it.
Justin
I can’t pretend it ain’t hard to get back to writing to you. I don’t do it at all when I’m on the job. When I’m climbing trees twelve hours a day, I don’t have to worry about the proper handling of my own memories. By the second day on a job, I’m too tired to put pen to paper anyway. And even if I could stay awake to write, I can’t imagine a better way to piss off a work crew than to keep a light on so’s I could put my feelings down in some notebook. I’d be lucky not to find my harness cut the next day. The men I work with, they don’t grieve. They drink, then they erupt.
This year’s work season was the roughest I’ve had in a while. There was a tropical storm that hit Texas in August and it took out most of the power in the southern half of the state. They were offering double time clearing power lines, which I couldn’t pass up, but it was the worst kind of work. Eighteen-hour days, with six hours off to try to get a little sleep in the tent city they’d set up for us, no hot meals but what we could cook on campfires. But I figured since I started early maybe I’d knock off in March. Not that it worked out that way, of course. It never does. I ended up in Missouri, South Dakota, Virginia, and then, after a freak spring storm, down in Florida. Which is why it’s now May and I’m just getting free.
I’m not ready to drive back to the mesa yet, I’ll tell you that. I need some space before making that particular drive. Some years it takes me weeks to make it back home. Driving in thousand-mile loops, sleeping in campgrounds, figuring out what to do with myself when I don’t have work to keep my mind off you. This year I was supposed to have two weeks of camping in the Ozarks with a buddy of mine but it fell through in a big way. In fact, I’m writing this in the cab of my truck in East St. Louis, about a mile from his house. I’m worn so thin you could put your finger right through me like tissue.
The thing is, it’s the driving that’s probably the worst of it. Knowing that I should be coming home to you. Knowing that I’m not. I don’t know how your mother does it, still living in the same house where you died, still eating at the same kitchen table where we used to feed you. I can’t even listen to the same music I listened to back then. Chase made fun of me all season, finding old country music cassettes in the truck. I didn’t tell him that I wasn’t listening to it because I liked it much, just that it was the only thing I wasn’t listening to at any point when you were alive.
That’s what the drive is like. It’s like every song you and I used to listen to together playing at once. All the ones I used to sing to you at bedtime. The old gut-sick pain has died out, and I don’t have to pull off by the side of the road shaking too hard to drive anymore, but it’s still like somebody’s peeled off the top couple layers of my skin. I don’t even bother trying to stop for sleep or food. I just white-knuckle it the whole way.
2
maps
Patterson sits in the parking lot of a cinder-block bar at the bottom of the I-70 ramp. Lit by the dome light of his Ford Ranger, staring at the ruled schoolboy notebook he writes to his son in. Then, nothing left to write, he puts the notebook in his Alice pack and pulls out a road atlas. East St. Louis. East St. Louis to where? There has to be somewhere else besides the mesa. Montana, maybe. Or the Black Hills. There’s nothing like the Black Hills in spring. It’d be chilly at night this time of year, but daytime’d be perfect. He and Sancho could live out of the tent for a couple of weeks. The dog could run around and chase all the animals he wanted.
But maps never do him any good, not when he’s already set on the mesa. So he folds the atlas closed and stares at the I-70 ramp. Then at the cinder-block bar, thinking about going inside and getting good and drunk. But he knows better than that, too. Knows that drunk’s just about the last thing he needs to be. The bar looks like it’s undergone a disaster of its own, the cinder block pitted and blasted and the steel door slightly crumpled, as though it’s been ruffled by a minor hurricane. Patterson’s always surprised at how far gone everything is when he comes out of the rubble at the end of a season. The thing about working in disaster areas is that you expect that the rest of the country is doing better. And it could be that there are parts that are. Somewhere along the coasts, maybe, where the people who matter live. But the interior is perpetually rolling wreckage, and the ruin visited by hurricane isn’t even different in degree from the ruin found in your average midwestern city.
That shows in the bars like nowhere else. The bars are identical. You’d be surprised, but no matter how bad it is, there are always bars. Somebody was serving drinks in New Orleans the day after the levees broke, that’s a guarantee. All the hospitals were flooded, the churches closed, but there was some joint serving straight whiskey to disaster-addled drunks the next day, even if it was over a plywood and sawhorse counter. And those ad hoc bars you’ll find in disaster areas, they’re no more disheartening than your average rust-belt beer joint.
Which is why Patterson really doesn’t want to get up and go inside this one. But he can’t remember the last time he ate, and he knows that once he starts the drive for real, there’s no stopping for anything but gas. Besides, he’s twitching for a drink. Not a dozen, he tells himself, but one very stiff one. Maybe two. So he reaches behind his seat, scratches Sancho on the head, not even eliciting a whine from the sleeping dog, and opens the door of his truck.
It’s just as bad as he expected inside.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asks.
Patterson takes a stool, dumping his Alice pack on the floor next to him. “You serve food?”
The bartender nods at a snack machine by the door. Pork rinds and miniature donuts. “Got frozen pizzas in the back, too. But you’re going to have to order a drink.”
“Give me a beer. And a shot of Beam. A double.”
The bartender pours the bourbon and hands it to Patterson, the beer following. Patterson drinks the bourbon straight off.
It’s just then that
he hears the door open behind him. And the rust-belt warriors who occupy the shadows of the bar all turn in a pack. Eyeballing what comes through the door with the kind of interest that wild dogs reserve for fresh meat. She sits down next to Patterson, wearing a hooded sweatshirt over her Steve Earle shirt and a pair of engineer boots that add an inch to her height. “Looking for food,” Mel says to the bartender.
The bartender sighs as if this line of inquiry is a calamity that just won’t end. His head makes the slightest movement toward the snack machine.
“They have frozen pizzas in back, too,” Patterson offers. “But you have to order a drink.”
“Good.” She drops a fresh pack of Marlboros and a new Bic lighter on the bar. “Beer?”
“Bud Select?” the bartender says.
She peels the cellophane from her cigarettes. “Why Bud Select?”
“A lot of the women who come in here like it.”
“That’s fine,” she says.
“It’s just one, really,” he says.
She lights her cigarette and blows smoke at him.
“The woman who comes in here. She lives next door and she’s almost blind. It’s the only place that serves alcohol that she can find.”
“Bud Select is fine,” she repeats.
The bartender pulls the tap handle and watches her. “Where you headed?”
“Just passing through.”
“I think I’ve seen you before.” He passes her the glass.
“You haven’t. What about the pizza?”
The bartender lifts his hands in surrender and moves down the bar toward the flap, heading for the back.
Mel rests her cigarette in an ashtray and blows her red nose in one of the cocktail napkins, then folds it in half and blows her nose again.
“I can drive you.” It’s a big man in a flannel shirt. A port-wine stain running from his forehead down into his bushy beard.
She crumples up the napkin and drops it in the ashtray, taking up her cigarette again.
Cry Father Page 1