“You’re walking, right?” He winks down the bar at a little man in the shadows. “I didn’t hear no car before you came in.”
“Easy,” Patterson says, without looking at him.
“Easy yourself, motherfucker,” he returns. “I was talking to the lady. Offering her a ride.”
She looks tired. Very tired. But not even a little scared. “If I decide to take you up on it, I’ll let you know,” she says.
“Whatever you say,” the man says. “Just trying to be friendly.”
Patterson lifts his Alice pack and takes out his road atlas again. Hoping there’s some magic route that he’s going to land on just by opening it. But knowing that once it’s time to start the trip back to the mesa, there’s no stopping it, that it’s like a runaway train rolling under its own inertia. And also knowing that he’s mostly trying to ignore Mel sitting there.
“You either got it all figured out or you’re starting all the way over,” Mel says, her voice close at hand. Her face leans in on his as she checks out the atlas, open to Colorado.
“I had it all figured out,” Patterson says.
She leans back from him. “And now?”
“And now the San Luis Valley.” Patterson closes the atlas. “Did Chase wake up?”
“Fuck Chase.” She lets the final hit from her cigarette float out of her mouth on a sigh. Then she lights a second cigarette with a kind of reckless gusto, only letting off the lighter after scorching it halfway to the filter. “Fuck Chase.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Patterson says, and does.
“You some kind of one percenter?” she asks.
“One percenter?”
“The tattoos.”
“I’m a tree trimmer,” Patterson says. “That’s how I know Chase. Worked with him. We were supposed to go fishing.”
“A tree trimmer.” She runs her fingers over his forearm, purple with ink. Patterson catches a glimpse of Port-Wine Stain, who looks likely to start gnawing chunks out of his beer glass. “So where’d you get them all?”
“That’s a long story,” Patterson says. “Most of them are cover-ups.”
Even her grin is crooked. “I know some guys covering up the same, I think.” She stands. “Would you do me a favor?”
“Probably.”
“I need to use the bathroom. Would you watch my cigarettes?”
“That I can do.”
When she’s gone, Port-Wine Stain lifts his beer at Patterson. “Looks like you got her all figured out.”
“I ain’t got anything figured out,” Patterson says.
“Sure you do.” His ruined face carries all the pride and guts that comes with living in a town full of crumbling factories. “This ain’t your bar, buddy. This ain’t even your fucking town.” He fumbles his shirt up, his hand shaking with alcoholic palsy. A snub-nose .38, shelved in a white roll of fat.
“Settle down, Vince,” the bartender says to him. “You ain’t shooting anyone in here.”
The man lets his shirt fall over his gun. “I can wait until he walks out.”
When Mel returns from the bathroom, Patterson slings his Alice pack over his shoulder and stands.
“We ain’t got our pizza,” Mel protests.
“I don’t recommend waiting on it.”
“Suit yourself,” she says, sitting. “Make sure you don’t get too far down the road before you turn around.”
“I suggest you walk out with me,” Patterson says.
“I ain’t leaving without my pizza,” she says.
As Patterson pushes through the door, Port-Wine Stain laughs a rolling whiskey laugh that makes the point between his shoulder blades twitch. But you can’t tell anybody anything, and he can’t imagine anything good coming out of any time spent in the woman’s company.
3
implosion
The first three-quarters of the drive is interstate. It’s semis and vacationers, truck stops for coffee and cigarettes, whatever country music station flashes across the plains until it doesn’t anymore. The sun rising and traveling across the wide-open Missouri sky and then falling in Kansas and nowhere to be seen again in Colorado.
It’s a heavy drive, almost like falling. A drive like toward some planetary mass, with the broken plateau around Walsenburg, Colorado, being the bottom. And then it’s up again, through the La Veta Pass, where the sky lowers to ten feet off the ground and the temperature plummets by double digits. And Patterson’s up through the pass, and in an instant the clouds are gone and the sky is a sudden blue, and he’s looping through the Sangre de Cristos in easy arcs, through mountainsides dressed in lodgepole pine and the last rags of spring snow.
By the time he clears the pass into the San Luis Valley, entering the A-frames and manufactured homes of Fort Garland, Colorado, population four hundred, Patterson’s almost excited to get to the cabin. He hasn’t slept in nearly two days, but he’s not tired, not even a little bit, spinning the truck south onto CO-159, aiming at a massive gray storm front ten miles down the road.
And he does the first thing he always does when he makes the San Luis Valley. He spins the radio dial until he finds Brother Joe’s voice. Brother Joe’s ranting about the group of international bankers who blew up the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and then blamed it on the Arabs. About the Israelis who got the warning and escaped. About implosion patterns.
Patterson drifts somewhere between his cigarette smoke and Brother Joe’s tinny voice. The radio man sounds like home. A patch of fresh rain, wet highway, then the storm. Heavy drops of rain bullet the windshield and Sancho wakes, making a pantherlike growl in the back of his throat. Patterson reaches around to stroke his shivering neck, and the dog whines for a minute or two, then falls asleep again as they exit the storm into a grayish spatter of sunlight and the village of San Luis.
It’s one gas station and three bars, all of which open sometime after four and close at eleven, the Sangre de Cristo church overlooking the town to make sure of it. Patterson parks on the main drag and cruises the short aisles of the R&R Market, pulling water, bacon, and canned goods into his cart. The woman behind the counter watches him with the same amount of interest she has for the insects let in by the warped screen door.
4
horses
The truck’s tires skew in the dirt as they switchback up the mesa onto a plateau of blue-gray rabbit brush and sage, skirting the small ponds left in the road from the short storm. Then Patterson has to brake as one of the bands of mustangs cross the road in front of him, the familiar chestnut stallion turning to warn the truck back with a look before following the boss mare along with the rest of them.
Patterson adjusts his ball cap on his head and watches them. There are eight total and all but the stallion are some variation of bay. After they’ve trotted all the way off the horizon, Patterson following them with his eyes the whole way, he catches notice of the other truck. It’s parked off the side of the road just past where the horses had crossed, a Wild Mustang Mesa logo on the door. And leaning against it, Henry and Emma, watching him.
Patterson spins up alongside them and rolls down the passenger’s-side window. “Was it a cold one?” he asks.
A flicker of a smile occurs somewhere in Henry’s beard. He’s gaunt, like the winter’s whittled away at him, but he still looks all the part of rakish rodeo bum. “Not the coldest we’ve ever had.” He tamps the ground with his cane. “But it was cold.”
“The horses look good,” Patterson says. “Almost wild.”
Emma grins at that. She’s young, just out of her teens, with a body that’s a little too long to be entirely gainly. Her face is broad, broken by light freckles, and now, in the morning light, there’s a blond tint to her dark red hair. She was raised on the mesa, and whatever her oddities, she’s put up with Henry for more than two years now, serving as his assistant. Together they take care of the stables used by the summer vacationers and tend to the wild horses, making sure they don’t get the urge to go get wi
ld somewhere else or inconvenience anybody by dying in the middle of the road.
“Patterson’s ashamed of the horses,” Henry says to her. “Doesn’t have a reason in the world to be, he got a hell of a deal on his cabin. But he’s still ashamed of the horses.”
“I think they’re the best thing about living here,” Emma says. She’s not the kind who can hold two thoughts in her head at the same time. Who can be embarrassed at something she loves. She’ll have to grow into that.
“They are,” Henry says. “They’re goddamn beautiful. Some people won’t have nothing that ain’t authentic.”
“I’m gonna go open the place up,” Patterson says, before the lecture begins.
“I’ll be up before too long,” Henry says.
Patterson nods. “Do that.” He touches his hat. “Emma.”
She touches her forehead, mocking him. “Patterson.”
Homecoming. A half dozen piñon pines circle the cabin, their trunks twisted as though they’ve been caught trying to scuttle off the mesa without being noticed. Patterson shoulders open the heavy door, cold dust and ash whirling across the firepitted floor. Sancho snakes his way through Patterson’s legs and curls up on the tattered rope rug between the small woodstove and the battered couch. You can tell he’s ready to move to the cabin full-time, Sancho. He’s a black and tan German shepherd mixed with something else big, a work dog, and it used to be he couldn’t wait for some new disaster-ruined city to explore. But now he spends most of his time curled up behind Patterson’s seat, moping for the mesa and waiting on his human to bring him food.
“Well,” Patterson says to Sancho. They look at each other for a minute, then Sancho throws his head to the side and slaps his tongue out at his nose. “You missed it, didn’t you?” Patterson says. Sancho snorts from somewhere deep down in his throat and puts his back to him. Sancho’s a smart dog. He knows Patterson wants to talk and he’s not interested.
“Fine,” Patterson says. He peels off his Avrilla ball cap and tosses it on the table, following with his keys. Then he makes a piñon fire in the woodstove, and walks the food he bought out to the root cellar he made last season by burying a refrigerator under the floor in the shed. He finds canned food already in the shed that he doesn’t remember buying. And a half-empty bottle of Evan Williams.
“You awake?” Patterson asks when he gets back in. Sancho doesn’t answer. So Patterson sits down at the table and starts a list of what he’ll need from the Walmart in Alamosa.
Then he stops writing and just sits. The last of the evening light filters in through the dusty windows. Cool valley air, the smell of burning pine. Patterson lights the kerosene lantern, sending wick light and shadow rippling across the walls.
A wind builds over the mesa. The kind of wind that whistles right through him. Outside, the piñons crackle and the brush rustles. It’s a homecoming, all right. Patterson pulls out his box of pictures of his son and gets properly drunk.
5
half
Patterson wakes on his thin mattress in the loft to the sound of his cell phone ringing. It’s just before daybreak and the phone’s on the table, of course. He fumbles his way down out of the loft, banging into everything he can find a way to bang into. It’s Laney on the caller ID. Which, if he’d thought about at all, he would have known before getting out of bed.
“Hello,” he rasps into the phone.
“Hello, yourself,” she says. “Are you settled in?”
Patterson hasn’t heard her voice in almost a year, but it still washes over him like somebody’s poured gasoline down his neck. “Pretty close.” He makes his way to the sink, peering out the window over the hand pump. Deep darkness, the first glimmer of light barely registering. “How’d you know I was back?”
She laughs. “You’re at the window, aren’t you? Looking to see if I’m outside?”
“How’d you know I was back?” he asks again.
“Lucky guess,” she says.
“Pretty lucky. I only pulled in this evening.”
“I need to talk to you,” she says. “I have a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Not on the phone,” she says. “I want you live and in person, so it costs you something when you give me the wrong answer. Can you come down to Taos tomorrow? I can buy you dinner.”
“How’s the day after tomorrow?” Patterson squints out at the morning again, still not sure she isn’t out there somewhere.
“It’s not something you have to prepare yourself for,” she says. “It’s dinner and a question.”
“The day after tomorrow.”
“The day after tomorrow.” She sighs. “Where do you want to meet?”
“You employed?”
“I’m employed.”
“The Adobe Bar,” Patterson says. “Six o’clock.” He ends the call.
Patterson cooks flapjacks and bacon on the woodstove, polishing off a generous glass of whiskey while he does so. Neither the bacon nor the whiskey help much with the hangover, but they give him an opportunity to enjoy one of the cabin’s greatest advantages. The outhouse. Where you can take a shit with the door open, watching the morning sun wash yellow across the scrub, the prickly pear cactus trying to match its southern brothers in shadow if not substance. After breakfast, Patterson pulls on his loggers and he and Sancho take a walk on the grass-patched dirt road that runs by the cabin, Patterson hoping fresh air will cure what hair of the dog and bacon couldn’t.
The morning drifts past him in a painfully bright haze. Wildflowers list purple in the light morning wind, bullet-pocked washers and refrigerators lie abandoned in the ditches. Dew mists off the mesa toward the high sun, the air bristling with morning insects. Sancho wanders ditch to ditch in broken zigzags.
Then Patterson comes around a corner and almost walks into the rear bumper of a matte-black 1969 Dodge Charger pulled off the side of the road, the driver’s-side door hanging open and the door-ajar bell ringing tinnily. “Shit,” Patterson says, to nobody in particular, realizing how far he’d been gone into thinking about nothing.
“That’s hardly neighborly,” a man’s voice says. It’s Henry’s son, Junior. He steps around a tree, zipping up his jeans, the dust on his alligator-skin cowboy boots pocked with urine. He has a midtwenties’ version of Henry’s face, just as handsome but with a grin that never seems too far from a sneer and a marred left iris that’s filmed over gray. He pulls a black handkerchief out of his back pocket and dabs at the eye, which seems to be perpetually weeping.
A wary growl rumbles out of Sancho’s throat. Patterson crouches and strokes his neck. “Junior,” Patterson says, by way of greeting.
“Patterson,” Junior says in the same tone of voice. “Need a beer?”
“I could use one,” Patterson says.
Junior reaches into the car and tosses him a can of Budweiser.
Patterson pops the tab, drinks.
“You always had the dog?” Junior asks.
“A few years.”
“What is it?”
“Mutt. Some part German shepherd, but mostly mutt.”
“He’s a good-looking dog.”
“Visiting Henry?” Patterson asks.
“Something like that.” Junior leans back on the car, bending his head at Patterson like his neck is just a little bit broken.
“Something like what?”
Junior hacks something globular and wet up from his lungs, spits it in the dirt. “You seen him? Henry?”
“You check down at the barn?”
“I did. He ain’t there.”
“Probably working,” Patterson says. “Might be one of the horses is sick.”
“Might be,” Junior says. “Might be he found him some little bitch down in San Luis that don’t mind he’s a cripple.”
“He’s allowed,” Patterson says.
Junior looks off at the north. “Which one of those is the one where they found the horse?” he asks, nodding at the mountains.
“Horse?
” Patterson repeats.
“Snippy,” Junior says.
“It was the Blanca Massif,” Patterson says. He points at the mountains on the north rim of the valley, sloping up from the floor to a sawtoothed ridge, the peaks blue-gray and snowcapped. “Can’t miss ’em.”
Junior squints. “Where?”
“Straight,” Patterson says. “It’s the five peaks right there. Little Bear, Blanca Peak, California Peak, Mount Lindsey, and Huerfano Peak.”
“I heard about it on that dipshit radio show Henry listens to,” Junior says. “Brother Joe. You believe all that shit he gets from that damn show?”
“Not much,” Patterson says.
Junior nods for a second or two. Then he says, “Did he tell you that I gave him the money to move out here?”
“No,” Patterson says. “He didn’t.”
“I sure enough did. Didn’t have a pot to piss in and I gave him everything I had. Never saw it again, neither.”
“I don’t have any interest in getting in the middle of your shit,” Patterson says. “None.”
“Sure,” Junior says. “But there’s a bunch of things you ain’t heard about that old asshole. Don’t let him fool you none.”
Patterson pours the rest of the beer in the dirt and tosses the empty can in the ditch.
Junior laughs out loud. He walks around to the driver’s side of the car and climbs in, still laughing. “It’s real easy to do with the second half, ain’t it, partner?” he says, starting up the engine.
Justin
I don’t know if I ever told you about the horse, Snippy, but that’s probably the strangest story to come out of the valley. She was found in 1967, skinned nose to shoulders, completely empty of organs. Not a drop of blood, neither. The lady who owned her said she was killed by flying saucers. Said they’d be back. And, sure enough, it was only a couple years later that the cattle mutilations started. And they’ve been continuing off and on ever since.
Cry Father Page 2