Cry Father

by Benjamin Whitmer

  “I really do like your face,” she says to his back. “Try taking a little care of it for me, if nothing else.”

  10

  whiskey

  Whoever built the cabin had the sense to set it facing the Blanca Massif, which is pretty much the only criteria Patterson had when he bought it. Right now he’s on his porch, just finishing watching the first sunset of the season play over the west side of Mount Blanca, when Henry pulls into the driveway. He climbs out of his truck and, holding on to the doorframe, fumbles his cane out from behind the driver’s seat. “Sieg Heil,” he calls, rollicking his way up to the porch.

  “Cut that shit out,” Patterson says. He stands and takes Henry’s arm, helping him up the crooked steps.

  Henry hangs his cane over the porch rail and sinks down in one of the camp chairs. “Where’s that bachelor mutt of yours?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.” Patterson peers out into the gloom for a second. “He ain’t been back all day.”

  “Probably found himself a little bitch,” Henry says.

  Patterson looks at him.

  “Right.” Henry chuckles.

  “I found a bottle of whiskey in the outhouse. You want a glass?”

  “Whiskey in the shitter,” Henry says admiringly. “How many exactly would you say you’ve got stashed away around here?”

  “It ain’t entirely his fault,” Henry says later, much later. They’ve let the kerosene lantern run out of fuel hours ago, and the stars are so numerous and low you could soak your feet in them.

  “Which part?” Patterson asks.

  “The part about him hating my guts.” Henry’s holding on to the hook of his cane with both hands, resting his chin on it. “I wasn’t around much, and it’d probably have been better if I hadn’t been when I was.”

  “You were hard on him?”

  “I was a sorry son of a bitch.” Henry leans forward toward the darkness. “There. I thought I saw something move.”

  “Where?”

  “Past my truck.”

  Patterson narrows his eyes and tries to stare himself sober. Then he spots it, a quick dog-sized hole in the darker darkness. “That’s Sancho.” Patterson leans back in his chair.

  “Why ain’t he coming in?” Henry asks.

  “He’s embarrassed.”

  Henry chuckles. “He’s got a lot of personality, your dog.”

  Patterson raises two fingers to his mouth and blows a loud whistle. Sancho’s head raises. “Can I ask you a question?” Patterson asks Henry.

  “I don’t think he’s coming,” Henry remarks.

  “SANCHO,” Patterson yells. “GET YOUR ASS UP HERE.” His voice sounds strained and weak in his ears, like it’s coming from an accordion with torn bellows. But the dog rises to his feet and mopes toward the porch.

  “What was the question?” Henry asks.

  Sancho slinks warily up the steps, making as if to head through the flap in the front door. Patterson grabs him by the skin of his neck and yanks him yelping by his leg. “Did he give you the money to move out here?”

  Henry barked a laugh. “I was only coming from Cheyenne. He loaned me two hundred bucks for gas. I paid that off with my first paycheck.”

  Patterson pats Sancho down for injury. Nothing but mud and burrs. He scratches Sancho’s head with one hand, strokes his neck with the other. Then he puts his face into Sancho’s neck and holds it there. Sancho smells wild and happy. Happy to be wild, and happy to be home from it. “He says otherwise.”

  “Yeah?” says Henry. “Well. He may even believe it.”

  11

  lemonade

  The Adobe Bar is the hotel bar for the Taos Inn, right downtown in tourist central, modeled on the real Taos Pueblo where the Pueblo Indians have lived for more than a thousand years. It has a neon thunderbird sign out front and hosts new age flute players most weekend nights, but if you can stand all that there’s every kind of bourbon you could want. And that had seemed pretty important to Patterson when Laney had said she needed to talk to him.

  She’s already seated at a table. She looks good, too good. At least ten years younger than Patterson. Which is not exactly some great feat, but is still no fun to look at. She’s lost weight and replaced it with lean muscle, and her broad Irish face has mellowed some, either because of her age or because of something she’s had done to it. Whatever it is, it’s softened some of her shrill edges, and almost gives her the illusion of tenderness.

  And then there’s the little boy with her, her new son, Gabe. He’s three years old now, sucking the sugary life out of a tall glass of pink lemonade next to her. Patterson tries not to stare holes in his face while Laney makes small talk.

  How are you doing, Patterson? Still living up on that mesa so you don’t have to be around people? Still drinking yourself stupid every night? Still don’t have the guts to settle down and live like an adult?

  None of which is said, exactly, just implied. But, then, she’s always been very good at implication.

  Finally, just before Patterson excuses himself for the bathroom to hang himself with his belt, she comes to the point. “I have a lawyer,” she says.

  Patterson is still staring at the boy when she says it. Trying hard not to, but still staring.

  “You can talk to him, Patterson.” Her voice softens in a way that makes Patterson even more uncomfortable than he already is. “Say hello, Gabe,” she says to the boy. “This is Patterson. Patterson Wells. Do you remember him from last summer?”

  Gabe wrinkles his nose, grinning with his lips puckered around his straw. Patterson finishes his first bourbon double and thanks Jesus he had the sense to order himself two.

  “He remembers you,” Laney says. “He always remembers men. I think it’s because his father isn’t around.”

  Patterson clears his throat, but he has nothing.

  “They finally got him,” she says. “He burnt his house down trying to make meth. He never was very good at following recipes.” She smiles at Patterson. “We were never together, not really. But you know that.”

  Patterson doesn’t know that. He’s never met Gabe’s father. Whatever happened between them had happened while he was on the road. He just came back after a season of work one year and she was pregnant. But he nods like he knows the whole story, mainly so she doesn’t tell it to him again.

  Laney rubs Gabe’s shoulder. “It was worth it,” she says. The way the boy’s going at his lemonade, you’d think it’d take him two seconds to finish it, but the level of the liquid barely seems to move.

  “You got a lawyer,” Patterson prompts. Gabe’s one thing he can’t talk about for any length of time.

  “I have a lawyer,” she says. “He’s seen the medical records and he thinks we have a case.”

  “A case of what?”

  “A lawsuit, Patterson,” she says. “A lawsuit against Dr. Court for what he did to Justin. For letting him die. We’re not the only ones. He has no right to hold a license. What he likes is looking like a doctor. Having everybody impressed with him for it. But he’s messed up all kinds of people. Justin was the only one he killed, but he messed up others. Other kids.”

  “You got a lawyer,” Patterson repeats.

  “I want to add you as a plaintiff,” she says. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Patterson shakes his head.

  “You don’t have to pay anything,” she says. “All you have to do is sign a piece of paper.”

  Patterson continues to shake his head.

  “If somebody doesn’t stop him, there’s no reason to think he won’t do it again. That other parents won’t have to go through exactly what we did.”

  Patterson is still shaking his head.

  “Okay,” she says. “Let’s try this. It’s money. Not a little money, a lot of money. You’re too old for the work you do. You were too old when we met, now you’re too old by ten years. Do you have a retirement plan?”

  “I’ve got the cabin,” Patterson
says.

  “The cabin,” she repeats in a voice that makes it easy to tell she doesn’t think much of the cabin as a retirement plan. She fixes Patterson in place with her brown eyes, smirking so imperceptibly you could almost miss it. “I won’t give up on this,” she says. “I can be persistent. And you can’t keep doing what you’re doing.”

  Patterson doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t bother shaking his head again. There are plenty of advantages to being married, though he could never properly enumerate them, but the biggest advantage to not being married is not having to explain yourself. Sometimes Patterson even remembers that in time to keep from doing it.

  “Well,” she says brightly, “are you ready to order food?”

  “I’ve gotta get back to Sancho,” Patterson lies. “He ain’t feeling good.”

  “Sancho,” she says. “I miss Sancho.”

  “He’s a good dog.” It comes out warbly. Patterson clears his throat.

  “Does he still hate women?”

  “Everyone but you,” Patterson says.

  “He’s a dog with sense,” she says. “I’d like to see him.”

  Patterson nods and finishes his second bourbon. Then he pats her on the shoulder and walks out. It’s probably the cruelest thing he can do, given what she’s asking him. But it’s either that or grab her by her carefully piled hair and start pounding her face into the table.

  12

  chess

  It took Junior a while to recover, but he finally did. After a couple of days of not moving much at all, he took a bath in his big claw-foot tub, the water near to boiling. The muscles and tendons stretched out in the heat, and it looked like the only real injury he’d sustained was two broken molars. That and the loose canine. And the black eye and swollen nose. And the lips that could do decent work as sausage models. But nothing that wouldn’t heal given a little time. Junior remembers Henry coming home after rodeos looking worse. Sometimes after he’d won, even. And sometimes when he hadn’t ridden.

  The real problem was that Junior couldn’t find another 1969 Charger anywhere. He and Jenny had looked all day, rolling from car lot to car lot, Casey tagging along, offering her input on the matter. That one’s pink, Daddy, get that one. Get that one, Daddy, it’s got fuzzy dice. If you get that one we can go camping, Daddy. My friend Alicia went camping with her daddy, and they caught six fish. They had to let them all go, though. But if you buy that one I’ll bet we could catch twice as many, and I get sick of her bragging.

  But nothing would do for Junior but to get something as close to his original car as he could find, and that turned out to be a 1972 Charger with a new engine. The only hitch being that it was lime green. So, after counting his cash into the salesman’s hand, Junior drove it straight off the lot to a Mexican body shop by his house to get it painted black.

  He’s heard all the arguments against driving conspicuous vehicles in his line of work. He knows other drivers who make it a point to never drive anything but minivans and sedans. But Junior, he doesn’t figure there’s any point in being a drug runner if you can’t drive a cool car.

  Of course, not an hour after he got home from picking the freshly painted car up from the body shop, he got a call from Vicente. It was the first of several, which is always the way it happens. Six trips down to El Paso in three days. I-25 both ways, the endless interstate blur. No time for sleep or even a sit-down meal.

  Now that he’s back home on the couch and trying to nap through the morning sun, Junior’s lower back feels like some small animal’s made a nest in it and is trying to gnaw its way out. He’s not complaining, though. Sure as hell not to Vicente.

  Before Vicente, Junior had no prospects at all. After his mother died, he’d been run straight into foster homes, Henry making no attempt to hang on to him at all. They weren’t the kind of foster homes you hear about, the bad ones. When Junior was younger and drunk in the Colfax bars he would tell people they were, but they weren’t. He just had to say something about the shit Henry had piled up in his head, and none of what was real seemed like enough. Henry wasn’t the first father who wasn’t much of one, and Junior wasn’t the first boy to ever grow up in foster care. But it was the only childhood Junior’d ever had, and he needed it to sound as lonesome and dangerous as he felt it.

  Still, life in a foster home hadn’t left him with a lot of preparation for the job market. And he’d never been very interested in the education side of school. So he left the last home when he was seventeen and started working day labor with Mexicans, falling in and out of weekly rooms on Colfax. Fistfighting the cowboys who stayed in those hotels when the rodeo was in town, getting drunk alone in his room or outside in the parks.

  That’s where he met Vicente, in a park. He was setting up chess problems for himself at a picnic table and Junior was spread out on a bench, working off a hangover with the spring sun and a bottle of fortified wine. Chess was the only thing Henry’d ever taught Junior. On those warm afternoons he couldn’t afford a bar, which were many, Henry’d brown-bag a bottle of wine down to one of the picnic tables on the St. Vrain River that cuts through Longmont, carrying his pieces in a grocery sack and taking all comers, playing Junior in between money games.

  Henry played a looping and erratic game that he learned from other rodeo riders, striking out and withdrawing in strange patterns that defied recognition, and he’d taught Junior the same. Their first game, Vicente checkmated Junior in eleven moves. They played six more games after that, all of which Vicente won easily. But when they were done Vicente asked Junior a few questions, then offered him a job driving. At the time, Junior was working twelve-hour days delivering sandstone to construction sites. He accepted on the spot.

  The knocking hits like a midnight hailstorm, rattling Junior awake so abruptly that he falls off the couch in a flurry, striking out at the air to clutch anything that might stop his fall. “What?” he yells.

  The knocking continues. Junior smoothes down his T-shirt, answers the door. It’s Jenny, in a clean pantsuit that has a worn Goodwill look to it. “Good morning,” she says brightly. “I need a favor.”

  “We’ve all got needs,” Junior says. “I need some more fucking sleep.”

  “It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”

  “I was driving all night. Didn’t get back until seven.”

  “Casey’s in the car,” she says. “I need you to watch her.”

  “I’m fucking tired.”

  “Please,” she says. “I’ve got a job interview.”

  “What do you mean, job interview?”

  “Typing. Data entry.”

  “If you need money, tell me you need money.”

  “It’s at the Tech Center and Mom’s sick. Three hours tops. Please.”

  Junior presses his bad eye against his shoulder. “All right. Send her in.”

  “Thank you.” She kisses him quickly on the cheek and turns to run down the porch steps, but stops. “Do you need a couple of minutes to clean up anything? Put anything away?”

  “I’ve been on the road,” Junior says. “Ain’t nothing she can get into.”

  Jenny starts to say something else, standing on the top step. Then she bites her bottom lip.

  “What?” Junior says.

  “Can you put on your eye patch?” she says. “It scares her.”

  13

  stink

  Junior lives in the battered residential neighborhood of Elyria-Swansea, tucked away in the junkyards, body shops, and crumbling beer joints of Northeast Denver. It has the distinction of being within two miles of six Superfund sites, one of which happens to be the neighborhood itself. When the stink of oil and animal waste being processed rolls in on a hot afternoon it’s a little like being suffocated in sewage. They call it the big stink, and rumor has it that you can get used to it after a while. That third-generation residents have even been known to claim they can’t smell it at all. But there are very few third-generation residents left.

  It does have a few
advantages over the rest of Denver, though, and one of them is its lack of police presence, which Junior decidedly enjoys. In every city there are neighborhoods abandoned to industry. Wastelands and disaster zones sacrificed to the greater good. As long as you can stand to live in them, they’re one of the few places you can almost be free to be left alone.

  Today the stink isn’t too bad, so Junior and his daughter sit on the front porch on kitchen chairs. They’d been inside, but she’d brought a DVD of The Wizard of Oz, and the absence of a television had set her crying. Junior’s pretty sure he used to have a television, a little color model, but it’s sure as hell gone. Somewhere.

  “Do you know why they call the lion the Cowardly Lion?” Casey asks. Her feet don’t reach the ground. She swings them back and forth, banging her dirty pink tennis shoes on the chair legs.

  Junior tries not to scowl. She doesn’t let anything go. “Because he’s a coward,” he answers her.

  “Yeah,” she says, as if that was a stupid answer. Which, Junior knows, it was. “But do you know why he’s a coward?”

  She’s a little woman, all right. There’s no answer that’ll satisfy her but exactly the one she’s looking for. “No idea,” Junior says. He picks at the cuticle on his thumb. He picks too hard and his thumb rims with blood, so he sticks it in his mouth and waits for her to say something else.

  “It’s because he’s scared of everything,” she says.

  “That’s what coward means,” Junior says. He wipes his thumb on his jeans and adjusts his eye patch. His eye sweats under it, which is part of why he doesn’t wear the goddamn thing.

  “I know. That’s what I said.”

  Too smart for her age. “We should do something,” Junior says. “Walk over to the park, maybe.”

  “I know what we should do,” she says.