Cry Father

by Benjamin Whitmer

  The whiskey is a small fire in his solar plexus. “I don’t know how you do it,” Patterson says.

  “People survive, honey,” she says. “Why don’t you go in and look in on Gabe? Look in on him sleeping.”

  Patterson finishes the bourbon. He knows it’s time to leave.

  “Look in on him while he’s sleeping,” she says. “It’ll help.”

  Patterson pushes off the sink. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Don’t go.” She stands, steps toward him. Patterson puts the palm of his hand in the middle of her chest and pushes her back. He isn’t as gentle as he could be. “Patterson,” she says. She steps toward him again. He shoves her back again. “Don’t be stupid,” she says. “Stay.”

  He moves toward the door, but she’s there. He puts out his hand to move her aside. She slips it. “I’ve got to go,” he says. He hears panic in his voice. He shuffles to the side, steps forward. She’s there again in front of him. He shoves her out of the way. She bangs into the cupboard by the door. The dishes inside click together. “I’ve got to go,” he says again.

  Her face blotches red. “You’re not going.” She slaps him on the forehead. She probably means to hit him on the mouth, but she’s out of practice. She tries again and gets him on the chin. He stiff-arms her into the writing desk. A cup of pens turn over, clattering out onto the floor. She pushes off the desk, swinging with her open hands. Right on his cheek, left on his jawline, right across his eye. Then she closes her fists and flurries him. She tires finally. She drops her hands and stands with her shoulders hunched, breathing hard like an animal.

  Patterson smacks her openhanded on the side of the head. She cries out, curls her face into her shoulder. She swings tentatively back at him. He grabs her hand out of the air and hits her on the other side of the head. She flails with her free hand. Patterson catches it, shoves her backward into the desk again. The chair hits the floor, the cushion falling free of the seat. “I’m going,” he says.

  “You better not go.” She’s breathing heavy. “You motherfucker.”

  60

  weakness

  It’s early morning, but they’re in the garage with the door open, the heavy fan set into the wall pounding tirelessly at the acrid air. Eduardo’s under the hood of the Corvette and Vicente’s sitting at the chess table with one leg crossed over the other. He’s wearing a long underwear shirt covered in oil stains, drinking an espresso and reading the New York Times. He looks up at Junior and nods, but doesn’t say anything. He sips his espresso and returns his attention to the newspaper. The sun through the windows lies in dusty yellow blankets on the floor. Then Eduardo turns. “Hello Junior,” he says.

  “A man came in my house,” Junior says.

  Eduardo leans over and picks up a rag and wipes his hands. “A man?”

  “A man.”

  Vicente folds his paper and sets it down on the table. He places his espresso cup on top of it. “Did he mean you harm?” He asks it in a serious voice.

  Junior nods. He starts to say something, but his voice thickens in his throat. Then he says, “I blew him inside out.”

  Eduardo doesn’t say anything.

  “I unloaded a shotgun into him,” Junior says. “By the time I was done you could’ve fit him in a dustpan.”

  Eduardo finishes wiping his hands. He tosses the rag in the dirt. “Junior took his friend with him down to El Paso,” he says to Vicente. “Just took him along for the ride. This is what Carmichael told me.”

  Junior pulls the little black leather book out of his front pocket and shows it to them. “This is one of their books,” he says.

  “He is never sober,” Eduard continues. “He will have us both in jail or dead.”

  “What did you do, Eduardo?” Vicente says softly.

  “He is weak,” Eduardo says. “Not only weak. Weak and stupid. You think because he is charming, he is smart. But he is not.”

  “Did you try to have this boy killed?” Vicente says.

  “I am not the one to worry about,” Eduardo says.

  “It was La Familia?” Vicente asks. “You contacted them.”

  “This was a risk of working with La Familia,” Eduardo says. “I warned you of this, Vicente. I warned you of it and you let him into your house. He preyed on your weakness. Your considerable weakness.”

  Vicente just shakes his head.

  Eduardo holds his hands out. “Have you thought about what would have happened to us?” he says to Junior. “To Vicente?”

  “I thought about it all the way over,” Junior says.

  Eduardo opens his mouth to say something else, but Junior has his Glock out of his holster and does his best to put the bullet right down Eduardo’s throat. The hollow point round misses, but just slightly, catching him through the right eye. It expands, fragmenting in the tissue and skull, and everything to the side of Eduardo’s eye blows off his skull in a vapor. He staggers toward Junior. Juniors drops the front sight and fires three rounds into his chest. Eduardo crumbles forward in a heap. Blood spits from his head, from his mouth, from his nose.

  Junior’s never heard anything like the sound that comes out of Vicente. It’s something like the scream of a monkey. He hurtles from his chair, his hands clawing at Junior’s eyes. Junior punches into his chest with the Glock, fires two rounds right into his sternum. Vicente’s nails rake Junior’s cheeks, taking chunks of skin and flesh.

  Junior tries to move backward, to give himself some room. Vicente keeps coming. Junior stumbles over a toolbox. He falls, firing upward into Vicente’s body. Vicente jumps at Junior. His glasses are broken, blood frothing from the corners of his mouth and his nose. Junior slams the Glock into his side, under his arm, and fires twice more.

  It’s the second round that stops Vicente. Junior doesn’t know what he hits, but Vicente’s face freezes and he stops moving, blood spilling out of the hole in his side. Then the muscles in his face slacken and he’s dead.

  Junior grunts and shoves Vicente off him. He stands, looking around.

  61

  sorry

  Dr. Court still lives in the same little adobe house, near downtown Taos. He bought another place up in the ski country, but his main house is in Taos. When Patterson rings the doorbell, it takes a few minutes for him to answer. Long enough that Patterson starts to wonder if he finally left town.

  But then he hears him fumble with the lock.

  Patterson lets him get the door wide enough open that Court can see his face, then he shoves it all the way open with his knee and punches the old man square in the nose. Court falls back hard, landing with a muffled thump. Patterson lunges, looking to give him a boot in the side, but he’s already rolling across the wood floor, his dark robe swirling in a tornado of fabric, slamming into the umbrella stand.

  Patterson comes after him, too slow. Court’s already on his feet, swinging a hickory cane. The knob explodes into the side of Patterson’s jaw, sets every nerve ending in his head screaming. Patterson ducks the second swing and it punches through the drywall. Patterson catches the third swing on his forearm, grabs the cane with both hands, and yanks. Court lets go and the knob smashes into Patterson’s nose. Something back in his nasal cavity snaps like a dry twig and blood sheets down his face.

  Patterson jabs the cane at the old man, who sidesteps easily. He’s moving fast, faster than any man of his age has any right to. Patterson throws the cane at his head and he snatches it out of the air. He readies it in his hands, but before he can fall back into a fighting stance, Patterson plows into him center-mass with his shoulder.

  They fall together on the wood floor. Patterson lands on top of him. He plants his left elbow in Court’s solar plexus and rears back to punch him, but both of Court’s hands shoot out, take Patterson by the back of his neck, and he head-butts Patterson square in the mouth. Teeth break. Patterson spits bone and blood on Court’s face and Patterson grabs him by the throat with his right hand.

  Patterson squeezes down on him. It’s li
ke holding on to a boa constrictor, but he holds on. That stops him from dodging. Patterson chokes the old man, he chokes him hard, and when Court stops moving, Patterson punches him three times in the nose, feeling it break, and then climbs off him and sits with his back against the wall.

  After five or ten minutes Court stirs and crawls his way to the wall opposite Patterson. Both of his eyes are filling with blood, his nose is crushed, and there are a series of gashes in his forehead from Patterson’s teeth. Patterson spits tooth fragments out of his mouth. He tries not to swallow his tongue. “You motherfucker,” Patterson slurs.

  “I’m getting married,” Court says. His voice is hoarse and swollen. He breathes heavily.

  “You motherfucker.”

  “I’m so sorry.” He’s crying, the cocksucker. “This has to stop.”

  Patterson leers at him through the blood. “Or what?”

  Court pulls a baby Glock from the underside of a hallway endtable, the duct tape he’d used to affix it in place looping away in a curl. “Or you’ll have to kill me.”

  Patterson stumbles to his feet. “See if I don’t.”

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Court says. He’s still crying. “Nobody deserves this.”

  “You do,” Patterson says.

  62

  robots

  Later, much later, Junior sits on Casey’s bed and watches her sleep. He’s climbed in through the window. Her five-year-old face seems to have plumpened in her sleep, her eyes swelling behind the lids. She looks like some exotic fruit, ripe almost to bursting, just waiting to be bruised.

  Then Junior feels bad for thinking of her as a fruit. Then for everything, right up until now. And for knowing that he won’t see her again, and there’s nothing he has that he can leave her to make her life any easier.

  Junior loves her so much that it makes his bones go soft when he thinks about it. But there’s nothing that’ll make you hate yourself like having a child. Nothing to better expose all the holes in the person you’ve been telling yourself you are for your whole life. And when you make the mistakes a parent will make, even parents who aren’t Junior, the guilt eats at the edges of those holes until there’s nothing left but the holes.

  He looks at her face. Plentiful and delicate. He sits on the bed and wells with guilt and love. And some other things, too.

  Her eyes flicker open. “Daddy?”

  “Hey, baby.” He puts his hand on her cheek and then on her forehead. It’s clumsy and blocklike, his hand. Not only the beer, but whiskey, too. And cocaine.

  She yawns. “I was having a dream about robots,” she says.

  “Good robots or bad robots?”

  “Robots are always good. It was the witches that were bad. But you were there to protect me.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “That’s what Mommy says her job is, too.” Her nose wrinkles. “Your breath stinks.”

  “It happens when you grow up. Your breath stinks more.”

  “I know,” she says. “Yours is worse than most grown-ups.”

  Junior laughs out loud. And then he stops. Those nights when Henry would come home, drunk and feeling sorry for himself. Junior’d hide so Henry couldn’t hold on to him, crying and breathing whiskey all over him.

  It occurs to Junior that there’s nowhere to run. In the United States, it’s prison. In Mexico, it’s La Familia. It’s almost a relief, knowing that there are no more questions. That his life is down to one choice. And all he can think of is Henry. Henry, who up until now has managed to take Junior’s campaign of minor terror and fold it into his own story of himself.

  “I don’t care about your breath,” Casey says. “Give me a kiss and I’m going back to sleep.”

  63

  darker

  Patterson’s chewing Vicodin with broken teeth, swallowing blood and tooth fragments. He stops at the Questa Stop & Go for beer and drives out of New Mexico into Colorado, past the mesa, through San Luis, the valley rolling by in a long, aching blur. He drives with the window down. He drives fast, too fast, working his way through the first twelve-pack of beer, doing whatever he can to keep the night’s fog over his mind. He drives pumping at the wheel, sometimes punching the dash. Then it dies down and he just drives. Left on 160 at Fort Garland, through Alamosa. Into the Rio Grande National Forest, up into the San Juan Mountains. It’s dark in the San Luis Valley, it’s darker in the San Juans. The flat black nothing of the valley floor trading in for the ragged black of the passing alpine forest. Deep into the night. Now and then a car, a pinpoint of light off in the distant black, a flash. The flare of his lighter illuminating the cab in a quick burst, gone. The coal burning red against the green dash lights.

  Then there’s a side road, then another. Dirt. Banging the truck over the ruts. Then, at the top of a rise, a place to stop. A valley below, more mountain above. He climbs out of the car, bringing his pack of cigarettes and the rest of the beer, and stretches out on the hood of the car and waits for the sun to rise.

  Then he’s awake. He’s been asleep somehow and he’s awake. The sun breaking over the mountains, ricocheting through the fog over the lodgepole pines and reflecting off the windshield, an explosion of light. His mouth as hard and dry as if he’d spent the night chewing cement mix. He turns to the side, scorching his cheek on the hood, and retches a string of stomach bile off the truck. Then finds his pack of cigarettes accordioned in his front pocket. He straightens one out and lights it, the smoke ripping over his broken teeth and hitting his lungs like a wood rasp.

  He can’t see the Blanca Massif from where he is. And he looks around and realizes that he can’t see anything he knows. That’s what drinking and driving is for. For blowing everything you’re used to seeing into the rearview mirror, for bolting from all the shit that builds up in you, if only for your time on the road. And for Patterson, the thing that was building up against him is the Blanca Massif. He’d realized that just after leaving Court’s house.

  The problem being that when he tries to recollect how he got to where he is, there’s nothing. Not a street sign, a turn. Nothing but that he’s pretty sure he was heading west. And he realizes that his road atlas is in his Alice pack, back on the mesa.

  Then his cell phone rings. He pulls it from his pocket, staring at it in disbelief that he has a signal. He accepts the call.

  “Where are you?” Junior asks.

  “The San Juans,” Patterson says. “Somewhere.”

  “The San Juans. You want to know where I am?”

  “The San Luis Valley?”

  “The San Luis Valley. I been thinking about our conversation the other night.”

  “What conversation?”

  “About Henry. About your confusion as to who the motherfucker is.” A lighter flicks in the background. “I thought I’d come down and give you a lesson.”

  “No lesson needed. Besides, there’s no telling when I’ll be back on the mesa.”

  “If I were you, I’d drive fast.” Junior disconnects.

  64

  blood

  Patterson drives up the winding dirt road onto the mesa, into the low stars and the lower darkness. The constellations rise in crystalline explosions, endless and dizzying with alcoholic clarity. He drives like somebody falling in and out of sleep, yanking the wheel, and finally brings the truck to a stop behind Junior’s Charger in Henry’s barn’s gravel lot. Where he opens the glove compartment and pulls out his .45.

  The first thing as he comes around the barn is the smell. Blood and something else. Something heavy and wet and fertile, something he only remembers back in his snake brain, something that reminds him of Justin. Then there is the flickering of a nearly dead fire a few yards on the other side of the fence, barely illuminating a pile of gnarled brush. And a strange, wet, snuffling sound.

  Patterson hops the fence into the pasture and almost lands on the body of a dog, a single leaking hole between its eyes. Patterson stops and looks down at the dog. Then, not quite believing what he se
es, leans over so he’s close enough that there can be no mistake.

  It’s Sancho. And all the sounds and smells of the night disappear. Patterson feels like he’s stepped suddenly into a pressure chamber. He can’t move and he can’t speak for it all pressing in on him. But he knows he’s out of options now, if he ever had any. So he stifles a round of dry heaves and forces his hands to stop shaking.

  Then he makes his way toward the fire, into the flickering light and the shadow. Seeing as he closes the distance a man’s form, squatting in the dirt and holding on to his knees. His head bowed, his face dripping blood into the dust. “Henry?” Patterson says.

  Off beyond the fire, something rises out of a lake of shifting shadow. It’s Junior, his Glock outstretched one-handed at Henry’s head. “Throw some of that wood on the fire,” he says in a thick voice.

  Patterson doesn’t move.

  Junior flicks the muzzle of the gun at his father’s head. “You better tell him,” he says.

  Henry turns his head to Patterson very slowly, and when he does, Patterson feels his muscles flush through and go weak. There’s a silver dollar–sized puddle of gore where Henry’s left eye had been. “Do what he says,” Henry rasps.

  “Did you drive fast?” Junior asks.

  Patterson concentrates on his breathing, keeping the front sight of his .45 on Junior’s chest. “You shouldn’t have killed my dog, Junior.”

  “I didn’t,” Junior says. He reaches in his pocket and pulls out Chase’s Kel-Tec .380, only about as big as the palm of his hand. “Henry did. Wasn’t even hard to make him do it. You’d be surprised how quick he folds.”

  “It was me or him,” Henry says. Blood drools out of his eye socket down his cheek. “He was going to shoot me if I didn’t.”