Blood Father

by Peter Craig

  Now, since he had been on the outside for over two years, Link missed the ornate work on that one tattoo. He had made the rare leap from scratcher to artist, with his sonic cleaners, his top-of-the-line tattoo machines, which he’d bought after six months of hammering nails. But he had a hard time finding any adventurous clients. When he hustled work around the Coachella amphitheater or the Burning Man festival, he did marijuana leaves and pornographic cartoons. Mickey Mouse took Minnie from behind. Tweety Bird held up his middle finger. There was always some vehement rave party idiot waving a handful of cash, some kid wearing stupid glasses and a tight T-shirt, fucked up on ecstasy or hard lemonade. Link would shrug, take his money, and figure that he was laying down a colorful scar from a fleeting and moronic youth. After all, a tattoo might be the only thing in a punk’s life that stayed with him forever.

  When he finished the serpent, he waited quietly while the woman regarded it from all angles in a mirror. He took a Polaroid and taped it to his wall. While he wrapped her leg in gauze, giving her the instructions—keep it dry, don’t get sunburned—he saw the same flush come into her cheeks that he’d watched develop on her bare legs. He realized that she was embarrassed, maybe wanting some response after her long speech. She wasn’t a bad-looking old broad, despite the craggy features of a hard-drinking life; maybe, in his youth, he might have ducked forward and kissed her as suddenly as if bobbing for apples. But now he just wanted to be alone with his instant soup and his Dr Pepper. So he looked away and said, “Good luck with, you know, that shit you were talking about.”

  Twenty minutes later he was listening to a game of Trivial Pursuit on the CB, coming from the trailers down along the Salton Sea. Some jackass thought it was funny to keep yelling “Sasquatch” to every question, until Link keyed in and told him he’d find him and crush his skull. Then he microwaved a cup of minestrone, perched on his front steps, and watched the sun set beyond the chalk-colored mountains.

  At least a half hour from any other services, his neighborhood was just a small cluster of trailers in a plot of gravel and dust, strung together with laundry lines and surrounded by flags and anxious, decorative windmills. The dogs were barking at something in the distance, sounding desperate and trapped.

  When his phone rang, he hoped that it was the woman, maybe asking him a question about the ink. He’d ask her to coffee—or whatever it was that grown, sober people were supposed to do. He shuffled into the dim trailer and found the phone.

  “Missing Link Tattoos,” he said.

  “Dad?”

  The silence lasted long enough for three cars to wash past. Then Link panicked and began tearing down letters and notes from his wall, assembling information across the table.

  She said, “It’s me. I’m alive. Barely.”

  He told her to hold on as he searched for a pen. He thought that he needed to have all the supporting documents in front of him, until it occurred to him that this was his actual daughter, not some new lead or twist in an investigation. He stopped in the middle of the room, holding the cordless phone to his ear, hearing the ocean in it like a seashell. He could only think to say, “Holy shit, kid.”

  “I had a bad fucking day, Dad.” Her voice trembled like she was running or jumping, and he heard the crash of waves in the background. “I would never bother you like this in a million years, I swear to God—but you’re the only person. It’s like I’m in one of those places—in life, I mean—one of those surreal moments when everything just starts going all fucking Armageddon on you. And it’s like one minute, you’re just a regular fuckup, you know, and then all of a sudden it’s like: Oh, no, no, no—you—you’re coming with me, bitch. You’re going down. You know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  She was rambling with hardly a pause or breath between words, her voice quivering, her jaw chattering around syllables, with sudden, shouted words barked louder than the rest.

  “My point is—and this is so totally, unbelievably rude, okay, and I’m sorry, because normally I’d be all: Let’s catch up, talk about old times—fucking current events and shit—but, Dad, seriously, I just don’t have the time to put smiley faces and birthday candles all over this shit—so my point is, I need cash. Fuck, I’m so sorry about this!”

  Link thought for a moment, but she started talking again before he could formulate his words.

  “Not a lot. Just a little money so I can skip town—because I’m not even kidding, Dad: I am so dead. I’m like this little insignificant fly that’s just about to splatter on a big windshield, you know, a big eighteen-wheeler. I figure I can get up to Portland by tomorrow.”

  “Oh, okay, Oregon.”

  “Look, so it rains a lot—trust me—that’s like the least of my worries right now, okay? I’ll live in a poncho. I mean, you know as well as I do, there’s some shit that just, like, transcends weather.”

  He paced down his steps and onto the gravel outside, staring at the trace of the sunset, savoring the first pause in her ranting. Finally he asked, “How much you need?”

  “Can I say something, Dad? Can I just say something? That’s first class, right there, after all the history between us. Thank you. That’s character—that’s what I’m talking about. I figure I need two g’s tops, if I’m going to get settled up there and start working—”

  “What kind of job you lookin’ for?”

  “I don’t know. Like some kind of nanny or something.”

  “Why don’t I bring you the money?”

  “Well, yeah—but I’m just not really at an address—”

  “You can’t walk into a Western Union if somebody’s looking for you. That’s the first place they go.”

  “Okay, okay. That’s what I’m talking about: I need cash, I need an escape plan. I need somebody who knows these things.”

  “What you got to do, kiddo—you got to find someplace where you can be safe for about two and a half hours. Okay? And you tell me where.”

  “Serious? Don’t just string me along, okay—because I’m a disaster right now.”

  “You just tell me where you’re at.”

  There was a windy pause on the other end, followed by a choking, hysterical sound that he first thought was an outburst of tears. It turned out to be a laugh, yelping and strange, like the excited sound of coyotes when they got into his trash. She said, “God, you must think I’m such a horrible person. I don’t even know how many years, and suddenly I call out of the blue for a handout. How pathetic is that?”

  “Just settle down and tell me where to go.”

  “Do you ever just look at your life and go—fuck?”

  “Hey, kid, listen to me. Listen real close. Tell me something you see, something around you. Anything.”

  She seemed bewildered by his stern tone, as if she had forgotten why she’d called, and, as he listened to the ocean, he worried that she’d passed out on the other end. Finally she sniffled and said, “There’s a trash bin, and there’s some kind of seafood restaurant. The Screaming Clam.”

  “Okay. Stay there. Sit someplace where nobody can see you.”

  He walked back up the steps and faced the far wall of his trailer, where there spanned ten years of correspondences with the girl, each letter with an altered slant in her handwriting, like ripples on a changing sea. Amid pictures, impulsive notes on the backs of homework assignments and torn out from spiral notebooks, one layer replacing the last, clear sentences stood out in the clutter:

  To John Link, Prisoner #C-77909, Calipatria.

  Dear Dad, I hate this class!!!!

  Mom is driving me crazy.

  On the line, she waited, and the phone was full of passing traffic, sirens, and collapsing waves, until she sighed and said, “I bet you gave up on me, huh? I bet you thought I fell off the map.”

  “You just stay safe until I get there. That’s your only job right now.”

  When he hung up, he stood for a stunned moment, gazing at the collage of letters, reassembled to match the arrangement in hi
s prison cell. He was face-to-face with the picture used on most of the flyers and Web sites, a school photo from the year she left home, at fourteen. She sat rigidly with a puffy collar and black wavy hair arranged neatly around her face. The picture was beautiful but awkward, and when he stared at it long enough he could see beyond the girl’s basic prettiness and privilege to something desperate in her eyes.

  Beside it, among the formal responses Link had received from the LAPD Missing Persons Unit, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the National Runaway Switchboard, and so many other services, there hung an age-enhanced photograph, used also for the Web sites, newsletters, and fliers. Link could never figure out the reasoning behind this simulated picture: The forensic programming seemed to predict, from her bone structure and genes, that her face would lengthen like a horse’s, that her hair would straighten, and that her nose would thicken at the bridge. Representing only three rapid years through whatever tumultuous adolescence, the photo was unreal and frightening—pretty, pristine, and idealized in a mechanical way—a computer’s memory of a human face.

  Stretching west along the wall, backward, hung the timeline of pictures and notes. He knew it so well by now that he could have thrown a dart with his eyes closed and hit any snapshot, form letter, or scribbled complaint in the girl’s life; yet he felt now, with his chest tight and his stomach wavering, that not a single thing on this wall had prepared him. Soaring again into some dark and unimagined moment, he feared that he had researched and assembled the wrong girl.

  So maybe this peaceful interlude in his life was over.

  He took a deep breath, smiled, and patted his hand against the age-enhanced picture. “Okay, kid. I’m coming.”

  Link & Ursula

  part two

  three

  In one of his most weatherworn pictures, John Link sits on a stripped-down Harley 74 with his tiny daughter in his lap, sometime during the last unraveling hours of her sixth birthday. They don’t look happy. Obscured by ribbons coming undone in her hair, Lydia is turning away from the camera like it’s a spoonful of medicine, while, decked out in his black riding goggles and threadbare vest, arms scrawled with tattoos, Link appears ready to attack the pink balloon that’s just been tied onto the clutch cable. In the background the other parents have gathered to watch, as if the chopper were a drugged swayback pony hired for the amusement of their shrieking children.

  The photo session had been the fitting end to an awful afternoon. Link had gate-crashed the party, pulling up onto the lawn at Ursula’s new home, the remodeled Valley ranch house of a new husband. Because of a Saint Patty’s Day party a week earlier, Link’s beard was streaked with green, and from a brawl he didn’t remember, his knuckles were still scuffed. But rather than causing the unsettled reaction he had expected among the suburban parents—this degenerate biological father, a relic of Ursula’s “checkered past”—he was instead treated like some fascinating countercultural entertainment, as harmless as a sidewalk Santa, as anachronistic as a Viking.

  Lydia’s mother, Ursula, was at first horrified by his arrival, the bike tearing up sod, then grumbling as he walked it between cars up the packed driveway. But after a few hours and a glass of wine, she began to enjoy parading around this skeleton from her past. She clearly noticed how the other women grew competitive, hauling out their own stories of depravity: One woman had been a groupie with an obscure rock band, and another had overdosed twice on Quaaludes. Every now and then a parent would shout across the yard at a boy throwing rocks, or rescue a bawling child from an overturned garbage can, but for the most part the kids were left alone—little boys flying like hot popcorn kernels off a distant trampoline, paramilitary gangs of muddy children in the trees, and tea-party clusters of girls around mewling, incontinent dolls—so that the parents could sit back on foldout chairs and reminisce about the crazy days, exchanging stories of bad acid trips and teargassed protests. Even Ursula’s new husband, a man on the cusp of a well-tanned and simpering old age, whose shirt seemed to come more unbuttoned with each hour, was newly titillated by the implication that his trophy wife had once been a filthy biker moll. “Was she as bad as she makes out?” he asked under his breath. Link wanted to beat him to death with the piñata stick.

  “There’s kids around,” he told the smirking man, then added in a whisper, “you limp-dick motherfucker.”

  He watched the smile fade.

  Ursula had certainly come a long way since her youth, ascending social classes with each opportunistic marriage, always as determined to milk her good looks as any athlete would be to cash in on a vertical leap. She was just a kid when Link knew her, and he could hardly reconcile his memory with this lipsticked mother in white pants, who opened her mouth too wide when she spoke, made lavish hand gestures, and threw her head back laughing at her own jokes. When he knew her, she could hardly take two steps without encouragement. He’d hovered over her, telling her again and again that she was a diamond, until she got tired of him and needed a more convincing appraisal.

  The summer they first met, Link was a thirty-two-year-old Hell’s Angel, on probation for a fight in a bowling alley, wearing a cast on his wrist that was filling up with signatures as fast as an angry petition. He held a state-required framing job that he was planning to quit; everything he owned in the world was either on his bike or in his pockets. He was handsome in those days, except for his habitually broken nose, and he was known among his brothers for being tough, loyal, and quiet. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a few scattered tattoos, Link was still surprisingly boyish, with a round, cheerful face under the stubble and sideburns.

  Almost a generation younger, Ursula had grown up in the same shabby cluster of stucco apartments—The Pink Ghettoes of Lakeside, California, which with each passing year looked more like the lush aftermath of a monsoon. Doors were never fixed after police raids; tattered waitress and machinist uniforms hung forgotten off laundry lines among the sycamore trees. Nestled between horse ranches and an Indian reservation, the neighborhood was a stretch of broken bottles, faded pastel paint, and barred windows down amid the date palms and overgrown weeds. Abandoned houses filled up with sparrows’ nests and white power graffiti. Once the mills shut down, there was little work beyond the gravel mines; and whenever Link slept late with a hangover, he’d wake to the distant drone of those tractors chewing up the streambed. The gravel companies had to put back every pound they took out, so they filled up the arroyos with scrap metal and burnt-out cars, until the town was ringed by a moat of rust and steel, and the creek where Link had swum as a boy became a junkyard where kids fought, got high, or got pregnant.

  Ursula was not one of those kids, though probably every teenager in the town had tried to lure her down there at one point or another.

  The summer of 1982, Link was riding with the San Diego chapter of the Angels and sponsoring a young prospect named Hardy Stillman, whom he’d met in county jail. Both were there on possession charges; both made their living mostly selling weed and hustling. Hardy was a rangy kid, all Adam’s apple and stuffed-up nose. Because he liked to wear Luftwaffe helmets and play with nunchucks, he gave Link the impression of an underweight, underage soldier, allergic to the battlefield. Twitchy as a rabbit, he flinched whenever Link made a fist, until a joke developed in which Link would stand up quickly and Hardy would flee the room. But the kid was a shoo-in for the club, mostly because he was a promising mechanic and his ride was a thing to behold—a completely restored 1946 Indian Chief.

  Link and Hardy would stay up late, night after night, and Hardy was awestruck by how well Link could draw. His eyes greasy with smoke, Link would sketch motorcycles, mermaids, and bosomy witches in loose-fitting clothes, hovering over the paper for hours in a trance of fidgeting pencils. One night, Hardy showed up at a party with three girls from his old high school, Ursula Carson among them, looking mortified by the scene. Hardy asked Link to draw her portrait—“the best-looking chick in this fucking shithole town!” Hardy soo
n lost patience with the time it took, rejoining the party. But Ursula sat primly for almost an hour, hands in her lap, on a wooden chair across from Link.

  Link could not help but draw how uncomfortable she was, how her eyes had shrunk with fear and her mouth was curving down faintly at the edges. They were the only motionless people in a rowdy place, sitting at opposing ends of a table littered with bottles and smoldering ashtrays. Finally, Link held up the picture for her, and she gave him a strained and self-conscious smile. Then Link raised his voice over the din and said, “You don’t look too fucking happy, do you?”

  She shrugged.

  Link thought there was something odd about his attraction to the girl: She was so damned beautiful that he didn’t want to touch her. She seemed breakable. She was pretty to the point of being sexless. She smelled like those stores that only sold soap. Her skin was so fair and clean, touching her might leave a thumbprint. Her neck was thin and white, her wrists were small under the cuffs of her blouse, her hair was pulled back crisply into a ponytail—something about her was like a bed made up so preciously that he’d feel bad messing it up. Raising her chin to project her voice, she said, “You draw so well. You could probably get a job doing storyboards.”

  “What’s that?”

  She explained that every shot in a movie had to be drawn before it was filmed. She knew this because she had met a director once and talked to him all night. Chattering idly seemed to make her forget her surroundings, and for a long time she told Link about how she intended to move up to Los Angeles and get into “the industry,” as soon as she passed summer school. Then she began telling Link everything that he should do with his life, some elaborate scheme for sending his drawings to various people she knew; and she talked about how lots of bikers made money working as extras in films. Link wasn’t in the mood to get career counseling from a high school girl, so he tore off the portrait and gave it to her, then walked away.