Blood Father

by Peter Craig

  ...

  When his daughter was seven days old, Link made it to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and bought a newspaper for a souvenir.

  The paper seemed a bad omen—a suicide bomber had killed over two hundred troops in Beirut and, for some reason, the United States had just invaded an island he’d never heard of. Link rolled up the paper, as if hunting mosquitoes, and entered the hospital, first washing his hands in the bathroom. In front of the broad mirror, he noticed that his face was scuffed and bleeding from debris and horseflies along the road; and he was sunburned and filthy except for two raccoon circles where his goggles had been. He scrubbed his face and watched the water turn black and sooty as it went down the drain.

  When he reached the semicircular desk, there was a nurse who seemed to know who he was already. “Let me guess,” she said. “Miss Carson’s baby.” She was a tiny, wrinkly Southeast Asian woman—maybe Cambodian or Laotian—with square glasses that took up most of her face. She was stern and abrupt. She studied his license, handed him scrubs, attached an ID bracelet around his wrist, and led him down a long labyrinth of corridors to the NICU, updating him as they walked: Ursula had been sent home to rest; the baby’s chances were better than they were a week ago, but still not good.

  His baby was the only one in a special room at the far back of newborn intensive care, where she lay under a network of tubes and wires in an incubator that looked like a terrarium. He was afraid to go closer. The nurse moved ahead and waved for him impatiently. When he hung over the plastic bassinet, he couldn’t believe that the little girl was alive—she was raw and purple and brittle-boned; her lungs heaved; a respirator nozzle wedged into a tiny mouth. There were strange twitches on her chicken legs, and her eyes were closed and crusted over, like a bird recovered from a fallen shell. Link wanted to smash everything in the room behind him, every piece of dormant equipment.

  Instead he only said, “She’s cold.”

  The nurse explained that the incubator was kept at an ideal temperature. She shivered because of her underdeveloped nervous system. The doctors had been careful with the amount of oxygen they gave her, in an effort to avoid blindness. But all Link could see was that the little thing was suffering, and he was sick with the idea that all she’d know of this world would be wires, lights, plastic, and pain.

  The nurse said, “Now, you see her. Okay? Clean up next time you come here. Wash up. You smell bad, and it’s not right. This is your daughter.”

  A tiny woman, not five feet tall, she scolded him with furious eyes, pointing up as he lowered his head. He nodded at her name tag—Vu Thi Tuyet—while she told him to stand up straight and look her in the face. She said, “Promise. You don’t come in here again like this. Promise me, right now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said quietly. “I promise.”

  An hour later he called Ursula’s studio apartment, then arrived with tulips from the hospital gift shop, which had come apart in the wind during his ride. He hardly recognized her at the door. Her hair had thickened and turned dark, her skin had a glazed quality, her eyes were bloodshot, and she was so expressionless that he thought she must be tranquilized. She thanked him for the flowers and led him inside, filling a pitcher with water while he sat on a box in her kitchenette. He couldn’t tell if she was in the midst of packing or unpacking. In the bathroom, a wet hostess uniform hung over the shower. He asked her if she wanted to go out for something to eat. She said she wasn’t ever going to eat again, suddenly puffing her cheeks like a blowfish.

  She wouldn’t answer any of his questions. He asked what money she was living on, and when she was silent, he said that he could get a job and pay for his end of things. He had the name of a guy in Palm Springs. Ursula asked, “Did you see her?”

  Link nodded.

  “Bad news?”

  “No,” he said. “She’s tough.”

  Ursula started pacing and talking about how she hadn’t been back for a few days: She had simply panicked at the sight of the little girl. She couldn’t face it right now; she felt so guilty, so overwhelmed, she couldn’t imagine going back to the hospital. Her mother and her aunt had planned to drive up next weekend to take care of her, but she had told them not to bother. She couldn’t think all the way to next weekend. It was another lifetime.

  Link said, “Ursula, it’s not over. I promise you that. This is my daughter, and she’s not going to go down without a fight.”

  Ursula nodded in a distracted way, moving to the window, and said, “Right, right. Because you’re such a fighter.”

  Link gave her his plan: He was going to ride straight out to Palm Springs tonight, meet up with some contacts, and by tomorrow afternoon he’d have a job. He said he was ready to take care of everything—the bills, the diapers, whatever the fuck babies needed. Ursula stared at him like he was speaking another language.

  The next twenty-four hours were the most frantic of his life.

  By nine o’clock he found the house beside the golf course, introducing himself to a sun-baked, balding old man known as Preacher, who lived just off a sand trap on the back nine. Preacher was in the midst of a screaming rampage because someone had taken their chopper out and torn up the tenth fairway. He immediately began yelling at Link, the newest suspect. But even with his teeth bared and his eyes clouded with rage, the crazy old man seemed like a worthwhile boss. Link had never seen such energy, especially in a brother who had survived into his late fifties. From talking to Count, Link knew that Preacher had been in an engineers’ battalion during the Korean War, and he apparently still had an itch to blow things to smithereens. Every few weekends, he took packs of enthusiastic Angels up into the mountains with claymores and grenades, and they would pass the afternoons blowing up tree stumps and firing at cans floating downstream.

  That night, Preacher’s house was packed with other Hell’s Angels from around the state, all gathered for a funeral the next day: a Berdoo brother had been shot in the head when he got off his bike to fight seven street kids in the City of Industry. The group was drunk and somber now, worn out from Preacher’s tirade. One man eulogized in the low-ceilinged living room, saying that the brother had gone out with dignity. Another claimed that he would have expected a good party. To talk about business, Preacher led Link into the garage, where a claymore rested against a tire, with the inscription on the side:

  Face toward enemy

  Preacher didn’t seem to want Link to speak. He said, “So Count called me about an hour ago and explained. You come highly recommended, and I don’t think I have to tell you about the sensitive nature of our operation. The less said, the better. Count tells me you’re the strong, silent type—and that’s what I need. I need somebody who can take orders and keep his trap shut. Understand?”

  Link nodded.

  “Your little pal Hardy Stillman is running for me down in San Diego. Make sure he keeps quiet, too. He’s a leaky faucet, that one. We got trials going on all over the country, and we don’t need some motor mouth. Now, go back inside and have a beer. You’re too fucking tense.”

  A little while later, Preacher came into his crowded living room clutching the neck of a beer and started musing aloud about the nature of life and death.

  “We are not going to mourn old Wes!” he shouted as if to a congregation. “Not here. If you came here to feel bad, you’re in the wrong place, brother. That was his death. His very own.” Stomping back and forth across the room, he continued, “Not a day went by when he didn’t know it was coming. Like all of you and like me. But he lived every day like a free man, because he didn’t know what fear was. That’s a life. He refused to back down, not one inch. And thirty-eight years of real living beats a hundred years as a slave.”

  Link had heard this speech; every Hell’s Angel made some version of the slave reference at one point or another. But Preacher was such a weathered and tough-looking old buzzard that it seemed to take on new significance.

  “Do not cry for this man. We’re going to celebrat
e his life. He died like every brother should: with his boots on.”

  In the midst of his speech, Link met Preacher’s old lady—Cherise—a platinum blonde with a sarcastic shape to her mouth, as if she had heard this sermon every night of her life. She had a suntan darker than her amber beer, and Link couldn’t help noticing how her tits stood up high and straight under the halter top. She said, “So are you joining the cult of personality?” She was drunk and wavering slightly on her high-heeled boots.

  “Guess so,” said Link.

  “Tell me something—how noble is it to get beaten to death by teenagers?”

  “Probably how I’m going to go,” said Link.

  “Yeah,” she said, toasting her beer in a plastic cup. “Purple Heart. Everybody dies with their boots on.”

  Link pointed down at her boots, two long red leather ones with zippers up the fronts. She laughed and modeled them, standing on one foot, then grabbing him as she lost her balance.

  The next morning, Link was up early making deliveries across the San Bernardino Valley, carting red phosphorus, ephedrine, and other precursors to warehouse laboratories and aluminum sheds out in the desert. He listened to a few jittery cookers complain about their profit margins, and one explained some of the chemistry in layman’s terms: “Ephedrine and red phosphorus. Think of it as a match head and a diet pill—one way or another, it’s going to blow you sky-high.”

  By two o’clock in the afternoon, Link had finished his errands, and he rode in the funeral procession to the cemetery in Covina, hundreds of Angels from all over the West Coast rumbling through the streets and attracting startled onlookers from stores and apartment buildings. They rode so tightly packed together that a single swerve might have brought down the crowd. They swarmed through the towns, past people fleeing out of crosswalks, cars pulling over, and cops barricading the side streets to guard against trouble. When they lowered the brother into the ground, Link was sober, and he felt hounded by clarity. Too many details vied for his attention—the freeway beneath them and its streaming sound, his daughter hooked up like a time bomb under a twenty-four-hour lamp, Ursula in her dirty apartment, and this departed biker who had lost his life in a back alley over an insult.

  Preacher noticed Link and came over, patting him roughly on the back. He whispered to Link in a rush of hot breath, “We’ve got a hundred police around this graveyard—like anybody’s going to do anything here.” He raised one shaggy gray eyebrow, then led Link around the tombstones, saying, “Someday, son, we’re going to get out from under this persecution. I’m going to build myself a free state—out in the middle of nowhere, like the first pioneers. Get away from all this bullshit stuffed down our throats. FBI, CIA, the fucking RICO statute. I want you to know that every day out there, you’re a part of that goal.”

  Immediately following the pep talk, Link returned to the warehouses to pick up the product. Next he made the second half of his deliveries in a trail from Fontana to Costa Mesa. Just past eight, so tired and tense that he could barely grip his handlebars, he pulled up at Ursula’s to give her all of his thousand-dollar cut. She let him sleep on the floor that night, and, as soon as the sun was up, he showered, scrubbed, and tied back his hair. He returned to the hospital looking like a puffy, blow-dried bear.

  He stood for an hour by the incubator, watching the baby’s lungs quiver. He didn’t know what the numbers meant on the monitors, but he noticed that they were higher than before, and—as if all the apparatus were just a variation on a speedometer—he assumed this was a promising development. His daughter’s chest looked stronger and she seemed able to move her legs in more than a startled twitch. Exuberant as he left the NICU this time, he ran around the halls and called for the nurse to tell her about his daughter’s thickening legs.

  For the next ten days, he alternated between deliveries for Preacher, showers at Ursula’s, and nights on her floor or a bench outside the hospital. One day, when Nurse Vu Thi had just come on her shift, she told him the good news. The baby was breathing on her own. The pediatrician thought that her vision would likely be unaffected, and there was a chance that she’d have few long-term complications. She needed to put on more weight under close observation. The doctor told Link that, at twenty-nine weeks, she had been the second most premature child to survive in his time there. Link couldn’t hold all the information about the nervous system and possible deafness; he only heard that his daughter had beaten all the odds.

  When he reached Ursula’s apartment, he was riotous with the good news. Ursula had been up all night cleaning. She said that she was going back to work, and she wouldn’t need his help with the rent anymore.

  “Ursula—she’s going to do it. She’s a tough little thing, that kid.”

  Ursula didn’t seem to hear him. She went over to the closet to organize her clothes, then she stood in front of a mirror trying on earrings. Link hovered in the center of the dim room while she walked back and forth around him, saying something about the interview just being a “technicality,” that the boss knew her well and had promised her the job.

  Link said, “Ursula! I want to name her!”

  Clasping an earring, she tilted her head, as if there were water in her ear. She smiled at him, sadly, like the butt of a cruel joke, and he realized that she had not even considered the possibility of her baby surviving.

  “After my mother,” Link said.

  “What are you doing anyway?” she asked. “Where is this money even coming from?”

  “Lydia Jane. You never met my mother. She died when I was about twenty-three. My father died when I was twelve. Just worked to death. Mean as hell, and he died young, and they just worked and worked until they broke in half. Never had a second of fun. Never had a nice day in their lives. My old man was the sourest, bitterest man you ever met. Beat the shit out of my mom, day and night. Tore into me, too. And all the kids hated his guts and used to plot to poison him at night. But I was his favorite, I think. And I was the only one who got upset at the funeral. Cried like a pussy. And you know what? All my brothers kicked my ass for that. Never let me live it down. Don’t know where they are now, bunch of assholes. You never knew a thing about my family, I don’t think. Shit, she’s going to live, Ursula. The little girl, Lydia—Lydia’s her name, and they said she was the second toughest baby they ever saw.”

  Ursula was rubbing her temples.

  He had never thought two people could be so far away in the same small room. She looked up at him finally, her face abstracted as if she were listening to another voice in her ears, and she said, “Well, what do you know? I guess it’s a miracle.”

  four

  After waiting almost half an hour in an access parking spot behind the seafood restaurant, Link was about to step out and comb the beaches for his daughter when he saw her tall ragged figure climbing up the large rocks along the shore. She was barefoot and carried a backpack that kept sagging off her thin shoulder. He rolled down his window and waved his arm, whistling to her, but she didn’t seem to remember why she was waiting. He could tell from her listless walk that she was beginning to crash; her shadow drifted toward him, wavering, as if on the deck of a ship. Her arms hung limply at her sides and the cuffs of an enormous sweatshirt drooped over her hands.

  The passenger door didn’t open from the outside, so Link leaned across the car to let her in as she staggered backward a few steps. She seemed confused about her own actions, and when she noticed the opened door, she gave him the finger, backtracking, and said, “Oh no, no, no. Fuck you, dog.”

  “Lydia, it’s me. It’s your father. Sit down right here. You’re okay.”

  At first she made an exaggerated, childlike frown, then her eyes trailed away and she nodded, seeming to remember her phone call as if it had happened years ago. She glanced at him for just an instant, but Link could tell, from the sudden drop of her mouth, that she didn’t recognize him easily. She plopped into the seat and wiped her nose on her sleeve, making the same high-pitched laugh again. T
hen she looked ahead through his cracked and bug-stained windshield, stewing in the long silence.

  He could smell the meth in her pores—that harsh, chemical stench. She had blood on her sweatshirt sleeves, cuts on her feet, and she seemed to have no energy left in her body beyond her shivering hands and chattering jaw. However much she could comprehend of the moment, Link knew, had to do with how many days it had been since she’d slept; and from the hollow look of her bluish, pallid skin with red pimples, a sore on her neck, sweat in her hair, and chapped nostrils—she’d hit the end of a long binge and was now accelerating downhill. She sank into the seat as if she intended to live there forever. She sniffled and whispered, with a hoarse voice: “Every time somebody looks at me, it gets colder.”

  “I’ll turn on the heat.”

  She jolted, as if surprised by his voice. “You can’t talk to me like that. I want you to know, right off. I’m not going to put up with it. Ground rules.” She pointed at him but seemed to have no idea who he was. “I’m not going to sit here and be treated like shit for the rest of my life. I mean it. You can’t expect to treat a person like this and have them just smile, okay. Because I’m a human being—and I have self-respect. I have self-respect. I’m a fucking educated person and I’m not going to just sit around and have people dump on me.”

  “Okay, kid. Fair enough.”

  Her face clenched up and she cried for a moment, a passing cloudburst, and she pleaded to the windshield, “What did I ever fucking do to anybody in the world to deserve this shit? I swear to God—I didn’t do anything.”

  “Nope, you didn’t do anything. Let’s just go on ahead and close that door.”

  She didn’t hear him, so he walked around to her side, listening to her continue, “. . . and it was that bald Uncle Fester asshole—he was going to kill me, because I’m not stupid, and I may be a lot of things. . . .” He closed the door carefully beside her.