Blood Father

by Peter Craig

  Hardy really wanted to ruin the husband, and he started to seem crazy, staring off into space and talking about how the guy had stolen Ursula from them; how he was a rich thief, and that he stole everything he ever had. He said that the Jews had been kicked out of every decent country in the world. This was how they infiltrated, he said. They married good Catholic girls like Ursula, and had half-breed children. He was the devil in that house—and they had to get him.

  Link was exasperated with this line of reasoning, and replied, “Now don’t start getting all religious and political about it, Hardy—because we don’t even know the guy. And I don’t even know which guy you’re talking about.”

  “I loved her so fucking much, man.”

  He started crying again as he said this, and Link had the guilty sense that this poor loser had cared a lot more about Ursula than he ever had. But Link just said, “You keep crying like this and I’m going to have to kill you right now.”

  “We’ll ride out there, you and me—and we’ll tear the place up,” said Hardy. “Torch through that house. Teach them both some respect. And when we’re finished, she won’t even challenge you again. Come on, Link. You let her punk you, man. She made a fool out of you. We can do this. You’ll go get your daughter back. Take her someplace, don’t ever look back.”

  Link thought for a long time, and imagined himself living out of motel rooms, town to town, trying to take care of that little girl. Seedy dives would fill up with plastic ponies, dolls and coloring books; and he could head north, across the border, eventually take up with friends in Vancouver. It wasn’t any kind of life for a kid—but it couldn’t be worse than the life she had now: She’d never have an ounce of freedom; she’d have her whole life written for her on the back of a cotillion program, from ballet lessons to rich prep schools, graduating from a childhood of antipanic medication to an adolescence full of vigorous cokeheads. Link pictured all the Hell’s Angels’ kids at campsites and clubhouses, dashing around with runny noses and stained shirts. How could God even sort out which life was better than another? All he knew for sure was that he loved the little girl, and that her mother was a bitch.

  “All right, Hardy. We’re going.”

  They were out of cash, so they siphoned gas and headed west, and Hardy rode harder and faster than Link had ever seen. Somewhere just past the state line, weaving in and out of weekend traffic at ninety, Link began to perceive his situation more clearly in the rush of passing taillights. What the hell were they doing? Were they honestly going to ride back to L.A. and beat up Ursula’s old man, and grab his daughter and ride off into the sunset like mechanized cowboys?

  He thought of the nurse, the family court judge, and, for a while, he even thought of his mother and how she used to berate him for his muddled decision making. As a kid, he broke windows and shot pellets at the neighbor’s laundry. He liked to set fires in Dumpsters, and once he had thrown a rock at a motorcycle cop. He broke into houses, he hot-wired cars. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the rules; he was more acutely aware of the law than the kids who followed it. It was as if he only knew himself in the face of some self-created danger, and he only liked himself when he was shrugging off the consequences. He was a tough fucker, and if you questioned him at nine years old, he’d pop you in the mouth. There was a kind of dignity in it—a refusal to budge; and he remembered how his mother would cry, and his father would strap him with the belt, pausing, giving him a wink, as if his punishment was less for any crime than for simply making his mother unhappy.

  He remembered how guilty he felt when his father died and he was having such a good time with all the cousins he had never met. What a blast it had been to have them all playing those sinister games, hiding the retainer of one girl down under the porch, stripping off each other’s fancy clothes, playing hide-and-seek around the yard. He’d cried during the burial, but he’d plundered the coatroom during the wake. Then Link remembered how his mother had cried as if assaulted, so angry at all these children who refused to share the burden, and she shouted at them that Link’s father wasn’t coming back to whip them senseless. And it seemed like the whole rest of his life had been a search for that phantom beating. He remembered it all so clearly as he rode through traffic uphill, over the desert and past the looming brush and saguaro. He didn’t want to carry out this midnight plan. He tried to catch up to Hardy, who was cutting right in front of cars. Finally, when they could occupy both lanes, Link hovered alongside his partner and yelled over the growl and the gusts: “Pull over.”

  Hardy veered off the freeway and stopped along an empty road. Link told him, “Buddy, we’re not doing this. Let’s go back to Vegas and get some tail.”

  “You go back,” said Hardy. “I know where she lives. You want to bitch up on me, go ahead.”

  Hardy sped back onto the highway, and Link couldn’t believe the little bastard. He was having some kind of psychotic episode. He’d snapped. So Link went after him, trying to catch him among the cars, speeding right up next to him and throwing pennies at him across the rushing wind. Hardy was cursing from his bike, and finally pulled off the road again, up into the desert foothills, winding a long way from the freeway before stepping off beside a water relay station along the aqueduct.

  Hardy said, “I’ve fucking had it. Right now. You and me, Link. You and me!”

  “You and me what, you little shit?”

  “You been fucking with me since I was seventeen years old, and I’ve had enough. I love that woman—I loved that woman since the first time I ever saw her—”

  This speech embarrassed Link. In the edges of a broth-colored light, he noticed that Hardy had a long blade dangling out of his sleeve.

  “Hardy—this is all bullshit. Stop this. You and I are friends, and I’m sorry I dump on you. It’s just you’re such a cute little cocksucker.”

  “You say whatever you want, Link—because I see the picture all real clear now. You’re a manipulator. You’ve been keeping me down all my life.”

  “Listen, Hardy—I got to level with you about something. I was supposed to kill you about two or three days ago.”

  Link started to walk over, thinking he would just put his arm around the kid and calm him down, like always, but Hardy turned and stabbed him in the gut.

  Crisp and jagged, the blade sunk down into his abdomen. He didn’t feel pain right away, though he could tell the damage by how quickly the blood saturated his shirt and his pants; but he felt a deep and blinding surge of disgust, as if the betrayal itself had reached down deeper.

  Link took off his chain belt and tried to see the wound. Hardy came at him again, lunging ahead, grunting and growling like a cornered dog that finally panics. Link whipped the chain across his face to keep him away. It broke the skin on Hardy’s cheek, and the pain riled him further. He started shouting and pointing at Link and accusing him of lying. Trying to stop up the blood coming from his belt line, Link looked up and added, “I can’t believe how stupid you are, Hardy. After every fucking thing I ever did for you.”

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  Link stood up with his back against the high fence along the aqueduct, lit by a distant spotlight. Hardy rushed at him and Link whipped the chain again, catching him on the hand. When Hardy flinched backward and dropped the knife, Link wrapped the chain around his fist. He called out his name, and Hardy looked right up at him. Then Link connected a punch so solidly into Hardy’s temple that the kid sank right down into the dirt, holding his head around both ears. Methodically, Link dragged him away from the knife, a lumbering giant, moving slowly in the bleak light. As if by rote, a show of strength, Link stomped on his struggling hands. Concentrating more with each brutal and deliberate move, Link said, “You see, you dumb motherfucker. You see what you just did! You don’t want this shit.”

  Hardy didn’t speak, but roiled in the gravel; so Link kicked him a few more times, and shouted, “I’m dying here, you little traitor. You got me in the fucking kidney, I think. I’m b
leeding all over.” He stomped Hardy’s ribs, feeling them give way like the wooden keel of an old canoe; he picked up his limp body, propped him against the fence, and busted the chain across his face. Just talking to himself and grunting, as if the procedure were now more irritating than violent, Link picked Hardy up and threw him down headfirst; then he twisted Hardy’s legs, curled them upward in the air, and sat on them with all his weight, bending the kid’s spine with a move called a Russian omelet. There came a loud crack, as if a sapling had broken in half. When Hardy collapsed into a lump, Link kept on kicking him and heaving him around the dirt road without a thought.

  A while later, it occurred to him that Hardy hadn’t moved in a long time.

  Then Link sat down and felt the anger leave him as if through the open wound; the last sparks of hatred and vengeance seemed dampened by a grim feeling of worthlessness.

  Twenty minutes later, Link was dizzy, dragging Hardy’s dead body toward the aqueduct. He found a place where coyotes had tunneled under the fence, and he tried to pry up the rest of the wire, cutting his hands. Once he had a small, workable space, he shoved the body through to the other side, but he got stuck trying to wiggle through after it, and lay stranded, feeling the throbbing pain and blood loss. Finally, caught halfway under a crooked fence, Link passed out.

  He woke with police cars around him, wire cutters clipping him free and paramedics already stripping his shirt around the gash. Someone was reading him his rights in the darkness while a few ranchers stood by.

  As they placed him on a gurney and raised him back into the ambulance, Link said, “Dumb son of a bitch. Died with his boots on.”

  For eleven years Link kept his mouth shut.

  Preacher never faced charges stemming from either Link’s arrest or Hardy’s death. The theory in the courtroom was that the fight was entirely over Ursula, which Link thought might as well have been the case. He was less ashamed of this as a motive. Although his defense lawyer seemed mostly concerned with developing any courtroom theory that covered Preacher, he was either so incompetent or so indifferent that he never managed to prove that Hardy had stabbed Link first. Link was in a fatalistic depression so deep that he stopped caring. When he testified on his own behalf, he convinced the jury that he was nothing more than a grave and sullen ape. He was convicted of aggravated second-degree manslaughter, and because of his previous record he was sentenced to fifteen years with the possibility of parole in eight. This was meaningless arithmetic to Link.

  A year later, he killed a man at the RPC in Chino and got away with it. It felt easy now—part of living. He was without remorse for the job on the inside, because he no longer thought life was worth more than a few tough deals or bad decisions. He had heard about how long it took to fry somebody on the electric chair, how it surprised onlookers that an average man was so hard to kill. But nobody was hard to kill. You could have had a convict do the same job with one flick of the wrist. Life stopped being a miracle on the inside. As a prisoner, he learned to see it as a narrow path between the plans and accidents of other men. A Hell’s Angel convicted of killing a brother, he was without support, and he knew that he survived only because he was lucky and quiet and—eventually—because he could make pictures under the topmost shroud of skin.

  Two years later, transferred, he received his first letter from Lydia, then in the third grade. Amid a tumble of breathless descriptions of her life, from the classroom where she wasn’t paying attention, to her friends, to her clothes, to her problems with her mother, she wrote, “I know that deep down you are a good person.” Reading this, it was the first time that he’d been afraid in years. He desperately didn’t want his little girl to discover that he was as ugly as anything she could imagine.

  This correspondence over the years was his rehabilitation, for he stopped drugging on the inside, he got a job, he read, he learned his skills—not because he believed in his own redemption, but because he wanted to compose letters that wouldn’t diffuse the girl’s simple belief in the world. He needed to find what was worthwhile about this god-awful planet, if only to have a decent conversation with the kid someday. He wrote back to her, and she confessed things to him in sweeps of childish sentences. Four years later, when he had been reclassified and moved to Calipatria, sharing a cell with Rios, Lydia wrote him a passionate letter about how much she hated her social studies teacher. The woman humiliated her, made her stand up in the front of class every day and read her homework out loud; required her mother to sign everything she did; assigned extra projects; made her stay in for recess.

  Link tossed the letter across his cell to Rios, and asked, laughing quietly, “What can we do about a Mrs. Wooten? Marlboro School for Girls.”

  Even under the best circumstances, prisoners live at a different speed than those on the outside, as if on a distant planet with a wider orbit. It was nearly impossible for Link to keep up with the pace at which the world changed. Eight and a half years felt like freezing into a glacier, suspended animation, only to someday step out into an uneasy future of Internet porno and two-buck-a-gallon gasoline. But it was worse for him than most convicts, because he went so long without visitors, because for so many years he’d felt excommunicated by his friends, abandoned by his family, and betrayed by Preacher. At one point, he went a stretch of two years at Calipatria without a single visit, only his daughter’s inconstant letters.

  Arturo Rios used to rag on him about it. Rios himself had a huge extended family, and every weekend he saw his wife and children, who came with care packages, gossip, and bribes for the COs. All over the state, during a federal racketeering case against the Mexican Mafia, guards were cracking down on privileges, but Link couldn’t tell from Rios, who doled out a secret fortune each month for conjugal visits. He had fathered his two youngest kids behind bars. Whenever the older ones acted up—smoked, drank, or sassed their mother—they’d wind up in the visiting room for a lecture. Depending on the political climate with the guards, Rios would sit behind glass and dress them down on the phone, or he’d meet them in a private attorney’s room and give them a thrashing with a guard’s belt. He would return to the cell, turning gloomy, and Link knew that he missed the day-to-day struggles too much to be compensated by a ceremonial fatherhood. He was the kind of man who loved his children most when disciplining them.

  Sometimes Link would try to strike back at Rios, saying that of course he had tons of visits, because he had a family of thousands like every other spic. How many junk cars did they need to get here?

  Rios said that Link was just jealous because he was a big, ugly peckerwood who scared all the women away.

  Link replied that Mexicans stole American jobs. Rios said that Americans stole America. Besides, Mexicans took jobs because white people were soft.

  Link said the only place a Mex could conceivably beat a white guy was in the lighter weight divisions of boxing. He didn’t want to hear about how California was stolen, because Mexicans stole everything that wasn’t tied down.

  Rios said that America couldn’t function without Latino immigrants; they were the only thing that made the country float in the post-slavery era.

  Rios had done too much time: Arguing with him was like getting smothered to death in a prison library. He railed on the Aryan Brotherhood, and said that anybody who worshipped European history was a fool, because the only true talent of the Anglo-Saxons was turning other races against each other. American history was an experiment in getting the poor stupid white people to defend the rich stupid white people. The middle class was nothing but a new moat around the castle, filled with managers, cops, dutiful Protestants, and a few brawling rednecks like Link.

  He claimed that he respected the Hell’s Angels but thought that they were suckers for still calling themselves patriots, for letting all the white-power bullshit creep in with each new wave of embittered losers. White people had never fought a fair battle once in their history; they kicked the rest of the world in the balls; sucker punched them in the dar
k. They had taken America with smallpox and gunpowder and wave after wave of armed, Puritan assholes, bribing and rat-fucking the Indians westward, or riding train tracks laid down by the Chinese (“And Irish!” shouted Link), and it didn’t matter if you were country club or white trash, you bought into the same bullshit—that the danger bubbled up from the classes below, stirred by the newest wave from somewhere else.

  Link replied that Mexicans smelled bad.

  “Politics,” said Rios, “life is politics,” and he meant two things at once. In a high-tech prison like Calipatria, with twenty-three-hour lockdowns, where most days seemed like a progression of shadows and kited messages, conversations through the walls and the ventilation shafts, an hour grimacing at the sunlight in shackles, walking between layers of barbed wire and under towers with poised rifles, seeing only the dead gulls that had flown into the electric fences—survival was an exhausting political campaign. Maybe, Link thought, this was why so many lifers talked like they were campaigning for office. After all, a convict’s descent matched, inversely, the rise of any congressman, from the college of the county lockup, wrangling over scrip and fighting for recreation, to the law school of the RPC, where a prisoner joined his party—the Aryan Brotherhood, La Eme, La Efe, the Black Gangster Disciples—and began making contacts and clawing his way up the ranks with shivs and contraband.

  Link’s unexpected loyalty to his cell mate, his refusal to become an informant for the guards, who were looking for ways to erode the power of La Eme—all of it had hurt his political standing with the authorities over the years. In the super-maxes like Calipatria, the corrections officers had their own gang—White Lightning—gaining numbers, and they tried to control every green light on a government snitch, every piece of gossip through the pipes, every rumble between rival cliques. The more separate Link felt from the Aryan Brotherhood, the more he became paranoid that the guards were intercepting his daughter’s letters. His mail had arrived opened for a few weeks, until, one day, the flow stopped entirely.