by Peter Craig
“Kirby,” said Link, “I want you to be careful, buddy. I may be in some deep shit down here, and somehow, these motherfuckers know where we’re going. Only thing I can think of, maybe somebody went through my shop, found business files or something.”
“Okay, John,” said Kirby, sounding beleaguered on the other end. “But listen, you got to trust me. You got to ask me for help here, and be straight with me. You trying to get this kid across the border or what?”
“I don’t know yet, man. I’m looking for a guy down here who owes me. Old lunatic I told you about—Preacher Harris.”
“And you think he’s going to be a help, after all you been through with that.”
“I got no choice, Kirby. Listen, I got to go. This little girl is like a cat in heat, and she’s already got a crowd around her. I’ll call you again, man.”
When he returned, Lydia had a napkin with writing on it, and she crumpled it up and stuffed it into her bra under the tank top. Link sat down beside her and asked for a cup of coffee. She was eating the remainder of her pretzels, and she chewed for a while in silence. He could feel how she kept looking up to study his profile, and finally she asked, “Do you want to hear a joke I know about a Hell’s Angel?”
“Is it funny?”
“No.”
“All right. Let’s hear it.”
With a pretzel still in her mouth, she said, “So there’s this flea, okay. Spent his whole life living on dogs, having an easy life, and one day, he jumps into the mustache of a Hell’s Angel. An hour later, he’s getting thrown around by the wind. He’s hanging on for his life. He’s freezing to death at night, and he’s getting punched by big fists, and he’s getting battered by hail and rain and dust all day. So this flea’s like: ‘I’m getting out of this guy’s mustache. This sucks.’ They get to a bar, and the flea jumps out, and, first chance he gets, he goes right up a woman’s skirt. Gets between her legs and says—‘Now that’s more like it.’ And he’s so tired, he just settles in and goes to sleep.”
Everyone else in the bar was listening.
“A couple of hours later,” she said, “the flea wakes up, and he’s getting pelted by wind and rain and dust again, he’s going a hundred miles an hour—and he says, ‘Oh no—I’m back in the Hell’s Angel’s mustache!’”
All around the bar, the men were clapping and laughing, harder than Link believed was natural; but he only watched his daughter’s face blush. She looked up at him finally with a tight smile on her mouth and said, “We need to talk about something. Seriously.”
She grabbed his forearm and led him to a booth between the jukebox and a dartboard, and she moved with such patronizing seriousness that Link expected her to break the news to him about some feminine product she needed to buy. The jukebox hit on a random Allman Brothers song, and Lydia leaned across the table and yelled the speech into his ear. “Listen, all night and all morning I’ve been thinking about this, okay—so just hear me out. I have a workable plan here. Now, I know it’s a crime not to report a crime. Right? And I know you’ve been harboring me, whatever that means. And I know you don’t have visitation rights and any of that other stuff—so there are some parole violations. But, really, other than that—what have you done wrong? Nothing.”
“Kid, it doesn’t work like that. You help somebody get away with something, and that’s a serious crime.”
“But, see, you could pretend that you didn’t know. You could say that I just showed up and we just hung out for a couple of days. Like, father-daughter shit.”
Link just stared at her for a while.
“My point is, you could go back. You might not have to do any more time, and you could even cooperate with the cops—because I’m going to be long gone. I figure from here—I just head west to Otay, and slip across the border. Nobody ever sees me again. I speak Spanish. You heard me. I’m like fluent almost.”
He waited a long time, then replied, “You’re just so goddamn bubbly sometimes, ain’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—what the fuck are you talking about? A pretty little white chick with no money in her pocket, wandering all by herself in Mexico. That’s a hell of a plan, Lydia.”
“You don’t think I can take care of myself?”
“Not even in this dump here—let alone in Guadalajara or some big turd factory down there. I don’t think you could get across the border. And then if you did, you’d be turning tricks by the end of the week.”
“That’s like the most insulting thing anybody has ever said to me.”
“Well, how else are you going to make any money?”
“I could go down to Guatemala where they have those schools. And I could teach English to little kids.”
“You don’t hardly speak English. What are you going to teach them—jokes about eating pussy? The history of dirty words? You dropped out of high school.”
“Oh, and people down there are going to ask for a diploma. Yeah, right.”
“They sure as shit ain’t going to hire a weird drifter off the street.”
“So that’s what I am to you, huh. I’m a weird drifter. I have no abilities or skills whatsoever? I’m just a complete loser.”
“Why don’t you settle down and be realistic. You screwed up bad, and you need to get your head out of the clouds.”
“I can do millions of things, Dad. I’m not useless, okay. Just because you don’t know me—just because you can’t fucking read, doesn’t mean I don’t have any, like, marketable skills.”
“Fine. Tell me what you can do. Tell me what you think somebody is going to pay you for.”
“I speak Spanish.”
“Other than that. About a billion people speak Spanish—so you ain’t on the cutting edge there.”
“I’m a good artist. I have a good eye for design, and stuff like that.”
“Well, there you go. We’re all dying for more of those people.”
She took a deep, flustered breath and said, “I’m smart.”
“No, you’re not.”
She was so angry she had to look away at a neon clock on the wall.
Link added, “Besides, being smart isn’t a skill. It’s just some shit that annoys everybody else.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “You’re such a—”
“Look at this, Lydia. You’re already panicked. You’re going to cry right here. How the hell you going to sell yourself out there in the big bad world if you can’t even tell me what you’re good for?”
“Fuck you,” she shouted. “I can play the clarinet.”
“And I’m sure there’s an opening with the Tijuana symphony.”
“Running—middle-distance—I was on the track team in tenth grade and I almost went to city in the eight-hundred. Have you ever run eight hundred meters?”
“I never ran eight meters.”
“I know a lot about politics—and activism. You know, political science. How corporations screw people, and how messed up things are with the World Bank and third world debt.”
“So you’re good at complaining.”
“I’m friendly. I’m a nice person. I’m motherfucking personable. People enjoy my company when they’re not asshole biker ex-con cocksuckers who have absolutely no reason to live.”
“Uh-huh. So what job is that?”
She threw her hands up and slapped them down onto the table. “I don’t know. Retail? I give up, Dad.” Tears were welling up in her eyes, and her bottom lip was twitching. “I’m completely useless. Nice fucking inspiration, great work. So you just go home to your tattoos of goblins and genies and shit. And just leave me here to do whatever—give hand jobs for a living.”
She started crying violently in the booth, pressing her hands to her face. Link reached across the booth to touch her arm and she flinched away from him.
“I was trying to say it was a bad plan. I wasn’t trying to say you were useless.”
Into her cupped palms, she said, “Why are you still here? Just go
away. I don’t want to look at you anymore.”
He waited as she tried to recover herself. Her suffering only seemed to intensify, and she was moaning and throwing her head back as if every new thought cut her more deeply than the last. She said, “I’m a fucking murderer.”
“All right,” said Link, nervously scanning the men at the bar. They were all watching, sitting forward on their stools now as if mustering energy for a fight.
“I’m not going to make it, am I?” she said. “This is never going to go away. This fucking feeling is never going to go away.”
“No,” he said. “Probably not.”
“And they’re going to torture me, Dad.”
“Shhhh, these guys are itching for trouble over here.”
She cleared the hair from her face, and her eyes were a brighter shade of blue, as if rinsed by a passing storm. She said, “Dad? Will you kill me?”
He turned to her suddenly, frowning. “Lydia, sweetheart. Settle down.”
“I mean it. When they get close to me—the cops or these guys—and they’re going to—will you just kill me? Please.”
“No,” he said. “No, you idiot. What kind of stupid idea is that? Look, kid, we can’t think about next year or the year after that. We’re not there yet. Understand? We got to go one day, one hour, one minute at a time. We got to get enough cash to stay afloat, hide you for a little while. You need to get cleaned up. Get the cobwebs out of your head. Sleep, eat better. You can’t make a plan while you’re running full-speed. I’m an old loser, I agree, but I know about having the shit fall on you. And I’m here, and I’m committed, and I’m trying my ass off not to go over there and down a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. You say you can’t turn yourself in for this—and I believe you. After what I saw from those punks up at my shop, and what I heard today, I think you may be right. But people get caught because they’re stupid. And I’m not going to let you be this stupid.”
“I’m sorry I ruined your life.”
“I didn’t have anything left to ruin, kid. I’m having the motherfucking time of my life. I haven’t had this much fun since I was fifteen and I stole a car and tried to drive to Miami Beach. This is a party to a dirtbag like me. So shut up and let me try to help you. I know a crazy old man who used to have a lot of money, and he lives somewhere out in the middle of nowhere around here. So if we can find him—”
Lydia pulled the napkin out from her bra, unfolded it, and handed it to him. It was a map drawn in crooked intersecting lines, with smudged handwriting that gave directions to Preacher’s ranch up in the hills.
Link shook his head, started laughing, and said, “There’s one thing you got, kid. One definite skill. You do know how to charm the devil.”
fourteen
Following the bleeding crisscross of lines on the napkin map, hitching rides on trucks and horse trailers, eastward toward the mountains and down dirt roads, Link and Lydia arrived at the gate of a vast ranch in the foothills. They were sunburned and exhausted. It was the hour when their shadows slanted far ahead of them along the path. There was no sign or marking on the wooden gate. The ranch burrowed into a canyon between scrubby hills, sprawling across acres of brush and greasewood trees that lived along the shallow path of a dried-up stream. Link and Lydia descended the road, past bottles and broken glass along the creek bed, and, farther along, circles of scorched rocks, oil drums, and lawn furniture sunken into the silt and pebbles, as if a party had been wiped out suddenly by a flash flood. Once they had hiked completely into the shadows, they passed a breeding ground for flies.
They began uphill, swatting at the air, through a clearing and into a break of slanted afternoon light. A gathering of shanties, teepees, and lean-tos surrounded a steel-and-concrete hangar, which towered over the scrap houses like an altar. Her father told her that this land had also once belonged to the military, and it seemed that a hamlet had formed over a few generations of squatting. One ring, farther back, was of small adobe houses with open windows and blankets over the doors; and another, closer to the hangar, was of shingled boxes with trapdoor windows. As they neared the center, a few chickens scampering across their trail, Lydia saw a woman on a lounge chair, sunbathing in a bikini, with reflectors under her chin. Her body was so tanned and leathery that Lydia was startled when she opened her eyes. The woman said, “Back by popular demand.”
She had sunken cheeks, and her mouth didn’t seem to sit right on her face—maybe from a bad toothache or a long history of sarcasm. When she stood, she was a skeleton except for her garishly fake breasts, which seemed to Lydia like a curse—two young and perfect boulders that this gaunt body was forced to forever trundle uphill. She shielded her eyes from the sun and continued, “It’s the missing Link. I’m speechless. Can’t believe they ever let you out.”
“Cherise, this is my daughter. Lydia.”
The woman placed her hands on Lydia’s shoulders, peered into her eyes, and said, “Wow. It was just yesterday, wasn’t it? Well, go on inside and say hello to the dinosaur. Don’t get lost in there.”
They moved into a front section of the hangar, the size of a mechanic’s garage, with bikes under a tarp and a vast collection of military souvenirs, ranging from antique flintlock rifles mounted on the walls to entire tables full of fragmentation grenades, field mines, fuses, and trip wires. Crossing the floor were bunching arteries of extension cords, leading into a hallway made from unfinished drywall. Beyond this entry area, the other three-quarters of the hangar had been broken into cubicles by makeshift walls and cork partitions. Link and Lydia followed the sound of typing on a computer, passing under hanging Indian beads and tapestries, until they finally emerged into an office. At a steel desk with an impressive arrangement of computer equipment there sat the oldest-looking man that Lydia had ever seen. His shaggy eyebrows drooped like hoarfrost, and the white stubble of his beard grew out over a permanent sunburn. He perched at his high-tech console, rapt at the computer screen, reflections of text scrolling up his narrow glasses.
“I expected you a couple years ago,” he said, without looking away from the screen. “Hold on—I need to finish my thought.”
He typed only a few more letters, then stood, formally shaking her father’s hand. As if her father had never been away at all, Preacher immediately began explaining that he administered his own Web site for military collectibles, and that he had recently begun “blogging.” It had increased traffic at his site threefold, though he faced the constant threat of losing his domain, particularly because of the advice about grow rooms and hydroponic marijuana.
Lydia thought there was a mad-scientist quality to him, since he hardly seemed to notice the people he addressed, so long as they were willing to walk with him along his vast laboratory of experiments. He gave them the tour of his indoor village, slot to slot through the fabricated walls and alleys, until the structure seemed to Lydia like a maze within a giant pinball machine. He had a giant aluminum shed in the back that he described as his security vault. He had a room filled with uniforms from a dozen wars: brownshirts, Napoleonic epaulettes, ANZAC fatigues, a Confederate officer’s coat, an RAF jumpsuit. There didn’t seem to be much distinction made between eras or ideologies. The Nazis hung alongside the Vietcong; World War I boots propped up a musket. The clutter was so complete that Lydia imagined this room as the backstage wardrobe for the entire history of human conflict.
Her father interrupted to say, “I want to talk to you about our old deal.”
The old man was either growing deaf or had selective hearing, for he led them onward to his arsenal room, where he spent a long time detailing all of the unexploded ordnance he had from six different wars and police actions. He became suddenly grandfatherly and asked Link if he remembered the trips out to the Mojave. Before Link could answer, he told stories about dropping grenades down rabbit holes and setting up trip wires that they detonated with remote-controlled cars. He was a man in his heavily armed dotage, and because there was something so nervous and unfulfilled
about him, Lydia began to view him as if he too were an antique booby trap that had never exploded.
Link finally stopped walking alongside him and called ahead through a hallway of particleboard: “I want her back, Preacher. And I want to talk about the money.”
“Which money is that?”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t remember—you senile son of a bitch. Because I kept my mouth shut for a long time.”
Preacher returned and put his hand affectionately on her father’s shoulder, and with an abstraction in his eyes as if he couldn’t focus on anything closer than the horizon, he said, “Yes, you did. You were always the quiet one.”
“I don’t ask you for anything more than what you owe me.”
Preacher stared at Lydia inquisitively, a souvenir from a war he couldn’t recall. He kept his eyes on her while he spoke to her father: “Business isn’t so good at the moment, brother. Let me go through the books, see what I can do. The boys will come by later, you can catch up. Just relax, have a good time. You’re welcome to stay here long as you like. But, you got to understand, I can’t just scrape up money the way I used to. I used to be able to find twenty thousand lying around the house—but it’s not like that nowadays. Some of my contacts got busted up in Orange County, and that was the Alamo, John. That was the last holdout. The golden days are over. Ninety-three. In ninety-three, we lost. You were lucky you missed it.”
Two hours later, Lydia sat outside with her father on vinyl chairs as dusk came over the bare hills. Just past sundown, choppers began rumbling up the dirt road. They were giant machines, and the men who rose off them, with heavy earthbound bodies in leather vests, seemed to have a tough time readjusting to the ground. In the last light, she watched her father’s reunion amid opening beers and throttling bikes. The men were either obese or rail thin, as if some had absorbed the years and others had been eroded by them. The women were loud and brassy and had surprisingly goofy laughs. When some danced around a portable tape deck, Lydia had a hard time believing that anyone could be threatening with such a poor sense of rhythm.