Blood Father

by Peter Craig

  Her father roamed around greeting the bikes before he found their owners. Some men were wildly enthusiastic about seeing him again; they hit his shoulders and chest in a way that, to Lydia, seemed too hard to be friendly. One man, with shiny fake teeth, long gray hair, and a tattoo of a dragon eating its own tail, shouted, “This motherfucker had the stomach of a monster. He could drink for two weeks straight and still walk a straight line. Look at yourself, old man!”

  What surprised Lydia was that her father was so reserved—almost bashful—during these loud exchanges. He nodded and recited their names quietly: Count, Sheila, Cask, McCoy. He seemed to abandon himself to a gauntlet of violent greetings as they tackled him and pounded on him; and, the longer he stayed quiet, the more he loomed as a silent, mysterious shadow. The sight of this made Lydia feel tender toward him, for he endured the play fighting and facetious headlocks, even though he was irritated and sober; and she saw him as a large, tired dog who allowed a rowdy gang of children to leap onto his back and pull on his ears.

  He introduced Lydia as his daughter, and everyone howled and talked over each other. She heard stories about herself as a baby. Someone had bought diapers for her when Link had planned to kidnap her from her bedroom window, and someone else had joined Link and Lydia at a Baskin-Robbins. “You had that green kind of ice cream—like turtle shit!” Lydia didn’t remember any of these moments, and she had a funny sense that she had once known her father in another life, somewhere in the long blackout before the age of eight. The man with the dragon tattoo described how everyone had expected her to die as an infant, and Lydia replied that she knew this story. Her mother talked about it as if it were the great trial of her life. But Lydia hadn’t known that her father was there.

  Her father kept pacing back and forth from the hangar, checking on her. She asked him if she could have a beer. In a grumpy voice, he said, “Can I?”

  “Can you?” asked Lydia.

  “If you have one,” he said. “The dam breaks and I’m having fifty.”

  “That’s a lot of pressure, Dad. Thanks a lot.”

  All of his old friends booed and hissed at him, calling him a sellout, but Lydia stayed sober, fearing what she might unleash.

  After someone threw a grenade down in the creek bed, Preacher roamed around shouting at the dark figures. The party resumed with more deadhead guitar riffs from the tape player, and soon there were bonfires casting up sparks along the silt. A group of men played horseshoes in the dark, tripping and snickering. There were a surprising number of children running around, crawling in a tree, wrestling in the bushes. One of them was thrilled at the project of throwing old furniture into the rising flames.

  For a long time this seemed to Lydia like a happy band of middle-aged people, with only a few sulking younger men in the packs moving with lowered heads and a more foreboding motion in their shoulders. They revved their engines and shouted everything they said, as if their masculinity were measured in decibels. It was clear to Lydia that these were violent men, all of whom had done time, but they seemed easy and relaxed on this forgotten plot of land, and she stopped feeling nervous. As they became drunk, they talked to her a bit more, joking that she was lucky to have a pretty mother—because her father was “ugly as a warthog.” She said that she thought her father was cute, and they all laughed up at the sky.

  But her easy feeling ended when Preacher came wandering back to her to begin a story in a pushy, stentorian voice. He told her that he knew everything there was to know about her, and that she couldn’t fool him by laughing, smiling, and acting friendly.

  She shrugged at this, completely baffled by the hostility.

  Someone was playing a guitar in the distance, and the smell of a skunk reached her in the breeze. Preacher said, “You kids have so much bullshit in your lives, you don’t recognize real freedom when you see it.”

  Lydia had no idea why he’d decided to attack her all of a sudden, but she nodded politely, as if she agreed with his comment.

  With the slowed pace of a schoolteacher, he explained that this was a party full of “survivors,” and that this ugly patch of desert would remain long after the rest of the country had destroyed itself. He talked for a while about the end of the society, telling her that it was much closer than anyone in her generation realized: They were all too spoiled and preoccupied to see it. It seemed to Lydia that he had taken the usual Hell’s Angels philosophy, a basic rebellion against society, and married it to several different apocalyptic theories. He went on and on with a speech, gathering a crowd of bemused onlookers. He said he was the last true outlaw in America; everyone else had given up or gone soft. America had a way of buying out the subversives, turning them into fashion trends. “It happened with the Angels in the sixties and seventies, and it’s happening with that fucking rap music now.” With a trace of spittle on his lips, he said that the corporations packaged and sold revolutionary poses to little suburban princesses like her.

  The old man seemed to have so much invested in the end of the world, Lydia noticed a manic frustration that it hadn’t yet happened. She figured that doomsday prophets were the world’s most tedious salesmen, since they needed to contend with every new day. The others around Preacher nodded occasionally, as if listening to a radio program in the distance. Their respect for him seemed worn-out, based on a memory. Lydia desperately wanted to escape, and she watched the others at the party, drifting away, back to their jobs and their lives. One man was an Amoco mechanic, another had said that he managed a go-cart track.

  As the store managers and foremen headed off on their choppers, Preacher told her that her eyes were opening and she would never be the same again. Just by coming here, she had finally stepped out of the fantasy of her everyday life.

  “Thank you,” said Lydia. “I’m going to go find my father.”

  Stifling a laugh, she ran back to the hangar.

  There, on the wide-open floor, her father was polishing his old chopped Harley. She waited by the door, and he didn’t see her. He had a can of compressed air, and he was spraying out dust from around a v-shaped engine, then kneeling down with a rag and gumming out dirt. From thirty feet away, she could feel his quiet concentration, more intense than when she had seen him tattooing. Something about her father was so solitary, like a boy happy to play by himself in his room. After all the proselytizing outside, she thought for the first time that her father had a secret and silent wisdom about him.

  She didn’t interrupt. She walked across the floor and sat down by the far wall. When he saw her, the purposeful look on his face didn’t change. He said, “How are you holding up out there with those maniacs?”

  “I think I was supposed to prove some kind of point to the crypt master.”

  “That’s what crank does to your brain. That ought to scare some sense into you.”

  He sprayed something onto the tailpipe and began working it with a rag.

  “Old guy’s got a lot of followers.”

  “Yeah, you start young,” said her father. “Make sure everybody gets dumber every year with you. You all go down together.”

  “Are you dumber than you used to be?”

  He waited a long time and said, “I think I was so dumb when I started, I didn’t have anywhere to fall.”

  She laughed at this, echoing in the warehouse, and he looked surprised by her tickled response. He sat down on the floor across from her, draping the rag over his jeans. “I couldn’t get in touch with the sponsor tonight. His cell phone died on him, I guess.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m keeping busy. But I called information, called a neighbor—woman I did a tattoo on a little while back.”

  “Your girlfriend?”

  “Stop that shit. No. I asked her about my trailer. Police cordoned it off, but a few nights ago, she saw some kids going through it, past the tape. Digging around. These kids—they might have gone through my business files. My addresses. Personal ones too. So we should call everybody, s
oon as we can. That means your mother too. These guys are going to go way past tearing up your little friend’s apartment back there in Hollywood.”

  Lydia nodded solemnly at the ground, then, after a long pause, asked only, “So is that creep going to sell your bike back to you?”

  “He owes me more than that, kid. I’m not going to talk to him about it right now.”

  “No, not right now. I wouldn’t.”

  “You did a nice job out there, Lydia. You’re clear in the eyes, you know. You’ve been drying out a little these past days. It’s hard to know somebody when they’re wired up like a bomb all the time.”

  “What is the war this guy talks about losing all the time? Ninety-three, all of that?”

  “Well, that’s when the ride ended, I guess.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, ask around out there, they’ll tell you the government allied with the Mexican side of the fence, sent our business down south. This shit that you do, that you see everywhere—in every neighborhood—it wasn’t like that when we controlled it. I’m not saying we were better people: We were a bunch of assholes. But we didn’t push. We treated it like a crop, and we tended to it and were patient with it. We sold it in small loads, kept the prices high. We didn’t go to high schools and grade schools. That’s not morality: It’s just economics. Then, in ninety-three, it all changed.”

  “What? NAFTA?”

  “Sort of. Same year—I was on the inside—but a couple of government branches got together and made it impossible to get ephedrine in this country. Or red phosphorus, or any other chemicals. I don’t know if it was a conspiracy, but the Mexican cartels just picked up the trade right away. They had all the supply lines, and they didn’t even need to worry about the Colombians anymore. So you had these assholes from Guadalajara and Tijuana taking over our business. They could get shipments of pure ephedrine straight from China. And when the DEA got down on China, they could get sugar mills in Burma to start making the shit from molasses. They got boatloads of every chemical they needed, and they made speed in super-labs—ten, twenty, fifty times bigger than any stupid biker ever had. Hundreds of peasants cooking the shit for nothing. That’s just a classic business strategy. They could outproduce a guy like Preacher, and they flooded the market. They got kids hooked; they had connections opening up in the Midwest, everywhere. Brought the price down to nothing. You couldn’t cook enough speed to make any real money nowadays. You couldn’t do it. The guys they nailed up in Orange County, they were working with the cartels and the assistant DA, because you need labs like NASA now, and you need intelligence like a small country. It’s not like you can just buy a crate of cold medicine and split off the pseudoephedrine. What little I know about chemistry, it’d take a truckload of chloroform. I heard some of that shit outside just now: This motherfucker ain’t waiting for the end of the world, Lydia—the world already ended. These guys are bitter, because legal or illegal, they feel like Uncle Sam took a good old American drug and handed it over to somebody else.”

  “You feel like that?”

  “Fuck no. We were drug dealers. Boo-hoo. Who the fuck is crying?”

  “So onto the tattoo needle. Right?”

  “Doing American flags,” he said.

  “Land of the free,” said Lydia.

  “Yeah, kid. Love it or leave it.”

  The party was dying down outside with a last flurry of cherry bombs and throttling engines, and as each new wave of choppers trailed down the hills, the crowd thinned until distinct laughs and voices could be heard in the driveway. In an alcove in the hangar, Link had made his daughter a bed on the floor from the pillows off a couch. She curled up and clutched her sweatshirt between her knees. For hours Link kept guard over her as she faded in and out of sleep.

  Link picked up a few coils of her hair and studied them in his palms, black and rich. Outside, the last choppers roared and ground away down the dirt road while Link worried that the sound would wake his daughter. She only flinched, as if from a bad dream. He watched her hands unfold. If she could sleep at least three or four hours, he thought her system would begin to recover its natural rhythm, and he was determined to keep a vigil over her. But he grew drowsy, and closed his eyes, and saw, like a flickering home movie, images of fistfights and unraveling roads. He imagined himself beating her little boyfriend to death with a hammer, until he fell asleep.

  He awakened with something poking his ear.

  The light through the high transoms was a washed-out gray, and he could hear echoing sparrows that had gotten into the hangar. Link glanced up and saw Cherise, dressed in a dirty terry-cloth bathrobe. She nudged a shotgun against the side of his head, a motion less aggressive than curious, as if she were jabbing some roadside animal to check if it were still alive. Link shoved the barrel off his temple and said, “What’s wrong with you?”

  She told him to wake up his daughter.

  Link shook Lydia gently by the shoulder and said, “Kiddo—we got to get up. Come on, rise and shine.”

  Lydia twitched away from him and rolled flat onto the ground. Cherise began tossing Lydia’s hair aside with the end of the shotgun. When Link pushed it away, she said, “I’m serious, Link. This is a loaded firearm, and I will shoot. The past is the past.”

  He grabbed Lydia by both shoulders and shook her up and down against the pillows, but still she didn’t respond. She smelled vinegary with sleep, and her face was creased by the edge of the pillow. “You need to get up, Lydia. It’s some kind of kidnapping thing.”

  She groaned loudly, rolled to the side, wiping drool from her mouth. “Fuck,” she said. “Tell them to do it later.”

  Cherise shot up into the steel rafters, scattering birds across the vaulted ceiling. Lydia sat up and scraped the corners of her eyes. When she yawned and stretched her arms upright, Cherise cocked the gun and pointed it at her, dropping the spent casing onto the floor beside the pillows. “God, stop,” said Lydia. “I’m up already.”

  Link said, “You can’t wake people out of a dead sleep with this shit—”

  “Let’s go. Let’s move into the office. Preacher’s working out the details.”

  Cherise led them down the patchwork corridor, through the hanging sheets and the beads, into the office cubicle, where Preacher sat at a computer with his shirt off and a pen gripped in his teeth. The printer ground out color pages, and amid a clutter of wires and a .38 revolver, a curl of paper unrolled slowly from the fax machine. When Lydia plopped onto the couch across the room, Cherise gestured with the shotgun and said, “Don’t let her fall asleep again.”

  In the clutter of papers, Link saw pictures of Lydia, and then he saw a poster fall out of the stack onto the floor—complete with the age-enhanced picture and the offer of a thirty-thousand-dollar reward.

  A sparrow landed on the partition, then flew back into the girders above.

  Link said, “You try this bullshit, I’m going to put your head through that computer.”

  “A lot’s changed,” said Preacher. “I appreciate your loyalty, Link—I truly do. But I can’t let opportunities slide by anymore.”

  “You’re going to be pulling glass out of your teeth.”

  Preacher wagged the revolver while he continued typing with one hand. “Let’s be civil about this, Link. We’re not going to turn you in; we’re just going to follow the letter of the law here. Now thirty grand, that’ll fill up some holes around here. She goes home to her gold-digging mommy, you hit the road. Status quo.”

  Cherise ordered Link to sit down, but he picked up the chair and hurled it across the cubicle to where it smashed into a panel of drywall and tumbled onto the floor. Preacher said, “That’s great, Link. Very professional. Cherise—what are they even doing in here? Let’s lock them up someplace until we can get organized. All right?”

  With her face down in the couch, Lydia said, “You can’t call the cops.”

  “I’m going to beat you to death with that fucking keyboard,” said Link. “Then I’
m going to burn this place down.”

  “Cherise is going to lock you two up. We need to figure out how to get this girl to the police in one piece, keep it all at a safe distance from here.”

  Lydia sat up, cleared the hair from her face, and said, “If you turn us in, the cops will bust you for the shit you do out here.”

  “You are just a snot-nosed kid,” said Preacher, suddenly furious. “Don’t presume to motherfucking tell me how to run a business. I was running the Coachella Valley before you were an itch in your daddy’s sack. I’m seventy-one years old, and I’ve been in a crisis my whole life. I am a fucking survivor, little girl. Korean War, Tenth Engineers Combat battalion. Third Infantry. Dug up enough mines to blow up the moon. So don’t presume to tell me anything. Cherise! Get them out of here before I lose my patience.”

  As Cherise waved them out with the shotgun, Link turned and said, “You keep talking like that, senile motherfucker.” He shuffled ahead, down a dark hallway with Lydia, talking to himself, the gun jogging his back. “See how much you got to say with a screwdriver in your skull. Dumb fucking redneck—probably got shrapnel in him from the Civil War, don’t mean he’s going to fuck with me. Damn musket-firing motherfucker. I’m going to beat him to death, Cherise—then I’m coming for you. I’m going to kill you with his dentures. They’re going to find you in a ditch with a bite out of your ass.”

  Cherise forced them all the way across the unfinished corridor to a long aluminum shed in the back, where she undid a padlock and shoved them inside.

  It was the grow room. For a moment, Link and Lydia stood quietly and regarded the long aisles of six-foot cannabis plants, rising upward like a jungle from the hydroponic network of PVC tubes and buckets. All around the arrangement there were thermostats and humidistats, and above stretched panels of fluorescent lights. Lydia paced around the stalks with a hushed awe, like a tourist amid the sequoias, until finally she said, “We need to call your sponsor again.”