“My father was a perverse man. That should have been evident from the start. Six wives, thirteen kids, God knows how many others he strung along who we don’t even know about. Anyway, I’m done trying to make sense of why he did the things he did. There’s only one thing keeping me in this dusty shithole of a state, and it’s tied up in that co-op where I can’t get my hands on it.”
“I’m guessing you plan on going ahead with the shakedown, then.”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I? If what you’re saying is correct, then all I have to worry about are five lonely widows and their brats.”
“That’s so. Although I can’t help but feel you may be underestimating what they’re capable of, especially if you put them in a position where they don’t have any other options.”
“They’re middle-aged mothers from the valley. Pushovers. They probably don’t even keep guns on the property.”
“My research suggests they don’t. Or at least there aren’t any firearms licensed under their names in the national registry.”
“See? They wouldn’t know how to run me off even if they wanted to. Plus, you just said they’re more pliant than most.”
Ramirez uncrossed his legs and rested his spit cup on the armrest. His free hand started fiddling with one of his shirt buttons, pinching it between his nails and drawing it forward as far as the thread would allow. It occurred to me that none of these idle gestures of his ever seemed to stem from nerves or restlessness; it was as if he were in complete control of himself, and yet resolved by choice to expend his energy on actions that served no purpose other than to give his hands something to do.
He said, “When I was working for the government, I learned from doing criminal profiles that you always have to ask yourself the questions that will force you to defy the expectations of who and what you’re dealing with. In the case of these five women, I asked myself what it is that they value more than anything else, and the answer jumped out at me almost instantly. Security. Safety. Stability in their lives. They were so desperate for it that they married a man they had known for only a short time, and that was before they were mothers. Now, with two houses full of children to look out for, they might take even more drastic steps to ensure their family remains unmolested. Something you should keep in mind before you go and threaten them with anything.”
I smiled and stole another harsh swig from the Mason jar. “Don’t tell me you’re intimidated by a handful of country widows. Mister big, tough federal investigator.”
“A handful of mother hens can peck a fox into submission. Evolution can’t help but give the female of the species the tools she needs to keep her babies safe. Call it instinct, call it irrationality, or whatever, but at the end of the day, those with something to live for tend to outlast those with nothing to lose.”
“Right. And I suppose that’s me in this scenario. The man with nothing to lose.”
He looked around at the general squalor of the room, another seemingly idle gesture delivered with clear and deliberate intent. “That depends on how you define the word ‘nothing.’ For me personally, I have a hard time believing that a man who’s shirtless and drunk before noon on a weekday is hiding some inner light behind a bushel. That’s just me, though.”
Ramirez stood and put his hat back on. I was so angry I could barely stand to look at him, but I wasn’t about to let him go away thinking he had left me feeling humbled. I reached into the nightstand drawer and took out a white envelope with several hundred-dollar bills sealed inside.
I said, “Leave the folder on the chair and get the hell out of here. Your money’s all there just like we agreed. But don’t expect to hear from me again.”
He stuffed the envelope in his jacket pocket and sauntered casually to the door. He said, “Don’t worry. Illegal or not, your plans are safe with me. That’s the deal I strike every time I take on a new case, and I don’t mean to go against it now just because you turned out to be an asshole. Just remember what I warned you about. One stitch now could save you a whole lot of them later down the road.”
Unwashed and grody as I was, I still managed to get to my feet before he could leave. “You fucked up today, my friend. I’ve got plans for that money, and someday I’m going to be a very important man in this country. You’ll wish then that you had been civil to me, instead of trying to tear me down any way you could. Because I can tolerate a lot of things, but I won’t tolerate being belittled by someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me. I got enough of that when Elliot was alive.”
Ramirez shook his head. After all the snark and stubbornness that had tainted his work these past weeks, it seemed strange to find him suddenly divested of any concern for the situation at hand, standing with his hat brim low over his forehead, already off-duty in his heart and mind. “I worry about you, Mr. Temple. I really do. You’re an odd duck with big ideas, dangerous methods, and poor impulse control. You might end up running the Republic someday or lying dead in a gutter, but not likely anywhere else in between.”
I slammed the door behind him. I did so in the spur of the moment, just as he was passing the threshold, and afterwards I felt petty and childish for letting him drive me to such a pointless final gesture. It was the sort of thing I imagined he would have done in the same position, and it left a bitter taste in my mouth for the rest of the afternoon. With enough vodka, of course, almost any shame could be forgotten. But even as I began to make myself very drunk, the thought that he was somehow still in my head, driving me to drink from afar, made the whole thing as joyless as any other chore.
After our plates were cleared away, Dad ordered a glass of brandy to cap off the evening. He told me to order another round myself, but advised that I should “stay with the one that brought me,” which I took as an indirect way of reminding me that, regardless of the fact that I had matched him glass for glass over the entire course of the meal, he was still more experienced in these matters than I was, and always would be. He produced a cigar from out of nowhere and lit up right there at the table. Either smoking laws were very lax in San Joaquin, or Dad felt confident that no one in that place, customer or staff, would dare ask him to put it out.
He said, “So. Here we are. A couple of men out on the town. How do you like that?”
I took a drink of water from the overflowing glass in front of me. Every bit of ice had melted since we first sat down and started ordering booze. Seemed like hours had passed in the interim, although in reality it was still barely nightfall. “Can I ask you a question, Dad? And have you answer me seriously?”
Dad blew smoke in my face. I fought the urge to cough. He said, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve been serious this whole time. Go ahead.”
I started to speak almost immediately, but my tongue felt strangely heavy and I couldn’t get my thoughts arranged in any coherent order. I took another gulp of water and ran my damp hands over my face. “Why does it have to be like this? Why? You show up out of the blue and ask me to take this trip with you. So why do you feel the need to ride me like this all night? Why can’t you treat me like a father ought to treat his son?”
The deep red embers pulsated dimly at the end of his cigar. He said, “I could ask you the same thing.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Ask me the same thing?”
“You know what I mean. You sit here with my food and drink inside you, and you have the gall to ask me why I don’t treat you better. But when have you ever treated me like a son ought to treat his father? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“Jesus Christ, Dad. What did I do? What did I ever do that was so terrible?”
“Don’t act like you don’t remember. Spitting in my face. After all the effort I put in.”
“I never spit in your face, Dad. I don’t even know what you’re saying anymore.”
“Right. It must be some other son I’m thinking of, then. Some other son who takes the present his father gets him for his birthday and throws it away like it’s nothing but ga
rbage.”
“What present? What birthday?”
Dad lowered his head and hacked violently into his fist. Afterwards he stared at me with eyes full of vindictive rage, as if I had been the one gagging him instead of the cigar smoke. “You really don’t remember. The bicycle meant so little to you.”
“Bicycle?”
“Yes, goddamn it, a bicycle! A brand new fire engine red bicycle that any eight-year-old boy in the country would have been proud to call his own. Any boy except you, of course. Oh, you pretended to be interested in it. You even took it around the block and made a big show of how much you liked it. But the next time I came into town, it was gone. You had traded it to a Mexican boy down the street. Swapped it like it was a rusty old dime-store piece of crap, instead of an expensive import that took a lot of research and legwork to find. I tell you, I’ve been betrayed many times in the past, and it stung like hell when it happened, but I never felt as double-crossed as I did the day I came home from the road and found that bicycle gone. It was like even then, at age eight, you were trying to say that you didn’t care for me or what I had to offer. It was like you were already laughing at me and you could barely tie your shoelaces.”
Dad sloped down low over the table. He had started to chew compulsively on the end of the cigar, staining his teeth with its earthy brown juice. I began to worry that I was in just as bad a shape as him, and that the second wind I was feeling was nothing more than the vodka’s way of covering its tracks for the damage it had already done.
I said, “I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t remember any of that. Why did I give my present away?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing for ten years. It was a beautiful bicycle. It was worth so much more than the monster you replaced it with.”
“Did you say monster?”
Without any warning, Dad slammed his fist against the table so hard that our drink glasses rattled. The nearest other diners were all the way on the other side of the room, and still they looked over at us with nervous alarm. Dad took a breath and said, “A fucking iguana. That’s what you accepted in exchange for your birthday present. A dirty, disgusting lizard with jagged claws and lumps on its neck like something out of a medical journal. You used to keep him in a glass box with a heat lamp and feed him old cabbage so the whole house stank of rot. Damn thing would pull food into its mouth on the tip of its tongue like a frog. I watched it being fed one time, just once, and nearly threw up from the sight of it. But to you the little bastard was worth more than my gift ever was. It was a good trade in your eyes. That’s how little value you placed in what I did for you. That’s how little you thought of me.”
I sat there stunned, staring into my father’s otherworldly eyes and feeling the bitterness that permeated every aspect of his being. An iguana. I had owned a pet iguana as a child. Of course I remembered it all so vividly now, the proud, menacing curve of the creature’s back, its slow crawl across the kitchen floor to the sunny spot under the windowsill. But I hadn’t thought about it for years until Dad brought it up. I couldn’t even remember the name I had given it. Still, it was more than I remembered about the bike. I could have sworn Mom had bought the iguana for me, even though affection for any type of animal, especially reptiles, was completely out of character for her. But no. I had made a deal for the iguana, and in doing so had wounded Dad enough to make him resent me secretly for nearly a decade. What could I even say to make it up to him? The whole episode was a blank for me, a piece of original sin of which I never realized I was guilty. I didn’t remember trading the bicycle to a Mexican boy when I was eight. I didn’t even remember the Mexican boy.
“Dad. I’m sorry I upset you. I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate the bike. I know raising a child is never easy. But come on. I was eight years old. You can’t seriously hold it against me. It was just me being a dumb kid. Nothing more.”
I really should have known better than to try being sincere with him, at least when it came to something like this. It would have been better if I had lied and said I wanted to hurt him, if I had confirmed his suspicion that the eight-year-old me had been full of contempt, that I had been angry at him for some reason or another, that the lizard was my own cheap way of getting back at him, and then apologized and promised never to hurt him again. He could understand pettiness, and he could understand revenge, and maybe he could have forgiven both. But he would never accept that such a slight against him, even one committed by a grade-schooler, could have been perpetrated thoughtlessly, without intent. It would have meant going against his whole perception of the world and his place in it. If on some cloudy day he had suddenly found himself caught in a downpour, it would have been more comforting to believe the skies held some secret grudge against him than to accept that they were totally indifferent.
He shook his head and said, “Spite. That’s what this is. You were a spiteful child then, and now you’ve grown up to be a spiteful young man. The sort of pathetic person who blames his father for the hair in his soup.” He took his sweaty palm off the tablecloth and held it in front of his face. The tips of his thumb and index finger were so close they were almost touching. “I came this close to poisoning your damn lizard. Would have been so easy, too. Just a couple squirts of pesticide in the cabbage and I’d have been rid of that nauseating thing once and for all. Your mother was all that stopped me. Said she’d lock me out of the house if I tried it.”
I looked at him for a long second and smiled. I said, “It’s funny. Even now, after everything you’ve said, it still doesn’t change the way I feel. I mean, I can think all sorts of nasty things about you, even more so now that we’ve had this time together, but the core feelings stay the same. I love you, Dad. I always have.”
He stared at me for so long after that that a trickle of brown drool began to seep through his lips and soak into his beard. He put the cigar out in his water glass and wiped his face with a napkin. I didn’t see him cry that night, nor did he ever give me the impression that he was on the verge of breaking down. But just seeing him flummoxed as he was, taken aback by his spiteful son’s words of love, was enough to give me chills. There were some things that seemed too unnatural for me to comprehend at that age; God never dies, the sun doesn’t set in the east, and Dad doesn’t get choked up. That’s the way of sheltered adolescence. All great truths go together, or they were never really true to begin with.
Dad said, “It’s been a long time. Since you said you loved me. I can’t even remember the last time, in fact.”
“When I was eleven, and you took me to see the Russian circus in San Jose. I said it a couple times in the car on the way there. But you didn’t like it, so I stopped.”
“How do you know I didn’t like it?”
“You told me it was peculiar for a son to tell his father he loved him.”
“Did I?”
“Those were your exact words.”
“Well.” Dad brushed his hand through the air like he was shooing away a fly. “As you said, raising a child is never easy. It was my job to make sure you turned out strong enough to make it in a difficult world. I had to be careful not to let you turn soft on me.”
“You talk like you raised me up single-handed. But I haven’t seen you in person in over four years. I don’t see how you can reconcile that with what you’re saying.”
I expected him to shoot me a nasty glare, but he didn’t even look up from the table. He said, “I had to make a living. It wasn’t like your mother was going to be able to support a decent lifestyle for you on her own, what with her lack of work experience, and a degree in the humanities. Or perhaps you would have preferred growing up in an East Bay shithole and going to school with a bunch of Nigerian refugees.”
“It’s not like you couldn’t have found a job that kept you closer to home. How was I supposed to feel with you away on business all the time?”
“Grateful. That’s how you were supposed to feel. What? You think you’re the only son who ever had to make do while his fat
her was out earning money? If you were a Chinese boy, you’d barely see your father’s face until you were all grown up. And you’d be proud that he had a job that kept him busy with so many responsibilities.”
“I’m not a Chinese boy”
“Evidently. Evidently.”
“Please. Let’s not get started on another mean streak. I just told you that, despite everything you’ve said to me so far on this trip, I still love you. I thought maybe you could take the time to say you love me as well.”
“Yes. I suppose I could.” He took a slow sip of brandy, and afterwards he sat idly swirling the liquor around in his glass like one of the noble lords he admired so much from history. “It’s difficult for me to express myself like that. With words. To go around saying how I feel like a woman or a hippie. I’ve always been more comfortable with actions and gestures, with doing things to show people that I care. That’s why I place so much importance on gifts, I think. Because making an effort to do something is the best way I know to let those feelings out.”
“I can understand that, Dad. And to be honest, I had kind of hoped this trip would be a way for you to do just that.”
“Well. The trip’s not over yet. Let’s get the check and see what we can do about it.”
“You’re saying you want to buy me another gift?”
“In a sense, yes. But first tell me something. Are you still a virgin?”
The question was so unexpected I nearly sprayed vodka out my mouth and across the tablecloth. I said, “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
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