Cry Father (7 page)

17

scope

I
t was curiosity that had convinced Patterson to take Junior up on his offer. When Patterson had said Henry’s name, some small roughing had happened behind Junior’s face. It was like watching stone fall away from a sculpture, the way he revealed himself, and Patterson wanted to see more of it. Not to hear Junior’s story, Patterson knows enough to distrust stories. Just to see Junior operate a little. To see what he can of Henry in the way Junior moves.

So they work together quietly. Neither of them knows shit for carpentry, but it turns out to be a fine little deck. And when they drive the last screw Junior pulls two hundred dollars out of his pocket, the same two hundred dollars Patterson had tossed at his feet that morning, and passes it to him. “How’d you find me?” he asks.

“I ain’t gonna answer that,” Patterson says. The answer is easy enough, though. He’d had Emma look through Henry’s loft while the old man was outside throwing up his hungover guts. And sure
enough, Henry’d had Junior’s address written down in a steno notebook by his phone.

“It don’t matter,” Junior says. “I’m getting cleaned up and going for a beer. If you wanna come, I’ll buy you one.”

T
hey walk up the street to a little Mexican bar, a freestanding brick building next to a junkyard. One long room inside, with a few rickety booths and a clothes washer with a Post-it note on the door that reads “$57” at one end of the pitted wooden bar. There aren’t many other patrons. A pair of dark-skinned girls, exactly the kind of women Patterson doesn’t have any need to be looking at anymore. Lean bodies, eyes pleading boredom with everything Denver has to offer. They’re with two young men wearing tank top undershirts, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes, who’re talking to the bartender in Spanish. The bartender’s older and bigger, probably Junior’s age, dressed up in a Western shirt and black crocodile belly boots, a small glass of tequila in front of him.

Junior slides into the first booth and fingers a cigarette out of his pack. “Where you from, Patterson?” he asks.

“Right here,” Patterson answers, taking the other side of the booth, which squeals and shudders in protest.

“Right here, meaning North Denver?”

“Right here, meaning Denver. East Colfax.”

“Do you smoke?”

Patterson pulls out his cigarettes and holds them up.

“Good man.” Junior points at Patterson with his cigarette. “Do you know about the Sand Creek massacre?”

“I’ve read about it.”

“Did you know that afterward, Chivington and his boys rode through Denver with women’s cunts stretched over their saddle
bows and pinned across their hats? Carrying Indian kid’s hearts and fetuses on sticks.”

“I’ve read that, too,” Patterson says.

“Friend of mine told me about it,” Junior says. “Vicente. All he does is read about shit like that.” He lights his cigarette. “The people of Denver threw them a ticker-tape parade, did you know that?”

“Yep,” Patterson says.

Junior nods. “That ain’t what gets me, though. The cunts on a stick and the ticker-tape parade, that ain’t it.”

“It’s enough for me.”

“The thing that gets me is that now you can’t even smoke a fucking cigarette in a bar. Back then you could walk down the street with a woman’s cunt on a stick, and now you get treated like a pedophile for smoking a cigarette.” He snorts in disgust.

Patterson doesn’t point out that they’re both smoking cigarettes in the bar right there. Instead he looks over at the girls, can’t help it, and catches them looking right back at him. Or looking at Junior, anyway. And he can’t blame them. Junior’s showered and shaved, putting on fresh jeans and a Rockmount shirt and his eye patch, and he has all of Henry’s hard and boyish good looks on display. The little light that’s managed to struggle through the unwashed front window seems to hover around him, wavering when he moves to draw on his cigarette or kick his boots up on the bar chair across from him. Patterson knows just enough about cowboy boots to know that they’re handcrafted hornbacks, and that he’s owned cars that cost less.

“You gonna lecture me about Henry?” Junior asks.

Patterson pulls his attention away from the girls. By force. They’ve set a hole blossoming open in his chest that he knows he doesn’t have any hope of filling. “I can’t let you come up there and kick the shit out of him whenever you feel like it.”

“You can’t let me,” Junior says scornfully. “He’s lucky I didn’t use a tire jack, the motherfucker. You wanna know what he said that set me off?”

Patterson shakes his head. “Not even a little.”

“All right,” Junior says. “Tell you what. As long as he doesn’t repeat it, I won’t whip his ass again.”

“How’s about this,” Patterson says. “How’s about the next time you get the urge to start beating on him, you give me a call? How’s about we have a drink and talk it over.”

Junior looks at him. “I’ll do my best,” he says.

They stop talking for a minute. The girls aren’t even trying to hide their interest in Junior from their boyfriends anymore. One of them, the longer and prettier of the two, says something to the other, and they both smile. Their boyfriends are hunched on their elbows at the bar now, talking low to the bartender. The first thought that goes through Patterson’s head is that he’s way too old for this shit. The second is that he wouldn’t leave the bar now if you put a screwdriver to his temple.

“That one there, she’s something,” Junior says.

“The other one, too,” Patterson says. “Which one were you talking about?”

“I don’t suppose it matters.”

“I don’t suppose it does,” Patterson says. Then, “Do you know what scope lock means?”

“Go ahead,” Junior says.

“It’s a military term.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed you for the military.”

“I wasn’t,” Patterson says. “I read it somewhere.”

“You read a lot,” Junior says. “So it’s a secondhand military term?”

“That’s right.”

It could be the light, but it looks an awful lot like Junior winks at one of the girls. Though with the eye patch, he could have just been blinking.

“So what’s it mean?” Junior asks.

“It means when somebody only gets their information from one source, and it starts to affect their thinking.”

“Like Henry and that fucking radio show he listens to? Brother Joe?”

“Yeah,” Patterson says. “And other things.”

Junior laughs out loud at that. “Go fuck yourself.” He draws a vial of cocaine out of his pocket and cuts two lines on the booth’s tabletop with his pocketknife. The bartender looks over at them and looks away. Junior snorts one of the lines and passes Patterson the straw. Patterson hesitates. “Go ahead,” Junior says. “They ain’t going to call the cops. Ain’t one of them legal.”

Patterson takes the straw and snorts the other line while Junior cuts more. When he’s done there are twelve, each of which would kill a large child outright and drown most adults in postnasal drip. “I got enough for everybody,” Junior calls to the girls. The long one licks her lips and all the breath goes out of Patterson. But she doesn’t approach. “Calm down, Patterson,” Junior says. “We’re just fishing.” His good eye glitters like that of a child arsonist.

I probably should shoot him right here, Patterson thinks. Instead he does another line.

The main problem with cocaine is that you never really have enough of it. Even on a binge, you’ve usually got just enough to keep yourself in nosebleeds and self-hatred. But Junior cuts lines like other people serve beers, and inside of a half hour he and Patterson are falling-out-of-the-booth high. And Junior’s pitching the girls, calling to them every ten minutes or so that he has more cocaine back at his house, a whole lot
more, and plenty of beer. It isn’t the kind of offer that’d work on every girl, probably. Just every girl Patterson’s ever known. Then Junior winks at Patterson across the booth. “Watch the coke,” he says. And he stands wobbling out of his chair and saunters down the bar, disappearing into the restroom hallway at the back of the bar.

To their credit, the Mexican boys wait nearly thirty seconds before following him.

Patterson picks up the vial of cocaine and slips it in his pocket. The bartender moves out from behind the bar, meeting him in front of the hallway. “They’re fine,” he says. “There is no trouble here.” He’s holding a little Raven .25 automatic in his right hand.

“Sure,” Patterson says. “I just need to take a piss.” There’s a loud thump from the direction of the bathroom. Then a strangled high sound, like a pig’s squeal, that cuts off in the middle.

“Piss in the alley,” the bartender says, grinning. “Your friend is fine.”

Patterson turns and walks back toward the front door, ignoring the other sounds coming from the bathroom. Just thuds now, like somebody stomping on a pumpkin. The girls sit in the booth, ramrod straight, their eyes craterous, shell-shocked.

But Patterson had one of those little Raven .25s in his younger days. Bought it for fifty bucks at an Ohio flea market. He got drunk the night he bought it and fired off an entire magazine at a tree that couldn’t have been seven feet in front of him, and managed to miss with every shot. When Patterson’s put four paces between himself and the bartender, he swings around, pulling out his .45, and puts his front sight right on the man’s chest.

“You pussy,” the bartender says, but he doesn’t raise the .25. Patterson figures he’s probably shot it once or twice himself. “You are a fucking pussy.”

“Put it down and turn around,” Patterson says.

“You pussy,” the bartender says again. But he places the pistol on the bar and turns around.

Patterson grabs him by his thin black hair and shoves him down the hallway, through the men’s room door.

It’s over. Junior’s washing his hands in the sink. One of the boys’ legs are sticking out from the stall and the other is slumped against the wall, staring senseless through bloodred eyeballs, the capillaries exploded. The bartender’s breath hisses out between his teeth.

Junior shakes water off his hands. “I was wondering if you were going to show,” he says to Patterson. Then he takes the bartender by the back of the neck, like you might take a friend to draw him in to tell him something. Patterson lets go of the bartender and steps back.

“You’re a pussy, too,” the bartender says into Junior’s ear.

Junior shoots a rabbit punch into his gut, and when the bartender tries to hustle back to get some boxing room, Patterson grabs him by the cheek and slams his head into the wall. Patterson doesn’t like having guns pointed at him, and doesn’t particularly give a shit for the reason. The bartender doesn’t even try to resist after that, and Junior makes short work of him. First fists, then boots.

“Now I got to wash my hands again,” Junior says when he’s done.

Justin

I didn’t keep a gun around the house when we had you. They make your mom nervous, for one thing. For another, there didn’t seem a whole lot of need when I was working Questa and Taos. I looked forward to teaching you how to shoot, though. I don’t hunt much, but I like skeet shooting. I figured that sooner or later I’d buy a little .410 single shot for your own. I had it in my mind. Just like teaching you how to throw a baseball. Or fishing. All of those father-and-son moments you see on television. But shooting was one of those many things I didn’t get around to when you were alive. It seems like my memory’s nothing but a series of holes where those moments should be. Moments I spent drinking beer, sitting on the front porch. Moments I spent wondering how the hell I ended up settled down in Questa, New Mexico.

It was only after you died that I started carrying a gun full-time. I was in Louisiana, just after Hurricane Katrina. I’d never carried
one up until then, even when I was working with the worst crews. Most of the men I was with aren’t exactly opposed to violence. That comes with the job. Hell, when you’re young, it’s part of the attraction. When you still give a shit about things like whether you can hold your own in a fight, you’re more than happy to work with those kind of men.

It’s a job that attracts that kind, I guess. The kind of men who get shaken out of normal life and collected at the bottom. I ain’t saying everybody, but I doubt there’s any occupation with a greater percentage of convicts, drunks, and addicts. It’s just the way it is. Even so, they never scared me enough I felt like I needed a gun. A good clip knife was fine.

Besides which, almost all the danger we faced came from our work. Especially since the men I worked with didn’t exactly hold safety as their highest priority. I know I didn’t when I was younger. I worked an entire season once dropping LSD every morning, and I don’t know anybody who works strictly sober. Men fall out of trees, men amputate themselves, and when there ain’t easy access to medical help, men bleed out. When that happens, there’s not a whole lot to do but watch them die while the foreman tries to call whoever the hell he’s supposed to. A gun’s not of much use in that situation.

But Louisiana after Katrina, that was different. Where we were camped, you could hear gunfire most hours of the night or day, and we weren’t even close to the worst of it. We just tried to keep our heads down, work on clearing the lines of debris, and let everything else take care of itself. But still, we heard stories about what was going down. People being gunned down by vigilantes and rogue cops. Whole blocks tagged “Dead Body Inside,” nobody even bothering to remove them. Refugees from the city being turned away at gunpoint from higher ground.

We didn’t belong there. Everybody knew we didn’t belong there. And we were working equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, all of which was exactly what every person there needed. Most things lose their value after a hurricane, but bucket trucks and chain saws don’t, not for anybody who’s got a house buried under rubble. We were targets and there wasn’t one of us who didn’t know it.

And then there were the bigger stories. Blackwater mercenaries cleaning out the most desirable New Orleans real estate. Developers buying up the newly vacated land, planning condos, already rebuilding New Orleans as a cheap theme park of itself. Corporations moving in to take over everything they could get their hands on, right down to the schools and hospitals. And the big story, the one everybody believed. That the Lower Ninth Ward levees had been deliberately breached, smashed by a barge in order to save the French Quarter. I didn’t meet a single person who lived near the levees who didn’t tell me that story.

It was hearing those stories that made me realize I wanted something besides a pocketknife to protect myself. It was not having any idea what was actually going on. So I bought a 1911 from a street kid I found walking a wheelbarrow of looted goods past our bucket truck in Jefferson Parish. He told me it was junk, that it’d jam up every time after the first round, so I only had to give him a hundred dollars for it.

The thing is, I knew exactly what was wrong with the gun the minute that street kid told me the problem. My father, your grandfather, he carried one of those every day of his life. He was a Vietnam veteran and he didn’t go anywhere without his service issue .45 Colt 1911A1. One of the many gifts given him by the Vietnam War was that he had more conspiracy theories than Brother Joe, and all his theories made him feel a hell of a lot better armed.

So I sat down in the street right there, took the extractor out of the slide, and tensioned it with my thumbs. It’s run like a top ever since, and when I got back to Colorado that summer, I applied for my concealed-carry permit. It’s good in most states, and now I’ve got just one rule. I won’t work anywhere I can’t carry. That’s my only rule.