Cry Father (3 page)

5

half

P
atterson wakes on his thin mattress in the loft to the sound of his cell phone ringing. It’s just before daybreak and the phone’s on the table, of course. He fumbles his way down out of the loft, banging into everything he can find a way to bang into. It’s Laney on the caller ID. Which, if he’d thought about at all, he would have known before getting out of bed.

“Hello,” he rasps into the phone.

“Hello, yourself,” she says. “Are you settled in?”

Patterson hasn’t heard her voice in almost a year, but it still washes over him like somebody’s poured gasoline down his neck. “Pretty close.” He makes his way to the sink, peering out the window over the hand pump. Deep darkness, the first glimmer of light barely registering. “How’d you know I was back?”

She laughs. “You’re at the window, aren’t you? Looking to see if I’m outside?”

“How’d you know I was back?” he asks again.

“Lucky guess,” she says.

“Pretty lucky. I only pulled in this evening.”

“I need to talk to you,” she says. “I have a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Not on the phone,” she says. “I want you live and in person, so it costs you something when you give me the wrong answer. Can you come down to Taos tomorrow? I can buy you dinner.”

“How’s the day after tomorrow?” Patterson squints out at the morning again, still not sure she isn’t out there somewhere.

“It’s not something you have to prepare yourself for,” she says. “It’s dinner and a question.”

“The day after tomorrow.”

“The day after tomorrow.” She sighs. “Where do you want to meet?”

“You employed?”

“I’m employed.”

“The Adobe Bar,” Patterson says. “Six o’clock.” He ends the call.

P
atterson cooks flapjacks and bacon on the woodstove, polishing off a generous glass of whiskey while he does so. Neither the bacon nor the whiskey help much with the hangover, but they give him an opportunity to enjoy one of the cabin’s greatest advantages. The outhouse. Where you can take a shit with the door open, watching the morning sun wash yellow across the scrub, the prickly pear cactus trying to match its southern brothers in shadow if not substance. After breakfast, Patterson pulls on his loggers and he and Sancho take a walk on the grass-patched dirt road that runs by the cabin, Patterson hoping fresh air will cure what hair of the dog and bacon couldn’t.

The morning drifts past him in a painfully bright haze. Wildflowers list purple in the light morning wind, bullet-pocked washers and refrigerators lie abandoned in the ditches. Dew mists off the mesa toward the high sun, the air bristling with morning insects. Sancho wanders ditch to ditch in broken zigzags.

Then Patterson comes around a corner and almost walks into the rear bumper of a matte-black 1969 Dodge Charger pulled off the side of the road, the driver’s-side door hanging open and the door-ajar bell ringing tinnily. “Shit,” Patterson says, to nobody in particular, realizing how far he’d been gone into thinking about nothing.

“That’s hardly neighborly,” a man’s voice says. It’s Henry’s son, Junior. He steps around a tree, zipping up his jeans, the dust on his alligator-skin cowboy boots pocked with urine. He has a midtwenties’ version of Henry’s face, just as handsome but with a grin that never seems too far from a sneer and a marred left iris that’s filmed over gray. He pulls a black handkerchief out of his back pocket and dabs at the eye, which seems to be perpetually weeping.

A wary growl rumbles out of Sancho’s throat. Patterson crouches and strokes his neck. “Junior,” Patterson says, by way of greeting.

“Patterson,” Junior says in the same tone of voice. “Need a beer?”

“I could use one,” Patterson says.

Junior reaches into the car and tosses him a can of Budweiser.

Patterson pops the tab, drinks.

“You always had the dog?” Junior asks.

“A few years.”

“What is it?”

“Mutt. Some part German shepherd, but mostly mutt.”

“He’s a good-looking dog.”

“Visiting Henry?” Patterson asks.

“Something like that.” Junior leans back on the car, bending his head at Patterson like his neck is just a little bit broken.

“Something like what?”

Junior hacks something globular and wet up from his lungs, spits it in the dirt. “You seen him? Henry?”

“You check down at the barn?”

“I did. He ain’t there.”

“Probably working,” Patterson says. “Might be one of the horses is sick.”

“Might be,” Junior says. “Might be he found him some little bitch down in San Luis that don’t mind he’s a cripple.”

“He’s allowed,” Patterson says.

Junior looks off at the north. “Which one of those is the one where they found the horse?” he asks, nodding at the mountains.

“Horse?” Patterson repeats.

“Snippy,” Junior says.

“It was the Blanca Massif,” Patterson says. He points at the mountains on the north rim of the valley, sloping up from the floor to a sawtoothed ridge, the peaks blue-gray and snowcapped. “Can’t miss ’em.”

Junior squints. “Where?”

“Straight,” Patterson says. “It’s the five peaks right there. Little Bear, Blanca Peak, California Peak, Mount Lindsey, and Huerfano Peak.”

“I heard about it on that dipshit radio show Henry listens to,” Junior says. “Brother Joe. You believe all that shit he gets from that damn show?”

“Not much,” Patterson says.

Junior nods for a second or two. Then he says, “Did he tell you that I gave him the money to move out here?”

“No,” Patterson says. “He didn’t.”

“I sure enough did. Didn’t have a pot to piss in and I gave him everything I had. Never saw it again, neither.”

“I don’t have any interest in getting in the middle of your shit,” Patterson says. “None.”

“Sure,” Junior says. “But there’s a bunch of things you ain’t heard about that old asshole. Don’t let him fool you none.”

Patterson pours the rest of the beer in the dirt and tosses the empty can in the ditch.

Junior laughs out loud. He walks around to the driver’s side of the car and climbs in, still laughing. “It’s real easy to do with the second half, ain’t it, partner?” he says, starting up the engine.

Justin

I don’t know if I ever told you about the horse, Snippy, but that’s probably the strangest story to come out of the valley. She was found in 1967, skinned nose to shoulders, completely empty of organs. Not a drop of blood, neither. The lady who owned her said she was killed by flying saucers. Said they’d be back. And, sure enough, it was only a couple years later that the cattle mutilations started. And they’ve been continuing off and on ever since.

I went and looked at a calf they found during the last round. Henry took me. It was in the shadow of this wind-twisted pine in the middle of a field of brown scrub. It’d been completely cored out, just a hole in the middle of the carcass where the organs had been, and its face had been cut off in laser-straight lines, not a drop of blood to be found.

Of course, some believe that there ain’t really any cattle mutilations at all. Or, at least, that they aren’t caused by anything as exotic
as aliens. The story runs that a man from Denver named John Baylor bought a hundred thousand acres in 1960 with the intent of clear-cutting it, only to find out that the land shouldn’t have been for sale. That it was communal-use land guaranteed by a Mexican land grant in 1863. Most descendants of the people who settled this valley under that original grant, they’re still here. They ranch and they farm, and they have about as much interest in newcomers as they have in mosquitoes. They’re transplanted Mexicans who never bothered to concern themselves with the English language or any legal niceties past what gave them their stake. Anyway, as you can imagine, they weren’t real happy about land that they considered theirs being fenced in and clear-cut. So they put up a fight. There were shootouts, fires set, fences cut, beatings, the whole bit. Baylor even hired a private army.

It wasn’t too long after that Snippy was found and the cattle mutilations started, with a bunch of folks saying it was aliens. Not the folks who were fighting with Baylor, though. See, they couldn’t help but notice that the aliens seemed to mainly target his opponents. It drove a lot of them out of business, too. When you’re a small outfit, it doesn’t take the loss of too many five-thousand-dollar steers to put you under. And supposedly Brother Joe has evidence of helicopters taking off and landing at the Baylor Ranch. The fact that it would be a half century and running now, and that John Baylor’s long dead and his children would have to be the ones carrying on the cattle killings, that doesn’t even slow Brother Joe down. He’s the kind who believes in tradition.

For my part, I don’t know which sounds more far-fetched, Black Op cattle killings or aliens. Brother Joe believes in both as far as I can tell. Only last night he was on about the lights over the mountains, which he says are aliens. He says he saw one trail that ran the whole San Juan range, which’d be the whole west side of the valley, then
stopped in front of Mount Blanca, and shot around the Sangre de Cristo range on the east side. All in the time it took him to smoke a cigarette. Then he started in about underground government bases and some secret tribe of wandering Jews. Which is about when I turned the radio off.

When I lived in New Mexico with you and your mother I used to drive up here a lot. Some of those trips were because I needed to get out of the house, but some were just because I needed a sunset. I read a lot about the valley before I moved here, too. One of the things about clearing power lines is that you spend a lot of time sitting in a bucket truck waiting for the work to start, and I’ve always spent that time reading. One thing I read is that if you ask a Navajo Indian about the valley, they’ll tell you it’s sacred. They’ll tell you that Blanca Peak is the Dawn Mountain, and that it’s strapped to the ground with lightning. Which, if you see it at sunrise, you’ll understand.

6

outlaws

C
O-159 is about as straight a piece of road as you can find, carving through the flat bottom of the San Luis Valley like it’s been dragged into the landscape with a machete. It’s the kind of highway that makes it hard not to speed, and when the gray sky’s about ten feet off the ground and the sun’s streaking bolts of yellow light through pinhole gaps in the firmament and raindrops are just beginning to pock your windshield, it makes it nearly impossible not to drink while you’re doing it.

Not that Junior’s trying real hard not to do either, running a hundred miles an hour north toward Denver with a beer between his legs, his elbow hanging out the window, empty cans and Marlboro boxes rustling around on the floorboards like there’s a rat digging through them. The way he’s feeling, he knows that if he weren’t on a schedule, he’d end up driving loops through the valley, running himself dry of gas and beer, smoking until his lungs burned. That he’d
probably find himself shivering awake into a San Luis Valley sunrise with his cowboy boots hanging out the window, the car pulled off to the side of some dirt road.

He’s even thought to himself about buying some little patch of scrubland down here and building himself a cabin. But he knows better than to think he could live that close to Henry and both of them survive it. Not to mention Patterson, the sanctimonious prick.

That’s the kind of fucking idiot who lives up on the mesa, Patterson. The kind who’d buy into a land scam, playing at living off the grid. Cheap plots for city fuckers who want a place in the country. They advertise it as a vacation resort, but it ain’t. The roads are dirt, and half the places don’t even have power. What they end up with are half-ass survivalists. Junior almost hopes that the apocalypse they’re hoping for comes, just so he can drive down from Denver and shoot every one of them. Henry first.

O
n the north side of Denver, there’s a roadhouse bar with a creek running behind it. Red trim and a red door, no windows at all, sitting off a side street in a sparsely used warehouse park. Junior spins the Charger into the gravel lot, parks in the line of motorcycles and pickup trucks. He’s got the feeling full-on now. The same feeling that always shows up after visiting with his father.

It’s something like trying to swallow a two-by-four. Or maybe waking up to find yourself falling out of a moving truck. It’s a feeling that comes when he remembers his mother, too. When he tries to remember her face, and can’t exactly. When he thinks about the days when she wasn’t working and Henry was on the rodeo circuit.

She’d spend the whole day sitting in bed, smoking cigarettes. Staring at the wall like paralyzed while Junior did dishes, caught up
on laundry, swept the floors. Then he’d bring her dinner, tomato soup from a can, and a seared grilled cheese sandwich, and set it down on the bed. And she’d look at the food and look at him and then her cigarette in the ashtray and pull him in for a hug, crying again. And all he could think of was how he couldn’t wait for Henry to walk through the door, crowing about whatever he’d won or lost.

Inside the bar, Junior takes a stool next to a paunchy Indian woman in a leather vest and chaps. She’s with a bald black biker in his thick-muscled forties. He’s wearing some kind of bone hanging from his leather motorcycle jacket, a touch shared by every one of his comrades. And he’s smoking a cigar. Or not so much smoking it as conducting a love affair with it. Puffing it, blowing it, working its burn as sure and steady as some long-awaited one-night stand.

Junior’s never met a single biker who didn’t consider himself an outlaw. Not one. And it doesn’t matter that ninety-nine percent of them pay their taxes, live in a cul-de-sac, and wouldn’t say boo to a cop if he was raping them with his nightstick. Granted, there’s the other one percent, and Junior’s even tangled with a few known to run a little crank, but they don’t impress him. The way he figures it, bikers are just about as much outlaws as rodeo riders are cowboys.

“Bourbon. A big glass,” Junior says to the bartender. He looks at the Indian woman. “You got a name?”

“Janet.” She doesn’t look at him.

“An Indian name,” Junior says.

Now she looks at him. “An Indian name?”

Junior pulls out his handkerchief and dabs his bad eye with it. “Dances with Niggers, maybe?”