Take Me There (21 page)

“I was afraid you wouldn’t see me if I did.”

“What I told you still stands. You can’t go stirrin’ up trouble with Jack Golden’s family.”

“I know. I won’t.”

“If they have any money, they came by it honestly.”

“I know.”

“Good. Now, on that subject …” A long, slow breath escapes him like the air from a leaking tire. “How have you and your mama been makin’ out for money all these years?”

“Okay, I guess. Mom has a job singing at a nightclub in California. I’ve got a job too. Plus, Uncle Mitch sends us a thousand dollars a month and lets us live in one of his rent houses for six hundred. I never understood why he doesn’t just send four hundred, but that’s Mitch.”

“Is that all he’s doin’ for you?”

“Yeah,” I say, thinking it’s a lot, but then maybe my father doesn’t know what rents are in Southern California.

“Damn him,” my father mutters under his breath.

It makes me wonder, was there money for my mother and me, like there was money for Tornado Tim and his mother? I can’t ask with the guard listening.

“Was he your border connection?”

My father looks at the guard, and if I could read minds I’d guess he’s wondering whether or not he wants to rat out my uncle. He finally looks back at me and says, “There are a lot of things I can’t talk about.”

I nod, afraid to push him too far, but at the same time hungry for answers and revenge. My life could have turned out totally different if we’d just had a little bit of money. I might have settled in a different neighborhood, done better in school, gone to college, ended up with Jess.

“Cartwright told me he gave you my book,” my father says, intruding into my thoughts.

“Yes, sir.”

“I think you’ll find some of the answers you’re lookin’ for in chapter five.”

“Chapter five.” I groan. There is no way I’ll make it through an entire chapter.

We sit in silence, all the unanswered and unasked questions thicker than the wall of glass between us.

“How’s your mama?” he finally says. Today is the first he’s mentioned her, and the look on his face surprises me, as if everything hangs on my response.

I think about how lost and desperate my mother looked the last time I saw her and wonder how she’s doing at Uncle Mitch’s house in La Puerta. I’ve hardly thought of her since I left California, and I’m suddenly filled with guilt. “She’s okay,” I lie.

“You said she was singin’ at a nightclub in California. Is it a nice place?”

It’s a cocktail lounge inside a bowling alley, but I’m not about to tell my father that. “Yeah. Pretty nice.”

“Did she ever find someone?”

I’m not sure what he means, but then he adds, “Did she remarry?”

“No,” I tell him, realizing that she never really looked. Wondering why, becoming conscious of the fact that I’ve been so wrapped up in my own grief and misery that I’ve never questioned hers.

He nods, as if this makes him sad for some reason. “Does she ever talk about me?” he asks, and then he seems to hold his breath while he waits for the answer.

“No.”

He nods again, but this time there is the faintest hint of a smile on his face, even though he looks as if he could cry. “Good,” he tells me. “Maybe when this is all over she can forget.”

When I leave the prison I notice a large black vehicle coming up behind me, gaining speed. I’ve been so worried about my father I haven’t planned what to do if Eight Ball catches up with me.

I killed his brother, and he will come after me. Then he will kill me. There are few things in life as certain as this. I wonder if Two Tone’s dead, empty eyes haunt Eight Ball the way they haunt me.

The black SUV gets closer and I see that it is not a van, but a Jeep. I inhale a small breath of relief, but it is still clear that someone is following me. I wonder if Tornado Tim and his friends have decided to kill me in Livingston, away from the watchful eye of Uncle Arnie.

I pull off the main road and wind through the town, make quick turns onto various side streets. All the while the Jeep stays on my tail. Whoever is driving isn’t even trying to hide the fact that they’re after me. I take two more quick right turns and pull into a car wash before I lose the guy.

I drive to Huntsville, checking my rearview mirror all the way. I cannot stop shaking and realize that part of the reason is that I haven’t eaten all day. As much as this place gives me the creeps with its nine prisons and its death house sitting in the middle of town, I decide to stop at a sandwich shop on the town square for lunch.

Maybe a small part of it is morbid curiosity. Leaning into
the thing you fear, like Uncle Mitch used to advise me. Out the window of the café I can see protesters lining the street on both sides leading up to the Walls Unit.

The waitress, an old woman with too much makeup and flaming red hair not even close to a natural color, delivers the roast beef sandwich I ordered.

“Can you tell me how to get to La Puerta?” I ask her.

“La Puerta!” says the waitress. “That’s all the way down on the Mexican border. Two hundred and fifty miles. It’ll take you at least four hours to get there. Why would you want to go all the way down there?”

“Family.”

It’s a slow afternoon. She shrugs, sits down in the chair across from me, and draws me a map on a paper napkin. “Take Interstate 45 to Houston. Then catch 59 to Victoria. Then you’ll merge with 77. Stay on 77. If you find yourself in Mexico, you’ve gone too far.”

“Thank you,” I say, tucking the napkin into my back pocket.

“Looks like it’s gonna be a big one,” she says, looking at the protesters gathered down the street.

“A big one?”

“You can rate ’em by how early the protesters start lining up, how many TV cameras show up, how big the crowd gets—that sort of thing. Sometimes hardly nobody shows up at all. Like in the case of that child molester they killed last week. No sympathy for him. Raped two little girls, sisters, and left their bodies in shallow graves next to Ray Roberts Lake up by Gainesville. Washed up after the first heavy rain. After what he did to ’em, they had to use their dental records to identify the bodies.”

I was starving half an hour ago, but now I look at my
half-eaten roast beef sandwich and can’t find the stomach to finish it. The waitress continues, “Used to always be a crowd, back in eighty-two after the state first started doin’ executions again. Now they’re so common nobody pays ’em much notice.”

“Oh.” I say. I wonder what it has been like for this woman, working in this diner all these years, with a front row seat to a constant parade of executions every other week. But then maybe it’s not that much different from Southern California, where you learn to tune out the sirens and police helicopters and the murder statistics on the late-night news.

“Could I have my check, please?”

“Sure thang, darlin’,” the waitress says, easing herself out of her seat and ambling toward the register like she has all the time in the world.

As I walk to the old Ford, the only thing on my mind is putting as much distance between myself and that redbrick fortress as possible.

W
HEN I GET TO
L
A
P
UERTA, I ASK FOR DIRECTIONS TO
Mitch’s Motors and find a gigantic lot filled with used cars out in the middle of nowhere. There are so many Cadillacs of so many strange and varied colors, it looks like somebody burst open a huge sack of M&M’s.

Behind the cars is a warehouse where I imagine barrels of flashy paint are stored. It looks a lot like the warehouse in East L.A. where Wade and I used to chop cars, only this one is three times as large. The entire property is surrounded by an electric fence.

“Señor Mitch is at home today,” a man in a blue dress shirt informs me, pointing to a compound about a hundred yards farther down the road, surrounded by a brown stucco fence twelve feet high. He’s wearing a semiautomatic secured in a shoulder holster. Pretty tight security for a car lot.

I get into the pickup and drive to the compound, where a man wearing another semiautomatic greets me in front of an electric
gate. Behind him looms a sprawling adobe house covered in a Spanish tile roof. I think about Tornado Tim’s big house in Quincy, remember the tiny rent house Mitch lets me and Mom live in, and wonder again about how different my life might have turned out if we’d had a little money in our pockets.

“I’m Dylan Dawson. I’m here to see Mitch Osterhaus. He’s my uncle,” I tell the guard.

The man eyes me skeptically, talks in Spanish over a two-way radio, then switches open the gate. “He says is okay,” he tells me, flashing me a nearly toothless grin.

I park in front of the house and have to peel myself off of the vinyl seat before I get out. My body is covered in sweat, and it’s all I can do to keep myself from sticking my head in the fountain covered in blue tile as I make my way to the front door.

I’m so thirsty I could drink the thing dry.

“Dylan, is that you?”

I turn and see my mother, standing by a row of rosebushes, holding a pair of pruning shears. “Mom?” I nearly don’t recognize her in the big floppy hat. There is no sign of the distraught, catatonic woman I last saw in Downey. In fact, she looks completely recovered, but then gardening tends to do that for her.

“Dylan,” she says, dropping her shears and running to wrap her arms around me. I hold her in my arms, wondering when she got so small. I want to hold her like that forever and make sure nothing ever hurts her. “I was so worried about you when I heard what happened,” she says.

“What did you hear?” I ask, taking a step back.

She lowers her voice, even though there is no one around to overhear us. “Your uncle Mitch has a friend in California who said you robbed a liquor store. Is it true? Tell me it isn’t true,
baby,” she says, pushing my bangs out of my eyes like I’m five years old.

“It isn’t true,” I say as I imagine Eight Ball using Jake to get to Mitch so he can find me. Maybe it was Eight Ball in the black Jeep after all.

“If you didn’t do it, then why did you run?” she asks.

“I came to see Dad.”

She lets go of me and looks away. “Did you … see him?”

“Yeah.”

“How is he?”

“He asked about you.”

She fidgets with her hair. “What did he say?”

“He asked me if you ever talked about him. I told him no.” She looks away again, and I take her hand in mine. “Come with me to visit him?”

“I can’t.”

“He’s a decent guy.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” she says, and starts throwing her gardening tools into a box.

“Well, well, well, the prodigal son from California.” Uncle Mitch comes out the front door of the house wearing cowboy boots and a big Stetson hat. He’s carrying a glass of wine and a white pill. He gives both of them to my mother, and I suddenly understand why her mood has improved so much. “I hope you’re not excitin’ your mama. She’s just started comin’ out of her slump,” he tells me. Then he walks behind a bar in the cabana and opens a refrigerator. Meanwhile, a nurse dressed in white comes out of the house with a wheelchair. “Time for your nap, Miss Mollie,” the woman says, and my mother sits obediently down in the chair, but before they leave she pulls
me close and whispers, “Next time you see him, tell him …” She suddenly looks away as if she’s changed her mind.

“Tell him what?” I imagine she wants to say she never stopped loving him, but I want to hear it from her.

“Tell him I never had the nerve to make the big time, but it was easier to blame him than to admit I was afraid. Tell him … I’m sorry. Tell him it wasn’t all his fault.”

“What wasn’t all his fault?” I ask, but by then she is being wheeled away.

I walk over to Uncle Mitch, ready for a fight. He opens two Coronas, keeps one for himself and slides the other to me across the bar. Thirsty as I am, I cannot bring myself to touch it. Partly because I remember the last time I started with beer and woke up in a dumpster clutching an empty whiskey bottle. Partly because accepting any gift from him feels like I’m betraying my father. “Guess we got a few things to talk about,” he says. “From what I understand, you’re gonna need a good lawyer.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell us my father gave you money to take care of us? Why did you keep it for yourself when you knew he wanted us to have it?” My throat is so dry I can hear the words cracking like sandpaper against brittle wood.

“Whoa, boy. That’s a mouthful of accusations for a kid on the run from the law.”

“Don’t act high and mighty with me,” I say. “You’re the one who got me that job with Jake. He’s the one who hooked me up with Eight Ball and had me chopping cars. You knew he was dirty the whole time, didn’t you? What was I supposed to do when Wade robbed a liquor store to get into their gang and then Two Tone came after him with a blade?”

“Is that really the way it happened?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say, and realize that even though I started out with all the questions, I’m the only one giving any answers.

“Let me see what I can do,” he says, winking like he’s about to do me some huge favor, but I’m sick of Mitch and his favors.

“Why did you keep the money my father gave you?” I ask again.

“Sit down,” he tells me, pointing to a bar stool.

“I’ll stand.”

He shrugs, pushes the beer a little closer to me. “Go on. I didn’t poison it,” he tells me.

I’ve been driving around all day in a truck without any air-conditioning. My head is spinning, and I know I’m dangerously dehydrated. “Do you have any Coca-Cola?”

“You know me better than that,” he says with a grin. “Go on. One beer won’t kill you.”

I put the bottle to my mouth, and it feels so good against my parched lips that once I start drinking it I can’t stop, until the entire bottle has been emptied. The familiar alcohol buzz starts to settle me, taking off the edge, turning down the tension that’s been threatening to explode inside of me.

And I realize that a little alcohol might be just what I’ve needed.

“Feel better?” he asks.

“The state of Texas is getting ready to kill my father. How the hell do you think I feel?”