Wear Your Home Like a Scar, page 10
Junior looked at it like it was a snake that might strike. “So it’s, like, old?”
“It’s not worth anything. Not to anyone who isn’t a Bleaker.”
Scooping the chain with his thumb, Junior let it pendulum before his eyes.
Sal stood and patted his shoulder. “Get some sleep tonight.”
They looked from the necklace to Sal. Junior said, “Dad, what are we going to do?”
“You’re coming to work with me tomorrow.”
“You sure you don’t want to do this alone?” Junior glanced back and forth between Melanie and his dad, maybe confirming something, maybe searching for some exit in the alleyway. Across the street, he could see a young couple with a stroller chatting with Ari inside the deli.
Sal double-checked his Sig again, pulled the Shatner Halloween mask over his face then motioned for Junior to do the same. Something about that motion, his son’s face disappearing beneath the dispassionate mask, broke Sal inside. Everything he’d done—working extra shifts, eating pasta damn near every night because it was cheap and he could save money for Junior, foregoing any social contact to be home when Junior got out of school—had led to this moment: robbing the one person who’d shown him kindness over the years to save the son he hadn’t seen in years.
“Just remember,” Sal said. “Those are real bullets in there.”
“Yeah. I know.” Junior waved the gun around, trying to feign nonchalance but Sal could see the tremor in his hand. The couple waved goodbye, wheeling their baby outside and down the sidewalk.
“You wanted to be in.” He chambered a round, let out a long, defeated breath. “You’re in.”
They rounded the corner to the sidewalk; Sal shouldering open the door with Junior following.
Ari threw his hands in the air, his shocked yelp stifling itself.
Sal shoved the gun in his face, keeping Ari docile while he walked around the counter, then nodded at the register. With a surprisingly steady hand, Ari pressed a button and the till sprung open. His hand went back in the air.
Junior came to the register, scooped out bills from the slots and tossed them into a brown paper bag while Sal kept Ari covered. The man was no liar. He kept himself calm and chose family over money. Sal admired him for that and hoped that Ari would understand his motivation, were the situations reversed. On the wooden counter beside Ari sat a chunk of what looked to be cow, a cleaver sunk into the chopping surface by the tip.
Sal looked up, saw Junior heading toward the back.
“No.”
“What about the safe?” Junior turned and continued walking.
“Get back here. Now.”
Ari cocked his head. “Salvatore?”
Junior froze. Sal swallowed.
“You rob me?”
“Hands up.”
Ari’s hands sunk like deflated balloons. “You are one of them? You are not a man?” His fingers curled into fists.
“I said put your damn hands up.”
“Dad—”
“Shut up.” Sal whirled toward Junior, leveling his gun. “Shut up.”
“Dad.” Junior’s yell was muffled by the mask but it didn’t matter. Sal caught a glint of light, then a bright blue shock tearing through his stomach. He looked down, saw the bloody cleaver, the red slash across his gut.
“You’re not a hero.” Sal stumbled back against the counter, bracing himself with a slick palm. His legs were missing but freezing. “You said you didn’t care about money.”
“It is not money.” Ari stepped forward. “It is honor.”
Sal swung his gun up and fired. Ari’s head flew back, a rooster tail of blood splashing against the wall.
Sal slumped against the counter, holding himself up with his elbow. He felt the blood run from his stomach, trying to push it back in. Ari’s hands twitched as the man fell back against the wall. Commotion in the back room, the back of Junior’s body visible in the doorframe. A click and a long creak. Rustling paper. Junior turned and caught Sal’s eyes. Green bills peeked from the paper bag in Junior’s hands. He glanced at Sal, at the money. He ran.
Sal’s elbow slipped from the counter and he let himself fall.
A car slams on its brakes and blares its horn. Junior and Melanie stumble across the street, Junior’s feet nearly dragging as he latches onto Melanie’s shoulder. He barks out another sob, doubles over and screams before Melanie can get him to the sidewalk.
“I just left him there!” Junior lurches forward, his palms scraping the concrete.
“I know, babe, I know, but what were you supposed to do?” Melanie hefts him back up, aiming him toward Lanvale. “Come on. Just one more block and we’re there.”
“I just…left him.” His words are slippery, covered in tears and bile.
“But he shouldn’t’ve gone in like that, with a gun and—”
“He was trying to help us!”
“I know, babe,” she repeats. “Here, just wait here a second.”
She leans him against the wall of a rowhome and hurries down the alley.
Junior slides down the brick, mouth open as if he’s praying but no words come out. His hands search his pockets, first slowly then more frantically. “Where is it where is it where—”
“Here, babe, here,” Melanie says, suddenly standing over him. She holds a glass pipe in her hand, a bulge under her shirt where she’d stuffed the bag of bills.
Junior grabs the pipe and sucks greedily, like salvation lies within. His brain lights up, body begins to float away.
Melanie licks her lips, the edge of a scab catching on her tongue, waiting her turn.
They kill one bag then head down Montford, through another alley and over to the cemetery, and sit before the headstone they like, the angel with outstretched arms.
While Melanie opens the second bag and cooks for them, Junior rifles his right pocket, his left pocket, his right one again, trying to find his great-granddad’s necklace, searching for something of his father’s to hold close. Melanie nudges his arm and hands him the glass pipe again.
He pulls his hands free, closes his eyes, breathes deep, holds it.
“We’re going to ration this, babe,” says Melanie. “We’re not going to blow it all at once.”
“No, course not. We’re going to be smart with it.” Junior lets smoke drift from his mouth. “No one’s ever smart, but we’re going to be smart.”
“Just a little taste, then some for the road, and we’ll head out. Start over, right?”
“Right. Start over.”
Back to TOC
A Hundred for the Crows
When Lester Pruitt pulled back onto his land after the twelve-hour ride back from re-burying his father, he turned off the Indian’s engine then went inside and found his house vibrating with emptiness. His voice echoed off the wood floors, off the tin dishes sitting in dirty water in the ceramic sink, off the wood walls adorned with only two photographs. He stood in the kitchen, looking around as if his pregnant wife Ruth and son Charles might be hiding beneath the folded Navajo blankets on the deacon bench. Faintly, he could smell burnt coffee and cornbread.
The funeral man had sent word two days earlier. Seemed the gravediggers hadn’t buried his father’s body deep enough and the coyotes caught scent. Lester was only supposed to be gone until sundown—the next morning at the latest—but coyotes had a tendency to scatter their food. He wasn’t happy about having to ride from the Navajo Nation down to Mexico but it was his father’s wish to be buried there. Even though his father was a mean bastard, Lester felt compelled to oblige, in the same way that victims felt connected to their kidnappers, and it took him damn near a whole day to collect and account for the bones to make sure everything would be interred within blessed ground.
Outside, he heard feet scuffling. He walked outside and was surprised to find one of the local Navajo boys, standing in the dirt at the edge of the porch with his back toward Lester. The boy kicked his toe at the ground and wouldn’t face Lester. He glanced over the boy’s shoulder to the machine barn and the heavy rusted chains hanging through their eyelets, his motorcycle and equipment still safe inside.
“You need help, son?”
The boy backed up a hair but still refused to look at him. Lester heard the boy mumbling but couldn’t understand. Whether it was volume of voice or origins of words, he couldn’t tell.
“Speak up, son. Turn around now. I’m not one to raise a hand.”
He could have swore he felt the sun tick, the boy moved so slowly. Down in town, in Ningunita, all the boys ran after one another so fast, and they were covered in similar amounts of dust so that faces blended together, and Lester couldn’t tell this boy from any others. But he was pretty damn sure this boy didn’t normally sport the weeping gash on his cheek or the rock-sized welt on his forehead. He spat in the dirt and stepped off the porch, then pulled the handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to the boy, nodding toward his cheek.
“What’s your name?”
“Tahoma.” He squinted when he pressed the cloth against his face.
“You got a good sense of direction, don’t you?”
Tahoma nodded.
“Then why are you on my farm?”
Tahoma looked to the side, then up, finally, at Lester. His eyes reminded Lester of the color this dirt used to be when he was a boy, back when his father raised actual horses, before Lester converted the family business into horsepower.
Tahoma mumbled something. Lester knelt before him. “I’ve had a hell of a day, Tahoma. Tell me, please, before I lose my temper.”
The boy looked over Lester’s shoulder then met his eyes. “Mister Hank said your daddy took his land, so he take your family. He gets the land, you get your family. He doesn’t, you don’t.”
“Land don’t belong to anyone. Your people get it when I die anyway, far as the law’s concerned. I put it in my will.”
“Just what Mister Hank said.”
Lester pressed a hard clump of dirt between his thumb and forefinger, watched the dust blow away in the wind. “He the one to give you those scrapes?”
Tahoma nodded. “Said he’ll kill me, I don’t tell you.”
Standing up straight, Lester looked out over the fields. The mesas and boulders cut stark black shapes from the setting sun, throwing shadows across the scrabbled fields where cattle used to graze. Dots of light shone through the holes in the old water tower, a speck for each bullet Lester had put through it when his daddy taught him to shoot doves and crows, back in the good days, back before the incident. Sometimes Lester wondered if everything would’ve just been okay if he’d never learned to shoot.
One day, when Lester was seven, he got the idea to practice his aim by shooting some cans off the fence. Show his daddy how good he’d gotten, make him real proud. Only Lester’s aim wasn’t as true as he’d thought, and the bullet hit his daddy’s prize breeding steer right in the eye, tearing through the tissue and burying itself in the steer’s brain. His daddy had to put the animal down the same evening.
When confronted, Lester did the natural thing for a seven-year-old: blamed someone else. The sound of leather strop on Jacob’s tender flesh rang throughout the house. With every howl, Lester cringed harder, knowing that beating was meant for him, but if he were to confess, it would only make his daddy angrier.
Without the prize steer, the family business began to drop quickly. And as that business disappeared, the strop became a constant fixture in the house—as did a bottle of corn whiskey—dispensed on Jacob for the slightest offense. When their mother intervened, their father turned his wrath to her. It wasn’t long until beating one was as good as beating the other, as they were the same person in their father’s mind.
The cycle continued for a long two years, their father’s anger exacerbated by the crops slowly turning brown, until Jacob, then twelve and nearly his father’s size, finally stood tall against him. This defiance was an affront to their father’s whiskey-pickled brain, and so he charged the boy with the bowie knife he’d sharpened on the strop. Had he reached the boy, he would’ve bled him dry, but their mother put herself between them, catching the blade in the center of her gut.
While his father killed another bottle on the front porch, Lester buried his mother on the edge of the fields, without his brother, and he had always held tight to the notion that it was her blood that poisoned the crops just to spite his father. Truth was, though, that if his daddy hadn’t been so intent on keeping his throat wet with whiskey, he might’ve noticed the grasses drying up all through the south. Turning to engine repair was the only thing Lester could do to keep food on the table.
Lester looked down at Tahoma, drawing shapes in the dirt with a stick.
“I don’t have a helmet for you,” he said, “so you’re just going to have to hold on tight.”
Lester kicked over the Indian’s engine and hoisted Tahoma up behind him, then set off toward Ningunita.
Tahoma hopped off and scampered around the back of the drug store as soon as Lester parked. The streets were covered in sand and dust on account of the wind, making it look almost like there had never been any asphalt to begin with. A twist of smoke rose from the butcher’s shop. Smelled like someone was burning tires in the back, and Lester wondered if that was how he got his smoked pork so rich. He hung his helmet on the handlebars then pushed open the doors of Belle’s.
Mabel stood behind the gnarled wood bar, cigarette perched between two stained fingers, her thumb erratically flicking the end. She wore a men’s white oxford rolled up at the sleeves, dirt clinging to the sweat stains. Two lumps in grease-stained coveralls kept the bar’s corner from floating off into space, and a dried rose sat in a mason jar on top of the piano in the corner. Mabel’s grandfather had been caught in the Gold Rush current and swept from New York to the West Coast. When his manifest destiny revealed itself to be lead and rocks, he turned back and got as far as Arizona. He started the saloon and named it after his dead wife, Belle. Mabel’s mother, Isabelle, gave the building to Mabel when she passed. The place wasn’t designed to look like an old west saloon so much as it hadn’t managed to give up the ghost, but Lester thought decay suited the place well.
“You come to pay your tab?”
Lester gave her his best Clark Gable smile. “Next time?’
She snorted a laugh through her nose then pulled out a chipped tumbler and sloshed some bourbon into it.
He swung a leg over the stool and tipped back half the drink. The two at the end just sat there. The man on the radio talked about Roosevelt promising to repeal the Volstead Act if elected president. Lester figured Mabel didn’t much care either way: there had to be someone around to check whether they were selling booze illegally or not, and the last agent who came through caught an ass-full of buckshot.
“Mabel,” he said. “Where’s your nephew?”
She squinted one eye and took a long drag, considering him through the smoke. If she’d tried a little harder, she could’ve killed a whole cigarette at once.
After a long minute, she said, “I don’t get into feuds where blood is involved, but I heard Hank has been shacked up in El Pozo the last while.”
“He been in contact with my brother while there?”
She pulled out a tumbler for herself, this one with a complete rim. “I told you I don’t like it when blood is involved. Either kind.”
“I heard you the first time. And you know damn well my brother and I are a far cry from blood.”
“There’s always time to change that.”
“Not for us, there ain’t.”
Lester had sought out his brother several times in the years after their mother died, hoping to make amends, to apologize for not taking responsibility for the breeding steer, but Jacob wouldn’t hear anything of it. I couldn’t sit for two years because of that son of a bitch and you just let it happen, he’d said. I was seven years old and scared of the bastard, Lester told him. To which Jacob responded, You were scared, and now Mama’s dead. So you can take those tears and go to hell.
Lester threw back the rest of his drink and stood from Mabel’s bar.
“You going to kill him?” She swirled the liquor around in her glass, like she was afraid her drinking it would seal his fate.
Lester glanced around the bar, at the tarnished mirror behind Mabel. He pointed at the rose on the piano. “Things don’t stay alive on their own. You got to work to do that.”
He walked out of the bar and turned over the bike. El Pozo was well over a hundred miles for the crows, more than two for cars. Lester didn’t have that long.
He set out across the desert.
The midnight desert always held a special holiness for Lester. In the time after Jacob had left home, he’d tiptoe around his father’s drunken mass and out to the porch to watch the stars poke holes in the darkness, sky that same color as the onyx pieces he’d find when digging in the fields. He’d listen to the javelinas huffing through the fields, the bats and owls flapping through the night. It was about the only time that, despite there only being the two of them, the air was still in the house. Lester tried to let it all absorb into his skin like salamanders did water, carry it with him until the feeling evaporated.
Hurtling through the night desert on two wheels, though, that was no time for Lester to become lost in revelry, revisiting a time that was only worth its salt when the memories were covered in dust. Lester wove around saguaro cacti, squinting his eyes to keep watch for the shimmer of moonlight on a kangaroo rat’s back, the highlighted fur of a jackrabbit. He opened the throttle for a moment then pulled it back, telling himself that an extra few miles-per-hour wouldn’t help his family when he hit a rock and split his head open like a walnut, leaving himself splayed out for the coyotes.
