Wear Your Home Like a Scar, page 11
When he’d heard that Jacob had become part of the law, Lester understood. It was a logical step, considering their childhood, that he’d want to effect some peace and order. He never could figure out why Jacob ended up in El Pozo, though. Maybe it was the same reason Mabel’s granddaddy had for being in Ningunita, that his legs just couldn’t carry him any farther. The literal translation of El Pozo was hole, but it held a meaning closer to pit or cesspool. Lester’d tried to teach his son, Charles, a few words in Spanish and Navajo, hoping it might help him get on with some of the boys in town. He’d also showed Charles how to shoot, using the water tower as a target every afternoon until Ruth called them in for dinner. Just in case the language familiarity didn’t work. To Lester, every shot Charles lodged in the metal side of the tower was a bullet in his daddy’s chest.
Off in the distance, a faint pink glow became visible over the horizon. El Pozo shouldn’t be too much farther. Lester opened the throttle.
He pulled into town as the sun crested above the mesas. Main Street slumbered before him, the storefronts dimmed. The only people he encountered were a few milkmen and young boys on bikes throwing newspapers. He stopped by the one restaurant with lights on and asked where he might find the police.
The wrinkled man behind the counter cocked his head, considering Lester. “Where you from, son?”
“Pardon me?”
He set plates out on the counter for future customers, a fork and knife on each one. “We ain’t had police for a spell. Sheriff got rid of them when he came on. Picked himself up two deputies. Now they keep watch, make sure things are as he like.”
Lester glanced outside. A row of wooden posts stood before the restaurant, seemingly pointless except for tying up a dog during the meal. Maybe Jacob had been promoted to deputy. If not, they would probably know where to find him.
“Where could I find this sheriff, then?”
The wrinkled man pulled off a meal ticket, licked the tip of the pencil a few times and drew a crude map. Lester slipped it into his pocket.
The man called out to Lester, “Sure you don’t want some coffee first?” but Lester just let the door slam.
It was more of a house than a station, where the map led him. Lester was hesitant to knock, fearing the old-timer might’ve been pulling some local stunt, but his eyes were burning with a lack of sleep. He took a deep breath, readying himself for this, then let his hand fall on the brass knocker. The sound echoed through the inside of the house. After a long quiet minute, Lester debated knocking again, then turned around to leave. He stopped when the door opened.
“I can help you?” The voice was older, had been soaked in grain alcohol then left out in the sun and wind, but Lester would’ve recognized it anywhere.
“I know you don’t want to see me,” Lester said before his brother could get a word out, “but I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important.”
He watched recognition seep across Jacob’s face.
“Heard about the old man,” Jacob nodded. “Was wondering when you’d show up.”
Lester propped himself up against a porch post. He swallowed, keeping the rising blackness of exhaustion from overtaking him. “Hank McCray took Ruth and Charlie. I don’t give him back his land, I don’t get back my family.”
“Daddy won it from Buck McCray in a card game.”
“Daddy always cheated at.”
Jacob shrugged.
“Look, Jacob. I know we’ve never been close, but you’re the only one who can help me here.” He stepped closer, hoping to make a connection. “Mama and the old man are gone. We’re all we have anymore.”
Jacob’s silhouette shifted in the threshold of the door.
“Please, Jacob.”
Jacob exhaled, acrid alcohol fumes riding on his breath. “It get any better after all that? In the house, I mean.”
“No,” Lester said. “I didn’t get beat as bad as you did, but there were times I couldn’t sit. Mostly he just walked around the house acting like I didn’t even exist.”
“Where’d you bury him?”
“Mexico.”
Jacob gave a vicious smile, showing off his blunt and gnarled teeth. They were the same color as the sheriff’s badge pinned to his left breast. “Just where he always wanted.”
“And a long way from me.” Lester licked his lips and swallowed, then repeated, “Please. Jacob.”
After a long minute that stretched and twisted, Jacob stepped back from the door. He didn’t tell him to come in but didn’t block his entrance either. Lester took that as an invitation, pushed himself off the post and took two steps toward the house.
“What’s your plan?” Jacob said.
“I need to lie down a bit, then get you and your men help me track him down.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’ll gut him where he stands.”
Lester woke to the sound of banging. He ground his palms against his eyes, trying to get himself together. The banging continued. In the breezeway, he could see the blood red glow of a setting sun pass through the window above the door. Someone was knocking on the door. He opened it to find a young man in his dress browns, presumably one of the deputies.
The man pushed past Lester, his head on a swivel. “Why’d you lock the door?”
“I just woke up.”
When the deputy found the adjacent rooms suitably empty, he grabbed Lester’s arm, pulling him out the door. “Sheriff tracked down the man with your family.”
“Where?” Lester was already hurrying to his bike.
“Hiding on the edge of town.” The deputy opened the door of his cruiser, watching Lester.
“You better drive fast, son.” He kicked over the engine a few times but the only response he got was a sad sputter. He shook the bike back and forth and opened the gas tank. He must’ve been more sleep deprived than he thought, because he’d normally never leave himself with less than a quarter-tank; no telling how long you’d be before seeing another filling station.
The deputy called over to him, said to get in. Lester set the bike upright and climbed into the passenger seat, barely closing the door before the boy spit rocks with his tires. Lester watched the dust cloud fade behind him.
“You got a gun?” the deputy said.
“No. Should I?”
The boy glanced down at his own holster for a flash, then kept his eyes on the horizon and drove.
They pulled up to an abandoned quarry as the sun whispered below the horizon, spilling darkness over the land. In the dirt parking lot, Lester saw another dented cruiser parked at a severe angle. Several small, abandoned buildings ringed the area, obscuring the quarry. A ramshackle workers’ quarter sat opposite them, with two rusted transport trucks parked beside them.
Lester had the door open before the deputy had even stopped and sprinted to the main building. The pieces of corrugated metal siding weren’t plumb with one another, giving the impression the building had been erected quickly and without much thought to structural integrity. The door stood cracked open.
Behind him, he heard the deputy step on the gas, the tires throwing rocks and dust as he got the hell away from whatever was about to transpire. Lester felt his arms go to gooseflesh as he entered the building.
Inside he found an office housing only two desks and a row of filing cabinets. A pad of blotter paper sat on each desk, along with a pen set and blank name plates. A thick layer of dust covered everything, as if all the workers had simultaneously quit or just disappeared. He heard scuffling toward the back and fought the urge to run. Jacob had been a tough bastard when he was younger, and the years in this hellhole could only have served to fortify that, but where Lester’s family was concerned, no amount of caution would be unwarranted. What if Hank had gotten the drop on Jacob, or if there were more men? Lester slunk along the walls, trying to stay in any available shadow.
The first room had its shades drawn, but Lester could see enough through the thin slices to know the room was empty. He stood quietly, tried to quell the blood rushing through his ears. The scuffling was farther down, at the end of the hallway. He willed his breath away, then crept across the carpet, kneeling before the door to slide the bowie knife from his boot.
For years he’d kept the knife on his person, waiting for the day his father felt treacherous again so Lester could help the old man meet the same end as his mother with the same knife. Once he met Ruth, though, once Charles came along, that anger just drifted away like smoke, and the knife became more of a reminder of his mother than a promise of death.
Lester wrapped his fingers around the handle, took a long breath to steel himself, then set his hand on the door and charged in.
Reams of chewed paper sat on the built-in shelves. Two thick rats scurried up the sides, disappearing through a hole in the ceiling. Black pellets and bits of pulp decorated the floor. Lester pressed his fist against his hip, breathing in and out through his nose to let the anger settle. He spat on the floor and started to turn, then heard the click, not more than five feet behind him.
“You better pull that now, Hank, less I get a chance to turn,” he said. “If I turn, you die.”
He heard a quick exhalation through the nose, a snuffed laugh.
“I don’t give a fuck about that land, but I will crawl through hell to protect my family. I’ll keep walking with all your bullets in me until I find them safety. Then I’ll track you down and gut you top-to-toe.” Lester cleared his throat. “This is your chance.”
“That land was my birthright.”
“Your old man lost it. Anyway, I promised the Navajo they could have it back when I died. They were there first, so it’s only fair.” Lester paused as he felt the pistol barrel press against the back of his head. “I didn’t even want the damn place.”
“Well, you got it anyway.” Hank reached around and dislodged the knife from Lester’s hand then pulled his arm and shoved him down the hall from behind. “Come see what it got you.”
Lester opened the door to outside with his face and tripped over the moulding but stayed on his feet. When he looked up, he saw Ruth, her face so bruised it melded with the night’s shadows, the top of her shirt splattered with blood.
The first thing Lester said was, “Is the baby okay?” to which she nodded.
Charles stood behind her, visibly unharmed but with eyes shining with some animal combination of terror and fury. Maybe it was the same thing.
Jacob paced behind them, smoking a cigarette while his boots crunched the gravel that ringed the quarry’s ridge. In his right hand he held a revolver, the chamber hanging open. Lester started to run to his family but held himself steady when Jacob snapped the chamber shut.
“You motherfucker,” Lester said through his teeth.
“My, but how your tune has changed when you don’t need something from me.”
Jacob flicked the cigarette into the void behind them. It left a red arc in the darkness before disappearing into the pitch-black quarry.
“You are goddamned insane, Jacob. What the hell is this?”
“This?” He held his arms wide, gesturing around. “This is comeuppance.”
“Comeuppance? Comeuppance!” Lester started to rush him again but was met with a rap against the back of the head. He stumbled, catching himself before crashing to the ground. Pebbles stuck in the flesh of his palms. He righted himself. “I apologized for lying a hundred times over already, but we were only kids. We didn’t know better. You want to blame me for our father being a piece of shit, go right ahead. But don’t you take it out on my family. They didn’t do a goddamned thing.”
“I couldn’t speak to that,” Jacob said. “Never had a family to know.”
“That’s your own problem, Jacob. That’s not on me.”
“You don’t lie to the old man, he don’t tan me. He don’t tan me, Mama don’t try to stop him. She don’t try to stop him, she don’t get killed and I don’t replay it the rest of my life.” Jacob let out something like a laugh, but covered in shards and splinters. “Shit, he only started drinking so hard because you killed his only way to provide. He wasn’t a bad man until you ruined the family, brother.”
“I was there too—brother—and I still managed to get married and have kids.”
“We were in the same house. Brother,” he said. “But we lived in much different places.”
“He hurt us both, Jacob, but I didn’t abandon my family. You left me in that house, alone. Stuck there with him. Your tanning hurt like hell, I’m sure, but it was just me and him,” Lester said. “More than ten years together, and the only words he said to me were come here, boy when he had the strop out. Shit, I’d go days without speaking a word to anyone. Ruth is the only thing kept me from taking the knife to myself and joining Mama.”
“That should’ve been my land.”
“That land is poisoned.”
Jacob grabbed Ruth by the hair and yanked her head back. She gave out something between a grunt and yelp. Lester told her everything was going to be okay. Charlie came up beside Ruth. To comfort her and his unborn sibling, Lester thought.
“That land was my future,” Jacob said. “I could’ve been Daddy, with the wife and the kids and happy family. I could’ve been what we were before you poisoned our family.”
“I don’t know what you’re remembering, Jacob, but our family was never like that,” Lester said. “He was always a scary man.”
“He didn’t have to be.”
Lester shook his head and exhaled hard. “So what’s your plan then, boys? I’m supposed to sign something, give a handshake? What?”
Jacob dropped Ruth’s hair, stepped forward with swagger, letting the gun hang loose at his waist. “Plan is, now that the old man’s dead, Hank gets his daddy’s land back.”
“You terrorized my family over a piece of land you don’t even want?”
Jacob ignored him and continued. “Then your family, they get a close-up view of the bottom of that quarry.”
Charlie crept forward again, his uncle oblivious and Hank paying too-close attention to Jacob’s grandstanding to notice. Lester wanted to say something, tell him to stay out of this, but couldn’t risk Jacob turning and firing. Instead, he shifted his stance, putting himself between his boy and Hank.
“What about me?” Lester said, making sure they stayed focused on him. “What do I get? A bullet in the belly?”
Jacob laughed like he was a regular vaudeville comedian. “No, brother. I wouldn’t kill my own blood. I’m better than that.”
“Then what?”
Charlie watched the revolver swinging alongside his uncle, his fingers flexing. Lester forced himself to remain calm.
“You? You get to live like a real Pruitt,” Jacob said. “Alone and miserable for the rest of your days.”
Lester clenched his jaw and took a step forward, getting into Jacob’s space. “You touch my family, I will end you with my bare hands.”
Jacob unleashed that hideous smile. “That would be appropriate.”
He’d barely finished the word when Charlie lunged forward, snatching at the revolver in Jacob’s hand.
Hank’s arm wrapped around Lester’s neck, the barrel pressed against his temple. He smelled the whiskey sweating from Hank’s greasy pores.
“Put it down, boy,” Jacob said, hands held up to calm the boy. “Trust me, you don’t want to watch a parent die.”
“Then tell him to let my daddy go,” Charlie said.
“It does things to you,” Jacob said. “Things you can’t undo, things that won’t be dulled by any number of bottles. Things you’ll see when you sleep for the rest of your life.”
“Then let him go,” Charlie said.
Jacob shook his head. “Nothing doing, son. Put it down.”
Ruth tried to speak but her sobbing shook the words into unintelligible bits.
Hank let the hammer click back.
“Close your eyes, Charlie,” Lester said.
“Toque la tierra,” Charlie said. “En tres.”
Lester smiled to himself, then took a deep breath, said, “Te amo, mijo.”
He let his knees collapse when the shot rang out. Hank grunted and his arm tightened as two more gunshots fired, Lester’s side exploding in bright white this time. He fell to the ground, Hank’s twitching body landing on top of him. The knife clattered on the ground beside him. He stretched out an arm, trying to pull himself free but felt the wound in his side gape open as he moved. Grunts in the darkness just above him. Jacob had his hands wrapped around Charlie’s, trying to wrestle the gun free. Ruth had her arms wound through Jacob’s and was trying to push him away before he flung her aside. Jacob shoved his leg in front of Charlie, then pushed him to the ground, flipping him over on his back. Jacob dragged a hand across his mouth, wiping away the blood, then stood over Charlie with the gun at the end of his arm.
Lester dug his toes into the ground and pushed himself from under the dead man, grabbing the knife and swinging it at Jacob’s thigh. His howl rang out like a coyote’s. Lester stabbed again and stuck the blade in the front of Jacob’s knee before falling back to the ground. Jacob hobbled back, screaming twice more before tripping over Charlie and falling backward into the quarry.
His voice echoed for long minutes from the bottom of the pit.
Ruth’s face appeared over Lester’s.
“I’m sorry it took so long to get back,” Lester said. “This is my fault.”
“You damn fool,” Ruth said, cupping her hands around Lester’s chin. “Why didn’t you drop like Charlie told you to?”
“Tried.”
“Help me stand you up.”
“Can’t,” Lester said. “Get the boy and drive back to town. Get some help.”
“Dad,” Charlie yelled to him. “Dad, Uncle Jacob has the keys.”
“Don’t call him that.” Lester squinted away a wave of nausea. “How deep is the quarry?”
