Blood Father Read online

  Lydia grabbed the towhead and yanked him across the yard, making him sit with the others. Finally the fifth boy drifted over and joined the circle. “There! Motherfucking nap time!” she shouted with her teeth bared. The stress was in her shoulders and fingertips and there was a jolting motion in her chest. She started to cough violently; the kids waited patiently, suddenly intimidated by the hint of illness. “Everybody put your heads down. Maybe you don’t take me seriously, but don’t make these guys mad.”

  The freckled boy raised his hand, his body twisted down in the dirt.

  “What?” Lydia asked.

  “Are we hostages?”

  “No, you’re not hostages. I’m just guarding the door—you’re just—we’re just all going to sit here and stay out of the way.”

  “You should definitely kill Teddy’s dad. He’s a dick.”

  From inside the house, beyond a dim sliding glass door, Lydia could hear scooting furniture, shouting, and splintering wood. The freckled boy blurted out, “Have you ever shot anybody?”

  “No,” she said, looking back over her shoulder. Her palms were damp with sweat, and she wiped them on her shirt.

  Past a patio of loose bricks, through the glass door covered with reflected trees, she could see movement as if in shallow water. She turned back to the boys all lounging in the dirt. She said, “It’s just money. It’s always money—it’s my boyfriend’s business.”

  “I’m your boyfriend,” said the one with the gouged elbow. They all laughed as he grabbed the crotch of his loose pants.

  Just then, a shot fired, louder than a cherry bomb, and all the boys leapt to their feet. There followed the sound of kicked bottles, breaking glass, a woman’s muzzled scream.

  When a shot burst through the glass door, the boys dashed for cover, sliding downhill and behind the trees in what seemed to be a planned evacuation route for any broken window.

  Lydia headed toward the door. She could see into the dim living room beyond the punctured glass, where a woman was sobbing, a noise so strained that she sounded like a suffering mule. Coming through mounted speakers, a CD was playing an interminable guitar solo with an occasional hailstorm of bongo drums, and it took Lydia a moment to realize that the other, more erratic percussion of banging was coming from the kitchen, where Jonah’s men were dumping out drawers and tearing through the floorboards.

  On the sharp crust around the glass door there hung syrupy droplets of blood, which expanded into a sprayed trail along the walls, across the floor, and into a saturated arm of the couch. The woman sat just below this bloodstain, with her hands duct-taped together, braying in pain with a strip across her mouth. Lydia slid the door open, dropping more chips of glass, and, once inside, she saw the woman’s mangled bare foot: the two smallest toes blown off, and blood welling up and leaking down to the floor. The room smelled like burning skin and hair. Up three steps to a short hallway, a shirtless man lay facedown, his twisted arm blocking the kitchen door. Blood pooled beneath his forehead and spread in the grout between the Spanish tiles.

  Lydia was numb.

  She wanted to say the woman’s name, but she couldn’t remember it. Probably in her mid-thirties, the woman already had eroded cheeks and witchlike features from years of glass pipes and needles. She wore only an oversized T-shirt stretching over her lap. Over the patch of duct tape, her eyes were sick and raw, and her nose was straining for air.

  Stepping casually over the body between the kitchen and hallway, Jonah appeared with his gun at his side. He had a wet paper towel and was trying to rub a stain off his pants. Quietly he said, “Okay, you’re here. Take the tape off her mouth. She needs to remember where this shit is or she’s going to lose another little piggy.”

  Lydia’s hands were trembling so badly that she couldn’t grab the edge of the tape, so Jonah tore it loose, leaving a streak across the woman’s mouth.

  “Don’t start getting paranoid again,” he said to Lydia. “Focus.”

  Lydia nodded and said, “I swallowed my gum.”

  The woman shouted, “Teddy! Run! Run away, baby! Get out of here!”

  “I didn’t know we were doing this at a fucking day care center,” said Jonah.

  Smashing through shelves in the bathroom, Cully was hollering that he couldn’t find anything. Jonah snapped his fingers in front of Lydia’s eyes and whispered, “Come on, come on. Wake up. I need you to hold her foot against the couch right there. Hold it still.”

  “Jonah, I can’t,” said Lydia, hovering in the center of the room. She barely opened her mouth when she spoke. It seemed as if she were watching the scene unfold from a distance, only half involved; every movement had a slow, underwater quality; even her own voice seemed to come from somewhere else in the room, a few steps behind her, as if a ventriloquist were speaking for her.

  The woman leaned back against the couch and said in a bleating, hoarse voice that she didn’t know where anything was hidden.

  Lydia whispered, “She’s trapped. She’s just lost.”

  “Lydia, listen to me here: This is a worthless human being. Deals to twelve-year-old kids. She could’ve saved her old man over there, trust me. Don’t get caught up in the drama here—this woman knows what she’s doing. She’s got a sick calculator in her head, and she knows exactly how much every finger and toe is worth—right? And it’s not going to add up to the cash she’s hiding.”

  He pushed the woman’s head down against the sofa cushions, and she stared ahead with bulging eyes. “Stay there,” he said. Then he reached over and took Lydia’s hand, gently raising her gun and guiding it. “Shhh. Just relax. You’re going to learn this.”

  Lydia stayed rigid as he maneuvered the gun toward the woman’s temple. He straightened her arms and locked her elbow, as calmly as if guiding her through a tennis swing, saying, “Now it’s a light gun, so it’s going to kick. Don’t look at me, look at her. She lied to you. Show me you can do this, Lydia. This will change you, baby—this will make everything work again.”

  Lydia’s hands were frothing sweat over the trigger as she closed her eyes. Soon Jonah grew tired of waiting, and he stepped back and angled his head and spoke to her with his lips tensed. “Lydia, you’re still here today, with this choice—because of me. Because I love you, and I stood up for you. This is our chance, right now. If we stand together on this, all of us—then you need to be a part of it, so there’s never any doubt. You’re a murderer just for being here—you know that, don’t you?”

  The woman was watching Lydia with wide, yellowish eyes.

  “Lydia, you’ll never understand my life without this. But I need you, and you didn’t let me lie to you. From the day I met you, you wanted to know everything. Well, here it is. For you. Everything. You’ll never be the same kid again. And you cross that line, baby, and I’ll be right here on the other side, waiting for you.”

  The song on the CD player changed and Lydia recognized a drawling ’60s ballad. She began to laugh and cry simultaneously, overwhelmed by the absurd and maudlin song.

  Jonah stroked Lydia around her cheeks and forehead, clearing the hair from her eyes, then he pressed his own pistol against Lydia’s face while massaging her back and shoulders like a coach.

  “Jonah?” she called, as if in the dark, refusing to look at him as he brushed hair off her ear with the muzzle.

  “It’s a marriage, kid,” he said as he pulled back the slide on his gun, still held against Lydia’s cheek. “I’m down on one knee.”

  From the kitchen, Iván shouted that he had found the stash, and there were cheers and hollers, and Lydia laughed nervously and looked over at Jonah. “They found it.”

  “Yes or no?” said Jonah. He pushed his gun harder against her skin, smudging her face. The woman was closing her eyes now, breathing in tremors, lying just below Lydia’s outstretched arms. “Right here, right now—in this room. The rest of your life.”

  Lydia turned and faced him, smiling like a madwoman, breaking into harder tears that warped her face
. She said, “Okay, baby, okay. I will. I will.”

  Jonah lowered his gun and tilted his head, an expression she’d never once seen from him, softened and affectionate.

  Then Lydia raised her pistol in a fluid motion and shot him—through the base of the neck below his gaping mouth. Blood streaked as far back as the kitchen door. The shot deafened her, and Jonah dropped down to his knees, stunned, staring up for a moment with a viscous chunk torn out from his throat, his eyelashes netted with blood and a flood over his collar and down his shirt. He blinked several times, mechanically, before sagging against the steps.

  By the time Lydia had fled past the shattered door, nearly tripping on the loose bricks, she knew that the others had found him; and, though it didn’t seem real to her in the muted sounds and altered time, she heard them firing. The toe band broke on her sandal. She kicked off the other and leapt barefoot into the ivy, clambering downhill and falling the last few feet into the undergrowth around the creek.

  She splashed through shallow, scummy water, stirring up gnats and cutting her feet as she scampered over the broken glass along homeless encampments. The canyon snaked downhill; the creek was a thin groove of moss and silt, and she couldn’t tell which way to go once inside the enclosure of saplings and interlaced shrubs. Sirens came from both directions, and a helicopter crossed the narrow channel of lit sky. She crawled past bottles, crushed reeds, and the exposed roots of oaks, until she heard the hammer click back on a revolver.

  She had come to an arrangement of stones in a clearing, each covered with years of tangled graffiti. Several of the boys sat around the rocks. When they saw her, they stood upright and puffed their chests like roosters. One boy waited in a dark shadow, holding the gun sideways. “Now who’s my bitch?” he said.

  The other children were pale and hushed.

  Lydia said, “You were right about the guns. Please, help me. I’m just a kid, too, and they’re going to kill me. Pretend it’s a game, get me out of here—show me your hideouts. I’ll never tell. I swear to God.”

  The boy’s posture relaxed, and Lydia rose, dusting her pants. As they began traipsing through the undergrowth, away from the sounds above, Lydia added, “And sweetie, one more thing, don’t call me a bitch.”

  two

  When John Link announced for the umpteenth time that he was only here because of his parole requirements, the room filled with a mixture of groans and laughter. At any of the two, sometimes three meetings he attended daily across the Coachella Valley, he would repeat this like the signature line of a deadpan comic. He didn’t smile. In fact, ever since the regulars had started to enjoy his grumpy tirades, Link began focusing on the newcomers, who still found him intimidating. He threatened to break their fingers and toes. He claimed that if he had known any of these twelve-step sissies in his prime, he would have run them down like rattlesnakes on the highway.

  He sat in the back of a small, smoky living room on a foldout picnic chair, which seemed too rickety for the weight of his beer belly and enormous frame; and, playing up his boxer’s flattened nose and his thick arms sleeved with tattoos, he bragged that he had never lifted a barbell in his life but had bulked up on a regimen of hurling yuppies through plate-glass windows.

  Yet the more he startled the younger kids, the more obliged he was to give them guidance, since, even among the failed marriages, car wrecks, and damaged livers, he still considered himself the lone ambassador from rock bottom. His newfound purpose was to represent the furthest limit of what a body could endure. He tried to dole out pithy advice, but his wiser thoughts never turned easily to words, and he could tell when the more educated types became bored by his downshift into platitudes. He wouldn’t wish his life on anyone. Let him be an example.

  So he told another story, this time about wrecking his chopper at ninety-plus on the PCH and spilling two pounds of crank across rush-hour traffic. “And it was a windy day,” he said. “People were rolling up their windows, putting on their windshield wipers, nobody knew what to do. Of course, I heard this later. I was unconscious at the time. Dead for a few minutes—I think.”

  He once burned down a room at the Disneyland Hotel; he survived an exploding meth lab only by staggering outside to piss. While jousting with pool-cleaning brushes, he broke his tailbone when he was lanced off his chopper. In fact, in his fifty-one years, Link had been stabbed, clubbed, shot, burned, and dragged a half mile down a county road. “And I been sober now for six years, seven months, and twenty-two miserable days. If I can do it—any of you punks can.”

  Link didn’t appreciate the way the new DUI was smirking at him. Just because his beard was almost completely gray didn’t mean he was now some quaint grandfather acting like the bogeyman; so he took off his T-shirt for proof, flexing and showing the pink chisel work of scars around faded prison ink, until Kirby, who was Link’s sponsor and today’s chair, stopped him midway through the rant.

  Link allowed him to diffuse the tension. Only Kirby had Link’s total respect. Only Kirby had visited Link’s tattoo shop, a trailer in the desert, equipped with autoclaves and sonic cleaners, where a single wall served as a scrapbook for his life. Kirby knew how hard Link fought to stay afloat, making his sketches and stencils, working on just a few regular clients, drinking his ritualistic Dr Pepper on the front step at sundown as he watched downshifting rigs and listened to a CB radio. His parole stipulated that he could not ride—so a man who once flew through traffic on a rebuilt ’56 Harley 74 with a suicide shift, power-jumped with hot-cams, now puttered down main street in a Chevy Nova. He could not “fraternize” with any of his old buddies or one-percenters, so he lived in exile among the last-chance services off the highway where it dropped downhill toward speckled desert. In this clutter of trailers, scrap tin, and corrugated titanium awnings, Link had soldered his life back together with God and cigarettes.

  But, most of all, Kirby knew about his daughter, the one story Link would never tell at a meeting.

  Once Link had encouraged the smug DUI “to keep coming back,” Kirby followed him to his car. Link appreciated the old guy’s efforts to be helpful, even when he sometimes looked so damned pious, as if heaven would owe him his own cloud. Kirby asked Link if he wanted to have a cup of coffee someplace.

  Link said, “I got a lady coming at two. Lives just down the road.”

  “Decent work?”

  “Nah, she just wants a snake crawling out of her sock,” he said, raising his steel-toed boot and slapping the ankle. “First installment. Biblical thing, you know. Then she’s talking about Adam and Eve and that whole situation.”

  “But the serpent first,” said Kirby.

  “Yeah, well—probably saving up for paradise.”

  Three hours later, Link had been overcome by ambition, and his subject had allowed him to extend the scope of his project. Working in his trailer, shading the last scales in the serpent’s body where it twisted around the knee, Link had modeled the tattoo on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Fall, mostly because he loved raiding pictures from old art books. Maybe in order to escape his dreary feeling after the noon meeting, he had settled nicely into a groove and did some of the best sweep shading he’d done in months. Onto her shin he feathered lighter, water-diluted green between the scales; and, around her calf, he made the snake pass through a simulated shadow.

  The woman was a talker, though, and her chatter kept drawing him out of his trance. Lounging back on the lifter bench, a cigarette between her lobster-colored fingernails, she grimaced and confessed about cheating on her husband. Why did people always expect Link to have some ready-made advice for bad situations? Something about the low-grade pain and the long penitent hours—it made too many clients treat him like a therapist or a priest.

  He grunted whenever she paused.

  He knew he would remember the snake on her leg forever, but probably not a single detail from the woman’s depressing life. His memory was a tangle of isolated arms and torsos. Skin and pigments and blemishes. After all the time he�
��d spent doing blue tats in the joint, first with the Polynesian method of dots from a straight pin, then with a homemade gun (slot-car motor, hollowed-out pen, ink tubes, guitar strings, and a nine-volt battery), the years were a blur of cobwebs, clocks without hands, shamrocks, pentagrams, crying women, and granite walls. He kept his tools clean, he worked on any gang sign or religious conversion—on everything from numbers around an eye socket to crucifixes on the neck. Soon he was collaborating with the subjects, making stencils off the library’s single art book, broken at the spine. He carved a Chagall into a Ukrainian car thief, and he still recalled how the veins stood up on his pale arms like on the underside of a leaf, though he couldn’t picture a thing about the kid’s face.

  Of all his projects, it was fitting that the only convict he knew and remembered well was the one whose tat he had never finished. Arturo Rios Tehada—temporary cell mate, shot caller in La Eme—had wanted, beneath the usual snake-eating eagle, a landscape of his “varrio” across his broad back, done epic-style like a Hieronymus Bosch, sinners and saints, demons and angels, vying for space on a hill of tombstones and shanties, rising toward a halo of hazy California sunshine. Rios was a good canvas, a wide stretch of parchment-colored skin, and he was usually silent under the scratching in the institutional hush of maximum-security lockdowns. During a season of overcrowding, both Rios and Link knew the prison administration had dropped them together like pit bulls. Only one was meant to come out alive. But they were united, at least somewhat, in their common hatred of the COs, and they tolerated each other over the months of work. Link even carved the “in memoriam” to his son; and, likewise, Rios watched and sometimes helped Link write inquiring letters to Missing Persons departments and runaway bulletins, regarding his daughter. They would argue about politics and history—Rios was another prison autodidact, always showing off. But they treated each other with the stoicism of castaways on a deserted island.