Cursing under his breath, he ran back to the house, found Patsy waiting for him out front, her arms crossed over her chest as if there were a chill in the air only she could feel. “I didn’t find it,” she said. “Where did you go?”
He threw open the front door as if he were about to confront a band of insurgents, as if something about the room might have shifted and given up some evidence of Alex’s intention in the few minutes he had been gone. His sister had to say his name several times in a row before he could feel his feet again.
“‘I hope you will hear from me soon,’” John said. “Like there’s a chance that’s not going to happen.”
“What does that mean, John?”
“I think you’re right. Somebody called his cell and told him about the story, and now he knows where Mike’s body is and he’s planning on doing something about it. And he needs Mike’s knife and my gun to do it. I think he’s going to try to kill Ray Duncan.”
Patsy sank to a seated position on the foot of the bed; then a thought struck her. “How the hell did he get the keys?”
“Where were they?”
“In my purse,” she said. Then her face seemed to cloud over, and suddenly she was running out the front door and toward the house. John followed her, calling out to her, and she called back that everything was fine in an absurd attempt at placating him, even though she was running so fast John could barely keep up with her. She bypassed the back porch. Some of the men were watching television in the living room. John followed her around to the front entrance of the house, stopped calling out to her because he didn’t want to draw the attention of any of the men. Was she afraid that Alex had stolen her entire purse?
To his shock, she tried to close the front door behind her in John’s face, but then she was drawn to the sight of her purse turned on its side on a table inside the white-walled foyer. The sight of it lying there didn’t seem to give her any relief. Breathless, her brow furrowed, she hurriedly went about stuffing the contents of her purse back inside it. That’s when John saw the envelope, the same envelope she had been turning over in her hands early that morning as he drifted in and out of a drugged haze, the same one he had assumed was a good-bye note.
He tried getting her attention by saying her name. When she ignored him yet again, he snapped, dug into her purse with his left hand, pulled the envelope free, and was shocked to see her holding on to it, panic in her eyes. Then she released it, brought her hand to her mouth as if she expected John to sock her in the jaw. He turned the envelope over and saw his first name written on it in blocky handwriting that at first seemed only vaguely familiar. Then he recognized it, and the breath went out of him. It was his brother’s handwriting.
For a while they just stood there, Patsy breathing into her hands, the sounds of some cop show thudding against the walls. At one point John looked up to see Eddie standing in the doorway, but when he saw their postures and the look on John’s face he retreated without comment. When John turned for the door, Patsy said his name in a trembling whisper that had the threat of tears in it. He stepped outside anyway, walked a few paces away from the house, waited until he heard the sound of Patsy’s footsteps crunching the gravel behind him.
“How long have you had this?” he finally asked.
“Since he died. I found your trailer, tried leaving it, but the damn envelope was too big to fit under the front door, and I figured—” Her voice caught, and John remembered that Mandy had told him that Patsy had tried to leave a note for him. “I figured it wasn’t the kind of thing you left under somebody’s door. It was with him, John. It was with him when he died.”
A suicide note, he thought.
“You should have given this to me, Patsy.”
“You were distracted. You had other things on your—”
“You should have given this to me, Patsy.”
When she didn’t respond, he turned, saw her bowed head and heaving chest as signs of surrender. “I know, John,” she whispered. “But I wanted a shot at you first. I wanted to see if I could get you back.”
He had no answer for this, and when he started walking away from her, she didn’t follow. He walked all the way back to the outer house, where the front door was still open and the bedside lamps inside gave off a deceptively welcoming glow.
John pulled the door shut behind him and locked it, sat down on the foot of the bed Alex had used, and opened the envelope.
The envelope was large because it contained an entire sheet of watercolor paper that had been folded in half. At first John thought it might be a store-bought, oversized greeting card. Then he saw that Dean had glued an old tattered photograph of John and Dean to the front flap, taken a few days after they had moved to the desert. They stood in front of a one-story tract home with salmon-colored stucco walls just south of Highway 62 in Yucca Valley. The two young men posed on the dried patch of dirt that passed for a front lawn were doing their best to look happy to be in each other’s presence, if not the high desert. The bill of John’s baseball cap with the New Orleans Saints logo on it shadowed his glower, but Dean’s red curls were exposed and his smile was a metal-studded rictus thanks to braces, which flashed against the deep red of his first California sunburn.
John could remember the picture being taken, could remember how Patsy had tried to force them into this tiny moment of celebration. With trembling fingers he opened the card and took a few seconds to squint at the tiny block letters that passed for handwriting, too tiny and too controlled, and he wondered if his brother had spent his last days under the influence of something speedier than heroin. He began to read.
John,
I know you’re probably pissed at me for doing what I did. I wish I could say I’m sorry, but I’m not. And it’s not because you left me in Yucca with that stupid bitch—I won’t even bother to say her name! It is because I think as hard as you tried to be good to me, you couldn’t understand what it was like inside my head. All these voices, all the time, telling me I’m a piece of shit. And I hate to say this, John, I really really do, but a lot of them sounded just like yours. I know what you wanted, John. You wanted me not to cry so much. You wanted me not to be so sad all the time about Mom and Dad, and what I need to tell you is that I stopped, I stopped being sad about them, and I stopped being mad at you for leaving. (I know you left because I lied—I’ll get to that.) But see, what happened was when I stopped being mad and sad, shit really got bad. It really got bad.
Okay. Sorry. I had to stop because my friend is coming over with the stuff soon and he just thinks I’m going to sell it. He doesn’t know anything. Whatever. You don’t need to know all that and it probably makes you mad, so I’ll stop. What I was saying was…I know you wanted me not to be sad all the time and you wanted me to be stronger so the other boys at the school wouldn’t pick on me, but see, I think looking back that you were upset because you could tell what I was, you could already tell the way I was going to be. I know you probably don’t see it that way. I know you probably think you were doing the best you could do, but I could tell, John. I could tell that you were never going to accept me, so I lied to you, but that’s why I lied, John. I hope you can see that today. Now that I’m gone. I hope you can see that. It’s not like I blame you for it, but I figured I should tell you so that you can understand.
That day you walked in on me and Danny, he wasn’t raping me. We had been doing it for a while and I really liked it, and we were even going to move away together when I was eighteen. He wanted to go to West Hollywood because he said guys like us could get along there but I knew that wouldn’t be far enough away from you. But I was so afraid. I thought if you knew the truth you would kill both of us, but if you thought he had raped me, I would get to live. Problem was, I didn’t expect you to go to that bitch. (I won’t say her name. She is dead to me!) So I had to lie before she started asking questions, even though I knew you would never forgive me. Can you understand that, John? I was trying to keep myself alive. I was afraid of you. I
loved you—not in that way!!! But I was afraid of you. I wasn’t surprised when you ran away. I knew how badly you wanted to be a Marine. I know you did good and stuff. I got into some bad shit, John, but I tried to turn my life around and I went to see that bitch we call our sister and she wouldn’t give me any money. She just gave me your e-mail and said that you were at war and everything and I should write you, and so I told her who the fuck does she think she is ordering me around…. You don’t need to read this. The point is, she knew already. She knew I had lied about Danny, and she said if I wanted to turn my life around I could find him and apologize and I should tell you what really happened. So I guess that bitch got to order me around after all. Ha ha ha.
John, I’m sorry for what I’m about to do but I know that if you knew what it was like to be me that you would understand. I’m sorry that God was never kind to our family. And I know you’re probably sorry for the way you treated me and I wish I could have given you a chance to tell me in person, but it’s time for me to go now.
Dean
“Your li’l bro”
After he finished reading the note, John rose from the bed and left it lying on the comforter next to the spot where he had been sitting. He got a beer from the fridge, his first in days now that his job as drill instructor had come to an end, and spent a few minutes trying to use the bottle opener with his left hand. When his sister knocked on the front door, he opened it for her and brushed past her without meeting her expectant gaze. She moved past him into the house, probably toward the note, and he walked through the darkness toward the creek, waiting for the predictable emotions to come.
Instead he felt anger, pure and simple, and he realized that for so long he had nursed his rage toward Danny Oster, and next to that whirlwind, his brother had been nothing more than a birdhouse rocking in the winds of other men’s perversions. The idea that an anger that had driven him so completely had been based on a lie—that was just too overwhelming to swallow all at once, like staring down at a corpse and demanding that you immediately accept the fact that you yourself will become one someday. He started for the meditation garden and realized from the numbness in his legs that he was in a kind of shock. He sat down in front of a Buddha statue and tried to lose track of time until he heard twigs crunching underfoot.
Patsy stood next to the bench off to his side, probably so he wouldn’t have to look at her if he didn’t want to. “Are you sorry for the way you treated him?” she asked, a tremor of anger in her voice.
“Should I be?”
“You never lifted a hand to him in his life. He wasn’t afraid you’d kill him. He was afraid you’d reject him. That’s a different goddamn ball game, and he knew it.” He realized her anger was on his behalf, or at least she believed it was, and this silenced him even further. “What he left out of that little note is that he had been dealing heroin for three years. He also left out that he and that buddy of his owed his supplier almost fifteen grand and that his buddy had skipped the country rather than pay his portion of the debt. So rather than face up to anything he had done, he decided to get good and numb and check out. But not before blaming you first.”
“He came to see you,” John whispered.
“Yes. He did. And he had track marks up and down his arms and he didn’t say a damn thing about owing anyone any money. He wanted three thousand dollars, and I told him the only way he was going to get it was if he let me check him into rehab and if he started trying to put his life back together. And he could start by telling you that he had lied about Danny Oster.”
“He admitted it to you? That he had lied?”
“Yes. He told me you would have killed him if he hadn’t. The same…crap he wrote in that letter. And when he saw I wasn’t going to budge, he called me a stupid cunt and left.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this the other night in the car?”
“Why, John? So I could be right? I don’t want to be right anymore. I want to be able to sit down and have a meal with my brother and talk about what’s going on today.”
He wasn’t ready to accept her belief that he hadn’t played a hand in Dean’s suicide. For the first time in his life, he felt diseased, as if a sickness of his had caused his brother to lie to him, and that same sickness had caused Mike Bowers to lie to him about who he was.
“You wouldn’t have killed him, John. He knew that.”
“Death isn’t always the worst thing that can happen, Patsy.”
“No. You’re right. It isn’t. For the one who gets to die, it’s pretty easy.”
He knew exactly what she had meant, had groped from the same logic himself in his long nights of mourning a brother who was still sixteen in his mind, but it always seemed to wiggle out of his hands like a wet fish. He got to his feet suddenly, which startled her, and that’s when he realized that she had slowly been trying to close the distance between them.
In the darkness, it was impossible to see her face, but he looked right at its shape as he said, “A fate worse than death is life in prison, and that’s what Alex is going to get if he kills Duncan, or tries and fails. Mike wouldn’t have wanted that. It’s the only thing I can be sure of. So I have to stop him.”
“How the hell are you going to do that?”
“I need to get to his friend Philip in San Diego. If he didn’t go there, Philip might know where he’s gone. I need wheels, Patsy.”
A long silence settled between them. Then Patsy said, “I’ll drive.”
She told him to wait for her while she talked to Eddie, collected some things, and got ready. Then she was gone before either of them could say another word about Dean’s suicide note or the names he had called her from the grave. He was walking back toward the cabin when something glinted at him from the darkness to his left. He went to the spot, at the edge of the dirt road they had driven in on, and found the shattered casing of a cell phone. Alex’s cell phone. He recognized the Samsung logo above the cracked plastic display.
Alex had gone to the effort to back over it more than once.
After thirty minutes Patsy called the phone in the outer house and told John to meet her next to the garage. When he got there, he saw that the door was already up, the overhead light was on, and his sister was stepping inside the driver-side door of a battered Toyota Tacoma pickup with a dented camper shell on the back. It sat parked next to a dusty green Ford Explorer that Eddie probably took on more respectable trips than a hunt for a would-be killer.
When he got in the Tacoma’s passenger seat, he saw that Patsy had shoved her hair up under a Phoenix Suns cap. But when she turned to pull her seat belt over her, he saw that the back of her neck was covered in brown bristle, and without asking her permission, he reached up and pulled the cap from her head. Startled, she turned and stared at him wide-eyed as he took in the fact that she had chopped off her lustrous brown mane. She looked like a punk rocker, or a woman who needed to disguise herself.
And for what felt like too long, too long considering Alex was probably burning rubber toward his date with death, John fingered the chopped ends of her hair. “They’re going to figure out I skipped town,” she finally said. “They’ll see I made an ATM withdrawal before we left. Pretty soon my face will be all over the news, too.”
“He shouldn’t have called you all those names,” John said.
She shook her head and looked down at the steering wheel as if he had paid her a petty compliment she didn’t feel she deserved. Gently, she pulled his hand from her new do and set the hand on his knee, but she didn’t let go out of it. “Just tell me I wasn’t dead to you and everything should be all right,” she said, trying to sound flip and almost pulling it off.
“You weren’t.”
He knew full well that the things his brother had said about him were far worse than the names he had called their sister. Names were one thing, blame was another, and he had laid that one right at John’s feet. Maybe John needed his sister to cry over it for him, or maybe he needed the anger between them
to dissipate and there was no other way to do it.
People talked about therapy and change and the power of Christ, but maybe you just had to wake up one day and say you weren’t going to do it anymore, you just weren’t going to act like someone who felt that way, and you had to begin by saying words that felt strange on your tongue, even if they resonated inside your heart.
“Maybe when this is done, you and I can have a meal.” After a few seconds of trying to control her breathing and failing, she closed her fingers around his and nodded, tears spilling down her cheeks, jaw quivering.
She let go of his hand after a while, wiped tears away with the back of one hand. “Sounds good to me,” she said, and then she started the engine as if they were on their way to a Sunday BBQ.
But when her eyes passed over his, he saw the fear in them and was reminded that he was not the only one risking everything.
14
Loop 303 took them around the western edge of Phoenix. After just three days in woodsy isolation, the city’s massive, twinkling expanse seemed like an alien landscape, one he was unfit to inhabit. He barely knew the city, but Mike’s ghost loomed so large in his life now that the entire expanse of it seemed like a graveyard dedicated to him. Somewhere out there were streets Mike had played on as a kid, the university classroom where he had first learned of the Spartans’ brave stand at Thermopylae, the alley where he had been beaten and left for dead. Look at any city through the right memories and it could become a graveyard as haunted as a former battlefield.
They had given up listening to the radio because one of them would keep switching to the nearest available news station, which usually led with a report on the two fugitives connected to the gruesome murder of a gay Marine.
They were about an hour from Yuma and two hours from dawn when Patsy pulled off onto a side road that seemed to go nowhere. Inside the camper shell, Patsy made a makeshift cot of grease-stained blankets and whatever else she could find, and John eased himself inside. He watched dawn rise over the Anza Borrego desert through the camper shell’s grease-stained windows, knew they were two hours from San Diego and their only possible lead on Alex’s whereabouts. Before they had left the house, Patsy had used whitepages.com to find a single listing for a Philip Bloch in San Diego. She had MapQuested the address, which was in University Heights, the same neighborhood where The Catch Trap was, where John had almost abandoned Alex when he had insisted on getting that box of Mike’s belongings out of his car.