The I-5 is the highway that the Baja 1 aspires to be: long, straight, impeccably maintained, and running through similarly featureless terrain. Endless rolling hills line the valley, all of them dirt brown year-round, except for a few brief moments in late fall and early spring. Orchards and cattle ranches offer an occasional break from the usual scenery, which consists of dead grass. There are the anomalous palm trees, the abandoned farm equipment, and the massive rest stops, but other than that, it’s a long haul with nothing to look at but the other cars and the assortment of Oakland Raiders paraphernalia they sport.
With one hand I twist the cap off my water bottle and take a swig. I try to fiddle the cap back onto the bottle and it drops between my thighs. I feel around for it and my foot comes off the gas a little. The motor home behind me makes a move to pass me. I look down at my lap, find the cap, and put it back on the bottle as the motor home leaves the right lane and starts to slowly pass me on the left. Behind the motor home I see a black car coming on way too fast to stop. The motor home tries to get out of its way by ducking back into my lane. The huge RV veers at me, horn blaring. I push the brake, the motor home creeps farther into my lane. I stick my foot into the brake, the BMW skidding slightly as I try to steer onto the shoulder.
I drop back behind the motor home just as it swerves sharply into my lane and barely misses hacking off my front bumper. And now I see that the speeding black car has driven half onto the left shoulder to pass the motor home while it was passing me. I also see that the black car is not a black car at all, but a black Toyota pickup. Then I’m pulling to a stop on the side of the road, watching Danny and his friends as they speed up the highway. Fucking hell. What is this, Deliverance?
I LET Danny get farther up the road before I pull out. Around Coalinga I see a black pickup across the meridian, headed south. Could be them giving up, or driving back to scan the northbound traffic. I don’t know.
It’s after dark when I see my exit. By now my eyes keep dropping shut and I’ve lost most of the sense of forward motion; the road just seems to be reeling toward me as I stay in one place. I hit the blinkers and turn off.
God, I forgot what Christmas is like in the suburbs. It’s still a couple weeks away, but lights are dribbling down from the eaves, reindeer are on the rooftops, forests of giant candy canes are growing from the lawns. We used to do that thing; drive around all the different neighborhoods looking at the lights. Christmas. I should have got them something. I park a few blocks away, rather than leaving a strange car in front of their house for the neighbors to see. Then I sit behind the wheel, trying to get my shit together. Maybe I should have called.
AS SOON as I knock on the door, the dogs start barking. The same dogs. I can hear her inside, coming into the hall, telling them to shush, and them not listening at all, just barking like crazy. A lock snaps open. They never used to lock the door, but I guess they’ve had reason enough the last few years. The door swings open just enough for her to look out and still keep it blocked with her body so that neither of the dogs can squirt out around her.
She looks at me.
Mom is a tiny woman. She likes to claim she’s five foot two, but the truth is she’s just a shade over five. At least she used to be. It’s been several years and she looks a bit smaller now. And older. Much older. I did that to her. She looks at me, the guy on her porch with the deep tan, short beard, and long hair. She looks at the nose, crunched and bent, the extra twenty pounds of weight, the tattoos dribbling out the tugged-up sleeves of my shirt and down my forearms. There is no beat, no pause or halt, just instant recognition and the sudden escape of air from her mouth.
I push the door open, catch her as her knees give out beneath her. I hold her shaking body up and kick the door closed with the heel of my foot. She gasps for air and I give her a little squeeze and a shake and a huge gob of snot and phlegm flies out of her nose and plasters the front of my shirt and she starts to breathe again. I hold her tight and she shivers and sobs and pounds on my back and shoulders with her tiny fists and curses at me and tells me she loves me while the old dogs run around in circles, barking at me.
PART TWO
DECEMBER 11–14, 2003
Two Regular Season Games Remaining
—Henry.
My name.
—Henry.
Hearing my name from my father’s mouth almost starts me crying again.
—Henry!
—Yeah, Dad.
—What the hell do you think you’re doing?
What I’m doing is standing on the back patio, lighting a cigarette.
—I was just gonna have a smoke.
—When the hell did you start smoking?
—I don’t know. Couple years ago.
I light up.
—Look at that, you have a great meal and now you’re going to ruin it by killing your taste buds and filling your lungs with that poison.
—OK, Dad.
—Look at the pack, it tells you right there.
—Got it, Dad.
I stub the smoke out in an empty flowerpot.
—They just about tell you that you have to be a suicidal idiot to smoke the things and people keep smoking them.
I’ve been here for maybe two hours.
—It’s out.
—And you, you wait over thirty years and now you start?
And already it’s like I never left home at all.
—Dad, it’s out. OK?
—Yeah, sorry. I just. I just don’t want you to get hurt or anything.
He turns his head as tears start to well up in his eyes again. Well, almost like I never left home.
—I don’t want to get hurt, Dad.
Mom opens the back door.
—Come inside, it’s cold out.
THERE WERE steaks in the fridge. Dad grilled them for us, standing by the propane barbeque out on the cold patio, watching me through the windows as I helped Mom set the table.
He had been at the shop, working late just like he always did when I was a kid, unless I had a game. When he came home, Mom met him at the door. But she started crying before she could say anything. By the look he had on his face when I walked out of the kitchen, I think he was assuming the worst. One second he thinks his wife is trying to tell him their son is dead, and the next I’m standing in front of him.
After that there wasn’t much to do except decide what everyone wanted for dinner.
NOW DAD and me come in and sit down at the kitchen table with Mom. She’s sipping a glass of red wine and Dad is drinking some brandy he got from a bottle that was buried at the back of one of the cupboards over the sink. He pours himself another and looks at me.
—Sure you don’t want one?
—No. I had a drinking thing there, Dad. In New York. I was drinking too much, so I had to stop.
—Yeah, we heard something about that.
Mom moves her hand so that it covers mine.
—People said a lot of things, Henry. We didn’t know what to believe. Except about the killing. We knew they were wrong about that, we knew you couldn’t kill anyone.
My left forearm is lying there on the table, the six hash marks exposed. I open my mouth, close it. Dad sets his glass down and covers my hand and Mom’s with his own. He has big hands, nicked and cut and bruised from the shop, a thin rim of grease permanently tattooed under his fingernails.
—Why are you here, Hank?
Someone threatened to kill you and I came home to make sure it doesn’t happen.
—There’s just some more trouble, Dad, and I need to take care of it.
—But why, what did you do?
—I.
I helped a friend. I tried to protect people. I did everything I was supposed to and the only thing that worked was killing the people who were trying to kill me.
And then I took their money.
—Dad, I just tried to do the right thing.
He pours himself another drink. His fifth. I’ve never seen him drink this mu
ch before.
—So what now?
—I’m gonna take care of it.
—How?
—I’m gonna give these people what they want.
THEY GO to bed a short while later, and I page Tim. And wait. And then I page him again. And again. And again. And again. I page him ten times and he doesn’t call back, and finally I’m just too tired to care.
AFTER MY leg was shattered and I couldn’t play baseball anymore I took all my old trophies and plaques down, boxed them up, and stuck them in the attic. Sometime in the last three years Mom or Dad must have gotten those boxes down to look through them, because all the old trophies are in my old bedroom. My bed is still in there too. Other than that, it’s a different room. Mom uses it for her sewing and crocheting and the several other crafts she’s thrown herself into since she retired last year.
I lie in the too-small bed in the darkness and watch light from a street lamp glinting off of all the fake gold and silver. Outside, it’s silent except for the occasional bark of a dog, quieter even than my beach in Mexico, where there is at least the sound of the surf.
On the nightstand is a small, framed picture of me. I’m sixteen, my hair is almost white from years under the California sun, my face is golden brown and unlined, and I’m wearing a cap from my high school team, the Tigers. I remember the day the photo was taken. I had pitched a shutout for the varsity squad, hit a homer, and had five RBI. I was six feet tall, a hundred and sixty pounds and still growing, working out every day and eating anything I could get my hands on, trying to build muscle for the inevitable day when I would be a Major League player. To this day, it is the face I expect to see when I look in the mirror.
NORMALLY DAD would take the truck parked in the driveway to work, but today he fires up the tiny MGB in the garage. He hits the automatic opener, the door flips up, and he pulls into the street.
—Where did you park?
—Over on Traina.
There’s been a lot of turnover on Dale Road in three years. A lot of people I used to know moved out during the year of constant attention from media, police, and sightseers that followed my adventures. But even the newcomers know who my parents are, know that they have a mass murderer for a son. I stay squished down in the footwell until we get a couple blocks away.
—A BMW 1600?
—Yeah.
—Oh, Hank, not this piece of crap?
I scoot up into the seat. Dad has stopped where my car is parked.
—Yeah.
—How much did you pay for that?
—Four.
—And you drove it from San Diego?
—Yeah.
—You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself in that thing.
—It’s not that bad.
—Like hell it isn’t.
He sits behind the wheel of his perfectly restored 1962 British racing green MGB and stares in horror at my wreck.
—Well, let’s get it over to the shop and out of sight.
I get out, start my car, and follow him over to Custom Specialty Motors.
CSM SERVICES and restores classic, exotic, and performance automobiles. Says so right on the sign. This is the business Dad dreamed of owning his whole life, the one he created and built over the last twenty years after he threw in the towel as hotshot mechanic for a series of high-end dealerships. His customers are mostly middle-aged men who finally have the money to buy the toys they craved in their youth, but who lack the mechanical aptitude to keep them running.
He unlocks the big rolling garage door and I drive into the shop. He pulls the MG in behind me, closes and locks the door, and switches on the overheads. Fluorescent light bounces off of some very expensive paint jobs. I get out of my crappy car and go look at a 1953 Corvette Roadster, cream with red interior.
—Wow.
—Look at this mess.
I look over my shoulder. Dad has the hood of the BMW up and is peering into the disordered engine compartment.
—Jeez, Hank, your plugs are filthy, there’s corrosion on the battery cables, the gaskets on the carb are rotting, there’s oil everywhere.
He grabs a socket wrench from one of the big rolling tool cabinets and starts pulling the plugs.
—Dad, you don’t have to do that.
—There is no way you are driving this car anywhere without a complete tune-up.
—Dad.
—No way. Now, you go home and get out of sight.
He’s right. His customers may not know how to change the oil on all this steel candy, but most are retired and they love to come around and get underfoot while Dad is working. He goes into the office and comes back with a CSM cap and windbreaker.
—Here.
I slip them on, get into the MGB, grab his sunglasses off the dash, and put those on as well.
He stands next to the car, not moving to open the door for me.
—Hey! Hey, we haven’t talked about the Giants yet. Can you believe the season they had?
I know. I know they dominated the National League West, and won their first World Series since they moved to San Francisco. I didn’t get to watch or listen to a single game, but I know.
—Yeah, I haven’t seen much baseball, Dad.
—Oh.
—But maybe you can tell me about it later.
—Yeah, sure. At the house maybe.
He goes over to the door and pushes the big black button that rolls it up.
—Well, take it easy in that thing.
—No problem, Dad.
I drive home, this town’s most infamous son, dressed as my father.
MOM WANTED to skip her volunteer day at the elementary school where she tutors special-ed kids. I told her it would be better if she and Dad did everything as normally as possible until I left. The specter of my departure made her start to cry again, but she went. Now I’m alone.
When the landlord cleared out my apartment in New York, he sent the stuff to my folks. Mom donated some things to Goodwill, but I’m able to find a couple boxes of my old clothes. The jeans and thermal top I pull on are snug, but they’ll do while the clothes I was wearing go through the washer. In the meantime I page Tim some more and try to distract myself by watching Monday Quarterback.
The guys on TV are breaking down just how bad Miami is without Miles Taylor when the phone rings. I reach for it. Stop myself. I’ll let the machine pick up. If it’s Tim he’ll let me know. The machine picks up and whoever is calling hangs up.
OK, not Tim.
The phone rings again. The machine picks up. The caller disconnects. Maybe it is Tim and he doesn’t want to talk into the machine in case . . . In case what? God, who knows what that pothead could be thinking? The phone rings again. Christ! The machine picks up. The caller hangs up.
Jesus F. Christ.
The phone rings. It has to be Tim, who else would do this? The machine picks up. Caller hangs up.
Goddamn it, Timmy, you know I can’t answer the fucking phone. Just talk to the machine, you burnout.
The phone rings.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
The machine picks up. The caller does not hang up.
—Mr. Thompson.
A voice I don’t know, a caller for Mr. Thompson: my dad.
—Mr. Thompson? Are you there?
I stop holding my breath.
—Mr. Henry Thompson, please pick up.
Oh.
So yeah, turns out the call is for me after all.
MILL’S CAFÉ is the oldest restaurant in town. When I was in high school, Patterson was so small there wasn’t anywhere else to go. Now there’s a McDonald’s and a Taco Bell and a Pizza Hut and God knows what else, all thanks to the Silicon Valley real-estate boom that sent people scurrying farther and farther east of San Francisco in search of affordable housing. We could have gone to one of those new places where all the employees are kids that I’ve never seen, but he wanted to try this place, where the waitress serving us is the same one who used to bring me burgers and
Cokes after baseball games. I keep my shoulders slumped, Dad’s sunglasses on my face, and try not to look around too much.
He takes another bite of his egg-white omelet and keeps talking.
—Honestly, it’s easier to explain in terms of political science rather than business.
He pauses, gathers his thoughts.
—OK, OK, I got it, it’s like this. When a country gets a nuclear weapon, the first thing they do is to test it. Publicly. They don’t do this because they want to know if the weapon works, but because they want everyone else to know that it works. For a country, having nuclear weapons isn’t so much about being able to blow up your enemies, it’s about letting your enemies know that you can blow them up. You test your new A-bomb where it can be seen and heard so that you can be sure that your enemies know what’s coming if they piss you off. Now Russians understand this kind of thinking because they pretty much invented it when they tested their first hydrogen bomb after the war. That’s why your particular Russians never sent anyone to kill your parents. What would be the point? They kill your folks and it removes the biggest weapon from their arsenal and they don’t get anything in return. What they wanted was for you to surface so that they could threaten to kill your parents unless you gave them back the money. Now, after that, they would have killed them, and then you of course.
A couple old-timers are at the counter reading the Patterson Irrigator. Other than that, it’s just us. I’m drinking coffee, but I was only able to eat a bite of the English muffin I ordered. When he mentions my parents, that one bite of muffin flops over in my stomach.
—That was a sound strategy, and it was clear to me that it was one I should stick with. Except the part about killing your folks and you once the money is returned. That’s just pure revenge. The Russians had their reasons for wanting revenge, but I could care less about what you did or who you killed. For me this is purely a business proposition, and revenge is a poor business strategy at best. If I get my money, that’s all I care about. And I want no confusion about this: it is my money now. I paid for it.