“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay, yeah, when?” He looks at his watch and hangs up. “The caller said there’s a bomb in here,” he announces. “And it will go off in five minutes.”
Nobody makes to leave, and neither do we.
Dad uses plastic tongs to help himself to a pickled egg, which he eats whole.
The bartender sets up a silver shaker and follows a scoop of ice with a clear stream of liquor. He shakes it with two hands, and the muted rattle of ice sounds like the rocks inside the rotating drum of the cement truck when my father and I pour footings. But with the smell of chilling alcohol, I think of Loren, try to picture the inside of her house. I see a refrigerator at the center, hear Christian rock everywhere, but other than that, I mostly see objects — sports cups, crowbars, protein cereal, a hot rod in the garage — and I can’t really get them to come together, get them rolling like a movie in my head.
Dad orders two more beers. “I wish it would hurry up and rain,” he says.
I’ll confess I’m also thinking about the bomb, which is getting to me a little.
A guy at the end of the bar asks if the caller’s voice was a woman’s, but the bartender doesn’t answer him — instead, he just turns the TVs up again.
“Enough with the bees, already,” I say and get some dirty looks.
* * *
Back at the job site, Treen shit-heels us. I load up the trucks while Dad finishes the yellow wall by himself. I hose out the mixer, shovel sand, and pack the leftover cement and dye. I spray down the walls with the hose, and I like the feeling of the water coursing through the nozzle. The slower the mortar dries, the harder it gets, so this is the last part of every job, and I’m on the west wall when Treen comes out with a check that’s only half of what it should be.
Treen points to a crack in his driveway he claims wasn’t there before we stacked block on it. “I’ll have to repour the whole pad,” he says.
“Driveways crack,” my father says. “That’s how it works.”
“Nobody cracks my driveway and gets away with it.”
“Your driveway was probably cracked long before I came,” my father says.
“Look, this isn’t about you,” Treen says. “It won’t cost you anything. You’re bonded and insured. All you have to do is file a claim.”
“This is a bad idea,” Dad says. “You’ve come up with a real mistake of an idea.”
“You’re bonded and insured, otherwise you couldn’t get a license. We all know it’s a crime to contract without a license. I know it is because I’m a member of the county commissioner’s board.”
“You can barely see that crack,” I say and point, but they don’t even hear me.
My father considers Treen very carefully and then walks to his truck.
Deep down, I know my dad isn’t going to hurt anyone, but I want it to happen, I do. “You better start running,” I say to Treen, and the two of us watch my father stride toward his truck like he will return with a bazooka.
Instead, he comes back with a push broom. He sweeps out the crack to show its age, which begins a long, futile debate with Treen that leaves my father exhausted and angry. At the end, Treen holds a light check in one hand and a cordless phone in the other, threatening to call some public agency I’ve never heard of.
My father will not take the check.
I’m looking at Treen, and his collarbone is right there. I am so ready to lay some jiu-jitsu on him that I start bouncing up and down on my toes. “Come on,” I tell Dad, “let’s take him out.”
“Go wait in my truck,” he tells me, and I just do what I’m told.
It’s only a minute later that my father is behind the wheel, and without really speaking, we’re driving to a gas station to buy a twelve-pack of Coors. Then we return to the job site, where we find Treen’s gone inside, the check sitting under a rock in the driveway. Here we drink in the hot cab for three hours, until sunset, looking at the blue kachina symbol painted on Treen’s garage door. It is a rainbird.
My father starts talking and he never really stops. He talks about everything, most of it I’ve never heard before, and though his mind goes all over the place, it’s like he’s only telling different parts of one big story. He tells me that when he was a boy, he had a half-wild sheepdog named Bone that killed the mayor’s son’s prize boxer in front of the Bijou Theater. He tells me I was named after his great uncle Ronald, who was rumored to have seen an angel, underwater, when he was drowning in the Atlas River — the angel said breathe the water, but Ronald knew the angel was lying. I hear that Dad enlisted in the navy on a bad impulse, and regretting it, stole a horse from a ranch in Kingman, rode into the hills to decide whether to report for service, and when he returned nine days later, no one had noticed the pony was gone. I was conceived at a drive-in feature of The China Syndrome, he tells me, a movie that kind of rattled him because it was a true story.
We sweat beer, and the adrenaline settles into a dull ache in my stomach. While Dad talks, he lets his arms hang on the steering wheel, so that it seems like we are driving to a place we know so well there is no need to watch the road. The illusion is ruined only by Treen’s head popping over our pink wall from time to time to view us with eerie concern. But my father does not seem to see him.
“You know,” my father says, “by the time I was your age, I’d made it through shark survival school, dengue fever, and a magazine fire. I’ve made it through the seven seas of the world.” He lifts his hands. “Now where am I?”
“Let’s go home,” I say.
Looking tired, he says, “I suppose,” and puts a smoke in his lips that he doesn’t light. Then he steps out of the truck, walks up the driveway, and bends down to grab the check, which he folds and puts in his shirt pocket. “I’ve got a repair job for us tomorrow, at the end of Ocotillo Street,” he says and clamps a hand on my shoulder, squeezing the way he used to when I was a kid. Then we part.
My legs are cramped when I climb into my own truck. Pulling away, I can barely work the clutch. In the rearview mirror, I see my father pausing to light his rojo before he, too, heads out. His face flares orange as he lifts the glowing lighter, smoke curls from the cab, and then comes a faint clang as his shifter finds reverse.
* * *
Loren’s house is across from the Presbyterian Youth Center, and at eight, I pull into its parking lot. Under this low cloud ceiling, the moon, if involved, casts no glow, and it is absolutely dark. The church’s perfect lawns crawl right to the asphalt, and my headlights set to glowing a row of white-trunked orange trees.
I find Loren sitting on the curb, the way her daughter might between classes. Right away, I can see she’s been crying, and when she climbs in, a shiner is clear under the dome light.
“What happened to your eye?”
“Don’t say anything, please. Jack had another relapse. Let’s just leave it.”
“Is this because of me?” I ask. “I mean, I got a look at his power thing today.”
“Don’t worry, tiger. He’s more likely to try to baptize you than kill you.”
“I’m worried about you,” I say. “I can take care of myself.”
Loren laughs once, a little too hard, and has to blow her nose.
“Look, I don’t want him to ruin this, too,” she says. “Let’s just go to the desert again. That’s all I want right now.”
I put the truck in gear and swing south toward the desert, but as soon as we hit the two-laner that crosses the Indian reservation, we get stuck behind a semi rig pulling an open trailer of onions. The papery skins snap into the wind and flutter in our headlights like snow. Our eyes water as they whip in the cab, do loops, and leave.