“They’re all here,” Patrick said, holding a clipping up for Drake to see. “Even the newspaper articles from Arizona, from when you played basketball.”
“Why would you keep those?”
“So I don’t forget.”
“Sometimes things are better forgotten.”
Patrick paused, looking down at the clipping in his hand. Even with his eyes on the road, Drake couldn’t help but notice. “I don’t plan on making any problems for you,” Patrick said. “Not anymore.”
Drake looked over to where his father sat in the car, the green shift of the landscape going by, the backs of houses, run-down and scabbed with paint.
His father closed the folder and put it back with the rest of his possessions. “You don’t need to worry about me,” his father said, his eyes looking to the side mirror as the road went by in a flicker of light. “I just want you to know that I’ll be fine. I want you to know that I have a plan. Whatever I did in the past, it’s covered. You and me are going to be fine.”
Drake nodded and watched his father. Now it’s me and him, Drake thought. When did that happen? When has that ever been the way things were? Drake certainly hadn’t played a part in the second mortgage Patrick took out on their house, on the money he owed. All that had added up after Drake’s mother passed and there just wasn’t anything in the bank for the bills.
“I was away for a long time,” Patrick said. “I thought about a lot of things. I know going back to Silver Lake is what I have to do now. But someday I plan to build a cabin in the woods—live like your grandfather. Just disappear.”
Drake shifted, rolling his shoulders back. “Don’t disappear just yet. You’re still out on parole. Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if the forestry service had some sort of restraining order out against you after all the time you spent in the woods last time you were free.”
“Very funny,” Patrick said. He had his eyes on the side mirror and it made Drake look to the rearview, scanning the highway behind. Nothing to see but a tall line of semis and the daytime running lights of cars shining back on him.
Drake took the exit. He slowed into a stop sign and then turned to the east, where there were several gas stations and a McDonald’s. Up the road he saw where a big warehouse store was going in, the skeleton of the place big as an airplane hangar.
“You need money?” Drake asked.
“No, just a bathroom.”
Drake pulled in beside one of the pumps and watched his father go in. With his credit card Drake paid the machine and let the tank fill, sitting in the car with the door open and the sound of the engine ticking beneath the hood. With his hand he pushed into the muscle of his thigh and felt the tendons pull. Two years before he’d been shot in the knee while trying to help out a DEA agent by the name of Frank Driscoll, and there were pieces of Drake’s patella still floating around through his insides. All of it the result of a bust Drake had tried to make on a man smuggling drugs over the mountains outside Silver Lake, a former acquaintance of his father’s.
With the door open he brought his legs around, resting them on the pavement and working the muscle in his hands, the smell of gas strong in the air. There had been physical therapy for a year afterward, lessons on how to shift his weight, how to swing his knee, and try to minimize the limp he would have for the rest of his life.
All the people we try to be, Drake thought. All the people we will be in a single life.
On the weekends Drake still pushed the ball up the court at the local high school. Wearing a knee brace. His bad leg constantly losing the battle with his good leg. He’d had to adjust for how he shot, making sure he came off his good leg when he ran in for a layup. He had to think about it now, the way he couldn’t jump as high anymore. He’d always been an outside shooter, playing point in college, he’d spent most of his time moving the ball around at the top of the key, or stepping back beyond the three-point line to line up his shot. But he’d put on weight since then. He’d slowed. And even keeping himself in shape he knew he’d never be the same player he once had been. Though he was teaching himself to be something different now, not worse or better, but something different. Smarter perhaps. Drake didn’t know. The person he was then so far from the person he was now.
He sat in the car with the door open. The smell of gasoline dissolving in the air as he ran his fingertips over the muscles of his thigh, pushing the strain away. His fingertips digging for the familiar scars and wounds of his past.
A minute later his father came out of the gas station wiping his hands down the sides of his pants to dry them. “I worried about you when I read in the paper what happened,” his father said.
“It’s nothing now,” Drake said. “It stiffens up on long drives.”
“You were shot twice, weren’t you?”
“Once in the knee and once in the arm,” Drake said. His hand on his kneecap and the slight indentation left in the bone from where the bullet had passed through. He’d thought in that moment, two years before, he was a dead man, and that all he had tried to do in his life had been for nothing. A scar in the shape of a star on his forearm where the second bullet had gone in, and the dark purple sliver of tissue at the back of his left hand where he’d caught a knife through his palm. Thinking on it now he couldn’t even begin to put it back together, or reason out why he was still alive. But he was. All that in the past and now he sat trying to wring the stiffness from his leg.
When he raised his eyes from his knee, his father was no longer looking at him, his head up, with his focus across the street. “You know those men over there?”
Drake turned and found where Patrick’s gaze fell. A new-model Lincoln Town Car with two men inside, sitting in the McDonald’s parking lot. “I don’t think they care much about us,” Drake said.
“They’re a little too far for me to make out.”
“I don’t recognize them,” Drake said.
“They pulled off the highway as we came up the exit,” his father said. “They’ve been sitting like that ever since I got out of the car and went inside.”
Drake stood and put his hands to the small of his back, working his shoulders until he heard the ligaments pop. “Is that why you were looking in the side mirror?”
Patrick stood watching the men. “Why are they just sitting there? Why don’t they go in?”
“They could have gone in while you were in the bathroom.”
“I wasn’t in there that long.”
Drake stared at his father and then looked back at the men. “Is there a reason they’d be following us?” The pump clicked off and Drake walked back to take the hose from the tank. “Are you feeling all right, Dad? You’re scaring me a bit here.”
Drake watched as his father’s eyes quivered, something watery and loose in their stare before they broke away and met Drake again. “Just paranoid, I suppose. Too much time locked away in small places seeing things that aren’t there.”
Drake nodded, taking the receipt from the machine. Patrick stood on the other side of the car, the beard and stark white hair giving him a mythical quality, like some piece of history come to life from a book. “You sure you’re okay, Dad?”