Plaster City (A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco) (3 page)

“My daughter is missing.”

TWO

Angie watched me from the bedroom door. She hadn’t said more than ten words since picking me up, not even a snide remark about the fist-shaped bruise on my forehead or my mud-caked clothes. I would have preferred a scolding to the fatalistic scenarios in my head.

I pulled my big gym bag from the closet and chucked it on the bed. I opened the bottom dresser drawer and threw a random stack of T-shirts in and around the bag.

The neutrality of Angie’s expression gave me no gauge. Her silence, even less. It made me infer emotions and thoughts that probably weren’t there. In film theory, it’s called the Kuleshov Effect. A blank expression taking on whatever emotion the context implies. A neutral expression looking at food. Hungry. A neutral expression looking at a clown. Amused or terrified, depending on one’s opinion of clownkind. The things you retain from the easy-A classes in college.

When I couldn’t take the silence anymore, I let words leak out of my mouth to fill the void. “I read somewhere that a good thief starts on the bottom drawer. So they only have to open them, but not close them. If you go top to bottom, you got to close ’em as you go. Saves valuable stealing time.”

“Or you can pull them all the way out,” Angie said.

“Yeah, I suppose you could do that.”

A handful of socks joined the pile. Angie walked to the bed and refolded the shirts, placing them one at a time into the bag.

I shook my head. “I ain’t seen Bobby that messed up since we were kids and his old man made him shoot his dog, RoboCop. It had attacked some sheep, got the taste for blood. Bobby’s confusion was scary then, and he was thirteen. I can’t imagine what’s going through his head.”

“He should’ve waited for you,” Angie said.

“If it were Juan, I’d’ve—you’d’ve done the same. I’m only a couple hours behind him.”

“Anything I can do?” She set another freshly folded shirt into the bag.

“Hell, I don’t know if there’s anything I can do. It’s not like he even asked me to come along—to help. I just know this isn’t a thing anyone should do alone.”

“Hopefully it’s normal teenager crap. Road trip with a boyfriend. Running off to become an actress. Finding-herself shit.”

“Julie’s somewhere around sixteen. I’m thinking how wild we were. Must’ve freaked out our folks plenty.”

“It’s a teenager’s job to torture their parents. Wait’ll Juan grows up. You’ll see.”

“Let’s hope it’s something stupid,” I said.

Angie nodded, but I could tell by her face that her thoughts had drifted to the other possibilities.

“You going to be okay with Juan?” I asked.

“We’ll be fine, but try not to be gone long. You know how he gets. Even this morning, he woke up and you weren’t there. He got real quiet. Wouldn’t talk to me.”

“He’s got to start getting used to me being gone. He starts kindergarten soon.”

“You concentrate on finding Julie. And keeping Bobby out of trouble. Which is no simple task. Longer than a few days, we might have to figure something out. See how he is. At least we got Mr. Morales. Who knew he would be such a good babysitter. Now run across the road and get your son. I’ll pack the rest of your shit.”

“Rudolph El Reno de la Nariz Roja” played on the jukebox of Morales Bar. Since I’d been raising Juan, Mr. Morales (or Mr. More-Or-Less, as Juan said it) had been the go-to babysitter and all-around grandfather figure for the boy. Right across the street, Mr. Morales and his bar were our only neighbors out in the country. I had known him my whole life. Notoriously stolid, I almost saw Mr. Morales smile for the second time when Juan went nuts for the pocketknife he gave him on his fifth birthday.

Without prompting, Mr. Morales had added a half dozen kids’ songs to the bar jukebox. The first time one of the regular campesinos made some noise about “La Itsy Bitsy Araña” replacing his favorite banda tune—well, it was also the last time one of the regular campesinos made any noise about any song selection.

When I was growing up, Mr. Morales had raised his grandson, Tomás. I think he missed it. In recent months, Mr. Morales’s relationship to Tomás had all but dissolved. He didn’t discuss it with me, but I had to guess that it was mostly due to Tomás’s role as a prominent Mexican crime figure. Two years ago, it had been pornography and prostitution, which Mr. Morales had no moral reservations about. But if the scuttlebutt and bar-whispers of the last few months were to be believed, Tomás was attempting to expand operations north. And that level of crimelording—and the violence that came with it—rubbed Mr. Morales the wrong way.

Mr. Morales had Juan in the middle of the empty bar, both of them crouched in a boxer’s stance. From what I could figure, Mr. Morales was demonstrating proper technique for throwing an uppercut.

“You want to really feel these two knuckles hit,” Mr. Morales said.

Juan nodded intently.

“Are you teaching my boy how to fight?” I asked.

When Juan saw me, he dropped his hands and ran to me. I knelt down and lifted him as he leapt into my arms. With Juan in one arm, I gave Mr. Morales an awkward handshake with the other.

“Someone has to,” Mr. Morales said. “If I leave it to you, Juanito will sissy slap, kick shins, and pull hair.”

“He’s five. And you forgot eye-gouging.”

“That bruise on your face is all the reason I need.”

“I got sucker punched.”

“Don’t blame the punch. Blame the sucker.”

I set Juan down, got on my haunches, and held up both hands to him. “All right, grasshopper. Show me what Mr. More-Or-Less taught you.”

Juan nodded and, with textbook timing, turned and punched Mr. Morales square in the nuts. The old man let out a deep exhale and took a knee. Like father, like son. Juan had my moves.

“What was that lesson called?” I asked.

Mr. Morales silently rose. He cowboy-walked to the bar, put a handful of ice in a towel, and gingerly held it to his groin.

“I punched him good. Like Mr. More-Or-Less teached me,” Juan said, smiling broadly.

“You sure did.” I put my arm around him and concentrated on not laughing at Mr. Morales. No reason to add insult to injury. Especially not to someone who had a shotgun within reach.

Back at the house, I set Juan in front of a big box of crayons and some coloring books. I joined him, trying to get Wonder Woman’s costume just right. Really working the curves.

I looked at my boy, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration. I wondered what I would do if he went missing. I couldn’t fathom it. I didn’t want to.

As much as I loved Angie, Juan was the thing that made everything make sense. The reason I kept my feet planted and took whatever shots came my way. I had never thought I’d become a father. Did so reluctantly. But two years later, I couldn’t imagine my life without him. As Pop would say, it doesn’t matter what we want, it’s what we do with what we have.

“I have to go away for a little while, a couple days maybe. Okay?” I said.

Juan stopped coloring and screwed up his face. Not tantrum-angry, but definitely mad. “I don’t want you to.”

“I have to. Uncle Bobbiola needs my help.”

“Why?”

“His daughter Julie is in trouble. Nobody can find her. I have to help Uncle Bobbiola look.”

“Maybe she’s playing hide-and-seek and she’s a real good hider.”

“Maybe. I won’t be gone too long.”

Juan’s brow wrinkled with concern. “How do I know you’ll come back?”

“Of course I will,” I said. “I’ve gone away before. And I came back those times, didn’t I? I’m your father. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

Juan thought about it for a moment. He picked up a crayon and squeezed it in his hand. He didn’t look happy, but he said, “Okay.”

“Listen to your mom and Mr. More-Or-Less. Do what they say. Be good.”

Juan nodded and returned to coloring Batman’s cape a blasphemous lime green. But he had lost his passion for it, going through the motions of filling the blank spots with random color.

I chucked the gym bags in the passenger seat of my truck. Angie gave me a quick kiss, more of a see-you-soon kiss than a come-back-in-one-piece kiss.

“Could be overnight, could be longer,” I said. “Depends on how things shake out. I’m only an hour and a half away. I just irrigated, but I’ll have Mike check on the fields if I’m longer than a day or two. I know money’s tight, but we’ll figure it out.”

“I wish Buck Buck or Snout could go instead of you,” Angie said.

I laughed. “Even if they were in town, you know that wouldn’t work. Becky called Bobby to look for her. Buck Buck and Snout would be gasoline on whatever nuclear explosion he sets off while searching. I can keep Bobby from getting into trouble.”

“No, you can’t. When have you ever? That’s like trying to rope a tornado.”

“Everything’s going to be fine,” I said, not selling it. And from the look on Angie’s face, she didn’t buy it either. Something told us both that this was going to get bad.

Bobby Maves and Becky Espinosa met in kindergarten or first grade. Like most of the people we graduated high school with, we all went to grade school together.

It wasn’t love at first sight. If I remember the story correctly, Becky beat the shit out of Bobby on the playground over a game of marbles. A few choice words and punches were exchanged over whether or not blocksies, jumpsies, and no-takesies could be used in conjunction with each other.