Cry Father Read Online Free

in through the dusty windows. Cool valley air, the smell ofburning pine. Patterson lights the kerosene lantern, sending wick light and shadow rippling across the walls.
    A wind builds over the mesa. The kind of wind that whistles right through him. Outside, the piñons crackle and the brush rustles. It’s a homecoming, all right. Patterson pulls out his box of pictures of his son and gets properly drunk.

5
    half
    P atterson wakes on his thin mattress in the loft to the sound of his cell phone ringing. It’s just before daybreak and the phone’s on the table, of course. He fumbles his way down out of the loft, banging into everything he can find a way to bang into. It’s Laney on the caller ID. Which, if he’d thought about at all, he would have known before getting out of bed.
    “Hello,” he rasps into the phone.
    “Hello, yourself,” she says. “Are you settled in?”
    Patterson hasn’t heard her voice in almost a year, but it still washes over him like somebody’s poured gasoline down his neck. “Pretty close.” He makes his way to the sink, peering out the window over the hand pump. Deep darkness, the first glimmer of light barely registering. “How’d you know I was back?”
    She laughs. “You’re at the window, aren’t you? Looking to see if I’m outside?”
    “How’d you know I was back?” he asks again.
    “Lucky guess,” she says.
    “Pretty lucky. I only pulled in this evening.”
    “I need to talk to you,” she says. “I have a question.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Not on the phone,” she says. “I want you live and in person, so it costs you something when you give me the wrong answer. Can you come down to Taos tomorrow? I can buy you dinner.”
    “How’s the day after tomorrow?” Patterson squints out at the morning again, still not sure she isn’t out there somewhere.
    “It’s not something you have to prepare yourself for,” she says. “It’s dinner and a question.”
    “The day after tomorrow.”
    “The day after tomorrow.” She sighs. “Where do you want to meet?”
    “You employed?”
    “I’m employed.”
    “The Adobe Bar,” Patterson says. “Six o’clock.” He ends the call.
    P atterson cooks flapjacks and bacon on the woodstove, polishing off a generous glass of whiskey while he does so. Neither the bacon nor the whiskey help much with the hangover, but they give him an opportunity to enjoy one of the cabin’s greatest advantages. The outhouse. Where you can take a shit with the door open, watching the morning sun wash yellow across the scrub, the prickly pear cactus trying to match its southern brothers in shadow if not substance. After breakfast, Patterson pulls on his loggers and he and Sancho take a walk on the grass-patched dirt road that runs by the cabin, Patterson hoping fresh air will cure what hair of the dog and bacon couldn’t.
    The morning drifts past him in a painfully bright haze. Wildflowers list purple in the light morning wind, bullet-pocked washers and refrigerators lie abandoned in the ditches. Dew mists off the mesa toward the high sun, the air bristling with morning insects. Sancho wanders ditch to ditch in broken zigzags.
    Then Patterson comes around a corner and almost walks into the rear bumper of a matte-black 1969 Dodge Charger pulled off the side of the road, the driver’s-side door hanging open and the door-ajar bell ringing tinnily. “Shit,” Patterson says, to nobody in particular, realizing how far he’d been gone into thinking about nothing.
    “That’s hardly neighborly,” a man’s voice says. It’s Henry’s son, Junior. He steps around a tree, zipping up his jeans, the dust on his alligator-skin cowboy boots pocked with urine. He has a midtwenties’ version of Henry’s face, just as handsome but with a grin that never seems too far from a sneer and a marred left iris that’s filmed over gray. He pulls a black handkerchief out of his back pocket and dabs at the eye, which seems to be perpetually weeping.
    A wary