Coronado - Dennis Lehane [34]
“See, there’s this secret group that works for the Vatican? They’re like a, like a…”
“A hit squad,” your father says.
“Exactly,” Mandy says and presses her finger to your nose. “And the lead guy, the, like, head agent? He’s the hero. He lost his wife and daughter in a terrorist attack on the Vatican a few years back, so he’s a little fucked up, but—”
You say, “Terrorists attacked the Vatican?”
“Huh?”
You look at her, waiting. She has a small face, eyes too close to her nose.
“In the movie,” Mandy says. “Not in real life.”
“Oh. I just, you know, four years inside, you assume you miss a couple of headlines, but…”
“Right.” Her face dark and squally now. “Can I finish?”
“I’m just saying,” you say and snort another line off your fist, “even the guys on death row would have heard about that one.”
“Just go with it,” your father says. “It’s not like real life.”
You look out the window, see a guy in a chicken suit carrying a can of gas in the breakdown lane, think how real life isn’t like real life. Probably more like this poor dumb bastard running out of gas in a car with wings painted on it. Wondering how the hell he ever got here. Wondering who he’d pissed off in that previous real life.
YOUR FATHER HAS rented two rooms at an Econo Lodge so you and Mandy can have some privacy, but you send Mandy home after she twice interrupts the blow job she’s giving you to pontificate on the merits of Michael Bay films.
You sit in the blue-wash flicker of ESPN and eat peanuts from a plastic sleeve you got out of a vending machine and drink plastic cupfuls of Jim Beam from a bottle your father presented when you reached the parking lot. You think of the time you’ve lost and how nice it is to sit alone on a double bed and watch TV, and you think of Gwen, can taste her tongue for just a moment, and you think about the road that’s led you here to this motel room on this night after forty-seven months in prison and how a lot of people would say it was a twisted road, a weird one, filled with curves, but you just think of it as a road like any other. You drive down it on faith or because you have no other choice and you find out what it’s like by the driving of it, find out what the end looks like only by reaching it.
LATE THE NEXT morning, your father wakes you, tells you he drove Mandy home and you’ve got things to do, people to see.
Here’s what you know about your father above all else—people have a way of vanishing in his company.
He’s a professional thief, consummate con man, expert in his field, and yet there’s something far beyond professionalism at his core, something unreasonably arbitrary. Something he keeps within himself like a story he heard once, laughed at maybe, yet swore never to repeat.
“She was with you last night?” you say.
“You didn’t want her. Somebody had to prop her ego back up. Poor girl like that.”
“But you drove her home,” you say.
“I’m speaking Czech?”
You hold his eyes for a bit. They’re big and bland, with the heartless innocence of a newborn’s. Nothing moves in them, nothing breathes, and after a while you say, “Let me take a shower.”
“Fuck the shower,” he says. “Throw on a baseball cap and let’s get.”
You take the shower anyway, just to feel it, another of those things you would have realized you’d miss if you’d given it any thought ahead of time, standing under the spray, no one near you, all the hot water you want for as long as you want it, shampoo that doesn’t smell like factory smoke.
Drying your hair and brushing your teeth, you can hear the old man flicking through channels, never pausing on one for more than thirty seconds: Home Shopping Network—zap. Springer—zap. Oprah—zap. Soap opera voices; soap opera music—zap. Monster truck show—pause. Commercial—zap, zap, zap.
You come back into the room, steam trailing you, and pick your jeans up off the bed, put them on.
The old man says, “Afraid you’d drowned. Worried I’d have to take a plunger to the drain, suck you