Plaster City (A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco) Read online

  Bobby was the chaotic ballast that held it together.

  Every time things felt crushingly dull, when life wasn’t as Norman Rockwelly as it appeared, when the bills piled up or the crops died, I’d get a call from the one and only Bobby Maves, my best friend.

  Every three or four weeks, I would end up at a bar or a strip club or an open field that would represent the launching pad for what Bobby would refer to as an “official Mavescapade.” I would hate to see what an unofficial one looked like. A Mavescapade was hard to explain. Slightly dangerous, always childish, and frighteningly irresponsible. But when it was all over, I only remembered the laughing and the bruises. A Mavescapade meant raising seventeen kinds of hell and then eating menudo and drinking Clamato and room-temp beer the next day to mute the hangover.

  With the help of the irregular Mavescapade, I could live the straight life. Knowing there was fun-danger around the corner kept my itchy feet scratched. On the toughest days, the promise of a Mavescapade kept me from jumping in my car and heading out of town screaming from the tightening responsibilities and pressures a grown-up endured.

  I wouldn’t call it a healthy balance but it was a balance. One that even Angie had reluctantly come to accept. Not at first, but it didn’t take her long to see the positives of the dynamic. She knew me well enough to know that it was something I needed. And it was all going well. Until Bobby and Griselda broke up.

  They had been a couple since I had been back. A strange pair to be sure, with Griselda being a Deputy Sheriff and Bobby being a—well, Bobby. But it worked. I don’t know what happened between them, but it hadn’t been good. When I asked Bobby, all he had said was “Didn’t work out.” And that was the last he spoke of it.

  After the breakup, the Mavescapades shifted from monthly to weekly to all the time. Bobby lived in a constant state of madcap mischief. He went from a fun-loving loose cannon to a monkey with a machine gun. Sure, it’s cute, but eventually someone’s going to get hurt.

  Bobby drank every day and raised hell every night. Inevitably I would end up getting a call from some bartender or bouncer or friend begging me to drag Bobby out of their bar or house or barn. It’s hard to admit that your friend is an alcoholic when he’s a fun drunk. Bobby made it easier with each day.

  The problem was I owed him. Bobby had been there for me when I needed him—no questions asked—when anyone with sense would have turned his back on me. Bobby hadn’t flinched when I had asked for help. So I wasn’t about to. Even if he pushed limits that I didn’t know I had. There were times I wanted to bail on him, and I felt like shit every time I considered it.

  It might sound hokey, but Bobby was a man of action. Denied action, he created it. Fun, dangerous, exhausting—you never knew what you would get. But beyond my sense of duty, it was always an adventure hanging out with the funniest guy I knew, doing the stupidest shit we could think of, and opening up that release valve to let off all that fucking steam.

  Beyond Bobby’s innate ability to get me to do stupid things, I couldn’t resist fulfilling a childhood dream. I had always wanted to drive a police car. Been in plenty, but never behind the wheel. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

  Bobby and I tossed the unconscious Officer Ceja into the back of his squad car and we hit the mean streets of Holtville.

  Ceja lived out in the country north of town, which gave us a chance to see what his cruiser could do. Well over 130 miles per, was the answer. And smooth, even on some of the washboard roads. Cop shocks.

  Bobby insisted on running the lights and the siren. It was a bad idea. I knew it. But I couldn’t come up with a good argument, because I wanted to run them, too. Sometimes bad ideas were the best ideas. I’m sure we didn’t make any new friends along Holt Road.

  Bobby and I took turns pretending to talk into the radio.

  “Strike Force Delta 8, Strike Force Delta 8. We got a 957 on Chell Road,” Bobby said, making static sounds with his mouth between sentences. “What’s your 10-11, Officer Veeder? Roger. Over.”

  “Can you give me a spelling on the location of that Niner-Fiver-Sevener? Roger Dodger. Over.”

  “A 957. An illegal sheep-fighting ring. Chell Road. Chell. Um. Charlie. Hepatitis. Elephone. Lumbago. Luggage. Over.”

  “You used two different words for L. That’s not how they do it. And did you say Elephone? Not a word and way confusinger.”

  “How else would elephants talk to each other? On the elephone. And you forgot to say, ‘over.’ Over and out.”

  I threw some donuts in a flat lot used to store hay bales. The car spun in a tight circle, kicking dust that sparkled in the moonlight. Ceja’s torso flopped to the floor in the back with his feet still on the bench seat. If he could sleep through it, it couldn’t be that uncomfortable.

  “Speaking of doughnuts,” I said. “It’s practically breakfast time and I got the hungries. Could really go for one or a dozen glazed.”

  “Fuck doughnuts, man. Fucking carne asada. Let’s hit that roach coach outside of Paloma’s. Two dollar burritos. Might be open. Throw ourselves a spicnic.”

  “Spicnic? Really?”

  “I’m half-Mexican, so it’s okay.”

  “Only half okay. Ten-four on the carne, good buddy. I’m on it.”

  I pulled the parking brake, sending the car spinning. Bobby and I scream-laughed. After doing a full 720, we came to a stop perpendicular to the road. I made a slow seven-point turn that took forever. Incredibly anticlimactic. But not more anticlimactic than what happened next.

  We ran out of gas on a ditch bank six miles north of town and three miles from Ceja’s house. It occurred to us at that moment that we hadn’t thought things through. We had gotten so excited about driving a police car that we never considered how we were going to get home with both our vehicles back at the bar. Planning wasn’t really our strong suit.

  “Who can we call?” I asked.

  “You’re the only one I call this late.”

  “Buck Buck or Snout?”

  “Don’t get back from San Felipe until tomorrow.”

  “Not Angie. She’s already going to give me shit when she sees my face bruise.”

  “Maybe there’s a gas can.”

  We popped the trunk. No gas can. We did find a spare and a jack. A scattergun. Road flares and a first aid kit. Little Debbie boxes of Zebra Cakes, Nutty Bars, and Banana Pudding Rolls. Two dog-eared pornographic paperbacks titled Wet Cheerleaders and Balling on the Ballboy’s Balls! Three gallon jugs of water. A case of beer. And two collapsible frog gigs.

  When you get dealt a ten-high, you can’t change it. I decided to play the cards I was dealt, not because I was overly excited about them, but because it was what was in my hand. I used the contents of the trunk to determine the next chapter in this still-unfinished misadventure. As if the Fates themselves had left me and Bobby with beer, dessert, and frog gigs.

  I woke up the next morning in a sugar beet field covered in mud. Sadly, it wasn’t the first time. My head hurt, my mouth tasted like artificial banana, and I was missing a shoe. The mud felt cool against the already triple-digit heat. The low sun stung my eyes, but that pain was just the preamble. I knew it. When a Little Debbie and beer hangover kicked in, it was a dilly of a doozy.

  Mud oozed between my fingers as I pushed myself into a sitting position. Five feet away, Bobby sat Indian-style, as peaceful as a Buddha. The mud on his face and clothes had set, already dry, deep brown fading to gray. He grinned, nodded, and tossed me a can of beer. It bounced off my shoulder and landed in front of me.

  “Ow,” I said. “We should go. Angie’s going to be worried. And pissed.”

  I stood up too fast, got dizzy, and slipped in the mud onto my ass. A karmic lesson in impatience.

  “Take it from a man with experience,” Bobby said. “Never rush. It’s not natural. Life is harsh sober.”

  I scraped fresh mud off my arm, the clean areas only highlighting the overall mess.

  “How do you get me to do th
is shit?” I said.

  “Don’t blame me. You wanted to drive a cop car.”

  “Fucking stupid,” I said and cracked the beer.

  Fifteen minutes later, Bobby and I plodded through the field, hopped the ditch, and circled the police cruiser like we were examining a crime scene. Looking through the back window, the previous night’s activities came back to me. Ceja remained passed out in that strange position. But now he was covered in dead frogs.

  After we had run out of gas, Bobby and I had knocked back some beers and frog gigged in the ditches. Without a bucket, we shoved our bounty through a crack in the car window. Stranger things had seemed like a good idea to a drunk mind. Sober and in the light of day, covering your buddy in dead animals wasn’t nearly as funny.

  Bobby gave the window a knock. The heavy ring on his pointer finger—the one he called Knockout Charlie—clicked loudly. He held up his phone, poised to take a picture.

  Ceja’s eyes opened. It took a second. Then the screaming started.

  Click. “Oh, man. That’s a keeper.”

  One hundred percent pure panic. From sound sleep to what he must have perceived as an amphibian takeover of the world. His body flailed, slipping and sliding and swimming in the blood and slime of a sea of dead frogs. Ceja started crying.

  Before anyone brands me cruel, remember that Ceja knocked out my tooth for corrupting a nonexistent sister. And while this wasn’t a conscious revenge, I’d take it. One man’s cruelty is another man’s justice.

  As Ceja tried to get up, the bloody frogs flopped around the back of the squad car like popcorn. Ceja looked like he was in a serial killer’s version of an amusement park ball pit.

  I opened the back door. Frogs spilled to the ground. It smelled like the men’s room in a bait shop. Ceja darted out, dancing and rubbing at his clothes.

  “Where am I? What happened? What are you guys doing here?”

  Bobby answered calmly. “We’re in Texas. Outside Laredo. You were drugged last night by an operative working for the CIA, the PTA, and Amazon. We are here from the future. Come with us if you want to live.”

  “I don’t understand. Why frogs?”

  “Exactly,” Bobby said.

  Ceja looked from Bobby to me and back to Bobby. Confusion and fear. I thought he was going to start crying again.

  “Take it easy, Ceja. Bobby’s screwing with you,” I said. “Except the part about the CIA. That’s true. They put a tracker up your ass. Way up there.”

  As an accidental punch line to my joke, Bobby’s phone farted. He answered.

  “Yello,” Bobby said. “Hunh? Slow down, Beck.”

  His expression stopped me cold. With every second, his face grew more serious. His eyes stared at a dead spot in space. He was focused entirely on listening. Bobby didn’t do serious that often. Something big was happening.

  “Why did you wait until now?” A hint of suppressed anger in his voice.

  Ceja looked at me. He looked worried too. We waited. Bobby hung up.

  “Bobby? What is it? What happened?” I asked.

  It took a moment, but Bobby finally looked at me. It was like he’d never seen my face before.

  “What?” I pleaded.

  “Julie ain’t been home for five days. Nobody’s seen her, knows where she’s at. Cops got nothing.” He looked down at his phone like it was the phone’s fault. He turned back to me.

  “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—an
d 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.