Force Protection

FICTION FRIDAY (Short provocative originals.)

[NOTE: Nothing about this is for kids, including the use of violence, explicit language and even slurs, unpalatable, but appropriate to the character building and mindsets essential to the narrative within this work of FICTION.]

"Secrets are no longer necessary when those they indict or protect stop sharing your air."

I’m certain this will be just another of my journals locked in a desk drawer that no one will read. But stories like this are really just for the teller anyway, so I write. And as I force those memories from their containers back into the circulation of my mind, I can see the problem clearly again, as if it were yesterday. Teddy was too pretty.

Even with all the drinking. I mean early Elvis pretty. Blue eyes, skin a smooth, taut canvass without a blemish, cheek bones that could cut diamonds. Thick black hair he combed up in a pompadour still at the turn of the new millennium. He said his hair came from his ancestors, that he was part Navajo, not uncommon where we lived in Grants, an hour and change west of Albuquerque at the intersection of the Continental divide and the badlands of El Malpais.

But Teddy didn’t know his own dad, let alone his supposedly indigenous ancestors. And the mystery, fiction, whatever it was, both fed his inner demons and inflated his sense of importance. Liked to lord it over my mom, Loretta who, unapologetically came from a long line of New Mexico trailer trash. Allowed Teddy to feel superior even though it was her work that bought us the double-wide we grew up in, put the food on our plates, the clothes on our backs, the few presents around the tree at Christmas.

Still, Teddy fervently believed his presence was the golden sunshine of our existence. As husband and father why wouldn’t he? Everybody else was drawn to Teddy, women, men, cats and dogs. He had that giant Venus fly trap smile with charming micromillimeter gap between his front teeth. Wasn’t anyone that didn’t want to be around Teddy. Except us. We knew him when those Hollywood high beams of his shut down, when the last shot of Cuervo or can of Modelo that put him over the line, switched on that reserve of anger and meanness, activated his desire for confrontation that got his fist twitching in our direction.

To the rest of the world, Teddy was magnetic. Nuclear even, like the uranium motherlode discovered here by Paddy Martinez in the 50’s giving the place it’s nickname, Yellowcake Boomtown.  Teddy was a boomtown unto himself. Didn’t even need a job. Folks bringing him over their cars to work on in the aluminum shed garage that Loretta bought for him and had set up next to our trailer. It was tactical I think. Teddy so averse to real work he needed to be walking distance to it to ever get there.  Also close enough for Loretta to keep an eye on him. When she could, anyway.

On a typical day he’d make it to the garage by 10 or 10:30 am after a big hangover breakfast first. She’d cook him up platters of scrambled eggs drenched in salsa, black beans and corn tortillas. After eating he might flush a transmission or rethread a new timing belt-- if he’d had the foresight enough to pick one from the Auto Zone the day before. Usually not. If you brought your car or truck over to Teddy for even the smallest, easiest work you were probably leaving it for the week.

But it might not be the work you were looking to get done anyway. Rather a chance to sit on the tattered bar stool next to the tool bench and drink a beer while Teddy had you laughing your ass off with a stream of jokes, or unkind observations about the good folks of Grants.  Occasionally he’d use a ratchet to tighten or loosen something under the hood, every action inevitably leading to another story that would delay the work even longer.

It was okay, because if you used Teddy, you didn’t come here to be in a hurry. You came to be entertained, to feel the warmth of his nuclear core, to get his focused attention for a minute or an hour or whatever he decided you needed, or he had to give you that day, all while old school country played in the background on the black JBL Boombox that Loretta also bought him after he hounded her for weeks. His old radio not good enough for his “business.”

Maybe it was you didn’t come over for work on your vehicle at all. Maybe you came over, to get worked yourself. That usually happened when Loretta put in her guard shift at The Northwest New Mexico Correctional Facility. She’d been there nearly 20 years since the time it had been a women’s only prison, but stayed after it went private and now housed just men. She had enough seniority to get good day shifts and admin duties. No longer working the tower, walking the walls or the yard. She was respected. She didn’t take anybody’s shit, not the inmates, not the other guards, not even the warden. The only person she took shit from was Teddy.

I could never figure out why, other than him having hypnotized and dazzled her too. Once Teddy got you under his spell that’s usually where you stayed, no matter how many lies and betrayals. And when it came to Loretta, there were too many to count. When she was off at the prison, was when Teddy focused his attention elsewhere. Everywhere actually.

Any pretend effort under the hood giving way to the insatiable drive under his belt. He wasn’t too discriminating and never discreet. Just as willing to doggy the 29-year-old, single-mom, deli clerk from Albertson’s against her ’89 Honda Civic as use the dirty green vinyl couch, considered the customer waiting area, to reverse cowgirl the Wal-Mart greeter grandmother on the backside of her 50’s. Wasn’t too proud to get sucked off by the local Methodist minister’s son, either. A deeply lost soul himself, as I recall, and regular glue sniffer who’d been in Henley’s grade but dropped out his junior year. Do almost anything for pocket change including Teddy.

Teddy told me once with drunken pride,

“Son, don’t matter who on the end of your dick when your eyes closed.” Something he said he learned during various d & d stints at county.

I know all this because I saw it too many times. Often just after the school bus dropped me off in front of the trailer. Teddy not even bothering to slide down the garage doors. It’d be a coin flip on which Teddy was more of, voyeur or narcissist. That’d take the wisdom of Solomon to decide, and I don’t have that even all these years later.

But it didn’t really matter what I saw though that garage door because’ I wasn’t no snitch. Once I was though, briefly at age ten. Loretta put an end to any stoolie inclinations I might’ve had. Flushed it out of me. Really. Put my head in the shitter and yanked the handle three-times just to make certain. Her the original water boarder. I’d caught my brother, Henley smoking in his room with a couple of friends. Grabbed the ashtray they were using. Put it in my Aqua Man lunchbox. After I showed her, she just shook her head, stubbed out her own butt on the kitchen floor with a grind of her work boot. Dragged me into our trailer’s bathroom and cured me of it right then and there. I was still  on my knees, coughing and choking when she looked down at me with disdain.

“I didn’t raise no rats,” she said. I got the message. In a world full of traitors and two-dollar turnkeys, family loyalty was everything. This from a prison guard.

Maybe that’s why she put up with Teddy. Figured it was just his nature. Figured it was that story, you know, the scorpion on the frog’s back, a sting killing them both in a swim across the river. I think she didn’t see Teddy as a bad man, just one full of appetites. People for him were no different than his shop tools or a plate of tacos. Something he used to sustain himself.  

I admit, Teddy did have one admirable quality though he did his best to hide it. Deep inside himself he was not deluded by his own game of smoke and mirrors. When I looked at him directly I would sometimes catch it in his eyes. A sliver of shame. That momentary eclipse of his self-confidence. That he understood it all was just a long grift and that everyone who ever engaged with him at any level would eventually go away disappointed. But leave enough of folks like that in your wake and one day somebody’s going to turn that disappointment into action.

It was the summer before my sophomore and Henley’s senior year of high school. He’d already decided he was leaving Grants and just how he’d make it out. Enlisting in the Marines. In 10 months, after graduating, he’d go to boot camp at Pendleton. But he’d already quit the cigs, was running and lifting weights so he wouldn’t be gassed once the drill sergeants got their mitts into him.

“Couldn’t be no worse than life here,” he told me one night while we lay in our beds, too hot to sleep, just a few feet apart in the trailer’s second bedroom. “ Teddy sucks the life out of us every day for free, why not get paid for it.”  I agreed, wished I was old enough to go too then, but at 16 I had  a few years left in Grants -- all within Teddy’s crosshairs. And the man had a way of pushing you until you just couldn’t or wouldn’t take it anymore.

He had dogged Henley endlessly when he told him he was joining the Marines. Told him he was a pussy and too skinny, that he’d wash out before a week went by.  Couldn’t stand the fact that his oldest son would be out of his clutches, trying to be something more than he was. Even refused to sign the parental authorization for his early enlistment, since Henley wouldn’t turn 18 until the follow Spring.

When he found out Loretta had instead, he rewarded her with a slap that nearly dislocated her jaw. Was going in for more when Henley jumped on Teddy’s back, wrapped his long arms around his neck, pulled with all his might. Enough to bring him to his knees. Enough to choke him out cold. He might not have let go had at all had Loretta not dragged him off. Told Henley it wasn’t worth going to jail for killing a sack a dog shit like Teddy. Henley finally unwrapped himself from where he’d clung to Teddy’s back, laying in the dirt. Anger not fully dissipated he stood up, reared back and laced into one of Teddy’s kidneys with the toe of his boot. A satisfying crunk.

When Teddy finally came to gasping for air, he crawled, hands and knees into his garage looking like a tarantula on the hot desert sands. Went straight for his shop fridge, drank the two sixes in there and a few of the pint bottles of tequila he had stashed under oily rags and in empty parts boxes.

Got so fucked up he passed out again and  pissed himself while slung over the green vinyl couch, dark amoeba spreading from the crotch of  his greasy coveralls.  We just left him for the rest of the day. Thought he might be dead, until he finally roused himself when Loretta left for her shift. Came into the trailer, took a shower and slept it off. Got up the next morning, smiling like nothing happened. Concealing his plans behind bloodshot eyes and booze swollen face.

That same year, maybe it was March already, Henley had started seeing, Juanita Guzman. A dark, haired beauty who was studying cosmetology through the high school’s vocational program. Cut hair on the side to make some extra money. Offered to cut his for free. He told her the Marines would do that come summer, but maybe they could see a movie? Go for a pizza? Henley was kind, respectful and she liked he had plans to get out of Grants too. Before long he was with her all the time. I barely saw him that spring. He kept away from the trailer and Teddy as much as possible. Had since choking Teddy out. But that ended with the Senior Prom. Loretta insisted Henley bring Juanita over for pictures before the dance.

I remember the first thing I saw was the corsage. Henley had gotten her one so big it nearly cast a shadow. Loretta was gushing like she never had, took a million pictures of the two smiling like nothing else mattered. Even Teddy got in on it. Had washed and waxed his Ram 1500 and made a big show of handing Henley the keys like a regular dad might.

That’s all it took. Maybe because he wanted to believe his father really cared about him or maybe because he was in love, Henley got comfortable. He started bringing Juanita home more and more often. I mean why not. It made Loretta so happy. She would cook up a big pot of spaghetti with pork chops, fuss over how pretty Juanita was, how she’d wish she had a daughter like her instead of two lunkhead boys. And Teddy would sit there, watching it all, laughing, feeding into the moment by recalling some of Henley’s childhood glory days, scoring goals in middle school soccer or hitting home runs in Little League and such, or teasing about goofy Halloween costumes and him waiting up all night for the tooth fairy. Being the perfect dad, being the perfect gentlemen. Daring Henley to forget that one afternoon, daring him to believe we were part of a normal family. And Loretta wanted another female around so badly she forgot the wolf at her table or — chose not to see him for a time.

But not me. I had been studying Teddy my whole short life, then. I looked past his false smiles and his fatherly nods of approval.  I watched his hands. Watched how he patiently peeled back the labels of his beer, slowly, methodically, letting the condensation do its work on the glue and then ever so patiently, rolling it diagonally across, no smudges, no streaks, no paper backing left, just the smooth amber darkness and his hand around its neck.

After awhile I could tell Juanita had been convinced by Teddy’s charade too because she opened up. Shared the darker aspects of her own life. Hinted at her daddy having some drinking issues, older brother in a gang and the younger one a pothead. Tween sisters getting too much attention from a sketchy uncle. All those revelations made our secretly dysfunctional home look like a comforting desert oasis, our family a masterpiece of modern tranquility by comparison. Everything Teddy needed.

One night when Juanita came over to watch the X Files with Henley, after his workout, Teddy mentioned that her old Corolla seemed to be running hot, a shimmer from the hood and smoke out of the tailpipe.

She shrugged, turned her attention back to the screen in our living room, but that was Teddy just waiting for the condensation to soak through before he started the slow peel. Said he’d take a quick look under the hood, no big deal. She found her purse, handed him her keys, a My Little Pony plush attached to the chain. She thanked him and turned back to the screen.

I had been sitting on the floor, watching TV with them,  but got up and pretended to go to the bathroom. Instead, I went out the backdoor and around the corner of the trailer. I spied as Teddy pulled the latch on the Corolla’s hood and propped it up. It was a perfect screen, blocking the view from the living room but not from me. I saw as he rummaged through the glove compartment, looking at the car’s registration and owner’s manual with little interest. Then he moved on to the latched center console, rifled through some wet wipes, some loose tampons a bag of generic breath mints from the Rite Aid. Teddy popped one in his mouth and smiled—until he saw me looking at him.

“The fuck? You little creeper?” Hid his surprise with anger. Hid it more by pretending he was just getting ready to turn the ignition which he did, clumsily inserting the key and starting it up.

Teddy told Juanita the radiator was leaking. Would find her another at the junk yard, Corollas being as common as cactus there, swap it out for her. He looked up, scratched his perfectly square jaw, pretended he had a list of customers waiting on him. Could maybe do it on Wednesday of that week. Wouldn’t take but an hour or two. When Juanita said she’d didn’t have the money that’s when Teddy went, well, full Teddy while Henley was taking a piss.

“C’mon now Juanita,” he said in a low conspiratorial voice. “You practically family now all but in name. Henley over there slower n’ sloth putting a ring on it . Spending all his time getting ready to be one of the few and the proud.”  Teddy winked at her, his grin nearly reached his earlobes, “Forgetting what’s really important.” Juanita blushed.

“But tell you what,” Teddy touched his pomp, “getting a little shaggy here. Maybe you can bring your scissors and combs over one night and give me a trim. That way everybody be running clean. Sound fair?”

Juanita brought her Corolla over that Wednesday and Teddy, as promised, fixed it for her in a couple of hours. A miracle of motivation if there ever was one. But, of course, nothing happened then. We were all around. Henley, me, even Loretta. Teddy had the audience he wanted. The one that proved he could be trusted to do what he said. No monkey business, at all. Just a good dad, doing a good turn for his potential daughter-in-law. 

But what nobody saw but me, was when he called in the barter. Not more than a few second after he shut the hood on her car, Teddy was throwing his head back, trying to flick some stray locks that had slipped their pomade and fell over his left eye. Sighed in frustration. Juanita stepped to him, pushed it back with her forefingers. Smiled. Agreed that he needed a trim. Teddy suggested the following Monday afternoon, knowing Henley would be at his recruiter’s, as he always was for his weekly check-in.

I continued to shoot baskets on the netless, rusty hoop and filthy backboard welded to the side of Teddy’s garage. Conspicuous by the noise I made, giving Teddy what he thought was perfect cover.

There was flu outbreak at the prison and because a handful of other guards called in sick , Loretta had to work that Saturday. That left me, Henley and Teddy alone together. Never a good mix. The cyclone of Teddy’s dark-side swirling in on us when there was no-one around he thought necessary to activate his pretensions or restraint.

He cracked a beer for breakfast started in on Henley. Same tired Teddy bullshit, taunting that he’d be on Greyhound back to Grants after the first week of boot camp. Or if, by some miracle, he did make it through they’d send him off to a jungle hellhole in the Philippines or to freeze his nuts off during a Korean winter guarding the DMZ. And while he was thousands of miles away, Juanita would find someone else to keep her warm.

Teddy pantomimed a cartoon fucking motion pushing his hips forward and scrunching up his face. Henley shook his head with tired resignation. Had been waiting for months for the return of the real Teddy and here, finally, he was. He flipped him the bird on his way out for, what I knew would be one of his long desert runs, not coming back until he lost the desire to beat Teddy to a pulp. Something he could clearly do now, after all his bulking up and training.

Once Henley was out the door, Teddy turned his formidable bitterness on me as I ate a bowl of Sugar Crisps at the kitchen table. Asked me if I knew I was queer yet, that it was obvious to him the way I spent all my time in my room reading those Harry Peter books. In mock seriousness, he asked if I’d thought about my future. With my grades maybe I could get into UNM in a few years and me and all the other fruits could play with each other’s magic wands in our dorm rooms. Or I could just skip all that, he offered, and go directly to Santa Fe, open up a little boutique selling dreamcatchers and turquoise jewelry to tourists. Teddy told me he had it on good authority that was all the entrepreneurial homos did. Either that or real estate.

“The world is your motherfucking oyster girl,” he said sarcastically, slipping in shots of tequila now with his second beer.

I said nothing, took one more bite of my cereal, then got up and to wash my bowl in the sink. I’m not sure where it came from, but I remember I stopped and just stood there still, with my back to Teddy.

“You hate us all so much Teddy,” I finally said, “why don’t you do everybody a favor, pack your shit into that giant truck Loretta bought for you and just drive away. Just go somewhere else.” I let it sink in.

“Oh, that’s right,” I said, feeling braver than I should have. “You can’t because you don’t have a dime to your name. Wouldn’t take but a day or two before you were sleeping in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Waft of your own failure come spilling out of the cab every time you opened the door.”

“Better watch your tongue, little cocksucker, else I cut it out your head,” Teddy shouted at me, sitting up, straight now, getting ready to lunge. “I ain’t going nowhere,” he sneered. “This is my house you living in. Be your useless ass and your jarhead wannabe brother out in the streets with nothing but the clothes on your back before me.” I could hear him taking a long draw on his beer nearly emptying it. Then started up again.

“Hairless little, peckerwood talking at me like your balls already dropped.” He was getting worked up now, volume and anger building, words nearly fumbling through his increasingly alcohol addled brain. I kept my back to him. “You ain’t even close to being a man yet. So, don’ trying talking like one.”

I turned on the faucet, the old pipes groaning as I rinsed the milk and leftover cereal out of the bowl. Teddy suddenly changed pace, turned inward, muttered to himself, “Fucking end you all, I don’ start seeing some respect.” For a second, I thought I heard him draw back a sob and to me it was the blood in the water.

“You’ll be the dead one,” I said, called back his attention from the pool of his own self-pity.  “Henley catches you trying to fuck Juanita. Might’ve been already,” I turned off the faucet so he could hear me clearly, “Loretta not pulled him off you.”

I saw his reflection on the fridge and ducked as he reared back and winged the half empty bottle of Modelo at my head, missing it by inches and exploding against the kitchen cabinet in front of me. Glass tinkled into the stainless-steel sink, while beer foamed pooled at the downward tilt of the broken cabinet door. The one Teddy had promised Loretta he’d fix, but never got around to. Everything went silent for a moment except for the drip, drip, drip of the beer foam on the Formica counter. I smiled to myself knowing Teddy hated people knowing his plans, even though he telegraphed them by a mile.

“Clean that shit up before she gets home,” he said, pushing away from the table, nearly slamming the front door off its hinges on the way out to his garage.

~ ~ ~

I must’ve got Teddy pretty worked up since instead of just sitting around on the couch getting more shitfaced all day he decided to get shitfaced while changing the oil in his Ram.

He was tucked half-way under it, removing the oil pan, blasting the classic country station on his JBL, early Waylon Jennings mournfully singing about always being crazy or something, as I recall.  From the trailer window I could see through the open garage door, just his dirty jeans and snakeskin boots sticking out from under the truck—along with the red-handled jack.

I felt a wave of heat build in my feet and climb up to my forehead. Felt the swell and contraction of my heart in my chest. In that garage the future unspooled before me. Teddy would climb out from under his truck more determined than ever.

In just a day and a half he’d be sitting at the bar stool in the garage while Juanita trimmed his hair. He’d breathe in her smell as she pressed close to him and he’d look at her as if she were some heavenly vision he couldn’t imagine had materialized in front of him, Our Lady Overwhelming Beauty or some such shit.

Then he’d make her laugh, so much her side would hurt, and then he would change it up, tell her how pretty she was again, then tease her. She would feel ebullient, prized, but more than anything, seen. That’s what Teddy did, that’s what Teddy could do. And once he filled her up with those emotions, he’d work on her logical side; make the case that Henley was just a boy, didn’t deserve a smart, ambitious, beautiful woman like her. Henley had chosen the Marines instead of her, that was how much he really cared about her, how selfish he was.

And that while she was waiting for him here, faithfully, Henley would be sticking it in all kinds of whores all over the world, coming back with who knows what diseases, probably even give her something himself. Something dirty and unspeakable, uncurable, even. No, she needed the kind of man that appreciated her now, a man of some means and respect. A man filled with desire for her, that thought about her all the time and would take care of her needs first, not his own, how she deserved.

But then she’d ask about Loretta, how it could work the way things were. And he’d tell her that had been over for a time now. Working the prison all those years had made Loretta hard and distant. She didn’t even like sex no more cause of the ugly things she seen. They even sleept on opposite sides of the bed. They were just sticking it out until the boys were both out of the house. It wouldn’t be long now, but he didn’t want to wait to be together. He didn’t think he could wait anymore, the way he burned for her each day.

I know now I heard every word he would say to her before it actually happened and also exactly how she would buy into it. Teddy was that convincing, had done this his whole life, after all. But even so, it wouldn’t happen all at once. He was still peeling the label. She’d be ready in a few weeks or maybe months after Henley left. Regardless of what he’d said to her, he could be patient. Patient until her 18th birthday at least, that was for damn sure. He wan’t about to go down on any statutory rape bid.

And finally, when Henley came back on leave after boot camp, all muscled up, hair high and tight, Teddy would tell him what he'd done. And there would be no run long-enough to dispel his fury. All his pent-up anger and rage from the years of alternating neglect and abuse would come spilling out of him in a geyser of  uncontainable violence.

Something Teddy would not only welcome but had sought in the first place—the end to his own miserable existence at the hands of his son. But as badly as Teddy sought his own ruin, of one thing I was absolutely certain, he was too much of a coward to go it alone. He needed to take Henley with him.

When the vision ended I stepped on the back of my sneakers, barefoot I opened the trailer door just wide enough for me to slip through and moved heel to toe across the stretch from the trailer to the open garage. Standing there I realized I had already resolved to accommodate Teddy’s plan, just not the way he intended. Slowly, silently, I reached down and twisted the jack handle counterclockwise, as I’d seen him do so many times before.

One turn was all it took before the gravity of the Ram took over.  The shaft spun  in my hand  like a drill bit, and I dropped it to the floor. Immediately the truck’s undercarriage bore down on the poured concrete floor with all the substantial gravity of its 3.6-liter V6 engine.

I watched Teddy’s legs scrabbled on the slab trying to find purchase, heard a cracking sound underneath, similar to popping bubbles from sheets of plastic package insulation, finally a long, flat ‘ploooooof,’ like the remaining volume squeezed from a blow-up camping mattress.

Only I knew it wasn’t air, but a life’s worth of meanness, beatings, cheatings and fear. All the blackness squeezed out of Teddy in less time than it would take to say Dóó ni'áásh. Navajo for ‘until we meet again.’ (Figured Teddy would like that one even though a tribal elder spirit would need to translate it for him after his crossing.)

Once the sound stopped, I watched as blood seeped from under the truck and pooled around the jack. A red moat around a red castle. It was hypnotic.  But then a disturbance in the light made me look up. Henley’s silhouette in the garage opening.

The three of us were questioned later that afternoon by Grants PD who, for due diligence, also called in the Ciopla County Sheriff’s detectives. But the story told itself. The pile of empty beer bottles on the garage floor and later, the tox reports, indicated a very drunken Teddy probably forgot to set the jack’s safety before he crawled under the truck.  

Wasn’t a surprise to any of the local law enforcement with all the drunk and disorderly charges Teddy had racked up over the years. And they quickly agreed with Loretta, who they had long respected and admired as a fellow officer, but sympathized for being married to Teddy, that this was all but inevitable.

At the end of the interview, she got up from the couch, where we were sitting but turned ever so slightly toward me before seeing the cops out. In that gesture I knew that we would weather this little storm and all would be good again. Because as she clearly demonstrated years earlier, she didn’t raise no rats and in this family loyalty was everything.

But secrets are no longer necessary when those they indict or protect stop sharing your air. Henley in Fallujah five years later and Loretta of breast cancer, two after that.

Now I’m free to do whatever I please with my knowledge -- or nothing at all.

But call me sentimental, after chronicling all of this in my journal, I realize I still can’t fully let go of that memory that bound us all together so tightly for so long – nor the 25-year-old pickup I still own.

Now sun faded and inoperable, it’s covered by decades of New Mexican dust and parked in the backyard of my modest little home outside Santa Fe, a small dreamcatcher dangling from the rearview mirror.

Just in case Teddy decides he doesn’t like the way I rewrote the ending.

-END-

If you liked what you just read and want more, order Kevin Sites’s award-winning, debut novel The Ocean Above Me, available at the link below.
https://www.amazon.com/Ocean-Above-Me-Novel/dp/0063278286