Don Winslow: While Drowning in the Desert

Heinz-57 wasn’t all that thrilled either. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that he had this bewildered, confused look on his puss. You know, that sort of dazed expression that Type Triple-A anal retentives get when things aren’t going exactly the way they planned.

I made Heinz-57 out to be one of those kind of cooks who absolutely, positively cannot substitute an ingredient in a recipe. There are some people like that, you know. They have everything together and are just paragons of control until they find out they have to use Monterey Jack instead of cheddar and then they just go to pieces.

I filed this piece of psychological insight away, figuring it might be useful at some point, because it was clear just then that Heinz-57 had just had to swallow his first slice of cheddar. (I guess Neal would call that a “tortured metaphor” but screw him.) Whoever it was that old Heinzy was calling, he damn well expected him to be there. And the fact that it was a mobile phone led me to believe that Heinzy was not precisely sure where he was going.

This would, of course, drive a Type Triple-A anal retentive German (Neal would call this a “double redundancy” but screw him again) just nuts.

“Not home, huh?” I said.

See, I’m one of those kind of cooks who just can’t resist squirting lighter fluid on the charcoal briquettes.

“I told you not to listen!”

“What’s that?”

“I told you not to listen!”

“Sorry?”

“He told you not to listen, sweetie.”

“I told you not to listen!!”

“Yeah? And what are you going to do about it?” I asked. You know, lighter fluid, briquettes. Hormones, whatever.

He sat back and sulked for a minute. Then he said, “When we get to the desert you will see what happens.”

“We’re in the desert, dickhead.”

“Language, sweetie.”

“Sorry.”

“Into the Mojave,” Heinz specified. “Where your bodies will never be found.”

“Sorry?” I said. “What did you say? I wasn’t listening.”

But I sure as hell was. Old Heinz-57 was taking us up to the Mojave, where the sun could kill you in about forty-five minutes. That is, if Heinz-57 didn’t want the giggles of shooting us. And he was right-either way, nobody would ever find our bodies. Not mine, not Hope’s, not Nathan’s, not Neal’s.

Neal-the reluctant father of our unconceived child.

Then a really awful thought occurred to me. If Heinz-57 was planning to dump our bodies, had he already dumped Nathan’s?

And Neal’s?

I was trying to stay awake.

You’d have thought it would be easy, right? What with the fear, anxiety, hunger and thirst and all. But there’s something in the human system that just wants to shut down when things get too hideous, and I was struggling to stay conscious and keep that gun pointed right between the beady eyes of our new friend Sami.

So I tried to think about things.

First I tried to focus on the dynamics of our situation. Heinz was on his way and had a gun. Heinz would be thinking that we were already dead and all he had to do is pick up Sami and drive back. So the thing to do was to hide, throw Sami out as bait, and get the drop-oh God, did I say “get the drop”?-on Heinz before he figured out that we weren’t dead.

Simple, right? What could go wrong?

Another possibility was that Graham would track us down before Heinz could. It wasn’t out of the question. Graham wouldn’t fly out-that would waste time-but he’d direct efforts over the phone. He would have already used my credit-card number to get the car-rental agency and the license plate of the car. A little grease would have the state police locate the car at the rest stop. That’s where it would get tricky. Would they just assume we kept going west on Route 15, or would they think of taking the back road south through the Mojave? If they looked down the back road, they’d see the wreck of the car and figure it out from there. If not… hello, Heinz.

So what would Graham do? Send his troops on the highway or the back road?

Easy. Graham would do both.

Graham would have a map spread out in front of him and would consider each and every possible route from where they found the rental car. Then he’d send his troops out on a coordinated, organized search with designated check-in times and places.

You’d have to know Graham to know how sure I was of this. For example, this is a man who does his weekly grocery shopping as follows: He decides what he’s going to cook, then writes down all the ingredients he needs. Then he redoes that list, rewriting the items in the order they appear in the grocery store as you work from the left aisle to the right. That way he can go through the store once, in one smooth progression from left to right.

If any man could sit behind a telephone in New York City and find the splotch of a burned-out car in the middle of the Mojave Desert, that man was Joe Graham.

Since I figured it was a push between Heinz and Graham getting there first and there was nothing I could do to affect the results of that race, I moved on to another topic.

Babies.

Specifically, a baby. Karen’s and mine. Not a real baby, not yet, but a putative baby. A possible baby.

Baby, baby, baby, baby. Just the word was intimidating, and yet…

Maybe it was the very real prospect of imminent death that made me reconsider my timetable on the b-word thing. Two years was a long time and a lot of things could happen. And it would seem like a waste if Karen and I didn’t have a… a kid. Karen would be a terrific mother and I would be a-well, I could be an acceptable father.

There probably was something to all Karen’s psychobabble about unresolved rage at my absent father and inadequate mother. That didn’t necessarily mean that I couldn’t rise above it, though. A man plays the cards he’s dealt, right?

A man. Sigh. A father.

Now if there’s a scarier word than “baby”, it’s “father”.

I know it seems obvious to you, but I just then figured out that it wasn’t the kid I was so afraid of, it was being the kid’s father. I mean, what does a father actually do? I knew from watching old television shows that a father takes the kid into the study and says wise things to it, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. And I believe we’ve already pretty much established that I don’t exactly overflow with wisdom. What was I supposed to do, take the kid into the study and say petulant things to it?

Oh, man. A father. Sigh.

Okay, so I never knew my father. I never even knew who he was. For the longest time as a kid I thought he was Chinese or something, because when I asked my mother who my father was she answered “some John”.

In my childhood years, such as they were, Some John had loomed large in my imagination. He was variously a football player, a baseball player, an astronaut, a war hero-you get the pathetic idea-and in my imagination he was always coming back for me. Somehow he’d get the idea that he had a kid and would move heaven and earth to track me down, and one day I’d be sitting on the fire escape and see him coming down the alley and he’d look up and see me and just know, and in that deep, manly television voice he’d say, “Son, thank God I found you.”

Pathetic, huh?

When I got a little older, say ten, I gave that one up. By that time I figured out that my father was just another pathetic loser who had to pay a woman to be with him. The kind of guy that, even if he knew he had a kid out there somewhere, wouldn’t give a good goddamn.

So what does a father actually do? See, I can’t tell you. I can only tell you what my father actually did.

Nothing, that’s what.

So what chilled me right then, more than even the freezing desert air, was the unavoidable fact that at least half of me was that guy, that bum. And I didn’t want to do to any kid what…