Saving Jason (20 page)

T
ravel out west is not so different from what it was two hundred years ago. You steer toward the horizon and stop when you need to sleep. The choices for a map-obsessed Easterner were remarkably few and dictated by geographic obstacles—mountain ranges, bottomless gorges, or rivers that were either flooded or dry, never in-between—or the sheer vastness of empty space. Drive three hours from New York City and you can see ocean beaches, mountains, rivers, forests, and deepwater lakes. Three hours from Tucson we had yet to see anything but cacti. A car passing in the other direction was an event.

“Did you notice anything about that little escape hatch in the closet?” Willie asked. He was driving. Hal was playing with his phone.

“Like what?” There was a shimmer like sunlight on water on the road up ahead. It had been there, at about the same distance from us, for a half hour. At what point does a mirage cross over into hallucination?

“He took that section of the wall apart. It would have taken him quite a while to cut through that old drywall and clean up the mess so we wouldn’t find it. He didn’t do all that in the few minutes he was in his room after breakfast.”

The Kid was so frightened—of something, of someone, or of everything—that he had felt it necessary to create that back door. And, to keep it a secret, even from me. That thought gave me a shock of conflicting emotions—none of them happy ones. On the other hand, he had carried it off successfully, created it, used it, and evaded five grown men until he had been distracted by a vintage Barracuda.

“How long do you think it took him?”

“I wouldn’t guess.”

“We’re coming up to Deming. We should stop and eat,” Hal said.

I pulled my eyes away from the contemplation of a mesa—or butte, I did not know how to tell one from the other—that vaguely resembled the front of a locomotive, if you squinted enough. Getting out of the Tucson area had been the priority. Lunch had been forgotten. The Kid would be hungry. “I’ll call them,” I offered.

Cell phone service had been spotty out where the nearest tower was well over the horizon, but the signal was strong as we approached the town.

“Your son’s been asleep for the past two hours,” Deputy Marshal Geary said. “Are you sure you want to wake him?”

“He does that after a panic attack. He’ll wake up as soon as you start to slow down—and he’ll need to eat.” He would be ravenous. The attacks, whether seizures or bursts of running or other activity, left him exhausted and calorie depleted. He might even eat a green vegetable.

“Does he have any food preferences? Special diets?”

“Any place that’ll make him a grilled cheese and French fries will be just fine,” I said.

Hal looked up from his smartphone. “There’s a Denny’s.”

I spoke into the phone. “Hal found a Denny’s.”

“He’s joking, right?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’ll find something better. Just stay right behind us.”

I relayed the order to Willie, who nodded and kept driving.

“Denny’s not high-class enough for you?” Hal said with just enough of an edge to his voice that I couldn’t tell whether he was truly offended or attempting a joke.

“Do they make a good green sauce at Denny’s?” I responded.

“Denny’s feeds America,” he said.

“I think we can all agree on that.”

—

Willie followed the Cuda off the highway and we began threading our way through the main street of Deming, New Mexico.

“So who was this Castillo that got axed? How do you know him?” Hal asked.

Willie looked at him in surprise. I was surprised, too. Hal was the first bodyguard to ask any question that might pertain to my past. And this was the first time he had done it. As far as they were concerned, I was John Slater—now Sauerman—who had sprung into existence in May of that year and I needed constant protection. End of story.

I tried answering with the bare minimum. “He was a banker who got involved with the wrong people. A drug cartel from Honduras. He chose to testify rather than go to prison.” I elected not to go into the details of how I had helped put Castillo in the position where he was forced to make that choice.

“Sinaloas? Don’t they run everything down there?” Willie asked. The taboo had been broken. My past was now fair game.

“From what I understand, it’s more like a free-for-all these days. Maras versus Zetas versus Zacapas versus Sinaloas. The DEA took out some major players, thanks to Castillo, but it seems that just makes room for some other bunch of crazies to take their place.”

“So which group would have come after the banker, do you think?” Hal said, his eyes concentrating on his phone.

Every bit of information that I knew about the heroin smugglers came from Special Agent Marcus Brady. It had been shared with me on a confidential basis, and I did not want to give it away in casual conversation. “Why the interest?”

“I’d like to know who I’m protecting you from.”

“Or what we might be in for,” Willie added.

That made sense and helped to alleviate my quandary. “Fair enough. The people he helped put away were from different groups all over Central America. But the main group called themselves Mijos. They’re
an offshoot from the Honduran MS-13 branch. With Castillo’s information the United States and Honduras were able to crack down on them. Hard. If there are any of them left, they’ve been reabsorbed back into the Mara.”

“That’s a nasty crowd,” Willie said. “They get kids—young kids, preteen—and train them to be
sicarios
. They feed them on cocaine and hate. By the time they get turned out, they’d kill their own mothers on orders.”

I did not want to think about teenage hit men on my trail. Luckily, just then the Cuda pulled to the curb in front of a washed-out-looking café that advertised both
SOUTHWESTERN AND A
MERICAN CUISINE
and Hal said, “Lunch.” We pulled in next to the marshals and I saw the Kid peeking over the edge of the rear passenger window, looking for me. I gave him a wave. He looked worried and still half asleep.

Willie got out and went over to talk to the marshals. He and Reyes went inside the café to see that it was safe—and, I hoped, to check that the chef could put together a good grilled cheese. The rest of us waited in the cars.

“That was a bit of a surprise,” I said.

“What’s that?” Hal asked.

“You’ve been here more than a month and never asked any of those kinds of questions.”

He stared straight ahead. “I’m just being cautious.”

“And your partner?”

“It’s the first time we worked together. I think he enjoys fraternizing more than necessary, but that’s not a bad thing in our business.”

I regretted saying anything. I’d been looking for words to calm my uneasiness and I’d gotten them. Only to discover that I needed more.

“I’m going to check on my son,” I said, reaching for the door handle.

Hal held up a hand. “Don’t exit the vehicle until Willie gives the all clear. Please,” he added a beat later. That barely qualified as a request.

There’s not much point to having bodyguards if you don’t pay any attention to their advice. I didn’t like taking orders—just on general
principles—but I stayed in the car. I watched the Kid. He wasn’t in distress; his worry was his natural “at rest” state. He sometimes lost the look when he felt safe in his own space, but I hadn’t seen him without it since we came west.

Willie stuck his head out the door and, with a big grin, waved us in.

T
he house in New Mexico was not in Las Vegas proper, it was a few miles out of town, up a long serpentine valley that cut through the foothills, and just north of a place called Devil’s Gulch. As the marshal had said, it was distinctly more rural than Tucson. And a long way from Seventy-third Street.

It was a bigger house, with four bedrooms and three baths on two floors, and a professional kitchen—which made Willie happy, and by extension, Hal and me, too. The Kid and I shared the upper floor and a balcony that ran the full length of the front of the building. My room had a sliding glass door that opened onto the balcony overlooking a barn and corral. I showed the Kid that if he was ever so afraid that he needed to find me, he could come down the hall, or go out the window onto the porch and come into my room by our “secret passage.” We tried it out together a couple of times so he’d know how to do it. I made it a game, but he wasn’t fooled. It was serious preparation.

The balcony was the only spot in the house that had any kind of a view. My room faced west, but the hill behind the house blocked everything but the tops of the Bear and Barillas Mountains. The front of the house looked out onto a rust-brown valley that felt more like a border than a vista. If the house had been higher on the ridge, we might have been able to see the town down below and the beginning of the Great Plains, which seemed to begin just the other side of Route 25. If you dropped a tennis ball down our driveway, it might have rolled east all the way to the Mississippi, ending up somewhere near Memphis. In back of the house stood the small corral and a lean-to, where the property owner had warehoused his small herd of cattle.
The long drought had done in his entrepreneurial dreams. The house—and the outbuilding—had been empty for over a year.

Willie took charge of making the house livable, overseeing two short Latinas from town who worked harder and faster than any team of eight men, cleaning every surface and disposing of the desiccated dead mice we found in the traps that had been left behind. Willie said the presence of the mice was a good sign. It meant that no snakes had taken up residence.

Hal, the Kid, and I took a drive farther up into the foothills. To an Easterner, the flora and the land looked sparse and sere. Dwarf-sized pinyon trees, too water-starved to grow much over four or five feet tall, shared the landscape with sagebrush and a spiky plant that I didn’t recognize. To a grown-up city kid like me, it looked like an alien planet. The nearest house was down in the hollow on the far side of the next hill. I thought it strange that, rather than build on a site with a view, this homeowner, like the man who owned the house we were renting, had chosen to place his home in the shadow of these bleak mounds. I said so to Hal.

“Water,” he said. “There’s little enough of it up here. You don’t want to have to drill an extra hundred feet or more, just so you can see a whole lot of nothing.”

It was an alien planet.

The road petered out halfway up a canyon. Beyond that point was nothing but wilderness. Well to the west, blue mountains colored the horizon. Santa Fe was over in that direction—beyond one and a half million acres of mountain forest. I was as out of my comfort zone as I was ever likely to be in my lifetime.

“Let’s go back to the house,” I said.

The Kid looked at me. He’d picked up on it, too.

“Tell you what, son. We stay here long enough, we’ll open a New York–style kosher deli. Steam our own corned beef and pastrami. We’ll introduce these folks to latkes and tzimmes. Too much? Maybe you’re
right. Okay, then we’ll open a bakery and get rich selling black-and-white cookies and semolina bread. Just think, these people have been living their whole lives without fresh-baked seeded rye. We’re going to show ’em what they’ve been missing.”

I was losing my mind. I wanted my life back.

P
arenting an autistic child is like hitting a baseball. The best you can hope for is one in three, and that’s if you are truly stellar. One in four keeps you in the game. Sometimes you’re just going to be trying to draw a walk. You will strike out more often than you would like. And every once in a while, you’re going to get beaned.

But you can’t ever take your eye off the ball.

I had begun homeschooling the Kid over the summer. I wasn’t a natural. The Kid did not miss his friends—he had none. The other students had been tolerated, nothing more. But he did miss routine and those who helped him to maintain it. I was a poor substitute for the combined powers of Heather, Ms. Wegant, her assistant, and even Mrs. Alysha Carter, the lady dragon who guarded the gates at the school. For my part, teaching was much more difficult than trading had ever been.

“The . . . house . . . is . . . red.”

“Excellent,” I said.

The Kid had such a strong memory that he could often “fake” reading. I had to create new books for him every day, otherwise he would simply repeat, as though by rote, the information from the previous time we had covered that lesson. Regular reading books were only good once, or twice at most. He could effortlessly do the same trick with any book on cars. Getting him to actually sound out words or to remember their meaning beyond the subject of cars was the challenge. He had come a long way in the past few months, but each new word was a hard-won victory.

I started every reading session with flash cards. Each one had a picture—a prompt—and a word. I made them myself with three-by-five cards and cutouts from magazines. If I thought he had memorized
a picture—and so was able to cheat on the word—I would drop it out and replace the picture later in the day.

Neither of us was a particularly patient human being. I had to bring enough for both of us.

“Next page.”

I also made books with pictures and simple sentences. He memorized the books even faster than the cards. The more complex the context, the easier it came to him. I thought this was a good thing. It meant that he was smart. But was he smart enough to fool me? Easily.

“The . . . cat . . . runs.”

“Try again. What’s that letter?”

“J.”

“Right. What does ‘J’ sound like?”

“Jason.” He put his teeth together and blew out, showing me how to make a ‘J.’

“Excellent. So is there a ‘J’ sound in ‘runs’?”

His eyes drifted away. He did not like to be corrected or to have me demonstrate his mistakes. I didn’t know any better.

“What letter is this?” I pointed.

“T . . .
U
 . . . V.” He emphasized the right answer. He knew the alphabet in three- or four-letter groups. He could only find a letter by finding the group.

“Good. And what’s next?”

He looked away.

“Come on. Stay focused,” I said.

He put the back of his hand to his mouth and began making fart noises.

“Does Heather let you make those noises? Does Ms. Wegant? I don’t think they do.”

The noises stopped. The Kid picked up his pencil and took a bite off the end. He did not just nibble on his pencil. He bit off a chunk of it and crunched it into a million soggy splinters.

“You
may not
do that! Not allowed.”

His mouth opened and a soup of drool and gnashed pencil ran down his chin and onto his shirt.

I grabbed a paper napkin and wiped crud out of his mouth.

“What is your problem?” I was yelling, which meant that I had already lost control of the situation. The frontal lobe was trying to maintain and regain, while the darker, more primitive parts of my brain were recommending more violent courses of action. “Stop this! Pay attention and do your work.”

He flopped facedown on the table, almost, but not quite, banging his forehead into it.

“Read this, damn it! What did the cat do?” I was screeching. It was wrong and I knew it.

The Kid reared up and screeched right back. “The cat jumps,” he blurted out. He picked up the book I had lovingly made and turned the page.

“Awesome. Well done.” I was exhausted.

“Ooooooh. The big dog is fat.” He laughed. It sounded like a cat with a hair ball.

He had made a joke. The caption read
THE BIG DOG IS
FAST.
But the picture I had chosen showed a running Saint Bernard, shot from an angle that made him look like he was sporting a good-sized beer belly. Or brandy belly.

“Very good, son.” He knew the word
fast
. The great thing was that he understood the difference well enough to make a joke out of it—no matter how lame.

The front door opened and Willie came in bearing two bags of groceries. We’d been four days at the house and had already drifted into a regular schedule. Willie made a run into town every morning before the heat became unbearable. The Kid and I worked together. Hal stood watch and played with the apps on his cell phone.

“How’s everybody?” Willie said. “I found a restaurant if you want to venture out some night. The El Fidel. The lady at the gas station
says it’s as good as anything in Santa Fe.” He rattled on as he put away the supplies.

The Kid shut down in Willie’s presence. He put the book down and his eyes went blank. It was as though a switch was thrown and he went into stasis. I wasn’t going to get him to concentrate until Willie put the food away and left us in peace.

“You need a break?”

The Kid didn’t answer, but his eyes flicked in my direction.

“Take five minutes. Yes,” I answered before he even got the question out. “You can watch Goofy. One cartoon. Just one. Then we go back to work.”

He scowled. I knew he was going to try for two and that I was going to let him. He knew it, too. He didn’t see the point in my making an annoying and useless insistence upon only one and it ticked him off. He was right, but I wasn’t going to admit it to him.

I needed a break.

“I’m going to get some air.”

He looked up with a questioning look.

“Some
outside
air,” I said.

He opened the iPad and was gone.

Dust devils were racing down the valley and there was a brown haze over the eastern horizon. It was going to be a scorcher. Mid-nineties. Every day had been a scorcher. It had not rained so much as a drop the whole week we had been there. The waitress at Daylight Donuts, where we’d had breakfast our first day, told us that August was their “rainiest” month.

“It gets downright dry come the fall.”

I saw the flash of reflected sunlight off Hal’s mirrored sunglasses across the yard. He had set up a blind on the hill where he could sit and watch the road below. He could see the whole valley from there. It should have been comforting to have him on watch, but instead it was a reminder of why we were there.

I realized that he was talking on his cell phone. Reception was better up there than around the house.

The two bodyguards had set up motion sensors along the road—there was little enough traffic—but the coyotes and a herd of javelinas kept setting them off. The pigs weren’t going to leave—they saw us as interlopers on their territory—so Hal shut the system down and we relied on more primitive surveillance.

There’s no such thing as quiet in New York City. Even in the Ansonia, with its thick walls and renovated double-paned-glass windows, there was always a background hum, punctuated with occasional sirens, car horns, or the clash of metal upon metal when some fool ran the light at Seventy-second Street. The valley was quiet. Even the wind was quiet.

“That town was once—” a man spoke behind me.

“Whoa!” I yelled. I turned around. It was Willie. “Shit fire, you scared the piss out of me.” My heart was threatening to beat its way out through my eyeballs. “Why the hell are you creeping up on me?”

“
Hmpf
. Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry.” I pulled myself together and tried on a laugh just to see if I could do it. “I must have been miles away. I did not hear you coming.” The laugh hadn’t gone over with the level of cool required, so in desperation I just kept talking. “You were saying something about the town? What about it?”

“Las Vegas—this one, not the other one—was once one of the most lawless, wide-open places in the West. Doc Holliday lived here with his lady. Wyatt Earp, too, for a while. He was the town dentist. Holliday, that is, not Earp.”

“Oh? I knew a man once who had a bit of a fixation on those folks.” Virgil’s father had named all four of his children after the Earp brothers.

“This old guy bagging groceries down at the Lowe’s told me all this. Jesse James. Billy the Kid. Somebody called Dirty Dave.” He laughed. “They were all through here at one time or another.”

“Jesse James?” I was no expert on the Old Wild West, but I thought the James Gang did their business more in the Midwest.

“That’s what he said.”

I looked back to the house. “How’s Jason the Kid?”

“He went up to his room.”

“I better get him back to work.” My heart wasn’t in it.

“He doesn’t like me.” Willie stated it as a fact. There was no emotion in his voice. He might just as well have been going on about Doc Holliday.

“He trusts very few people, which is a very logical reaction to his experience. Most people have no idea what his world is like. They approach him with a set of expectations that only confuses him.” In other words, cut the guy some slack. A lesson that I had to relearn every day. I had just failed another of our lives’ little tests.

“Time to spell Hal,” he said. He sauntered across the road and climbed the hill.

I walked back to the house.