The visit

The visit

I had seen it in movies. God bless it wasn’t raining. The window was open, it was always open because it had no handle. My pants were half way on my calves as I was in the middle of taking a crap, a large one because for breakfast I had a large burrito portion at Pedro’s, just around the corner. I heard the knocking on the front door despite the bathroom was locked and the aircon was pumping like a whore. The son of a bitch was banging so hard that the whole house was shacking. They don’t say your name, those pests. They just bang hard until you go and open the fucking door. They had come already for other reasons in the past but I knew this time they were not going to stop so I’d better prepare. I was even considering moving home but I had not yet talked to Mrs Ramirez. This was no Katy. This was east downtown, the bad part of it and before lesbians started populating it. If a landlord wanted you out, it took you five minutes to see your things thrown on the driveway but, if it was you who wanted to go, they came up with all sort of reasons to take your money. That morning I ended up going to the garage in my undershirt and that was fun for the boys who could admire my hairy armpits. They made a joke or two but I sent them straight to hell with their mothers before going back to the engine of the old Corvette I was working on in those days. It was a C4 from 1985. Under my hands that bird was going to sing again like a little robin but I needed no shitbag walking around and telling things about my underwear to do my magic. When I went back home that evening I made sure there was nobody around before I went to collect the notice that the banger had left in the porch. Without opening it, I ripped it off in four pieces and threw it straight into the black bin. As I had no keys with me I had to go back to the bathroom window to get inside. I walked around my own house feeling like a thief. Madison’s son watched in his own way, with the eyes pointing in another direction. As it goes in one’s life it was more difficult to get in than it was to get out of that bloody window. With my hands covered in grease and oil, I ended up making a mess everywhere. I went in with my head and banged on the toilet with the rest of my body.

I knew a lawyer from the time when I had crashed my truck on the highway. I used to work as a driver in those days, always on the interstate, sleeping on the road or in some damp motel. Those were good days. You could always find a decent girl that wanted to make a few extra bucks in those motels or in the Hooter next door. I was young and with a few stones less, sort of attractive, I think, and those girls preferred hooking up with me instead of ending with some fat ass who had been on the road for thirty years and needed one blue pill or two to make them happy. I had been on the wheels for some fifteen hours in a row that day, coming down all the way from Denver Colorado. In the trailer I had more than a thousand chickens that did nothing but shitting on their legs during the entire trip. I was told that only a dozen survived the crash. I was less than an hour away from the 610, just before Conroe. The last thing I remember was that Robert Keen was singing I was wishing that the world would stop on the radio. His voice could not keep me awake, the son of a bitch, and I slammed against the guardrail with the whole damn’ trailer that ended on its side, pouring chicken shit everywhere. After that I remember lying on the ambulance stretcher, the large knockers of the nurse on my left arm. Because I am a good Christian nobody died other than the bloody chickens. I ended up in the hospital with a couple of ribs looking like boomerangs and my left foot pointing west. I lost my license and I had to say bye to the road-life but I found a good lawyer, one of those with their name on the big billboards that you see on the highway. He came to see me in the hospital when I was still in bed. A red tie hanging from his neck and the thick hair of a black rat, he pulled his business card out before even saying his name. I thought he was a pastor or a preacher of some sort and I told him to go save his sister’s soul but he said I had a problem or two. To me, that sounded pretty optimistic. He had been assigned by the judge and I could refuse. He said he could help. He knew I had been on the road for more than fifteen hours. He had seen all the papers and shit. In his mind, it was my boss who was really screwed. I listened to his big words and all and when he said that he was going to cost me only a few hundred bucks and I could put that on my credit card I gave him the job. He saved my ass. I came out pretty clean apart from the license and shit. I got charged nothing for the truck and for the dead chickens and I kept his card.

He was a truck lawyer for God’s sake but after I entered my own home through the bathroom window that evening I thought I did not know any better. I cracked four eggs in the pan when the butter was all melted and fried them on both sides. I toasted two slices of bread until they got brown and hard, I covered them in more butter and salt and I sat at the table, Tayler’s telephone number and office address in front of my unshaven face, still in my filthy undershirt. It wasn’t that I did not want to take care of my daughter but I knew that the bitch was going to try to suck the life out of my bones if she could. And she had been clear. If I did not give her money for little Sarah, I was not going to see her anymore. She would put a restraining order on me. It’s not that she lacked excuses for that. I was 420 friendly, I drunk, I had passing jobs and I hardly paid any taxes, but the money thing was a matter of principle she would say. I could keep on being the dirty asshole I had always been but Sarah was our daughter, my daughter too and, if I wanted to see her growing, I had to put my share down. She had a point and I loved little Sarah, as much as I love her now that she is a young woman with a boyfriend with a dirty mind and all that, but I did not want to give my money to the bitch. The truth is I was scared. I knew too many stories about men losing their house and their car and ending up under a bridge after a divorce, or even just a separation like mine. They were stories I would hear at the barbershop or at the bakery or at Pedro’s Mexican restaurant and then they would haunt me in the sleep-like disgusting nightcrawlers. Also, Madison, my neighbour, had sent her ex-husband to live in one of those old mobile home camps on the road to the Hill Country, not the fancy ones you see today. So I called because I needed advice and I knew nobody who could make sense of those things. I took the phone, pressed the sticky numbers with my thick finger and I called, even if it was past eight.

As soon as he answered I remembered how his whiny voice, like the one of a fat boy, used to make me crack, especially when he turned all serious in front of the judge. He wasn’t a big man but somehow that voice was too faint and too thin even for one like him. I told him who I was and he had everything on his mind, like a computer. He spat out all the story of the truck and how we made it all straight. He said we even if it was him who did everything. When he was done, he asked how he could help and I blabbed the whole thing out, just like that. Before I finished I was sobbing. I was fucking sobbing like a virgin pussy. He was nice. I mean, he said he understood I was in a difficult situation and that I could not keep running away if I wanted to see my daughter growing. You do not find many understanding people out there. He said that I was right in being scared. He also had a friend who ended up sleeping in his car for a while. I asked him if he was married and he said that thanks God he was and his wife wasn’t so bad after all. He also had a daughter. I did not know this at the time of the truck accident. She was a few years older than little Sarah. We talked for thirty minutes, I reckon, and then he called me by name, my full name, not Bob or Bobby, as the boys at the garage do all the time, and he said that he was just a truck lawyer. I told him that I was not even that and I knew no other lawyer and he had been so good with all those dead chickens. Now I was really crying out. I said that I needed help. Finally, he pulled out a voice I had never heard from him, as if in the end his throat had found its right place. He repeated my real name and then he promised that he was going to come up with an idea. A cheap idea I said and he replied that friends do not talk about money, which is not true but at that moment calmed me down a big lot.

There were no nightcrawlers when I went to bed after the call. That had not happened for weeks. It is not that all my problems had gone away but I knew Tayler was going to find a solution, so I slept like a baby. The following morning, when the front door rattled under the heavy fist, I hesitated. The man came a couple of hours earlier than he had done the day before but again, as if he could smell it, I was taking a crap. I took my time, knowing that he wouldn’t be leaving so easily and, when I was done, I flushed looking down. The water struggled to make the load go away and only when the toilet was clean I crossed the house and went to open the door. The messenger of the Harris County Tribunal was plump and had a face like a television. He was Asian but I couldn’t tell from where. He asked me if I was Robert Callum and when I said yes he replied that I was being served. I said that I knew that already but he made no sound. He simply handed me the envelope and gave me his dropping shoulders. I watched him walking down the driveway thinking about what a shitty job he had. I opened the letter standing on the door. Madison’s son was riding on his bike on the sidewalk. The letter said that I had to appear in front of the court in three week time. I was being accused of neglecting my parental duties. It said exactly that and I thought of little Sarah and how much I loved her and I felt scared again.