“I didn’t come here to kill you. I came here to have cake and sing, ‘Happy Birthday,’ ..."
Excerpt
July 9, 2004, midafternoon. “Go! Dumbass Broad!” yelled Jess, as he honked his horn. The light turned green five seconds ago. A flesh and blood Barbie finished touching up her lipstick in the rearview mirror of her Hummer and then flipped him off. It was July in Las Vegas on a Friday afternoon. Traffic was as thick as mastic. It was one-hundred-sixteen degrees in the sun, and one-hundred-five in the shade. The handsome, young ironworker, drenched and filthy, drove his old red Ford down Warm Springs Road. As he shifted into fourth gear, the hot air rushed through his open windows, blowing the sweat off his brow into his sky-blue eyes. He grabbed his do-rag and wiped the salt away.
Jess turned left into a business park and cruised past rows of available spaces, all the way to the back wall, where he parked under the shelter and in the shade of an enormous pine tree. His ass and the inside of his thighs were raw and blistered from the iron he had been tied off to all day. Come July in the desert, I-beams are like waffle irons on high. Jess wanted to drag up and sit in the air-conditioned union hall, collect unemployment, and wait for the next big casino to break ground in September. In other words, he had been fighting off a case of the red-ass all week. Now, he had a literal case of it.
He opened the door to the Blue Suede Booties Daycare and walked in. The young woman behind the desk asked him if he came for the wet tee-shirt contest. He smiled and winked at her, while he wrote his name, Jess Willis, signing his daughter out for the day. He walked down the cool, dim hallway to her classroom. Jess’s daughter was four-years old now, with his blue eyes and nearly black hair, except her hair grew into natural, soft ringlets that bounced past her bum.
Lillie was ready and waiting for Jess, wearing her Snow-White backpack that she had stuffed with papers and projects from her cubby. As the door swung open, she galloped into his arms, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
“Well, hello there. All ready to go?”
“Yes, and I missed you.” Lillie said, giving him a big kiss on his cheek.
“Careful, Dad’s dirty.” Jess said, setting her down.
Lillie stuck her tongue out at him. “I don’t care. You tasted like lemony salt, Daddy.”
“How would you like to go swimming today? Elena invited you over and, if you behave, you can have your first sleep-over.”
Lillie squealed, “Hooray! Goodie! Goodie!”
Jess held her hand, as they walked down the hall and out into the furnace he spent the day in. “Daddy, give me a ride, okay? Give me a horsey ride.”
“Okie-dokie, but you’re going to get dirty,” Jess warned. He lifted her up on his shoulders, and she giddy-up’d him all the way to the red Ford. He buckled her into her car seat, wishing like hell he had an air-conditioned vehicle, and then drove to Target in search of a new bathing suit for his little girl. Afterwards, he could head home, all the way up Blue Diamond Road, almost to Red Rock, down the unnamed dirt road that snaked its way to the empty little cul-de-sac where he built his house.
His best friend, Rob Fisher, aka, Bones, as he was known in the trade, built his own home three empty blocks away, just lizards and horny toads, sagebrush and tumbleweeds between them. The Willis and Fisher families had lived on their properties in trailers for three years, while they paid their properties off. Jess and Bones would work all day in town, come home for dinner, and then would toil every night and weekend on their homes.
When they needed help, they had enlisted friends from work or the bar, paying them with beer, barbecue, and lots of “I owe ya’s.” They carried home all the plywood, plumbing, marble, any material they could scavenge off the job sites they worked on. When they were finished, Jess and Bones had beautiful ranch style homes built for pennies on the dollar. Jess’s home had no landscaping. Not yet. Bones had a slab patio and a swimming pool. He claimed it was the only way his kids were going to get bathed in the summertime. With no neighbors for miles, except the coyotes, burros, and an occasional family of wild mustangs, neither wanted to put up a fence, because the view from every direction was spectacular.
The Fishers, Bones and Elena, had two sons, Gunnar and Blue, and a daughter, Nadezhda, whom they called, Daisy. They were Irish triplets – not to infer that either parent was Irish. Bones was Norwegian; Elena, Bulgarian – Irish triplets meaning the kids were all barely a year apart, and there was one more on the way, they prayed their last. Bones’s oldest boy was five when Jess’s second child, a son, was born. Jess decided to name his boy Gunner, too, but with an e-r at the end. Bones didn’t care. Ironworkers don’t care about crap like that. Jess’s wife Jadzia (pronounced, Ya-Zha) had wanted to name the baby Willam, for her favorite brother. When Jess heard it, he laughed out loud, “Kiss my ass, sweetheart, Willy Willis, Will Willis? They’ll think he stutters every time he says his name.”
Jess hated going anywhere after work, especially in the heat, but he wanted to take Lillie out and buy her a new swimsuit, some floaties, maybe new pj’s for her first sleep-over with Daisy, because it was the ninth of July, which meant it was his son’s first birthday. But there wasn’t going to be a birthday party, because the baby was dead. One year after the happiest day of Jess’s life, his son was dead; his daughter was in daycare; and his wife was in a nuthouse.
*
Gunner Willis lived four months, and then fell from his changing table up to heaven, like something from a Maurice Sendak book. In her ninth month, Jadzia had repainted Lilly’s old changing table to resemble a high-rise under construction, topped off with little clothespin ironworkers eating lunch along the top beam. After Gunner’s funeral, Jadzia had begged Jess to bring the baby’s body home, to let her keep him one more night. After that it went south.
A week or so after their baby’s funeral, Jess realized that Jadzia was not just grieving and took her in to see her OB-GYN, who shot her full of Valium and transferred her from his examining room to a private psychiatric hospital, Sierra Vista, in an ambulance. She was committed out of concern for her own safety and the safety of others. In the hospital, sobbing uncontrollably, Jadzia recounted to everyone, even the janitor, “I only turned away for a second, just one second. I tried to catch him, and I couldn’t. I picked him up and I yelled at him. I shook him. I begged him to open his pretty blue eyes and he wouldn’t.”