“Tough guys don’t draw attention to their wounds,” said my father. “They go on like the injuries aren’t even there. Tough guys just walk it off.” In the seventies, he had walked off a deadly snakebite. The story changed frequently. One time it was a blood viper in the Redwood Forest, and another time it was a dagger boa near Tijuana. Neither of those are actual snakes, but that didn’t matter. He was trying to toughen me up from too much time spent with my mother, who’d already sissified me almost beyond his help.

The German allowed him to use the port-o-johns and to siphon electric and water from the overseer’s hut into his container, but the place still needed what my father called “bach-pad essentials,” so we had work to do. One Friday evening the Diplomat pulled up in the alley behind the house, its engine roaring like a jumbo jet. As I swung around to the trunk I said, “Can’t wait to hit the cages!” loud enough so he’d think Mom might hear.

“Just get in the car already.” He was wearing his favorite hat, a white foam-bill cap with the Jiffy Lube logo on the front scratched out with black marker. He craned his head, trying to find her face in the windows, and popped the trunk so I could ditch my backpack. I found what looked like a pipe bomb lying inside. It was a large metal thing, bulbous in the middle, with cut lengths of steel tubing coming out its top and bottom. Black fluid leaked into the wool trunk liner in a skullshaped puddle.

My father drove with an ear turned upward, listening to the howl of the motor, and whenever we hit potholes he scanned the rearview as though he feared parts might be falling off. In the console between us there was a syrupy amber liquid in a glass juice bottle. On the bottle’s label, someonehad written “JUST IN CASE.”

I asked if there was something wrong with the car, but he acted as though he hadn’t heard me. After I’d given up waiting for him to respond, and joined him at watching his hands on the wheel, he cleared his throat and said, casually, “Diplomat’s running a tad loud today.”

The velvet portrait of Jim Morrison, which he’d had cleaned and put into a new frame, rode upright in the backseat, buckled in. They’d been together—my father and the velvet Jim—since the great high school days in California, and because I was the newer addition to Dad’s life, I sometimes thought the velvet Jim was jealous of me.

“What does your mother say about me coming back?” Dad asked as we thundered through a stale yellow light. “I’m interested in how this intermodal experiment goes, but everyone knows I really belong at home.”

“What’s an intermodal?”

“The big storage thingy,” he said. “It’s called an intermodal.”

“Oh, cool. What does Lu Kang mean?”

“Jesus, I don’t know.” He slapped the sun visor up against the ceiling. “Forget that. Has she said when?”

“Not really.”

“What has she said about me?”

“She hasn’t said anything.”

He gave me his famous sideways glance, as though I were guilty of buying into some grand scheme of hers. “She’s sending me messages, Son, and you’re the messenger. So pay attention, or this little game she and I are playing is gonna get all confused.”

I screwed the top off the juice bottle and, for no good reason, took awhiff of the amber liquid. The vapors sizzled the insides of my nostrils.

“Jesus Christ, that’s motor oil.” He waited until I’d recapped it and put it back into the cup holder before smacking my hand away.

Part of me wondered if he was planning on drinking the stuff. I knew that you could drink rubbing alcohol, and I knew that meth was basically just Drano and cold medicine, so I figured you could probably get high off anything powerful. And if the stories his friends told were true, my father was the kind of man who would drink almost anything on a dare. Sometimes my mother asked whether he drank much while we hung out on Fridays, and I’d remind her that they didn’t serve booze at SlugFest. “Oh right, of course,” she’d say, already dropping the subject. “I forgot. The batting cages.”