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Matty would have hated Albuquerque.
That’s the first thing Mike thought about when he stepped out of his car and into the New Mexican desert—how much his son would have disliked the glaring sun and barren, weed-strangled ground. Matty was never one for heat. In the southwest, where the air was so thick that even breathing was a struggle, he would have wanted to be somewhere else, would have wished for snow. Picturing a younger, scrawnier version of Matty barrelling down an icy hill on a bright red sled, Mike decided it was fitting that he should end up here. It was the closest he could get to hell.
He had parked his car in the shadow of a neon motel sign. Somewhere, a woman was singing, a wild, off-key scream of a song. He ignored the voice, the smell of stale cigarettes in the air, the sound of gunshots still ringing in his ears, and stepped into the lobby.
“You staying here long?” the manager asked after handing him his keys.
“That’s the plan.”
“Well, you have a good day, sir.”
Mike managed a half-hearted grunt of acknowledgement. He left before the man could say anything else, focusing on what would come next, what would happen now that he was in Albuquerque. He needed to call Stacy. He needed to bring her here, so he could take care of her and her daughter. Matty’s son. His granddaughter. It was the least he could do, after everything he put them through.
Before that, though, he needed to sleep. He hadn’t closed his eyes in days. Every time he tried, he could hear the screams, see blood spreading over pale cement, a blur of red against the dark blue night. But something about the place lulled him into a hollow, quiet sense of acceptance. When he collapsed, fully-clothed, onto the musty bed, he couldn’t help but drift off.
There was no going back now.
***
“You wanna pass me that screwdriver?”
His head shoved underneath the kitchen sink, Mike could just barely see the small hand of his granddaughter reaching down to him.
“When are you coming out?” she called, like they were playing hide and seek. “You said fifteen minutes.”
“I did say that. And it’s been about five.” He fiddled with the pipe, tightening it over and over again to make sure it didn’t leak. He must have fixed this pipe at least five times before, but somehow, it always ended up broken.
Last night, Stacey called him, panicking because the dripping wouldn’t stop.
“Calm down,” he had said. “It’s fine. I’ll come by first thing in the morning.” This wasn’t the first time she called in the middle of the night, worried about a maintenance issue. It had only been a few weeks since she moved in, but she already hated living there, hated the furniture, the heating system, the floor, the neighborhood. Mike didn’t blame her. He hated her house too, hated the fact that Matty didn’t live in it.
“I can’t sleep,” she whispered, as if Mike would be able to help her with something like that.
“Did you try counting sheep?”
She laughed weakly, her voice cracking, but didn’t respond.
“Listen,” Mike said, rubbing his eyes. He had struggled with sleeping too, at first. But now he slept just fine. “You’ve got a kid. Think about her.”
On the other end of the phone, Stacey was crying, trying and failing to disguise her quiet sobs. There was only one thing, Mike knew, that kept you waking up every day, the same thing that kept him from turning the gun he had used on Matty’s killers towards himself.
“If you can’t keep it together,” he continued, careful to keep his voice matter-of-fact. “She’ll have no one.” Stacey fell silent
“C’mon!” Kayleigh now whined. He dropped the screwdriver and slid out from under the sink. She beamed.
“What do you say I teach you how to build a birdhouse?”
***
After Werner’s death Mike made Gus Fring promise that he would never ask him to kill a child.
“I would not order the murder of an innocent person,” Gus responded coldly. Mike couldn’t tell if he was angry, or just annoyed.
“Then we shouldn’t have a problem.”
No one told him how easy murder would become. After the officers, after Werner, nothing, no guilt or remorse or horror, stopped him from pulling the trigger. He got used to watching people’s faces go blank, accustomed to the split second when a terrified, blubbering mess of a person became an empty shell, just another body to get rid of. There wasn’t much, it turned out, supporting a human life. It only took a moment to reduce someone to nothing.
“Do you have children?” Gus asked, fixing him with a long stare. Mike stared back, unblinking, unfeeling. He had never asked him a question like this before.
“Nope.”
Gus nodded. It wasn’t a lie, not really. He used to have children, but not anymore. “You will never be asked to do something like that,” Gus concluded calmly, returning to his work. The conversation had been so short, so simple.
Really, for Mike, everything about working for Gus was simple. Killing was simple. Risking his own life was even simpler. It scared people, how little he feared death, and once they were scared they were weak, vulnerable. He couldn’t respect people like that. Killing them was the simplest thing he had ever done in his sorry life.
Mike wasn’t scared of killing a child, not really. That wasn’t the problem. He was scared of feeling nothing when he did.
***
Jesse had no idea how to shoot a gun. In another life, Mike might have laughed, watching the poor kid aim it like he was the star of an action movie.
“Two hands,” Mike said gruffly. Jesse looked at him like he was crazy.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
Mike sighed. He wasn’t sure what the point of all this was, turning a drug addict into some sort of hero. It didn’t matter what Gus did. Mike had seen enough of the world to know that sooner or later, Jesse would go back to Walter.
For now, though, he pulled the gun from Jesse’s hand and wrapped his own hands around it, aiming at the target in front of them. They were outside, at a shooting range sleazy enough to take them. Even the look of the place was depressing—miles and miles of bare dirt. When he pulled the trigger, leaving a bullet-sized hole in the center of the target, the sound rolled over the desert. Out of the corner of his eye, Mike watched Jesse’s jaw go slack.
“Do that again.”
Mike shook his head, pressing the weapon back into Jesse’s palm. “Now, it’s your turn.”
Obediently, he raised the gun, both hands clasped firmly around the handle. The bullet hit the target’s edge.
He looked to Mike, defiant, a small glimmer of pride in his eyes.
“Well?” he asked, and for a brief moment, Mike imagined that there was a different young man standing next to him, waiting for instructions, desperate to do something right.
Mike pulled his own gun, a slightly larger, deadlier version of Jesse’s, out of its holster and started taking aim. “Aren’t you gonna tell me the like, million things I’m still doing wrong?” Jesse continued.
“Not today.”
By the end of the afternoon, Jesse was able to hit the target every time. For a junkie, Mike had to admit, he was a fast learner.
***
Before he woke up, Mike was pretty sure he was dead. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been shot before, but this time, bleeding in the back of the car as Jesse barreled down the empty, sun-stained roads, felt different. It felt permanent. For a few peaceful moments, his eyes adjusting to the fluorescent light of the makeshift hospital, he convinced himself that he was in some sort of afterlife.
But then the doctor came over, asking him if he would be able to leave in a few days, and he started hearing the bustle of people around him, and he realized that he was not, in fact, dead. The reality of it all was harsh, not because he wanted to be dead, but because now he would have to go back to living, back to taking orders and giving orders and killing.
It turned out that Mexico wasn’t so bad. In the mornings, he drank coffee and watched the sun rise over the endless stretches of rocks and saguaros. He liked the stillness. In those few moments when he allowed his thoughts to drift to Matty, he didn’t think about the end, about the weeks that stained everything else like mold. Instead, he thought about teaching him how to ride a bike, taking him fly fishing on the weekends.
For someone else, maybe, it would have been easy to forget that he hadn’t always lived like this. That miles and miles away the man who paid him the money he would someday leave to his granddaughter was waiting for him to return. But Mike was practical, and he knew that no amount of time here, feeding chickens, watching the sky, would make going back to Albuquerque any easier.
Sometimes, though, he looked up at the sky, and let the rest of his surroundings—the desert, the complex, the cactuses—fall away. On rare, cloudy days, when the blazing sun hid itself behind layers of gray, he could almost imagine that he was somewhere else.
That he was back in Philadelphia, waiting for it to rain.
***
He didn’t like the way Jesse looked at him then. Felt too much like trouble. Felt like some small, dead part of him wanted to stay in this mess against his better judgement. The kid was hopeful, of course, because he was stupid, and because he was stupid and hopeful he wanted Mike to tell him where to go.
Jesse wasn’t really going anywhere, Mike knew, because deep down Jesse was still the same scared kid who couldn’t hold a gun. He didn’t want to play a part in envisioning a future that wasn’t going to happen. Fantasies were for people who didn’t know how the world worked.
“C’mon,” Jesse said. “Play along, for once. If you were my age, starting fresh, where would you go?
He thought of Matty, who hated the desert, the heat, Matty, who was lucky enough to never have lived in a place like this.
“Alaska,” he said, staring into the river. “That’s where I would go. The final frontier.”
And, watching Jesse’s face light up at the idea, he thought of children, of sadness, of snow.