"Yeah, not fucking drunk at all," both King's said sarcastically, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Listen you two motherfuckers,” I pointed between solid King to fuzzy King. “You're both wrong. I’m not JUST drunk.” I placed a finger over my lips and lowered my voice to a whisper. I looked around as if someone might overhear me. “I is also very VERY fucking high.”
“Pull your shit together, Preppy. We got kids around here now. I can’t have you high at eight in the morning or stumbling around while they’re fucking playing in the backyard.” King pointed to the blow on the table. “You can’t leave that shit around either. There is a safe in my shop and another hidden in the back closet. You can keep your stash there.”
I sat up, his mention of the kids finding its way through the haze and waking up a small part of my brain. “I’ve missed so fucking much,” I said, suddenly feeling a sadness wash over me. I wiped my runny nose with the back of my hand and realizing there was white powder residue on the back of it I licked it off. I shook my head. “I’ve missed everything.”
“Not everything, Prep,” King said crouching down next to me. “But you can fix that. Look out that window. Look at those kids. Go meet your nieces and nephew. Go talk to Bear’s girl and get to know her. Go insult Bear for fuck sake. I thought he was all torn up when we thought you were dead but I think he’s more torn up now that you’re back because you ain’t you.”
“What the fuck does Bear know. I’m me. I’m fucking fine.”
King ran his hand over his hair and squinted as if he were in pain. “You know I really told myself that you were okay. That everything was going to be fine. I think I told myself that because I wanted it to be. But shit’s not fine, Prep. You need help or time or something. Whatever this shit is that you’re doing isn’t working. You need to be able to get through whatever it was you’ve been through. If you can’t talk to us and tell us what happened, then you need to talk to someone to help you get through it.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Not with you. Not with anyone. I don’t even want to talk about it with myself. It never happened. It’s over,” I slurred, reaching for the bottle and sticking my tongue into the neck to reach the last speck of un-spilled liquor clinging to the top.
King grabbed the bottle from my hand and slid it across the room, out of my reach.
“Give that back, motherfucker,” I demanded, reaching my hand out and wagging my fingers at my lost bottle of booze.
“You think you’ve been through some shit? Well, you’re not the only one. Ray was raped by Isaac right before he, or one of his men, shot you. She was kidnapped by her ex who played a round of ‘burn off this tattoo’ on her with a motherfucking blowtorch. I was shot four times trying to save her. You want to hear some more shit? Just ask Bear what the fuck’s been going on since you’ve been gone. Ask him about what Eli and his men did to him. I realize that you’re fucking hurting but get your head out of your own fucking ass long enough to understand that you have people around you. Family. And we’re here to help so stop fucking pushing us away.”
“What the fuck happened to Bear?” I asked, sitting upright.
“Ask him your fucking self,” King snapped.
“I would but everyone’s been tiptoeing around me and no one fucking tells me anything!”
“Then get your ass up and come outside. Breathe some fresh air and at least try!”
I shook my head. “I want to. I really do. But I can’t, man. I just can’t. Every time I try to leave the light outside is blinding as fuck. Every time I convince myself it’s all okay my chest seizes up and I…I just can’t. And you’re right. They don’t need to be seeing me like this, so I’ll go.”
“Prep, that’s not what I’m fucking saying and it’s not what I want. That’s not what any of us want. You’ve been through hell. We get that. Let us help you through it. Come outside. Breathe some fresh fucking air and do something other than work on your uni-nostril.”
I chuckled. “Was that your attempt at a joke?” I asked, lighting a cigarette and leaning back against the recliner. My temples started to ache with the beginnings of a headache.
“I guess,” King said, scratching the back of his neck.
“It was fucking awful.”
“Fuck off.” King smiled, grabbing my face in his hands. “At least try, Prep. Try for us.”
“I don’t know if I can,” I said honestly.
King surprised me by stomping back across the room and pulling me up by my arm. “Come on,” he said dragging me into his shop and pushing me down onto the couch. He walked over to a picture on the wall and shifted it aside to reveal a safe. He entered a few numbers on the keypad and when the door opened his arm disappeared into the wall and when he pulled it out he was holding a notebook in his black gloved hands.
A familiar notebook.
He tossed it to me and I caught it. I didn’t need to open it to know what it was. I ran my hand over my eleven-year-old doodling on the cover. SAMUEL CLEARWATER written in graffiti style letters over the top. “I can’t believe you still have this,” I said.
King reached over and turned to a dog-eared page, revealing the stilt home drawing we drew that first day on the playground. The day we met. The marker ink had barely faded. The drops of red from my bloody nose from being beat up minutes before were still visible over stick figure versions of ourselves. “Of course I fucking kept it. I don’t want to forget where I came from or where I’m going.” He pointed to the page. “THIS might have been two fucking kids making a plan, but I still live by what we wrote that day and someday, far in the fucking future, I’ll fucking die by it too. I want to know if you’re still fucking with me.”
I looked from the notebook to him. “We were just kids, boss-man. We were just fucking around,” I said, closing the notebook and tossing it up onto the tray.
King blew out a frustrated breath. “Preppy, since we were kids we’ve always said we were gonna go out into the world and we weren’t going to wait for anyone to give us anything. We were gonna do what we wanted and take what we wanted. Since day fucking one, man. Me and you on that playground with that fucking notebook. We mapped out our lives in those scribbles. Don’t tell me you don’t fucking remember that and what it meant because I sure as shit do.”
“I remember,” I muttered, wondering where King was going with all this.
“You know; I don’t think you fucking do remember.” King stomped his way over to me, stopping only when his knees were pressed against mine, towering above me, glaring down as if he were about to strangle me with his bare hands. His nostrils flared. “You claim to remember. So tell me, what do we do when we want something?”
“We…we take it,” I said, rubbing my temples and recalling the words the naive kid versions of ourselves wrote down that day.
“Louder,” King demanded roughly grabbing me by the shoulders and lifting me off my feet.
“We take it.” I said a little bit louder, pushing his hands off of me only to have him grip me again, harder this time, and stepped even closer until he was right up in my face and our noses were almost touching.
“Louder, motherfucker,” King demanded with a growl.
“We take it!” I yelled, pushing against him only to have him push back against me yet again. He grabbed me by the back of the head and pushed his forehead against mine so he was staring right into my eyes and I had no choice but to stare back.
“Again! Louder! What do we do when we want something?” King screamed, anger pulsed from the vein in his neck as he talked through his teeth. “Tell. Me. What. We. DO!!!!”
I hit my boiling point. His fingers dug into the back of my neck as we squared off. “We take it!” I yelled. “We motherfucking take it! ‘Cause it’s ours! It’s all fucking ours to fucking take!”
“Scream it! Show me you still fucking believe in this! In us!” King said shaking me by the back of the neck and screaming in my face.
“We fucking take it!” I r
oared back with everything I had, my teeth clenching together as King held his forehead against mine. “We fucking take all of it!!!!!”
King clapped me on the back and released me, but he continued to crowd my space, his eyes never leaving mine. “Good. Now tell me what happens when someone stands in the way of us taking what’s ours?” He grabbed the notebook and thrust it against my chest. I closed my hands around it and looked from it to my best friend with newfound determination I felt building in my soul.
“We fucking kill ‘em’,” I huffed feeling more like myself in that moment than I had since before I went into the hole.
“Damn fucking right we do,” he said with a satisfied smile and another slap to my back. He pulled me in for a one armed hug before pushing me back down into the chair and turning around to pick up his stool. He placed it upright and sat back down, rolling back over to me and again picking up the needle.
“Now what?” I asked, feeling like he had more to say and wanting to hear it.
“Now? I’m gonna work on some of those scars of yours and you’re gonna spend some time working on getting you right again. Whatever it takes.”
“And then?”
King lit a joint and passed it to me. “And then you tell me.”
A wicked smile spread across my face. “And then I’m going to get my fucking girl.”
Bear stormed in with his helmet still in hand looking like he’d just driven his bike at break neck speeds. “Sorry to interrupt your little pow-wow,” he turned to me, “but that kid you’ve been looking for, Prep? My boys found him.”
I was instantly sober. “And?”
Bear shook his head and blew out a long breath. “And…it’s not good, man.”
23
Preppy
Bear told me that Bo was in the hospital and my fucking heart sank into my gut.
Twenty minutes later I was staring at the nurse at check-in who looked like she’d been on the wrong end of a beating herself. She had purple bruises on her face. One on her chin and the other under her right eye. I could tell she’d tried to cover it up with makeup, but no amount of concealer could cover those angry fuckers, and they were fresh, it would only get worse. “Car accident,” she said when she saw me staring.
“Didn’t know cars had fists,” I commented.
She pursed her lips and set down the chart she’d been holding, looking me in the eye for the first time since I’d arrived. She sighed and looked around to make sure no one was listening. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “The boy you’re looking for was brought in a few days ago with a minor concussion and a sprained wrist. He’d been banged up pretty badly and from what I could tell, pretty often. It’s not the first time he’s been in here either. Between you and me I called child services, but when I brought the social worker to his room he was already gone.”
“You let him go?” I asked through my teeth, stretching my fingers to ease the tension building in my hands.
“Let him go?” She looked stunned at my question, hugging her clipboard to her chest. “We didn’t lose him, he escaped.”
“Do you have a home address for him?” I asked leaning over to look at the chart in her hand. “Please, I have to find him.”
“You know damn well I can’t tell you that,” she whispered.
I was about to ask her nicely, beg her until she gave in, but the fluorescent lights overhead caught the yellowing edges of her bruises I thought of a new angle. “The same thing is happening to him that’s happening to you. I recognize a good ass kicking when I see one. Shit, I’ve started thousands in my life, but I’ve got this crazy idea that I only start fights with someone who deserves it, someone who can fight back.”
“I can’t…”
“No, just listen. You see, that little boy? That was me. Years ago in another life I was the one with the concussion and the broken wrist. The one who’d been beaten and starved regularly.”
“We’ve…we’ve all had problems,” she said, backing up when I stepped into her space. I put my hand beside her head onto the wall and leaned in close.
“Yes, we all do. And right now my first problem is finding Bo so I can keep him safe. Do you want to know what my second problem is?” I asked.
She nodded.
“My second problem is that I’m going to find the person responsible for hurting him.”
“What are you going to do when you find them?” she asked, sounding both scared and intrigued.
“That leads me to my third problem. Body disposal.”
She gasped but didn’t move away.
“What if I could promise you the same thing?” I whispered.
“What?” she asked, her eyes going wide.
I grabbed a Post-It tacked to the bulletin board above her head and grabbed her pen out of her hands. “Write down Bo’s address. Underneath it, write the name and address of the cocksucker who did this to you.” I shrugged. “And I’ll dig an extra hole.”
She grabbed the paper and pen from my hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no one hurting me. I told you. I got in a car accident.” She smiled at another nurse walking by and dropped it again the second she was gone. “But I’ll give you the address of the boy so you can get the fuck out of here and leave me alone.” She scribbled on the paper and handed it to me. “It’s not so much of an address as it is a location. We don’t have any official address on file for him but one of the other nurse’s said they see him around there from time to time.”
“Thank you,” I said, turning to leave.
“Go save that boy,” she called out.
I waited until I got to the parking lot to check the Post-It in my hand. She’d written Bo’s location down all right.
And more.
Check the Rainbow Ends Trailer Park for your boy.
Trip Reid
1720 Alabaster Road #4
Black hair. Snake tattoo on his forearm.
Mean right hook.
He’s always home...Thank you
24
PREPPY
King, Bear and I scoured the trailer park for any sign of Bo, but he couldn’t be found. Some of the neighbors pointed us in the direction of a mound of garbage. We wouldn’t have even known a trailer was underneath if we hadn’t been told. I pushed over a stack of empty cans with my foot and was about to kick in the door when a tall man with bloodshot eyes and a beer in his hand approached us.
“Word is you’re looking for the kid?” he asked, adjusting the brim of his trucker hat depicting the silhouette of a stripper sliding down a pole.
“Yeah, we’re looking for him. You Bo’s dad?” King asked, stepping in front of me, and for good reason. I was wound so tight I would have fired first and asked questions later. The funny thing about dead men was that they didn’t talk and we needed this shit bag to tell us where Bo was.
“Names Burk. I’m the boys stepdad,” he corrected, crossing his arms over his bare chest that was covered in paper clip style prison tats.
“Fucking figures,” I muttered.
“What the fuck do you want with him?” Burk asked. “He steal something from you?” He leaned to the side, spitting black tobacco onto the asphalt. He wiped the spittle off his chin with the back of his hand. “I told that boy to quit stealing shit. I guess that whoopin’ I gave him last time didn’t teach him any kind of lesson. Looks like he’s got another one comin’.”
My rage had reached the point of no return and King felt it too because he stepped aside and let me step forward. “The only thing he stole was food. And while I’m sure your cigarette and beer money comes first you could have bothered to feed your fucking kid.”
“Who the fuck are you to tell me how to discipline my kid? Withholding supper builds character. It’s how my daddy and his daddy before him did it and it’s how I do it.”
“So the bruises and beatings are all part of it too?” I asked.
“If the boy won’t answer my questions, he gets punished.”
&
nbsp; “Wait, he can’t speak…so you gave him a concussion? Starved him?”
“What the fuck?” Bear asked.
“Can’t speak or won’t?” Burk asked, crushing the empty beer can in his hand and tossing it onto the pile beside the door. “Should have never bothered with the boy or his whore of a mama. Hope wherever he is he don’t come the fuck back or he’s gonna get the tail end of a switch and learn what real punishments all about.” He shook his head. “If you want the little retard so much you can fucking have him.”
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” I asked, blocking his way back into the trailer.
Burk looked over my shoulder to the crowd of neighbors that had gathered around to watch the commotion. Burk sneered, tobacco covered his yellow teeth.
“What are you gonna do? Call the fucking pigs? IF they even bother to arrest me I’ll do thirty-days at most and be out fucking his mama again before football season starts.” Burk laughed.
“He must be new in town,” King said from somewhere behind me.
“’Real new. ‘Cause we don’t call cops,” Bear added, pushing his gun into my hand. As soon as I touched the cold metal I knew it wasn’t his gun after all. It was mine. “We didn’t get rid of all of your shit,” Bear said to me.
“What? You gonna shoot me in front of all these people? You gonna kill me in the middle of the fucking day with a bunch of witnesses standing around who could send you to jail?” Burk rolled his eyes.
Preppy, The Life & Death of Samuel Clearwater Page 38