In This Life

by Cora Brent

  “Fuck!” he howled. “You broke my goddamn arm. Bitch,” he spat.

  Devin was floundering at my feet, still drunk and now with his right arm bent at a cruel angle. A leg of the table had broken off and I grabbed it, holding the thing like a baseball bat and enjoying the way he cowered at the sight of me.

  I tapped his sweaty forehead with the table leg. “I’m leaving,” I told him plainly, “and if you try to stop me I’ll break something else. Something more important.”

  Devin glared at me hatefully. I could almost read the disjointed outrage churning behind his dark eyes as if he’d spoken the words aloud. Sorry ass bitch lucky I stuck it to her all this time should have tossed her snatch out months ago.

  I stood and felt oddly clear headed. I needed to get out. Now, before he was done stewing in his pain.

  With one eye on my sprawling ex-boyfriend and the other feverishly packing a duffel bag, I warily held the impromptu bat in case Devin got a burst of adrenaline to call his own. With breathless haste I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and grabbed a shoebox of my most treasured possessions; a small army of thumb drives holding everything I’d written since the age of ten. I’d always meant to upload it all to a more secure location. As soon as I figured out where I was going, that’s what I would do.

  I paused in the living room with my bag over my shoulder. Devin seemed like he was beginning to sober up. Amid the splinters of the ruined table, he appeared to be struggling to pull his phone out of his back pocket.

  “Devin, you are a cruel bastard,” I told him coolly. “And you are going to have a miserable life.” It felt good to say that to him. He gave me an uncomprehending look. “Goodbye.” I left.

  When I sat behind the wheel of my ancient Civic I breathed a quick prayer for it to start. Then with a sigh of weak relief I pointed it east. I wanted to get the hell out of California. The entire state seemed wrapped up in Devin. Wrapped up in the worst things I thought about myself. I wasn’t at all the confident, successful woman I’d planned to be. I was a weak-willed girl.

  Worse, I hadn’t learned a thing about who not to trust.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cord

  I hate dreams. My mother used to be one of those crystal-wearing Tarot-reading types who saw every twitch of the subconscious as a message from the universe. At least that’s how she would talk when she wasn’t fucking high. And she was high most of the time.

  No, dreams were the useless leftovers. It was shit that had been shoved to the back of your mind for a reason. It was the nightmare of constant childhood hunger. It was the agony of watching your brother get the tar kicked out of him by a madman who was your blood too. And it was the knowledge that you would be next. Dreams were the place that made you and the place you hated most. They were heat and dirt, sometimes with blood and screaming. Worst of all, dreams were isolation because you had to walk them alone, without the two people who were a part of you since the moment you existed.

  Creed and Chase knew I liked to wander after a fight so they let me be. We all handled it differently. On the rare occasions Creed did the work he would lapse into a dark place, grumbling about our bastard father as he drank himself into a blackout. It wasn’t good for him to be in that place and anyway he was better at the agent role, making deals and getting the action set up. People looked at him and were reluctant to pull any bullshit. Chase was different; he needed to exercise his dick until he ran out of juice or ran out of women. But on my nights I only wanted a few hours of quiet.

  “Damn good fight,” Creed said, slapping my shoulder.

  “Hell yeah,” I agreed, picking the last of the tape off my knuckles and rolling it into a sticky ball. My knuckles had impact cuts anyway; they would be stiff tomorrow.

  “Three G’s, bro,” hooted Chase, fanning himself with the cash. Creed made a face and grabbed it from him

  “You takin’ the truck?” Creed called as I started to walk away.

  “Nah,” I answered, pulling on a frayed old flannel shirt with the sleeves cut out. Chase liked to tease me about my Goodwill pickings. He shouted that 1993 called and wanted its fashion sense back. He laughed when I flipped him off.

  We lived in an apartment complex less than a mile from the university and the place was crawling with students. I hadn’t been in a classroom since the last bell rang in the dusty hallways of Emblem High. These college kids seemed like a different species; sleek, shiny and groping their way through the best days of their lives. Finals had ended and parties oozed out in every direction. The two girls nudging each other ten feet to my left were cute. I knew they were whispering about me. They looked like expensive types though, the moneyed daughters of Scottsdale who were looking to roll with the rough stuff for a night or two. Another time I might have taken them up on the nasty offer in their heavily lined eyes. A glance down at their shapely, tanned legs was enough to get me rising. But my head still wasn’t right and I didn’t want to deal with any of it.

  I got all the way to the north side of the complex before finding a building that wasn’t the site of some wild orgy of a party. Stepping on the stucco frame of a dark patio, I hauled myself onto the second floor balcony and from there hopped up to the flat roof. I knew a guy who lived there, an owlish kid from Emblem named Brayden. The first time we’d run into one another at the mailbox, I’d read his loathing. I couldn’t pretend not to know why. But the years we’d spend in the same shithole of a town seemed to cement a nameless bond. He struck up a conversation one day at the pool and we’d been something like friends ever since. I asked him that day why he didn’t just spit in my direction and walk the other way. He would have been justified. Bray McCann dangled his skinny white legs in the pool and looked thoughtfully over to where his hot little taste of a girlfriend was toweling off.

  “Everyone should have one chance to remake themselves, Cord.” Then he peered at me with a green-eyed intensity that reminded me uneasily of someone else. “Don’t you think?”

  Yeah, I did think so. Creed hadn’t wanted to stay in Arizona but Tempe was a far cry from Emblem. And Chase just wanted to go wherever there was a diverse selection of ass. A college town was just his brand of pretty. We scraped by for the first few years, finding work where we could and hitting the after-hours scene pretty hard. Everything was lively here, clean. In that way it was worlds different from the place we’d come from. Emblem was seventy miles away but might as well have been the far side of the moon.

  Here, in the shadow of one of the nation’s largest universities, we didn’t have to be ‘those Gentry boys’ and everything the curse of our last name entailed. All the men in our line went rotten at some point and everyone in Emblem just knew we would follow suit. After a while we gave them reason to believe it. We weren’t good kids. We were tough and mean, terrorizing our peers and running roughshod over any authority figure who tried to give a damn. And when we grew a little older, we were the nightmare of every man with a daughter.

  But there was a world of hurt none of them knew about. Even the ones who lived out in our neck of the grubby outlying desert would have been shocked to see now we hunted ground squirrels to fend off the hunger pangs. It was a rare cloudy day in the desert when our mother emerged from her fog of addiction long enough to notice she had children. Our father, Benton Gentry, was the lousiest piece of filth who ever walked. In a long life filled with heinous acts the worst thing he ever did was beat his pregnant wife to a pulp, throwing her into premature labor. She almost bled out in surgery, taking the three of us with her. Her jaw still pained her and she was never able to have any more children, although that might have been a blessing. Benton could have killed us all and sometimes I thought he would. Although he wasn’t much nicer once we were on the outside, eventually we learned to fight back.

  Chase, Creed and I were always surrounded by a shifting collection of motley relatives. Family lore said that Gentrys found themselves out Emblem’s way in the 1930s. A pack of forsaken Okies who chugged west in their jalopies
en route to the golden country of California, one of them glimpsed the wide irrigation canals and figured they must be closing in on the Pacific Ocean. And so they stayed. Most of their descendants were shells of something less than humanity, strung out and useless. It was best to keep wide of them. But when Uncle Chrome visited for a stretch we clung to him like a life preserver. He’d done time for some of the worst things a man could do to another man, but he knew shit. He knew how to hit and where a body was softest. He would spend tireless afternoons with the three of us under the brutal sun. He had scars everywhere and most of them he didn’t like to talk about. He met a bad end, Uncle Chrome did, spread out all over the road three years ago when his bike took a drunken tailspin on a freeway outside Flagstaff. I still grieved over that. Uncle Chrome was one of the only adults who ever seemed to really care in a way that was honest.

  The surface of the roof was hot under my back. I removed my shirt and lay flat, letting the day’s heat soak through my skin while I stared up at the sky. I always looked for the Three Kings even though they were harder to find out here amid the city lights. They comforted me, a reminder of my brothers and the unbreakable entity we made together.

  Creed was right; it had been a good fight. My challenger was just another frat boy but quicker than most. Stakes were higher this time. For us, it might mean the difference between eating well for a few months or scraping together lousy pennies for backbreaking labor under the summer sun. He’d gotten me good in the ribs twice. I fingered the firm, muscled skin covering my ribcage and pressed. Yeah, I’d be feeling that tomorrow.

  Frat Boy backed away after he’d gotten in those shots and I circled, taking shallow breathes to fend off the pain and gauging my opponent more carefully. The way he kept glancing back at his cheering fraternity brothers told me a lot about him. Almost as much as the scuffed combat boots he must have scored from an army surplus store.

  Creed had set things up with this crowd before. They were wealthy, arrogant, as were most of the boys who gravitated to this sport around here. But anything they’d learned had been taught to them in sterile safety. They couldn’t fight for crap. This dude was different though. He wasn’t really one of them, no matter how desperately he wanted to be. The frat probably pledged him for this purpose, so they could throw him out here and test what value he had. If he failed they would probably toss him away like a bony fish.

  The venue was an abandoned warehouse on the other side of the Salt River. It was adjacent to an old bread factory that hadn’t operated in decades, yet somehow the yeasty smell of the dough lingered. The only light was from a few old camping lanterns. The only noise was the bloodthirsty yells of men who had money riding on the fight’s outcome.

  My opponent had gotten cocky pretty quick under the hooting praise of his buddies. He parried and feinted in a show that began to irritate me. Some of these guys were fucking dancers. I wasn’t. This was about beating the man in front of you. It didn’t need to look pretty.

  The guy’s crooked-tooth smile was centered on me but I could tell he wasn’t really focusing. I could feel the rising fire in my blood, the pulsing rush that would end his night. I didn’t need to glance back to know that Creed and Chase were there. My brothers were always there.

  I continued to circle, slowly, ever so slowly. The frat boy took mistook it for fear and decided to talk trash.

  “You had enough?” he mocked. He had one of those naturally pinched faces that gave him a beaten look no matter what expression he wore. I kept quiet.

  “Yo boys,” he yelled. “I think this little poodle needs to be taken for a walk. What do you think?”

  He’d looked away, just briefly enough. When he returned his gaze to the ring his beady eyes showed alarm as I advanced. I got him in the jaw and he stumbled, spitting a line of bloody saliva. When he righted himself I saw he was no longer unfocused. I also saw hate in his narrowed eyes. I was standing between him and whatever reward he’d been promised by those fraternity shits.

  Gabe Hernandez watched us on the sidelines, his hand at his chin, a mild look on his face as if he were watching something no more compelling than a dull sitcom. He was a major player, the guy to deal with when the stakes got into the four figures and beyond. Of course, that was still small potatoes in the world of underground fighting. Creed had told me that even in the dusty belly of Phoenix there were six figure fights. But the higher the payout, the more brutal the action. At least that was the word.

  Frat Boy turned out to be a kicker too. He let fly with his left leg and I jerked back. I was quick but still caught a glancing blow off my shoulder. I spun and landed a tight fist in his solar plexus. He staggered backward, his face a sick blend of pain and fear. But with all the men yelling behind him he clenched his jaw and found some more scrappiness, plenty to take another swing.

  It wasn’t enough. I ducked his aim with ease and crushed the bone under his right eye. My hands were already swelling and I glanced back at my brothers. They soberly nodded in unison and I heard them as clearly as if they were on either side of me, speaking in each ear.

  Finish it, Cordero.

  I pulled back and gave him a clean cross to go out on. His eyes rolled back into his head and he fell to his knees as the loud mouthed little twerp who’d done the announcing tonight counted to ten.

  Frat Boy didn’t get up again and my brothers and I were three grand richer. It would pay rent and more for the next few months. I held out a hand to Frat Boy but he didn’t take it. He wobbled to his feet and someone tossed him the beaten shirt he’d been wearing. I saw the shame in his posture as he returned to his suddenly unfriendly companions. I felt a little sorry for him.

  Money changed hands and the place began to empty out. I found myself eye to eye with Gabe Hernandez. He gave me a cold smile.

  “You Gentry Boys should consider upping your game,” he said.

  Creed answered. “Nah. We like our bones intact, you know?”

  Gabe nodded as if he didn’t really care anyway. “Well, I can appreciate that. But if any of the three of you ever change your mind, you know where to find me.”

  “Hey,” I coughed. “Sorry, you know, if you lost some change here tonight.”

  Gabe smiled. “I didn’t. My bet was on you. Good night, gentlemen.”

  When he was out of earshot Creed spat on the floor. “Fucking snake,” he swore, glaring after Gabe.

  “Maybe,” agreed Chase. “But he probably ain’t sharing an old Chevy with no bumper.”

  Creed scowled. “You think some fresh wheels is worth getting your neck broke?”

  Chase waved a hand. “Hell no. I got such a pretty neck.”

  Creed nodded at me. “What do you say?”

  I shrugged. “I like all my shit where it is too, but damn man, it’d be nice not to scrape the bottom for once. It would be a hell of a payout.”

  Creed looked away and Chase grinned at me. We were three pieces of a puzzle but no one would mistake one of us for another. Creedence had always been the biggest. He’d grown into a serious man prone to episodes of crushing darkness that were better left untouched. I’d seen so many willing girls try to break through that gruff fog but none had even chipped a dent. I think out of the three of us he was the most wounded by the terrors of our childhood, although he would have popped me a good one if I’d said so out loud.

  Chasyn played the foolish playboy but he was a lot smarter than he let on. Back in Emblem he was always the one who scored outrageously high on any test thrown in his direction. Teachers had tried to push him into the smart classes but he balked and made a nuisance of himself until they sighed and sent him back down to us.

  As for me, I was somewhere in the middle of all that. When we finally reached the age where we could leave Emblem and not get chased down by the law, there was no question we were in it together. As we always had been.

  The events of the night played out casually in my head as I lay there on that roof. And when I stared unblinking at the Three Kings, th
e stars of Orion’s Belt, those distant balls of fire blurred together in my sight until they seemed to be one unbroken line. If I had been the only one born the day Benton Gentry assaulted his pregnant wife, I doubt I would have survived this long.

  The stars moved an inch across the black sky and the restless fury that still sometimes threatened to devour me was quieted.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Saylor

  As I made my way to the I-10, that thick manmade artery cutting through the continent, I knew where I was going. I plucked my phone from my purse and dialed my cousin.

  “Brayden,” I choked, hating my own rambling distress. “I did it, I left him. He’s-fuck, it’s bad. It’s about ten o’clock right now. Damn, I really need to talk to you. School’s finished. Me and Devin are finished. California tastes like shit. I can’t stay here. And Bray, I’d rather swallow acid than face the Emblem peeps right. So I’m heading in your direction. Call me back. Please Brayden, call me back.”

  A curse escaped my lips as I threw the phone down. Brayden was notorious for failing to answer his cell phone, or even keep proper track of it. I had no idea if he would receive that message.

  Southern California sped by and I bid it a bitter good riddance. As far as I knew, my dad had been planning on driving out in two days to attend my graduation. Somebody would need to tell him it wouldn’t be necessary unless he wanted to sit there and watch everyone else’s kid walk across the stage. It didn’t matter, the ceremony. It was a bunch of preening and photographic flashes. It was the culmination of a long journey that for most would end in crushing debt and disappointed hopes. I kept telling myself that. My father would certainly be happier to have the obligation removed. Instead he could remain in Emblem for the weekend, ensconced in the flabby arms of whatever big breasted bimbo had attached herself to his shiny Dodge rims. As for my mother, well, she was in the throes of a new love substitute anyway. She had sighed with happy relief when I said, “No ma, don’t sweat it. You don’t have to be there.”