by M. O'Keefe
“The police told me to stay here in case there were more questions.”
“Terrence can handle the police.”
“How will it look if I leave with you? If we both leave the area. We can’t, Dylan.”
The blood splatter on the floor held his attention like a magnet.
“If I could erase everything that happened, I would,” he whispered.
“I don’t want to forget everything,” she said, stepping forward, her fingers touching his waist. “Some things that happened in this trailer were beautiful. Amazing.”
“You masturbated, Annie,” he scoffed, diminishing what they’d had. But the color was high in his cheeks. “You can do that in a new place. I’ll buy you a goddamn vibrator and you never have to get out of bed.”
“Don’t.” She knew what he was doing and she understood where his words were coming from, but they still hurt. “Don’t be mean.”
“I’m sorry. But I can’t…I can’t just leave you here, Annie.”
“Then stay.”
The second the words were out of her mouth, she knew they would cause trouble. Push him away. And they did. He looked at her with horrified, incredulous laughter.
“Here? Stay here?”
“Your father—”
“Don’t call him that!”
Annie pulled herself back in. Reeled in the hope, that foolish wish. She clutched it all to her chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But that guy you like. The guy I like being, that version of me—he doesn’t exist when Ben’s around.”
“How do you know? You haven’t had a relationship with him in years.”
“Well, the one we had was pretty bad.”
“Then go. I absolve you of responsibility.” This was a fight that had spun out of control too fast and they were both saying things they didn’t mean.
They blinked at each other, held back by a thread that ran between them both.
“Is that what you really want? Is that what you think this is?”
Before she could answer, before she could say of course not, before she could do anything but shake her head, there was a knock on the door.
Swearing, Dylan leaned down and pushed it open.
Ben climbed up the top step and stood in the doorway. She imagined the walls of the tiny trailer bowing out with the pressure of the three of them and all of their drama. She could practically hear the metal stretching.
“Ben,” she said. His arrival put all their damage in perspective. He was dying. That was another reason why she was here. “Are you—”
“What the hell are you doing back here?” Ben asked, his eyes bouncing between her and Dylan. He seemed wired. Angry.
“Ask her,” Dylan said, pointing at Annie.
“He’s rich, Annie,” Ben said. “He’ll take you anywhere. Anywhere you want to go—”
“What is wrong with you two?” she asked, taken aback by Ben’s frantic energy. “This is the only place I want to be right now. Right here. It’s my choice. Mine. Not anyone else’s. Why can’t you both respect that?”
“I respect it, Annie,” Dylan said, shooting Ben a killing glance. “We get it.”
“I don’t!” Ben cried.
“It’s not your business,” Dylan said to Ben. “It’s Annie’s. We’ll work it out.”
“I need to talk to you,” Ben said to Dylan. “Outside.”
Dylan shook his head. “We got nothing to say to each other.”
“You’re going to want to hear what I have to say,” Ben insisted.
“No—”
“It’s about an old friend.”
She didn’t have any idea what Ben was talking about, but a chill ran up Annie’s spine all the same. “Ben?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. I just…I need to have a word with Dylan.”
The panic in Ben’s face that he was so clearly trying to contain must have registered with Dylan, because after a moment he said, “I’ll be there in a second.”
Ben nodded and stepped back outside the trailer. The door shut behind him with a small click. She looked at Dylan and realized how they knew each other in theory, behind the safety and subterfuge of lies and phone calls. The dizzying haze of sex and desire.
But she did not know him in real life.
In practical terms they were still strangers.
And that look on his face was guarded and braced. Wary. He was realizing the same thing.
Now what? she thought.
“You look tired,” Dylan told her. “Why don’t you go lie down? I’ll go see what’s wrong with Ben.”
She nodded and stepped up next to him, wrapping her arms around his neck. Sighed with relief when his arms came around her back, pulling her closer.
“I can’t stay here with you, Annie.”
She hugged him harder, trying to absorb the pain he had to be feeling. He could pretend all he wanted, but a man who spies on his dad for years doesn’t feel nothing. But Dylan began to step away, taking her hands and removing them from his body. She could feel the whole of him retreating, pulling away from his skin, sinking deep inside himself where he’d been living for so long.
“You have the phone from the hospital?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, patting the front pocket of her hoodie.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
He kissed her lips, a soft kiss. A friend’s kiss, without the breath and the bite of every kiss they’d shared before. It was a new kiss, ushering in a new version of them.
And then he was gone.
Leaving her alone in the trailer she called home.
DYLAN
I stepped down out of Annie’s trailer and stopped, blinking up at the sunny world.
There were birds somewhere making a racket, and the swamp nearby made the air smell like dying plant matter. It was hot down here off the mountain. The air was soggy. Thick.
Ben came back around the edge of the trailer with a familiar look in his eye. I grit my teeth, not wanting to remember. I’d spent years killing off these memories, but now, with one look the old man brought them all back.
That look, it was panic. It was panic he was trying to hide. It was the look he got whenever he knew Mom was using again and he was trying to keep it a secret from me and Max. Or pretend it was no big deal.
But the old man had a shit poker face.
Growing up, I felt like our little family boat was full of holes and we were sinking into poison and I was the only one who bothered to say, “Holy shit, I think we’re sinking.”
And I was a goddamn kid.
Everybody else was busy pretending we were fine.
“What the fuck are you doing back here?” Pops spat, his voice low. I guess because he didn’t want Annie to hear what we were talking about.
“This is where Annie wants to be.”
“You need to change her mind. Fast.”
“Yeah, well, I’m trying to be sensitive—”
“Fuck sensitive,” Pops hissed, getting up in my face. “Both of you need to leave. Now.”
I stepped back. “What the hell is wrong with—”
“Well, well, well,” said a voice over my shoulder. “It’s a regular family reunion.”
Shit. Shitshitshitshitshit.
That’s why Pops was so scared.
I didn’t want to turn around. Turning around made everything real. Too real. Too dangerous. But there was no choice.
Because it was Rabbit standing there, leaning against the edge of Annie’s trailer in his leather cut and his fucked-up teeth. His dirty-blond hair hung down to his shoulders. He wore his leather cut over a plaid shirt with the sleeves ripped off, revealing bone-thin arms covered in shitty tattoos.
Seeing him was like running into a wall at top speed, and I lost my fragile grip on happiness. On hope. On everything good that came with Annie. Everything we were reaching for—it vanished over the horizon.
And all that was left was a bone-deep dread.
My past coming back to bite me.
“Come on, Dylan,” he said, lifting a can of Bud in his hand. “I got a case a beer, and me and your old man were just talking about the good old days.”
Despite that smile, fucked up as it was. Despite the beer and the mention of good old days—of which there were very few with him—Rabbit reeked of menace.
Of danger.
Whatever this guy wanted, it wasn’t conversation. And it wasn’t good.
“Dylan was just leaving,” Pops said. He was such a shit liar.
But I wasn’t going to leave. Not while Rabbit was here, three feet from the door of Annie’s trailer.
Oh God, please, Annie, don’t look out your window. Don’t come out your door.
“I got time for a beer,” I said with a smile. The thing with Rabbit was to not show him anything. Not weakness, not fear, and definitely not ever happiness. You show that guy happiness and he’ll find a way to take it from you. To spoil it. To turn it to poison while you still held it in your hand.
He did it to me over and over again.
“There we go.” Rabbit laughed. “There’s the Dylan Daniels I know.”
He put an arm over my shoulder and I felt his gun in its holster against my side. His long knife pressed into my hip. And I would guess he had at least one more gun and probably one more knife hidden on his body.
He was armed and he was crazy.
And I could feel Annie, her tender flesh, her beating heart, behind me, through the walls of her trailer.
So, I let this asshole lead me toward a dirt track that ended at a big, long trailer with an awning off the back. Under the awning there was a cement pad with a picnic table and in the shadows, a brown recliner. There was half a stone oven built on the edge.
A few feet away from the trailer was a water spigot, and next to that a fenced-in garden.
“The old man is a gardener,” Rabbit said. His arm over my shoulder weighed a thousand pounds and I wanted to shrug it off. Put my fist in the asshole’s face. But no good would come of that. Instead, I counted each step away from Annie’s trailer. Hoping it would be far enough. But knowing there was no chance it would. “Can you believe that shit?”
“No,” I said, because I couldn’t.
We got under the awning and Rabbit took Ben’s chair, dropping into the recliner with a sigh. He pushed the case of beer over toward me with his scuffed, worn boot. “Help yourself.”
I reached into the ripped hole at the top and grabbed a lukewarm can. I handed the first can to Ben, who was sitting next to me. He shook his head.
“Come on, old man,” Rabbit barked. “When a guy offers you a beer, you take one. Am I right, Dylan?”
Ben took the beer and I popped the top off mine. Foam poured out and I sucked it into my mouth. Warm and gross. It was the taste, in a way, of my childhood. Drinking beer with my brother on the beach, in the back of a car. After a race. Before we’d go on a car-stealing spree through parts of Jacksonville.
It reminded me of Max. Of happier days.
What does it say about my memories when the taste of shitty, warm beer actually makes me happy?
That I need better memories, probably.
Ben beside me popped open his can and held it out past his legs so the foam ran down over the brown grass and dirt.
Rabbit rubbed his forehead. His cut had a sergeant-at-arms patch on the left side, which meant he had moved up in the world in the nine years since I’d seen him. Back when we were racing, he was just a soldier for the Skulls. Unpredictable and brutal. But cagey. And a straight-up believer in the club. A wide-eyed convert to the life.
He’d worked a pretty good chop-shop network over the years, and Max and I had been two of his big producers.
“See now, this is nice, ain’t it?” Rabbit grinned, revealing his yellow teeth. “How long has it been since we shared a beer?”
“Just before the cops raided that race,” I said. We’d been drinking. Toasting my victory, again. Rabbit used to find the illegal races, on the edges of backwater towns or using the logging roads in the Florida Panhandle up into Georgia. He’d find them, Max and I would steal a car, and I’d drive and we’d split the winnings.
Because I always won.
We’d been talking about going legit, Max and I. Leaving Rabbit behind. Buying a car, fixing it up, entering a race at the local track. Getting some of the expensive NASCAR insurance.
But then we got busted and everything changed.
“Yeah, fucking shame about that,” Rabbit said. “But you took that shit like a man, keeping your brother out of jail.” He lifted his can toward me in a toast and I raised mine toward him. After a long moment, Ben did, too. “You took that shit that happened to you in jail like a man, too. Proper fucking Skulls business, right there.”
He was talking about the kid that I killed. Proper fucking Skulls business, indeed.
“You know what your Pops told me?” Rabbit said.
“Couldn’t begin to guess.”
“That you like…made some kind of fortune building engines for race cars. You have like patents and shit…”
“I’ve done all right.” I could feel the tension rolling off Ben and I refused to look at him. I refused to wonder how he even knew about the patents.
“Look at you being modest. Now that’s a change—you used to be the cockiest fucking kid.”
“I was winning a lot of money,” I said with a shrug.
“And fucking a ton of pussy. Jesus, you were pulling left and right. I guess…” He winced, waving his fingers over his own face, indicating my scars. “Those days are over, huh?”
“I do all right,” I said, keeping my smile on, though it hurt. It hurt to not put my fist through his face. “With women and money.”
“Right. Money. See…” Rabbit tapped the side of his head. “Makes me think, you never would have started racing cars if it weren’t for me—”
I laughed, because that was what Rabbit wanted, for all of us to grin while he tried to slice us apart. “You want a cut?” I asked.
“That ain’t fair?” He laughed, too, but nothing was funny.
“It ain’t gonna happen,” I said.
“I know, I’m just giving you a hard time.” he sighed. “Too bad about the fire. You were on a hot streak for a while there. Thought we’d be seeing your name up in Daytona. That would have been something, huh?”
“Accidents happen,” I said, looking right into Rabbit’s dark eyes. I wasn’t laughing anymore. I could barely keep down the warm beer and I wanted this over.
“Yes, they do,” he said right back.
“What brings you up here?” I asked, turning the can in my hands.
“The North Carolina chapter closed down in ’86,” Ben said. “You guys opening it back up again?”
“Look at you.” Rabbit grinned at Ben. “You can take the man out of the Skulls but you can’t take the Skulls out of the man. But no, we’re just up here doing a little business.”
“What kind of business?” Ben asked.
“The kind I can’t tell you about.”
Sweat ran down my side into the bandage around my wound, which was aching. I shifted, trying to relieve the throb.
“I heard you got sliced open the other night,” Rabbit asked, pointing his can at me.
“How’d you hear about that?” Ben asked.
“I have my sources,” Rabbit said. “Sounded like you all had a real trailer park special the other night, some bitch shot her husband.”
Show him nothing. Not one thing.
Because there was no telling what Rabbit knew.
Out of the corner of my eye I watched Ben take a drink of his beer, like nothing at all was wrong.
“You guys never lived in a trailer park, did you?” Rabbit asked.
I shook my head. “We had an apartment out on Olive.”
“Yeah, I remember that place. Your mom threw some fucking raging parties there. You know,” Rabbit said, draining the last of his b
eer, “my parents were nothing special. My dad was a drunk who liked to hit us and my mom was the fucking doormat he wiped his feet on, but they were better than the folks you had. That’s for damn sure. That mom of yours—”
Rabbit took his empty can and stepped on it, the metal crunching under his boot.
Ben flinched next to me. “I gotta use the can,” he said, and leaned hard on the table to get to his feet. Rabbit and I did nothing to help him, and he slowly shuffled into his trailer.
“The old man don’t look so hot,” Rabbit said. He reached into the case of beer for another can and offered it to me. “He used to be the toughest brother around. I watched him once, just fucking slice this dude open, balls to—”
“What are you doing here, Rabbit?” I asked.
“A guy can’t catch up with old friends?”
“We weren’t friends. So you can drop the act.”
And just like that, the smile left his face. And those eyes, those hard, mean eyes, they got harder. “You know where your brother is?”
“I got no clue.”
“See,” he said, pointing at me again, “I think you’re lying. I know Max was here a few nights ago.”
“I didn’t see him. Max stopped being my problem a long time ago.”
“Well, I’m making him your problem.” Rabbit leapt to his feet and I got to mine. Too fast and the world swam around me, but I kept myself rock solid. “He’s been missing for three days. Everyone thinks he’s split. Like…for good. And we got this deal happening, and the bat-shit-crazy parties involved won’t deal with anyone but Max.”
“I still don’t understand what this has to do with me.”
“You’re going to find him. Make him come back.”
“I haven’t talked to Max in nine years.”
“Well, I figure there’s no time like the present to get in touch.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and pressed it against my chest. His touch made my skin crawl and I grabbed the paper, shaking him off.
“That’s the last number I had for him,” Rabbit said.
I looked down at the numbers. “And you think…what? I call him and he’ll answer? Call me back? Come back here just because I ask him to? He forgot all about me.”