by Nicole Fox
With that he stands up and goes to the door, his men following him with their backs turned, facing us, their guns gluing us to our seats.
“Don’t follow me,” Big Loco says. “I have eyes everywhere.”
Chapter Fourteen
Fury
I have eyes everywhere.
Those words echo around my mind as Gloria storms around my apartment, breaking everything in sight. She’s already slashed two of the couch cushions apart with a kitchen knife and now she’s in the kitchen, tearing the drawers from their bearings and tossing them to the floor, screaming and crying at the same time. Eyes everywhere. The mole, but not the Kid, ’cause the Kid didn’t have all the information. Who, then?
My attention is pulled to Gloria when she marches into the bedroom, goes under the bed, and takes out a pistol.
I jog over quickly and take it from her.
She slaps me across the face and stamps her foot. “That man will never be Jimmy’s father!” she snarls. “Never! Never! He called him Samuel, Jack! Samuel! His name is Jimmy!”
“I know,” I whisper, trying to hold her
She wriggles out of my grip. “Don’t touch me! What are we doing? Why are we here? We should be chasing them.”
“We are,” I assure her. “Butcher and—”
“Butcher!” she snaps, slapping me again. I take the hits without flinching. “Yeah, because Butcher was so much help last time!”
“He’s just as pissed as us,” I say. “Okay, no, not just as pissed, ’cause it ain’t his boy. But he don’t like being bested like that. He’ll find ’em, properly find ’em this time, and we’ll go after them.”
“Why aren’t you with him?”
“I should be,” I tell her. “But I can’t leave you here like this. I’m afraid you might hurt yourself. It’s a miracle you haven’t already.” I wave a hand in the direction of the living room, where the destruction is.
“I don’t even know you!” she cries, throwing herself onto the bed and weeping viciously. “Who are you?” she snarls. “For all I know you could be in league with him! Maybe you wanted this deal just as much as he did!”
I sit on the bed next to her, my heart aching like it hasn’t—like I haven’t let it—in years.
I never talk about my past, but suddenly I find myself talking, leading her into the dark depths of my soul
***
When I was a kid I never knew it was strange, what my parents did to me. It was painful and I was scared all the time, but I just guessed that life was like that, that every kid went through it, for some reason I couldn’t even guess at.
Mom and Dad would drag me down to the basement, past the cobwebs and over creaking steps, to an old mattress-less bedframe in the corner. It was wiry and rusted. It looked to me like a hundred dead spiders woven together. Dad was a tree of a man; at least that’s what he seemed like at the time. He was six-foot-tall with a massive beer gut and graying hair combed over a vein-covered head. He would lift me by one hand and throw me onto the bedframe, and then Mom would come over and tie me down with rope, going about it all the same way she went about unloading the groceries.
Then they would beat me, one at a time, with whatever came to hand. It started with belts and their fists. Dad got an old inner tube from his bicycle, cut it at one end so that it unraveled like a black-skinned snake, and whipped me with that. I stared at the walls as it happened, counting the cracks in the brickwork. Usually they stopped by the time I had counted fifty cracks but if Dad was in a bad mood, I could get as high as two hundred. Once I counted four hundred and fifty-two cracks before it ended.
“Tell me I’m nothing,” he would grumble, striking me sometimes lazily, sometimes brutally. “They all think they’re so special, don’t they, because they went to some fancy-ass school and got some fancy-ass schooling. Think they can talk to me like I’m beneath them, somehow, like I’m not worth their time. They’re fools.”
“Oh, they are,” she would agree. She’d always agree with him, no matter what he said. It didn’t make any difference that he was a plumber who never tried to make himself presentable, who never learned how to make folks like him. It was the world that was to blame, never him. Mom would strike harder than Dad most of the time. I figured out early on it was because she hated Dad as much as she hated the people Dad spoke about. But she couldn’t leave or maybe one day the bedframe would become her prison, too. “They don’t deserve somebody of your caliber, Andrew. Stop squirming, Jack!” she’d suddenly break out, whipping me even harder. “You know I hate when you do that.”
It was true. I was nothing but a canvas to my mother, a canvas for scars and cuts and bruises. Sometimes when it was over and Dad was upstairs, drinking beer and watching football, she’d keep me tied to the frame, kneel down next to me and trail her fingers along the cuts the same way a carver might trail her fingers along a particularly impressive piece of work.
And she’d speak to me.
“I never wanted you. I never even wanted a child. I was one hell of a dancer before you were born. Modern dance. I was taking a course down at the community college. And then you had to come along and ruin it all. Your father loved my dancing, but once I was pregnant, that was that. You know how he is. So I had to drop out and get fat, so fat I couldn’t even try to dance, and what do I get for my troubles? An ungrateful little brat, that’s what.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy.”
“You’re sorry.” She snorted. “You’re sorry. What do you want me to do with that?”
“Your hair looks lovely today, Mommy.”
In truth it was long and greasy and stained, just like the rest of her: tongue stained with nicotine, teeth stained with coffee, nails stained with grime, face stained with poorly-applied makeup.
“I know.” She tossed her greasy hair. “But don’t change the subject. Why don’t you do it one day, huh?”
“Do what, Mommy?”
“You know what!” she snarled, slapping me between the shoulder blades. “Find a very tall building, over ten floors tall, and go to the top of it and throw yourself off. Couldn’t you do that for me, dear?”
“But that would kill me, Mommy.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “It would.”
Later, when I got bigger and tougher and started hanging around with the smoking kids and the violent kids, they stopped taking me down to the basement. But the abuse didn’t stop. I was two inches older than my old man at fourteen but that didn’t stop him from trying to pick a fight with me, especially since he knew I’d never really hurt him. That was because part of me still loved the sick bastards. I was confused about the whole thing. Still somehow thought it was my fault.
One day I was walking toward the door to meet some pals and drink some beers when Dad stepped out in front of me, even fatter than he’d been when I was a little kid. He spread his arms, chest heaving and wheezing, and stared me straight in the eyes.
“Think you’re tough, do you, bringing those little sluts around here when we’re at work?”
I looked down at his hand: purple panties, my girlfriend’s.
“I’ve never seen them before,” I lied on instinct.
“Never seen them before,” he scoffed, balling them into his fist. He brought the fist to his nose and sniffed, closing his eyes like a wine taster. “What sort of whore wears panties like this at fourteen?”
“But she’s nineteen,” I said.
“Oh, so she’s a child molester, is she?”
That really pissed me off because I’d convinced myself I was in love with the nineteen year old. I took a step forward and stared into his eyes, which were the same damn shade as mine.
“Don’t say that again,” I muttered, terrified beyond belief. It was the first time I had stood up to him like this.
“Or what?” he whispered. Then he exploded. “Or what?”
He caught me with a sucker punch across the jaw and then smashed me over the head with a half-full beer can. I grabbed his arms, tryi
ng to restrain him, but he just bit my finger and then spit blood in my face, took my leg out with a sweep and dove on me as I fell to the floor. He drove his knee into my chest, dribbling all over me as he waled on my face.
“Not so tough now, are you?” he snapped. “Little fuckin’ freak!”
I could have kneed him in the back and caused him some pretty serious harm, but I knew he had a bad back and my warped sense of love for him stopped me from doing it. So I just lay there and waited for him to stop hitting me, and then I got up and dragged myself outside and slumped down on the curb. I looked back at the house. A trail of blood followed me, and there was a pool of blood between my feet.
That was when Jackson Caw pulled up, though I didn’t know him then. He was like a knight, astride his bike, looking down at me with a crooked smile. “You all right, kid?” he asked.
***
By the time I’m finished, a couple of tears are rolling down my cheeks. I make to wipe them away but then Gloria does it with her lips, kissing them into nothingness. She’s in my lap, her arms wrapped around my shoulders, sobbing softly. She kisses me again and then sits up and presses herself firmly against me.
“Oh, Jack,” she whispers. “That’s horrible.”
“Yeah,” I mutter. “I guess it is.”
“I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
“It’s in the past now. Don’t pay it any mind. You said you didn’t know me. Well, that’s me, Gloria. That’s where I came from.”
“Where are they? Your parents?”
“Dead,” I tell her. “They died a few years back.”
She swallows. “I bet that was hard: them dying without reconciling.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “But life is hard, ain’t it?”
“Thank you for sharing that with me.” She opens her mouth. Closes it. Blinks rapidly.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I have something to tell you, too.”
She tells it quick, rushing her words out.
***
She was in the back of the car with her brother, Jimmy, and her mom and dad. Her dad was driving and they were a good family, a family that loved each other even if they had their ups and downs. They were nothing like my family; she was loved, and maybe that was worse.
There was nobody to blame. It was a rainy day and her dad was driving the speed limit, being cautious, and then it was like the car was flicked by a giant. It flipped around the corner and slammed into a tree, tipped upside down and crushed into the ground. It was a pancake and her mother and father and little brother were all dead, lying around her, and all she could do was hang there upside down and wait for somebody to rescue her. When they did, they called her a miracle. She was mostly uninjured except for a few cosmetic cuts and bruises. But she was alone now, without family, without loved ones.
She didn’t care if she was a miracle.
***
We hold each other for almost an hour after that. There ain’t anything sexual in it. Our bodies are warm, our breath warm. I keep my phone next to the bed as I hug her close to me, breathing in the scent of her.
She drifts off to sleep just as my cell phone buzzes from the dresser.
It’s Butcher.
Chapter Fifteen
Fury
“Holy shit,” Butcher says, sounding crazed. “Holy shit, Fury. Holy-fuckin’-shit.”
“What is it?” I ask urgently. “Don’t keep me in goddamned suspense.”
“I can’t tell you over the phone.”
“What?” I snap. “Don’t call me up with that shit. Do you have news about Jimmy or not? Do you know where Big Loco is? Do you know where they’re hiding out? Fuckin’ hell, Butch, speak!”
“I can’t tell you over the phone!” he snarls. “This is big, Fury, this is really fuckin’ big, and I know it sounds paranoid but I’m afraid if I tell you over the phone, we’ll never see each other again.”
“The fuck are you talkin’ about? Do you think your phone’s tapped?”
“Not mine,” he says darkly.
“Mine?” I laugh. “Who the hell’d tap my phone? Who even could tap my phone? I’m careful about that. I ain’t let the Kid near it, if that’s what you’re worried about, or any other outlaw either. You’re safe, Butch. You can talk.”
“Not on the phone!” he insists. “Meet me at the place we talk about women.”
He hangs up. I stare down at the cell phone for a few moments, chewing the inside of my cheek. I’ve never heard Butcher like that before. He’s a calm man. He never gets melodramatic or ridiculous. I sigh, drop my phone into my pocket, and scrawl a note for Gloria. Then I place the pistol on the bedside table and lock all the windows and the front door, and then, for safety, I call a brother and tell him to watch my apartment building. Once that’s all taken care of I head toward the tracks, which is pretty clearly the place Butcher was talking about.
As I ride, I think. I think on Jimmy and I think on Gloria, think on sharing my past with her and how it doesn’t feel strange or like a disaster. I always thought it would be a disaster, that my life would implode the second I let that shit out. Maybe Gloria’s different. She’s the mother of my child. I reckon that’ll help some. But mostly I think on Butcher and how fuckin’ weird he’s being.
I speed toward the tracks, cutting more’n one red light, and then drive under the gate and stop next to the line.
I’m there for at least two hours, pacing up and down, calling Butcher over and over again.
It goes to voicemail every time. “Listen, Butch, whatever the fuck you’re doing, you need to answer this goddamn phone before I get really goddamn angry. You don’t call a man up and tell him you have massive news and then fuckin’ dodge his calls. Goddamn!”
I call the Kid.
“Fury?” he answers tentatively. I never call him.
“Where the hell is Butcher?” I snap, though I don’t mean to snap.
“Butcher? I don’t know. I thought he went to meet you.”
“Level with me, Kid,” I say. “The fuck is goin’ on with you? How’d you let Big Loco know we were coming, eh?”
“I didn’t,” he says, sounding hurt. “I swear I didn’t, Fury. I’m loyal. Maybe I get a bit scared sometimes—okay, I’ll admit that—but I’m loyal. I’d never let him know we were coming. I’d never betray the club like that.”
“So where’s Butch, then?”
“I don’t know!” he cries.
I hang up the phone and pace up and down, muttering to myself. Two hours wasted here which means two hours not looking for Jimmy, which means Big Loco could be any damn place. This is a real goddamn mess. I’ll have to go back to my place, get all my cash, and pay the Marine a ransom to pull out all the stops. And this time, when he finds Big Loco, there ain’t gonna be any goddamn playing. I’ll blow them all to fuckin’ pieces.
I’m on my bike when Jackson rides through the gate, steps from his bike, and holds his hands up to me. I turn off the ignition and join him. He lights a cigarette and smokes half of it down with an air of desperation, one big puff, and then he reaches into his pocket and takes out a hip flask.
“Jack,” he says eventually.
“Where’s Butch, sir?” I ask. “I was supposed to meet him here. He said he had big news.”
“I know,” he mutters.
“You know? How?”
He flinches, takes another drink. “He told me,” he says.
But something about it seems off to me. I tell myself I’m just being paranoid.
“He told me about what happened with Big Loco, too.” He strolls over to the tracks, lighting another cigarette with the end of his nearly-smoked one. “I know this must be hard for you, Jack, that being your kid and all. But—”
“But what?” I growl, when he trails off. “But what, Jackson?”
“Isn’t that funny?” He doesn’t turn around, just stares at the tracks. “I’m Jackson and you’re Jack, but Jackson means son of Jack, so really it ought to be the oth
er way around. Because you’re my son, lad. You’ve always been my son.”
“Sure, sir. Okay. But where’s Butch? What’s going on?”
“You’ve had a tough time of it, Jack. I reckon what happened to you, day after long day, would’ve broken most men. But you’re stronger than that. Stronger than most. You’re stronger than me. I’m certain of that. You’re the strongest man I’ve ever met, Jack.”