When my mother was gone she opened the folder she carried and said, “Who all lives here in the home?”
“Me, my mom and dad, that’s it.” But she could move in any time.
“And your father is Joe Turner?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She gave me a weird look, kind of like she had a bad taste in her mouth. I wasn’t sure if it was because I called her ma’am, because my father was Joe Turner or both.
“Have you been looking for a job?”
“Well, I was actually thinking about going back to school.”
And helping out in my dad’s biker bar, which was a known hang out for most of the felons in the county. Oh and taking rides out to warehouses that were probably hideouts for drugs and guns.
She raised an eyebrow and for a second I was worried that she was reading my mind.
“You need to decide soon. Sitting around doing nothing every day will get you into trouble quicker than anything. But I guess you know that since you spent most of your time in the SHU.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. No weird look this time so the other one was definitely about my dad.
“Are there any weapons in the house?”
“My dad has a gun safe, but they’re all legal and registered.”
“To him?” Again, the look.
“Uh, I guess probably to my mom.” Shit! My dad had been off parole for a long time, but I guess since he was convicted of a felony that would mean he was not supposed to have guns. This was all new to me. I really hated being forced to think like a convicted felon.
“I know your CCI went over all of this before your release, but I’m going to touch on some of the things here that are pretty common reasons why a parolee can be found in violation, okay? I don’t want you saying later that I didn’t tell you something.”
Her beauty was quickly fading under the glare of her talking about me going back to prison.
I swallowed and said, “Okay.”
“You understand that your residence and your personal possessions can be searched at any time of day or night without reason and without a warrant?”
“Yes.”
“You understand that if you want to leave the county, it has to be approved by me and so you know, it would have to be a pretty damn good reason for me to approve it?”
“Okay.”
“If you get a job or start school, you will have three days to let me know.”
“Okay.”
“If you travel more than fifty miles from your home, it will need to be approved by me.”
“Okay.”
“You cannot be around guns or things that look like real guns, bullets or any other weapons. What that means is if you’re going to stay here, your….mother will have to get rid of her guns or at least store them in a place that is not your residence. You will have a week to sort that out and when I come back I’ll expect them to be out of the house.”
Shit! My dad was going to have a fit. “Okay.”
“No knives with blades over two inches either, unless it’s a kitchen knife and then it should be in your kitchen.”
“Okay.”
She looked at me, long and hard. I was actually starting to sweat under her gaze before she spoke again.
“Listen, Dax, I do what I do to help people, believe it or not. My one true goal is to keep you out of prison and make you a productive member of society. I look at the fact that you had no priors, no juvenile record and you were an honor student before this happened and I would like to think that you were at least trying to break the mold that being Joe Turner’s son poured around you. I have to tell you that I wish you had somewhere else to go, somewhere else to live. I don’t know what your relationship is with Joe and I don’t know if what I’m saying is going to piss you off. The truth is I don’t give a shit if it does. Whether you admit it or deny it or don’t want to hear it, you and I both know that if you continue to hang out with your father and his friends your freedom will be tenuous at best.”
I wasn’t pissed. She didn’t say anything I didn’t already know to be true. But I didn’t have a job, any money or anywhere else to go.
“I’ll make sure the guns are gone and I will be looking for a job and an apartment.”
“Good,” she said. “As long as we have the same goals in mind we’ll get along fine.”
“As long as that goal is keeping me out of prison, then yes, we have the same one.”
I walked her to the door and after I closed it behind her I turned to see my mom standing in front of me.
“I’ll call your father and have him send some of the boys over to get the safe. They can keep it at the club.”
“I’m sorry about all of this, Mom.”
She came over and put her hand on the side of my face. She and I never talked about why she wouldn’t leave him. It was one thing that was never on the table.
But today she said, “Stop apologizing to me, Dax. I should have taken you away from all of this long ago. I didn’t, so now you have to live with the fallout. I am going to do whatever it takes to make sure the consequences you suffered already were the only ones that you’ll have to suffer and I don’t care how pissed off it makes your father.”
“I got lucky the day they handed out mothers, you know that?”
She blushed and patted the side of my face. She sighed and went back to cleaning the house or whatever it was she was doing. The dynamics of our family were seriously screwed up, but at least I always knew that she loved me.
I showered and headed out. I hit a few auto parts stores and picked up applications. I was sure if I asked, Olivia’s uncle would hire me, but there was already enough awkwardness going around. When I ran out of places to get an application from, I headed for The Smoke Joint. I knew my parole agent literally just told me to stay away from those guys, but the thought of sitting in my mother’s house doing nothing for the rest of the day was almost equivalent to the thought of going back to prison.
I spent the early part of the afternoon helping the guys do some modifications to a few of the bikes. It passed the time a lot more constructively than watching reruns or daytime programming. My dad was there and he was his usual gruff self. He didn’t mention the guns or the safe so I didn’t know if my mom had talked to him about it yet or not. I figured that was a conversation best left alone until he brought it up.
Terrance had been making himself scarce lately and I was grateful for that too. I guessed one of these days we might have to continue that conversation we touched on that first night. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I just couldn’t stand the way that he and Olivia both wanted to keep making excuses, trying to explain it to me. The simple fact was that I wasn’t around so the two of them got busy. For some reason that was a bigger slight coming from my best friend than it was from my ex-girlfriend.
I was getting hungry so I headed toward the kitchen to see if I could find Cookie or something he may have cooked up and left behind. I was surprised when I found my mother.
My mother pretty much steered clear of the bar and the club unless there was something going on that either forced her to be there or that she wanted to be there for like a birthday party or an anniversary party. She was still the Queen of the Joint no matter how few and far between her visits were. When she walked in even the old timers jumped to attention and she would always put everyone to work. She was gracious about it and always thanked them all profusely, but there was never any doubt in anyone’s mind that they would do whatever she asked of them.
I knew something was up when I found her and Cookie whipping up a feast in the kitchen.
“Hey, Mom, what’s going on?” I asked, giving her a kiss on the cheek and sticking my fingers in a bowl of freshly-made mashed potatoes.
“Oh nothing,” she said as she slapped my hand away. “Cookie and I just had some new recipes we wanted to try out.”
I doubted her sincerity, but I let it go. “Good, is any of it ready? I’m starving.” Cookie was frying up some chic
ken and my mom was making gravy. I spotted a platter of ribs that looked done on the far counter and headed toward them.
“Only take one, Dax, they’re for later.”
With my mouth already full of barbecue ribs I said, “I thought you were just trying out recipes.”
“We are, but we’re going to serve them for dinner later. I don’t want them all picked at.”
“Okay, Mom.”
I grabbed another rib and I wondered out to the garage and found my dad and Blake shooting a game of pool. I joined in, after I put up my fifty bucks of course. My dad didn’t do anything that didn’t involve money. It was actually my mother’s fifty bucks. All the money I had in my bank accounts at the time of my arrest had been seized by the State for restitution. My mom had paid for my attorney. I had told her I would just use a public defender, but she wouldn’t hear of it…for all the good it ended up doing.
While my dad was taking a shot Blake asked me, “Have you had much time to catch up with Terrance?”
You had to understand the mentality of the club to understand why no one seemed to get that I might be pissed at Terrance these days. If she was your legal wife, nobody even looked sideways at her. No one would ever consider approaching my mother and if they did, they would have hell to pay from my dad no matter how much he screwed around on her. If you introduced her as your Old Lady, that was as good as putting a ring on her finger too. She was off-limits while you were with her and shunned when you left her. That part put the legal wife one rung above her.
If my dad and my mom had ever split up, she would still be royalty and the guys would still be expected to treat her as such. But, if she was just a girlfriend and you didn’t make it clear she was hands-off, those guys did a lot of sharing. It was kind of gross, if you asked me, but that was their life. When Olivia and I were together, I only brought her there with me maybe twice. I guessed Terrance didn’t mind bringing her around. Maybe she wasn’t just his girlfriend. Maybe she had reached Old Lady status. It was a weird system, but if you hung around those guys it was one you were forced to live with.
“No, I haven’t had much of a chance yet,” was all I told him.
There was no point in getting into an argument with Blake over it. Terrance didn’t have a mother. He and Blake were a lot closer than my dad and I were because of it. My mother was the closest thing to a mother Terrance ever had. I had wondered once or twice since I got back why my mom didn’t tell me about Terrance and Olivia. I couldn’t hold it against her though, during that time everything had fallen on her shoulders. It wouldn’t have done any good for me to know about them while I was sitting in the Bay. I’m sure my mom knew that.
“Did you have much trouble with the gangs in there?” he asked next. He was the first one of them to ask me anything about my time inside.
“Not really,” I told him honestly. “They kept us pretty segregated.”
“In gen pop?” he asked, referring to general population where everyone was supposed to get along with everyone. I got the feeling he was fishing now.
“No, I spent a lot of my time in the SHU.”
Blake laughed and said, “You don’t say? Why is that?”
“Because I didn’t play nice in gen pop,” I told him.
He laughed again and my dad who was taking a shot again smiled. Go figure, it was the only thing I had said in four days that had made him proud. The truth was, I had just refused to segregate with the Aryans, but that didn’t make the blacks and Mexicans like me any better so when they wanted to fight with me, I had no backup and I had to learn to fight as dirty as the rest of them to get along. I got caught with a shank in my cell. They sent me to Administrative Segregation, which I hated. There were no windows and no cellmates to talk to and no television. I was going to lose my mind there, so I attacked a CO. I didn’t hurt him, just pissed him off. That was what got me into the SHU and that was where I spent the duration of my sentence.
While we played, the other club members started showing up and a few of the nomads I had known years back. I figured whatever my mom was cooking up was for me and as much as I hated being the center of attention, I resolved to play nice and let everything run smoothly for her sake.
After we had been shooting pool for about an hour, my mom stuck her head out and said, “Joe, can I see you for a minute?”
Joe was my dad’s given name and my mother was the only one in the world who wouldn’t get a bullet in her brain for using it. He was okay with Bull, which was what everyone called him, but Joe was a no no. Sometimes I thought maybe that was why my mother used it, just to prove she could.
“Yeah, sure.” He sat his pool stick down and went inside. After a few minutes he came back out and told the other guys, “Hey, can I see you guys in here for a sec? Dax you go on and take your turn, we’ll be right back.”
I didn’t know how my father got away with the things he did, he was a terrible actor. I guessed it was a good thing he was smart. It was funny the things my mother could still make him do though.
Not long after that, they finally called me in and everyone yelled, “Surprise!” For my mother’s benefit, I acted like I was. It was a welcome home party in my honor.
My mom and Cookie had outdone themselves on the food. There was fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn on the cob, ribs seeped in barbecue sauce and beans. I was in Heaven. The food sucked in prison and there was never enough of it.
My mom also made a big ass cake that said, “Welcome home, Dax.” It was like I had been away to war or something. In some small way, I guess that I had. There were close to a hundred people there and everyone seemed to be in a good mood and getting along. Since my mother was there, all of the guys had toned down on the making out with biker babes and were just talking, laughing, dancing, drinking and having an all-around good time.
Terrance and Olivia were there too, but I did my best to act like I didn’t notice. I had actually enjoyed talking to her the other day, but it was hard to look at her lips and not want to kiss them. It was hard to think about Terrance kissing them and not punch him in the mouth.
“Hey, boy, wanna throw a dart or two?” It was Buster Balls. I looked at his swollen knuckles curled around a dart and I wondered if we should clear the place out first. He could have likely taken out someone’s eye.
“Sure, Buster. Don’t hustle me though.”
The old man cackled. Sometimes I wondered how old he really was. He told me sixty-nine when I asked, but he had been saying that since I was fourteen at least. He hadn’t been able to hold on to the handlebars and operate the hand brakes and clutch on his bike for years because of his arthritis. I was surprised to see that with the darts, his aim really wasn’t half bad.
We took a break for another beer and I opened his and handed it to him.
He thanked me and said, “You know, I did some time I didn’t have coming once…a long time ago.”
That simple statement was huge to me. It was the first acknowledgment from anyone besides me that I was serving someone else’s time.
I threw my dart. I looked at him and said, “What did you do time for, Buster?”
“Same thing you did,” he said, tossing his dart. It barely stuck to the outside circle of the target. “Drug trafficking and possession with intent. I did five years, but that was almost twenty years ago and they were tougher on drug crimes back then.”
Interested, I asked him, “So when you say you did someone else’s time you mean you weren’t guilty of the crime you got charged with?”
“Yep, that’s exactly it. I was set up, like you.”
“Who set you up?” I asked him.
“The old club president, the one before your daddy. His name was Raymond Winkle. He was a tough old bastard.”
“Why would your own club set you up?”
“You’ve heard how the inner city gangs use kids to do their killings and their drug running, right? Well, I wasn’t a kid. I was twenty-one at the time, but I was squeaky clean. I
didn’t have a record and I was the only one of them who didn’t. I thought we were goin’ for a ride. But I found out when the State police stopped us that we were moving a few kilos of coke and we were movin’ ’em in my saddle bags. I had no idea them drugs was there, but since I refused to roll on anyone else, I took the fall.”
It sounded eerily like my situation. I had spent two years thinking that maybe the shit was put in my bags at the bar we had stopped at in Barstow. I always knew I was set up, obviously, but I thought or at least I hoped that it was by a rival club; one that had a grudge against my dad for whatever reason. Buster had me thinking differently. What if my own father had set me up? That would just clinch him for father of the year, that’s for sure.
I had been in college at the time. My dad and the other guys in the club used to bug me all the time about taking over the bar. Bartending at The Smoke Joint wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t like anyone popped in and ordered a Sex on the Beach. It was straight up beer, vodka or whisky. They thought I could do that until I finished school and then when I had a business degree I could take it over, make improvements. I told them all, more than once, that once I finished school I was getting as far away from the club as I could. The only thing that would bring me back would be my mom, but she had been the first one to understand me leaving and she encouraged me my whole life to do so.
Would my father go to such an extreme to keep me in the club? With two felonies on my record no one was going to hire me. But that was ridiculous; my father couldn’t have controlled the cops pulling us over and searching the bikes. Could he?
That didn’t mean that he didn’t set me up though. Maybe I was like what Buster said, the guy who was carrying just in case they got stopped. I looked at Buster and saw what the rest of my life was going to be like. I suddenly saw red.
I looked across the room at my dad. He was talking to Bo and his old lady. Bo had a kid named Mickey who was about twelve. He hung around the club a lot and Bo’s old lady didn’t quite seem smart enough to protect her son from this life. She seemed happy as could be to be standing with her old man. In twenty years that would be Mickey and his boy would be playing in the back. It was a vicious cycle, one that I had tried to break.
Dirty SEAL (A Navy SEAL Romance) (The Maxwell Family) Page 73