Saving Axe

  if it had just happened yesterday. They assumed I was a child.

  “It was years ago,” Stan said. “But it was my responsibility.”

  “No, Mr. Austin, it wasn’t,” I said. “And April, it’s fine, really. You’re not overstepping anything.” April looked confused, while Stan sat across from me, studying his cup of coffee. I only realized then how much guilt he carried with him for my family’s deaths, and it made me feel sad. I wondered if Cade was carrying the same burden.

  Cade cleared his throat and looked up at me. “June,” he started.

  “No,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with asking about it, and I want to clear the air. April, when I was seventeen, my parents died. They were killed in an accident, by a drunk driver. The driver," I said, leaning forward as I looked at Mr. Austin, "was one of the ranch hands who worked here, for Mr. Austin. My sister and him had a thing going on, that Mr. Austin didn't know anything about." I emphasized the words, trying to make it clear to Stan that he wasn't at fault.

  "Anyway, my sister went out to a party with him, and my parents went out looking for her. It was bad luck, what happened. And my sister felt guilty. She killed herself later."

  I watched Cade and Stan, neither of whom would look at me. "No one was responsible for what happened, except the ranch hand, and he’s dead. My sister was running wild back then, and even if anyone had known, she wouldn’t have listened to anyone. It was just how she was.”

  “I’m sorry,” April said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “But it wasn’t your fault, and it wasn’t anyone else's, including Mr. Austin or Cade’s."

  April averted her gaze. It was shit like this that made telling this story difficult. People heard it, and it was such a tragedy that they wouldn't look me in the eye because because they were so uncomfortable. I hated that more than anything.

  "Everything about what happened was senseless," I said. "But it's even more senseless if you all are still taking responsibility for it."

  I looked directly at Cade. I knew he blamed himself. It was the kind of man he was, always accepting responsibility for others. It was part of his nature.

  “It’s good of you to say that, June,” Stan said. “But -"

  “No,” I said. “There are no ‘buts’. This was never your fault. It wasn’t Cade’s. And it wasn’t mine."

  The room was silent, and the air felt thick. I wasn’t sure what else to say. There had been so much that had been unspoken, for so long.

  It was late when I finally left Stan’s house, and I’d walked a few feet across the pasture when I heard the screen door slam, and footsteps behind me.

  “June,” Cade called, jogging up behind me. “I’ll walk you home.”

  “It’s a hundred yards away. I don't need an escort," I said. I couldn't help but add, "Certainly not one who thinks he's going to come over and I'm going to beg him to screw me."

  Cade took my forearm, and I turned to look up at him, surprised by his touch. "June," he said.

  "What?" I forced myself not to think about the heat that ran through my body where he touched me.

  "What you said tonight, about your sister, your parents -”

  "I don't want your dad to blame himself." Or you to blame yourself.

  Cade nodded, his expression serious. "My dad," he said. "It tore him up, what happened to your sister."

  “I know,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t know back then. I realize now.”

  “It ate at him,” Cade said.

  We weren't just talking about his dad.

  "It wasn't his fault," I said. "He couldn't have known about the ranch hand. And my sister, you know how she was."

  "You know how my father is," Cade said. "How he's always been. Protective."

  His eyes burned with intensity, and I suddenly became aware of the tension between us. I stepped away from him, away from his touch.

  "Well, I just wanted to clear the air," I said.

  “Junebug,” he said. “It wasn’t just him that was torn up.”

  “I know, Cade," I said, before I turned and walked away.

  Axe

  I walked away from June's house, filled with this strange mixture of emotions I couldn't place. What June had said about her parents, about her sister - that it wasn't my dad's fault. That part was true. But it was mine. She thought I was blaming myself for no reason. She didn't know everything. If she did, she wouldn't be able to do anything except blame me.

  She didn't know that I'd caught her sister and the ranch hand, walked in on them together in the barn. She'd only just turned eighteen and he was older, too old for her. I sent her home, warned him to stay away from him.

  But I should have had a more physical conversation with him. If I'd have run him out of town, none of the rest of it would have ever happened. He may have been older than I was, but I should have beat the living shit out of him right then. Everything would be different.

  Not only for them, but for June and I.

  We might have ended up in West Bend, running the ranch, a couple of kids in tow. We might have grown old together, the way we'd talked about.

  Back then, I'd thought she was it. The one.

  Back then. Who the fuck was I kidding? She was the one.

  She always had been, from the very beginning.

  People say you don't know yourself well enough when you're in high school to know if you want to get married. They say you'll change so much you'll just wind up growing apart.

  The part about changing was true. I sure as shit wasn't the same person I was in high school. But growing away from June?

  I had been trying to do that for years, and I couldn't.

  No matter how hard I tried.

  And it was destroying me, eating me up from the inside.

  Standing there with her outside the house, I could barely think. I was the one who wanted to beg her. I wanted to grab her, throw her over my shoulder, carry her inside the house. It was painful standing there, but not just because of what she was talking about. She was a painful reminder of who I used to be.

  Of who I could have been, with her.

  Of what I would never have now.

  That night, I slept fitfully, the way I always did. But it wasn't the dreams of Iraq that haunted me. It was dreams of June.

  The next afternoon, I walked down the sidewalk, headed for the general store. MacKenzie wanted cowboy boots, and I was going to get her a real pair. She'd ridden one of the horses this morning, squealing with delight perched high on top of the saddle. I figured I'd make her day if I could find her a little pair of boots all her own.

  Maybe I was getting soft in my old age, but that kid killed me. Having her here was like getting to peek into another life, the one I would have had if I'd have stayed here.

  I lingered on the sidewalk. It was amazing, how much the town had changed. And how little had changed, all the same. Funny how that worked. The old barber shop was there, with its same outdated sign, repainted a hundred times, the cracks showing through the layers of paint. There was a new sporting goods store, with expensive gear. Catering to the tourist crowd, I supposed. And Nina's coffee shop was still there. I glanced in the window as I passed by, and saw her.

  June.

  No, not her.

  Them.

  Her and a sheriff. I stood there, staring through the window like a crazy person, but neither of them noticed. Shit. June and a fucking cop.

  I squinted. It took me a minute to recognize him. Fucking Jed Easton. He looked different, but it was him. He'd always had a thing for June, back when we were kids.

  I turned around, fists clenched, headed back in the direction of my dad's truck. I needed to leave now, before I did something colossally stupid, something that would jeopardize Crunch and his family. I needed to think about them, not myself.

  Fucking Jed. So he was the town sheriff now.

  And June.

  My mind swirled with possibilities. Would June be ratting us out to a cop? Or...was she d
ating him?

  I didn't know which alternative pissed me off more.

  “I’m going for a ride.” I stormed past my father on the way to the bedroom to change clothes. What I wanted was a fucking drink.

  Screw June and whatever it was she had going on with Jed back in town.

  "Cade." My dad stood in the bedroom doorway.

  "What?" The word came out as a snap, harsher than I intended.

  "Did something happen in town?"

  “No,” I said automatically. “Maybe. I don't know.”

  “Anything that’s going to affect that little girl in there?” he asked, referring to MacKenzie. My father was already protective of her, and I felt a pang of guilt that she was involved in all this club bullshit.

  “I don’t know, Pop,” I said. I could feel the blood pumping in my ears, and I could barely hear what he said above the din of my own blood pressure. All I knew was that I had the nearly irrepressible urge to throttle that Jed guy. "Do you know Jed Easton?"

  "Yep," he said. "Sheriff in town."

  "What do you know about him?”

  “Why are you asking?” My father's eyes narrowed, immediately suspect. I'm sure he thought I was asking for some reason that had to do with my criminal enterprises. My father thought I was scum of the earth, I knew it. I couldn't exactly fault him for thinking that way. Not when it was true.

  "June was at Nina's, having coffee with him."

  My father studied me. "Do you care because she was having coffee with a cop, or because she was having coffee with someone that wasn't you?"

  Screw my dad, too. I reached for my hat. "I need to get out of here."

  My dad nodded, a knowing look in his eyes. "Saddle up Moonie. She needs to be ridden."

  As I rode away from the house, I could feel myself start to calm down, the same way as when I rode the bike. That bike had been my saving grace too many times to count, a way to get away and leave it all behind.

  You can't run away from this, my dad had said when I'd joined the Marines. He didn't understand that I needed to get out of this town. It was filled with memories of her.

  Memories of my failure.

  My dad thought I had run to the Marines because of June. He didn't know it was also because of what I'd done. I'd kept that secret, about June's sister and the ranch hand. If I hadn't, if I'd have done something about it, they'd be alive right now.

  He didn't understand that I never wanted June to stay. If she stayed, she'd find out that I'd done nothing to stop what happened. She'd never forgive me.

  Joining the Marines was a way of atoning.

  How could I have known I'd wind up being a sniper?

  So much for atoning.

  I had a hell of a lot more to atone for now.

  I stopped at the ridge and dismounted, stood there with my hand on the horse, feeling her breath rise and fall, the warmth of her flank under my palm. For the very briefest of moments, I was sixteen again, standing on this ridge, imagining my life stretched out before me.

  Infinite possibilities and boundless optimism.

  Fuck if it ended up that way.

  Maybe I began my descent during the Marines, after all the bullshit deployments had finally eaten away at my soul. But I didn't go full fucking throttle into the abyss until I joined the Inferno. I was drifting, after I got out of the Marines. No, not drifting. I was fucking lost at sea with no rudder. No structure, no purpose. Just me and all the memories of the shit I'd done and seen. I was filled with rage, and no amount of talking about my feelings was going to change it. And I couldn't come home and face all the people who knew me, once upon a time. I couldn't face my dad, most of all.

  So I'd picked Los Angeles. I figured I'd always heard people talk about how soul-sucking it was. It would be a perfect fit for me, the man without a soul. I got a job as a supervisor at a warehouse. Turns out, being a supervisor at a warehouse is really fucking boring.

  So when one of my buddies introduced me to Blaze, Vice-President of the Inferno MC, it seemed like an ideal place for someone like me. I wasn't the only disillusioned veteran there. My buddy fell out while prospecting, but me? I went full monty, prospected and patched. Worked my way up pretty quick, too.

  Mad Dog seemed took a real shine to me, psychopath that he is. He liked that I’d killed before with no qualms, and guided my skills toward his particular need - club enforcer. It wasn't long before he got to trusting me. What he didn’t count on was that my policy was to never trust anyone, no matter the rank. I’d learned that when I was in the Marines.

  What I’d told my dad before, all that shit about brotherhood? Yeah, that sounded great. The problem was, it’s what I believed when I started, but I didn’t believe it anymore. Kind of hard to believe in that when your own brothers just tried to kill you. But I guess that’s been going on since the beginning of time, Cain and Abel and all that.

  And the past year had been the worst, all the drugs and booze and girls. None of that had really gotten to me before. But it had become harder and harder to keep my head above water. The worst of that shit was getting involved with Sam, a stripper with a hard core coke habit and a penchant for doing crazy shit.

  Three months ago was the end of that, thank God.

  ~ ~ ~

  Three months ago

  Los Angeles

  I rode in, past the gate guard, and could already see the clubhouse was busy, even though it was two in the morning. Bikes lined the parking lot, and I could hear the thumping of bass from the speakers inside before I’d even pulled off my helmet. I needed a party after this shitty week, even though really I didn’t want to deal with one.

  Inside, the place was torn up, par for the course on a party night. The clubhouse wasn’t exactly the highest quality establishment ever, and I hadn’t been enforcing good order and discipline as much as I used to, back a year or so ago. Mad Dog had let in a couple of guys who were shitbags, one who I thought was using more of the meth than he should be, and Blaze was distracted, gone to Stanford half the time, banging Dani.

  So parties, while they used to be just wild, had gotten out of control.

  I surveyed the room, taking in the chaos. One of the mamas, Deb, was bent over the pool table where a group of bikers were running a train on her. Deb was into that kind of thing, luckily, but I wasn’t sure this new group of assholes Mad Dog had recruited gave a shit if the female was into it or not, and that made me nervous.

  “Good to see you, brother,” Mad Dog said, clapping me on the shoulder as I walked inside. He reeked of cheap whiskey and cigarette smoke. I exhaled heavily. I was tired and didn’t want to deal with him tonight.

  “Yeah, Prez. You too.”

  “Been gone a while.”

  I shook my head. “Went out for a ride.”

  “Well,” he said. “You should be careful riding alone at night.” His voice sounded friendly, but nothing was ever really friendly with Mad Dog. There was always subtext.

  “I’m always careful,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, as long as you know where you got to come back to.” He sauntered off, back to the used up looking girl waiting for him. She giggled, tossing her bleached blonde hair over her shoulder and stumbling drunkenly into him before they staggered to the back room.