container of black ink. “But if we don’t do something, the threat never goes away.”
“Ain’t that the fucking truth,” I agreed. “I don’t wanna be looking over my shoulder, or Ti’s shoulder, for the rest of my fucking life.” I paused, taking another hit. I held it in as long as I could and released it with a small cough as my lungs fought to push the smoke back out. “You gotta do me a favor though, brother,” I said. “If nothing else, you gotta do this one fucking thing for me.”
“Anything,” King said, pressing on the foot peddle that brought his gun to life, buzzing louder and louder as he brought it to the spot behind my right ear.
“If I lose. If I… if he wins,” I said. I dug out the cash I had buried on the island. “I need you to use it to make sure Ti is taken care of.”
“Ain’t nothing gonna happen,” King said, pushing the ink into my skin.
“I hope not, but you gotta promise me,” I insisted, King needed to know how serious I was about this. If something did happen to me I needed to know that my girl was still be okay.
“I promise. She’ll be taken care of,” King said, “but you talk like I’m not going in with you.”
“You’re not,” I spat.
“Like fuck I’m not,” King argued, pressing the needle in harder to punctuate his point.
“Fucker,” I said. “I just mean that I need you to hang back a bit. We can’t both be six feet under.”
King dipped the gun back into the ink and wiped at the spot he’d just finished with a paper towel. “Ray knows everything. We have a contingency plan if something happens to me. Shit’s in place. Don’t worry about me or Ray or the kids or even Thia. Do you, man, and I’ll be there to watch your fucking back.” He held the side of my head down with his forearm. “Now sit fucking still or your girl is going to think I’m shit at this.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, mockingly, staring back up at the plastic hog’s head. I let the pain from the sting of the needle envelope me as I remembered a better time. Less threats. More fun.
More plastic hog’s heads.
“I still can’t believe she’s fucking gone,” I said, saying the same thing to King that I’d said to Ti after the funeral.
“I can’t either,” King said. “But what I really can’t believe is that she put up with shits like us.”
“Aint’ that the fucking truth. There was this one time, when I got suspended from school, just shortly before I dropped out entirely, the guidance counselor scheduled all the parent teacher conferences. When my time slot came up I knew it would be just me and the guidance counselor because I hadn’t even told my old man about it, not like he’d fucking show up if I had. But the second my ass hit the seat in his office, Grace burst through the door wearing her church clothes.”
“I didn’t know that,” King said, concentrating on my new ink.
I smiled, recalling the memory. “Yeah, and the cool part was that when he asked her who she was she looked at him like he should’ve already known. ‘I’m Mama Grace, of course,’” I said, mimicking Grace’s voice. “The thing about her that I always liked was that no one questioned her. She really hadn’t told the counselor shit, but he told her to take a seat anyways and off they went, talking about my fucking grades and shit like she was always meant to be the one there.”
King paused his gun. “Probably because she was.”
“Yeah man. She was.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Bear
Eighteen years old…
“You know, you should just give back your name now. Just hand it over. ’Cause with a name like Bear, you should be fucking happy to be in the woods. You should be rubbing your cock up against a fucking tree or something. Humping the dirt. Getting off on the wilderness or some shit, not moping around like I just fucked your golden retriever. So change your name to like…Ralph or something, and just be done with it. Embrace your inner vagina,” Preppy said, waving his hand around dismissively before laying on the ground with his ear to the dirt like he probably saw someone do in a movie.
Or YouTube.
That’s it. I made up my mind right then to destroy his fucking computer when the day was over. Sleep first. Destroy computer second. Then maybe he won’t be able to search for new ways to torment us and besides, a little less porn wouldn’t hurt the kid.
“It’s not the outdoors that’s pissing me off. It’s the fucking cunt of an hour,” I muttered, running my hand through my hair. Preppy rolled his eyes and parted the leaves of a tree that didn’t need to be parted with the machete he insisted on bringing.
“So why do they call you Bear?” Preppy asked. Grabbing a handful of dirt, he tossed it into the breeze and sniffed it before the wind blew it right in King’s face.
I was also canceling the Discovery Channel.
“Do you know?” Preppy asked King who ignored his question and growled while shaking the dirt from his shirt.
“You don’t want to know,” I said with a sigh, making it sound like the reason behind my name was a lot more sinister than the real story, which was as simple as the cleaning lady at the club calling me Abel Bear every time she visited, which turned into everyone calling me Bear. Thank God she didn’t call me Abel Lovey or Abel Babydoll.
I’d be fucked.
“Whatever, RALPH,” Preppy said, and on any other day I would bitch slap him into tomorrow.
But not today.
Today I was under strict orders from King that there would be no bitch slapping of any kind.
How many hours until tomorrow?
The sun finally started to make an appearance, shooting soft rays of pink through the tops of the trees, reminding me of the hours we’d already been awake thanks to Preppy’s 4:30am wake up call where he’d jumped on my bed like it was Christmas morning and Santa had just delivered a shit load of blow and porn.
Preppy was so amped up that for a minute I thought his excitement was going to burst right through his skin. Unfortunately, at that hour, his excitement was not contagious.
We’d driven an hour in the dark to a plot of land near Charles Harbor where Preppy was convinced we’d find the biggest and baddest wild boar, just begging to be hunted down. The way he pitched the idea made it seem like the pigs would come out of the brush waving a white flag before putting our guns to their own heads and finishing the job for us.
A sharp poke drew my attention down to where yet another bunch of sandspurs had attached themselves to the bottom of my jeans. I plucked them off and tossed them into a nearby bush, hissing through my teeth as one of the sharp-ass seedpods pricked me. A drop of blood pooled on the pad of my index finger. “Fuck,” I muttered, sucking the coppery red from my skin then waving it into the air to dry it off.
“Tell me why the fuck we’re out here again?” King asked on a yawn as Preppy led us through the tall grass and deeper into the woods. In Logan’s Beach, the woods were wet and swampy with dark green foliage and soft mud, where as the area around Charles Harbor was dry with brittle grass and hard packed dirt that cracked into pieces under the weight of our boots.
In our part of Florida, hunting after school or on weekends for guys our age was as commonplace as getting your driver’s license or feeling up your date after prom. It was what the normal guys did.
We weren’t the normal guys.
Never were.
Never wanted to be.
Some of my brothers in the club were avid hunters. I’d even gone out with them on one occasion. But in my eighteen years I’d already shed enough blood of the human variety to not really give a shit about the pointless killing of a dirty animal that, when sliced open, the inside of it’s belly smelled worse than a fucking rotting corpse.
“Well, my friends, we’re out here because I’m a man now. And this is the kind of shit that real men do. So come on, little girls, pick up your panties and grab your balls because we are gonna kill us some fucking wild piggies,” Preppy said, before giving us his best nasally impression of a wild hog oink.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. I reached into my cut for my smokes. Unlike Preppy, who was dressed for the occasion with his cargo pants, bright orange vest, and a camo hat that read PUSSY HUNTER in neon green lettering, I opted for my usual uniform of my cut, no shirt, and dark jeans. I held my shotgun in the crook of my arm with my chin across the barrel while I fished a lighter out of my back pocket. I wasn’t exactly following proper gun holding etiquette. Hell, I didn’t care if I blew half my face off in the process, because nicotine was going to be the only thing able to keep me from jumping into the harbor and swimming back to Logan’s Beach.
“I’ve been practicing my feral hog mating call so that the biggest and baddest alpha motherfucker comes out to play ‘catch a bullet’ with us. And what the fuck are you doing smoking, Ralph? Put it out! They will smell it or see the smoke and they’ll spook and run the fuck off!” Preppy scolded. Turning back around, he crouched down and scanned the foliage around us for any sign of his feral fucking pigs.
I stayed upright and so did King. I rested my gun against my shoulder in a very not-ready-for-this-shit kind of way. I had no intentions of putting my smoke out, but out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the look King was flashing me, a reminder of the reason why we were there in the first place, and, reluctantly, I put out my smoke on my boot and flashed King an exaggerated “You happy now?” smile.
There was only one reason on fucking earth why either King or myself would be up before the sun and in the middle of the fucking woods, and thank fuck that reason only came around once a year.
Preppy’s birthday.
In the three years or so since I’d met King and Prep, I’d been roped into their unspoken tradition, where for one day, Preppy calls the shots. “I should have skipped town when I saw you looking up these beasts on my computer” I said, stepping over a downed pine tree.
“You were just shocked he wasn’t looking at porn for once,” King quipped, and he was right. It may have been the one time I would have preferred to open my screen to find some of the sick shit Preppy liked to occupy his time with, rather than what he had in store for us on his birthday.
“Actually, if you motherfuckers must know, I was looking up porn,” Preppy said with a shrug of his shoulders. There was a rustling in the brush up ahead. A huge brown hog with wiry hair and a broken tusk darted out from its hiding place and into the clearing, making a run for his life through the trees. Preppy lifted his gun and pulled the trigger. He missed the fast moving pig and the bullet blew a huge hole into a tree stump. “But you’d be surprised how one little misspelling of the word BEASTIALITY can change the entire fucking nature of a search.” King and I looked at one another and followed Preppy, who started reciting lines from Braveheart as he ran full speed after the hog there was no way he was ever going to catch.
After an hour of chasing Preppy through the trees and almost accidentally shooting one another a few times, Preppy finally gave up and we headed back out to the truck. “Fuck this. I’m just going to get one of those plastic pig heads they sell at the gas station and mount it in my room.”
“Could have decided that a lot fucking earlier,” King muttered.
Preppy cracked his knuckles. “And now for the business portion of the day,” he said, grabbing two shovels from the bed of the truck which were laying over a blue tarp. He tossed us each one and pulled off the tarp, revealing the tied up body of a man underneath.
“Who the fuck is this?” King asked.
“This was the motherfucker who pulled a gun on me last night when I was out running collection,” Preppy announced, poking the corpse with the handle of his shovel.
“Ugh, why are you guys dragging me into this. This is your shit,” I huffed.
“Bear you can’t fucking complain,” Preppy snapped, grabbing a hold of the man’s ankles.
“Why the fuck not?” I asked.
“’Cause, bitch,” he said, flashing me a big white-toothed grin as he slid the body from the truck bed until it was about halfway and then he let it fall to the ground with a dull thud. “It’s my motherfucking birthday.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Thia
I wrapped my arms around my legs and held them close to my chest, resting my chin on the tops of my knees. I closed my eyes and slowly inhaled through my nose, breathing in the wet air and the smell of Grace’s roses.
We’d finished with all the boxes just as the sun set. Ray was inside making a call to the babysitter to check on the kids while I sat outside on the deck in Grace’s backyard and wondered what the hell the future had in store.
For Bear. For me. For us.
Only time would tell, but the time I was most concerned about was the next few days, and whether Bear would come out of them alive.
I tried my best to steady my erratic beating heart, but I felt helpless—a feeling I hated more than anything.
Crickets chirped loudly from out beyond the fence. I rubbed the heels of my bare feet over the warmed fabric of the chair. There were so many questions in my head that I just wanted to do a hand stand and shake them out of my ear.
He could be hurt. He could die.
My stomach twisted as I forced myself away from that thought.
He could also succeed.
Then what?
I didn’t hear Ray approaching until she sat down next to me, her shoulder bumping mine. “In my life, everyone close to me has died,” Ray started with a sigh, looking out over the backyard as if she were wrestling with something in her head too. “My best friend from when I was a kid. Well, I guess my two best friends, although one was kind of my husband for a minute. A woman who was more like a mother to me than my actual mother, and someone I knew for only a short period of time, but was more connected to than anyone else, besides King.” Her eyes flickered from the house to the trees and finally back to me.
“Preppy,” I said, wishing I’d had a chance to meet the guy that King, Ray, and Bear had all cared for so deeply. Ray nodded and attempted a small smile that did nothing to mask her hurt.
“Yes, Preppy. I was in love with him you know,” she said with a sniffle.
“You were?” For a second I thought that Bear hadn’t told me the entire story.
“Yeah, not in the way I’m in love with King, but I was…or I am,” Ray corrected, “as in love with Preppy as I could be without it being a romantic kind of love. I loved him deep, and so it hurts deep. That’s just the way love works, I guess.”
“Aren’t you afraid something will happen to King?” I asked, needing to know if I was alone in the anguish I felt over them going to war against Chop. “If he goes to bat for Bear, he’s putting his life on the line. It’s not even his fight. Even Bear has tried to talk him out of it.” I was grateful that Bear had King in his life and that King was so willing to step up for Bear, but being no stranger to loss myself it was easy to put myself in her shoes.
If something happened to King, it would leave their three kids without their father, and she would lose yet another person she loved. “I know how it feels,” I added, reminding her that she wasn’t alone.
Ray shook her head. “No, I’m not afraid. If I’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that going to bat for one another is what family does, regardless of the cause. This is King’s battle because it’s Bear’s battle.” Ray absentmindedly picked at the threads of the fraying chair cushion. “I grew up in a house with two parents and it still took me coming here to learn that myself. Besides, it wasn’t like when I met King he was an accountant or something who suddenly decided to venture into another questionable and dangerous line of work. I knew what I was getting into from day one.” Ray let out a quick burst of laughter. “Did. I. Ever.”
I laughed with her as she disappeared for a moment into some memory she’d been recalling. When she came back she said, “King isn’t the kind of man you change, and I never went into this thinking I could change him. I went into this loving him. That’s all.”
“I know exactly how that feels,” I admitted.
Ray nudged my shoulder again. “The Bear I first met was a little bit different than the Bear you know now,” she said, looking out over the water. “I met him at a party, right before I met King. Such a smooth talker with his crazy deep voice. He was strong then. Confident. Then after Preppy died that all changed. He turned into a shell, then he just up and left.” The smile briefly left her face but returned when she added, “But he’s Bear 3.0, better than before…and it’s all because of you.”
“I can’t take all the credit. There was this guy who gave me a ring once,” I said, rubbing Bear’s ring between my fingers. “He made me better, too.”
I couldn’t help but think that even though Ray and I took very