Blood in the Water (Kairos) (2 page)

1991

As far as birthdays went, Paul didn’t think that this one sucked the worst out of all of them.  He’d never had what was usually considered a conventional birthday, with cake and candles and all that shit, but some had been better than others.  The ones that he’d spent on his own he’d enjoyed most of all.  His fifteenth when he’d popped Maddy Fisher’s cherry was right up there as one of the best.  This one, his sixteenth, stuck in solitary in juvie... it was okay, not the best, not the worst. 

In fact, if he’d thought about it, he would have planned it.  It was sure worth breaking that little sneaking shit’s face to get some peace and quiet.  He hadn’t even realized what day it was until the guard had made some snarky comment when he’d delivered what they laughingly referred to as lunch.  He might be stuck in a concrete box every hour of every day until someone decide he’d learnt his lesson this time, but he got time to read without being hassled.  As long as they kept the books coming it was all good.  He’d spent more time in solitary than out of it so far.

He had a feeling he was learning more in the concrete box through those printed pages than he ever would if he bothered to attend school.  He didn’t get a choice in what they brought him, and he wasn’t in the fortunate position of being able to ignore anything he didn’t like, so he read it all from Orwell’s Animal Farm to Teach Yourself Spanish.  School had been a good thing for a while.  At least when he was there he wasn’t at home.  Even when the other kids in class didn’t want anything to do with him, it was still better than the alternative.  Paul didn’t like to dwell on that too much, though; some of those early years held humiliations that still stung even now.  Something had changed somewhere, a teacher, the other kids, a combination.  Somewhere along the line school had become as torturous a place for him as home and he’d devoted all of his energy to avoiding both places.

Yeah, being in juvie didn’t suck all that bad.  Apart from reading he had a lot of time to work out.  Push ups, sit ups, squats; there was plenty he could do in the tiny cell without any equipment and it was all paying off.  He’d never known his pa, but he figured he couldn’t have been a skinny shit, ‘cause now Paul had extra time to put the effort in, he was putting muscle on pretty solidly.  He’d asked his mom, but she wasn’t giving up the skinny on his sperm donor.  He had little clue to his actual genetic makeup other than that he wasn’t entirely Caucasian.  His mom was fair skinned and... who the hell knew what color her hair really was, it was bottle bleach yellow most of the time; and she had blue eyes.  Paul’s skin was deeply olive-toned and his eyes were such a dark brown they were almost black.  His hair was dark too.  Most of all that had to have come from someone other than his mom.

He fucking hated that thinking about that bitch brought a lump to his throat.  The succession of ‘uncles’ was all her doing.  And never, not fucking once, had she lifted a finger to stop one of them when he was getting a beating.  As long as they kept her in booze and whatever else she was into at the time she hadn’t cared.  All his life he’d been little more than an inconvenience to her, something in the way, underfoot.  And that was when she’d even bothered to remember he was there at all.

Being inside was infinitely preferable to watching her fade to fuck all in that shitty little tin can trailer that was down as his official address on all the paperwork.  The years of drinking, sniffing, pill-popping and shooting up hadn’t dented her.  She was real skinny, but all the alcohol, pills and powders seemed to have preserved her.  Even when the middle of her nose, the septum he thought it might be, even when that had fallen out from sniffing everything in sight, she hadn’t stopped.

The docs were undecided about the cancer that was killing her.  They thought it might have something to do with all her addictions, but there was also a chance it had something to do with the chemicals in the job she’d had at a dry cleaners back when Paul was too young to remember.  That was just a fucking joke, the cosmos taking a stinking dump on his life.  There was something very unfunny about the one honest job she’d had killing her just as surely as all the years of drugs and booze.

It was her fucking fault he was even in here in the first place.  He’d been pretty proud of the fact that whatever he’d gotten up to, he’d always managed to avoid getting caught.  There wasn’t an inch of the town and the area around it he didn’t know.  He was always able to outrun the cops; he was fast on his feet, and he had a few people he could call in on who’d swear that he’d been with them the whole time.  Then he’d decided, against his better judgment, to drop in on his mom to see how she was doing, and her latest live-in boyfriend, pimp, whatever had decided to try and throw him a beating for telling his mom that she might want to ease up on the booze some.  Paul might not have been packing the muscle that he was now, but he hadn’t been a small kid since a growth spurt somewhere in his fourteenth year.  He’d beaten the shit out of the cocky fucker boning his mom. 

It wouldn’t have been a problem, it was unlikely anyone would have cared about the arrogant cocksucker, but his mom, his own fucking mother, had called the police.  He hadn’t even heard her do it.  One minute he’d been pounding the whimpering shit into so much raw meat, feeling pretty good about teaching him a lesson and maybe getting his own back for all the beatings he’d endured at the hands of these transient bastards; the next there were lights and sirens and he was being dragged back and cuffed.  Apparently he’d done enough damage to warrant a prison term even though it was technically his first offence.  Well that’s what having to use the shitty public-appointed defense lawyers got you.

His mind had been made up that day.  He wasn’t going back to that trailer, not ever again.  And if his mom wasn’t dead when he got out he wouldn’t be making any effort to go and see her before the ground took her.  As far as he was concerned she was already gone.  She hadn’t come to his hearing and she hadn’t tried to visit him, either.  When he got out he’d go and see some of the friendly faces he knew.  School could go fuck itself, too.  It was time for him to be earning steady money.  He knew he had almost zero chance of getting an honest job, but that was okay; he knew plenty of people who would be more than happy to find him something dishonest to do. 

If this, being inside, was supposed to be a deterrent, it wasn’t working.  There were some things he missed.  The warm sunshine on his skin, that was a good feeling you didn’t get in solitary and didn’t get much in Gen Pop either.  Pussy, you didn’t get that inside at all and he missed tapping some of the sweet young things that hung around the bad neighborhoods looking for a hookup.  The food wasn’t even close to being a joke, he wouldn’t have fed it to the rats, but it did stave off the hunger pangs. 

He couldn’t think of anything about juvie that was bad enough to make him swear off any activity that might see him back here, especially if that activity put money in his pockets.  In two years he’d be looking at time in an adult prison if he got caught.  He figured it couldn’t be much different, and if he kept building his body up the way he was doing then he wouldn’t have too many problems.  It was all about the image, the attitude.  You showed them big and muscles and gave off confidence – without arrogance – then you weren’t likely to be hassled much.  Not that he wanted to spend all his time behind bars, no, not at all; but it was an acceptable consequence.

Paul sat back on his cot, which was little more than a metal frame and a couple of blankets, the slightly thicker blanket was supposed to be a mattress, and thought about where he was going to start once he was released.  He’d spent time in the city, not enough to begin to be a player, but enough to get his face known.  He could start there, but there was something cold and impersonal about a lot of those crews.  Their soldiers were disposable.  He didn’t want to be cannon fodder; he wanted a place to belong.  He wasn’t sure he knew how to do that, to be a part of something like that, but there was something in him that wanted to try.

There was something else that appealed to him, too, ever since he’d first made the move to leave the shitty trailer that he’d called home for so long.  The day he’d left had been an endorphin rush of epic proportions. Walking away and knowing he could go anywhere and start from scratch.  He had nothing to lose and everything to gain.  He was free.  Paul thought he might actually be able to become a little addicted to that feeling.  And that was something that was beginning to factor into his thought process. 

There was maybe one person in the world that Paul would call an actual friend.  He’d known Charlie Davis since forever.  They’d grown up in the same trailer park.  In appearance they couldn’t be more different.  Where Paul was dark, Charlie was blonde and blue-eyed; their neighbors remarked on it all the time.  The other big difference was that Charlie’s mom was the one that had abandoned him and his remaining parent, his dad, seemed determined to keep an honest roof over their heads. 

Charlie’s dad was a genius with anything that had an engine and he worked at the auto shop owned by the local MC.  The two boys spent some time hanging around there; no one minded as long as they stayed out of everyone’s way.  Paul and Charlie were more than happy to stick to that rule because they were picking up a hell of an education just by watching and listening, and not just about fixing cars and bikes either.  Paul definitely preferred bikes to cars.  He’d never do anything as stupid as boost something in town, but he had when he’d been elsewhere.  Especially since that growth spurt, he felt awkward in cars.  He didn’t really fit in them.  Bikes, however, that was something else entirely.  That feeling of freedom, of being a part of the world as he rode through it, oh he loved that, alright. 

That train of thought was leading him to the Rabid Dogs MC, the club that owned the auto shop that Charlie’s dad worked for.  They owned a couple of other businesses in town as well, but the garage was their main legitimate front.  It made sense; it gave them the space, the time and the tools to keep their bikes in order.  There were rumors about some profoundly non-legit aspects to their income, but Charlie’s dad wasn’t involved in that and the patches didn’t gossip, so Paul didn’t know a lot about that side of the club.  Yeah, that was where he would start.  He’d go to the club and see if he could get work in the garage.  He wanted in on the club eventually, but no one else needed to know that just yet.  Paul did not want to spend the rest of his life living in a shitty trailer fixing other people’s crap until he croaked.  He wanted a little excitement, and he wanted the brotherhood, the family, that he’d seen in the MC.

Making the decision, settling on a plan for his future, lifted a weight he hadn’t known he was carrying.  Paul settled himself as comfortably as possible on his cot and picked up the copy of The Outsiders he’d been reading.  He wasn’t used to optimism, to anticipation, but he found that he liked it. 

1992

Ashleigh looked around the yard at the girls lounging around on the plastic furniture having their finger and toenails painted in bright colors by her Aunt Dolly and the girls from her salon, Divine Intervention.  Her momma had asked Aunt Dolly if she had any ideas for celebrating Ashleigh’s ninth birthday party, and Aunt Dolly had got that look in her eye and got all excited and had pretty much decided that Ashleigh would be having a princess pamper party and that she’d be inviting all the girls from her class.

Ashleigh had thought it was a bad idea, but there was no changing Aunt Dolly’s mind once she got it set on something.  Ashleigh hadn’t wanted a birthday party, and she definitely hadn’t wanted one which meant inviting the girls from school.  All she really wanted was her daddy to be home.  It felt wrong to be having another party without him here.  It seemed like her daddy had been in prison for forever, at least as long as Ashleigh could remember.  She’d never really thought there was anything wrong before, it was just how it was, but recently she’d noticed it much more. 

It had started before Christmas at the Father-Daughter dance at school.  The dance happened every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and every year Uncle Terry went with her.  She’d always had a pretty good time before, but this year Tanya and Melody and their little gang had been talking in the bathroom.  At first Ashleigh had thought they hadn’t noticed she was in there too, but then she’d thought that maybe they had known and had said all those mean things about her daddy being in prison for the rest of his life anyway.  Now it seemed that every time she passed them at the lockers in between class that they were saying things about her or her daddy and her uncles.

She’d half hoped that no one would want to come to the party.  Everyone seemed to think that her daddy being in prison was just about the worst thing and that it made Ashleigh some sort of criminal too.  That was one of Tanya’s little jokes; she liked to say in a really loud voice whenever Ashleigh was around that everyone should hide their stuff in case the jailbird’s daughter stole it.  A lot of the girls in her class had said they couldn’t come.  Ashleigh knew it was because their parents thought she was a bad influence, not just because her daddy was in prison, but because her daddy and her uncles had their club and liked to ride their Harleys.  For some reason everyone thought that was real bad.  Of course Tanya and Melody and their friends had wanted to come.  They acted like it was some big thing, that they were so brave for coming to her house, like they’d be murdered or shot at or kidnapped or something.

Her mama had been so happy when the girls had arrived and Ashleigh hadn’t wanted to make her sad by telling her that she didn’t actually like any of them and that they certainly weren’t her friends.  Her mama and Aunt Dolly didn’t seem to have noticed that Ashleigh had barely said more than hello to any of her guests all afternoon.  When she saw her daddy next, Ashleigh wouldn’t tell him how much she’d hated all this. She’d tell him it was the best birthday party she’d ever had and how much she’d liked the cake that her mama had made and how pretty the yard had been decorated. 

Her brother Dean had spent the afternoon in the treehouse in the old oak at the end of the yard.  He said he was keeping out of the way of all the skeevy girls but Ashleigh knew that really he was looking out for her, making sure that Tanya and Melody didn’t say anything too mean.  Dean knew how much she hated all this fuss, but he wouldn’t say anything to their daddy either.  He was eleven already and he knew how to lie real good so even their mama couldn’t tell.

When her mama had first asked her what she wanted to do to celebrate her birthday, Ashleigh had answered honestly that she really wanted to have a barbeque with all her uncles.  She loved it when they had barbeques at the clubhouse, even if she and Dean weren’t allowed to stay much after six ‘o’clock.  She liked it when they all came over here to the house too.  When she’d said what she wanted, though, her mama’s face had got all funny and twisted and then her mama had said that no, she had to do something proper for her birthday, something girly.

Ashleigh knew for certain she wasn’t going to have another one of these dumb parties ever again.  Even if she had to misbehave for a month and not have a party at all, that would be better.  There were going to be some arguments, ‘cause now Mama would start asking why she never invited any of these girls over for tea or sleepovers and there was no way that Ashleigh was going to invite Tanya or Melody over for a sleepover, even if it made her mama mad or sad.

Uncle Terry and Uncle Dizzy and the others would probably come over later.  They’d already said they wouldn’t turn up while the party was happening, that giggling girls broke them out in hives or something.  Maybe if she asked him really nicely Uncle Terry would take her out for a ride on his bike, just a short one.  Uncle Dizzy would, but not if everyone knew about it.  Her momma didn’t like Ashleigh being on a bike; she said it wasn’t safe, which Ashleigh thought was pretty dumb considering everyone they knew rode. 

Uncle Dizzy was cool, though, he took her out on the back of his bike on Sundays when everyone thought she was just watching him tune it up in the garage at the clubhouse.  He did do some tinkering on it.  He’d show her what he was doing and he’d let her help while they sang along to the radio.  Sometimes he had to work on one of the cars that was in to be fixed if it was an urgent job and he didn’t get time to play with his bike, but he’d always make time to take her to Gina’s Diner on the edge of town.  Ashleigh didn’t know who ‘Gina’ was, but they’d have a piece of cherry pie each and then Uncle Dizzy would take her back to the garage, and no one knew.  Uncle Dizzy was twenty four years old.  He was old but not as ancient as Uncle Terry.  She wanted to ask Uncle Dizzy to take her to see her daddy, but he wouldn’t; it was too far away.  It was a real long drive to the prison where Daddy was. 

A commotion by the back door made Ashleigh turn around.  Her mama was bringing her birthday cake out and everyone was starting to sing Happy Birthday.  Even Dean had come down from the tree house and was singing too.  The cake looked so pretty.  It was chocolate flavored with white frosting, and it had tiny silver sugar stars scattered all over the top.  Mama had stayed up late baking it and icing it last night. 

Ashleigh made herself smile a huge, bright smile like she knew her mama wanted her to.  She didn’t want her mama to cry tonight; it made her heart hurt when she heard the sobbing coming from the room that her parents should be sharing.  She blew her candles out when everyone had finished singing and wished really, really hard for her daddy to be home for her next birthday.  She’d have to ask Dean what she had to do to make that wish come true.  Dean knew everything; he’d be able to tell her how to make it happen.