Raw: The Ultimate Mc Collection (38 page)

“What’s the occasion?” I asked, as I plopped down on the end of the couch that wasn’t torn.  Cooking in this house was very rare.  Hell, any food at all in this house was unusual.

“Potato soup!” she replied, not bothering to even look my way.  “I found this recipe in the back of the Family Circle.  Your dad is going to love it,” she slurred.

“Sounds kinda gross,” I mumbled, as I reached for the remote and turned on the TV.  I put my feet up on the milk crate in front of the sofa and settled in to watch the latest episode of the A-Team.

“Shut your mouth!” she replied.

I sighed, ignoring her.

An hour later, the front door opened and my father staggered in.  He wasn’t a huge guy, but he had a way of sucking the air out of every room he entered.

“What’s up, chief?” he slurred.

“Hey.”  I had learned over the years that the fewer words used with my dad, the better.  If I actually started telling him what was indeed up, he wouldn’t have heard a word.

“Hi, honey!”  Mom came out of their bedroom, her lipstick reapplied, the smell of Aqua Net drifting out behind her.

My father grunted, and walked past her without a glance.  I watched as her shoulders slumped. 

“What’s for dinner?” he growled.

She perked up at his question.

“I thought I would try something new, Dale!  I found this recipe in the back of the…”  her voice trailed off as he walked the few steps to the kitchen area.

“What the fuck is it?” he asked, as he towered over her pot of soup.  She stopped next to him, her eyes full of hope that she would finally do something to please him?

What a joke
, I thought.

“It’s potato soup!  Doesn’t it smell good?” she asked, smiling at him.

He put his face closer to the pot, inhaling deeply, and then wrinkling his nose disgustedly.

“Fucking soup, Rosa? Are you fucking kidding me!”  As always, his anger level rocketed from one to ten in a matter of seconds.  “I work all fucking day, and I have to come home to a fucking pot of potato soup?  I told you to make me dinner, goddammit!  I meant a fucking
steak
, you stupid bitch!”

“Oh, Dale, I’m so s-sorry,” she stuttered.  “I - I just thought it would be n-nice to try something different, I didn’t mean to —.”

He turned to her, slowly looking her up and down, taking in her outfit, her hair, her makeup.

“You spent all that time getting made up like a hussy and you couldn’t make me a fucking proper dinner, you fucking whore?”  He lashed out, slapping her across the face.  Blood spurted from her nose and she put her hand up to her face to catch the blood.

In a split second, he reached up again, grabbed her perfectly coiffed curls, and pushed her bloody face into the bubbling hot soup.  Her arms flailed at her sides, her blood-smeared hands clawing at him, trying to fight him off, but he was stronger than her, and he held her face down in the soup.

By now, I had jumped to my feet, and I was yelling for him to stop, begging him.  He ignored me completely, shoving her head even deeper in the soup.

“She’s gonna fucking drown, you asshole!” I yelled louder.  That got through.  He stopped and turned to me, his beady eyes meeting mine, and I shuddered in fear.  He was the most menacing guy I had ever known.  And I knew exactly what that look meant.

He let go of her and she popped up, gasping for breath, her face covered in bloody soup.

She wiped her face with her hands and turned away.  His body coming towards me blocked my view of her as I backed away from him.

He had taken two steps forward when she sank the knife in his back.

“You fucking bitch!” he growled, turning back to her.  She ran,  locking herself in the bedroom. He chased after her, banging on the locked door, a paring knife still sticking out from between his shoulder blades.  “Get your ass back out here! I’m going to fucking kill you, Rose!"

I ran out the door as fast as I could, the sounds of his yelling and her crying following me as I raced through the trailer park.

I found my friend Riot sitting on a bucket behind his dad’s trailer, smoking a cigarette.  Riot was my only friend.   He was the same age as me - thirteen - and like me, he preferred to spend as little time with his alcoholic dad as I did.

We also had the distinct pleasure of hating our given names, so we gave each other new names.

Riot and Slade.

Much better than Edgar and Jeremiah.

“Hey, Slade.  Your old man sounds like he’s on a tear tonight…” he said in greeting.

“Yeah, man.  Can I hang here for a while?”

“Sure, man,” he said, and I sat on the ground beside him.  He handed me his cigarette, and I took a long, deep draw off of it, the harsh smoke filling my lungs.

“Do you need to call the cops or something?”

I sighed.  Scenes like this were so commonplace, I had stopped calling the cops long ago.  I knew exactly how the rest of that shit would play out.  Mom would stay in the bedroom the rest of the night, Dad would pull the knife out of his back, finish the bottle, and pass out on the couch.  The next morning, they’d pretend nothing ever happened.

If I called the cops again, he’d kick my ass, and I knew it.  And Mom would give me the silent treatment, act like I didn’t exist for at least two weeks.  I’d learned a long time ago that the best thing to do was to just get out of their way.

“I fucking hate this place,” I said, looking around at the poverty around me.  “So much bullshit.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Riot said.  “I thought for sure my old man was dead when I came home this afternoon.  Took ten minutes in the shower before he came to.”

“Fucked up, man.”  I shook my head.  If this is what being an adult was about, I didn’t want any part of it.  And yet, that’s all I yearned for - freedom.

Riot sighed, took another drag from the cigarette, and passed it back to me again.  “Yeah, well…it is what it is, I guess."

“I guess.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes before I spoke again.

“You ever think, man…that there’s another way?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Not everyone lives like this.  I want something better, something more…I just can’t wait to get the fuck out of here, that’s all.”

“Yeah.  Me, too.”

“It’s out there, you know.  Another life.  For both of us,” I said.

“I don’t know, man…I feel pretty fucking stuck right now.”

“Yeah, but that’s just cause we’re still kids.  In just a few years, we won’t be tied to this shit hole.  We can just pick up and leave, go wherever the fuck we please.”

“Yeah, man…but look at us,” he said, “this shit is in our blood.  Wherever we go, we can’t shake that.”

“I don’t believe that.  Fuck, Riot, I
can’t
believe that.  If I did, I’d just kill myself right now.”

“Yeah,” he replied.  “You know, you’re right.  It’s good to dream, I guess…” 

It sounded good, but even as I said it, as far as I could see, all I had to look forward to was poverty and dysfunction.

“It’s the only way to survive, Riot.  It’s all we’ve got right now, sure. But someday, man…we can have a different life.  We don’t have to be like them.  Don’t give up, dude.  There’s a better life out there, man.”

“Even for guys like us?” he asked.

“Yeah, brother, even for guys like us.”

I stared up at the sky, hoping to hell I was right.

CHAPTER ONE

Slade

Out of chaos God made a world,

and out of high passions comes a people.  

~George Gordon Noel Byron

The sounds of Sweet Home Alabama filled the Rodeo Roadhouse, and the place was packed, with couples dancing together in front of the band, every booth full of rowdy, drunk people eating burgers and every barstool was taken by the regulars.

John served bottles of beer as fast as he could open them, and Susie, his waitress, was running as fast as her short legs could carry her as she brought baskets filled with burgers and fries out to the drunken, hungry masses.

Before the end of the night, a few fights would break out and the floor would be littered with broken glass.

Just another Saturday night in the sleepy Tillamook forest.

Situated about an hour outside Portland, Oregon and just a short trek to the Oregon Coast, the Tillamook forest was essentially nothing but that.  A lush pine forest, spidered with secluded, curvy logging roads that one could easily get lost in.  And sometimes, they did.

I’d heard horror stories about people getting lost.  GPS was no help, the maps were often wrong.  If you were lucky, you could  find your way out, but there were a lot of unlucky ones that didn’t.  If it was winter and you got lost out there?  Well, you were fucked.  There were roads that nobody came down for months.

But now, it was summer, and like most places in Oregon, the Rodeo Roadhouse didn’t have air conditioning.  The sun had gone down already, but the blistering heat had lingered, hovering in the air like a thick blanket of sweat and sin.  Add the body heat of a bunch of drunks, and you had yourself a molotov cocktail of trouble.

There was something about the heat that made me people go  crazy and tonight was no exception.  I was quickly growing tired of the crowd and I waved goodbye to John as I finished my beer, threw a couple of twenties on the bar, and walked out the swinging front doors.

I stopped to light a cigarette and stood next to my bike.  I looked up at the night sky while I took a few drags.  The amount of stars you could see on a clear night like this never ceased to amaze me.  The fact that there were thousands of other planets, other galaxies, out there, floating around in this big, black space with us always blew my mind.

The doors of the bar flew open and I turned to watch a couple emerge from the bar.  Right away I knew something was wrong.  The woman had tears running down her cheeks and the guy was gripping her arm so hard that her flesh was turning white under the pressure of his fingers.

“Jimmy, let go of me!” she cried.

“I saw you, Tina!” he growled, digging his fingers even deeper into her flesh.  “You were flirting with that fucking cowboy!”

“I was not!” she cried, trying to wrench her arm away.  He held on tighter, twisting her arm painfully.  “Please let me go, Jimmy!”

“I’ll let you go, bitch!” Jimmy snarled as he pushed her roughly, flinging her violently away.  She stumbled and fell to her knees on the gravel parking lot.

Fuck.  I looked back at the bar door - John’s security guy was nowhere in sight.  I took a deep breath, threw my cigarette on the ground, and smashed it with the toe of my black leather boot.

Jimmy took two steps towards Tina and slapped her.

That’s it
, I thought.

Tina collapsed on the ground - a crying, bloody mess that reminded me of a night a long, long time ago.

I walked over to them, and Jimmy turned to me, his face full of bravado and ego.  He puffed out his chest, looking like an idiot.

“You got a problem, man?” he asked, his voice slurring. He stumbled towards me and I shook my head.

“Nope,” I said, closing the distance between us, calmly, yet quickly.  He didn’t even see my fist coming.  It hit his nose, a deep, satisfying crack, and then the blood came, pouring down his face as he looked at me like a deer caught in headlights.

“What the fu —,”

I hit him again, and he fell to the ground in a heap beside his girlfriend.

I stretched a hand out to her and she grabbed it, her face turned up to me, a look of awe in her eyes.  I pulled her up and we stared down at a groaning Jimmy together.

What a prick,
I thought.  He reminded me a little bit of my dad and that made me hate him that much more.  He was writhing on the ground, clutching his broken nose and moaning in pain.  Swiftly, I kicked him in the ribs, taking great pleasure in the crack that I heard.

I seriously loved breaking bones. There was something so fucking satisfying about it.