Slate (Rebel Wayfarers MC) (6 page)

Andy moved. He reached out and dragged the man off her by his neck, carelessly tossing him to the floor. “Get dressed and get out,” he said without emotion. Pointing to the man who had met him at the door, he mumbled, “You too, okay? Just get dressed and get out.”

He pulled his mother off the couch and laid her on the floor. Briefly checking the amount and source of the blood, he quickly covered her with a dirty shirt from the floor. “This dude a friend of yours?” he asked over his shoulder as he slapped the passed out guy awake.

“Yeah, that’s Terry.” The door guy threw a pair of sweats their way and Andy handed them to Terry.

“You know what she took last night?” Andy asked the room in general. “Is she simply passed out, or do I need to take her to the ER?”

Door guy bobbed his head. “She’s just passed out, mixed liquor and E. She went mellow and horizontal.”

Lifting a hand to acknowledge the statement, he watched as the men left the house by the front door, not looking at him or his mom; they carelessly vacated the house as if this was a regular morning in their world.

He picked her up and carried her down the short hallway to her room. Toeing the door open, he found a mattress on the floor, with empty bottles surrounding the edges. He put her in the middle of it, pulling a blanket up to cover her.

Gathering up the empties, he took them into the kitchen and found a roll of garbage bags in the cabinets. Taking one, he began going through the house to clear the obvious trash. He wound up back in her bedroom, picking up and throwing away drug paraphernalia along with the trash.

Andy looked down where she lay curled on the mattress, and saw age in her face for the first time. She was barely in her forties, but looked much older, worn and beaten down by life. She seemed past the point of caring about herself; for a moment, Andy tried to imagine how he would feel if this was the last time he saw her alive. He slowly nodded to himself; he didn’t feel anything, no sadness and no glee, just a void where his love for her had lived.

“What would Daddy say, Mom?” he asked with disgust thick in his voice. Turning to walk out of the house, he took three trash bags with him to the dumpster down the street.

7 -
   
Riding south

Sitting on the
bike, Andy watched the tractor-trailer rigs drive in and out of the truck stop outside Colorado Springs. It was an ever-moving kaleidoscope of truck types, logos, and colors, the big vehicles weaving up and down the aisles between parking spaces.

He’d been on the road for a dozen weeks, and was back to looking for work. If he could find a safe place to park the bike, he could probably pick up a few bucks unloading trucks. He’d been doing lots of different odd jobs since leaving Wyoming; nothing paid great individually, but if you did enough jobs, the money piled up. He simply had to work harder to get the cash than he’d expected.

He’d found that the oilfields weren’t hiring inexperienced hands, and since you couldn’t get that experience without working—which you couldn’t do without experience—well, that severely limited the opportunities to break into that area.

So, Denver had been a bust, but he’d talked to some ranch hands and backtracked north by a couple hours to a small town off the interstate. Sitting on a bucket in a feed store there, he had introduced himself to several ranchers in the area, and was able to pick up a variety of jobs. Those ran the gamut: fixing a bunkhouse roof, stretching five miles of fencing, seining a stock pond for turtles, digging irrigation ditches, and stacking tons of
square hay bales into a hayloft.

He’d been a sheep
herder for a day on a ranch northwest of Denver, which wasn’t a bad gig. That had lasted until the second day, when they were supposed to dip the sheep prior to shearing in order to kill any parasitic hitchhikers they’d picked up in their wool.

A deep channel with cement walls and a fence served for the dipping process. The fence ran along the inner edges of the structure to create a funnel. The ranch hands filled up the channel with the potent dip solution as if it was an artificial pond, and then began driving the sheep between the fences and into the dip.

Andy had watched the sheep wading into the chemicals and realized that a few of them were climbing on the backs of the herd to escape it. “Hey,” he shouted at the lead hand and pointed.

The guy nodded and rode his four-wheeler over. “See the railing? Stand on the cement inside that, and walk on top of the sheep to push them under,” he yelled and roared off on the equipment.

Andy looked after him like he was crazy, but he wanted the job, so he edged closer. Swinging one leg over the railing, he held it in a white-knuckled grip, sliding his other leg over and leaning back against the rail. Tentatively reaching out with one foot, he shoved down on the back of one floating sheep. It went under quickly, and he gave himself a little air punch of victory.

That was his first undoing, because he lost his grip and his feet slid off the cement into the dip. His legs were pushed against the wall by the bodies of the sheep, and he felt his boots filling with dip. Pulling them back up, he grabbed the railing with both hands again, disturbed by the smell now coming from his lower legs.

Cold, wet, and smelly—that sounded like an ad for his last girlfriend back home
, he thought and snorted. Seeing a brave sheep moving his way, one that had almost totally gotten itself out of the dip by climbing onto the back of fellow sheep, he primed his pushing foot. Just as the sheep got to him, it launched itself sideways onto the back of yet another sheep.

“Walk across there and push them all under,” he heard from behind. He looked around in disbelief, but it was the lead hand again. “Walk them sheep, boy.” Holding the railing with one hand, he shook his head but stepped out onto the back of a sheep, pushing it down into the dip.

He took a soggy step, and then another one, his footsteps absorbed by a combination of more than a half-dozen inches of saturated wool and bodies of the individual sheep trying desperately to get away from his weight on their backs.

Looking back, it was probably an inevitable conclusion to the exercise, and maybe even laughable that he hadn’t seen it coming. Maybe at some point in the future he could tell the story humorously. Maybe.

He’d taken a step outward, and the sheep simply wasn’t there. It had juked on him and avoided his big platter-sized foot. His foot and leg went down into the dip, and continued to go down. His other leg bent double and found no resistance to push against in order to help keep him upright.

Then suddenly, there were hooves climbing his back, pushing him underneath the dip. His hand was ripped away from the railing, and he barely had the presence of mind to take a big breath before he went under, closing his eyes and mouth tightly.

Those sheep and their hooves pushed him to the bottom of the channel, but his knees hitting cement reminded him that it was not deep, so he unfolded to stand upright. Reaching out blindly to find the railing again, he pulled himself up to the cement ledge.

Holding onto the railing with one tight hand, he tried to shake the dip from his hair and use the side of one hand to scrape the thick liquid off his face.
Oh God
, he couldn’t open his eyes yet; this shit would surely blind him. He couldn’t open his mouth either; he’d die if he swallowed this crap.

He pulled himself over the railing, getting away from the dip channel entirely. He was bent over, shaking his head violently back and forth when he heard the four-wheeler driving closer. “Goddammit, boy, did you fall in the dip?” came the terse question.

He nodded, still unwilling to open his mouth. Struck from behind, it felt like the man had rammed him with the four-wheeler. He was scooped up, with his butt up near the storage shelf on the front of the vehicle and his back wedged tightly against the handlebars. Andy held on to the metal mesh of the shelf with his fingers, nearly losing his grip a dozen times, only saving himself from falling off by sheer determination.

The four-wheeler came to an abrupt stop, and he tumbled forward into the dirt. Raising his head, he strained his eyes open a hairsbreadth to squint through his lashes just in time to see a hand reaching down to grab his collar. Dragging him
ignominiously across the open area in front of the bunkhouse, the man dropped him into the cement gutter of the outside shower and cranked the water on full.

Andy scrambled to his feet, pushing his face up into the water, sputtering it out of his nose and mouth as he scrubbed frantically at his face, trying to get the cloying dip off him.

“Here, take this, son,” came a gruff order, and he automatically reached out his hand to feel a bar of soap being pushed into it. He grunted in appreciation and raised the bar to his face, only realizing that it was a rough, scrubbing detergent soap after it had scratched his face raw and started burning. He squinted through his lashes again, making a thick lather to attack his hair.

He was rinsing out his hair when he heard, “Strip, son. Get those clothes off before it burns your tender bits crispy.” Nodding his head and squinting out of eyes that were only slightly more open than before, he toed off his soaked boots and then stripped off his shirt, socks, and jeans, standing naked in the water now.

After an additional ten minutes or so of lathering and rinsing his whole body several times, he realized the water was—and had been all along—colder than fuck, and he stepped out of the shower, turning off the faucet. Goddamn, his balls were trying to crawl up into his belly; he was
that
cold. He hoped he’d gotten all the dip off, but the smell was up in his nose so badly that he wouldn’t be able to tell by smell.

Covered in goose bumps, his eyes tearing, he looked at the man who had helped him. “Never had anyone fall all the way in before,” the man said, shaking his head. “You gonna be sick, boy? That’s some powerful stuff; I’ve seen it burn through leather gloves.”

“Not gonna be sick, but I don’t think I want this job anymore,” was Andy’s retort through chattering teeth as he gathered up his wet and smelly clothes and footwear. “I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I want to do that job.”

The man had laughed as he watched Andy walk to the bunkhouse. “Good idea, son.”

Sitting at the truck stop now, Andy swore he could
still
catch whiffs of the chemicals every time he moved. Wait a minute…
there
…his patience had paid off; one of the trucks pulling in had to be fully loaded by the way it moved on its springs, and the driver had looked his way—a clear sign he was hoping to hire a helper. Andy half-waved a question at him and received a chin lift in return. Now he needed to find a safe place to park the Indian for a few hours.

Later that evening, he checked in with Jen, a waitress, to thank her for helping him. She had let him park the bike in a locked storage shed out back of the truck stop. Smiling coquettishly, she asked him if he’d give her a ride when she got off her shift, and he shook his head and said, “I don’t have a second seat, baby, sorry.”

She grinned at him. “Who said I was talking about the bike? I’m off in ten minutes; meet me by the truckers’ showers.” She patted his cheek, turned, and walked away, her ass swishing with every step.

He was waiting by the showers in five minutes with a towel and a key, because whether she showed or not, he needed a shower. Hearing the
clip-clop
of heels on the tile hallway, he looked up to see her sauntering towards him, taking off her apron. She squealed a little as he reached out to grab her by the waist, and then he quickly unlocked the door and pulled her inside.

Wrapping his arm around her, he held her tightly, her breasts crushing against his chest. He dropped the towel and key on the bench inside the door, and raked one hand through her hair; he used that grip to angle her head back, which allowed easy access to her throat as she gasped and groaned. Sliding his other hand up the column of her throat, he wrapped his fingers around her neck,
and then moved to cup her jaw, rubbing his thumb across her lips. Nibbling and lightly biting along her throat, he used his grip on her hair to control her movements, twisting her head back and forth to ease his access.

He leaned her hard against the wall and pushed her skirt up to her waist. Angling himself into her, he bent his knees and rubbed his erection against the thin fabric covering her cunt, pushing and stretching her panties. Her hands were wandering over his body, and it was distracting, because he didn’t know if she was going to pinch, scratch, or stroke, so he caught her hands in his and pulled them to the wall above her head. “Leave ‘em there, baby,” he growled out.

He moved one hand to stroke up the back of her thigh, flirting with the elastic edge of her underwear. Slipping a finger underneath, he dragged his hand around her leg to the inside of her thigh and his goal. She wasn’t wet yet, so he was careful as he slid his fingers along her folds. He flicked her clit with one fingertip and heard a quick intake of breath, then a groan when he grasped it lightly between thumb and finger, rubbing and pinching.

He focused back on her neck, kissing and pressing his body against her. His hand left her hair, sliding down her side, where his thumb brushed the underside of her breast and found her hardened nipple. Putting his mouth over her breast and on top of her clothes, he mouthed and sucked, nipping and biting. Finally feeling her slicken below, he slipped one finger deep inside her, capturing her groan in his mouth and eating it down.