Chapter 4

Jem

The mouth-watering aroma of grilled onions drifted through the broken window in the kitchen. One of the hazards of living right next door to a busy truck stop diner was the constant trail of hunger-producing smells floating through the house. And, since a home-cooked meal was completely foreign to me, I usually ate half my meals next door. Milly, the owner, was one of the few people who didn’t sneer and look the other way when I walked into her business. She had learned to cook in the marines, and she dealt with ornery truck drivers all day so she had a high level of tolerance for bad elements like me.

The light in the small fridge was off. Not a good sign. I reached in and my fingers wrapped around a beer. It was piss warm. I shoved it back into the worthless refrigerator. Not drinking wasn’t an option tonight. Especially after the fucked up end to the work day was followed by the unexpected encounter with the impossibly sweet confection standing on the side of the road. Hell, impossibly sweet was a fucking understatement. She hardly belonged on this planet let alone in this shitty, dirt-hole of a town.

I walked out the door and headed across the weed patch to the front house. Almost every piece of property in town had been built with two on a lot, and almost every house was a dilapidated, crumbling pile of stucco and wood. Our place, or the place that my dad had squatted on long enough to take over as his own, was one of the worst.

After I’d come back from my three years on the road looking for a place to belong, any place other than Blackthorn, I’d moved into the back house. There was no fucking way I could stay under the same roof as my dad. Even if his whiskey soaked liver was slowly dragging him to the grave, I still couldn’t stomach the idea of living with him. Dad’s failing health and Dane’s lack of common sense had brought me back to Blackthorn. I knew once the old man kicked, Dane would not survive on his own, or worse, the town might not survive an unsupervised Dane. Not that I gave much of a damn about this town. They’d been judge and jury in my life since the day I was old enough to stand. I’d been born into a family with a tarnished reputation, and that stain had followed me wherever I went and no matter how hard I tried to scrape it off.

Through the shredded screen door, I heard laughter and nearly decided to forget the beer. I stepped inside and ignored Draven and Rocky, Dad’s two sketchy business partners, as I walked past the front room to the kitchen. Dad was leaned against the kitchen counter talking quietly into his phone. He looked up as I stepped into the room and quickly walked out speaking so low it was a wonder the person on the other end could hear him at all.

I walked to the fridge, pulled out a cold beer and sat at the kitchen table. A secretive call meant he was about to deal in some shady shit. After all these years, I still had no fucking clue who was holding my dad’s puppet strings, but whoever it was, they had never loosened the hold. I knew Dad and the two clowns leaving their stink on the front room couch dealt in stolen goods, whatever was hot and valuable at the time, but I had never known any more than that. I was thankful he’d kept me out of it. Dane had been more involved when we were younger, running errands and helping move goods, but my dad had soon realized that his loose-lipped son who rarely ever processed any rational thoughts was more of a liability than an asset. I, for one, was glad when he’d pushed Dane out of the business.

Of course, my dad’s fall into the world of black market trade could easily have been blamed on the town. In his teens, he had worked for the lumber mill like everyone else. His dad had left when he was six, but his mom, our grandmother, had been respected in town. After the accidental death of Dad’s high school girlfriend, the town jumped into their usual vigilante mode. They’d decided it was easier to despise him than trust him. No one would hire him. No one would give him the time of day. Any normal person would have taken the hint and left, but even after his mom died of heart failure, my dad, Alcott Wolfe, stuck around town just to spite everyone. Or at least that was what he’d told Dane and me.

Dane’s mom had died of suicide, a drug overdose, when Dane was two and I was still only a flicker of movement in my mom’s belly. My mom had me and then split the town for good, leaving my dad, a man whose parenting skills were right up there with all of his other life skills, in charge of a toddler and a baby.

Even though Dad had been, according to him, a ladies’ man in high school, his tragic track record with women didn’t exactly make him a catch. His despair at having nothing but two boys, including one who wasn’t quite put together in the head and one who found every reason to rebel against him, had grown so great, he’d tried to kill himself.

In the fifth grade, I was sent home early for talking back to the teacher, and I walked in on my dad’s makeshift gallows. He’d climbed up into the rafters in the garage with a rope and jumped off with a noose around his neck. I’d stood there for several seconds wondering if I was just watching some imaginary movie play out in our dusty, cobweb covered garage. His legs were twitching but his face was beet red. He gurgled his last few breaths of air as I raced over to him. Back then, he outweighed me by a good hundred pounds, but I lifted his body up high enough for air to flow back into his pipes. He was out cold for a good hour, and there was no one around to help. I held him up, keeping his windpipe free of rope until my entire body shook with fatigue. The mailman finally passed by with his little cart. He heard my yells. Dad still has the scar from the rope as a reminder. I could never tell if he was mad at me or thankful. I wasn’t completely sure I’d do the same for him now.

Dad walked back into the kitchen, and his two cronies followed. Draven was a few years younger than Dad. He was a beefy guy who was half muscle and half blubber. He wore a long ponytail even though the crown of his head looked like a plucked chicken’s ass, and he always smelled gross, like a mixture of cigarette butts drowned in stale coffee and the harsh gritty detergent he used for cleaning pots and pans at Milly’s Diner, where he worked. I remembered the soap smell from my summer job at the diner. For the longest time, I thought Draven spoke with an accent, but lately I’d determined that he just had terrible speech. He pronounced the letter a long and flat making all his words sound like a splat. When he wasn’t working with my dad, he was washing dishes at Milly’s. Jason Rockfield, the other guy, was from a long family of loggers. In his twenties, he’d nearly lost a leg as a chainsaw kicked back at him. He had a major limp that was so bad it seemed most of the time he was just dragging his second leg behind him. Hal, the mill owner, had given him a job moving logs with a tractor, but he’d still kept his side job of running stolen goods with my dad.

I gulped back the rest of the beer and pushed out my chair to leave.

“Stick around, Jem. I’ve hardly seen you this week.” The whites of Dad’s eyes were stained like the walls of a house filled with smokers. It was obvious from his eyes and the sickly pallor of his skin that his liver would be checking out soon. He’d always been one of the biggest, toughest men in town, but he was withering away to a pale yellow shell of his former self. “What have you been up to?”

“I’ve been working.” I lifted the beer. “And when I’m not working I’m drinking, playing poker and—”

“And fucking,” Rockfield said with a laugh.

I pointed my beer toward Rockfield to give him credit. “And fucking.”

Rockfield licked his lips. “How’s that little brunette, Annie? Ooh, if I could just have one night with that hot little piece of ass.”