Beard With Me

by Penny Reid

  The bastard sounded cheerful.

  Grabbing him by the collar of his precious leather jacket, I pulled Jet away from the fridge and to the back door. It was unlocked, and of course it was. That's how he must've gotten in. Or he picked the lock.

  Opening the door and the screen to the back porch, I shoved him out of the house like the garbage he was. “Get out and stay out.”

  He was still laughing, still holding his stomach. "Okay, okay. It's gunna be that way, huh?" he asked, straightening, rubbing the spot where my fist had landed earlier. "Should I wait out here for dinner? You gunna bring it to me, then? Are we having a picnic?"

  "Leave."

  "All right." Jet raised his hands, like he surrendered. "I see you've had a trying day. What happened? Someone molest your balls at practice?"

  I started forward while Jet laughed at his own joke. He had the good sense to retreat, descending the porch stairs with swagger and ease like he had eyes in the back of his head. “Cool down, Billy. I'm just here for a while. I wanted to—”

  "Leave."

  He gave me a patient smile. "Will you listen?"

  Listen? Listen? What could he possibly say that was worth listening to?

  We were both off the porch now, standing in the frozen stretch of dead wildflowers and grass. The tall trees of the forest at the edge of our field reached to the sky behind him, brown and gray with spots of yellow and purple, the last of the fall leaves clinging to the branches. The sky above was more gray than blue even though the sun hadn’t quite set. The air looked cold.

  Cletus had asked earlier if I could feel the cold anymore, I’d scoffed at the question then, but he wasn’t too far off the mark. I hadn’t been cold in the truck and I didn’t feel the cold now.

  "I don't care to listen to anything you have to say, and I want you gone before Momma gets home with the kids. Go."

  Jet's easy expression wavered at the mention of Momma. "I think I'll wait and see what she has to say about me joining y'all for dinner."

  "Why are you even here?" This question came from Cletus, standing somewhere behind me. From the sound of it, he was at the back door. "You know Billy moved all your stuff to the garage. You’re lucky he didn’t burn it. If you want something, get it from there."

  Fury’s grip around my lungs eased at Cletus's belligerent tone. He might question me in private, pushing my buttons and testing boundaries, but I could always count on him to have my back in public, especially with Jethro or our father.

  Jet's attention lifted over my head, settled on Cletus, softened. "Oh, hey there, Cletus. How you doing? How's school? And what happened to your face?"

  "Jet, it's nice to see you're still alive and all, but don't pretend you're interested in how school is going or how I’m doing.”

  “Now, Cletus. That’s not—”

  “Save us both from the indignity of pretense and get to the point.” I could almost picture Cletus’s single eyebrow lift over his mix of blue-green eyes. “What do you want? You look like shit.”

  My vision cleared somewhat at Cletus's words, no longer red about the corners, and I looked at my older brother. I didn’t like that I immediately noticed how skinny he was. Jethro coughed then, a wracking cough that shook his entire form. His cheeks were sunk, and the skin around his eyes looked paper thin. He was obviously sick.

  Dammit.

  I pushed my hand through my hair, warring with automatic worry for my stupid brother. Seeing him like this made my chest hurt. Now I was frustrated with myself for still caring about him at all.

  This was why I hated Jet. My brother had this effect on me, made me doubt what I knew to be true. Fact, Jet left us. Fact, he didn’t care about us. Fact, he only came back when he wanted something. Fact, I couldn’t trust him. I shouldn’t care that he looked about ready to keel over.

  And yet . . .

  It hadn’t always been this way. He hadn’t always been untrustworthy. We’d been close.

  And then he left, like you were nothing.

  Finally finished coughing, the side of his mouth curved up. His lips were bluish purple.

  "Would you believe me if I said I didn't want anything?"

  "Nope," came Cletus's reply followed by the sound of his shoes on the wooden boards of the porch. "You look like death, and death always wants something. Try again."

  Our brother grinned weakly. “’Death always wants something.’ Ain’t that the truth. I have missed you, Cletus.” Jet’s gaze slid back to mine and he stuffed his hands in his pockets, seeming to study my face. Then he sighed. I could hear his chest rattle with the exhale. "Listen, I'm honestly not here to cause trouble—"

  "Then leave,” I said, even as I fought the urge to bring him inside and out of the cold.

  There’d been a time, when I was just seven, that he’d made me chicken soup and read to me when I was sick. The soup had been microwaved out of a can and the book he read had been a manual on motorcycle maintenance, but still. He’d been there.

  And that was the problem. He’d always been there. I’d relied on him. I had thousands of stories and memories of times Jet had been my confidant, my co-conspirator, my best friend.

  Until he wasn’t.

  "I just wanted to see y'all." He shrugged, his shoulders slumping. “I thought maybe you’d like to see me?”

  "No. Leave." I had to be strong, because as much as part of me wanted to believe him, I knew he couldn’t be trusted. Every inch of giving with Jet ended up being a hundred miles of taking.

  A hint of irritation turned his friendly expression brittle. "Really, Billy? You get to decide when I see my family?"

  I took a step forward, but a hand settled on my shoulder, keeping me in place.

  "How about this.” Cletus stepped in front of me, using a deep voice that sounded forty years older than his age. “You go on, do what you do, and I promise to tell Momma you stopped by. You want to see her? You know she's at the library every day starting at ten. You go see her there. Take her out to lunch. She'd love it.”

  “And Ash? The twins? What about Roscoe?”

  Cletus shook his head. “That’s up to Momma to decide. You don’t get to decide for her by showing up here out of the blue after being gone for months. That’s exactly what Darrell used to do and I’m with Billy on this one. It ain’t right.”

  Jet frowned, his glassy gaze turning thoughtful, and he nodded. “All right. Fair enough. But you promise to tell her I was here.” He pointed at Cletus.

  “I will. You have my word.”

  “Fine.” Jet glanced around the ground, like he was looking for something. “I’ll be going, then. Oh, just one more thing.” Lifting his eyes, a smirk on his face, he addressed his next statement to me. “Saw your game last week, Billy. You weren’t half bad. And that brunette cheerleader I saw you with? She your girlfriend?”

  I said nothing, gave him nothing, because I could sense what he wanted was a reaction. I’d pissed him off, not letting him in the house, and now he was lashing out in return.

  “A year ahead of you, right? Already eighteen, legal. She’s a senior?”

  Cletus sucked in a breath between his teeth. “Jet, come on now. Time to go.”

  “I might look her up,” he continued, still smirking as he took two steps backward, obviously reading the hostility in my glare. “She’s got pretty eyes. Are they green? Or blue?”

  Predictably, my temper was threadbare. Yeah, Samantha was my girlfriend now. And yes, she was older than me, already eighteen. But this act of Jethro’s was bullshit. Jethro knew Sam already because she dated Ben McClure all last year.

  It wasn’t Jethro’s trash-talking that had my temper flaring so fast, not really. It wasn’t even about Samantha. Samantha could have been any girl. It was that he would never—never ever, not once in a million years—talk about a girl this way if she was with Ben. He’d be respectful, because what Ben thought mattered to him.

  But me? His own brother? There weren’t any insults off-limits. Another r
eminder that Jet cared for himself, and for Ben, and for some other random folks maybe, just not his family. And that arrow hit its mark. That was my sore spot.

  My older brother whistled. “She sure is one sweet piece of ass.”

  “You don’t talk to her.” My voice was sandpaper, promising violence, and I knew as soon as I spoke that speaking at all was a mistake.

  Jethro’s mouth hitched on one side, and in the moment, I became obsessed with smashing his face until his mouth became indistinguishable from his bruises.

  “Oh yeah? What will you do if I talk to her? It’s a free country.”

  I took a step back as the image of demolishing my brother’s face crystalized in my mind. Sometimes the viciousness of my thoughts scared me, and I knew fear was one of the main things stopping me from becoming what he was, what my father was. Fear and disgust.

  “Nothing? You won’t do nothing?” he taunted, his smile spreading. “What about if I fuck— “

  “Jethro!” Cletus stepped fully in front of me, hollering at the top of his lungs. “Would you just leave already.”

  But it was too late. I’d already moved around my little brother, not caring, not afraid, past disgust, just intent on one thing. And if that made me like my father, then so be it.

  Chapter Three

  *Billy*

  “The things we regret and the things we yearn for. That's what makes us who we are.”

  Will Ferguson, Happiness

  I knew better.

  I knew better than to get pissed at Jethro. There was no point with him, he was never going to change. I knew better than to chase him into the woods behind our house, and I cursed my blindness, both the losing of my temper and my lack of direction when surrounded by trees.

  Jethro knew this about me. He used to joke I was a city boy born in the country. Now I wasn’t only pissed, I was also lost.

  These miserable woods.

  I hated them. I hated that everything looked the same. I hated every piece of bark, every branch, every leaf. Some people considered this part of the world beautiful, but I didn't. I hated the Smokies, the blue and white mist that clouded everything, covered everything. Suffocated everything.

  And now I was stuck in them.

  I punched a bush. That did not end well for me. In fact, it ended with me face-first in the bush and wrestling with leaves and thin branches on the ground as I struggled to stand. But I did stand, telling myself to hit a tree trunk instead.

  The last time I'd been stuck in the woods I'd been just a kid, chasing an unsteady baby Roscoe past the tree line while Ashley tried to talk the twins into a bath. Our momma had been indisposed after a visit from our father.

  For those of you who don’t know, indisposed was just a polite southern word for having bruises that needed tending to.

  That particular time, Cletus had been the reason for our father's rage, and he’d been locked in the basement for his own safety under the guise of punishment. Jethro had held me back, stopping me from doing anything by threatening to put me in the basement with Cletus. My older brother intervened—in his own way—before Darrell did too much damage to our mother, distracting and charming our father enough to get him to stop. He then convinced Darrell to go to the club with him, which left Ashley and I to watch everybody as a dark cloud of despair and futility settled over everything.

  Just a typical Saturday at the Winston house.

  I'd followed Roscoe into the woods, and then he'd led us both out because I’d been useless. All these years later, I could've used a toddler Roscoe to help me out of this godforsaken wilderness.

  Catching my breath from the brawl with the bush, I glanced to my left, pretty sure I’d come from that direction. I searched the ground for footprints. All I saw were leaves and sticks and dirt.

  This day. This shitshow of a day. I still had homework and chores to do. And Roscoe was probably wondering where I was. I needed to get out of here. I didn’t have time for—

  I tensed, holding stock still, and listened.

  A sound rose above the disorienting noise of the forest. It was a person, singing, loud and clear. A woman, and her voice was beautiful.

  "Is that . . ." Guns N’ Roses?

  It was Guns N’ Roses. This angelic female voice was singing “November Rain.” I took an automatic step toward the sound.

  Laughing a smidge at the unexpected absurdity—that there was some woman out there who'd chosen to unleash her angelic voice on these hellish woods by singing Guns N’ Roses like they were choir songs—my feet were already moving toward the sound. A moment later, my brain caught up and told me she, whoever she was, should be able to help me find my way out of here.

  Also, I found myself sneaking, which made no sense. "Don’t scare the woman by sneaking up on her. Make some noise, announce yourself," I whispered. To myself.

  I continued to sneak.

  The song was much closer now, and if I strained my ears, I could hear the faint sounds of her moving around. I also smelled and heard a fire.

  The ground raised upward, and I followed the incline, breaching the crest just as she finished the last lines of her song. I halted, squinting through the branches of the trees and shrubs, and spotted a blue tent as well as what looked like a clothesline strung between two trunks. But I didn’t see her . . .

  And then she started to sing again, another Guns N’ Roses tune. This time “The Garden.” A breath pushed out of my lungs at her song choice, and how she made it sound like a sacred ballad.

  I was just about to take another step forward when I heard the zipper of a tent. Rocking back on my heels, I reasoned against the impulse to shrink back and just listen to her sing for a bit. And that was crazy. Also crazy, I was still lost in the woods and should've been spitting mad at my brother. But I wasn't.

  Holding my breath as the tent rustled, the beautiful voice clearer now, I caught a flash of hair, red as a firecracker. At the sight, the forest floor beneath my feet seemed to sway and then fall away. I reached out and held onto the tree trunk at my left, because I knew who this woman—girl—was. I’d know that hair anywhere.

  Momentarily paralyzed, I watched Scarlet’s pale, freckled hands reach out and tug on the stiff clothes hung over the makeshift clothesline. My eyes dropped to her back. She was wrapped in a blanket and it looked familiar, like one my Grandma Oliver used to stitch by the fire in her old chair, the pieces cut from worn-out clothes.

  I worked to hear past the rushing of blood between my ears, the jumbled disorder made it difficult to concentrate on just one thought.

  I had no idea she could sing like that.

  What the hell is she doing? Tent camping? It's winter, for Christ’s sake. She’s liable to catch pneumonia and die.

  That's an unusually high and flat stretch of land she has her campsite on, it certainly would make an ideal plot to build a cabin.

  Shaking my head at this last notion, my neck craned as I reflexively tracked her movements. She pulled a rigid pair of jeans from the clothesline, still singing with a voice like a siren, and then seemed to test the dryness of a big Texas A&M sweatshirt. It was the sight of the A&M logo that brought me to my senses.

  For the record, I wasn’t an A&M fan, but that didn't mean I'd turn down any scholarship from any school that got me where I wanted to go. Point being, I'd go to Texas A&M, I'd prefer Princeton, but I'd go to Texas A&M if need be. Whatever it takes.

  Back to now, and Scarlet, and her remarkable voice, but mostly it being winter. I should be irritated about finding her squatting on land so close to our house. We didn't need her kind of trouble. Every single one of my decisions and actions since before I could remember was about avoiding the kind of trouble she and her kind brought.

  But I wanted to listen longer. It was a silly desire that made no sense. She’d intruded. She wasn’t welcome, angelic voice or not.

  Remembering myself, I straightened my spine. Marching straight forward and onto her campsite.

  "Scarlet, what do yo
u think you’re—"

  I didn't get a chance to finish my poorly assembled protest because, without even turning, Scarlet dropped the jeans, let the blanket fall from her shoulders, and bolted.

  It took me a split second to realize what she’d done and another after that to force my feet to follow.

  This day. This fucking day.

  What else could I do? I chased after her because . . .

  Well, because . . .

  Because she shouldn't be here! Yeah. That's why.

  A streak of red hair between trees was blessedly easy to track, much easier than Jethro's long legs. That bastard has always been quick as lightening. Scarlet was short, her legs not nearly as long as Jet’s, but she was surprisingly fast. Not faster than me, but still. It was a good thing I never missed a football practice. The sprints were paying off.

  Damn, she'd make a great receiver, though. She's got good moves.

  After longer than I'd like to admit, I caught up to her, and brought her to a sudden stop with a hand around her arm. She nearly yanked her shoulder out of its socket trying to pull away, so I grabbed her other arm and tugged her close.

  “Hey, would you calm down. I’m not going to—”

  Without looking up, she kneed me right in the balls, and out of all the things that I'd witnessed about her over the last several minutes, that was the only thing I should’ve seen coming.

  "Jesus H. Christ." I let her go, wincing, winded, the air leaving my body along with a piece of my soul.

  Fucking hell, that hurt.

  "Leave me alone! I—I . . . Billy?"

  Ah.

  Damn.

  I just wanted to die.

  “What the—Billy Winston. What are you doing out here?” She hesitated where she stood. But then she knelt on the ground next to me, her hands hovering over my body but not touching.

  “Just—just put me out of my misery,” I spoke to no one, hoping somehow that bush I’d punched earlier would lend me a thin branch so I could strangle myself.

  “Come on now, it can’t be that bad.” She placed her hands on her hips, reprimanding me, but also sounding winded.