Adler

by Jessica Gadziala

  I would later learn, however, that my father was not a man who romanticized women, their sweet, their soft, their goodness.

  He was simply a man who liked to exert his power over the fairer sex.

  It was one of the reasons - I was sure - we skipped countries so often. Not because my father had a wicked case of wanderlust, but because he was running from charges, from more prison terms, from more women pointing to him in a courtroom, condemning him to years behind bars. His pride wouldn't have been able to handle that; having women decide his fate, being at their mercy.

  Even if he earned every sad, sick, torturous day he would have gotten.

  As for me, I grew up fast, grew up without ever having really been allowed to be a child.

  I knew no home, just places we stayed, cold, dirty, smelling of must and mold. Freezing in the winter. Because if we had any heat at all, it came from a small fire my father sometimes remembered to build, other times just let me huddle under blankets, rocking, rubbing my legs together, my arms together, desperate to stave off the threat of frostbite and gangrenous limbs, parts of me falling off, being cut off. I'd seen it more than I cared to admit, enough that I knew to be terrified of it.

  In the summers, I sweated through my clothes. As soon as they dried, they would soak through again, leaving me listless, lethargic, causing an anger to well up inside me, uncontrollable, making me lash out at anyone who bothered me - the kids in the town who mocked my rags, my accent, my boozing father who always quickly became known as a drunk, a lech, a predator, a man to be pitied and feared in equal turns. I would throw myself at my little tormentors, the feel of fist hitting flesh triggering something primal in me, something ugly and mean, making me thirst for it, seek it out. Until I quickly had the same reputation as the father I saw some days and not others, the one who sometimes remembered to feed me, but just as often left me to starve, to beg for food if my hunger was enough to fight my pride. But, the older I got, the more I wizened up, realized there were ways to save my pride while filling my stomach.

  I was eight-years-old when I learned how to steal, slipping an apple into my pocket from an open market in London.

  And when no one caught me, I got bolder.

  Vegetables, bread, jerky, cans of beans, soup, enough to sustain me.

  My father never asked.

  But he seemed to understand.

  "It's good for a man to find his own way in life," he had agreed when I once told him what I'd been doing, feeling near to bursting with guilt about it. "Maybe try stealing some vodka for yer old man next."

  Because everyone watched him when he came in a store, knowing a man with sticky fingers when they saw one.

  They were less likely to suspect me.

  We lived a dozen different places, half a dozen different countries by the time I turned ten.

  And it was at ten when we ended up somewhere as cold as my father himself.

  Russia.

  Why, I never knew, knew better than to ask.

  It likely had to do with the widespread debauchery, the way no one would look down on him for drinking too much, fighting too much, being a shitty provider and father to a growing boy.

  It was in Russia when one night he went out and never came home.

  If you could call the shack a home.

  A shack I wasn't sure he actually paid for, thinking it was more likely he had found it abandoned, and decided to squat so all his money could go to boozing and drugging and who the hell knew what else.

  I waited, knowing he was prone to benders, out burning the town down for two or three nights.

  But three nights turned into four.

  Four to five.

  By the seventh day, I knew there was something wrong. People didn't go out drinking for seven days in a row, never stopping home to change clothes or bathe.

  Me, I went looking.

  Down alleys.

  In bars.

  But there was nothing.

  Not a single trace of him.

  I would learn many years later that he had been caught with his buddies, gang-raping a girl who was just barely sixteen, who had the bad fortune of walking home from a babysitting job thinking she was safe when it was only a few blocks away. Pulled into an alley two doors from her parents' home, left bleeding and broken and just barely able to go on with her life after.

  He got shipped off to Petak Island Prison, a shitehole built for shiteheads.

  At the time, though, I was just ten years old, alone in the world. My father had never been much of a father, but he was someone who made sure I had shelter, someone who offered a bit of protection.

  I was mature for my age, but not ready to be alone in a country whose customs I didn't know, whose towns I didn't know my way around fully, whose language I only had a slight grasp on.

  That being said, I knew enough about the country to know I didn't want to end up in an orphanage - at least not in that day - so I needed to stay under the radar of the law.

  The winter that year nearly did me in. I had thought I understood cold, but nothing had prepared me for a Russian winter type of cold. The snow fell for days, unrelenting, merciless, trapping me in the shack with no way to start a fire because snow had started falling in the chimney, and no way to escape because the door was barricaded shut with a drift.

  I hadn't eaten in five days when I couldn't take the clawing, unending hunger in my stomach, making my brain foggy, jackhammering a headache into my temples. I forced open a window and literally burrowed my way out, coming across a rabbit half-eaten by wildlife, biting into what was left of its organs with an uncontrollable need for sustenance in my already too thin body. It was right then when I was come upon.

  By a man in the woods with an accent I didn't know, his Russian more choppy than my own, but disgust a look that could be read in every language.

  He said a string of words in what I knew to be Spanish even though it was one I spoke worst of all, tripping into Russian and English, saying something about Rough fucking place.

  I didn't understand, and I didn't have the strength to fight him when he reached for me, pulling me with him, tossing me into the back of a truck.

  Bijan was Iranian born, but like my father, moved around. At first, I didn't think to wonder, let alone ask, why. Because he fed me. He sheltered me. He became more like a father than the one by blood ever was.

  It wasn't until he sold me that I understood.

  "Sorry, kid. I need to get across an ocean. Can't have you weighing me down."

  It was then that I understood that just because someone showed kindness didn't mean they were kind.

  I lucked out in a way, finding myself sold into labor, not sex, tossed in a mine in the Ukraine, made to work sixteen exhaustive hours a day, live on less than a street dog could find, developing a cough that would plague me every waking moment for the year I was down there before finding a way out one afternoon while one of the guards was off fucking a girl in the back of his truck.

  Eleven going on twelve, I got myself to freedom.

  Or so I thought.

  I got far and fast and found myself in another land, with customs and languages I didn't understand. But bigger. Taller. Stronger. Fiercer.

  But not fierce enough.

  Not strong enough.

  Men with sick heads could always spot a kid like me, alone in the world, not sure how to build a life on their own.

  Vulnerable.

  Vulnerable kids were valuable in an ugly underworld.

  I thanked God those days that I was born male, that I was a little too old to fit certain sick tastes, though my age and sex didn't protect me fully.

  It wasn't long before I found myself in a shipping container with a huddled mass of boys and girls my age and younger.

  I don't know how long we were in there - days, weeks.

  The smell became unbearable, sweat and blood and human waste. Enough to make you sick enough that you could barely choke down the rations offered to us.

>   The crying got to me, trapped with no way to escape it, calls for their mothers and fathers in more languages than I could count. Calls of hunger, of fear, of pleading.

  It drove me half insane, feeling a rage like I had known in my childhood, when the hot summers would make me lash out irrationally, draw blood, crack bones.

  I had to force my hands under my ass to keep them from curling into fists, from striking out, from seeking some ever-loving silence.

  When I was certain I couldn't take it one more moment, that I would finally snap and go insane, the door was opened, and we were ushered out, looked over, split into groups. The girls were chosen first, fates worse than any I could endure before them.

  The older kids, the boys like me, heading into the prime part of adolescence, were sectioned off between bidders, heading to fates of labor of some kind.

  I ended up in Colombia in the coca fields, harvesting crops that would feed cocaine habits across more countries than I could count, generating income I would never know.

  But, for a change, we were fed.

  The cartels knew we worked harder, longer days when they took some care of us.

  It was perhaps the first time in my life that I knew the feeling of a full belly.

  It was enough to secure loyalty, move me from a picker to a grounds keeper at the Don's house, eventually being allowed to help work as a cover across country lines, confusing the men at checkpoints along with some prostitute hired to look like my mother. One, big, happy family. With a trunk loaded down with cocaine.

  Eight trips from Colombia to the Mexican/American border over the years until I turned sixteen.

  And that was when a situation, while illegal, and not ideal, but stable and relatively secure, got turned on its ass.

  In a hail of bullets, leaving me half-dragging a bleeding woman through the godforsaken Mexican desert without proper food or water, eventually having to leave her - likely to her death - to escape the border patrol who always seemed right on our heels.

  It had been late, the night giving me a break from the unyielding sun, burning into my skin, making me sweat through my filthy clothes, my body aching in every inch, but the not-so-distant sounds of men who wanted to grab me and throw me in a detainment center keeping me moving on wobbling legs, choking with lungs made weak from the years in the mines.

  And a truck pulled up.

  At this point in my life, I should have known better.

  I should have known how opportunistic slimeballs could be, how they knew exactly where to troll for victims.

  Like the border where families got separated, where little kids were left to try to find safety and new dreams on American soil.

  They likely rode the streets most nights, looking for someone alone, vulnerable.

  Like me.

  Like I had been most of my life.

  But all I saw was a truck with air, a full water bottle in the cupholder, a bag of groceries on the floor.

  So I climbed in.

  I remembered the swing of his arm, but not the pain, not the weapon.

  "Woke up in a basement," I went on, taking a steadying breath, searching Lou's face for something I should have known I wouldn't find there.

  Disgust.

  Pity.

  She was simply apt, watching, listening, waiting for the next chapter in my ugly story.

  "Do you want to take a break?" she asked at my silence, hand tucking some hair behind my ear, the touch gentle, familiar, a sensation I realized I could get used to. I wanted to get used to.

  I wanted a break.

  I wanted to stop.

  To quit leaking misery all over her.

  I was sure she had enough of her own.

  I didn't want to give her the burden of mine.

  But if I wanted her to give me hers, I had to first give her mine, show her that she could be vulnerable with me because I had been so with her.

  It was all about balance.

  And I needed to get it out.

  For myself.

  I guess I never really realized how much poison I had floating around inside. It was time to leech it out.

  It was time to get free of my past.

  "No. This part ain't as hard. Other people know this."

  I was used to basements.

  To captivity.

  To powerlessness.

  To being surrounded by others just like me.

  But the years had hardened me, made it harder to control myself.

  I nearly ripped out the voice box of a kid that first night in that basement, the howling he did for his mother and father and grandma grating on frayed nerves, on my thin cord of patience.

  Because I was over it.

  Being a commodity.

  Being traded into untold situations.

  Left uncertain of my future.

  Left to learn new rules, new people, new ways to survive.

  I was sick of it.

  I would get myself out of this situation.

  And then I would never find myself in one like it again.

  I didn't care what it took.

  I didn't care who I needed to become to make that happen.

  Whatever it took, no one would ever own me again.

  But right then, a teen surrounded by other teens, I didn't have the power yet. There were no paths to freedom. There was only a man with a baseball bat who would shove it up your arse if you didn't do what he wanted. And what he wanted was for you to fight. To fight these other kids you lived, ate, slept, shite with day in and day out. For his and his buddies' entertainment.

  "I met Ward down in that basement," I admitted.

  "As in Ross Ward?" she asked.

  "Aye. He came in a little after me, a little softer, so..."

  "Wait wait wait. In what world could anyone call Ross Ward soft?"

  I smiled at that, knowing his reputation was that of a cold, almost heartless bastard. But anyone who knew him outside of his business knew better. Even his fighters knew better. His fighters who were paid well, who had full medical and dental coverage, who could rely on him no matter what it took. The man had a giving heart, knew the ugly of the world firsthand, so was reluctant to contribute to it.

  "We were oil and water at first, him railin' on me not to be so hard on the others, that not all of them had backgrounds. Like his, like mine. Backgrounds that made us able to handle the situation with our sanity mostly intact."

  "And you were all forced to fight one another?" she asked, shaking her head. "Why?"

  "Why do people like to watch cockfights? Dog fights? Because they're sick and drunk and base and weak."

  She nodded a bit at that, letting me go on with the story.

  Months we were down there, seeing horrific things, beating the ever-loving shit out of each other. Ironically, the fights were likely the only things keeping us somewhat sane, the outlet, the catharsis through pain and violence.

  "How did you get away?" she asked, eager for the silver lining in an otherwise cloudy, dark scene.

  "One night, he wanted to play Russian Roulette. I ended up shootin' Ward, then killing our captor," I told her, not fancying it up, not softening the blow. I was a killer. I had learned the skill young. And I didn't have a drop of remorse about it. "Fished the bullet outta Ward, got the kids out of there, and took off."

  I took the money we had all split up, used it to feed myself as I learned major players, as I rubbed shoulders with them, as I made myself useful to them, just so happening to take out one of their enemies, watching as they took interest, as they thought I was some bad guy prodigy, some ambitious contract killer.

  So that was what I became.

  There's no way you could claim to be a decent person when you made your fortune taking lives off the surface of the earth.

  I consoled the pesky little sliver of a conscience I had been plagued with even after everything I'd been through that I was only taking out bad guys for other bad guys. I was just taking another drug dealer, gang banger, enforcer
, rapist, whatever, off the street.

  It wasn't an honest way to make a living, but it - in a sick way - did end up leaving the world a better place.

  "Why did you come to Navesink Bank?"

  "I checked in on Ward every now and again, squatted at his place, made sure he was doing alright. He was the closest thing to a friend I had ever really known. Then I got word that he was having a grudge match. He had been retired for a long time. I knew it must have been something big to bring him out of retirement. So I showed up. Ended up stopping him from fuckin' killin' a guy right in front of a huge crowd."

  "Then you guys had a reunion."

  "Somethin' like that," I agreed, thinking of the way I had wedged my way into his life, right down to stealing the apartment I lived in now from Ward's woman.

  I think a part of me was simply over it. Over the life on the road, a life that never stopped moving. I wanted to know what it would be like to stand still.

  "Why a Henchmen?" Lou asked, shaking her head. "Of all the organizations."

  "Eh, mob has too many rules. And even if I did want to look past that, I've probably taken out a member of most organizations over the years. If they figured that out, I'd be fucked. MCs are good. There are some rules, but after those, ya can just do whatever ya want. Debauchery is encouraged. I figured I could come and go as I please if I'm feeling too stifled."

  "Makes sense," she agreed pressing her face into my neck, planting a sweet kiss there. "Thanks for telling me."

  "Thanks for not giving me that look," I told her, hands moving up and down her spine.

  "I'd never do that," she shot back. "I mean, people don't usually end up in your career if they had nice, normal, suburban upbringings, Adler. Besides, I would never give you that look. I'd never want you to give it to me."

  "I won't," I assured her, not sure what her story was, but knowing it was the same shade of black as mine. "Now hop up," I demanded, patting her ass.

  She let out a low grumble, but rose off me to slide down onto my side, so I could stand, walking bare ass naked to the bathroom, glad it wasn't through the bedroom like it was in my apartment since I still hadn't figured out the secret there.