by Anna Roberts
Eli lifted the flap on the bar and stepped through to the other side, then fished another beer from the fridge. He snapped off the top, took a long pull and gave Gabe a long, not-entirely sober look.
“So what’s up, cuz?” he said. “You’ve got that look about you. Definite. Dark.” One corner of his mouth curled in a smile. “An immovable object.”
“Axl’s a werewolf,” said Gabe, deciding just to cut to the chase.
Eli squinted. “Who?”
“Your kid,” said Gabe. “The one you put in Stacy Wernicke fifteen years ago, when you were seventeen and my balls hadn’t even thought about starting to drop.”
“Oh,” said Eli. “That.”
That. Gabe shook his head. “Jesus, Eli. I know werewolves are like famous for being like the deadbeatest of all deadbeat dads, but come on. You’re like a parody of yourself.”
Eli gave him an incredulous look. “Yeah, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got kind of my own shit going on right now.”
“What?” said Gabe. “That girl in Miami?”
“Yes. I was arrested for murder.”
“And they let you go.”
“For what?” said Eli, waving an arm around the empty bar. “For this?”
The girl on the jukebox had stopped moaning. Eli’s words echoed, then the sound of an orchestra tuning up filled the bar. A piano. A fresh key of angst – one that Gabe knew all too well. Nightswimming.
Oh, this hurt. He had broken his own heart a thousand times over to this song when he was eighteen, just for the pleasure of putting it back together again. Then one day he heard it and finally realized what it meant, like it had been waiting for him to catch up in years and understand it. And when he did understand it he had cried, and there was no putting him back together. Just years he’d never get back.
Eli would never get it. Eli didn’t understand that those years had to end sometime. Even now he looked handsomely bewildered at his own isolation, like Byron in exile, striking poses and littering neglected children.
“I really thought I could make it work, Gabe,” he said. “I thought I could be different. I thought I could have a life, a living. And that nobody would ever need to know.”
“Everyone thinks that,” said Gabe. “Or hopes that.”
“And we don’t get that, do we? Hope.”
Gabe sighed, impatient. “Eli, I hope that one day when I’m spanking it I will somehow ejaculate a giant cotton candy unicorn that will scoop me up on its back and ride me off to the land of El Dorado. And it also shits solid gold and diamonds. I hope for that, but I know it’s probably never gonna happen. Sooner or later you’re just going to have to be realistic.”
“How is this unrealistic?” asked Eli, with another dramatic sweep of his arm. “I’m not asking for the moon on a silver fucking chain. I’m just asking to run a bar. I’m just asking to be a human being. Instead of some leper. The great untouchable.”
Gabe came round to the other side of the bar and wrapped his fingers around the neck of the bottle. Eli tugged on it like a child for a moment but then released it. Without turning around, Gabe poured the contents into the sink behind him. “You can,” he said. “And you can start by being a father.”
They were standing too close to one another, but it was gone now. Eli had a little extra flesh around his jaw and his middle. The sweet, boyish sharpness of his cheekbones had sunk in flesh and indulgence, and his heavy, sexy Elvis underlip looked like nothing more than petulance. That tattoo around his wrist was no longer a thrilling flag of rebellion; just one of those bad tattoos you got when you were seventeen, just so you could regret them when you were older.
Except Eli hadn’t been seventeen when he had it done. Gabe had been seventeen; Eli had been twenty-six.
Maybe it was pity that propelled him even closer, or maybe it was a desire to try it out and see if it was still there, but Gabe swayed forwards and did the thing he had wasted so many of his teenage years dreaming about. Eli didn’t object. He just stood there, slack jawed and tasting of beer, while Gabe kissed him.
And there was nothing.
“I loved you,” said Gabe, with his hands on Eli’s face and the taste of Eli’s mouth in his. “Once there was a time I would have done anything to make you look at me the way I looked at you.”
This time Eli leaned forward, offering his lips. It was so pathetic that Gabe nearly laughed.
“No, Eli,” said Gabe. “That was before I grew up.” He tossed the beer bottle into the recycling. It landed with a loud, satisfying clunk, and then he headed off down the bar, turning off the lights. Eli just stood there where Gabe had left him, looking hot and confused.
“I never knew,” he said, after a long pause.
“Of course you didn’t. You never noticed when anyone was in love with you because you didn’t know anything else.” Gabe turned off the jukebox at the mains; enough crying over times gone by. “Actually I can kind of understand why you’re so bummed now; this is the first time you’ve ever been the big bad wolf in all your charmed life, isn’t it?”
Eli sighed. “Could you maybe stop making me sound like an asshole?”
“I don’t know,” said Gabe. “Could you maybe stop being one?”
There was a brief moment when their eyes met and Gabe realized he might have gone too far. This was the alpha, after all. Eli may not have been the toughest wolf in Florida, but he’d proved himself time and time again in terms of charisma and potency. And while he didn’t tower over Gabe the way Joe did, he was still solid enough to smack him down like a cocky littermate.
But then Eli raised his eyes to the ceiling and the moment was gone. “Fine,” he said. “Don’t turn off the coffee machine. I’m gonna need a couple of espressos before I go anywhere.”
“Thank you.”
“No,” said Eli. “Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t around to stick a foot up my ass when I needed it.”
“You’d have kids all up and down the panhandle,” said Gabe. “And at least sixteen strains of really interesting herpes.”
Eli laughed as he moved the levers on the big, hissing Gaggia. He served up several cups and beckoned Gabe over. “Were you serious?” he said, carefully handing over the hot drink. “When you said you loved me?”
“Yeah,” said Gabe. “I was so gay for you back then.”
“That wasn’t the part I meant. I meant the tense part of it. Past.”
“Oh,” said Gabe, unscrambling his meaning. “Past tense.”
“Yeah,” said Eli, with a kind of dumb neediness that was so Eli that Gabe couldn’t imagine not loving him. “Is it a past tense thing?”
“Well, I’m not gay for you any more, if that’s what you mean.”
Eli laughed. “I love you,” he said. “Although not in a gay way.”
“I know,” said Gabe. “And it’s okay. I told you – I grew up.”
Eli touched his hand and squeezed it; a brother’s grip. “I should do the same, huh?”
“That would be good.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I promise; I’ll do better.”
“Don’t promise,” said Gabe. “Just do.”
17
Charlie was cooking Reese’s supper when the phone rang.
“Charlie?” It was a woman’s voice.
“Hey. Hi.” He cradled the phone against his shoulder, with his other hand breading a piece of chicken with a stroke-inducing mixture of crushed pork rinds and Doritos. Ever since he’d had his little epiphany Charlie had been having fun testing the limits of the human digestive system.
“It’s me. Barb.”
Barb Hallett. Holy shit. He set down the tongs, thinking fondly of the way the rambling rose inked on her right breast curled down into her cleavage. “Hey. How you doin’?”
But Barb was in no mood to flicker with old flames. “Have you seen Mike?”
“No,” said Charlie, turning cold. “Why?”
“He’s not answering his phone
,” said Barb. “To anyone. I sent Tobin and Brent – you remember my nephews? Yeah, well, they’re out looking for him but he’s not picking up for them either. Or Sarah-Lou, and there’s no way he doesn’t pick up for Sarah-Lou; she’s his princess.”
Charlie closed the kitchen door with his foot. “Okay,” he said. “This is awkward, but I’m probably not the best person to deal with this.”
Barb snorted. “Don’t you dare leave me high and dry, Charlie Silver. I found bones on the building site. A fucking deer skull and footprints in the mud – and not the right number of toes either, if you catch my meaning.”
“Jesus.” Swampers liked to leave skulls, as a warning of more death to come.
“They’re watching,” she said, and he caught the wet slur in her voice that said she’d been fuelling her fear with a bottle of Southern Comfort. “They’re waiting for me to run, I know it. But I’m not going, Charlie. This was my father’s land and his father’s before him and I - ”
“ - yeah, I know.” He turned off the light under the deep fat fryer. Reese would have to order out. “I’m coming over. Just hang tight. Have a smoke. Get your gun, okay?”
“I got it.”
Charlie hung up and opened the door. “That was Barb,” he said. “We’re going out.”
“What?” said Reese, glancing up from some trash show about child beauty pageants. “You were making fried chicken.”
“I was, now I’m not. On account of Mike the Bike probably having been eaten by swampers.”
Reese turned the color of French cheese. “I’m not going out.”
“Yeah, you are,” said Charlie. “I know you find it boring, but maybe if you pray to the Gods of TLC then Mike will be fine and you’ll get some live white-trash entertainment when he shows up and beats the shit out of me for fucking his wife that time. Wouldya like that?”
The kid’s little eyes glittered. He liked that. He liked it a whole lot. “You were making chicken,” he said. “You started making it, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but Barb’s all alone, Reese. She’s scared.”
“I can’t go out. I’m sick. I think I’m hypoglycemic. Maybe if I ate something...”
Charlie slammed himself back in the kitchen and took several deep breaths. He relit the gas.
“...I mean, you started, right?” Reese called through the door.
“You’re damn right I did,” said Charlie, and dropped the chicken in the sizzling fat.
Sometimes he felt bad, like he was doing to Reese what had been done to him, and that it wasn’t Reese’s fault, any more than it had been his. Sins of the father and all that.
And then Reese would pull shit like this and it would all seem so beautifully simple. He wasn’t doing anything that dearest Mommie Nature wasn’t going to do to Reese in the fullness and foulness of time. Being a werewolf was enough of a stroke risk even if you didn’t consume enough sodium to turn your ass into a living replica of Lot’s wife.
Charlie took out his hip flask. It was light when he shook it and he imagined Reese’s displeasure when he thought he was stealing booze, only to find the flask contained what he thought was plain water. Poetic justice really; Reese had never been properly punished in his life and now he was poisoning himself because he never learned to keep his sticky little fingers off other people’s property.
For a moment Charlie stood there, listening to the sound of the deep fryer, then Reese complained again about his blood sugar and that was all it took. Another tiny tipping point. Charlie poured a slug of the liquid into the barbeque sauce, and once he might have imagined that he felt some more of his soul drop away, but that was done. Gone fifteen years or more. That was the price of being one of Lyle’s men.
*
“What do you think of Kierson as a first name for a girl?” said Grayson, not taking his eyes from the laptop screen.
“I think whoever came up with that should have their parenting privileges revoked,” said Joe.
“Lovely. I’ll take it.”
“Is this for your book?”
“Yep. Maybe I’ll spell it K-I-E-R-S-Y-N for extra slackjawed flair.”
Joe stuffed another pair of socks into the corner of his bag. On one hand he was looking forward to leaving, but on the other he realized he’d miss this cozy little house and Grayson’s company. Not to mention the lingering question of that smell. It was bugging him like an underfloor leak.
“Don’t you ever want to write something you actually like?” he asked.
Grayson shrugged. “It’s a living. Do you like what you do?”
“Yeah,” said Joe. “I kinda do.”
Grayson took off his glasses and straightened up from the computer. “Really?”
“Sure. I mean, there’s poo. Occasionally there’s a lot of poo - ”
“ - I was going to say,” said Grayson, laughing.
“Yeah, but basically it’s just...fixing stuff. Making things work. I always loved that, even when I was a kid. Cars, machines, septic tanks. You do a little thing here and a little thing there and it...flows. Works. It’s satisfying.”
Grayson looked back at the laptop screen. He reached for his glasses then seemed to think better of it, because he just sighed. “Lucky,” he said, and maybe he might have said something else, but then someone knocked at the front door. “Could you get that?”
“Sure.”
It was Charlie. He looked drawn and tired but even so he still managed to tear into the room like a hurricane.
“Where’s Reese?” asked Grayson, folding up the screen and setting it aside. Charlie had the look of a man with bad news just behind his lips, and it was then that Joe realized that he wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Reese was dead. And maybe Grayson was bracing for the exact same bad news, and that meant something, didn’t it?
“He says he has low blood sugar,” said Charlie. “Which means he can’t stir his ass from the couch, where he’s eating fried chicken and watching one of those garbage TV shows that are like Christmas for pedophiles.”
“Okay. So what’s up?”
“Here’s the thing,” said Charlie. “You know that boundary shit that Reese was too busy eating pork rinds to deal with? Well, it turns out Mike the Bike is definitely missing.”
Grayson lowered the recliner and sat up straight. “Oh shit.”
“Yeah, I know, right? And Barb’s freaking out. And I’m not sure I wanna go out there alone on account of the whole...you know...”
“...previous Barbara incident. Yes, we heard.”
Charlie gave a hopeful grin. “So. I could do with some back up?”
“Well, Joe was just leaving tomorrow morning...”
“Come on,” said Charlie. “Reese doesn’t give a shit if I live or die, but are you guys really gonna leave me to die at the hands of an enraged Hell’s Angel who’s probably lurking behind the trailer with a shotgun?”
“Depends,” said Grayson. “Is he likely to shoot bystanders?”
“I thought you said he was missing?” said Joe.
Charlie shrugged. “He is. That’s currently my best-case scenario – that he’s hanging out on the down-low so’s he can kill me.”
Grayson blinked. “Wishful thinking’s really not your strong point, is it?”
“Yeah, well the worst-case scenario looks most likely. Barb found a deer skull dumped in the hole Mike was digging out for that safehouse.”
“Swampers?” said Grayson, and the word was like a chill in the room. Joe had tangled with a couple before, but even at their worst the Everglades families couldn’t compare to the fearsome reputation of the Okefenokee packs.
“Most likely, yeah,” said Charlie. “Please? I could really use your nose, Joe.”
There had been a time when Joe would have laughed at the merest possibility that he’d ever be doing a favor for Charlie Silver or any other of Lyle’s men, but Lyle was rotting somewhere in a swamp and his shriveled black heart had long since passed through the tortured col
on of that obese kid. Could you get sick from eating heart? As they drove out to the Hallett place Joe wondered if that was maybe the source of the sickly smell, and that he was sure he’d heard of some Arctic explorer who nearly died from eating dog liver, when his only option for survival was to chow down on the sled dogs.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t coming from Charlie. The pickup smelled of his usual mixture of blood and tobacco, sharp with an edge of something alkaline that told Joe that Charlie’s dealer was cutting the coke with baking powder. Before, Joe wouldn’t have even thought of baking powder as a thing that even had a smell, but now it burned the inside of his nose as sharply as if he’d breathed it in on purpose.
Barb Hallett’s trailer was a blowsy riot of scents - Southern Comfort, weed and cheap perfume. She sat hunched on one side of a narrow dining table, Mike’s shotgun propped against her knee. The floor shuddered as Grayson closed the door; a dreamcatcher shivered against the dark of the window.
“I wanted them to see me,” she said, looking out into the night. “I wanted them to know I’d blow their goddamn heads off.”
“Are they here?” asked Charlie. “They show themselves yet?”
She shook her head. It looked like she’d reapplied her mascara in anticipation of company - a typical Southern lady; always look presentable, even when you’re shithoused - but it started to run down her cheeks in raccoon rivulets all over again. “Brent and Tobin aren’t back,” she said. “And where the hell is Reese?”
“He’s...sick,” said Charlie.
“Sick my ass,” said Barb. “What the hell use is he?”
Charlie kept a credible poker face at that, although Grayson’s hasty look of nonchalance was nothing short of pathetic.
“We’re gonna take a look around,” said Charlie. “Sit tight, okay? You got your gun.”
“For what it’s worth,” she said, sniffing hard. “They’re swampers, Charlie. They don’t give a shit for guns. There’s only two people who ever kept them inbreds in line: one of them’s dead and the other one’s way down in the fucking Keys. And maybe she’s dead now, too.”
“No. She’s not,” said Joe.
Barb sniffed again. “Whatever. She’s a fat heap of good to me. I always said we needed the wolf witches, but Lyle knew better. You can always rely on a man to fuck everything up.”
