Marlin's Faith: The Virtues Book II

by A. J. Downey

  “Shoot.”

  “Why the iPod? What was your thought process in buying it?”

  I sniffed, “Faith told me she liked a particular song that’d play on the radio sometimes back when…” I skipped over it and kept going, “Anyways, we’ve had to take her out a couple times and it hasn’t gone well. She has these freak outs, gets all traumatized and freezes up and sh–” I caught myself again.

  “And the iPod?” Karen pressed.

  “I figured she could use it, you know? Plug the music into her ears and give her something else to concentrate on. Drown some of the other people around out.

  “A coping mechanism.”

  “Yeah.”

  Karen’s mouth turned down and she nodded her head thoughtfully, “It’s a good idea. Something dependable that isn’t bad for you. I think it was a really good, really thoughtful, idea.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I’d say you’re on the right track. It can, and will, be a good tool to help ease her back into things. What else are you worried about?”

  We talked, for a good long while. Kristen got a bite, and Johnny helped her reel in a red grouper. Enough for a meal for two, so that wasn’t bad and seemed to satisfy her enough that she’d caught something before the boys, that she didn’t feel the need to keep fishin’. She got her picture with it and I got the hook out of its mouth. I was about to toss it in the cooler when she squealed in protest. We weren’t exactly a catch and release outfit, but she and her boys were the ones payin’ so fuck it.

  “Your lucky day, Man,” I told the fish and leaned way over the side and let him go.

  As I watched his tail wave back and forth, and his reddish brown body disappear into the blue, I couldn’t help but wonder if this would somehow become a metaphor for my deal with Faith. Would she get better, wander off, and that’d be it? I’d never thought about what was supposed to happen after, you know? What came after all the therapy and recovery, when she was as put back together as she would ever be?

  The universe provides, alright. The rest of the trip, we didn’t catch shit. Their four hours were up and I got us turned around and headed back to the marina. I talked more with Karen, who was a smart girl with a good head on her shoulders and by all accounts, a heart made out of solid gold. Her and her man both, judging by the charity case his jackass buddy Doug, was.

  One of the things I liked about my business was the people I met. There was somebody new on these decks just about every trip out; this trip had been no exception. I felt better, more right about some of the choices I’d made regarding my involvement in Faith’s recovery. Of course, there was some advice I knew was coming, didn’t wanna hear, and was pretty much choking on, but I knew I needed to hear some of the hard truths. Maybe if I’d heard ‘em, or been more receptive to ‘em when Danny’d been alive, I would have been more understanding. Maybe I would’ve been more patient, and maybe, as a result, Danny’d be less dead.

  Kevin, Doug, Kristen, and Karen left all smiles after I’d backed the Scarlett Ann into her slip. I set about alongside Johnny in silence, going about the general cleanup. He was loading the rods back into the rocket launcher, which was basically a rack of tubes designed to hold and protect the rods when they weren’t in use when he finally spoke up, but it wasn’t with a fuckin’ apology.

  “You’ve seriously been blowing off our business for the last two weeks over some junkie fucking whore?” he demanded and I froze. Oh, hell no he didn’t. I straightened and turned around slowly to meet his accusing stare.

  “Johnny,” I drawled quietly, and watched the uncertainty slide behind his eyes, “You’re my brother, and blood is thicker ’n anything else, but you haven’t met Faith, you don’t know the half of what’s been goin’ on. Quite frankly, it ain’t none of your fuckin’ business either. Now, you got about two seconds to make some sort of apology before I beat the motherfuckin’ brakes off you. You get me?”

  We stared each other down for several moments and when no apology came, I lunged forward, catching my brother around the middle. We crashed to the deck and I reared up, bringing my fist crashing down into his face.

  He swore and swung back, boxing me in my fuckin’ ear which hurt like a mother and left it ringing. Wouldn’t be the fuckin’ first time though.

  “I said fuckin’ apologize!”

  “Fuck you, Man! You should be apologizin’ to me! I got a fuckin’ family to feed.” We grappled, and it wasn’t my best game, but there wasn’t much space to work with here on the aft deck with the butt seats and fighting chair. Even less when you factored in the two deck chairs and the small table with the electronics sitting on it.

  “Gahhhh!” Johnny had his hand on my chin, fingers digging into my face as he forced me up and away from him. I let fly with an awkward punch to his ribs and he grunted, doubling in on himself.

  We rolled around on the deck for a good long while, and I did as promised, I whooped my younger brother’s ass. Though granted, he got a few good licks in himself.

  Eventually, we each were sitting, legs sprawled in front of us, backs to the side of the boat, Each of us in a respective corner like a pair of wrung out prize fighters, glaring murder at each other as our chests heaved in great gulping gasps for air.

  “What, this bitch’s pussy made of gold or some shit?” he demanded.

  I snarled back, “It ain’t like that, and I could ask you the same thing. Better yet, when you gonna get your fuckin’ balls back outta Lynn’s purse?”

  That shut his trap for a minute. He glared balefully at me through one eye swelling and wiped at the blood under his nose. Heh, yeah, I got him good. Of course, judging by the stinging under my left eye, he got me pretty good too. Cocky little bastard.

  “I need the money or we’re gonna lose the fuckin’ house. She opened up a bunch of credit cards I didn’t know nothing about and has been skimping on the fuckin’ mortgage payments to pay ‘em, hopin’ I wouldn’t notice. The bank fuckin’ called me. I’m going into default–”

  “Jesus-fucking-Christ Johnny! When you gonna learn? Better yet, when you gonna start spending your money on something that matters like a fuckin’ divorce attorney that specializes in child custody?”

  “Man, you know how the fuckin’ system works! They always, always, give the kids to the mother, then she’ll have my balls in a vice when it comes to child support and who the fuck is going to take care of my babies then? You know she’s only good for a few hours at a time.”

  I shook my head, I’d heard it all before, and I was sick and fuckin’ tired of his goddamned excuses. What I said next, I admit, was pretty fuckin’ shitty, but my brother had put me in an exceptionally shitty mood by this point and he still hadn’t apologized for mouthing off about Faith; who he didn’t even know.

  “Fuck, Johnny. You’re more like Danny every fuckin’ day, except instead of smack, you’re addicted to that cunt’s pussy.”

  My brother recoiled like he’d been slapped, and just stared at me.

  “Low fuckin’ blow, Jimmy.”

  “Yeah, well so was the crack about Faith.”

  We stared each other down for a long minute.

  “Never seen you go to bat so hard about some broad before, what makes her so special?”

  “What makes Lynn so special, you little cock bite?”

  “I asked first, you big bastard.”

  I laughed, and Johnny laughed. No one can fuckin’ drive your ass crazy like family.

  “Seriously,” he gasped when we got our shit together enough to speak, “What’s the deal?”

  “I don’t know…” I said honestly, and I didn’t. I couldn’t explain it, yet there it was. We sat and talked a little more after that and I tried to explain. This wasn’t the first time my brother and I scrapped. Every once in a while it was like we each reached critical mass and had to blow off some fuckin’ steam or explode. We never hung onto it, or let it come between us for more ’n a minute, and this here was no exception.

  W
e finished cleaning up the boat, then took turns in the water closet cleaning ourselves up before I packed up the laptop and other electronics and threw some shit in my bag.

  “You stayin’ at Cutter’s with this girl?” he asked.

  “Yeah, for now.”

  “Mind if I do a few solo runs to catch up to Lynn?”

  I considered it, “You gonna look into a divorce attorney? Shit ain’t getting better, Johnny. If anything it’s worse.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He stood there silent and I finally heaved a sigh, “You got keys. Be fuckin’ careful and call and let me know, when, where, how long you’ll be… all that shit, okay? In case I need to come by and grab something or, you know, want to fuckin’ come home.”

  “Deal.”

  “Gimme at least the next three days before you hit me up to do anything, and keep my cut from this trip.”

  “No, not going to do that. You were out there too.”

  “Fine, whatever, I just don’t want to hear from your ass for at least three days about babysittin’ fucking tourists. You got it? I’m takin’ Faith to some shrink an hour inland and down tomorrow. Not sure how that’s going to go.”

  “You’re fuckin’ crazy putting your ass through this shit again, you know that, right?”

  “No, Man. I’m right where I’m supposed to be, doin’ what I’m supposed to be doin’. Never been more sure of it.”

  “I’m worried about you, bro.”

  “Not your job, Johnny.”

  “Yeah, then who’s is it?”

  “Mine.”

  Chapter 10

  Faith

  I was too warm and my mouth had a funny metallic taste in it. I was comfortable though, and I didn’t want to get up. Still, my bladder demanded I move, and eventually it won. It always did.

  I sucked in a deep breath to chase back the cobwebs and opened my eyes. I nearly crossed them to see what it was crammed and blurry in my field of vision, all pink, white, and yellow.

  I backed my head up on the pillow and frowned. A pink iPod with white headphones coiled neatly next to it, a creamy yellow mini post-it note clinging to the controls.

  Play me, Faith was written in a spidery scrawl on the post-it in black ink. The writing unfamiliar to me. I sat up on the bed and looked around the darkened bedroom. No one was there, nothing stirred… I felt my forehead crush down in a frown.

  I looked around the room again, just to be sure, before I plucked the headphones off the smooth cotton pillowcase. I spent far longer than was necessary uncoiling them and tucking them into my ears before I plugged them into the little player. I read and reread the note before plucking it from the front of the little clip and touching the little triangle button to make the thing play.

  My breath caught, and stilled completely as the first leading strains of Hope Never Dies spilled from the earbuds. The person playing the guitar was masterful, the notes solemn and quiet, building and subsequently building me up, surrounding me, tucking around me like an old and familiar blanket, or really, bandaging some of the broken bits of me. Holding me together again, just enough to allow me to mend.

  Marlin. It had to be. No one else knew what this song did to me, for me, in those darkened nights of desolation and ruin. I stared out of the floor to ceiling obsidian glass, at the faint glimmer of silver as the water lapped upon the shore and let the music soothe me some more. My nap had done me some good, calming some of the disquiet of earlier, and I was glad for it. I let my fingertips idly play with the band of leather and metal around my wrist and thought about what the boy said to me back in the rank dark of that awful storage unit.

  There are still good people out there, Faith. You gotta believe me…

  Finally, my body wouldn’t be ignored and I had to get up and take care of business. I set the little music player and headphones aside on the end of the bed and dealt with the unpleasantries of being human.

  The giant house was so quiet. I stood in the middle of the room, near the forgotten packages from our shopping trip and listened carefully, for any signs of movement, people talking, anything to let me know who was here. Nothing but the air-conditioned hush and hum of electronics came back to me. The distant sound of music lured me back to the end of the bed where the little iPod still played and I clipped it to the hem of my tee, slipping the headphones under my hair and back into my ears. I backed it up to the beginning of Hope Never Dies and figured out how to put it on repeat before I went in search of whoever else might be in the house with me.

  I padded barefoot out the bedroom door and down the hall, lightly slipping down the stairs, all the while Ashes & Embers playing soothingly in my ears. The living room was just as dark and vacant as the rest of the house, the only light on in the kitchen. I went that way and spotted him on the other side of the sliding glass, sitting in one of the chairs at the massive back patio table. He had his broad back to me and absently raised a cigarette to his lips, head turned to the side. He sucked on it, the tip flaring orange in the night.

  He turned his head sharply at the sound of the slider opening behind him, relaxing when he saw it was only me. I slid it shut and hugged myself. It was warm out here, I just felt… I don’t know, exposed? When I stepped outside. I padded along the warm flagstone of the back patio and drew even with his chair. He looked up at me, and squinted a bit in the light cast from the windows behind us.

  “You doin’ okay, Baby Girl?” he asked me and I smiled, a little sadly, but then again it was the best I could muster these days.

  “This was you, wasn’t it?” I asked plucking at my tee just above where the little music player was clipped to my hem.

  He twisted in his chair some more to get a look at it and smiled, before grimacing. His face was revealed to me more with the motion, the light falling along the left side. A raw and angry scrape, puffed with swelling and turning ripe with a bruise adorned his left cheekbone and I stepped forward quickly, rounding in front of him, to keep him from having to hold the awkward pose.

  “What happened?” I asked and grazed the injury with a light touch. He flinched back from it and reached up, gently capturing my hand with his much larger one. It was warm and calloused where it wrapped around mine, the knuckles scraped, bruised and swelling much like his face. The sight of it made me shiver. He immediately let me go and I tucked it into the crook of my arm guiltily. Of course, he didn’t want me touching him.

  “Business meeting,” he grumbled and I felt my eyebrows go up.

  “I don’t want to know,” I said faintly and pulled up a chair of my own to sit across from him.

  He smiled thinly, “Sorry, Baby Girl. Nothing bad. I own a business with my younger brother. We have a… unique business model, bein’ blood and all.”

  “I see.”

  I didn’t really, but I’d meant it when I’d said I didn’t want to know. Marlin sighed and reached out into the dark, toward the edge of the table. He brought a dark bottle to his lips and swigged down some of the beer inside. I didn’t know what to say, and he hadn’t answered my question. I placed my hands on the edge of my seat and kept my arms straight. My knees I kept together as well, leaning forward and back, hoping he would speak so I didn’t have to.

  He watched me for a few moments before smiling to himself, a fondness almost overtaking him. He slouched in his chair and saved me from having to make conversation by answering my question.

  “Yeah, it was me.”

  “Why?” I asked softly.

  “Figured it might help, you know, with going out there, around other people. Something to concentrate on other than what you got going on inside your head.” He tilted his head to the side and set his beer, which was mostly full and still weeping condensation down the outside of the amber glass, aside on the table.

  “Feel like taking a ride with me?” he asked. “I could use some wind therapy.”

  “What, now?”

  “Ain’t no better time. Can’t imagine you’re ready to go back to sleep,
seein’ as you just woke up. No need to talk on the bike, you can listen to your music and bonus points, ain’t no one liable to be out this time. What do you say?”

  I thought about it, I mean really thought about it, “I’ve never ridden before.”

  He nodded and captured my gaze with his, “Ain’t no time like the present to learn. Why don’t you head on up and go find some of that gear we bought you today?”

  “O-okay.” I stammered and pushed myself to my feet.

  Marlin nodded and I went past him, opening the sliding door, I looked back over my shoulder at him and he smiled at me over his, giving me a last encouraging nod before I slipped inside.

  I went back up to the master bedroom in search of the many bags we’d brought in earlier in the day. The bedside clock read that it was just after eleven pm, and I was startled to realize I must have slept harder and longer than I’d thought.

  I rooted through the bags to find the one that contained the leather items and changed swiftly into what had been provided to me. When I was finally dressed, I stood staring wide-eyed into the mirror above the bathroom sink.

  The leather pants were a touch loose, waiting for me to put on a bit more weight. The white tee beneath the leather jacket, however, fit well enough. I looked down at my booted feet and chewed my bottom lip. The clothing made me look sure; almost to the point that I could believe myself to be a capable human being.

  I swept my long blonde hair over my shoulder and twisted it into a braid, certain that I wouldn’t want to deal with the wind tangled mess that was certain to follow if I left it loose. I tied off the end with a thick black tie and stared for several moments more.

  I was scared. Nervous beyond belief, but comforted by the fact that it would be Marlin taking me for the ride. I trusted him like I could trust no other, so, with a deep breath, I clipped my new little music player to the edge of the inside pocket of my new leather jacket and went down to meet him.

  He was at the bottom of the stairs and had changed from cargo shorts to jeans and leather chaps. He’d placed his leather vest over his leather jacket and the added bulk of the protective gear made him seem even bigger and more imposing than he did before. I swallowed hard, mouth suddenly dry.