His to Own: 50 Loving States, Arkansas

by Theodora Taylor

  Chapter 6

  The someplace turns out to be a house. Not a one-room cabin in the middle of nowhere, but an actual house, sitting on several acres beside a county road just outside Eureka Springs.

  June feels like a participant on one of those house buying shows as she tours the cute contemporary ranch. It has two bedrooms, rosewood floors, and a deck which runs the entire back length of the home. The deck overlooks a backyard so huge, Jordan could kick his soccer ball as far as he wants without ever going over the property line. And she can barely see the neighbors, the next house is so far off in the distance.

  Jordan immediately abandons her when he sees the yard. June watches from the deck of the master bedroom as he tries to kick his ball over a small barn sitting kitty corner to the house.

  “The school district’s only a six,” Mason says, almost apologetically as he joins her a little later. “But Eureka Springs is just a couple miles up the road. They got an art store there. I saw it online. Noticed you were running low on paper. Not just the green kind, but the other kind, too.”

  He grins underneath his huge beard, and it humanizes him. Makes him seem like less of a monster, even as the wind whips his long hair back, uncovering the patches on the leather vest he only ever takes off to shower, and receive tattoos.

  He watches Jordan try to conquer the old barn with his foot for a few minutes before asking, “So…what do you think of this place?”

  What does she think? She loves it. How could anyone not love it? It’s everything she and Jordan never dared to dream of.

  She’s thinking this so hard, it takes her a few moments to realize he’s waiting for her to answer. Out loud.

  “This place is really yours?” she asks, carefully pushing out non-tattoo related words. “You own it?”

  He nods. “My cousin’s always saying I need to think about my future. Invest my money more wisely.” For some reason, the mention of his cousin casts a sad shadow over his face. “So yeah, I decided to buy a place out here. Better than them cabins at Beaver Lake anyway.”

  “So you’ll be staying here, too? With us?” she asks. Not that it matters what his answer is. This is the kind of house where any kind of future could be possible for Jordan. She’d do anything to have it. Let him go on top of her any way he wants if it means they can stay here.

  Mason looks at her for a long time before answering, “Nah…that wouldn’t be a good idea.” He shrugs his humongous shoulders. “But it’s all yours and the kid’s if you want it.”

  If she wants it. This time June doesn’t hesitate to use her words. “Yes, please,” she says. “We want it.”

  “Good.” With another grin, he pulls a huge envelope out of the vest and hands it to her as if she’s earned a prize.

  June takes it without counting the money inside. Suddenly trusting him in a way she couldn’t have even imagined less than an hour ago. She’s sure it’s all there.

  “Also got you this…”

  He brings out a shiny new phone and hands it to her. “If you need anything, call me. My number’s already plugged in. It’s a pre-paid deal, but it came with internet and I’ll put money on it every month. Okay?”

  Again he waits. Expecting an answer.

  “Okay,” she says softly, not knowing how else to respond.

  “Okay,” he says with a little smile. Then he says, “C’mon, walk me back to my van.”

  So she does. And that’s it. There should be more. It feels like there should be more.

  But with a rough nod and an “Alrighty then,” Mason turns and steps into the delivery van. He backs out of the dirt driveway, then peels down the same road he drove up to drop her and Jordan off. And as the van recedes into the distance, June wonders if he only invited her to walk him out so she could watch him leave.

  She doesn’t know how to feel about that. How to think about the strange sadness that lingers over her like a cloud for the next few days, although this house—this life he’s left them to—is more than she and Jordan could have ever asked for.

  She doesn’t understand this feeling, doesn’t know it’s a sort of missing until the phone rings a week later.

  “Hey, June,” Mason answers her silent pick-up.

  She has to work her throat a few times before she can say, “Hey.”

  “You doing all right out there? Need anything?” Then he says, “You got to answer my questions out loud, sweetness. Can’t hear you thinking over the phone.”

  “No,” she answers. She almost wishes she had more to say. So she can stay on the phone with him. Just a little longer.

  “Jordan okay?” He also seems to be fishing for something to talk about, or maybe something to get her talking. “You get him registered for school and all that? No paperwork problems?”

  “No, no problems.” She got his old school to send over all his records with only a few emails. And since his mother’s death isn’t exactly on record, there hadn’t been too many questions about her guardianship. As far as this new school district is concerned, she’s just another single mother who got pregnant way too early.

  “Good, good,” Mason says. But he sounds a little disappointed.

  And for the first time ever, she feels bad for him. She knows she’s not easy to talk to. Knows it’s a little like pulling teeth.

  “The problem is, she’s got a lot of art in her but not a whole lot of words,” her mother told her first grade teacher in that other lifetime, when she’d called June’s parents into a meeting about getting her switched over to Special Ed. Because she could draw for hours, but couldn’t express her thoughts with words. Because she could write and read at a sixth-grade level, but had trouble stringing basic sentences together.

  Her other lifetime parents, she vaguely remembers now, had loved her. Had wanted to talk to her, to nurture her. They’d wanted what was best for her. Just like she wanted what was best for Jordan.

  But as June and her parents had eventually discovered, wanting something doesn’t guarantee it will actually happen.

  And she was still very, very hard to talk to. Mason should stop trying. Hang up.

  But he doesn’t. “So, uh, you got any summer plans?”

  This question surprises her, because actually…she does. “I’ve been checking out local jobs,” she tells him, reflexively reaching out for her new sketch pad and starting to doodle with her Sharpie. “The Cal-Mart Superstore in Berryville is hiring for some stocking positions, and they have a GED program…”

  Her words are met with silence. One that stretches on for so long, she eventually stops doodling. Sets her Sharpie down on top of the pad while she waits for him to ruin her idea. To tell her she can’t. Or say she’s too retarded to work anywhere but on her back. Razo’s assessments of her chances of making it out in the real world ring in her ears.

  But all Mason says is, “Sounds good.”

  And June remembers something else from that other lifetime. How a speech therapist once told her if she wants to carry on a conversation with someone, all she has to do is reflect their questions back at them. “How about you?” she asks carefully. “Do you have any plans?”

  Pause. “Kind of,” he answers. “I’m in West Virginia right now, trying to sort some shit out with my cousin. It’s not going the way I want it to.”

  “How do you want it to go?” she asks, not having to try so hard with that question.

  “Fuck if I know,” he answers with a heavy sigh.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, not really knowing how else to answer, but for reasons she can’t explain, wanting to say something.

  “Ain’t your fault.” His voice is sharp now. Brusque. Not quiet and intimate like before. Back to nails and gravel.

  Nails and gravel, she thinks. If he ever lets me work on the other arm, that’s what I’ll give him…

  “Anyway, I need to go. Like I said, use this phone if you need anything, but I probably won’t be calling again. It ain’t a good idea…for obvious reasons.”

 
; This time June doesn’t answer. There are too many conflicting thoughts in her head to speak. Including, will I ever see you again?

  “Okay, bye,” Mason says after a few awkward beats.

  The line goes dead, and June looks at the silent rectangle in her hand, heart stretched tight. Because that “bye” sounded pretty damn permanent.

  Why did he do it? she wonders now that he’s gone, maybe for good. Why did he walk into her life, change it for the better, then walk right back out?

  And why…?

  Why can’t she convince herself that this ending is a good thing? The best possible ending for her and Jordan. Her ravens are quiet now. So why does it feel like something is dying inside her?

  Chapter 7

  Mason

  He’ll never see her again. Mason knows this. Knows he has to accept it, like he accepts breathing. Who he is. Who she is…no, he can’t never see her again. It would only compound a terrible fucking impulse decision. Maybe even get her and the kid killed.

  But that doesn’t mean he can’t buy her a birthday gift.

  Jordan mentioned the date in passing, and Mason has time to kill while waiting for his seat and pedal adjustments at the motorcycle dealership. So he walked over to the mall to get a bite to eat with the two Knights who decided to accompany him on his “field trip.” He hadn’t planned on looking for a gift, but as it turned out, the mall still had one of them old CalsonBooks stores.

  “Wait here,” he’d told his SFK buddies outside the store.

  And now here he is, scanning the aisles, panning for present gold. Searching, searching…until he sees it. The perfect gift. A slow, lop-sided grin spreads across his face. Yeah, that’ll work, he thinks, picking up the thick, floppy book.

  There’s a bored teen behind the register. She’s aggressively reading a Doctor Who graphic novel, the living picture of, “I don’t get paid enough to do this job.” And she doesn’t look up from it, even when Mason drops the book on the counter between them.

  He’d bet money she’s a college student. Pining away in retail until she finishes college and some company magically offers her the job of her dreams. It’s pathetic, but not for the first time since he left June behind in Arkansas, he wonders what life would have been like for him if he’d done that. Took schooling seriously and gone to college instead of stepping into his old man’s former position as SFK enforcer after Fred got promoted to VP. D always said he was smarter than anyone gave him credit for, and that he’d been hiding his brain beneath a cloak of violence—or some shit like that. D had a way with words, and Mason had a way of rolling his eyes at those words whenever D got to talking about Mason’s “wasted potential.”

  But lately, things were different. Lately, he’d been thinking a little too much about what might’ve been in ways he hadn’t before D disappeared.

  Finding his cousin’s leather vest when he searched the campsite where D last stayed but never returned to—well, it had shaken him.

  They’d vowed to wear their vests with pride during their swearing in ceremony, but there the damn thing was. Casually tossed across the front passenger seat of the delivery van D left behind when he took one of their restored bikes on a joy ride. Mason liked to do that, too. Bring a bike along in his van so he could get in some open road time between runs. Only in D’s case, he never came back.

  Not only did D leave his vest and van behind at that West Virginia campground, all his missed deliveries were still sitting there in the back of his van, too.

  Mason knew something had happened to D. But more and more, he was beginning to suspect his cousin hadn’t been jumped and/or kidnapped. For one, there weren’t any ransom demands. For two, every gun in the back of that van had been accounted for. In fact, D had only made one delivery: to The New Rebels, a mid-sized gang with a home base only twenty miles or so from D’s camp. But those fuckers claimed, and kept on claiming, not to know jack shit about D’s disappearance.

  “We did the exchange and he left with the money…” the New Rebel prez told him. And he stuck to his story, even after Mason offed two of his prospects.

  Mason gave the New Rebels a month to come up with some kind of additional information regarding D’s whereabouts, and he planned to return in a few days to interrogate them some more. But hell if he really believed he’d get anywhere with it.

  If those panties disguised as a gang knew anything about his cousin, they’d have definitely told him the first time he carved up one of their prospects and put a bullet through his head. So D’s disappearance was starting to look more and more like something Mason didn’t want to believe. Could hardly fathom. But nowadays he strongly suspected D might have disappeared himself. Run away from the SFKs and everything they stood for.

  And if that’s what happened, Mason knew things would be way worse than if D had been kidnapped or killed. As Fred was fond of telling newly-leathered SFK’s, “The only way you’ll get rid of your leather now is if we take it off your corpse.”

  So yeah, if D ran, if Mason doesn’t find his remains in a ditch on his next recon to West Virginia, shit will well and truly get ugly. Because that’ll mean his cousin is still out there somewhere, but in hiding. And once the club reaches the same conclusion Mason has, they’ll send him, their best tracker, after his own cousin. He’ll be expected to bring D back. Not dead, but wishing he was. Then Fred would do to his own nephew what he’d done to the few other Knights who’d decided to opt out of their “SFK for life” vows. But he’d do it even worse. Because D was not only legacy…the board had also pinned a bunch of their future white hopes on him from the get go. He was the club’s golden child, meant to lead them into a great white future. And their disappointment in D’s betrayal would take on a life of its own.

  As Mason thinks about his next and last trip to West Virginia, it feels like the huge raven wing that extends across his chest and up his neck is casting a dark shadow over his soul. Try as he might, he can’t get those damn birds to rest in the tree June made for them.

  Yet in spite of the pending shitstorm, here he is. At fucking CalsonBooks. Buying a gift for the black girl he really shouldn’t be keeping back in Arkansas.

  “You guys do shipping?” he asks the bored girl after damn near a minute of watching her pretend not to notice she’s got a customer.

  “We look like Amazon?” Bored Girl asks without glancing up from her book.

  True, CalsonBooks has seen better days. Back when he was a kid, they had stores in every mall across America. From what he’s heard, the last Calson executive damn near ran the company into the ground until his son took over a few years back. With all them Cal-Marts to save, this chain of bookstores was probably pretty damn low on the new leader’s priority list. So Mason can’t really blame the girl for not giving two fucks about her job or her customers in a dying bookstore. But still…

  He looks down at the GED book on the counter. The present he plans to send June, despite knowing a store as big as Cal-Mart probably has a fancy computer program or something like that to help her out. Truth is, he doesn’t even know if she actually followed through with her plans. Mason has forced himself not to call her again after that first time, and for all he knows, she wasn’t serious about getting a job. Or about going after her GED.

  And June had no way of knowing when she told him her plans…no clue about the buried memory she triggered inside him.

  “Mase, come here, honey. Come here. Lookit…”

  This was a good morning. At least it was good in the way ten-year-old Mason had come to define it. His father had returned from the clubhouse late last night, too drunk to hit. And now he was too hungover to do much more than silently stew in his morning-after misery at the breakfast table.

  Usually his mom watched Mason leave with little to no fanfare. Smoking a cigarette while she and Fred listened to conservative talk radio and finished off the pot of coffee she made each morning. They didn’t have a TV. Nobody at the compound did anymore. Too many coloreds on it these
days, the board had declared. Bad for the club. Bad for their impressionable youth.

  But this morning was different somehow. Mason could feel it, even if he couldn’t explain it as he sat across from his parents at the little table. His mother seemed…lighter. Happier. Even if she wasn’t smoking her usual cigarette.

  She’d run out of them, he soon discovered, when his mother told his father she’d be walking out with Mason to pick up some more. So they’d left the house together and headed toward what passed for a school on the compound. A sad little home schooling co-op a few houses over, run by Edna Brayton, an old lady whose only connection to the club had died over a decade ago. Miz Brayton didn’t really care about teaching, and Mason didn’t care much for learning. But anywhere outside his house was better than inside it. And Miz Brayton sold overpriced cigarettes out of her kitchen cabinet, so if you ran out, school drop off was the place for SFK parents to be.

  But this morning, his mother pulled him aside as soon as they cleared their front door. “Mase, come here, honey. Come here. Lookit…,” she whispered excitedly.

  Like a drug dealer revealing his most illegal product, she opened her purse and out peeked out two bus tickets.

  “We’re leaving tonight. Soon as you get back from school and that waste of skin you call a father goes to the clubhouse. Talked to your aunt last night. She said we could stay with her for a few weeks in Mississippi. Plus, the Cal-Mart near her is hiring, so I could work there for a little bit. Maybe even go back to school. Get my GED! Dixon’s mom is always telling me I’m smarter than I think.”

  Yes, D and his mom were alike in that sense. Optimistic about their Fairgood relatives against all proof to the contrary.

  Mason’s mother had been so excited. That was what haunted Mason the most. He’d never seen that look on her face before. Heard that note in her voice. It would take him years of watching forbidden TV during gun runs to eventually pin down the emotion. Hope. She’d been hopeful. And he’d allowed himself to get caught up in her hope, to the point that he could barely sit still while waiting for the bullshit school day to be over…