Strong & Wilde

by L. G. Castillo

  Strong & Wilde

  Part I

  L.G. Castillo

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  ONE: Cody

  TWO: Cody

  THREE: Cassie

  FOUR: Cassie

  FIVE: Cassie

  SIX: Cody

  SEVEN: Cody

  EIGHT: Cassie

  NINE: Cassie

  TEN: Cody

  ELEVEN: Cody

  TWELVE: Cassie

  THIRTEEN: Cassie

  PART II

  MORE L.G. CASTILLO BOOKS

  Author’s Note

  Strong & Wilde is a three-part novella serial with cliffhangers.

  Part I – September 7, 2014

  Part II – September 28, 2014

  Part III – October 19, 2014

  Content Warning: Although not graphic, Part II of this story contains an account of assault and may be triggering for some readers.

  Copyright © 2014 by L.G Castillo.

  STRONG & WILDE

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design: Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations

  ONE: Cody

  1980

  The yellow plastic chair was killing my butt. Uncle Mike had the right idea and didn’t bother sitting in any of the chairs lining the bare wall. He paced the length of the Texas State Penitentiary’s waiting area, worn cowboy boots clicking against the polished, white floor. His tall, muscular frame took each step with precision, careful not to touch the black crevices that outline the tiles.

  “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” he mumbled.

  My eyes darted around the room wondering if anyone else could hear him repeating the strange rhyme to himself.

  A lone prison guard stood at the door staring off into space, his eyelids drooping as if he were half-asleep. A woman with big, spongy, pink curlers in her hair sat in the far corner with a squirming toddler in her arms. She alternated between trying to feed the girl and fixing her own hair. She’d plop a plastic bottle in the chubby girl’s mouth and the girl would slap it away, the bottle falling to the floor with a thud. Curler Lady would groan and reach down to pick it up. It was like a never ending cycle of plop, slap, thud, giggle, and moan.

  It wasn’t the first time Uncle Mike acted like this. He didn’t do it often. It only happened when he was around people he didn’t know. I think being around strangers made him nervous. It usually took him a while before he sat down. Maybe if I said something, he’d stop acting so weird.

  “Uncle Mike, whatchya doin’?”

  Startled, his foot slipped and the tip of his boot touched the floor’s crevice. “Shit!”

  Curler Lady gave him a dirty look before turning her attention back to the toddler.

  Uncle Mike didn’t notice or maybe he didn’t care. It was hard to tell. He never gave away what he was feeling. He was the total opposite of his younger brother, my dad. Dad didn’t take shit from anyone.

  Dad once told me that living in a small town like Koppe made people think that your business was their business. “Just ’cause some people have more than others don’t mean they have a right to tell people how to live” was how he put it.

  Dad wasn’t afraid to give anyone a piece of his mind, especially when it came to defending Mom and me. And when that didn’t work, he wasn’t afraid to knock their lights out either.

  Last week when I got into a fight with Seth Baker for calling Mom a polygamist—whatever that meant, I thought for sure Uncle Mike would be proud. Hell, Seth was twelve and a head taller than me, and I still managed to break his nose.

  Mom freaked when she saw my black eye. I expected that. It’s a mom thing. But Uncle Mike, he just shook his head and muttered, “Gotta nip it in the bud,” or something like that.

  Uncle Mike stared in Curler Lady’s direction—or more like the empty space next to her. His unshaven jaw moved steadily as he gnawed on a toothpick. After a moment, he let out a heavy breath.

  “It’s okay. Do it again,” he mumbled to himself. Carefully, he placed his worn boots onto the center of one of the tiles and started the rhyme again, tapping a finger against his thigh after each word.

  I sighed. At least he had stopped walking around in circles. It was starting to make me nervous.

  I shifted in my seat and took out my brand new leather wallet, a birthday present from Mom, and flipped through the ten crisp one-dollar bills Uncle Mike had given me.

  “One for each year your scrawny ass has been taggin’ behind me,” he had said when he handed me the money. He was always saying funny things like that. I loved hanging out with Uncle Mike, especially since Dad had been sent to prison.

  Tucked in between two bills was a small photo of my father. The corners were worn and there were creases that formed a cross from where I had folded it twice. People say I look just like him. We have the same light brown hair with streaks of blond, from being out in the sun so much, and bright blue eyes.

  Dad’s handsome face stared back at me. I really should stick the phot in one of those fancy frames Mom had around the house, but there was something about having it on me that made me feel like he was near. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t look at it. I missed him so much.

  Mom missed him too. I could tell. Though I don’t know why she only came to visit him once. I remembered that day. She had come home with her eyes and face puffy like she’d been crying. That was the first and last time she went to see him.

  I knew they loved each other. I couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t touching and kissing. They had even kissed in the Piggly Wiggly, smack dab between the shelves of ketchup and pickled pig’s feet! And it wasn’t that quick peck that other women gave their husbands either. It was that long, opened mouth type with tongues and everything. It was embarrassing.

  I’d give anything to be embarrassed like that again.

  When Mom asked a couple of weeks ago what I wanted for my tenth birthday, I told her I wanted to go to prison.

  She didn’t think it was funny.

  She’d said, “Prison isn’t a place for little boys.”

  It was a lame excuse.

  I didn’t give up though. I asked her every day until Uncle Mike finally convinced her to let me go.

  “Cody’s gonna be a man soon. The boy needs to see his father ’fore it’s too late,” he had said.

  Uncle Mike had mentioned something about Dad catching the “man cancer.” I didn’t know what that meant. All I knew was that he was really sick. Mom cried for days when he told her. It scared me seeing her like that. The only time I’d ever seen her cry for that long was after the sheriff’s deputies dragged Dad away from our trailer.

  I thought she’d come with Uncle Mike and me to visit Dad—don’t know why she didn’t. She told us she had to work and couldn’t get the time off. I could tell she really wanted to come with us. Her brown eyes were red-rimmed and she had pink splotches on her neck, the way she always got when she was upset. But all she did was wave as we drove away in Uncle Mike’s navy blue pickup.

  I gazed at the photo and then back at my uncle. They were definitely brothers. They both had the same blue eyes and brown hair, except Dad wore his longer, and Uncle Mike kept his in a buzz cut. And then there was the dimpled left cheek. Uncle Mike had told me that all the Wilde men had one. He even said that it’s what got Mom to marry Dad and leave her family in U
tah to live with him in Texas. I think he was pulling my leg when he said that though.

  “Watch that dimple, Son. It drives women wild for Wilde,” he’d said.

  Uncle Mike lifted his Stetson off his head and nervously brushed his fingers over his scalp. The movement caused the sleeve of his black t-shirt to rise, revealing the tattoo on his muscular arm.

  “Uncle Mike, where’d you get the tattoo?”

  “Got it in ’Nam,” he mumbled as he stared intently at the floor, making sure that his boots remained in the exact center of the tile.

  “What’s—”

  “Hold on a minute, Cody,” he said, then continued his rhyme. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”

  When he was done, he gave me a big grin, flashing that Wilde dimple. Then he sat in the chair next to me, releasing a sigh of relief.

  “Sorry ’bout that. Been a while since I had one of my episodes. What were you saying?”

  “What’s ’Nam?”

  “Vietnam.” He leaned in lifting the right arm sleeve of his t-shirt. “See this?”

  “Yep.” His arm was huge. It was hard to miss.

  “Got this when I was stationed there. Remember when I told you how your dad and I went there to fight in a war?”

  I nodded. The movement must have distracted him because all of a sudden he spat in his hands and ran them all over my head.

  “Ugh. Whatchya doin’?”

  “Sit still. Gotta get these damn cowlicks. Damn hair won’t stay down. Your hair is just like your dad’s.”

  I sighed. There was no use trying to get out of his reach. Uncle Mike was strange when it came to my hair.

  Hoping to distract him, I continued, “Yeah, that’s why Dad couldn’t be with me on my very first birthday. I remember.”

  “Son, you were only a baby.” He licked his hand and smoothed it over the back of my head. “You couldn't possibly remember that.”

  “I could too.” I scowled, causing my bruised eye to throb.

  He chuckled. “You know you look like your father when you scrunch up your face like that.”

  My face grew hot at the sound of his laughter. I hated being laughed at. I jumped to my feet, the chair toppling over with a bang. “Stop making fun of me!”

  Uncle Mike pulled down his sleeve and gave me a serious look. “It’s just a little teasing. No need to get all worked up. Look, sit back down. There’s somethin’ I need to tell you.”

  I looked at him warily.

  “Come on.” He bent over, reaching for the chair, and placed it upright.

  I huffed and sat down, clenching the sides of the plastic chair, still angry.

  “Do you know why J.D. is in here?”

  “My dad?” Uncle Mike rarely called my dad by his name when I was around. He usually called him “your father” or “your dad.” Once in a while he’d refer to him as “my little brother.”

  “Of course. Know any else named J.D.?”

  “Okay. Okay. Well, uh...Mom said he hurt another man real bad.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “No.”

  He leaned back into his seat, unrolling his left t-shirt sleeve where he kept a pack of cigarettes and a small book of matches. Lighting one, he inhaled, holding his breath for a moment before slowly releasing a billow of smoke. Blue eyes stared at the swirling gray wisps as he spoke.

  “Ain’t no secret that us Wilde men get hot under the collar real fast. Didn’t help much after J.D. and I came back from the war either. That shit fucked us up in the head. No doubt ’bout it.”

  My jaw dropped. I’m glad Mom wasn’t here. She hated it when Uncle Mike cussed. I liked it. He talked to me like I was an adult. Now if only he’d stopped messing with my hair.

  “When we got back, we couldn’t find no jobs. Hard to find anything in a small town like Koppe. Had to go to Houston to find work. I went but J.D. wasn’t having any of that. Said he didn’t want to waste his time on a long commute.”

  He turned to me with a serious expression on his face. “Son, you know I think the world of your dad, but I know why he didn’t want to go.”

  “Why?”

  “He was scared.”

  “No way! My dad ain’t scared of anything.”

  “We all get scared sometimes. He was afraid of being closed up in that car for a whole two hours going there, then two hours coming back. Hell, I was scared too. If it weren’t for them pills the doc gave me, I don’t think I would’ve made it. Tried to get J.D. to get some of his own. He didn’t want to. Told me that he didn’t believe in no ‘psychobabble mumbo jumbo’. If he was going to put his money in anything, he was sticking to his friend in a bottle named Jack. Even when your mom asked him to, he wouldn’t, and you know how much he loves her.”

  “Yeah,” I replied sadly, wishing we could all be together again.

  “I don’t mean to make J.D. look bad, ’cause he’s not. He’s a brave man, your dad is.”

  “I know.”

  “Good. It might be hard for you to hear this, but you need to.” The chair squeaked as he shifted in his seat. Bringing the cigarette to his lips, he took another puff, his blue eyes deep in thought. “You see, J.D. liked his whiskey a little too much. Liked it even more after we got back from the war. Not even your mom could help him with that. He was a regular at the Dixie Bar & Grille. Not a night went by when he didn’t get into some fight.”

  He paused and glanced down at me, struggling with what he had to say next. “Well, one day he got a little too drunk and swung his fist a little too hard. Sent the mayor's son crashing through a window. It was bad. Real bad. A piece of glass sliced the kid’s neck. It sure did. Someone said it cut the carotid artery. There was bl—Hell, you don’t need to know that part. Let’s just say your dad’s new home was a six by eight, courtesy of the Texas taxpayers.”

  “Mike Wilde,” a voice droned.

  Startled, I turned to the sound of the guard’s voice. He stood at the entrance with a bored expression on his face as if he’d done this a thousand times.

  “Right here,” Uncle Mike said.

  “Follow me.”

  TWO: Cody

  We walked quietly through a long series of corridors. The only sounds were the clacking of Uncle Mike’s boots and the squeaks of my sneakers on the waxed floor. After turning through several hallways, the guard finally came to a stop and punched into a keypad on the wall. With a click and hiss the door popped open slightly, and the guard pulled on the door handle. The door opened wide and the guard motioned for us to step inside.

  “You have twenty minutes,” he said before slamming it shut.

  Two years. It’d been two years since I last saw Dad and now I only had twenty minutes. So why didn’t my feet move?

  I stared at the old man sleeping in the dimly lit room. I could hear his ragged breathing over the whirling and beeping of the machines attached to him. With each strained breath, his chest rose slightly, lifting the threadbare white sheet covering him.

  The guard brought us to the wrong room. The old man in the bed was not my father. He couldn’t be. My dad was strong and tall. He could lift me up like I was no heavier than a sack of potatoes. He’d swing me around until I was so dizzy that I’d wobble around before falling down laughing.

  The man was barely alive. He was a skeleton covered in wrinkled skin. My dad was full of energy and life. Whenever he’d come home, he’d grab my mom and dance with her around the kitchen. Then he’d scoop me up and we’d dance and sing to whatever was on the radio. After supper, he’d carry me into my room and tuck me into bed.

  Nope, that man was definitely not Dad.

  Just as I turned to Uncle Mike to tell him about the guard’s mistake, he rushed to the old man’s side.

  “J.D., we’re here.” He placed a hand on the man’s bony shoulder. “I brought Cody with me.”

  Sluggishly, the old man opened his eyes. He gazed up at Uncle Mike, who then gestured his head to
ward me. The clock ticked as the man turned his head ever so slow until finally I was looking into a pair of bright blue eyes that not even sickness could fade.

  “Dad!”

  What did they do to him? It’s as if they’d sucked all the life out of him, leaving an empty shell.

  I threw myself over him, burying my head into his bony chest.

  I sobbed as familiar arms embraced me. I didn’t know why I was crying. All I knew was at that moment, I wanted crawl onto his lap and have him hold me just like he used to.

  “Cody, my boy.” His chest vibrated against my wet cheek. “There ain’t nothin’ to cry about.”

  “I...I miss you, Dad.”

  “I miss you too. Your hair’s getting darker. It was like your mom’s when you were little—gold like wheat.” His hand brushed over the back of my hair, smoothing down the same spot Uncle Mike had earlier.

  I loved it.

  Warm, dry lips pressed against my head. “It’s been too long. You’ve grown so fast. Seems like yesterday I was holding a hairless, chubby baby. Let me get a better look at ya.”

  I sniffed, wiping my nose with my shirtsleeve, and sat up on the edge of his bed.

  “Look at him, Mike. I’ve finally done somethin’ right. Ain’t Cody handsome? I bet you’re already drivin’ the girls wild aren’t ya?” He smiled, his dimple visible on his gaunt cheek.

  I sniffed again. “Girls are a pain.”

  He chuckled. “That’s what you say now. You just wait a few years. You’ll change your mind.”

  His hand trembled as he lifted it and brushed a lone tear away from my cheek. Even though he was looking at me, he spoke as if he was seeing another me—a future me. “Smooth now. Wonder what it’ll be like when you’re older.” He swallowed thickly. “Gonna miss seeing your first shave, your first sweetheart. Your own family...”

  He shook his head, focusing his eyes. “Heard you’ve been getting into fights at school.”

  “It was Seth Baker. He was saying things ’bout Mom. I got him good though.”

  “Now Cody, I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I have. You’re gonna run into people like Seth and his brothers. They ain’t up to no good. All they want to do is rile you up. You need to let them be.”