Page 4 of Freak
Too many people were too damn snarled in worry about what other people thought, let other people determine their own value. Always seeing the world through somebody else’s goggles was no way to live.
Mel loved being alive. Sometimes the world was pretty shit, but there were always folks around trying to make it better. He figured as long as you were trying to be a decent person, trying to help and not hurt, trying to make up for the hurt you do, and looking for the good and the beautiful, then you were just as important and special as anybody else. And a damn sight better than the billionaires and politicians who were embedded so deep in their own asses they’d forgotten that wealth and power might be assets, but they damn sure weren’t virtues.
While Mel crouched to put his tools away, Nolan collected his personal shit, his lunch box and whatnot, from the corner. He and Zaxx had finished off their workday prepping for drywall installation in the morning, now that the electrical and other systems were rigged in the framework.
“You headin’ over to the clubhouse?” Nolan asked as he headed over to the open rear door.
The Night Horde MC comprised most of the staff of Signal Bend Construction, and most of those who didn’t wear the Flaming Mane wanted to. Thus it was typical for everybody to head over to the Horde compound after work, especially on a Friday. Mel had long embraced that tradition; he enjoyed little else as much as he enjoyed hanging with his brothers: good company, good booze, good food, good pussy.
Lately, though, sometimes he had a thing he’d rather do. Tonight was one of those sometimes.
“Yeah, later. Got something to take care of first.”
Nolan didn’t answer for a beat, and as Mel stood up, he glanced over at him. Nolan was at the door, grinning like he knew a secret. Before Mel could ask what that was about, the kid nodded once and went on out the door and about his business.
Adding that little moment to his collection of life’s lesser mysteries, Mel grabbed his gear and headed out and about his own business.
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~oOo~
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After a full shifton a warm day he smelled like sunbaked roadkill, so first Mel went home.
Home was a small log cabin he’d built himself on his grandparents’ property, not far off from a pretty little pond. Peaked roof, nice porch, plenty of room to meet his needs, and a spectacular view. The scene made a nice postcard of a country life.
Mel wasn’t a county guy, not originally. He’d been born and raised in the suburbs of Kansas City, and for the first part of his life, almost half of it, ‘country’ had been a destination—a place for recreation and vacation, somewhere to camp, or fish, or hunt. When he was fresh out of high school and arguing with his folks about going to college (they wanted it, he didn’t), his grandfather, in his late sixties at the time, retired from his job with the post office, and his grandparents suddenly announced their decision to sell their suburban rancher and move out to the country. After a lifetime of working and being in the world, Grampa was ready to escape. They bought twenty acres of rough woodland about eight miles outside Signal Bend and dropped a shiny new double-wide on it. Then they set about building their version of a quiet country life.
A few years later, as Mel was finishing his electrician apprenticeship (he’d won the college fight), his father, an insurance executive, had been transferred to Florida, andpoof!there went his parents. Nobody had died, yet it still felt like, all at once, Mel and his younger sister, Tara, had been abandoned by all the people who’d taken care of them. They were on their own—barely grown, still mostly clueless, Mel looking to get his career started in earnest and Tara trying to get through college.
At first, they’d lived together in a two-bedroom apartment with walls like cardboard and an ant problem. Mel had supported them while Tara focused on her studies, and it had worked well, especially at first. For each other, they’d filled in most of the gaps their elders had left.
A week before Tara’s college graduation, when she was twenty-two and Mel twenty-five, their grandparents had an accident on their way into town. Grampa had gone around a blind turn and swung over the double yellow line.
That shit happened to every country driver everywhere, just about daily, with no damage to anyone. Unless another car happened to be coming the opposite way on that turn at the exact wrong time. Even then, country drivers were usually able to correct; you know a road you travel on routinely, you’re ready for what it gives you.
But not that day. That day, Grampa hit the oncoming driver nearly head on.
The other driver’s old Suburban took significant front-end damage, but she’d walked away with a few cuts and bruises. Grampa’s Buick was totaled, and neither he nor Gramma walked away. Gramma died before an emergency crew could get there. Grampa’s legs, pelvis, hips, and lower spine were crushed. But he’d survived.
Mom and Dad were in Florida, with new jobs, a new mortgage, a new life, and a complicated relationship with Dad’s parents. Tara was just receiving her degree and about to start a fancy new job as a microbiologist at a research lab in the city. Mel, on the other hand, had been trying and not yet succeeding at getting his own business up and running. Of everyone in the family, his life had been the most elastic.
So he’d packed up that stretchy life and moved in to take care of his grandfather. As a caretaker for a seriously physically disabled person, he’d done things he’d never imagined he’d have to do for anyone.
When Mel was a kid, that old man had been Santa, Gandalf, and Captain America all squeezed into the body of an introvert mailman who loved model trains. While he’d been a difficult father—and Mel had seen some of that—he’d been endlessly patient with his grandkids’ antics and always enthusiastic about their activities and accomplishments, no matter how small or mundane.
Mel had adored and revered that man. But after the accident, Grampa had sat in his wheelchair and stewed in a hot sludge of guilt, grief, and bitterness. The wonderful grandfather steadily diminished inside the self-flagellating old man who believed he’d killed his wife.
When he died a few years later, Mel had felt no small measure of relief. And that had broken his heart.
With the exception of a cash bequest for Tara, Grampa had left everything to Mel. He could have sold up and returned to the city, back to his home, back to his plans. But his plans had stumbled in the city, and Tara’s plans had taken flight. Moreover, living together had put real strain on their relationship. Though they hadn’t bickered much as kids, in the days of sharing an apartment, they’d eventually been on each other’s necks on the daily. The substantial imbalance in their inheritance from Grampa made that worse.
They were sick of each other. Besides, Tara didn’t need him anymore; she was on the launchpad to a pretty great life. And Mel had grown fond of the slow, quiet country life. He loved the property, he enjoyed Signal Bend, and he’d made a few friends in town, particularly among the members of the Night Horde MC. He’d had handholds here that he no longer had in KC. So he’d stayed.
And finally built himself a pretty decent life.
All that had happened two decades earlier. Now Mom and Dad were buried, too, in Orlando. Tara, still in the KC suburbs, was head of her department, married, and had three kids. And Mel was a member of the Night Horde MC, lead electrician at SBC, and a true-blue Signal Bend local.
