Page 16 of Brutal for It
“Done,” Tripp states giving all of us the nod to round up for an exit. Red slams the door, slaps on the fresh seal with the number they gave us, and the thing is over. Easy. Clean.
And then the mustache ruins it. He’s grinning like he told a joke at his own funeral nobody laughed at. He leans on the loading dock rail, pushing his hat back with a knuckle. “You’re Tommy Boy, yeah?” he asks me, casual like a fishing question. “You the one shacked up with that little Rivera girl?”
I don’t answer. You don’t answer questions you weren’t asked to answer.
He keeps going anyway. Men like this always do. “Jameson,” he says, like he tasted it once and resented the sweetness. “Yeah. We go back, me and her. She used to—” he makes a crude shape with his fingers like a grade schooler drawing a dirty picture in the air. “—work for a friend of mine. Best I ever had. Shame about what the street does to pretty. You boys know the saying, right? Can’t make a hoe into a house?—”
I’m on him before the last word fits through his teeth. I don’t remember making the choice. I remember my boot leaving the ground, the way the little gap of air between us feels cold, the sound his back makes when it hits the corrugated metal. Then it’s hands and flesh beating into flesh.
“Don’t,” I snarl, voice from somewhere I don’t visit often. My fist connects with something soft and wet. His head snaps sideways. “You don’t ever say her name. Not yours to say.”
There’s motion in my periphery—one of the kids going for his waistband, Crunch moving faster, Red’s growl.
Tripp’s barked order. “Don’t.”
The air charges. I’m not listening. I’m busy. The mustache tries to put a knee up. I bury a forearm in his throat and hear the noise a man makes when his trachea is reminded it’s a pipe. “Say it again,” I tell him, calm like I’m ordering coffee. “Finish your sentence, and see if you can still chew.”
He doesn’t. Somewhere behind me, metal scrapes concrete and shoes scuff and then nothing moves except my hand and his face. It’s not smart. It’s not the plan. It’s not how we keep doing clean business with people who know our names.
I know all that, and still the only picture on the inside of my eyelids is Jami—lips bitten, eyes wide, the night she told the doc no narcotics, the time she carried a five-gallon bucket full of drywall scraps across a room twice, the morning she kissed me with dish soap still on her fingers and told me thank you for the coffee. The simple way we exist together.
The idea of this man reducing all that to something he could buy—that’s the kind of thought that eats holes in a person.
Hands hit my shoulders, a wall slams up between me and him. Tripp’s voice is a shot of reality in my ear. “Enough.”
I suck air and taste copper that isn’t mine. The mustache wheezes. Tripp steps into my space, blocking my line of sight, eyes flat as ice. “You good?”
“Ask him,” I say.
“I’m asking you,” he remarks, softer. “Because if you’re not, I gotta handle it a different way.”
I blink. I’m vibrating, the kind of hum you get after laying a bike down and getting back up on adrenaline. I flex my hands. They hurt. “I’m good,” I lie.
“Back to the bike,” he orders, and he doesn’t move until I move first in the direction he commanded at that.
Crunch is at my shoulder before I’ve taken two steps, and I hate how relieved I am to feel my brother there like my safety net. He doesn’t say you idiot or what were you thinking. He just walks with me, one body-width away, a shadow that doesn’t judge.
Behind us, I hear the mustache spit, and the younger one say something that sounds like words with lawsuit. Which is laughable since this entire encounter could put us all behind bars for some time. Red’s voice drops two octaves and the subject changes to seals and manifests and logs because Red can make an argument sound like a bedtime story and a threat sound like a prayer.
Moments later, my brothers all around, the problem settled, and time to exit is in front of us. We each swing a leg over and fire up engines. The run that was easy is now everything feels heavy. I knew better than to let some fucker get to me.
We split at the county line. The box truck peels one way, the bikes another, the pickup in a third. We don’t travel in a clump when we don’t have to, not when it feels like somebody’s mood could catch like dry grass and ignite a forest fire. Today I’m the spark looking to ignite.
When I roll through the compound gate, the sky is purple and late. I kill the engine and sit on the bike longer than I should. The adrenaline drains slow, leaving the weight of what I did settled in my shoulders and hands. I can already hear Tank’s voice when it gets back to him. Control is your job, son. The road has no use for a man who breaks because somebody says a word.
Maybe. Let him say it. He never watched her shake in her sleep and say please, it hurts to a ghost that hadn’t paid rent in years.
I head home. I don’t stop inside the clubhouse like I normally would. I don’t go check the shop. I don’t do the sensible thing and rinse the blood off my knuckles. Unable to stop the need inside me to see her, hold her, know that she is real, I do what my damn soul craves and let the road lead me home to her.
The house is dark except for the little lamp Jami leaves on, the one with the crooked shade she won’t let me fix because she says it has personality. The scent that hits me at the door is lemon cleaner and a little bit of whatever she baked this afternoon because she stress-bakes and we eat like kings when she worries.
I close the door soft. My knuckles throb in time to the kitchen clock.
“Tommy?” Her voice comes from the hall, sleepy, careful. She appears in the doorway in one of my shirts, hair up in a knot, bare legs like a sin you can pray about later. Her eyes go straight to my face. They go wide. “Oh my God.”
“It’s nothing,” I explain. Stupidest sentence I’ve said in a month.
She pads over, hands hovered like she wants to touch me and doesn’t know where it won’t hurt. “What happened?”
