Rachel Gibson: Tangled Up In You

Travis was giving Meg hell, that was for sure, and Mick’s sister had little understanding of boys. She just didn’t get why boys threw rocks, made weapons out of everything they touched, and punched each other for no apparent reason. It was up to Mick to be the buffer in Travis’s life and to help Meg raise him. To give the boy someone to talk to and to teach him how to be a good man. Not that Mick was an expert or a shining example of what made a good man. But he did have firsthand knowledge and some experience in what made an asshole.

He grabbed a set of keys off the desktop and headed out of the office. The heels of his boots thudded against the hardwood floor, sounding inordinately loud in the empty bar.

When he was a kid, no one had been around for him to talk to or teach him how to be a man. He’d been raised by his grandmother and sister, and he’d had to learn for himself. More often than not, he learned the hard way. He didn’t want the same for Travis.

Mick flipped the light switches off and headed out the back door. The cold morning air brushed his face and neck as he stuck a key in the deadbolt and locked it behind him. Right out of high school he’d left Truly to attend Boise State down in the capital city. But after three years of aimless pursuits and a rotten attitude, he’d enlisted in the army. At the time, seeing the world from the inside of a tank had sounded like a real smart plan.

A red Dodge Ram was parked next to the Dumpster and he climbed inside. He’d certainly seen the world. Sometimes more of it than he cared to remember, but not from the inside of a tank. Instead he’d viewed it from thousands of feet in the air within the cockpits of Apache helicopters. He’d flown birds for the U.S government before getting out and moving back to Truly. The army had given him more than a kick-ass career and a chance to live a good life. It had taught him how to be a man in a way that living in a house of women had not. When to stand up and when to shut the hell up. When to fight and when to walk away. What mattered and what wasn’t worth his time.

Mick started the truck and waited a few moments for the vehicle to warm up. He owned two bars, and he figured it was a very good thing that he’d learned to deal with belligerent drunks and assorted dipshits in a way that didn’t require throwing fists and cracking heads. Otherwise, he’d get little else done. He’d be in one fight after another, walking around with a black eye and busted lip like he had growing up. Back then he hadn’t known how to handle the dipshits of the world. Back then he’d been forced to live with the scandal his parents had created. He’d had to live with the whispers when he walked into a room. The sideways glances at church or the Valley Grocery Store. The taunts from other children at school or, worse, the birthday parties he and Meg had not been invited to. Back then, he’d handled every slight with his fists. Meg had retreated within herself.

Mick flipped on the headlights and shoved the truck into reverse. The Ram’s taillights lit up the alley as he looked over his shoulder and backed out of the parking space. In a larger town, the salacious lives of Loch and Rose Hennessy would have been forgotten within a few weeks. Front-page news for a day or two, then eclipsed by something more shocking. Something bigger to talk about over morning coffee. But in a town the size of Truly, where the juiciest scandal usually involved such nefarious deeds as a stolen bicycle or Sid Grimes poaching out of season, the sordidness of Loch and Rose Hennessy had kept the town talking for years. Speculating and rehashing every tragic detail had become a favorite pastime. Right up there with holiday parades, the ice-sculpting contest, and raising money for the town’s various causes. But unlike decorating floats and instituting after-school just-say-no-to-drugs programs, what everyone seemed to forget, or perhaps didn’t care about, was that within the wreckage that Rose and Loch had created, there had been two innocent children just trying to live it all down.

He shoved the truck into drive and rolled out of the alley and onto a dimly lit street. A lot of his childhood memories were old and faded and thankfully forgotten. Others were so crystal clear he could recall every detail. Like the night he and Meg had been woken up by a county sheriff, told to grab a few things, and taken to their grandmother Loraine’s house. He remembered sitting in the back of the squad car in his T-shirt, underwear, and sneakers, holding his Tonka truck, while Meg sat next to him, crying as if their world had just ended. And it had. He remembered all the squawk and adrenaline-laced voices on the police radio, and he remembered something about someone checking up on the other little girl.

Leaving the few city lights behind, Mick drove through the pitch-darkness for two miles before turning onto his dirt street. He drove past the house where he and Meg had been raised after the death of their parents. His grandmother Loraine Hennessy had been affectionate and loving in her own way. She’d made sure he and Meg had things like winter boots and gloves and were always filled with comfort food. But she’d completely neglected what they’d really needed. The most normal life possible.

She’d refused to sell the old farmhouse where he and Meg had lived with their parents. For years it sat abandoned on the outskirts of town, becoming a haven for mice and a constant reminder of the family that had once lived there. A person couldn’t enter town without seeing it. Without seeing the overgrown weeds, the peeling white paint, and the sagging clothesline.

And Monday through Friday, for nine months out of every year, Mick and Meg had been forced to pass it on their way to school. While the other children on the bus chatted about the latest episode of The Dukes Of Hazzard or checked out the contents of their lunch boxes, he and Meg turned their heads away from the window. Their stomachs got heavy and they held their breath, praying to God no one noticed their old house. God hadn’t always answered and the bus would fill with the latest gossip the kids had overheard about Mick’s parents.

The bus trip to school had been a daily hell. A routine torture-until a cold October night in 1986 when the farmhouse erupted in a huge orange fireball and burned completely to the ground. Arson had been determined as the cause of the fire, and there’d been a big investigation. Almost everyone in town had been questioned, but the person responsible for dousing the place with kerosene had never been caught. Everyone in town thought they knew who’d done it, but no one had known for sure.

After Loraine’s death three years ago, Mick sold the property to the Allegrezza boys and he’d thought about selling the family bar too, but in the end he decided to move back and run the place. Meg needed him. Travis needed him, and to his surprise, when he’d returned to Truly, no one really talked about the scandal anymore. Whispers no longer followed him, or if they did, he no longer heard them.

He slowed the truck and made another left, turning into his long driveway and heading up a hill seated at the base of Shaw Mountain. He’d bought the two-story house shortly after he’d moved back to Truly. It had a great view of the town and the rugged mountains surrounding the lake. He parked in the garage next to his twenty-one-foot ski boat and entered the house through the laundry room. The light in his office was on and he turned it off as he passed. He moved through the dark living room and took the stairs two at a time.

For the most part, Mick didn’t really think of the past that had been such a focus in his childhood. Truly didn’t talk about it anymore, which was ironic as hell, because he just didn’t give a shit what people said and thought about him these days. He walked into his bedroom at the far end of the hall and moved through the moonlight pouring through the open slats of his wooden blinds. Shadow and muted strips of light touched his face and chest as he reached into his back pocket. He tossed his wallet on his dresser, then grabbed two fistfuls of his T-shirt and pulled it over his head. But just because he didn’t give a shit about the past didn’t mean that Meg was over it. She had her good days and bad days. Since the death of their grandmother, her bad days were getting worse, and that was just no way for Travis to live.