“Blood in, blood
out,” he says.
It’s late. We’ve had too much to drink. We’ve been joking around, after a few false
starts. You never know where his
moodiness will take you. Tonight we get
past the rough patches fairly quick, then I let him lead the conversation, like
I always do. We talk about his
kids. His sister, who just had a
baby. His brother, the “dumb-ass crack
addict.” This is the older brother, not
the one who died. His mother. The girls all chasing after him on Facebook.
Work; how he can’t make it if he doesn’t get 60 hours a week. His kids again, Hoarders, whether it’s worse to be an obsessive compulsive neat
freak or a complete and utter slob (we are both the former). I reacquaint myself with all his scars and tattoos: the thin, faded razor slash running inside
his right forearm. The bullet lodged in
his head, the pointy part that I can actually feel with a fingertip. As the night wears on, we—as usual--revisit
our history and dissect the reasons why we never dated.
“I looked at you like you were an
angel,” he says. “Usually I went after
innocent girls and I broke ‘em. I don’t
know why I didn’t do that with you.”
The things you learn when tipping
back too many.
Usually I don’t drink much when I’m
with him. It’s safer that way. One of us needs to keep our wits. But tonight I indulge in cheap red wine. “From Aldi’s,” he jokes. All I know is, it doesn’t come from a box, so
that’s okay with me.
And I should’ve known he’d gone past
his limit. If there is such a
thing. Drinking Miller Light from a
frosty mug. Every time he pounds back
the contents, all he has to do is slam the mug down and the bartender comes
over and fills it up again. He starts to
grin, that half-smirk at the corner of his mouth. And he laughs—the I’m-pretending-that-you’re-crazy half-snort that has always
delighted me so much.
Normally he doesn’t smile. And the last time I saw any kind of light in
his chocolate brown eyes was probably 14 years ago. Now they just look dead.
Clearly we are entwined, coiled
around our shared past much like the way his pet python loops around the branch
in her tank. Sitting at the bar with
him, I can relax. No need to be smart,
or witty, or thin. He tells me
everything--almost. He’s real with
me. At least I hope he’s being real and
not playing with me, the way he plays with countless other women. Lure ‘em in, save ‘em, break their hearts,
dump ‘em. He doesn’t have to play games
with me because we don’t have that kind of relationship.
We’re just friends.
He’s settled into suburban
life. He’s worked a full-time job for 17
years. He has two kids and one step-son
that has gotten into trouble, so he’s taken the boy in hand. He buys his children gifts for all the
holidays. He puts up a Christmas tree
every year. He attends parent-teacher
conferences. But.
“When I walk out my door, I don’t
have kids anymore.”
This admission comes when I ask him
about the gang.
“I thought you said they’d come
after you eventually.”
He pounds back more beer, then looks
me in the eye. “They have.”
When they all started getting out of
prison, they came for him. Expecting him to fulfill his obligations.
“I took a vow. You don’t get out,” he says.
They expect your children to be
indoctrinated. His step-son is already
in. To keep his youngest out, he
apparently had to do some things—things he refuses to speak of with me—which is
just as well. He’s visiting his old
haunts. He’s running into old
enemies. There’s a whole world right in
front of our faces that nobody notices, unless you’re in it. It’s war.
Blood in, blood out.
He tells me he’ll be dead soon. Some rival punk will say something to him
that flares his temper, a temper that’s always so close to the surface. He’ll snap, and the kid will pull out a gun
and waste him. He says there’s always
younger ones to take your place. It’s
only a matter of time.
I feel tears pulsing in my
eyes. Part of me knows that we are drunk
and being melodramatic. But another part
of me knows he is deadly serious and is only telling me this because beer has
loosened the iron reins of his control.
“Don’t die on me,” I say and I grab
his hand, which, of course, he pulls away.
He slams his half-empty beer mug
onto the bar. Then he shuttles me
outside. We get to his car and I attach
to him, afraid to let him go into the rainy night. He hugs me with only one arm—not two, because
that’s too personal.
“Text me when you get home, so I
know you’re okay,” he instructs.
It’s not until I am driving on a
dark side road that I start to weep, from a place deep inside. He
is home. He is where I come from. Who he is, where he's been--it could’ve been any
of us. My brother. My father.
Me. Sometimes it just comes down
to the luck of the draw. And it’s not
fair. And the boy who may have had a
chance all those years ago, the one who almost escaped, whose eyes still had
life in them, who used to hug me with both arms—that boy is gone.
Blood in, blood out.
