Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
C hainsaw…
My hip twinged, and a second later, I felt an echo in my chest and shoulder, and then a heartbeat after that, I felt it in my leg. It sucked, but that was life now – especially when rough weather was rolling in.
I’d always thought that it was some kind of old wives’ tale, the whole old injuries acting up when weather was about to come in – but nope. Should have known if it was as widely talked about like that, there’s something to it.
I shook my head and checked my gear, the thick canvas strap around the pole I was climbing, the spurs in my boots wedged tight in the creosoted wood.
I was a lineman and tree trimmer by trade.
Working for the power company to trim hazardous branches and take down threatening trees, but I also did line work and got the big transformers back up and running when it called for it.
Hurricane and tropical storm season was my busiest season, but the work was year-round around here. When it wasn’t for some odd reason, there was plenty of work to be had in the rest of the country, out in Florida or up through tornado alley or Dixie alley.
I wiped the sweat off my brow, up under my hard hat, and from above my wraparound sport sunglasses with their safety rating.
Expensive, but needed out here doing what I did.
I looped the canvas strap up higher on the pole, pulled one climbing spur out from the pole, took a step up, and knocked it back in.
When I was sure it was secure, I looped up, took the other side out, and rinse and repeat.
They had us using bucket trucks more often than not these days, but sometimes I just liked the good ol’-fashioned old-school climbing method.
Helped my fat ass be a lot less fat these days.
I hadn’t quite reached the point in my health journey of quitting smoking or drinking, but I’d dropped a shit ton of weight since the necessary coup after Ruth had my ass shot up all to hell and gone.
Wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about that. Wasn’t a second after I thought about it that I didn’t think of her.
The blonde angel right out of the script by Milton, or that Alighieri guy. She’d been beautiful and my saving grace that night, chewing out the attending doctor motherfucker on my case, who was being stingy with the pain meds on my arrival after I’d taken three fuckin’ bullets.
She’d even been kind about how they’d cut off my cut – going along the top shoulder seams and sliding it out from underneath me. Some easy cross-whip stitching across both sides, and my colors were back together as good as they’d ever been and ready for wear.
By the time I finished my work up here, a quick glance over the Gulf of Mexico saw dark clouds on the horizon, heading right for shore.
My body’d been right once again. Weather was coming, and by the looks of it, it looked like it was going to be a rough band of thunderstorms. I had a fifty-fifty chance of being called out into it to fix something, but if I shimmied my ass down off this pole with the quickness, I could be at the club and enough beers deep, I could feign too drunk to work on-call.
Which was the plan at this point, with how my joints pained me and the fact that it was, in fact, my fuckin’ Friday, and it was supposed to be my long-stretch weekend off.
I did my work and hustled down the pole, the breeze picking up and blowing in wet off the water.
“You better get you gone and into something if you don’t wanna get tapped for overtime,” my work buddy Clayton Biggs said, spitting out his wad of chew onto the ground.
“Read my fuckin’ mind, homie,” I told him. His dark features cracked into a too-white smile against his dark skin, his teeth stained with the chew he’d had in his maw only several shades lighter than his dark skin.
Man, Clay was so fuckin’ dark he was one of those guys who had almost purplish highlights to his skin in places.
Didn’t help that half his bottom lip was fat as hell with one of those port wine stain birthmarks, which just added to the purple undertone to his skin where the lower left side of his face was concerned.
Still, while it was a glaringly obvious mark, somehow he wore it well.
The combination of the unique trait and his massive size – the fucker was well over six foot five and built like John Coffey out of the movie The Green Mile.
He had something like six different baby mammas and would take all the overtime he could get to support every one of his kids.
Some of the women in his life chose to keep his babies out of his life, but no matter what, they didn’t want for anything.
This man pulled in bank between the regular line work we did, and he was one of those guys who did the lightbulb replacement at the top of the big radio towers and shit – meaning he pulled over six figures a year for something like three days’ worth of work total from that gig alone.
Then, with all he worked here with the tree and lineman crews, he pulled almost six figures more with that when it came to all the overtime.
Dude was blessed and stacked with fuckin’ cash. But you’d never know it by the humble abode he kept and the beat-up old work truck he drove to and from the sites we worked.
He joked on the regular that the regular work he undertook was probably the only thing keeping him from getting with baby momma number seven, but that was alright with him.
He loved his kids, that was for sure. Had pictures of all of ‘em on the underside of his truck’s visor and showed everyone who’d look the latest pictures when he got ‘em.
Overall, he was a good dude, if imposing in size and with a booming laugh like thunder – but he and I shared a love of the Mississippi Delta Blues, which is where we’d found our common ground. Along with my not being so easily intimidated, we became and stayed fast friends.
Hell, I’d like to think he was my only real friend outside the club, and I was alright with that.
I stowed my climbing gear in my toolbox at the back of my truck to keep it out of the rain, and opened the tote, likewise, to keep my smaller chainsaw out of the wet and dropped it in, securing the yellow lid down tight onto the black tote to make sure it likewise stayed out of the coming rain – just as a gust of actual wind and not breeze shoved against us, bringing with it the heavy scent of petrichor as the clouds rolled overhead. The first fat drops started to fall.
“Later, man!” I waved at Clay and got into my truck as he looked to the sky and gave a nod, climbing into his rig.
I turned out from the side of the road and onto the highway.
I was headed in the wrong direction toward the Mississippi state line, but it couldn’t be helped.
I’d have to take the next exit that offered a way to get turned back around, headed back toward New Orleans.
The rain was harsh, clattering against the windshield in an angry cacophony that unnerved as well as made it fuckin’ hard as hell to see.
I turned on the windshield wipers full-bore and dropped my speed to a safer speed for the conditions.
I hit the switch for my emergency flashers for the travelers behind me so they would know I wasn’t moving at the speed limit and to hopefully keep them from bumping into my rear end.
I wasn’t into butt stuff, and neither was my fuckin’ truck – despite how beat to hell it may appear.
I took the next exit, carefully winding my way around and back down the on-ramp going the opposite direction, and got back on the freeway headed where I wanted to go, which was back to the club with the quickness before the shit hit the fan and I could be called back out.
I pulled into the lot outside the club around an hour later and hustled out of the truck and through the downpour into the front of the clubhouse.
Without a word, Axe Man, standing behind the bar, poured me two shots and slid them one after the other down the bar at me, where I scooped one right after the other up and downed them. I coughed and asked after the fact, “What was that shit?” He laughed at me.
“Beggars can’t be choosers, man,” he said, and turned the bottle to reveal it was cognac. “Making myself a Sazerac,” he said.
I shook my head. “Get me some of the absinthe that goes in that and we’ll be straight,” I told him, just as my phone started to vibrate in my coveralls’ pocket.
“Hey.” I answered it without looking, knowing it would be the boss man.
“You start drinkin’ yet?” he asked.
“Two shots deep already,” I declared.
He swore.
“Goddammit, need you out?—”
I cut him off. “Can’t do it, boss. I’m over the legal limit.”
He lit off in a string of Cajun-French insults. I chuffed a laugh and said, “Now, you leave my momma out of it. She was a good woman.”
“Really, now?” he said, and before he could start to apologize, I said, “No – she was a cracked-out ho and I hope she’s rottin’ in hell.”
He cursed again, but a guffaw of laughter was right on the tail end of it this time.
“Enjoy your weekend,” he said. “Don’t get too drunk now, y’hear?”
“Might surprise my liver a little later and drink some water. No guarantees,” I said. “You maybe try Clay. He’s always up for extra overtime,” I suggested.
“Motherfucker, I called him first!” he said, and I laughed.
“Kind of figured,” I said.
“Alright now,” my boss said. “Have a good time doin’ what you do.”
He hung up, and that was that.
“Saved in the nick of time,” Axe said with a wink, and I snorted.
“Now pour my ass the good stuff,” I ordered, and he grinned at me.
“Always chasin’ the Green Fairy,” he said, and I winked.
Absinthe was my drink of choice. I had a thing for its deep anise flavor. Loved me some black licorice. Couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Didn’t understand why people didn’t like it.
“We got church?” I asked, sliding up onto one of the barstools while he prepped a glass for my Absinthe, setting the absinthe spoon atop the glass, the sugar cube atop that, and all that jazz.
We didn’t have the fancy dispensers you found in the Quarter, making a neat production out of the pour – but then again, I was really the only one who drank the stuff in here.
I suppose I could have found one or built one if I’d wanted to, but honestly, there was no need.
Axe finished my drink before moving on to finish his, and I sipped joyously out of my glass.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged my question finally. “Just waiting for Bennie to get here.”
“He’s gonna be soaked,” I said, casually looking to the rectangle of light coming through the club’s new front door.
It was steel-plated and had one of those thick-ass windows that was meant to be bulletproof. It was cracked down a few layers from the beatings it had taken, but it let us get an idea of who was on the other side before we opened up if we needed to.
It was only a week or two old, and a salvage from some old prison that was being decommissioned.
We had a big, thick window from the same prison that was once used by the guards to watch the cafeteria. We’d be putting it in to one side to bring in some natural light during the day.
We’d already bricked over the two windows that’d been present before the drive-by that’d taken Louie from us, but it was gonna be a chore to get the window into one side. The side that didn’t have the bar on it.
We needed to get it done in one weekend max, and we were still in the thick of it with the Bayou Brethren and Ruth, so it wasn’t exactly a priority right now.
There were entirely too many old ghosts needing to be laid to rest right now, and now that we had an inkling of what was happening, we could come up with some kind of a game plan.
Who the fuck knew what that was going to look like, though…