4. Coyote
FOUR
COYOTE
“For the last time, Dingo, I didn’t leave my fucking bat at the bar! Yours was out in the hallway, and mine should have been with it!”
Those two had been at it for the last hour, back and forth about a missing bat, like it was the end of the world.
I hated being woken up in the middle of the day by two morons arguing. Jackal might be like my brother, but he was the annoying one that always got you into trouble and managed to somehow always irritate you to murderous levels.
He reminded me of a few wild dogs I knew.
Like a stray who’d been outside too long, he learned to survive, and when he felt threatened or ignored, like a teenager in the pack who challenged the leader, he snapped and snarled and bared his sharp fangs in the hopes of getting his way.
This time, though, he’d gone too far.
I’d just barely managed to pass out before he started up again, waking me for a third time in the same night. Day. Whatever it was.
Time wasn’t relevant when your schedule was as fucked up as ours.
The cold air chilled me bone-deep as I threw off my blankets and marched, bare-ass naked, to the door of my room, snarling like the feral dog they always mocked me for being. I said nothing as I gripped Jackal’s collar and jerked him along behind me, damn near throwing him into the hall and slamming the front door behind him. For extra measure, I threw the deadbolt into the locked position and blew a puff of air at the stray hair dangling in front of my forehead.
Dingo laughed like an idiot as I marched by him, fumbling for his phone to no doubt take a picture.
I indulged him and flipped him the bird as I ducked into my room, slamming the door behind me. Falling back asleep would suck, but at least I might stand a chance at a little bit of rest with Jackal locked out and Dingo placated for the time being.
Of course, hoping for sleep was pointless. Dingo caved in and let the fucker back in, and no amount of pillows over my head would drown out the asshole banging on my door for ten minutes straight in his frustration. I ignored him, but that didn’t deter him in the slightest. He only wandered off in search of new things to occupy his time when his hands grew tired.
I gave up on rest and slinked into the bathroom; my mood spoiled like two-month-old milk. Soap stung my eyes as I flung myself into a scrub-down, trying to wash away the feeling of wrongness on my skin.
It was the same every day. I’d felt this way since the day I wandered out of the woods and into the hands of humans who only saw me as a paycheck. A means to an end.
They never loved me. Like an orphaned cub, I bounced from house to house, only being tolerated, acting out for attention, until one day, the attention I got landed me in some sort of kid jail. When I came out, I knew I couldn’t go back in and survive it with my sanity intact. So, at the first chance, I ran from my next home and returned to the wilderness, hoping I could pick up where I’d left off.
I should have known that was impossible.
It had been years. Pups that were nothing but whelps when I left were now running their own packs, and all the older wolves that had raised me were dead and gone, or defeated and alone. There was no family waiting there for me anymore. They all moved on, and I was nothing but a memory, another human who would cause them harm and bring destruction and death to their packs.
Thankfully, I was okay with being on my own for a little while. I had enough life skills in the wilderness, remembered just enough to get by. And just when I was afraid I might actually starve to death or freeze in the middle of the woods, Jackal and his buddies came across me, and brought me home.
Home, to them, was a fucking warehouse filled with heavy drug users, alcoholics, and transients, all looking to keep a roof over their heads and get somewhere better. None of them would ever make it out of this four-block radius before they overdosed or died of exposure, or worse.
The knob creaked and squeaked as the room filled with steam, hot water splashing up against my forearms as I prepared to hop into the spray. I’d grown numb to the sting a long time ago. Grown numb to a lot of things.
Jackal didn’t see the same dead-end future for us. And as fucked up as he was, he still managed to keep myself and him from starving or freezing. He was always careful not to leave me alone in a dangerous situation. And when he clawed his way out of that hellhole, he dragged me kicking and screaming with him.
Life with a mattress and a kitchen and a grocery store wasn’t half bad, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting it. At least not while he was actively destroying what little schedule I had left.
My sleep was precious. It was the only thing that set me off these days. And I was at my limit.
One fucking day. Just one fucking day where I could sleep all the way through a night.
Was that too much to ask for?
I watched the rivulets of water run down my skin, diving in the divots of my well-honed muscles, curling around the swell of each of my abs, teasing the edge of my cock as the trails of water curled around a thigh and raced to the drain at my feet. I shook my head like the dog I’d once been and dispelled those thoughts. I wasn’t allowing myself to think of the past. Wouldn’t entertain the idea of falling back into being a depressed shell.
My life, my dreams, had all raced down the drain as quickly as this water. My hopes had been dashed, turned to ice in my veins as quickly as my water lost its warmth.
And now I was stuck in this hellscape with two morons who thought their morning was best spent arguing over a fucking bat.
My hand wrapped around the knobs, cutting off the stinging, sharp waterfall racing from the showerhead. I grunted as I realized there was still some soap on the side of my hair, but dismissed it as irrelevant. When I took a towel to my head, it’d dry up just like the water, and nobody would be able to tell.
There were more important things to do with one’s limited time.
The steam from the bathroom had fogged up the mirror, hiding my reflection from me in a half-assed attempt to mock the fact that my insides didn’t match the man on the outside anymore. My fingers worked with a fury, drying stray tendrils of my overgrown hair as I growled at myself and attempted to stare the fog into oblivion. When the last drop had fallen, and all the suds had disappeared, I turned the towel on the rest of my body, rough and hurried like it’d personally offended me.
I hated the man I had become. I was confused because I didn’t feel like a man. I barely felt human. So much of what I’d learned in my early years tainted my view of the world around me and made it hard to see things in the same light as others. I looked like them, acted like them, and occasionally, I talked like them. But though I walked amongst mankind, I was still an animal at my core.
Eat, sleep, kill. It was all I knew. I’d seen it in the wild, and later, in society, to a degree. And yet, only in society was it a sin to give in to our more animalistic urges.
It felt like a scam.
I yanked pants out of my dilapidated dresser and stepped into them, my toes flexing in the worn shag carpeting. If only it were acceptable to walk around naked. There was no truer freedom than running wild, bare but only for your own skin .
Somehow, I doubted it’d fly around Jackal and Dingo, even if they were more understanding than the average dude.
There was no reason to bother with a shirt for now. I didn’t plan to leave the building. And even if I did, the weather was mild. I’d survived colder in less. Jeans would be fine.
Jackal was doubled over in the kitchen behind the table, staring at something in the back of an open cabinet like it held the secrets of the universe or some shit. On the couch across the room sat Dingo, a book in his hand, bundled up like a frat boy in winter in a pair of loose grey sweats and a matching university hoodie, likely for some college he’d never been to. I hadn’t known Dingo as long as I’d known Jackal, but I’d bet money he’d never set foot in the lobby of an admissions office.
Of course, one of us hadn’t even finished high school, so who was I to judge?
His eyes tracked me like a seasoned scout, licking up my torso, making my skin crawl as I settled into the chair nearby and reached for my sneakers. Flinching was unavoidable as the cabinet door slammed abruptly, and Jackal started up his litany of curse words, spewing hatred and frustration in a colorful array of words I was well-acquainted with. Thanks to his vocabulary, it was the first informal speech I’d mastered.
“Fucking hell, man, I just don’t fucking get it.” He turned on his heel and splayed himself face-first on the counter as if the world were ending. “My fucking baby, man. Someone stole my baby.”
It was just a bat. We all knew it. But to him, it was so much more. To Jackal, it was a memory. A reason. A reminder.
It was what he’d given up when life had broken him all those years ago.
Losing it must feel like losing a limb. I couldn’t relate. And unfortunately, though I wished to, I couldn’t be sympathetic to his sorrows.
Like a magnet, his eyes slowly met mine, then narrowed as I winced visibly. The animosity that oozed from him in waves permeated the air and paralyzed me. I didn’t fear Jackal. He gave me no reason to think he’d ever turn on me. But I knew what he was capable of, and a part of me, the base, primitive side I’d been raised with, refused to let my guard down around the possible threat.
If his bat wasn’t frightening enough, his teeth certainly were.
“Look who’s awake. It’s mister can’t-hold-my-liquor-but-i’ll-drink-everything-i’m-handed..” His tongue darted out between his lips in a taunting gesture I knew well, and I returned in kind, rolling my eyes for good measure. “How’s your head?”
At the mere mention of my hangover prospects, I winced, my head throbbing as if it had just realized it was supposed to be in suffering mode. “Mmm,” I growled noncommittally, cradling my temples for a second as I closed my eyes against the light overhead.
Since when did my hangovers take orders and cues from Jackal?
“Fucker probably can’t even see straight right now.”
Dingo snorted, cracking his neck with a subtle roll of his head. “I’d bet he puked up all the booze last night. Probably got away with less than he deserves.”
I got sick? The night was a blur, just a run of faces and hands and drinks in a dark bar someplace we shouldn’t have been, but we were celebrating. The payout for the last job was double what we usually netted, and like starving men at a buffet, Jackal and Dingo’s money burned a hole in their pockets.
I tucked mine away in the little box I kept in the closet. Every month or two, when it got full, I had St. Clair take it to the bank for me.
There were some parts of society I didn’t really understand. And I was too ashamed to ask my brothers-in-arms to help me. I was a grown man. Feral child or not, I should have learned how to navigate the world by now. The fact that I couldn’t manage something as simple as a bank account was humbling, and one more reason to hate myself for my shortcomings.
Getting so drunk I barfed and passed out would certainly explain why I woke up naked. It would explain the pounding headache. And it would explain the loss of memory. What it didn’t explain was how Jackal somehow lost his bat.
And I wasn’t curious enough to speak the words aloud. I had so few words that made me sound like an actual intelligent man; I’d rather not waste them on these fools.
“I wonder if someone snatched it from the hall while we were busy with Coyote as a joke. Maybe they thought it’d be funny.” Dingo mused out loud as he picked at his cuticles, and Jackal groaned from the kitchen, opening the fridge next.
Seconds later, a bottle of chilled water flew at my head, and I had just enough seconds to spare to grab it before it made contact. If it’d hit me, Jackal would be lying on the floor, taking a little nap of his own.
His eyes narrowed as I cracked the seal and downed half of it in one gulp. “Don’t drink it too fast, fucker. I’m not cleaning you up again.”
I slowed down, albeit resentfully, and resigned myself to another day of stupid jokes, whining, and monotony.
If this was life, what was the point of living?