Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jackson
That night, I had a dream like I hadn’t had in many years.
Ever since Vietnam, my dreams, when I had them, were always nightmares. About death. Blood. Trauma. It got to the point that for a while, I did everything I could to avoid sleep. Thankfully, the nightmares had settled down some over time, and I had them less often now.
But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d dreamed about anything pleasant.
This dream, though, was about Roxy. It had the look and feel almost like one of those home movies.
Like I was watching her on a grainy, soft-focus screen, with no sound at all.
The sun was on her face and shone in her hair, making it look like spun gold as it flowed behind her.
She was looking back at me over shoulder, and laughing.
Her smile lit up her entire face as her deep blue eyes met mine.
The whole thing made my heart swell so much it almost hurt.
The next morning, when I woke up, the memory of it all was so sweet, it almost made me cry when I realized it hadn’t been real.
I would have done anything, even sold my soul to the devil, to go back to it, and to the way she was looking at me.
It was the happiest I had been in longer than I could remember.
The thing was, I would rather have had a nightmare about Vietnam if I could have chosen, instead of a dream like that. A million times over. At least with a nightmare, waking up to reality would have been a relief.
Rattled and feeling like I’d lost something precious and unretrievable, I went to the kitchen and made myself a pot of the strongest, bitterest black coffee I could handle.
I went out on the back patio and stared into space with a cup of it.
As I sat there in an old and rusting lawn chair, trying to clear my head, I realized that the dream kind of reminded me of this song I heard a while back.
It was by this guy named Jesse Colin Young.
It’s about a girl running through a field in the sunlight.
Her hair’s streaming behind her, and she’s laughing.
The singer’s describing her like she’s everything he ever wanted in a woman.
He can tell just by looking at her how she feels about him. How much she loves him.
I remember the first time I heard it on the radio, it made me really fucking sad.
Like, the song itself wasn’t sad at all.
But listening to it made me wish I had a woman who felt that way about me.
And then I had to switch the song off, because I realized I had no business wishing for a woman like that.
I wasn’t someone who could make a woman like that happy.
A woman like that would deserve a man who could stay in one place.
Someone who could give her everything she wanted, and more.
Someone who would treat her like a queen.
That was more or less what had been running through my head last night, when I made myself stop kissing Roxy.
I don’t know what I’d been thinking, doing it in the first place.
Hell, I know I wasn’t thinking. And that was just the problem.
She was way too good a woman for someone as damaged as me to mess with.
I knew I wasn’t worth much, and that I’d probably just hurt her in the end, even if I didn’t want to. She didn’t deserve that shit.
Before I’d gone to Nam, I had never had a serious girlfriend.
Then after I got back, I more or less stayed away from women unless I was pretty sure they’d be fine with just something physical, with no strings attached.
The women I’d fucked in the last three years were women whose names I barely knew — whose faces I could hardly recall even half an hour after I left them.
It was better that way. I didn’t have to care, and they weren’t under any illusions that I did.
But Roxy could never be just a roll in the hay for me.
I liked her way too much for that. And even though part of me wished I could give it a shot with her, I knew a relationship just wasn’t in the cards for me.
Which meant I needed to keep her firmly in the “Les’s kid sister” camp.
And until yesterday, I thought I could manage that.
After all, I’d done it all through high school, hadn’t I?
But now, after my stupid, colossal fuckup, I couldn’t get the taste of Roxy’s sweet lips or the scent of her hair out of my mind.
Even now as I sat here, the memory of how she’d moaned into my mouth as I kissed her made my cock harden uncomfortably in my jeans.
Back in high school, I’d jacked off guiltily more than once thinking about her.
Now, as I ached to hold her, ached to plunge myself deep inside her, all I could think of was giving myself that same relief.
But I forced myself to resist the urge. Because the fact was, I was afraid it would have the opposite effect of what I wanted.
Far from getting my mind off her, I was afraid it would just make me want her more.
* * *
In the days that followed, I finally went to see Dad’s lawyer, dealt with the funeral home, and arranged for a ceremony to be held for him.
I had his obituary published in the local paper and made sure the day and time of the funeral was in it, so everyone who wanted to would be able to come and pay their final respects to my old man.
The funeral was on a Tuesday, and it ended up being a bright and cloudless day.
The ceremony itself was a short one, held at the Methodist church where my mom went regularly but my dad had rarely set foot in.
A few dozen people showed up. Many of them were the older versions of people I’d remembered as friends of my parents.
The guys my dad used to play euchre with were there.
A bunch of our neighbors came too, as did some of my buddies from high school, including Greg, Mikey, Rich, Jeff, and Les.
At the gravesite, the minister said a few words over the urn that held my dad’s remains, and then asked us all to bow our heads.
I’m not much of a praying man myself, so I simply stood there in silence while he said some stuff about committing my dad’s body to the earth and asking God to give his friends and family comfort.
As he spoke, I glanced at the others gathered around.
I noticed that Roxy was among them. I hadn’t seen her at the funeral, and wasn’t sure when she’d shown up.
Her head was bowed but her eyes were open, and as I stared at her she happened to look over and meet my gaze.
Her eyes were startled, but full of sympathy, and she gave me a small smile and a nod. My heart started thudding in my chest.
When the graveside service was over, Roxy made her way over to me.
“I know I’ve already said this, but I’m so sorry, Jackson,” she murmured.
She was wearing a dark blue sleeveless dress that somehow made her cornflower eyes look even deeper than they usually did.
Her golden blond hair was pulled back in a loose bun at the nape of her neck.
A few strands had come loose and were floating distractingly around her lovely face.
I had to resist the urge to reach up and tuck them behind her ear.
“Thanks,” I nodded. “I know you know something about what this is like.”
She sighed. “Yeah. Dad’s passing two years ago was pretty rough. I still miss him every day.” Her eyes filled with pain at the memory, making me want to touch her even more. “At least I have Les, though,” she said, glancing over at her brother.
“You sure that’s a good thing?” I joked, and she laughed.
“He can be a pain in the ass,” she conceded. “But still. I think I’d feel so alone in the world if I didn’t at least have a brother. Even more orphaned, you know?” Her eyes widened in shock. “Oh! Jackson, I’m sorry!” she said in horror. “I didn’t mean to say…”
“It’s okay,” I interrupted her. “Don’t worry about it.
” After all, she was right. I was an orphan now.
I was truly alone — even more than I had been before.
I had no parents, no siblings, and no kids.
I had been working hard to push that reality out of my head, or at least make my peace with it.
But the thought that I should have appreciated my dad more when he was alive had been plaguing me since I returned to Lupine.
There was nothing I could do about it now, though. It was too late.
“Are you…” she began tentatively. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah,” I growled. “I’ve been through worse before.
” My voice came out hard as flint, and Roxy visibly flinched when I said the words.
I instantly felt bad for being so harsh.
I knew she was only asking out of concern for me.
But I didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted the funeral to be over.
I wanted all of this to be over, so I could get the hell out of Lupine and back to my life.
Alone. It was a loneliness I had chosen, being out on the road by myself.
Back here in Lupine, the loneliness I had been feeling was different.
It was the loneliness that came of wanting to feel a sense of belonging.
And that was a feeling I couldn’t let myself indulge in.
“Well,” Roxy mumbled, looking down. Her face flushed pink. “Again, I’m sorry, Jackson. If… if there’s anything I can do…” Her words trailed off. “I mean… I hope you consider me a friend, too, as well as Les.”
A friend. She had no idea how much more than a friend I wanted her to be. “I do,” I nodded. She looked up at me, her expression uncertain. “And thanks, Rox. I mean it. I know I’m not so good at stuff like this.” I gestured at the scene around us. “But it means a lot to me that you came.”
Relief washed over her face, making me feel even worse for my harshness earlier. “I wouldn’t have missed it, Jackson. Your dad was a really sweet man.”
I smiled at her. “Thanks,” I said again. She touched my arm briefly, sending a jolt of electricity through my body, then moved off into the crowd.
I was still watching her go when I heard another familiar voice over my left shoulder. “Hey, buddy,” Greg Rollins said as he came up beside me. “How you holding up?”
“Good,” I nodded. “Kind of glad it’s over.”
“You wanna come by the bar later, unwind a bit? First drink’s on the house.”
“I’d appreciate that,” I replied. I had a feeling I wasn’t gonna want to be alone later, and drinking by myself in the house didn’t seem like a very good idea today.
* * *
A few hours later, I was sitting in the Blue Angus with a shot of whiskey and a beer in front of me. Greg was behind the bar, and Les, Jeff, and Rich were seated around the same table as me. They were offering to get me good and shitfaced, despite my protests that I was fine.
“So, now that you’ve been back in Lupine for a few weeks, what do you think?” Jeff asked me. He slammed back his shot of whiskey and set the glass on the table in front of him. “Has it changed much since you’ve been gone?”
“Not really,” I grinned. “Seems pretty much like the same old place. Faces are a little older, is all. Must’ve felt the same for you guys when you got back from Nam, though. What’s it like being back here?”
“Weird,” Rich admitted. He drummed his fingers on the table, making the tattoo on his bicep jump a little. “Feels like fuckin’ Mayberry here sometimes, you know what I mean?”
Jeff snickered. “Yeah. On the surface, anyway. But shit is definitely different here now, if you look a little deeper.”
“How so?” I asked, picking up my beer.
“There’s a shitload more crime than there used to be,” Jeff remarked.
“You gotta be shitting me,” I said in disbelief. “In Lupine?”
“Yup. Bad element, coming in here from out of town, mostly,” he said, and shook his head.
“Local shop owners open up their places in the morning, find someone’s broken in, taken a bunch of stuff.
Cops can’t do shit, their heads are so far up their asses.
All they seem to know how to do is issue traffic tickets and kick kids out of city parks. ”
“They’ll hit any store with anything real valuable,” Les broke in, turning to me. “Jewelry store got hit a while back. Hell, your dad’s garage got broken into last year. Took a bunch of equipment. They never figured out who it was.”
“Shit,” I swore. “He never told me that.” Then again, I hadn’t exactly been around to hear about it.
“There’s more drug shit going on here, too,” Jeff continued.
“Seems like before we left, all you ever saw around here was weed. Nowadays, there’s a lot more H, uppers, you name it.
” He sat back in his chair. “I mean, I ain’t no prude or nothin’, but I don’t want my little brothers and sisters around that shit, know what I mean? ”
“Yeah.” I’d seen what heroin, especially, could do to a person. There were plenty of guys in the war who ended up getting addicted to it over in Vietnam. It wasn’t pretty.
“Hey, not to change the subject, but that’s a pretty nice bike you rolled up in,” Jeff said, gesturing toward the outside with his thumb.
“Thanks, man,” I grinned. “It’s an FXS Low Rider. Practically new. I got it off a guy last year in North Carolina, for a steal. His old lady got pregnant and didn’t want him riding anymore.”
“His loss, your gain,” Rich said, high-fiving me.
And just like that, the conversation turned to motorcycles. Eventually, Les proposed a group ride for that weekend, and all talk of Lupine and how it had changed over the years was forgotten.