Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dixon
When I arrived at the ranch, my brother, Bea, and my son met me in front of the house, Stuey sporting a blue and white Spitfire Ranch trucker cap way too big for him.
I flicked the brim and patted his head. “What’s up, kid?”
He smiled, but then Bax’s stern face crowded mine.
“Bedtime is 8:30. Bea made dinner for y’all. It’s in the fridge. Think you can manage to microwave it?”
“’Course.”
“And no TV. Stu lost his TV privileges this mornin’ when he decided to replace the truth about who broke the gear shift on the skid steer with a fantastical story about an invisible monster who goes around bustin’ up farm equipment.
” Under his breath, Bax added, “Makin’ shit up like somebody else I know.
“He wants you to take him fishin’. You’ve got about an hour and a half left of daylight, two at most, so you better get to it, but take a flashlight just in case.
Stu knows where everything is, and there’s bait in the fridge in the garage.
And keep your phone on you. I better be able to get ahold of you if I need to. ”
“10–4,” I said, and I saluted Commander in Chief Bax.
Stu giggled, but Bax scoffed.
“Don’t be a tool, Dixon. I don’t have to do this.”
Bea stepped in finally. “C’mon, husband. Let’s get goin’. Athena’s textin’ up a storm, wonderin’ where we are. The boys will be fine.” She flashed me a soft smile as she pushed Bax toward his truck.
“You have nothin’ to worry about,” I called after him. “I got this.”
Bax stopped and turned, his eyebrows ticked up with doubt.
Okay, so maybe I couldn’t blame him for worrying, but I felt confident and grounded. I knew I could return Stu to Bax in the same condition I’d found him.
“Bax, you promised you’d try,” Bea said. “Let’s go.”
“Fine,” Bax retorted, but I could see the worry lingering in his eyes. “We’ll be back around ten, maybe ten-thirty.”
Reluctantly, Bax backed up and drove off, with Bea waving out the window to Stu. Stu waved back, then grabbed my hand and dragged me inside.
He tossed his hat onto the couch. “C’mon. I need to get my fishin’ pole. It’s in my room, but Daddy cuts the hook off so you gotta tie it back on for me. I’m not good at that part yet.”
As I followed my son up the stairs, his little feet pounding the wood, I realized I’d never seen his room, and it nearly knocked me sideways when he ran into the same one I’d slept in as a boy.
It was different now, of course, and had been repainted a dark, dusky blue color, with hunter green accents.
The walls used to be a sickly-sweet robin’s-egg blue that Merv had picked out when Bax and Brand were babies, and I’d shared the room with them both when I came along.
Bax got the single and Brand and I shared bunkbeds so Abey, the only girl in our family, could have her own space for all the dolls Noah Lee bought her that she never played with.
When we were really little, though, she used to sneak into our room when our parents were asleep, and the four of us would pull our blankets to the floor and sleep huddled up together.
Even then we knew a monster lurked down the hall. It took a few more years for me to realize that our dad, or at least the man claiming to be mine, was the monster.
Stu threw open the closet door and disappeared inside for a few seconds, and I looked around.
Crayons and pencils littered his desk, and wadded-up pieces of paper had been discarded on top and on the floor surrounding a black, plastic wastepaper basket, the waxy, unfinished drawings on them hinting at Stu’s imagination and all the stories living in his head.
His bed had been made, probably by Bea or Bax, and it was the epitome of what I’d expect to find in a little boy’s room, with green-and-blue plaid sheets and comforter, and his white pillowcases coordinated with green fish on them, so that even when he slept, he could dream about fishing.
“I like your room,” I said.
“Thanks. Mama let me pick out the sheets and stuff.”
“You chose well. Y’know, your dad, Uncle Brand, and I used to share this room when we were your age.”
“I know. Daddy told me. Here it is!” He hopped out of the closet, holding a kid-sized fishing pole, which was also dark blue. “My dad says I’m too little for a big pole. He says it’d probably knock me over and the hook would get stuck in my britches, whatever that means.”
I laughed, remembering Bax saying the same thing to me when he and Brand had taken me fishing on our lake.
They fashioned a pole more my size out of a tree branch and taught me on that.
They’d also taught me to swim and ride a bike and a horse.
When I was little, my big brothers were my whole world.
When my chuckles died down, I said, “He just means that you wouldn’t be able to control the pole very well, and the hook would probably get caught in your pants.”
“Oh, that makes more sense, but I’ll be bigger soon, and then I’m gettin’ a bigger pole than his. It’s in the garage. C’mon. Let’s go get it so you can borrow it.”
“Comin’.”
We raced back down the stairs and ransacked the garage until we found Bax’s pole, and I pulled a Styrofoam container from the old fridge tucked in the corner, filled with wet dirt and earthworms.
And then I saw it—Bax’s four-wheeler.
Oh man. I’d wanted to ride this thing my whole life.
When I was down and out once, I considered stealing it to sell for dope money.
For many reasons, I was glad now I hadn’t.
While Stu rummaged through Bax’s bigger tackle box, searching out fancy lures for fish we’d probably never catch, I ran my hand over the four wheeler’s handlebars and gas throttle.
Memories of the past played in my head. At one point in time, all four of us had our own four-wheelers.
We rode every chance we got, and Abey and I tried like hell to keep up with Bax and Brand and their friends.
My bike broke down. It wasn’t as nice as my siblings’.
Bax tried to fix it, but it needed a specific part.
He’d gone to our dad and asked him to buy the part.
Noah Lee never bought it, and my bike sat on the side of the house, collecting rust for years until the prick had it hauled away with some other junk.
In my delinquent years, many times, I fantasized riding Bax’s bike off a cliff.
That would show them all, and I’d take the shiny prize with me.
Something stopped me from following through, and it wasn’t until I got sober that I realized the love and respect I had for my brother was the thing that had kept me alive.
“Hey, Stu, this thing still run?”
Looking over his shoulder, an excited glint lit behind his eyes. “Yeah. You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”
“I’m thinkin’ if we ride to the lake instead of walkin’, we’d have more time to fish before the sun goes down. Is that what you’re thinkin’?”
“Yes!”
“You got a helmet?”
“Oh man. You’re gonna make me wear that dumb thing?”
“You better believe I am.”
Dejectedly, he walked to Bax’s work bench and pulled an electric blue helmet down. The name “Stu Man” had been stuck on the back with white mailbox-letter stickers. Before he slipped it on his head, he said, “Fine. Happy now?”
“Yes. Your head and all the stuff inside it are really important. By the way, I heard you like to tell stories. That true?”
“I guess so.”
“Your dad said you told a good one this mornin’.”
Stuey twisted his lips, giving away his guilt. “That story got me grounded from TV.”
“Maybe you can tell it to me while we fish.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding and smiling.
I hit the button on the wall to open the garage door, and evening light flooded in and washed away the dark. “Alright then. Hop on, Stu Man.”
The ride was awesome.
I smiled the whole damn way to the lake, with Stu in front of me, clutching the handles and helping me steer while the wind whipped at us.
Although, I didn’t go nearly as fast as I wanted to.
My cargo was way too precious for speed racing, but the trees still blurred slightly.
The warm summer air molded and rushed around us, and I didn’t think I’d ever felt anything so perfect.
We parked a few yards from the lake near a little fishing dock someone had recently built that jutted over the edge of the water near where the lakebed had always dropped off, offering deeper fishing, and Stu hopped off the bike easily.
We didn’t always have trout here. They started populating when I was a teenager, swimming in from the creek that fed Lee Lake, but we’d always had bluegill and largemouth bass.
I was excited to get my hands on a couple trout so I could cook them up and eat the suckers.
I hadn’t had fresh lake trout since the Cascades.
Maybe AJ and I could grill them. I noticed a grill tucked against the side of her house, hidden under a waterproof tarp, when I boarded up her window.
Stu looked up at me as we walked, shading his eyes from the late sun with his little hand. “You’re my dad, aren’t you?”
“Wh-what?”
My legs stopped working, and they felt like they might buckle beneath me. Instinctively, I leaned on Bax’s fishing pole for support but felt it bend and realized quickly that it wouldn’t hold me up.
Shit. Fuck.
Had I said something?
Curious blue eyes, carbon copies of mine, stared back at me carefully while I tried to process what he’d just asked. Bax is gonna fuckin’ kill you, Dixon, you idiot!
“Why would you ask that?”
Stu was too young to figure it out on his own.
I must’ve said something. I promised Bax I wouldn’t, but maybe it slipped out?
The secret ate at me every single minute of every single day, so it wouldn’t have surprised me, but the anger I felt at myself for breaking the biggest promise I’d ever made roared inside me.
Bax would never forgive me now.
“Stu? What would make you ask me that?”
He shrugged and slipped his hand inside mine, like he might find comfort in my touch. Was this what comfort looked like to a little boy?