ALL GOOD SONS 6-7

 Here are chapters six and seven of All Good Sons. I've noticed that more people read chapters four and five than the first three so, yeah, spoiler alert, I guess.

Chapter Six

The answering machine light was flashing. I picked up the package that had been waiting for me, put it on the hall table and stared down at the machine.

One.

One.

One.

I debated for a few seconds before pressing the button.

‘Hi, Mom. I guess I missed you again. I sent you a package. Call me and let me know you got it. Bye.’

It occurred to me that the mother-daughter dynamic had gotten screwed up somewhere along the way. Wasn’t I the one who was supposed to be making check-in calls, and fretting, and sending care packages? I looked over at the package, thought about opening it.

I went to the fridge, got a beer, and sat down on the sofa to plan.

Chapter Seven

When embarking upon a journey of discovery, there’s no sense seeking the answers to the biggest questions first. The worthiest trips are taken via the longest route, with plenty of stop overs on the way. It also helps if your car isn’t running like a shit heap. With this in mind, I pulled in at Moran Auto Repairs just before closing time on a Saturday at the end of January. I’d bought the ‘65 Shelby anonymously from a ‘Direct to the public dealer’ who I knew owed Daryl a few rather large favors and was thus highly unlikely to run his mouth about it. It was delivered in mint condition, worth just as much (if not more) than the purchase price.

It took me a little less than a day to beat the shit out of it.

The priceless look of dismay on Ozzie Moran’s face at the sight of the saddest looking car ever made me wish I had a camera.

‘Got a rescue mission for you, should you choose to accept it.’

Ozzie’s mouth snapped shut when he saw me. Guilt instantly aged him.

‘Ms Perris?’

‘It’s okay, Honey,’ I said, patting him on the back, ‘I understand.’

Oh boy, was I beginning to understand.

‘Do you think you can save her?’

Ozzie walked around the car, appraised it.

‘It’s gonna take awhile. Where’d you get it?’

‘I bought it for Grey,’ I lied. ‘It was going to be his graduation present. I thought he could use a little passion project. He loved cars even more than you.’

I cleared my throat.

‘Sorry.’

The dismayed look was back. ‘I’ll fix her. No charge.’

‘Oh no,’ I protested, ‘I couldn’t let you do that.’

Ozzie shrugged. ‘It’s no problem.’

I threw my arms around him. An image sprang to mind when I felt his hands gingerly touch my waist of those hands restraining my son while his friends made Grey bruise and bleed. I’d never had a problem with Ozzie - or with most of Grey’s other friends - but now that I knew what really happened, other truths were coming to light that I’d all but ignored.

Ozzie had always been a quiet kid, but not in the adorably bashful kind of way that made you want to scuff his hair. Whether he was active or idle, Ozzie was always tightly wound. One got the sense that his brain was never switched off, and you could almost watch as he played various scenarios over and over, weighing up his options, building strategies. I observed this one Saturday afternoon when the boys were watching a movie in the basement.

‘If I had a penny for those thoughts,’ I said to Grey when Ozzie left to use the bathroom, ‘We’d be living in a mansion.’

Grey gave me a laugh that struck me as oddly humorless, but I dismissed it at the time. Grey was as protective of his friends as he was of me. It was just another thing you loved about him. I suspected Ozzie was equally as protective of his memories, so I had no choice but to do something I would have found completely abhorrent, if I didn’t know what I knew. I went down to the garage near closing time again three weeks later and found him right where I knew he’d be. Like Grey, Ozzie could never resist a project.

‘Restoration’s going great.’

Ozzie rolled out from under the Shelby and regarded me with polite friendliness.

‘She’s a beauty, alright.’

We had a few minutes worth of stilted conversation before he went out back to use the bathroom. I swapped over the pack of cigarettes he always left on the dashboard for the ones I had in my pocket. I took one out of his pack and was sure to let him see me light up as soon as he came back.

‘I didn’t know you smoked?’

I shrugged. ‘I quit when I found out I was pregnant.’

I inhaled deeply, and instantly regretted it. What was once a pleasurable teenage addiction tasted like burnt paper and noxious chemicals in the harsh, adult light of day. I watched him take one, put it between his lips, raise his lighter. This was when my nerves kicked in. Once those fumes hit the back of Ozzie’s throat, he’d know he wasn’t ingesting ordinary, deadly tobacco, and powerful though the shit I’d loaded into those papers was, I’d need to work fast.

Ozzie lit up and took a drag. His eyes, which were almost closed when he started to inhale, popped open. He was suddenly very aware of what he had just ingested. It was several, terrifying seconds before Ozzie’s eyelids dropped, and I finally allowed myself to relax a little – on the surface, at least.

‘Wha…what’s going on?’

‘Huh?’ I said.

Ozzie smiled for the first time in my presence. It was the most frightening thing I have ever seen.

‘Somebody…somebody dosed this. I’ve been dosed.’

‘Oh shit, you must’ve got mine by mistake,’ I smiled. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Yeah.’

I relaxed my grip on the gun in my pocket.

‘Good. Tell me about Prom.’

‘What about it?’

‘Did you have fun?’

‘Oh,’ he smiled, ‘yeah.’

‘Did you dance?’

‘Yeah.’

I swallowed. ‘Did Grey dance with Lulu?’

‘Grey danced with EVERYBODY…all the girls.’

‘Did Lulu get mad?’

‘A little. She slapped him. I talked her down, though.’

‘Oh yeah? How’d you do that?’

‘I told her it was gonna be okay. We were all gonna go down to the beach later, just like we planned.’

Many an evil plot in history was inspired by jealous little bitches.

‘Did you get high at the beach?’

Ozzie raised his finger to his lips. ‘Yeah.’

‘How stoned was Grey?’

Confusion passed over his face. ‘Grey wasn’t stoned. Grey never got high.’

‘That’s my boy. Was Lulu still mad at him?’

‘Yeah, but she kissed him, and they got all lovey-dovey.’

A look of mild disgust came over him.

‘Then what happened?’

‘Pierre was checking out this bike across the street, said he wanted it real bad. Lulu started kissing on Grey again, said Go get it for him.’

I would’ve laughed at Ozzie’s spot-on impression of Lulu, under different circumstances.

‘Do you like Lulu, Ozzie?’

Ozzie laid back onto the hood of the car. ‘Yeah, but I never had a chance with her then…’ He blinked, realized what he’d said.

‘And now?’

He shook his head, slowly. ‘She won’t even look at me. Guess I’m not her type.’

Ozzie had believed he could impress a girl who’d barely acknowledged his presence by rallying every guy in the gang to his cause. Stupid boy.

I wasn’t buying it.

‘Listen, Sweetie, I’ll level with you: I don’t want you to fix this thing up for me. I’m getting rid of her.’

I reached out and patted the driver’s side door.

‘Every time I look at her, I imagine Grey sitting behind the wheel, wearing that big, cheesy grin of his. Even if he does wake up, it’ll be a long time before he can walk again, let alone drive a car…maybe he never will. All this car represents for me is more heartache waiting around the corner. I’ve found someone who’ll love and take care of her.’

‘Who?’ Ozzie was straightening up now. He looked so forlorn, I took a few extra seconds before putting him out of his misery.

‘You, Honey. I want to let you have her.’

Ozzie stood up. He was completely straight now. ‘You mean it?’

‘Absolutely,’ I smiled. ‘Anyway, I gotta go.’ I gave him a hug. ‘Have fun with her.’

His hands were clasped behind his head in a pose of rapturous shock. That feeling would change in just a few moments. I wondered whether he would use those hands to try to protect a certain part of his body; the same part he’d rendered completely useless on Grey before he held him back so everybody else could take a turn. What stories had he told each of them in order to make them do what must’ve been unthinkable before that night?

The story I told on the phone to the lovely guys at the San Fernando Mustang Club, whose president was greatly relieved to find his pride and joy hadn’t been taken too far from home when it was lifted from the garage at club headquarters at four on a Sunday morning, was a simple one, but was nonetheless effective in eliciting just the right amount of emotion.

‘I was just looking for a car for my son to restore and, gosh, I feel terrible. Just the thought of my boy driving around in someone else’s…’

‘Excuse me, Ma’am…restore?’

‘Well, yes. It was in quite the state. My boy was so looking forward to working on it, too.’

Damned if I didn’t hear the tiniest squeak in the back of his throat.

‘Ma’am, could you tell me the license plate number, please?’

‘Well, I would dear, but there is no license plate. I knew it was yours, though, by the special lock you installed in the trunk, just like you mentioned in your missing poster. Oh no. I told him my son wanted a project; you don’t think he ruined it just to sell it to me, do you?’

This time there was a faint, throaty growl at the end of the line. Even if I hadn’t already seen what he looked like from his profile picture on the club’s website, picking him out in the flesh, along with his loyal constituents, wasn’t hard. They all pulled up across the street from the garage, and the caravan of early to mid sixties muscle cars was a striking sight against a backdrop of ugly cement buildings. The cars were spotlit by street lights like performers in the opening scene of a musical.

The president of the club got out first, his baseball bat held over his shoulder with determined dignity. His compatriots joined him, lining up behind him in single file and practicing their swings as they each lined up to bat. Their leader looked to me to have particularly strong arms. I started my car and turned away from the curb, uttering the last words my son had heard before he went to sleep.

‘Swing away.’