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Confused, Duncan turned to him. “Huh?”
Dad nodded at the item in Duncan’s hand: a little wooden box-like thing that might have been a very small wall hanging? Painted black, it said in white capital letters All You Need is Love ... AND A HORSE.
He hadn’t realized he’d picked the thing up, hadn’t even been really looking at it. He set it back on the shelf. “I don’t, I guess. Just wandering around.”
“The girl with the truck rescues horses,” Dad observed unnecessarily. “I guess she gives a shit about them, then. What’s her name again?”
“Phoebe. Yeah, she does. But I wasn’t looking to buy her anything. We’re not a thing. I’m just killing time.”
Dad smirked at him. “Okay. Well, time to mount up. We’re headed to that bar across from the motel.”
Great. Sitting around drinking and bullshitting. For something new and different.
Sometimes the Bulls were boring as fuck.
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~oOo~
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After a few hours drinking and bullshitting in some dark hole of a Tucumcari cowboy bar, Duncan was stretched out on a double bed, watching a two-year-old MMA bout on one of ESPN’s spinoff channels. His father sat on a plastic lawn chair outside the door, on the phone with Mom.
Duncan and his father were bunking together on this run. He didn’t mind it; they got along great most of the time. That hadn’t always been the case—for a few years, they could barely be in the same room together for more than ten minutes.
But they’d stopped getting in each other’s grille once Dad had finally let up and cleared the way for Duncan to wear the Bull. Their relationship was a lot more like club brothers these days than like father and son.
That was a relief, as far as Duncan was concerned. Dad’s version of fatherhood was pretty heavy-handed. He wasn’t a tyrant, and he’d never hit any of his kids as punishment or in anger, but he was a control freak. They’d fought a lot through Duncan’s teens and almost constantly while he was prospecting. Their spars in those days had not exactly been familial.
Dad had been a professional boxer back in the day, until he’d killed a man in the ring. He’d given up the profession after that, but he’d still fought regularly in pop-up street fights and bare-knuckle leagues, adding MMA-style moves to his boxer’s toolbox.
He’d been forced to fight a lot while he’d been in prison, before Duncan’s time. The guards at McAlester had a ring going while Dad was there. Probably still had it going even now. The guards had not been overly concerned with the health and safety of their inmate gladiators.
Though Dad was broken down after all that, with long list of permanently damaged parts, like deafness in one ear, diminished sight in one eye, nearly crippling arthritis in his hands, and more, he still loved the sport, and Duncan had grown up watching UFC with him. When he was in middle school, when Mom finally gave in, Dad started training him. By the time he graduated high school, he was fighting in underground matches and bare-knuckle street fights, and winning significantly more than he lost. He’d made some decent money at it.
If Dad had succeeded in keeping the Bull off Duncan’s back, his Plan B had been to try to go pro.
But the Bull was on his back now, and he no longer had much time for fighting. Besides, Eight wanted the patches to keep their recreational violence in their own ring. Though he’d apparently been a loose cannon as a soldier in the club, stirring up trouble wherever he could, as president he was all about keeping their shit low-pro and not catching the notice of Mr. and Mrs. Normie or John Q. Law.
The fight he’d wanted to see again was over, so he turned off the television. As he headed to the bathroom to brush his teeth, he heard his father laugh at something Mom must have said.
That laugh was specific, and for Duncan it carried a load of feelings and associations. Only Mom got that laugh, and only when they were private together. It was an intimate, secret thing, a lover’s laugh, and any time Duncan had ever heard it, he knew he’d caught something not meant for him.
His parents’ marriage was the model for what he wanted himself, when he was ready to want it. His father and mother loved each other, and it showed every day. They’d been married almost thirty years, they’d been together years longer than that, and they were still completely in love and completely horny for each other.
They argued, sure, and sometimes those arguments were loud and intense. Dad wasn’t just a control freak with the kids, and Mom tended to react to trouble with big emotions before she calmed and started trying to solve the problem. That combination sometimes produced an explosion. But they always worked it out, always apologized when they were wrong, always smoothed the path between them. They didn’t hide any of it from the kids, either. If they blew up at each other in front of them, they explained why, and how they’d made it better.
Because for them love was more than attraction, more than passion. It was respect.
Duncan knew more than a few people who thought real love had to hurt, that passion meant fighting, that the best sex was angry sex. But he’d learned that passion was what healed the pain. Real love meant trying not to cause pain in the first place and soothing it when it happened. People fucked up; good or bad, they fucked up. But good people, loving people, owned it and fixed it when they did.
That was the lesson Duncan’s parents had taught him about romance and relationships.
Hearing that quiet sound of his father’s love for his mother, Duncan felt a weird weight in his chest. He went back to his bed and grabbed his phone.
The last text exchange between him and Phoebe was from a few days earlier. He’d explained that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get the engine in shape before he had to leave town, and she’d replied: Understood. Whenever you can get to it. I’m just so grateful for this help. It is HUGE, and I will never be able to repay you adequately. But I do intend to try. Really, Duncan. Thank you.
Happy to do it was all he’d replied.
