Page 104 of Lone Wolf

But Jack was imperfect and didn’t have all the answers, no matter how much he tried to contain the world within rigid parameters to keep it safe.

Some people deserved to be left behind. Others didn’t.

And life was more complicated than any set of rules could constrain.

Evan felt himself free-falling through the awful expansiveness of freedom.

His foot hit the brakes.

The Ford F-150 skidded in the loose sand and halted at an angle. Evan was breathing hard.

It took a good thirty seconds of digging for him to acknowledge that he was scared.

Scared to go back. To see Tommy again. To open up what would be opened up inside him if he stepped outside the rules and exposed himself up to all the calamity the world could rain down on an armorless man.

He turned around.

He drove back.

He walked around the unlit shop to the fire.

He was still sweating, so he peeled off his undershirt and sat bare-chested beneath the stars.

Ten minutes passed and then another ten and then he heard the creak of the screen door and then boots shuffling over to him sheepishly if boots could sheepishly shuffle.

Tommy collapsed into his lawn chair with a groan, the frayed straps groaning along with him, and they sat with the crickets looking at the fire so they didn’t have to look at each other. A few clicks of a lighter and then a gust of Camel tobacco joined the cedar smoke.

Tommy’s hand swung down, found his bottle. A glug. And then: “Look, man…”

Evan said, “We don’t have to do all that.”

Tommy said, “Thank God.”

More silence. More sitting. Evan filled the empty space around them and inside him with a bit of vodka.

Then Tommy said, with a flare of anger, “No one asked you to come busting in there like the Kool-Aid Man.”

“Fair.”

Tommy took a moment to settle back down. Then he waved the bottle at Evan. “You’re young enough you still think you can beat it. Age.”

Evan didn’t agree in full but now was not the time to say that.

“I don’t get up no more when it don’t hurt. A lot. Ever. What the fuck. You’d think a guy who spent the first haul of his years figuring out how to kick life’s ass would get some … concession at the end before it just breaks you down piece by piece, you know? But no. Just fuck you and your joints.”

They sat and sipped.

“Tommy,” Evan said. “Quit whining.”

Tommy chuckled some, low like a dog purring. “If you fall soft, you splat. If you fall hard, you bounce. But after a while you can’t fall hard no more. Then what? There’s no point, Evan. To any of this.”

Evan let the thought in. Tried to find the right one to send back out. “If you give up, it’s just a fuck-you to anyone who ever cared about you.”

“That’s the answer right there, amigo. How many people care about me? How many people care about you? How many people ever really did?”

Once more Evan found himself at the limitations of his experience. If there were words to shape the chaos beyond into meaning, he didn’t know what they were.

Tommy gulped down another slug of bourbon. “That’s why we’re alcoholics.”