CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)(6)

Well, more cold if I was being honest.

It had gotten a lot worse since Elijah’s death. Somewhere along the way she’d just kind of thrown her hands in the air and given up. Hardly a day passed by when she didn’t let us know that after we graduated next year we were on our own. I didn’t know if those were just words or if she really meant it, but she’d always had even less patience for me than she had for Stone. My brother and I didn’t talk about that, not even to each other. We didn’t talk about the gossip that hinted about things that happened before we were born. If Elijah ever heard it as well he never let on. He was a good father. I missed him.

I watched my brother as he cheerfully discovered a forgotten pack of cigarettes in a pair of discarded jeans. Great. That meant he’d be puffing away in here all morning, inflicting his personal philosophies on me when all I wanted to do was jerk off and take a f*cking nap before I had to be at work at Carson’s Garage.

“Come on,” I complained, “take it outside. It’s bad enough it’s hot as an armpit in here. I don’t feel like sitting in a smoke cloud.”

He didn’t argue. He opened up the bedroom window and hopped through it. I stayed where I was for a moment, listening to him kick rocks as he wandered out to the yard. Then I jumped up and slammed the window closed, locking it. Stone whirled around, shouted a few obscenities and glared while I grinned and slowly extended my middle finger. He cursed again and walked away while I reclaimed my mattress and stuck my hand down my boxers.

I wouldn’t leave him out there for long, cursing and smoking in his underwear. Just for a little while. Just long enough to remind him that payback between brothers was what kept the world turning.

I forgot about Stone as I closed my eyes and thought about lips and skin. I thought about a girl telling me she loved me and how much I wished she was here in the room right now. With me.





CHAPTER THREE


ERIN



At least twice a day it occurred to me that this was the last summer.

Not the last summer ever, just the last free summer.

Maybe the last good summer.

This time next year high school will be finished and people will already be starting to go their separate ways. The few who would be heading out of Emblem to the exotic college world would already be mentally checked out. Those who couldn’t imagine leaving would be calling in whatever favors their folks had banked to try and get hired on at the prison or at any of the locally owned businesses lining Main Street. If they were really intrepid they would pack up their crappy cars and head out of this dustbowl in the hopes that a better life was somewhere beyond the town limits.

I didn’t count myself among the intrepid. Or among the future labor force of Emblem. My father had sacrificed a lot to save what little life insurance money had come his way so there was some left for us girls to go to college. My grades were good and I wouldn’t have a problem getting admitted to Arizona State, or so my guidance counselor told me. I had no idea what I was going to study when I got there but my counselor, a whisker-faced woman names Mrs. von Vechten who’d once been a friend of my mother’s, patted my arm and assured me that getting there was half the battle.

Speaking of battles, there was one going on behind me. I didn’t want to watch so I had drifted out of the tunnel, away from the drunken hoots and the bawdy cheers.

A bunch of us had ended up here once the sun went down. Whatever force of nature had knocked out Emblem’s power supply last night was apparently not easy to fix. Fourteen hours after I’d opened my eyes in my bedroom to the sound of silence the town remained silent. And now it was dark too, except for the prison, which operated on some kind of emergency generator. A halo of garish fluorescence made the Central State Penitentiary look like a cruel oasis. It was ugly to look at in the daylight. At night it was downright ominous.

The hangout everyone called ‘the tunnel’ was just an old railroad overpass. The line itself hadn’t been active in decades and the single lane road that cut beneath it had been abandoned around the same time as the town’s roads were reconfigured. My dad had once told me that before the days of asphalt this old road was lined with wooden plank boards and stretched all the way to Tucson, some seventy miles south. He said when he was a kid you could still find a lot of the old rotted planks half buried in the desert sand.

“Ah, you’re slipping, you’re slipping!”

“Shut up Stone!”

“Why are you fighting it, little brother? Just let go. It’s okay.”

“Fuck you.”

There was a lot of shouting, cheering and half drunk laughter. The Gentry brothers were fighting their latest war of wills. They’d climbed up to the bridge and were hanging from the old tracks by the skin of their fingertips. Some of the other boys had tried it as well but they’d already fallen into the sand, leaving only Stone, Conway, and one of the Cortez boys to fight it out to the silly, pointless end.

I rolled my eyes at the sound of the action, but I was facing away and no one was watching me anyway. I’d been listening to the noise of those two trying to outdo one another since I was a toddler. Since all I’d ever had were two sisters I didn’t know much about how brothers were supposed to be with each other, but it seemed like they should have outgrown juvenile nonsense like this. Somehow I guessed that the Gentry brothers never would, no matter how old they got.