Stay Vertical (The Bare Bones MC #2)(13)
“Fuck my Apache roots!” There were a hundred times Lytton would live to regret these words, but now he loathed his Apache roots more than anything. Those f*cking roots had brought him nothing but poverty, self-hatred, and now shame he hadn’t even known he had. “I’m only a f*cking Tomahonky anyway, a f*cking half-breed, and you want me to focus on my Apache roots? You know what? You and Sadie can just go f*ck off and die.”
And Lytton had stormed proudly out, knocking aside a dummy wearing a US cavalry uniform. Without thinking, he snatched a bugle off a display stand and angrily blew on it as he stomped to his ride.
It actually helped him to work off some steam, and he wound up blasting a sort of lopsided, ironic, and supremely pissed-off reveille as he straddled his saddle. All sorts of nons wearing shorts and Ray-Bans and carrying Whole Foods canvas bags gaped at him as though he were performing some battle reenactment. The ones that wore the tribal design sweaters had figured out they were one-sixty-fourth Apache. They eagerly tried to highlight that by playing lacrosse and talking about “using every part of the animal.”
Well, f*ck that. Lytton thrashed it down the state highway, chucking the bugle with all his might. It clanged with a satisfying crash against a boulder, leaving all the tourists to wonder when General Crook would lead the charge.
Lytton had ample time to work up a new head of steam as he rode north toward Pure and Easy. He had seen Cropper Illuminati a few times around town while buying groceries and shit like that. He had a tendency to look favorably upon the guy. Once Lytton had established the Leaves of Grass on Kino’s property, he had had nothing but hassles with The Cutlasses. But not once had any member of The Bare Bones tried to trespass on his farm or in any way harass him like The Cutlasses had.
And of course he’d seen the Illuminati Trucking equipment around town, working on highway jobs, shoring up cave-ins from flash floods, fixing overpasses. He had even paused in front of The Bum Steer Bar and Grill to admire Ford Illuminati’s ’98 Harley Softail. He had respected their tough, supreme, and arrogant lifestyle. The Bare Bones always had much better sweetbutts than The Cutlasses did. The Cutlass sweetbutts all looked strung-out, with scabby faces and pencil-thin eyebrows. The Bare Bones club whores at least looked somewhat fresh, as though they had all of their real teeth. It was as if they’d all banded together and decided to stick with the studs of The Bare Bones because they were treated better over there.
Or that’s what Lytton had assumed. It had even crossed his mind to patch in to a club like The Bare Bones, but you couldn’t just buy your patch in an outlaw club like that. You had to earn it, which meant “prospecting” for a year at least, doing the grunt work every fully patched member threw at you. No thanks. Lytton considered himself instead a nomad. He wore a leather jacket when it was cold, but of course no cut or rocker. He didn’t even wear boots, preferring the Nikes because he could feel the vibrations of the bike through the soles.
It had even occurred to Lytton that it might be a secure, brotherly feeling being a member of a club like The Bare Bones. Despite Kino’s best efforts at bringing him into the tribal fold, Lytton had grown up not feeling a part of something greater than himself. Lytton had an atheistic, every-man for-himself outlook on life that he pretended to enjoy. But often, when he got bitterly honest with himself after a bondage scene or other, he had to admit that it would be good to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of place. No wonder I never felt I belonged. The whole time I had no idea I was a half-breed.
He had even gone inside The Bum Steer once under the guise of wanting a burger. To be brutally honest, he was curious how those bikers interacted. The bartender was like Tom Cruise on meth, flipping bottles underneath his legs until he smashed a fifth of rum on the tiles. But he was having a good time doing it. It was a rowdy, loud place, as could be expected, carpeted with discarded peanut shells, resonating with shouts, camaraderie, and the Allman Brothers.
Lytton liked the Allman Brothers. Now he came to find out he actually had been a part of this brotherhood the entire f*cking time.
The Bare Bones lifestyle seemed so flamboyant, colorful, and dangerous. Lytton knew they also owned the Triple Exposure, the live sex streaming soundstage in the industrial part of P & E, as well as at least two brothels. Then, most interestingly, when Proposition 203 had made it legal to get baked, The Bare Bones had opened up their own dispensary, A Joint Effort, probably as a front for money laundering. Lytton had stopped on in a few times out of professional curiosity, talking to a soft-spoken guy about his growth cycles and color coding. Still, The Bare Bones farms weren’t as organic as the Leaves of Grass.
But by the time Lytton arrived on Mescal Mesa, he was steaming again. Cropper, long may he live, and his motherf*cking golden boy son Ford had cut him out of all this glory and splendor. Ford’s mother was another Apache woman, also of the White Mountain tribe—apparently Cropper liked the squaws. How did that equate to Ford being handed the keys to the limo while Lytton grew up thinking that fortified wine meant it was infused with vitamins? Thunderbird bum wine had been on so many tables in Whiteriver, Lytton had thought it was a locally-sourced drink.
No, once Ford Illuminati admitted that he knew Lytton was his brother, Lytton was going to demand an active share in some of the family business. He didn’t know much about construction, so he’d demand to run the weed dispensary. That made sense. He didn’t need the income—it was more about demanding his rightful place in the family hierarchy.