"It's stupid, isn't it? Sirens never used to make me jump. Hell, I ran to the police cars half the time just to see what was going on around here. I never got paranoid before. Never cared if I got busted by the cops. Just another night in jail, just another free meal and a chance to catch up with Billy or James or…Dallas." Tim took a swig off his whiskey, not even bothering with the chaser the woman laying next to him had poured. She placed her hand on his, but he kept his tight clutch on the bottle, his hands large and knotty from breaking his knuckles so many times.
"Fuck, Beli," he said, laying the bottle on the particle board night stand. "Me and Dall used to go up to cops and just start shit with them for the hell of it. The cops used to pull up to Buck's just waiting to catch someone coming out with public intox, and we were drunk as fuck and strolled right out the front door and started cussing out the cops, and Dallas just pissed right on the cop car." He started to chuckle until he saw the blue and red gleam of the cop car lights coming in through the blinds. Picking up the bottle of Jack, he took another long swig.
"God, I think I'm gonna throw up." He climbed out of bed naked, the white gleam of scars mapped across the dirt colored tan of his lean body, stretching from the corner of his hip and ass, detouring around the curve of his back. Little roads of scars lined across forearm and underlined his still-fresh, homemade tattoo on the top of his arm, bearing his last name "SHEPARD."
He paused in the doorway, his head slung across his shoulder. "Your kids ain't here, are they?"
"No, precioso, they're visiting their tia in Texas."
While Tim hung over the toilet seat in the bathroom, making a mess that Beli would clean up in the morning, Beli rolled a joint between her chubby, but dexterous fingertips. Her curves pressed through the faded blue cotton sheet. She was overweight, but her boobs, her hips, and her willingness to buy the boys in the neighborhood booze made her a favorite. She had moved to Tulsa for her manager's job at the grocery store. The last Harvest Grocer she worked at got hit by a tornado and she was lucky that the chain offered to relocate the workers to other stores. It was boring, though, being away from almost everyone she knew, but most of the women in her hometown gossiped all the time about her anyway. The only women she really talked to in Tulsa were not really women at all, young girls dating the gang members she often let sleep on her couch, or occasionally in her bed. She had no regrets about her life.
The boys made her life bearable here in Tulsa. They got her laid, hooked her up with weed while she hooked them up with Jack. She had learned plenty in her thirty-six years, and was a woman they actually listened to now and again. Steve Randle for instance, stayed with her for three weeks when he got into a fight with his dad and took it out on his little girlfriend. And what did Beli do? She fixed him up, sent him back to Evie, taught him well. He never hit Evie again, and she even heard they were getting married once Evie came back from visiting her friend in Florida.
She didn't think it hurt her kids any. Curly could be a little rough with Luis and Antonio sometime, but the Shepards toughened them up. They needed toughened up. Look at the side of Tulsa they lived in. The Shepard boys even stole her Tomasa clothes sometimes. She used to get made fun of for the way she dressed by the little rich pricks at school.
And Tim, he needed her right now. He climbed into bed, flicking the lights off, not even trying to kiss her again. He was done talking about Dallas for now, so she just wrapped her arms around him and let him sleep it off.