Disclaimer: S E Hinton owns The Outsiders
August 1984
Tim Shepard stood with his feet apart, fists up. The bare bulb overhead cast a circle of light around him. Outside the carport was a sea of darkness. inside him was the stillness he always felt before a fight.
A breeze blew through the open sides, hot and gritty. It was all fucking dust out here, dust and heat and the smell of oil. He never did get used to any of it.
"Ready?"
He pumped his arms. Curled his hands in the gloves.
"Ready, dad."
Jay shuffled in front of him, his own fists up, his shadow moving across Tim's.
Tim stood still and let him get close. He used too much energy dancing around, thought he was fucking Ali. He came in and Tim swung and he ducked away fast.
"Try and hit me, come on," Tim said.
Jay grinned a little and shook his head. He raised his gloved hand up to wipe his mouth across his arm.
Then he was right in front of Tim, fist snaking forward. It bounced off against Tim's gloves.
Jay backed away again and Tim narrowed his eyes in disapproval.
"That shit might work on your school friends."
His son was fourteen, nearly as tall as him, as restless as Tim remembered ever being.
But Tim could still see the sleepless baby who'd screamed against his shoulder through those dark nights, the boy who'd waited for him to come home with drilled down fear in his eyes. His son was everything at once to him, a baby, a child, nearly a man.
From the corner of his eyes he saw the dark figure appear at the edge of the carport.
"What you want, Jesse?"
His youngest son came further in.
"Phone, dad."
"Take a message."
Jay's gaze flickered, following his brother as he went back up to the house.
Tim aimed a punch for his jaw, pulled it back at the last second. Jay rocked on his feet even so. Shook his head and blinked and then looked at Tim with accusing eyes.
"Pay attention," Tim said. His son was going to know how to take care of himself. Pity wouldn't do him any good.
"Thought you'd stopped," Jay said.
"Was I on the fucking ground?"
"I wish you were!"
Tim dropped his guard and stepped forward.
"Come on and try," he said.
He moved back from another blow. Jay swung again, frustration making him sloppy.
"You know you look where you're gonna go every time you move?" Tim asked him. "Keep your plans in here. Surprise me."
He tapped a glove against his own head.
Jay nodded a little, watching him closely. Tim never held his attention so much as when they sparred in the evenings.
Tim moved forward again and Jay took a swing. It was wide and Tim dodged it without real effort. He didn't see Jay's left coming, only felt it knock his jaw sideways.
It was a good hit. Tim felt the strength in it, admired the clean and fast move even as he waited for the bright pain to die down. The darkness outside pulsed in and out again. For a terrible moment the ground rolled under him and he thought he might have to put a hand on the wall for support.
"Not bad," Tim said. Jay smiled.
Tim had twenty years on the boy and he felt every single one of them. He felt every cigarette smoked down to the butt, every empty glass slammed back on the bar for another, every long day he'd worked in the oil fields and came home tired to the bone.
But still when Jay sidled up to him, feigned a punch in under his ribs and asked with a grin, "You wanna go, dad?" he nodded. Threw back the beer, stubbed out the cigarette, shook off the tired haze of work and followed his boy out the door.
"Dad?"
Jesse was back, coming further into the garage.
"She wants to talk to you, says she's your sister."
The word sounded strange in his son's mouth.
Tim's sister. That part of him he'd left behind a long time ago. The Tim who was a big brother, a gang leader, a Tulsa hood.
He let his hands drop, forgetting whatever lesson it was he'd come out to teach. His boys stood in the light before him. Dark haired and blue eyed, two brothers who made his heart ache in all kinds of ways.
"So what should I tell her?" Jesse asked. He was three years younger than Jay, a whole lot more innocent.
"I'll take it," Tim said.
He ducked his head down to pull the Velcro off a glove with his teeth.
Jay came to stand in front of him and put his hands out for Tim to take his gloves off. Tim could hear his light, even breaths and tried to slow his own.
"I'm gonna have you one day," Jay said, glancing up at him.
He damn near had. Tim would never tell him that.
"Well you better start learning boy, 'cause I ain't going to start forgetting anything."
"Alzheimer's will get you soon enough," Jay murmured.
Tim bit back a smirk and cuffed his son across the ear instead.
"Ow, dad."
"Learn not to run your mouth for a start."
Tim handed him the gloves and patted the side of his head.
One day but not this day. It was a strange kind of pride, of knowing his sons would overtake him. It was their time coming and his was already behind him.
"That a night for you, dad?"
Jay was smiling again, cocky as only an untested boy could be.
"That's your night. Go in and get in the shower."
Jay rolled his eyes but he turned to go without protest. Not this night.
He walked ahead of Tim across the bare yard. He stopped on the porch, outlined against the light from the kitchen windows.
"Wonder what your sister wants?"
They knew his family never called. Once a year on Christmas Eve he downed a few bottles and phoned Angela after the boys were asleep, so late he figured she'd be asleep too yet always she answered.
The details of her life were updated to him in twelve month intervals. That asshole he'd seen her wed to was in jail and then he was out. He had a job and he lost it and he was in jail again. She had a kid, another, and another. He didn't try and remember their names or any other thing.
She told him which boys from those old days were still drinking in the bar where she worked, who was married and who was divorced, who'd left town and who was jailed.
She updated him on a life that was nothing but the dust that had risen up behind his car as he drove out of Tulsa, and still he phoned. She wrote him once when she moved house with the new number, but she never phoned him. Tim knew that someone must be dead if she was calling.
Jesse was sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal even though he'd eaten a steak dinner not four hours earlier.
Tim was sure he never ate as much as his own sons did when he was coming up. When the memories of those days came winding back like they sometimes did, mostly he remembered the twist of hunger in his belly as he walked the streets.
Tim lit up a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth and picked up the phone. He imagined the line that stretched all the way from Angela's house on the North side to his house in Odessa, Texas.
A chain that wound through all his days, that would be there holding him to Tulsa no matter how far he went.
"Hey," he said, moving to stand against the door frame. He blew smoke out at the starry sky.
"Tim, how are you?"
Angela sounded the same as she ever did, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary for her to call him near ten on a Thursday night.
"Good," he said. "How are you? How's the kids?"
He took another drag on his cigarette, held it while he waited for her answer.
"They're driving me crazy! How are your boys?"
"They're doing alright. They keep out of trouble."
"Can't hope for more than that," she said, her tone softer for a moment.
He and Angel had seen too much that could never be undone.
"Heard anything from Maria lately?" she asked.
"She sent 'em a Christmas card. Come in January."
Tim glanced back at the table. Jesse was pushing his spoon around the plate, chasing up the last of the milk. If he was hurt by the talk of his mother he didn't show it, he never did. Jesse was the kid he couldn't read.
Angela sniffed. "I can't believe that bitch. She's no kind of mother."
Same thing she'd said every year since the December of 1978, the Christmas Eve phone call when Tim had told her that five months earlier he'd come home late from work to find the boys sitting alone in front of the TV and Maria long gone.
"Mom's friend came and picked her up," Jay had told him, but for some reason Tim hadn't repeated that part to Angela. His sons all knowing eyes had twisted him with guilt, in some better life he would have never understood these things.
"Well it's her loss," Tim said.
She was silent on the other end. He could hear the spark and quick breath of her lighting up a cigarette. Jay came out from the shower and walked his usual line straight to the fridge. He got the milk out and drank from the bottle, standing in front of the open door.
"So what I got to tell you," Angela said, "Our mom's real sick, Tim."
They never talked about their mother. Tim never asked.
"That so?" he said, snapping his fingers at Jay and indicating for him to get a beer out.
"A couple months back she started losing weight. It's not like she was big to start with, and soon enough she nothing but skin and bone. I kept telling her she had to go the doctor but you know what she's like."
She paused so Tim said "yeah" into the silence. He knew what she was like.
He popped the lid off the beer and took a drink. Never should have given Angela his number.
"Then she couldn't eat, couldn't keep anything down. Finally went to the doctor and its cancer, stomach cancer."
"Shit" said Tim. He wondered if that was something that could be fixed. Sometimes no medicine could heal you. Sometimes the doctor only shook his head and said it was too late, nothing could be done.
"She's in hospital now. I mean, they don't think she's going to come out."
Her voice wavered. His little sister crying on the phone all those miles away.
"Look, I'll send you out some money. I'll get to the bank tomorrow."
"Hey fuck you," Angela said, the hardness back in her tone. "She's your mother too."
Jay was leaning against the bench now, watching Tim.
"It's been a lot of years, Angel."
When he left he knew he was never coming back. He drove away so early in the morning no one was awake to watch him go, Maria beside him and the baby asleep in the back.
"She's dying Tim. She's asking for you."
Her words dropped off.
Tim didn't have to look on a map to figure how many miles were between them. He could leave in the morning and be there Friday evening. Visit Angela and his mother Saturday morning and drive through the afternoon and night back to Texas.
"I'll call you when I get in," he told Angela, before he could give it too much thought. If he did he'd know all the reasons it was a shitty idea.
He hung up before she could say anything else.
"What'd she want?" Jay asked.
He was always curious about the place where he'd been born, the family he'd never known. The life Tim had left behind so that Jay could live a different one.
"Going to take a drive to Tulsa tomorrow," he told them.
"That's where you were born?" Jesse asked.
"It is."
"How come?" Jay asked. "How long for?"
"Just the weekend."
Jay frowned, chewed his lip. Tim could see him considering a weekend spent driving to the place of his birth against a weekend spent with his girlfriend.
"I'll stay here, make sure no one robs us," he said, his eyes brightening at the prospect.
"You're coming," Tim said.
Jay sulked and slumped back against the kitchen bench.
Tim never said a thing he didn't mean, he never went back on something he'd said. The boys knew it wasn't worth arguing with him when he laid down the law.
He aimed his gaze at Jesse where he sat at the table.
"You get to bed now."
Jesse nodded and got up, turned into Tim and leaned against him. Tim squeezed his shoulder and then gave him a gentle push toward the hallway. He never was any good at the shit that wasn't issuing orders and teaching them how to throw a punch.
He turned to Jay who was still leaning against the bench.
"Wash up these dishes then you get some sleep too. We'll head off early tomorrow."
Growing up Tim would have no sooner thought to wash dishes than put on his mother's lipstick. It was for a woman to do.
But after Maria left he realized if he didn't do it no one would. He saw a cockroach run across the stack of dirty plates on the bench one day so he filled the sink with hot water. Jesse wet his bed so he had to strip off the sheets, figure out how to run the washing machine.
Life taught him what no wife or mother or sister ever could have.
"You didn't say why we going?"
"My mother's sick," he said. "Going to see her before she passes."
Jay took the news without reaction. Grandmother was only a word to him after all.
"I got to call Connie first, I told her I was going to meet her before school tomorrow. Ok?"
"Yeah."
Jay picked the entire phone up off the bench and started down the hallway with it. When he spoke to his girlfriend he always dragged it all the way down to his bedroom, as far as the cord would reach. Lucky for him the place wasn't big.
But he stopped and turned back in the hallway, stood there holding the phone.
"You alright, dad?"
A strange look on his face. As if for a moment he thought of Tim as his equal, someone who had a mother too, someone who might feel pain.
"Sure," Tim said. "You got five minutes, then get onto those dishes."
If his son was going to start feeling sorry for him Tim would make sure it didn't last.
"What have we got for anyone to steal anyway?" he added as Jay went down to his room.
He walked out to the porch again. Lit up another cigarette and stared across the quiet street. He tried to shove back down the memories crawling up. Home was calling.
This is just my take on a possible future for Tim. Any comments welcome!