Sorry this chapter took a while, it was becoming massive and I decided to cut some stuff and put it in the next one, and I've been swamped with school/job hunting lately. But! I'm here now :)

We delve deeper into Tim's trauma this chapter unfortunately, the first scene has some pretty graphic violence towards a child and references to self-harm.

I dream about Santi, that night.

They're not always clear dreams, but this one's particularly vivid, the memories rushing forth from that makeshift crank den where my Tío Chuy lost two fingers and my cousin lost everything. Run, I want to holler, run, burro, God, just run, but he wasn't nearly street-smart enough to save himself. He'd begged, and in a way that was like flashing a red flag to a bull— my daddy, he'll pay you anything you want give you anything you want I don't wanna die I don't wanna—

He went quick, at least— I observe the scene with a cool detachment, like I'm hovering far above it, I'm the crime scene examiner and was never there at all. Thirteen-year-old Tim is screaming loud enough for his voice to crack on it, he can't stop screaming for anything, even with the barrel of a gun trained on him next. Thirteen-year-old Tim never realized a gunshot was that fucking loud, like a building blowing up around him. Thirteen-year old Tim has blood seeping onto him, brains, didn't know a skull could burst open like that. Thirteen-year-old Tim—

Morphs into eighteen-year-old Tim, who wakes up with his brother hovering above him, his face blanched white like a skeleton. "Tim, Jesus, it ain't real." He won't stop shaking my shoulder, but I can't move at all or acknowledge him for a few moments, every muscle paralyzed. My face is wet, I realize once I've gotten more of my senses back— some of it is drool, trailing down my chin and onto my worn-out pillowcase. Some of it is tears.

I'm more embarrassed than I ought to be— Curly used to have nightmares all the time, and I'd be the one hovering over him. Shit, not that he'd admit it anymore, but when he was even a couple years younger, I'd let him crawl into my bed after— complain about how he snatched the blankets and kicked in his sleep, secretly happy to have him close to me. He's my brother, but I still twist myself away from him, try to catch my breath as I fist a handful of my sheets. "I'm fine," I say, my first instinct is always going to be to reassure him, though I'd rather snap my response and tell him to leave me the hell alone. "Ain't nothin'."

"You was screamin'," he says bluntly, "that probably should count as somethin'." He stalks over to the window, lets a blast of freezing air into our room, cramped and overly warm even now that it's coming on December— I've toyed with the idea of moving into the basement before, the way Curly keeps me up all night with his chattering and always has his paws in my shit, but it'd hurt his stupid feelings and I don't have the heart. "You want a joint?"

"Yeah, what the hell," I say, still feeling like my voice is disconnected from my body as he rolls one for us; I rub my eyes with my fists, try to grasp at the details of the dream, but they've long since slipped through my mind like shadow. All I remember is the terror, on a level closer to the physical than the mental, pooled in my fingertips and tensed up in the back of my throat. "I said, don't worry yourself none."

He sparks his lighter and hands me the joint after a faint inhale, enough to keep the end burning; I should fuss over how much he smokes up these days, but can't muster the energy at all, not when my muscles have gone all weak like I have the flu. "You was screamin' Santi's name."

"Huh." I take a deep huff, deep enough to settle in my lungs. "Was I."

"I don't remember him so great," Curly says, picks at a hole in his threadbare pajama pants— I swear he stole those from me, it's a miracle if he puts on his own underwear every morning. "What was he like?"

I should tell him to mind his business, but maybe it's the pot that gets me going and makes me tell the truth, not the hagiography I've guilted myself into reciting since he died. "I thought he was a spoiled little shit," I say with a rough chuckle, around a mouthful of smoke. "First thing he did when we met was make fun of my bad Spanish and my worn-out sneakers... I jumped him for it, he turned out to be a better fighter than I expected." I shake some of the ash and resin off the tip of the joint. "Should've cut him more slack, we was real young. Too late now."

He was younger than Curly when he died, Christ. Thirteen years in my neighborhood can teach you a lot of bad lessons. I still feel his absence after all this time, the missing piece in the triptych of Luis's nephews. Still feel, like my Tía Mercedes said after she found out, like I'm the one that should've died instead—

"It was a long time ago," I say before Curly can press me for any more details. Maybe to remind myself. Five years. I'm a grown man now, I think as a hot flush of embarrassment threatens to engulf me, a grown man still waking up crying over some punkass I didn't even really like.

"He got shot on you, Tim." Curly's eyes are big and the exact same shade of blue as mine, in the reflection off the streetlights. "You don't hafta pretend—"

I want to say something pithy like I'm in a Clint Eastwood movie, that it wasn't nothing compared to the other shit I've seen, but the East side of Tulsa ain't exactly South Central Los Angeles. I haven't even shot a gun that many times, and never at someone, though my aim's pretty good. But I'm still not loving this new dynamic, I went away for five months and Curly suddenly thinks he's Doctor Freud, like he's become a man just because he held down the fort in my absence. I hold up his lighter in my hand and can't help but think about how much I want to—

Not here, not now, I need to get a fucking grip. The last time he walked in on me doing that, Curly begged me to stop, got all wobbly-lipped and shit. I can't do that to him, even if I'm desperate for it like Ma jonesing for another Miltown tablet, desperate for something to distract me from my raging thoughts. I don't care what happens to me anymore, but him, he's a lot higher up on my priorities list.

"When I want my kid brother's psychiatric help, I'll ask for it, kid brother," I say with a little bite as I stub the roach out— I try to cuff him, but it ends up as more of a hair ruffle. Baby that he is, he still makes a face at me like I hit him with a tire iron, but he goes back to bed and gets under his own covers all of a sudden. He's snoring unevenly within the next two minutes, I pity the poor woman who'll be stuck sleeping beside him once he's married. Sleep, as usual, eludes me.

Somehow, despite all of my agonizing over taking this job, I managed to ignore— or maybe I just selectively forgot— that the old man wasn't the only Curtis who worked at this construction company. That his mini-me was also, in fact, a contracted employee. And that fact just so happens to slap me right across the face like my mother's hand, when I first step onto the scene and see him.

Darry Curtis, my old best friend, before I started considering myself too hard for the concept and he started sucking up to the West side Socs like he was slurping a milkshake through a straw— before we grew too far apart for the gap to be breached. Before he spat on me and told me I'd never be shit. When I look at him again, I get a physical sense of recoil, an electric force field repelling us; I know he feels the exact same way as his fingers clench around the shingle in his hand.

He recovers himself first, scowls. He looks about the same as he did when we went to Will Rogers together, maybe more powerfully built, after a couple years spent doing manual labor. I wish he didn't, that I didn't have to stare into the exact same face, see if it'll provide me with any more context for how much he changed. "What happened, you get fired from Ramirez & Nephews?"

I don't love the fact that I'm indisputably on his turf right now, that his daddy is— God help me— my employer. Feel the need to grasp for the upper hand, it's been a long time since I've been this thoroughly out of my element. "Thanksgiving break's comin' up real soon, ain't it? It'll be great seein' your old friends again."

Either Darrel Senior is completely clueless, or he thinks he can defuse the tension between us by pretending that it doesn't exist, because he steps between us and smiles. He's always smiling or laughing, and I'm not so sure how much I like it. "Darry, c'mon now, y'know roofing's a tough job at first, I'm countin' on you to show him the ropes." Maybe he considers himself subtle, but the death glare he shoots at Darry out the corner of his eye isn't anything close to it. "Tim's real bright, you can get him on installing ventilation systems soon enough. Mr. Callahan wants them done before winter sets in."

The way Darry looks at me, it's pretty obvious that he doesn't think I'm any brighter than a birthday candle— which is just fine by me, because I ain't fishing for his approval, neither. "Maybe we should start you on how to use a hammer first, Einstein," he says once Darrel's gone. "Work our way up from there."

I hated being a bartender. I hated being a bartender. I really hated being a bartender— I keep repeating that like catechism to get myself through this. "Whenever you're ready, big guy."

I know I'm not exactly the kind of guy you want showing up at your house to take your daughter out, but hell, when I ring the doorbell, I'm not sure if I deserve the daggers her old man glares at me either, you dig? Hell, ain't like I even honked my truck horn to announce my presence or nothing.

"And just who are you?" He's not a big guy, wiry with expensive, shiny shoes and well-combed hair, but I'm still taken aback by the hostility, that and the scars on his knuckles. Then he spins around to face his living room— they have a pretty nice house, I think that's an Oriental rug on the wall, what does it say about me that I'm automatically casing the joint?— and hollers behind him. "Diego, what have I told you about bringing these fucking malandros to my front door?"

What must be Diego steps into my field of vision— he's obviously his daddy's son, but with about four inches and fifty pounds on him. "I've never seen him before in my life, Agustín—" he starts in a slow drawl. Then he squints at me. "Wait a minute. You Luis's nephew, the one with the big mouth?"

"That's Curly."

"Nah, compa," he says with a smile, "think that's you. You look just like him, too."

"Agustín?" I guess even Mr. Lopez only has so much anger in him before he needs to reach for his heart medication, because he turns right back to me. "You did not answer my question."

I think it's the lack of contractions— clearly the old man's English could use some practice— that makes him so menacing. And there's nothing for it but to answer him with the truth. "I was, uh... gonna pick up your daughter. We have a date. Sir."

I'm not good at sounding respectful even at the best of times, and 'sir' comes out about as sarcastic as I expected it would. Now he really looks like he's about to lay me out in a second. "You certainly are not," he says. "Ximena is fourteen years old. I will call the police faster than you can say statutory—"

"Papi, what's goin' on?" And the reason why I put myself through this interrogation is rolling out of her room too, wearing a white sweater set, sparkly blush smeared along one of her cheekbones. I swear I notice what she wears so much, I might as well apply to be editor of Vogue. "Why are you shoutin'?"

"This... man says he is here to go out with your sister."

"He's here to go out with me," she says, and the old man finally shuts his trap. In sheer horror. "Just for a few hours—"

"Mhm." He folds his arms over his chest. "Con permiso de quien?"

"Papi, please," she's not too proud to beg. "I'm seventeen, you can't just keep me locked up in here like Cinderella, washin' dishes all day—"

He's completely unmoved, doesn't so much as shift a muscle in his face. "Watch me. At least then I will know where one of my children is at any hour of the night."

Out of desperation, she takes a different tack. "Tim's real smart," she says, "we were biology partners when I was in ninth grade—"

"At that ghetto school?"

"He's real smart," she insists. "I never would've figured out mitosis and meiosis without him."

That actually seems to melt him, he gives me another long, scrutinizing look. "You get good grades?"

I haven't been inside Will Rogers, 'that ghetto school', since '62, and I sure as shit wasn't making no good grades. I'm pretty certain I didn't hand in a single piece of homework between that August and the beginning of November, when I dropped out. But I ain't dumb enough to blow my chance at getting her out the front door, either. Shoot him my most angelic smile, which, since I'm not Curly, could stand to look more genuine. "Yessir. We're doin' physics together now. Have a little study group in the library and everything."

He obviously doesn't believe any of the lies dripping from my mouth, but maybe the fact that I'm willing to lie about this at all is getting to him, because after threatening to bust my kneecaps if I bring her back past ten thirty, she's in my passenger seat. "I'm so sorry," she says with a groan as she pulls her purse in through the door, "he's just... always like that."

"He's a dad," I say, shrug one shoulder, "they're all like that." I've had a literal shotgun brandished in front of me before, this was nothing. Ask with a smirk, "your mama inside right now, tellin' him he better lay off before he's only gettin' cards at Christmas?"

Her mouth contorts into an awkward slash. "She's dead. Don't worry about it," she adds quickly, which makes me feel even worse. "It was a couple years ago. I'm sorry I even—"

"What happened?"

She picks at the stitching on the strap of her purse, and I regret having asked at all. "She had breast cancer," she finally says, and I understand right off the bat why she's reluctant to admit it. Cancer, that's just not something you talk about out in the open, I'm surprised she was even told what her mother had. "It... metastasized? I think that's the right word. You know I ain't too good with cells."

"I'm sorry," I say, and I mean it, wish I sounded better and more sincere offering sympathy. "My father—"

"I know," she says, "everybody talked about it at school after it happened, how he got—" shot and left to bleed out by his own crew, yeah. I didn't even realize we'd gone to the same junior high. "Quite a pair we make, huh?"

The smile she gives me is false, but I'm not going to push it, not when dates are supposed to be fun— and when I don't like thinking about my father, if I can help it. I hit the gas.

It's definitely past the curfew her daddy set for her, but I'm parking outside the cell tower, and she hasn't said a word in protest. "That was... a lot," she says, still looking slightly dazed. "She was his stepmama—"

I'm starting to think maybe The Carpetbaggers wasn't the best choice of cinema for her, but hell, it was that or seeing My Fair Lady again, and I can recite the dialogue by heart. "The book was better, they cut too many plot points out of the movie—"

"You read it?"

"Is it really that shocking that I'm literate?"

She bats her long eyelashes at me. "It's a lil' shocking that tuff Tim Shepard's got a secret library card, I'm just sayin'. You got a favorite book, too?"

So she's got a mouth on her— I find myself smiling a little. "The Catcher in the Rye."

"I don't buy it." She presses her fingertips up to her lips. "That book? I figured you'd just write Holden off as a spoiled Soc brat."

"I mean, I did at first," I grudgingly admit, "but it's a misinterpretation of the text, okay?" Yeah, at first, I wondered what the hell Mr. Syme was smoking, thinking I'd like listening to some rich white boy spout off about how hard he's got it, but then I kept reading. "His fuckin' brother died, his roommate jumped out a window in front of him, his English teacher makes moves on him— yeah, no wonder he was such a headcase."

"A misinterpretation of the—" She's laughing so hard she's doubled over, and then her arms are around my neck and we're getting into it in the backseat, all over each other. I put a hand up her skirt after a few minutes, and when she moans into my mouth and arches into me, I take that as my cue to move forward. "You wanna?" I whisper into her ear, but I'm not really waiting for an answer, it seems pretty self-evident that she does.

You can practically hear the record screech. She glares at me like I just suggested she eat a plate of shit, sits up and scooches away from me, her head against the window. "Do I look like I do anything in the backseat of a truck?"

And what do I come back with but, "you got in bed with me an hour after we met, was I supposed to assume you're a real well-bred lady here?" I keep this truck a damn sight cleaner than Buck keeps those bedrooms, that's for sure.

She shoots cold fire at me with her eyes. I'm definitely not getting laid tonight. Shit, I'll be lucky if I get a second date. "So now you're callin' me easy."

The thing about striking out is that you need to stay struck out. Keep pushing it, and she's either going to tell her girlfriends you're 'real desperate for some tail', or even worse, 'a fucking creep'. I know that, and personally smirked as I watched it happen to multiple Brumly boys, which makes this even more embarrassing. "Look, I get it probably wasn't great for you," I say, and cringe as I think back to it. I was so hammered, I'm surprised I even managed to find the right hole. "But I swear I know what I'm doing when I'm not soused, ain't my first rodeo. We can get a bed if you want, you'll have a good time."

"It's not that— it was okay," she offers, which I can tell is a generous attempt at preserving my ego. She tries to straighten her hair, looks at me haughtily once she's done. "That's the problem, I know I wasn't your first rodeo, or even your tenth. Ain't you heard what girls say about you behind your back?"

"They were all happy customers," I say a little too defensively, the back of my neck heating up. I didn't realize I had a whole rumor mill about me going on. "At least, I damn well tried to make them—"

"I'm not talkin' about your prowess." She rolls her eyes. "They say you love 'em and leave 'em, don't even wait for your—" Lord, she can't bring herself to say dick to cool, lets the sentence trail off. "That you never call after."

"Ain't my problem they got their hopes up," I drawl. "I never led any one of them on, I made my intentions clear from the get-go. No strings attached."

"But I don't want to be another notch on your bedpost." She plays with her cross necklace, twirls it between her fingers. "I know I don't have a leg to stand on anymore, pretendin' to wait for marriage, but it still means somethin' to me it obviously doesn't to you. What happened that night was a mistake... we made a mistake."

"I had a girlfriend, you know, we were pretty steady for years," I say, starting to feel a little insulted. Like I've been under any obligation to be a choir boy, before she came along— guys are supposed to be experienced, anyway. "Don't make me out to be some kinda sex-crazed nympho here. She told me I didn't give it to her regular enough, in fact."

That's the kind of thing girls tell you on the East side. In my defense, that little chick used to climb me like a tree just about every day. Ain't no man capable of keeping up with her pace without a steroid injection.

She bites down on her lower lip, looks at the carpet mats on the floor, looks back up at me. "Is that what you want? A girlfriend?"

And this is the point where I should thank her for her time and walk away— a girl who's too religious and too sentimental to put out, that's nice for her and I hope she finds the accountant of her dreams, but I'm never going to be able to give her what she wants. Before last week, I was damn close to swearing off women altogether and focusing on my promising drug dealing career. The fact that I literally hadn't learned the name of the last girl and had to describe her as 'blonde hair, big tits' showed just how sad my life had gotten. That ain't even my type.

So I shock myself, when I say, "maybe it is."