wasn’t supposed to happen! Damn your hide, Frenchy, for leaving me like everybody else…. But most of all I damn you for making me give a damn. It should be me who’s dead.”
They’d buried Frenchy beside his son, the son he’d lost right before Frenchy had saved Tag’s life.
Tag was glad the cemetery was deserted. He didn’t want anybody to see how profoundly Frenchy’s death had upset him.
Sunken black circles ringed Tag’s bloodshot eyes; his jaw was shadowed with several days of dark stubble. His stomach rumbled painfully from too much liquor and too little food.
The moon shone high in a cloudless, bright sky. The salt-laden sea air smelled of dry earth and newly mown grass. Frenchy’s favorite kind of night. The shrimp would be running. Not that Tag could bear the thought of shrimping under a full moon without Frenchy.
Tag’s big black bike was parked a little way from Frenchy’s tombstone under a live oak tree that had been sculpted by the southeasterly prevailing winds that blew off the gulf, cooling its protected bays and low-lying coastal prairies.
Tag was kneeling before the pink tombstone. Soft as a prayer, his deep voice whispered. “Haunt me, Frenchy. Damn you, haunt me. Stay with me.”
“You don’t need an old man past his prime. You need a woman, kids,” Frenchy had pointed out, in that maddening know-it-all way of his, a few nights ago.
“Strange advice coming from a man who’s failed at marriage four times.”
“Nothing like a pretty woman to make a man old enough to know better hope for the best. Life’s a circle, constantly repeating itself.”
God, I hope not.
“You’re young. But you’ll get old. You’ll die. Life’s short. You gotta fall in love, get married, spawn kids, repeat the circle.”
“There’s places in my circle I don’t want to revisit.”
“You’re not the tough guy you pretend. You’re the marrying kind.”
“Where’d you get a damn fool notion like that?”
“You’re either sulkin’ or ragin’ mad.”
“Which is why you think I’d make a delightful husband.”
“You don’t fit in here. Your heart’s not in bars or fights or gambling…or even in fishing. Or even in getting laid by those rich, wild girls who come to Shorty’s looking for a fast tumble in the back seat of their car with a tough guy like you.”
“What if I said I like what they do to me? And what if I said I can do without a heart, old man?”
“You’re a liar. You got a heart, a big one, whether you want it or not. It’s just busted all to pieces same as your pretty, sissy-boy face. Only the right woman can fix what ails you.”
“You’re getting mighty mushy, old man.”
“You think you can stay dead forever?”
The wind drifting through moss and honeysuckle brought the scent of the sea, reminding him of the long hours of brutal work on a shrimp boat. The work numbed him. The beauty of the sea and its wildlife comforted him, made this hellish exile in an alien world somehow more endurable. Just as those women and what they did to him in their cars gave him a taste of what he’d once had, so that he could endure this life. But always after the women left, he felt darker, as if everything that was good in him had been used up. Which was what he wanted. Maybe if they used him long enough, he wouldn’t feel anything.
Tag knelt in the soft earth and studied the snapshot of a younger Frenchy framed in cracked plastic in the center of the pink stone.
“You’re a coward to run from who you are and what you want, Tag Campbell—a coward, pure and simple.”
Tag had sprung out of his chair so fast, he’d knocked it over. “You lowdown, ignorant cuss! Every time you drink, your jaw pops like that loose shutter.”
Frenchy laughed. “What’s the point of wisdom, if I can’t pass it on to a blockhead like you? Life’s a circle….”
“Don’t start that circle garbage.”
Tag had slammed out of the beach house, taken the boat out, stayed gone the rest of the night on that glassy, moonlit sea. He hadn’t apologized when he saw Frenchy waiting for him on the dock.
Then Frenchy had collapsed on the boat a few hours later when they were setting their nets.
Guilt swamped Tag. He’d never thanked the old man for anything he’d done.
The wind roared up from the bay, murmuring in the oak trees, mocking Tag as his empty silver eyes studied the grave. It was difficult to imagine the hard-living, advice-giving meddler lying still and quiet, to imagine him inside that box, dead. Emotions built inside Tag—guilt, grief—but he bottled them, the way he always did when he wasn’t driving fast, fighting, chasing women, or drinking.
The dangerous-looking man who knelt at his friend’s grave bore little resemblance to the younger man whose life Frenchy had saved in a Louisiana swamp. That man had been elegantly handsome before the beating, his smooth features classically designed, the aquiline nose straight, his trusting silver eyes warm and friendly.
That man was dead. As dead as Frenchy.
The powerfully-built man beside the grave was burned dark from the sun. On the inside his heart had charred an even blacker shade. Fists had smashed and rearranged his once handsome features into a ruggedly-brutal composition. The broken nose had been flattened. There was a narrow, white ridge above one brow. Despite these changes, or perhaps because of them, an aura of violence clung to him. Maybe it was this reckless, outlaw attitude that made him so lethally attractive, at least to women of a certain class. Such women cared little about his inner wounds. They came on strong, wanting nothing from him except to use his body for quick, uncomplicated sex.
His guarded silver eyes beneath black arcing brows missed nothing, trusted no one. Especially not such women—women who made him burn, but left him feeling even colder and lonelier when they were done with him and drove off in their fancy cars to their big houses and safe men.
His muscles were heavy from hard, manual labor. He wore scuffed black cowboy boots, tight jeans, a worn white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket.
Frenchy.
Death triggered deep, primal needs.
Death. Violence. Sex. Somehow they went together.
Alone with his demons, without Frenchy to irritate and distract him, Tag needed a bar fight or a woman—bad. So bad, he almost wished he’d gone to the funeral and wrestled some shrimper for a topless waitress. So bad, he almost wished he was in jail nursing a hellish hangover with the rest of Frenchy’s wild bunch.
Instead he’d driven his motorcycle—too fast and over such rough roads, he’d almost rolled. He’d scared himself. Which was a sign that cold as he was in his lonely life, he wasn’t ready to end it. When he’d calmed down, he’d come to the cemetery to pay his last respects.
