I rolled my eyes. “You’re good at this shit. You covered up Ray’s scar and you did that piece on Abby’s back. Get on it man. Don’t let me down,” I said, taking a hit.

“Do you even know what you’re gonna wanna cover it up with?” King asked, pulling at the skin on my shoulder like it would somehow change the tattoo into something he could work with.

“No and I don’t care. Fucking surprise me. Anything but a big dildo or a portrait of the fucking queen of England would be fine with me as long as this bullshit is gone,” I said.

King nodded, leaning in closer to again examine the largest of my Beach Bastards tattoos on my shoulder.

“All right, fucker” he said, leaning back. “I’ll come up with something.”

“Good, now do this.” I pointed to the much smaller sketch I’d just had him draw.

“Do I look like your bitch?”

I shrugged. “No, but you’re my tattoo bitch.”

“Call me that again and you might get that dildo after all.” King opened drawers in his toolbox and started pulling out his gloves, ink, and other equipment.

“Bad Habit,” by The Offspring was blaring through the speakers in the ceiling. As I waited for King to start, my eyes landed on something I hadn’t seen in a long time. “Fuck, I can’t believe you still fucking have that,” I said, pointing to the plastic hog head on the wall. “And I can’t believe you actually hung it up.”

King looked to where I was pointing and laughed, taking a long pull from the bottle of whiskey before setting it on the floor snapping on his black gloves. “I found it in the attic. Ray begged me not to hang it up until I told her the story behind it. Now it’s her favorite thing in here.” King adjusted the height of his stool and rolled back over to the table I was sitting on. “They say you have to pick your battles,” he said, looking back up at the hog’s head. I’m glad I actually won one for a change.

I laughed but talk of a battle had my mind going somewhere else. Somewhere not too far off. “We got three days before the war. A fourth of the soldiers that they have. You think we stand a shot?” I asked King, knowing he’d give it to me straight.

“I don’t know,” King said, tapping his gun into a small plastic container of black ink. “But if we don’t do something, the threat never goes away.”

“Ain’t that the fucking truth,” I agreed. “I don’t wanna be looking over my shoulder, or Ti’s shoulder, for the rest of my fucking life.” I paused, taking another hit. I held it in as long as I could and released it with a small cough as my lungs fought to push the smoke back out. “You gotta do me a favor though, brother,” I said. “If nothing else, you gotta do this one fucking thing for me.”

“Anything,” King said, pressing on the foot peddle that brought his gun to life, buzzing louder and louder as he brought it to the spot behind my right ear.

“If I lose. If I… if he wins,” I said. I dug out the cash I had buried on the island. “I need you to use it to make sure Ti is taken care of.”

“Ain’t nothing gonna happen,” King said, pushing the ink into my skin.

“I hope not, but you gotta promise me,” I insisted, King needed to know how serious I was about this. If something did happen to me I needed to know that my girl was still be okay.

“I promise. She’ll be taken care of,” King said, “but you talk like I’m not going in with you.”

“You’re not,” I spat.

“Like fuck I’m not,” King argued, pressing the needle in harder to punctuate his point.

“Fucker,” I said. “I just mean that I need you to hang back a bit. We can’t both be six feet under.”

King dipped the gun back into the ink and wiped at the spot he’d just finished with a paper towel. “Ray knows everything. We have a contingency plan if something happens to me. Shit’s in place. Don’t worry about me or Ray or the kids or even Thia. Do you, man, and I’ll be there to watch your fucking back.” He held the side of my head down with his forearm. “Now sit fucking still or your girl is going to think I’m shit at this.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, mockingly, staring back up at the plastic hog’s head. I let the pain from the sting of the needle envelope me as I remembered a better time. Less threats. More fun.

More plastic hog’s heads.

“I still can’t believe she’s fucking gone,” I said, saying the same thing to King that I’d said to Ti after the funeral.

“I can’t either,” King said. “But what I really can’t believe is that she put up with shits like us.”

“Aint’ that the fucking truth. There was this one time, when I got suspended from school, just shortly before I dropped out entirely, the guidance counselor scheduled all the parent teacher conferences. When my time slot came up I knew it would be just me and the guidance counselor because I hadn’t even told my old man about it, not like he’d fucking show up if I had. But the second my ass hit the seat in his office, Grace burst through the door wearing her church clothes.”

“I didn’t know that,” King said, concentrating on my new ink.

I smiled, recalling the memory. “Yeah, and the cool part was that when he asked her who she was she looked at him like he should’ve already known. ‘I’m Mama Grace, of course,’” I said, mimicking Grace’s voice. “The thing about her that I always liked was that no one questioned her. She really hadn’t told the counselor shit, but he told her to take a seat anyways and off they went, talking about my fucking grades and shit like she was always meant to be the one there.”

King paused his gun. “Probably because she was.”

“Yeah man. She was.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Bear

Eighteen years old…

“YOU KNOW, YOU should just give back your name now. Just hand it over. ’Cause with a name like Bear, you should be fucking happy to be in the woods. You should be rubbing your cock up against a fucking tree or something. Humping the dirt. Getting off on the wilderness or some shit, not moping around like I just fucked your golden retriever. So change your name to like…Ralph or something, and just be done with it. Embrace your inner vagina,” Preppy said, waving his hand around dismissively before laying on the ground with his ear to the dirt like he probably saw someone do in a movie.