One Thing Leads to Another (pt 3).

Let it go. That’s what Jojo, his bitch counselor, told him right before he left. Whatever it is, let it go, old shit is bad news for us lions. Lions are what she calls addicts; she called them orcas when Wolf was sentenced the first time.

I can’t, Wolf told her so she gave him a kiss on the cheek. Then be careful, she said.

I’m being careful, he thinks, standing outside the State and rubbing the feeling back into his hands. I’m at ground zero and I am totally fucked, look how careful I’m being.

There was a van in the alley behind the hollowed out motel rooms; he and True lived in it after they were kicked out of the trailer park. Tambourine was gone a couple of years by then, and a black woman who claimed to be a cousin of theirs and said her name was Ann Coffee and that she worked at the nursing home with their mom and she knew she was gone and she told the park’s manager that she’d be paying the rent from then on, and told the boys that if they didn’t like it they could own up to the truth and get sent to foster care. True never forgave Wolf for not telling her to get lost, but he wasn’t even a teenager yet so what did he know.

The van’s still there; Wolf runs his hand through his hair and whistles. That’s where the cops found him nodded out and arrested him in place of Jude.

He slips on ice and lands on his knee, firing a silver bolt of pain through his leg and into his nuts and up through his guts; he fights to keep from puking, breathing through his nose. A blast of wind licks against him, making his eyes water; he could freeze to death out here on a night like this – he should go back inside, but his brother might be awake. He wants that. He doesn’t want that. He’s very cold.

He gets up, limping. What happened after the van? Jojo asks – he carries a version of her around in his head. What happened then, Wolf? What?

Annie got me and True jobs, he thinks, at the nursing home. I dropped out of school but I made True stay in. After awhile me and Annie were fucking. We were doing all right.

What happened then, Wolf? She’s asked this a thousand times, he’s sure of it. What happened, then? What happened then?

Wolf is back to the front of the State again, back inside the streetlight. Annie knew Jude because Jude knew everybody, he thought. Everybody came over after work and all we did was get stoned. True didn’t want to get high but I made him. I never wanted to be his mom. One time Jude said he had something we should try, and there was never anything better than when that needle poked me.

He swallows, his throat raw as razors. Then he did Annie, and then he did True.

Icicles fall from the power lines every time the wind blows, shattering on the street; his knee throbs like a toothache. He doesn’t go inside yet. He’s being careful.