Page 5 of Indecent Lies

He tended bar there for a few weeks before he got itchy feet and took off again due to boredom. Then it was to Houston where he spent a week earning money building fences on a cow farm. Next was Baton Rouge, he stayed there for nearly a month, falling into different beds and bottles every night, he hardly remembered any of those days, but he had a damn good time. Before climbing onto his bike with his one bag slung across his back and rode straight through to Kansas. He didn’t stay there but a few days because he got sick and sweated out a fever in a hotel room alone, eating crackers, feeling like a piece of shit.

His own pity party was in full effect that weekend.

Charleston and Richmond came next, only a couple of days a piece there, before he headed down to Greensboro and then he ended up in South Carolina and that’s where he was three months later.

He liked the small country town with the wide-open spaces and the friendly people.

Main street was storefronts and welcoming food smells and people who actually said hello as they passed by.

They didn’t have the snow-capped mountains, but the feel of the place reminded him of Colorado and somewhere between day one and all these weeks later, he’d found a place where he felt normal again.

A nice place where he didn’t hate looking at himself in the mirror for all his wrong doings looking back at him. He could hardly meet his own accusing stare most days, for seeing how ridiculously easy he’d fucked up his own life in such a spectacular way.

A place he could do the hard work for decent pay, though the money was never an issue seeing as how his bank account was more than full for several lifetimes, but he’d needed to do something with his days, or else he really would just become a no one.

He wasn’t hurting for money, not in the slightest.

What with his trust fund from his grandfather which came into effect on his twenty-fifth birthday and then all the illegal money he’d earned over the years in Colorado, he could easily wander futilely around the country or even the world for the rest of his miserable life and not have to work a day ever again.

But that wasn’t his nature.

He might not have been a manual labor kind of guy up until this past summer, his forte was more to do with stocks and shares and numbers, but the surprising part of this last year had been discovering he loved the outdoors.

He enjoyed getting his hands dirty and feeling the ache along his shoulder blades late at night in the shower when he washed the days dirt and sweat off his body. There was something cathartic in working outdoors under the beating sun, with sweat clinging to the back of his shirt, his forearms tight with fatigue from all the heavy lifting and his leg muscles working overtime just to hold him up, that made him feel good about himself for the first time in a long time.

On his third day in that small South Carolina town, at a quiet table in one of the local dive bars, he’d sat with a beer and a paperback book he’d picked up from Target, minding his own business when he overheard a conversation.

One of the customers, a robust guy with black hair and wearing what all the local guys did; jeans and a buffalo plaid flannel shirt with thick boots, was telling the bartender how he was looking for someone to help out around his farm over the summer.

Turns out, that guy was Austin Black.

A well-respected fire chief from the area and he needed someone to fix a few things around his place.

They’d shared a beer after he’d approached the guy and he found he liked the fire chief instantly.

Being in the outlaw business for years and around unscrupulous assholes who would sell you out as soon as look at you, it was always easy to spot a guy who had a bad vibe about them. While Austin gave off the aura of not suffering fools lightly, he was open and honest and easily likeable. As was his wife Bonnie, who he’d met the following day when he rode through to their large farm estate at the crack of dawn.

They didn’t keep animals other than chickens, it wasn’t a working farm, it just needed upkeep with the landscape and as Austin confided while Bonnie fetched a pitcher of freshly made lemonade, he needed the help around the place, so Bonnie didn’t overdo things as she tended to.

Months later, he was still there, much to his own surprise.

He hadn’t gotten bored with the place, the town or the job.

It was hard work, fixing fences along the perimeter, maintaining the landscaping, repairing the barn loft, and one day Bonnie fancied herself a pond, so he got to work on that too.

He didn’t know why that older couple took him in without so much as a reference to check his credentials, he’d been up front and told Austin he was a figures man previously but he wasn’t afraid of hard graft.

They trusted him on their property with no questions asked.

Each morning he showed up at 7 am to be greeted by Bonnie and she would always insist on feeding him. Even when he protested that she didn’t have to. “Piffle.” She’d tell him in her southern accent, that sounded like honey and smiles. “A growing boy needs his food, now stop dithering and come on inside. It’s hotter than hell on the fourth of July out here.”

He stopped objecting after a while and enjoyed the good home cooking and the company, though Bonnie did most of the talking which she didn’t seem to mind.

On certain days she had her sewing circle at the farm, as she called them.

Much as he could tell they didn’t do a lick of sewing at all, but they did drink homemade lemonade spiked with gin, and they’d sit out on the wide deck swing and gossip up a storm.

He even noticed those older ladies watched him like a hawk when he took off his shirt.