Hope he wouldn’t leave like everyone else in our lives did.
Wasp
“HOW’s it going?” I asked as I took a seat in the small, overly cheery room of the drug treatment center. Eagle (the club’s secretary) and Havoc sat on either side of me. We were there to evaluate Hound as a possible prospect and see if he cared enough about turning his life around to break his substance addiction.
“Good,” Hound replied with a quick bob of his head. He wore loose gray sweats and had his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward with his back arched at a strange, seemingly uncomfortable slant. Someone had cut his hair and trimmed his beard since I’d last seen him. He was still gaunt as a goddamn ghoul, but at least his skin had a little color to it now. His stark features and sunken eyes looked completely out of place on the overstuffed floral sofa with a bright yellow wall for a background. The contrast was almost funny.
“Doc says we’re seeing progress. The cravings aren’t as bad now.”
Great to hear since the club had very strict rules about drugs. Link would boot Hound’s ass at the first sign of use, and I’d back him. We couldn’t risk the health and stability of the entire club because one brother couldn’t get his shit together and clean up his life. It was tragic, but it was the way things needed to be.
“You look better,” I said.
The shame in his eyes about did me in. No grown ass man who’d served our country should feel that much remorse for how he had to cope with the aftermath. “Sorry I came to you fucked up like that. I didn’t know what else to do. Where else to go. Heard from Smithy you had this organization going that might be able to help me. Thanks for setting me up in here. I don’t know what I would have done…” he trailed off, looking away.
This was my fifth visit since he’d been admitted into the center, and every time he apologized and recounted how he’d found me. It was time to move on.
“It’s all good, man. This is what we do. We take care of our own.” Someone had to. The goddamn Department of Veterans Affairs definitely didn’t. “You feel like talking about what happened now?”
When I’d served with him, Hound had been a beast of a man. Tatted up with plenty of muscle to spare, he was a man who stood tall in his knowledge, skills, and reputation. It had been two weeks since he’d shown up at the fire station, and I still couldn’t reconcile the Hound I’d known from the service with the shell of a man sitting in front of me.
Hound glanced at Eagle and Havoc before his gaze fell to the floor. “Had a couple of bad accidents that really fucked me up. The first came when the landing craft air cushion broke down and I was part of the team doing the LCAC recovery.”
LCAC was the acronym for a landing craft air cushion, and when one broke down it was no joke. The team only had a few minutes to recover the air cushion before it sank and we lost everything it was carrying. More important than the gear, was the possible loss of life. There were operators on every LCAC, and when a recovery went south, the operators usually made it to the boat, but sometimes they didn’t. Nobody wanted that shit on their conscience.
“Well, we were carrying out the spanwire, and you know how heavy those fuckin’ things are. The girl behind me dropped her end, and that motherfucker came down on my back just right to do all kinds of damage to my spine. We finished the recovery and I went to get checked out, but you know how the ship medics are; bastards gave me a cortisone shot and I was back on duty twenty-four hours later.”
No doubt causing all sorts of long-term damage to his back. “How bad is it?” I asked.
“Bottom disk slipped and fused in the wrong damn spot. Muscles tore and incorrectly healed on the right side of my back, pulling the shit out of my spine. Fractured hip. Minor paralysis in my feet from my sciatica and scoliosis. Option for surgery, but it comes with a fifty percent chance I’ll end up worse off than I am right now.”
“Fuck those odds,” Eagle swore.
“Exactly,” Hound agreed, wincing as he shifted to another uncomfortable looking position. “Whenever I couldn’t function, they’d give me a cortisone shot and that got me through. Mostly. Then I got hurt again. Since I was one of the few hazmat certified crew members, I had to handle the acid we use to clean the guns on the side of the craft. I’d just finished cleaning and was carrying the five-gallon bucket back to the secured hazmat locker, when a couple of junior sailors slammed an ammo rail down, causing me to fall the fifteen feet off the flight deck. I was trying to keep control of the bucket, so the sailors wouldn’t get doused in acid, and the bucket slammed into my left knee while my right jammed into the floor, destroying the cartilage behind my knee cap.”
Holy fuck. The man couldn’t get a break. “What’d they do for you?”
He let out a humorless chuckle. “Bastards gave me an incorrectly-sized knee brace and a Motrin and put my ass back to work. The pain was debilitating. I hobbled around the ship best I could, trying to fake like I wasn’t hurt, but I couldn’t perform the physical tests anymore, so they put me on limited light duty and transferred me to shore command. I started physical therapy and took every damn drug they gave me, narcotic or not, to get through that shit. I studied my ass off and took the tests to become a Yeoman.” He glanced at Eagle and Havoc, then explained, “Administrative. I was trying to get a goddamn desk job to stay in the service, but no matter what drugs they gave me I still couldn’t pass the physical exam.”
Knowing what was coming, I let out a sigh. “They gave you a medical discharge.”
He nodded. “I fought it, taking exam after exam. I wanted to get my degree and become a mustang.” ‘Mustang’ was slang for a commissioned officer who started as an enlisted serviceman. Even wounded, Hound had wanted to stay in the service. The man was a soldier to his very core. He glanced from me to Eagle and Havoc, and then looked away, his expression tortured. “But the doc said I was done. Got me connected with disability and all that shit. I had nowhere to go so I moved back to Vegas and lived with my mom and little sister and helped them out with my disability checks.”
Under thirty years old, and Hound’s body and pride had taken a major hit. He wasn’t the kind of man who’d be content just sitting around and collecting a check. Not many servicemen I knew would. Ironically, the man who’d helped so many others get the help they needed to thrive hadn’t been able to fight hard enough to save himself.
“That’s when you started… self-medicating?” Havoc asked.
Hound barked out a laugh that held no humor. “Self-medicating. Yeah. Nice way of putting it. The fuckin’ eight hour, seventy-five milligrams of morphine they prescribed me barely took the edge off, so I started smoking a quarter ounce of weed every day. It helped, but not much. Mixing morphine and pot worked better. I topped off my pain management by hittin’ the bottle until I could take a goddamn breath without feeling like my body was being ripped apart.”
“What happened?” I asked. I couldn’t handle much more of this shit. His was one of the most depressing stories I’d heard yet, mostly because of his age. Hound was younger than me, and I couldn’t imagine my body being out of commission the way his was. This was the part of club business I hated most, but if I was going to sponsor Hound, I needed to make sure he had the motivation and will to stay clean. “What changed to make you leave your mom’s and come north to find me?”
He shifted again, straightening his back and stretching out his legs. “Fuck, I gotta stand.” He sucked in a breath and leaned heavily on one arm to heft himself up, barely stretching from side to side before listing a little to the right. “My little sister, Annie, happened. She’s fifteen, different dad. The bastard split when she was little, just like my old man. I’ve always tried to be there for her, always felt like I should be a role model or something. She used to look at me like I hung the fuckin’ moon, you know? But then for my birthday, she got me a present… these custom Budweiser glasses. It was a nice set, but I had to ask her why beer glasses. At fifteen fuckin’ years old, she shouldn’t be buying that shit. She said since I’m always drunk, she wanted to give me something nice to put my beer in.”
I winced. “Ouch.”
“Yeah. Like a fuckin’ punch to my drunken liver. She wasn’t trying to be mean or anything, just stating the facts like kids tend to do. But that shit stung. Made me realize just how far I’d fallen. I left that night. Knew I had to get the fuck out of there before my presence screwed her up. I need to become the big brother she can look up to again. The son my mom can be proud of again. The VA doesn’t give a shit about me, and I can’t trust myself to do this alone. I need help.”
“Can you ride a bike?” Eagle asked. “With your injuries.”
