I laugh, gather him up and carry him to the bathroom because I can.
Chapter 35: Tex
September comes in quiet, like the sneaky swarms of lovebugs.
For the uninitiated, lovebugs are Florida's most disgusting welcome committee. They fly in connected pairs because they are literally having sex in midair, which is a level of commitment I both respect and find deeply upsetting.
They don't bite.
They don't sting.
They just fuck and die.
That's their whole life cycle. They emerge, they find a partner mid-flight, they attach themselves at the rear end, they fly around as a coupled unit bumping into everything, and then they die, still connected, still going at it, on your windshield or your drink or your balcony railing.
My truck looks like a bug massacre. Big Bertha has a layer of dead lovebugs on her lid that I scrape off every morning like the world's worst snow. They get in the bar. They land in beers.
I pulled two out of a man's bourbon last week and he said, "At least somebody's getting lucky tonight" and I said, "but sir, they're dead" and he said, "But did you see the grins on their little fucking faces?" Then he drank the bourbon anyway.
They're on every surface, every car, every square inch of outdoor space, and the only comfort is that they'll be gone by October. Same as every other year.
Yes, it's Florida in September. Where the air is bugs and the bugs are fucking and the fucking is fatal.
Welcome to bug fucking paradise.
At least the bar is finally coming together. The first floor is nearly finished. New drywall, fresh paint, the floors gleaming under coats of polyurethane that Stormy applied himself, on his hands and knees with a brush. He said the roller left streaks, and he wasn't having streaks in his bar.His bar.He said it without thinking and I heard it. I didn't say anything because some things you don't point out. You just let them exist.
The bar top is the anchor, same as always. The neon beer signs are rehung. The kitchen passed the health inspection on the first try, which Stormy took as a personal victory. Sheila celebrated by buying him a fancier clipboard.
He carries it everywhere now. It's got a pen attached with a string because Sheila said, "pens walk away in bars" and she's right, pens do walk away. I've lost approximately nine hundred pens. He's got his name on it in Sheila's handwriting. STORMY. In permanent marker. The man who arrived with nothing now owns a clipboard with his name on it and a pen that can't escape.
We're not open for indoor service yet. Another week, maybe two. The second floor still needs work—electrical, plumbing, and the bathrooms. But the bones are good. Dad built this place to last and it'll last through whatever comes next.
The weeknights are slow now. Summer's over. The tourists are gone, the snowbirds from Canada haven't arrived yet, and the stretch between Labor Day and October is the quiet season at Panama City Beach. Tuesday nights, I'm grilling for maybe ten people. Wednesdays, fifteen. The regulars come, but the crowds that packed the lot during the rally and the cookout have thinned to a steady trickle.
The weekends are different. Friday and Saturday the bikes roll in. Not a hundred, not like the rally, but forty, fifty, enough to fill the lot and spill onto the shoulder of the beach road. The network I built the night Ron showed back up is working.
I called Denny first. The chop shop is only half of what Denny does. The other half is knowing people. Denny has been in the bike world for thirty years. When Denny puts the word out, it doesn't travel, it floods. He calls five guys. Those five guys call five guys. Within forty-eight hours, every shop in Bay County and half the shops in the Panhandle have the same name in their heads.
Ron Jackson.
Then I made my own calls. Not the shops. The riders. The men and women who've been coming to this bar since my dad opened it. People I've known for twenty years. People who stood next to me at his funeral. People who showed up with chainsaws and pickup trucks after the hurricane. Who didn't leave until the road was clear and the roof was tarped and Sheila had fed every last one of them. These are people who don't need a reason to show up for me. They just need to know I need them.
I didn't tell any of them everything. I told them enough. Be on the lookout for a man from Alabama named Ron Jackson. A predator. Hurts young men. Finds boys with nothing and nobody and uses them. He's been to the bar twice, looking for someone under my roof. He's coming back. Watch for him. Alabama plates on a truck. If you see him, call me.
Nobody asked for the details I left out. Nobody needed them. In this community, the word predator does its own work. It's a label that crosses every line—club affiliations, rivalries, the politics of patches and territories that I'venavigated my whole life. You can disagree about Harley versus Indian. You can beef over a poker run or whose old lady looked at who. But nobody—absolutely nobody—tolerates a man who hurts kids or boys or anyone who can't fight back. That's the line.
So, the weekends are full. And somewhere in all the noise, there's a wall being built out of leather and loyalty that Ron Jackson doesn't know about yet.
The weekdays, though, are different. The weekdays are when I feel it.
It's Tuesday night. Four people at the bar, all regulars. Sheila's wiping down tables. Stormy's restocking the cooler on the back porch. I can see him through the open door, his shoulders moving as he lifts cases of beer. I watch him the way I've been watching him all week. Not hovering. Just aware.
He's holding up. That's what I tell Mickey when he calls every other day to check in. And he is. He works. He organizes. He runs the kitchen with a skill that makes Sheila shake her head in admiration. He sleeps in my bed every night and most nights the knife isn't under the pillow.
But sometimes I see the edges. The places where the stress is leaking through the cracks in the composure he's built. The way his eyes track every vehicle that pulls into the lot. The half-second pause before he walks outside. The scan he does—parking lot, road, tree line—before his feet hit the asphalt.
He doesn't talk about Ron. Not directly. We talked about it the day I told him, the three of us at the bar, the plan, the perimeter, and since then it's been a silence that sits between us. We both know it's there. We navigate around it.
