Every time I’d seen Donny after that, he’d looked like a man with a crow sitting on his shoulder.
Every time I’d seen Bob after that, he’d acted like he was better than the rest of us.
This cave was where it had all begun.
This cave was where it was gonna end.
Last time I’d been here, after three days of digging holes to squat over, I’d wandered deeper into the cave than I’d ever gone. I couldn’t tell you why I’d never done it before, couldn’t tell you why I’d done it that time either. Boredom, maybe. Or the cancer making me restless. But I’d squeezed past the bat roost into a fissure I’d never seen and followed it fifty yards with my flashlight until I came out under a ledge north of the cave mouth.
It was pure luck that I’d found it, especially given that Bob had no idea that the second way out existed. Decades of spending time in and out of this cave together, and he’d never gone past the bats. He hated bats.
That was about to be his undoing.
I sat down with my back against the cool rock, unwrapped the bloody dishcloth from my hand, and tossed it into the fire. I didn’t want the damn bull ants crawling all over my hand when I nodded off.
What was left of my finger was bad. Black blood crusted around the exposed bone, and fresh blood was still bleeding from the stump like a bastard. The end of the bone was jagged where Wayne had bitten through it.
Fucking asshole. He should be dead by now. Got what he deserved.
I twisted the top off the Bundy with my teeth and poured a slug straight onto the bloody stump.
The pain hit like a red-hot branding iron. I bit down hard and didn’t make a sound. My old man had taught me how to take pain in silence. He’d held me to it, too, mostly with his fists. My sons had never learned that lesson. Maybe that was my fault. Maybe it wasn’t. Didn’t matter much now.
When the white cleared from my vision, I dug into Willy’s old fishing kit I’d found in the trunk of his car. I found a bait hook and a length of nylon and started stitching.
My old man used to hum when he butchered a beast. Same tune every time, low, mournful, and weird. He’d told me once he’d learned it from his father, who’d probably brought it over from Ireland years back. I’d never known the words and never asked.
But I caught myself humming it now, three stitches in.
I couldn’t remember the last time it had come to me. Funny what a body falls back on when it’s in enough pain. Then again, with the pain the cancer had been giving me, I should’ve been singing that tune all fucking day for weeks.
I tied the nylon off and wrapped strips of one of Willy’s old T-shirts around the stump. Best I could do with what I had.
As I swigged the rum, hating that I had to ration it, I lit a small fire in the drum. The barrel sat deep enough in the cave that the smoke thinned out well before it reached the mouth, and nobody was going to see flames from outside with those two giant boulders blocking the entrance. After years of using this cave, smoke from that drum had never given us away, not yet.
I pushed a sausage onto a bent wire and held it over the flames.
The smell of it cooking damn near brought me to tears.
When the sausage was black on the outside, I ate it straight off the wire. I scalded my tongue but didn’t care. Four bites, and it was gone. I took a long pull of Bundy to wash it down, knocked back four Panadol, and waited.
After a while, the pain eased some. Not much. But enough to think.
For some reason, my thoughts drifted to my boys.
Mitch was a big bloke. Hard like me, which made us useless to each other most of the time. I’d raised him with my fists, and he’d repaid me the day he’d turned twenty-six by putting me on the barn floor with one punch and walking out of Koolaroo without looking back. I’d told everyone he was a coward who couldn’t hack the land. Truth was, he’d been the only one of the three with the spine to leave.
Declan was too smart for his own good. He’d kept the books too clean, making laundering Bob’s money damn harder than it needed to be. I’d never figured out if that was backbone or stupidity in him. Probably both.
Kayden was the one who got under my skin. I’d called that boy useless so many times, he’d stopped bothering to prove me wrong. Stubborn bastard. Most like me of the three, which was probably why I’d given him the hardest time. I couldn’t stand looking at a younger version of myself and seeing all the same mistakes lining up.
I’d never told him that. He needed to figure that shit out on his own.
Three men. I’d raised them the way my old man had raised me, the way his old man raised him. No softness. No sympathy. The day I dropped dead, none of them would shed a tear, and that was exactly what I expected.
Tears never brought back the dead. Ask Donny.
That was the Branson way.
