But those boys were mine, and it was their turn to keep Koolaroo going after I was gone.
And Bob Ackerman wasn’t going to lay a finger on any of them while I was still drawing breath.
A thought hit me as I tipped a careful ration of rum into the bottle cap.
I was about to die for my boys.
Maybe that’s what made me a father after all.
That word had never fit me. Never sat right. I’d had three wives, and the two who’d actually stuck around long enough to raise my kids had rattled off the same complaint, nearly word for word, like they’d compared notes or something.
Frank, you’re a rotten husband, and you sure as shit ain’t a father.
Edith and Ingrid. Different women. Same verdict.
But sitting in this cave with a stitched-up hand and a few old graves in the dirt around me, I couldn’t think of a better word for what I was about to do.
Father.
The word sat weird in my head. I drank the bottle cap of rum.
The word didn’t fit any better after a second slug neither.
I stood, went to the back wall of the cave, and counted three rocks down from the bat roost. It was the same count I’d done in 1999, when every idiot in the country had been convinced the world was about to end at midnight. It had seemed as good a time as any to bury something that Bob hadn’t wanted found.
The dirt was hard as iron where I’d packed it down all those years ago.
I dug with my one good hand and Willy’s knife. It took so bloody long I was seeing stars, and they weren’t the ones in the sky.
The tin lunch box came up the same as I’d left it. Rust on the corners, lid still tight. Inside, wrapped in a dishcloth, was the old service revolver Bob had told me to make disappear. I’d never asked who’d used it or who he’d used it on. I hadn’t wanted to know.
But why the hell did he want to keep it?
He could’ve buried it anywhere out here, and nobody would’ve found it in a hundred years. But he’d wanted it gone from his hands, not destroyed. There was a difference. It made me think he wanted to use it again one day.
Pity there were no bullets to go with it, or I would damn well use it. On him.
Under the gun was a small stack of photographs.
I took them out and sat back against the rock.
Some of them I didn’t even remember putting in there. Joy on a horse, young and beautiful, back when she’d still thought the sun shone out of my ass—before she’d caught me balls-deep in Edith and thrown every plate in the kitchen at my head. I still had the scar above my eyebrow to prove it.
The next photo was Razor as a colt, the two of us covered in red dust. I don’t remember who took that shot but was glad they did. It was probably the only photograph in existence that showed me smiling.
Edith was in the last photo.
She was sitting on the verandah with our three boys around her—Mitch on the ground near her feet, Declan on her lap, and Kayden in her belly. She’d been about six months pregnant in the photo, smiling, blonde hair pulled back, and wearing one of them yellow sundresses she liked.
I looked at the photo for longer than I meant to, and for some reason, my damn chest began to ache.
“Fucking hell.”
Putting the gun aside, I shoved the photos back into the tin and the tin back in the hole. I filled it and patted it flat. Then I picked up the revolver, tucked it into my waistband, and staggered back to the rum bottle.
The gun didn’t have bullets, but Bob didn’t know that.
I kept myself busy, doing shit, until I couldn’t stand the pain anymore.
