1
Shotgun
I lean back on my front door, hold my coffee cup to my chest, and look out over the flowers blooming in front of me.
Flowers, I know. It’s not the first thing that people would think to see when they come by here. The property where I live, the one I share with other guys from the Men of Valor motorcycle club, is one of those places that they tell you to stay away from. Full of dangerous men; hard-asses with a grudge.
But that isn’t entirely true. We’re good guys, trying to make this town a better place. Sure, we all have some baggage and have been through some tough shit, but we served our time in the military and we know a thing or two about being real men.
Ever since I got back from my last deployment, this has been my home. Not that I ever thought that I would be able to call anywhere home after everything that I went through – once you’ve been in combat, the thought of standing still somewhere for even a hot minute seems downright impossible.
But here I am. One part of a compound where a dozen or so of us live. And I know that there’s nowhere in town I’d rather be.
I take a sip of the pitch-black coffee in my mug, look down at the last dregs swirling around my cup. I need to get off to work soon, down to the tattoo parlor, but honestly, I’m feeling out of it today. Need something to kick my ass into gear. Something other than the paycheck that I’ll be getting at the end of the week.
Ask any military guy and he’ll tell you the same – coming back to the real world after you’ve been in the service is a motherfucker. You get used to living with a certain level of excitement, a certain level of danger, and when you have to step back into the real world, nothing else feels like it comes close to giving you that same thrill.
It’s why so many of us end up in groups like the Men of Valor. Well, maybe not so many of us are doing good in the world, but you get my point. Biking, gangs, moving in groups, it feels right when you’ve been out in the field for so long, and I’ve got to say, I don’t know what the fuck I would be doing if I didn’t have them to keep me on the straight and narrow. Probably drinking myself into oblivion, regaling whoever would listen to me at the bar with tales of everything that I had done in Afghanistan. As though there weren’t enough of those guys to go around already.
Truthfully, though, I have started to feel a little out of it lately. Not that I’m not grateful for the job, or the home, or the friends I’ve made through the group. More that I can’t help but feel there should be something more to my life. Something bigger than this. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older, or maybe it’s because it’s coming around to spring again, my nana’s favorite time of the year, and she’s been on my mind a lot lately.
She was the one who raised me. Harriet. She was the kind of woman who took no shit, more protective of me than she ever was of her own kids. She’s the one who taught me that I needed to stand up for myself, first and foremost, that there were going to be a hell of a lot of people who tried to talk down to me or act like they were better than me because of where they were from or how they had grown up, but I was just as good as they could ever be.
She passed a few years back, and I try not to spend too much time thinking about her if I can avoid it. It’s prone to drive me crazy if I’m not careful. But she always wanted to see me settled down and happy; she told me, over and over again, how good a husband I would be, how good a father. I never really believed her, never felt much draw towards that side of life, until the last few months when I felt something shift inside of me.
After she passed, I planted tulips all over the front of my yard. Her favorite flower, she always kept a few in her slightly battered old vase on the windowsill above the sink where she would clean up the dishes and hum along to the radio. Whenever I saw them blooming, I thought of her, and it was hard not to smile. The colors, the purples, pinks, yellows, reds, have filled my space, and it feels like each one is a sprig of new life.