🔳 G R E E T

Arthur is four years old when his mother combs his hair with her fingers, a wobbly smile on her face as she presses a kiss to his forehead. He remembers wincing because, well, he loves his momma but also there's some spit on his skin and it's not the most pleasant feeling but, even at his age, he knows wiping off a kiss is rude and not something one should do, at least not until his momma stops looking at him.

She gives him another kiss, this time hugging him so tightly he now has to complain.

"Momma! Can't breathe!" He whines, trying to squirm his way out of her arms, to no avail.

"Shush, baby, quiet as a mouse, remember? Your daddy will pick us up soon."

It's dark outside, and he's a little cold in his sweater but it feels nice, in his momma's arms. They're sitting on a bench, at this park in a nice neighborhood. Arthur would have loved to play in the swings, but everything is so empty and still, it feels weird to even attempt to bring it up.

Besides, they need to be quiet.

It takes a little longer, Arthur doesn't really know how much, but he dozes off when his momma starts humming a song, her fingers once more combing his unruly hair.

At some point, a car screeches down the lane and stops by, breaking the peace in the quiet neighborhood, and Beatrice Morgan dries up her tears to get herself and her son inside.

She kisses the dumb, cocky smile off her foolish husband face, and they drive off. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days, and his cheeks are raspy under her hands, but she can’t say she doesn’t like it.

"How's the kiddo?"

Looking down at the boy in her lap as Lyle speeds up, she tries to ignore the anxious beating of her heart.

"Bored as a rock, took you way too long."

"Was careful, thought you wanted me to be careful, woman."

She grumbles something, looking out the window, her blue eyes always keeping track of the lights behind them in case they start being followed by blues and reds.

“C’mon sugar, don’t give me that look, ain’t you happy I’m back in one piece?”

Of course she is, her chest is just barely calming down from the rickety pace her heart had set as she waited, the knot in her stomach slowly untangling. It’s not enough, though, it never is enough and she’s sure there’s some part of her brain wired up to be always on edge, always wondering if her family is going to be safe.

She doesn’t look at him, not fully, just around the corner of her eye as she continues looking out the window. But it’s enough to see Lyle and his sly smug look, as handsome as the day she met him, as if he knows what her silence means.

As if he knows he’s off the hook.

Her heart skips a beat, she cannot help it one bit. Ever since she saw him, part of her has been irremediably tethered to Lyle Morgan.

And part of him to her, she supposes. Thinking about his kisses and his love promises and the way they stuck together even in the most inconvenient of situations.

He wasn’t a good man. But he wasn’t a bad man either.

Bea glances down at Arthur, quiet and drooling and clinging to her jumper. No matter the hell Lyle put her through with his plans and schemes and petty theft, he had given her a family.

“’course I’m happy.” She concedes. “Just- please tell me we’re going home now.”

“Yeah, yeah. Not a soul in there. We’re safe.”

Not for the first time, she wonders how long that will last.

They get home, a small camper a few miles outside the city limits, surrounded by similar people with jobs in a similar or perhaps more honest vein than Lyle’s, and she puts her son in bed. Arthur doesn’t even stir, and she makes sure he’s tucked in knowing he’ll eventually kick all the blankets away.

It’s been like this for a while now. She cannot even fault him for losing every normal job he’s ever landed and turning back to his trade. He listens to her whenever she asks, and he tries, and eventually everything goes back to the way it was. Bea can only accept the curve balls and bat as hard as she can, for her son and her own sakes.

Her mother still calls sometimes, asks her to leave that nasty piece of work she calls husband, and implores Bea to see her grandson before she dies. And Bea agrees, makes empty promises about getting plane tickets with money she doesn’t have, promises about seeing her as soon as possible before hanging up and turning her back on her again. She doesn’t expect anyone to accept her choices, not when she had a stable job and a simple life that should have been enough for her and instead she threw it all away.

It's hard, and anxiety sits like a heavy blanket on her shoulders, but it’s worth it. When Arthur smiles, when they sit together and watch a movie, when her little boy asks her to read his favorite book for the fifth time, when her husband hugs her and calls her the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.

When Lyle looks at her, when Lyle sees her. When he makes their lives a mess and they have to run and start over again.

It was all worth it, she thinks, even when she’s stuck in a hospital bed faced with her own mortality.

“Take care of him, please, he’s so little, he needs you. He needs his father.”

Arthur is eight years old when Beatrice Morgan leaves her husband and son behind, a desperate promise in her tired lips.

He watches as his father sinks into a pit of despair and alcohol, deciding to turn instead to the last notebook his mother gifted him. He wonders if he’ll be able to draw her from memory, some part of him realizing he’s not going to see her again.

“Dad?”

Lyle is asleep, comatose in a drunken haze that it will take him a few hours to get up from. Arthur’s started to get the hang of it, though, and isn’t surprised when the only answers are snores.

So he learns to take care of himself. Learns to commit his mother’s semblance to memory, learns to draw her favorite flower, the pink one in the small glass on the kitchen table, learns to find it and keep a new one each time the petals wilt.

He learns to deal with his father’s mood swings, learns to stay quiet in a completely different way when Lyle drags him to yet another job. Learns to lie, to keep his steps firm and yet light, to scurry away and let go of his earnings if someone ever gets a hint of his presence.

Learns to appreciate his praise.

“Your dad loves you, okay? Never forget that. He’s going to take care of you, always.”

He remembers his momma’s words. He supposes she was right. The few times he actually gets himself in trouble for stealing, Lyle strides into wherever it is they’re keeping him, proud and fearless.

“Yeah the little tyke is mine, what’d he do now?”

And he was never in trouble with his dad, because he’d usually chuckle and pat his shoulder once they got off the hook. “Learnt from the best, didn’t ya?”

For his tenth birthday, Lyle gets them tickets to a baseball game.

“Premium seats to get those lessons in practice, kiddo.”

They do, and they get hot dogs and his dad drinks but he’s not drunk, and it’s one of the best days of his life. They count their earnings in the car on the way home.

“Eight, nine, ten… That’s four hundred. Why do people carry so much cash?” The sun’s setting in the distance, painting the interior of the car in an orange light, and Arthur’s frowning, looking at the wad of bank notes in his hands.

“What’s that? Are you complainin’ we have money in our coats now?” Lyle barks a laugh, glancing sideways at the contents of his son’s lap. “Remember to spread those around, okay?” ID’s, driver licenses, credit cards… They don’t need anything that can be easily tracked.

Arthur nodded, serious. “Of course, dad.”

“Attaboy.”

After a pause, after Arthur has counted the money yet again, he asks:

“What are we gonna do with this now?”

“Don’t know, what do you want to do?”

“Huh?”

“You picked it, it’s yours.” With a simple shrug, as if it didn’t mean anything to him, his dad is handing him a small fortune.

“Mine? All this??”

“Got cotton in your ears, kiddo? I just said it! I’m proud of ya, get the cash and get yourself whatever you want. Some new colors or whatnot, you’re always saying you’re running out.”

He’s just turned ten, and he hasn’t had many chances of being unseen and unwanted and unloved, but he can still feel this one instance (where he’s being seen and appreciated and loved) is special. Arthur remembers his momma’s words. He can almost remember the way her fingers moved across his hair, soft and shaking, as if the strain of raising her hand was seeping too much strength from her.

Or maybe he’s just making it up.

Picking up on his son’s silence, Lyle reaches across the console and messes with his hair, laughing. The memory fades away.

“Happy birthday, son.”

Arthur complains, hiding a smile, no bark and no bite, glowing with the attention.

“Thanks, dad.”

He watches out of the window, the starts shining far away in the sky, the road becoming shapeless as they speed down the lane, as the blurry memory of his mother dissipates.

Eventually, that’s what his whole life turns into. Roads blurring, races against the clock, where the only permanent thing in his life is his bag and his father dragging him from place to place.

They stay in motels for days on end, until Lyle grows paranoid and they flee the state again. Arthur reads, counts their money and steals more wallets. He watches as his father meticulously cleans his gun every couple of days, deep eyes bags under his eyes.

He wonders if he’s ever shot anyone.

One time, he gathers the courage to ask.

“Have you ever shot anyone?”

Lyle looks up, brown eyes dark, moustache unkempt and a five of o’clock shadow making him look haunted. Exactly the kind of look Bea would somehow fix. She would rib him, ask him to shave, kiss him. She would become the center of his world and he would try his hardest to make her happy, in his own way, twisted as it could be at times.

He doesn’t know what to say. But he doesn’t like lying to the kid.

“Yeah.”

Arthur takes the short answer for what it is. A confession.

(Years later, when he’s reflecting on these memories, when he’s thinking about his own son, when he’s starting to think of himself of something else than a brother, he wonders if his father was repentant. If he was asking his ten year old son for anything close to forgiveness. If he really knew there was no other possible end for him. He thinks about the father figures he’s gathered across the years and wonders what will that make of him.)

Then everything changes, again.

He’s eleven, sitting behind a smoking car, cornered against the back wall of a gas station. Plumes of black smoke rise from the hood, and Arthur’s looking up at his dad, kneeling right beside him. Lyle just got him out of the backseat, and has his hands on his shoulders. The noises on the other side are deafening, a warbled voice in a loud speaker calling for Lyle Morgan, red and blue lights illuminating the poorly lit area.

He’s watching him, probably a one last attempt to commit his son to memory. To pinpoint the traces where Bea fought to shine through, aside from those blue eyes of hers.

“Take care of yourself, kiddo.”

Arthur is too scared to do anything but nod. Lyle shakes him, one, two times.

“Arthur. Promise. Just say it.”

“Yeah, Dad, I promise, just, what’re we gonna do now? What’s the plan?”

“Stay here.”

It will stay with him, that image. Lyle Morgan takes off that old, faded baseball cap and puts it on his head. Arthur can’t see anything, and it hits him deep in his chest, even if he doesn’t know it yet, that it will be the last time he sees his father.

“You hold on to that for me, okay?”

The money is packed in Arthur’s bag, and he figures the kid will be either smart enough to hide it or honest enough to give it up.

For some reason, he’s proud of him, either way.

Lyle stands up, hands up in the air, and walks around the car to face the music.

Arthur watches as the scene folds out, and screams when the bullets hit with deadly accuracy, and cries when his father drops dead to the ground. His own blood surrounding him like a halo, death creeping around his still figure as if it was finally claiming a life once promised and many times slipped out of its reach.

He knows death. He remembers the coldness that took his mother away when he was eight. He remembers her lifeless fingers. The way she stopped holding onto his hand. Her lips half open in a plea for her husband to protect her beloved son.

———

Your fine red coat had been like a tongue of flame among the black and grey dusters that flanked the bar in that riverside saloon. It caught Arthur’s eye the way a cardinal loosed among crows might. An outsider, and an easy mark. 

You could blush that same pretty shade with just a well-placed compliment, he soon found. Confessed with little resistance that it was your first time round these parts. Riding along to Strawberry to visit an ailing relative. 

Offhand, he mentioned the prettiness of the view along Diablo Bluff. Well worth a detour for anyone with a serviceable horse. He eyed your glossy-coated mare— a pale palomino with a mane like beaten electrum, newly groomed and newly shod— and offered to mark out a choice location on your map. 

The cheap room he books that night is solitary and bare as an anchorite’s lonely cell. Its cracked oil lantern magnifies the shadow of its wound across the wall. The washbasin is flecked with rust. When he splashes the grime from his face, the water that trickles over his lips has the coppery tinge of old metal. 

They say that sparseness leads to contemplation of god. Carves a hollow in a man in which repentance can trickle like rain to a well. And so here he is. Harboring a dog’s guilt. 

He had spun you in a simple two-step as the band downstairs had played Oh! Susanna. You seemed surprised that he knew the steps, laughed when he leaned his arm across your shoulder blades and dipped you down. “Do that again,” you told him, and the unbrokered ring of command in your voice had garlanded him like a vine. He did so twice more. Each time the bell of your skirt had billowed and flared like the pulse of a candle.

You had a clear-eyed way of looking at him that spanned him through like a shot from a rifle. As though you saw the wolf in man’s guise and would not flinch away. You stood on tiptoe to glance your lips chastely against his cheek before you excused yourself upstairs, and he had carried it for hours afterward, the purity of that touch seared like a brand upon his liar’s pelt.

Tender, naive little thing. Wrapped in a coat the color of apples and blood, the shade of raw sin. The scent of wealth drips off you like perfume, and wolves trail behind close as breath. The stitching on your riding gloves was finer than he’d ever seen. The bills that you passed over the counter had been crisp and new. His pack has not fed upon such a bounty in quite some time.

He ought to have warned you to keep to the road. He ought to have urged you to steer clear of strangers like himself. He ought to lay himself down in a ditch somewhere and put the barrel of his gun against the roof of his mouth. 

From the other side of the shared wall comes the sharp, complaining squeal of unoiled bedsprings. Then a soft susurration of a sigh, a quiet thump like a weight coming to rest against the plaster.

You do not see them, you guileless girl wandering the wood. The yellow eyes that peer luminous in the dark. You do not hear them, you hopeless creature stepping into a snare. The beast that circles you tight as a noose.

Arthur cups his hand against the rim of his ear and presses it to the wall.

He hears the dull drag of heavy fabric, the click of clasps. Your coat, perhaps. Then a series of quick, fastidious flicks followed by the busy rustle of silks and linens. Another sigh, longer and more luxurious than the last. When he feels the faint vibration of another thump shiver down the wall, as if someone had decided to lean the length of their spine against it, he lays the flat of his palm against the chipped plaster, and imagines it warm as skin.

———