The dust kicked up behind Charles’s Jaguar XJ as he made his way to the shack near the end of the narrow road.  It wasn’t a shack when he first rented it out ten years ago.  It was a cute bungalow that the previous renter kept up beautifully.  But then Jesse Colbert and his teenage daughter took over as tenants, and the beauty of the place, Charles thought as he stopped his car behind an old Chevy pickup, rolled downhill fast.

He lifted his sunglasses when he stopped his car and frowned at the condition of the place.  A trail of trash was the only way he could describe it, that led from the front porch, down the wooden steps, around both sides of the house, toward the back yard.  He shuddered to think what the backyard looked like!  And they called him a slumlord.  They called him an uncaring landowner when all he was doing was renting good, solid properties to sorry-ass individuals who didn’t give a shit.

He placed his shades back over his eyes, grabbed his repair requests booklet off of the dashboard, and stepped out of his car onto the dirt yard that was once a lawn, dirtying his expensive dress shoes as he did.  But it was all in the job.  He was a hands-on landlord.  He came to see for himself before he sent his men in.  But as he made his way toward the front steps, what he was already seeing disturbed him mightily.

A horde of old furniture, old clothes, and big, black garbage bags, all filled with old beer cans, clogged up almost every inch of the front porch.  Other than a small path to the front door; a path that could only be maneuvered by walking sideways, you could barely see the flooring.  It was so over-the-top that when Charles made it to the steps, he couldn’t help but stop walking and shake his head again.  “This shit makes no sense,” he found himself saying out loud as he stared at the cumulative mess.  He was getting angry.

“What’s that you say, Big Daddy?”

He turned when he heard that voice and saw Jesse and his daughter Shania (named, Charles was told, after the country singer Shania Twain), as they walked toward the front from the side of the house.  Both had firewood in their arms.  Jesse was tall and muscular with long blonde hair that flapped around his head as if he was a Chippendales dancer.  The girl, who looked to be around sixteen, was short and chubby with long blonde hair too.  They both had those strong features of slightly protruded foreheads, small eyes, and practically non-existent lips that led any onlooker to believe they were related.  But the ladies loved Jesse Colbert because he was buff.

“I said this shit makes no sense,” Charles responded as he turned toward his tenant.  “What the fuck is all of this, Jesse?” He motioned toward the pile of trash on the porch.

“All of what?” Jesse asked.  He was playing dumb, but Charles wasn’t.  He didn’t respond.

“It’s something I got to put away,” Jesse went on to say as if he was surprised that anybody would find his horde offensive.  “It’s just our stuff. I don’t know why you’re making a big deal about it.”

That was why Jesse, and a lot of other tenants, didn’t like Charles Sinatra.  He always expected them to be at the top of their game every time he saw them, when it wasn’t even possible to be that perfect.  Big Daddy’s children weren’t.  His wife wasn’t.  Big Daddy himself for damn sure wasn’t.  But he expected everybody else to be that way.

“Don’t worry, Big Daddy,” he felt a need to say.  “I’ll square it away, don’t worry.  This ain’t normally how it looks.”

Charles had too much still to do to let this man get his temper flaring.  “You phoned and said you had a leak?”

Jesse began walking up the steps.  “If you wanna call it that.”

Shania stayed close on her father’s heels, but kept staring back at the man in her yard.  Big Daddy Charles Sinatra was, by far, the largest landowner in Jericho, and the most powerful man to boot.  He came across as cool and nice and oh-so good-looking in his fancy suit and those dark shades that covered what she knew were his gorgeous green eyes, but everybody always told her to never fall for that.  He was a bastard on two legs, she’d heard, who would chew you up and spit you out.  And that was exactly the way they described him: a bastard on two legs.  She hurried to stay close to her father.  She wanted no parts of that man.

 “That’s not what I wanna call it,” Charles responded to Jesse as he followed them up the steps.  “That’s what you called it when you phoned my office.”

Jesse glanced back and smiled that smirk Charles knew was nothing more than fake charm from a man who was anything but charming, and kept walking.  “Come see for yourself,” Jesse said as he and his daughter walked sideways through the porch path that led to the front door.  “But I’m telling you now it’s not what you would call a leak.  It’s more like a hole.”

“A hole the size of a basketball,” Shania said with a grin.

But Jesse wasn’t grinning.  He quickly turned around and backslapped his daughter hard across her rosy cheek.   She stumbled back, forcing Charles to grab her by her waist and almost drop his repair booklet doing so.

But Jesse was fuming.  “Who asked you?” he asked her angrily.  Then he frowned.  “And what are you following me for, anyway?  Sit that wood down and then you and Babe finish bringing the rest from the back.  Winter’s coming and we ain’t nowhere near ready!  What you following me around for?  Get your ass out back!”

“Yes, sir,” Shania said with shame all over her plump face.  She avoided Charles’s eyes as she hurriedly squeezed past him and ran off of the front porch, down the steps, and around the house.  Charles didn’t like what Jesse had done to his daughter, but getting all caught up in these yahoos and their generations-old abusive treatment of their children wasn’t something he was going to get involved in on any day.  Especially not this busy day.  He followed Jesse inside.

The house was at least livable and surprisingly clean considering the condition of the porch, Charles noticed, as Jesse dropped his wood in front of the fireplace.  He began removing his gloves as he pointed to the cause of the leak.  Charles removed his shades and looked up too.

More like a hole was an understatement.  Shania was right.  The size of a basketball pretty much summed it up.  It was a massive opening in the living room ceiling, right near that fireplace, and Charles could actually see a sizeable portion of the sky through the shabby tarp that tried to cover it up.  He looked at Jesse.  He was amazed that he was just being notified.  “When did this happen?” he asked him.

“A few months back I had a leak,” Jesse said.  “So I went up on the roof to try and patch it myself, since waiting for any of your people to show up is like waiting for the tooth fairy.  It caved in when I tried to hammer in a shingle.”

But Charles heard what he said.  “This happened a few months ago?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Jesse said.  “So?”

“So why didn’t you call my office when it first happened, Jesse?”

“Because I didn’t mind it so much then.  It brought in a cool breeze.  But winter’s coming, and we ain’t gonna need any cool breezes.”

These yahoos, these yahoos, Charles thought irritatingly.  He exhaled, put back on his shades, and began heading out.  “I’ll get a crew on it,” he said as he walked.

But Jesse wanted more.  “When?” he asked.

Charles looked back at him.  “When they can get here,” he replied.  “You should have phoned it in when you first had an issue and when it was just a one-man job.  Now it’s’ a big-ass problem that’s going to require an entire crew.  I’ll send one over when one can get over here.”

“I was only looking out for you,” Jesse said, which was laughable to Charles.

“Oh, yeah?” Charles asked as he kept walking.

“I’m telling you the truth,” Jesse said, following Charles.  “You have too much property.  You know that, Big Daddy?  You own this whole town.  Everybody who works for you say they’re stretched too thin because of all the properties you own.  So I figured, since my house ain’t one of those ritzy places, I would be last on the totem pole, anyway.  I figured I’d give your guys a break.”

Charles ignored that comment.  Everybody was always claiming he owned the town, he owned too many properties, blah, blah, blah.  That was why they first started calling him Big Daddy.  It was a play on Big Brother and wasn’t meant, by any stretch, as a compliment.  It morphed, over the years, to just being his nickname.  But Charles knew the original origin.

But when he and Jesse walked out of the house and onto the porch, a nickname became the last thing on Charles’s mind.  His adopted daughter’s name became front and center.  Because she had just walked up and was standing right in front of him.

“Ashley?” he asked, as if he couldn’t believe it was her.  He removed his shades, as if he was seeing a mirage.

Ashley Sinatra had just walked from around the side of the house with Shania.  Shania was pushing a wheelbarrow filled with firewood, and Ashley, even though she was decked out in Dior head to toe, had a few logs in her skinny arms too.  But when she saw her father standing on that porch, she nearly dropped her load.  She had not expected to see him at all.  She was careful that way.  Especially since she worked for him and had phoned in sick.  She decided to smile and play it off.  “Hey, Daddy!”

But Charles was not playing along.  “What are you doing here?” he asked her, his frown a fixture on his face.

“What’s the big deal?” Jesse asked as he moved from behind Charles and walked sideways down the steps and over to Ashley.   He saw this as his moment.  This was his chance to get the better of Big Daddy.  “She’s my woman,” he said.  “Why wouldn’t she be at my house?”

Ashley would have preferred a subtler way to tell her father, because she knew how he was.

And she was right.  Charles looked at Jesse as if he’d lost his mind.  “Your woman?” he asked him.

“Don’t pay him any mind, Dad,” Ashley said, knowing that her father’s temper was rising.  “We’ll talk about it later.”

But Jesse was more than eager to talk about it now. “That’s what I said,” he said, placing his arm around Ashley as if she was some trophy he’d won.  He knew Big Daddy Sinatra would hate the fact that a man like him was fucking his daughter.  “She’s my woman.  Your daughter is my woman.  You got a problem with that?”

Ashley jerked away from his embrace.  “Knock it off, Jess,” she said frowningly.  “I was sick,” she said to her father, “that’s why I didn’t go to work today.  But I started feeling better.  And since Jesse needed some help around the house, I decided to help him out.  That’s all.  We’ll talk later.”

Charles was disgusted that she’d fall for this clown.  She should have known better than to hook up with a loser like Jesse Colbert.  But the ladies loved his arrogant butt.  Charles would never understand why, but they did.

“See that you get that man over here to repair my roof, Big Daddy,” Jesse said with a smile and in a tone that everybody listening knew was only utilized to get a rise out of Charles.

Charles looked at him, made a mental note to tell his “man” to put Jesse’s house repair last on his list, and then headed for his Jag.  When he got in, he tossed his repair booklet on his dashboard without bothering to put in an entry, flung his gear in reverse, and began backing out fast.

As Charles backed out, Jesse looked at Ashley with clenched teeth. “Why you wanna show me up in front of your old man?” he asked her.  “Who the fuck you think you were talking to?  Hun, Ash?”  And then he backslapped her the same way he had backslapped his daughter.  “You better watch yourself, bitch!” he yelled.

Charles had backed out to the road, and was about to switch gears and take off, when he saw Jesse backslap Ashley.  That fool had backslapped Charles’s daughter!  If he wanted a rise out of Big Daddy, that stupid move was the move to make.

Although Ashley pushed Jesse away from her after he slapped her, that didn’t matter to Charles.  He flung his gear from Reverse to Drive, floored his gas pedal, and sped back onto Jesse’s property so fast that by the time Jesse bothered to look, the car was racing straight toward him.  Ashley and Shania were shocked when Charles didn’t stop, but sideswiped Jesse enough that Jesse’s entire body flew over the hood of the car and landed in the dirt.

But Charles wasn’t finished with his ass.  He got out of the car, hurried over and lifted Jesse up by the catch of his collar, and punched him repeatedly in his pinched face.  “Hit a man, motherfucker!” he yelled as he continued punching him. “Hit a man!”

Jesse was flailing, trying to fight back, but it was like a boy trying to fight a man.  It was no contest.  Charles stopped hitting him and pushed his sorry ass away from him.  Jesse fell to the dirt like a rag doll.    Ashley and Shania, still stunned, looked from Jesse to Charles.  They didn’t seem to know what to do.

Charles was breathing heavily.  He knew what to do.  “Get in the car,” he ordered Ashley, and began getting in himself.

At first, it appeared as if Ashley was going to run to Jesse instead.  But she knew her father.  She got in the car.

As they drove away, Shania just stared at Charles.  This man beat her mean daddy, and her daddy didn’t do anything about it?  She inwardly smiled.  She’d never seen her father handled like that.

But then her father started moaning and yelling for her to help him, what was wrong with her fat ass, and she ran to his aid.