Chapter Five
Dax
My morning started out with my mother yelling at me to wake up. I looked at my phone, which was wrapped up in the sheets with me. It was only eight in the morning, what the hell? I didn’t have any appointments today that I knew of.
“Dax!” She was right outside my bedroom door. It was the same bedroom that I had slept in since I was a kid. The only time I hadn’t was the one year I lived in the dorms at college and the couple of years I lived in Pelican Bay.
“What, Mom? Is something wrong?” I knew I was whining but I had drunk way too much beer yesterday. I really needed to start finding other things to do than hanging out around that damn bar.
“Everything’s fine, but your parole officer is here.”
“Oh shit! Sorry, Mom. I forgot!”
“It’s okay, just hurry please.” She used her sweet voice, but I could tell she was annoyed. My parole officer had called two days before and said that she would be by that morning. I told her that I would be sure to be there. I threw on some jeans and a T-shirt, slipped my moccasins on my feet, pulled a beanie over my head and headed out.
“Hi, I’m sorry.” I stopped dead in my tracks.
My parole officer was hot. She reminded me a lot of Olivia with the petite build and the long dark hair that she wore in a straight ponytail down her back. Her eyes weren’t dark like Olivia’s; that was the one major difference. They were the most incredible shade of light blue. How the hell was I supposed to take her seriously as a parole officer when she looked like that?
“Um…Miss Ortega, right? I’m sorry. I forgot to set my alarm.”
Her sexy eyes were traveling all over me and it made me shiver. She was the first woman other than Olivia who ever made me feel like that without touching me.
“It’s fine,” she said, all businesslike.
She stood up when I came in the room and I said, “Please sit down. Can I get you something to drink, coffee or something?”
“No thanks,” she replied.
“If you need me I’ll be out in the laundry room,” my mother said.
Miss Ortega smiled at her. She was even prettier when she smiled. It softened the hard set lines of her face.
When my mother was gone she opened the folder she carried and said, “Who all lives here in the home?”
“Me, my mom and dad, that’s it.” But she could move in any time.
“And your father is Joe Turner?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She gave me a weird look, kind of like she had a bad taste in her mouth. I wasn’t sure if it was because I called her ma’am, because my father was Joe Turner or both.
“Have you been looking for a job?”
“Well, I was actually thinking about going back to school.”
And helping out in my dad’s biker bar, which was a known hang out for most of the felons in the county. Oh and taking rides out to warehouses that were probably hideouts for drugs and guns.
She raised an eyebrow and for a second I was worried that she was reading my mind.
“You need to decide soon. Sitting around doing nothing every day will get you into trouble quicker than anything. But I guess you know that since you spent most of your time in the SHU.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. No weird look this time so the other one was definitely about my dad.
“Are there any weapons in the house?”
“My dad has a gun safe, but they’re all legal and registered.”
“To him?” Again, the look.
“Uh, I guess probably to my mom.” Shit! My dad had been off parole for a long time, but I guess since he was convicted of a felony that would mean he was not supposed to have guns. This was all new to me. I really hated being forced to think like a convicted felon.
“I know your CCI went over all of this before your release, but I’m going to touch on some of the things here that are pretty common reasons why a parolee can be found in violation, okay? I don’t want you saying later that I didn’t tell you something.”
Her beauty was quickly fading under the glare of her talking about me going back to prison.
I swallowed and said, “Okay.”
“You understand that your residence and your personal possessions can be searched at any time of day or night without reason and without a warrant?”
“Yes.”
“You understand that if you want to leave the county, it has to be approved by me and so you know, it would have to be a pretty damn good reason for me to approve it?”
“Okay.”
“If you get a job or start school, you will have three days to let me know.”
“Okay.”
“If you travel more than fifty miles from your home, it will need to be approved by me.”
“Okay.”
“You cannot be around guns or things that look like real guns, bullets or any other weapons. What that means is if you’re going to stay here, your….mother will have to get rid of her guns or at least store them in a place that is not your residence. You will have a week to sort that out and when I come back I’ll expect them to be out of the house.”
Shit! My dad was going to have a fit. “Okay.”
“No knives with blades over two inches either, unless it’s a kitchen knife and then it should be in your kitchen.”
“Okay.”
She looked at me, long and hard. I was actually starting to sweat under her gaze before she spoke again.
“Listen, Dax, I do what I do to help people, believe it or not. My one true goal is to keep you out of prison and make you a productive member of society. I look at the fact that you had no priors, no juvenile record and you were an honor student before this happened and I would like to think that you were at least trying to break the mold that being Joe Turner’s son poured around you. I have to tell you that I wish you had somewhere else to go, somewhere else to live. I don’t know what your relationship is with Joe and I don’t know if what I’m saying is going to piss you off. The truth is I don’t give a shit if it does. Whether you admit it or deny it or don’t want to hear it, you and I both know that if you continue to hang out with your father and his friends your freedom will be tenuous at best.”
I wasn’t pissed. She didn’t say anything I didn’t already know to be true. But I didn’t have a job, any money or anywhere else to go.
“I’ll make sure the guns are gone and I will be looking for a job and an apartment.”
“Good,” she said. “As long as we have the same goals in mind we’ll get along fine.”
“As long as that goal is keeping me out of prison, then yes, we have the same one.”
I walked her to the door and after I closed it behind her I turned to see my mom standing in front of me.
“I’ll call your father and have him send some of the boys over to get the safe. They can keep it at the club.”
“I’m sorry about all of this, Mom.”
She came over and put her hand on the side of my face. She and I never talked about why she wouldn’t leave him. It was one thing that was never on the table.
But today she said, “Stop apologizing to me, Dax. I should have taken you away from all of this long ago. I didn’t, so now you have to live with the fallout. I am going to do whatever it takes to make sure the consequences you suffered already were the only ones that you’ll have to suffer and I don’t care how pissed off it makes your father.”
“I got lucky the day they handed out mothers, you know that?”
She blushed and patted the side of my face. She sighed and went back to cleaning the house or whatever it was she was doing. The dynamics of our family were seriously screwed up, but at least I always knew that she loved me.
I showered and headed out. I hit a few auto parts stores and picked up applications. I was sure if I asked, Olivia’s uncle would hire me, but there was already enough awkwardness going around. When I ran out of places to get an application from, I headed for The Smoke Joint. I knew my parole agent literally just told me to stay away from those guys, but the thought of sitting in my mother’s house doing nothing for the rest of the day was almost equivalent to the thought of going back to prison.
I spent the early part of the afternoon helping the guys do some modifications to a few of the bikes. It passed the time a lot more constructively than watching reruns or daytime programming. My dad was there and he was his usual gruff self. He didn’t mention the guns or the safe so I didn’t know if my mom had talked to him about it yet or not. I figured that was a conversation best left alone until he brought it up.
Terrance had been making himself scarce lately and I was grateful for that too. I guessed one of these days we might have to continue that conversation we touched on that first night. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I just couldn’t stand the way that he and Olivia both wanted to keep making excuses, trying to explain it to me. The simple fact was that I wasn’t around so the two of them got busy. For some reason that was a bigger slight coming from my best friend than it was from my ex-girlfriend.
I was getting hungry so I headed toward the kitchen to see if I could find Cookie or something he may have cooked up and left behind. I was surprised when I found my mother.
My mother pretty much steered clear of the bar and the club unless there was something going on that either forced her to be there or that she wanted to be there for like a birthday party or an anniversary party. She was still the Queen of the Joint no matter how few and far between her visits were. When she walked in even the old timers jumped to attention and she would always put everyone to work. She was gracious about it and always thanked them all profusely, but there was never any doubt in anyone’s mind that they would do whatever she asked of them.
I knew something was up when I found her and Cookie whipping up a feast in the kitchen.
“Hey, Mom, what’s going on?” I asked, giving her a kiss on the cheek and sticking my fingers in a bowl of freshly-made mashed potatoes.
“Oh nothing,” she said as she slapped my hand away. “Cookie and I just had some new recipes we wanted to try out.”
I doubted her sincerity, but I let it go. “Good, is any of it ready? I’m starving.” Cookie was frying up some chicken and my mom was making gravy. I spotted a platter of ribs that looked done on the far counter and headed toward them.
“Only take one, Dax, they’re for later.”
With my mouth already full of barbecue ribs I said, “I thought you were just trying out recipes.”
“We are, but we’re going to serve them for dinner later. I don’t want them all picked at.”
“Okay, Mom.”
I grabbed another rib and I wondered out to the garage and found my dad and Blake shooting a game of pool. I joined in, after I put up my fifty bucks of course. My dad didn’t do anything that didn’t involve money. It was actually my mother’s fifty bucks. All the money I had in my bank accounts at the time of my arrest had been seized by the State for restitution. My mom had paid for my attorney. I had told her I would just use a public defender, but she wouldn’t hear of it…for all the good it ended up doing.
While my dad was taking a shot Blake asked me, “Have you had much time to catch up with Terrance?”
You had to understand the mentality of the club to understand why no one seemed to get that I might be pissed at Terrance these days. If she was your legal wife, nobody even looked sideways at her. No one would ever consider approaching my mother and if they did, they would have hell to pay from my dad no matter how much he screwed around on her. If you introduced her as your Old Lady, that was as good as putting a ring on her finger too. She was off-limits while you were with her and shunned when you left her. That part put the legal wife one rung above her.
If my dad and my mom had ever split up, she would still be royalty and the guys would still be expected to treat her as such. But, if she was just a girlfriend and you didn’t make it clear she was hands-off, those guys did a lot of sharing. It was kind of gross, if you asked me, but that was their life. When Olivia and I were together, I only brought her there with me maybe twice. I guessed Terrance didn’t mind bringing her around. Maybe she wasn’t just his girlfriend. Maybe she had reached Old Lady status. It was a weird system, but if you hung around those guys it was one you were forced to live with.
“No, I haven’t had much of a chance yet,” was all I told him.
There was no point in getting into an argument with Blake over it. Terrance didn’t have a mother. He and Blake were a lot closer than my dad and I were because of it. My mother was the closest thing to a mother Terrance ever had. I had wondered once or twice since I got back why my mom didn’t tell me about Terrance and Olivia. I couldn’t hold it against her though, during that time everything had fallen on her shoulders. It wouldn’t have done any good for me to know about them while I was sitting in the Bay. I’m sure my mom knew that.
“Did you have much trouble with the gangs in there?” he asked next. He was the first one of them to ask me anything about my time inside.
“Not really,” I told him honestly. “They kept us pretty segregated.”
“In gen pop?” he asked, referring to general population where everyone was supposed to get along with everyone. I got the feeling he was fishing now.
“No, I spent a lot of my time in the SHU.”
Blake laughed and said, “You don’t say? Why is that?”
“Because I didn’t play nice in gen pop,” I told him.
He laughed again and my dad who was taking a shot again smiled. Go figure, it was the only thing I had said in four days that had made him proud. The truth was, I had just refused to segregate with the Aryans, but that didn’t make the blacks and Mexicans like me any better so when they wanted to fight with me, I had no backup and I had to learn to fight as dirty as the rest of them to get along. I got caught with a shank in my cell. They sent me to Administrative Segregation, which I hated. There were no windows and no cellmates to talk to and no television. I was going to lose my mind there, so I attacked a CO. I didn’t hurt him, just pissed him off. That was what got me into the SHU and that was where I spent the duration of my sentence.
While we played, the other club members started showing up and a few of the nomads I had known years back. I figured whatever my mom was cooking up was for me and as much as I hated being the center of attention, I resolved to play nice and let everything run smoothly for her sake.
After we had been shooting pool for about an hour, my mom stuck her head out and said, “Joe, can I see you for a minute?”
Joe was my dad’s given name and my mother was the only one in the world who wouldn’t get a bullet in her brain for using it. He was okay with Bull, which was what everyone called him, but Joe was a no no. Sometimes I thought maybe that was why my mother used it, just to prove she could.
“Yeah, sure.” He sat his pool stick down and went inside. After a few minutes he came back out and told the other guys, “Hey, can I see you guys in here for a sec? Dax you go on and take your turn, we’ll be right back.”
I didn’t know how my father got away with the things he did, he was a terrible actor. I guessed it was a good thing he was smart. It was funny the things my mother could still make him do though.
Not long after that, they finally called me in and everyone yelled, “Surprise!” For my mother’s benefit, I acted like I was. It was a welcome home party in my honor.
My mom and Cookie had outdone themselves on the food. There was fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn on the cob, ribs seeped in barbecue sauce and beans. I was in Heaven. The food sucked in prison and there was never enough of it.
My mom also made a big ass cake that said, “Welcome home, Dax.” It was like I had been away to war or something. In some small way, I guess that I had. There were close to a hundred people there and everyone seemed to be in a good mood and getting along. Since my mother was there, all of the guys had toned down on the making out with biker babes and were just talking, laughing, dancing, drinking and having an all-around good time.
Terrance and Olivia were there too, but I did my best to act like I didn’t notice. I had actually enjoyed talking to her the other day, but it was hard to look at her lips and not want to kiss them. It was hard to think about Terrance kissing them and not punch him in the mouth.
“Hey, boy, wanna throw a dart or two?” It was Buster Balls. I looked at his swollen knuckles curled around a dart and I wondered if we should clear the place out first. He could have likely taken out someone’s eye.
“Sure, Buster. Don’t hustle me though.”
The old man cackled. Sometimes I wondered how old he really was. He told me sixty-nine when I asked, but he had been saying that since I was fourteen at least. He hadn’t been able to hold on to the handlebars and operate the hand brakes and clutch on his bike for years because of his arthritis. I was surprised to see that with the darts, his aim really wasn’t half bad.
We took a break for another beer and I opened his and handed it to him.
He thanked me and said, “You know, I did some time I didn’t have coming once…a long time ago.”
That simple statement was huge to me. It was the first acknowledgment from anyone besides me that I was serving someone else’s time.
I threw my dart. I looked at him and said, “What did you do time for, Buster?”
“Same thing you did,” he said, tossing his dart. It barely stuck to the outside circle of the target. “Drug trafficking and possession with intent. I did five years, but that was almost twenty years ago and they were tougher on drug crimes back then.”
Interested, I asked him, “So when you say you did someone else’s time you mean you weren’t guilty of the crime you got charged with?”
“Yep, that’s exactly it. I was set up, like you.”
“Who set you up?” I asked him.
“The old club president, the one before your daddy. His name was Raymond Winkle. He was a tough old bastard.”
“Why would your own club set you up?”
“You’ve heard how the inner city gangs use kids to do their killings and their drug running, right? Well, I wasn’t a kid. I was twenty-one at the time, but I was squeaky clean. I didn’t have a record and I was the only one of them who didn’t. I thought we were goin’ for a ride. But I found out when the State police stopped us that we were moving a few kilos of coke and we were movin’ ’em in my saddle bags. I had no idea them drugs was there, but since I refused to roll on anyone else, I took the fall.”
It sounded eerily like my situation. I had spent two years thinking that maybe the shit was put in my bags at the bar we had stopped at in Barstow. I always knew I was set up, obviously, but I thought or at least I hoped that it was by a rival club; one that had a grudge against my dad for whatever reason. Buster had me thinking differently. What if my own father had set me up? That would just clinch him for father of the year, that’s for sure.
I had been in college at the time. My dad and the other guys in the club used to bug me all the time about taking over the bar. Bartending at The Smoke Joint wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t like anyone popped in and ordered a Sex on the Beach. It was straight up beer, vodka or whisky. They thought I could do that until I finished school and then when I had a business degree I could take it over, make improvements. I told them all, more than once, that once I finished school I was getting as far away from the club as I could. The only thing that would bring me back would be my mom, but she had been the first one to understand me leaving and she encouraged me my whole life to do so.
Would my father go to such an extreme to keep me in the club? With two felonies on my record no one was going to hire me. But that was ridiculous; my father couldn’t have controlled the cops pulling us over and searching the bikes. Could he?
That didn’t mean that he didn’t set me up though. Maybe I was like what Buster said, the guy who was carrying just in case they got stopped. I looked at Buster and saw what the rest of my life was going to be like. I suddenly saw red.
I looked across the room at my dad. He was talking to Bo and his old lady. Bo had a kid named Mickey who was about twelve. He hung around the club a lot and Bo’s old lady didn’t quite seem smart enough to protect her son from this life. She seemed happy as could be to be standing with her old man. In twenty years that would be Mickey and his boy would be playing in the back. It was a vicious cycle, one that I had tried to break.
Did my dad use this set up to drag me in against my will? I needed to find out. Whoever did it was going to get the payback they deserved.
“Hey, Buster, who do you think set me up?”
Buster glanced across the room at my dad and said, “I didn’t live to be this old by answering questions like that, kid, sorry.” I knew better than to push it. That was all he was going to say.
I finished my game with Buster and mingled a bit. It was actually kind of nice to see people I hadn’t seen in a long time. None of them were exactly upstanding citizens, but they weren’t all bad either. Some of them worked hard and played hard and some of them found themselves victims of circumstances they couldn’t break free from. I wasn’t normally one to judge, unless of course you set your own son up to take your fall.
I hung around until I saw my dad, Blake and Bo go out to where the pool tables were. There was always someone hanging around the clubhouse, day and night. This might be my one and only chance, so I took it. There were two ways into the clubhouse. I never asked outright, but I’m sure they planned it that way in the event of a raid. There was a door in the kitchen that connected to the hallway where my father and his friends proudly displayed the patches they had taken from other members over the years.
I let myself in through that door and stood quietly for a second listening to make sure no one was back there. I didn’t hear anything so I moved down past the meeting room which was a small room with a big table where their decisions were voted on and club members were made or broken.
I stopped at the next small room. My dad’s private office. He never locked it; none of his guys would dare cross him. I honestly had no idea what he was capable of if he was crossed, but the fear of God in the eyes of his crew when he was pissed was enough to tell me that they did fear him.
I trudged in and moved over to the desk and slid open one of the file drawers. They were all neat and labeled, part of my father’s control freak personality. They were all labeled legitimate business things like invoices, receipts and tax documents. You would think I was in the back room of a legal establishment.
I opened a few other things and didn’t find anything, but I did notice that he was still logged on to his computer. I went back over to the door and looked down the hall to make sure I was still alone. I was shaking a little bit, again wondering what he might do if he caught me in there. There was no one out there. So far, so good. Sitting down in his chair I pulled up his email. I scrolled through a few of the newer ones and realized that unless it was from a legitimate business contact, they were written short and curt.
Things like, “We’re on for Friday,” or “Things at the warehouse are set.” It wouldn’t be enough to charge him with anything, let alone convict him if the authorities ever seized his computer. Once again, good thing he was smart. Some crooks think you can just delete emails that may get you into trouble later on. They aren’t smart enough to realize that if you don’t scrub the hard drive and email server, they are never really gone.
I typed in 2011 and hit search mail and it pulled up the emails from that year. As I scrolled through I realized there were a lot of back and forth e-mails between him and Terrance. That was odd. Terrance was my age, which meant he would have been just over eighteen at the time. What did my dad and he have to talk about so often? The emails didn’t make sense to me. They knew what they were talking about I guessed, so some of them were only one or two words. I did find one from Terrance to my dad that interested me. The date was September 6, 2011. It was the day before I was busted on the side of the road with a lot of heroin that wasn’t mine.
I opened that one up and read, “Everything is set up and ready to go.”
What the hell did that mean? Was Terrance part of setting me up too? Shit! I heard a floorboard squeak. I hit the “x” in the corner. I prayed that when my dad logged back on it would bring up his current e-mail and not the ones I’d just been looking at. I leaned back in the big leather chair just as my dad stuck his head in the door.
“There you are. What are you doing?”
“I just needed a minute to myself. Sorry, I hope you don’t mind that I was hiding out in here.”
He shrugged and said, “I guess you kind of get used to the solitude in the joint, huh? All this is a little overwhelming when you first come out.”
“Yeah, a lot, actually,” I told him. “Did you ever do time? I mean, I know you did a few stints in county when I was a kid, but have you ever been in prison?”
He dropped down into the chair on the other side of the desk and after he lit his cigarette he said, “Yeah, once. I was twenty-four. I spent six years in Folsom. When I came out your mama and I got married and a year later, you came along.”
“Six years? What did you do?” I hadn’t meant to put it that way, it had just come out.
“I didn’t do nothing,” he said with a grin. Every so often it was apparent to me how my father was able to charm so many people into doing pretty much anything he wanted them to do. Looking at him with this boyish grin was one of those times.
“What did they say you did?”
“They said I shot a cop, but I really didn’t do it. I was at a party, things got out of hand and the cops raided the place. People started shooting and a cop took one in the shoulder. I was hauling ass out of there at the time, but the hog took a spill at the end of the road and all of a sudden there was cops everywhere, guns and lights shining down in my face. I was drunk and maybe a little high. I puked all over them, which pissed them off and suddenly I was Public Enemy number one. They beat the crap outta me before they took me in. They were allowed to do that back then it seemed like. It’s not like that now as you know. There were no worries then that someone with a smart phone was going to be recording the whole thing. Anyways, they had to pin that on someone, it was a cop. Cops will hunt down justice for one of their own like dogs. Good for me that he lived I guess or I’da been on death row at San Quentin and you would have never been born.”
“What kind of evidence did they have?” I, of all people, should know that you didn’t have to be guilty for them to convict you, but if everyone was running, wouldn’t they have had to have something at least a little bit concrete on him to hold him?
“They didn’t have shit. I was part of a motorcycle club and they found the gun down the street from where they found me, wiped clean. They weren’t even able to trace it back to me. They railroaded me and I did my time. I came out a lot smarter, like you, I’m guessing.”
I made a note to myself to look it up later and see what the real story was. What my dad told me was usually somewhere between a lie and the whole truth. I was a hair away from asking him. Did you set me up, Dad? Would my own father do that to me? All of a sudden Bo was hollering down the hall at him.
He looked at me and said, “Come on, let’s go whip some ass on the dartboard, you’re on my team.”
I stood up and he put his arm around me in a half-assed hug. That was the second one in a week. For most people that wouldn’t have been a big deal. For us, it was huge. It left me torn between feeling guilty for accusing him and feeling pissed that he was such a manipulative son of a bitch.