Aaron

Every day that I wake up a free man, I take a deep breath and thank God for it. Sometimes it takes me a minute to remember where I am, but it all comes back to me when I open my eyes and see my neat little trailer around me instead of a cage. But before I can even do that, I'm stuck shaking off the shadows of the past.

The guys at the bar would be shocked to learn that their six-foot-six bouncer, who once flipped a patron's MINI Cooper onto its roof when he wouldn't pay his tab, regularly wakes up gasping—shaking like a kid waking up from a nightmare. But that's me, every damn morning.

The worst part is that hazy instant before the nightmare lets go of me. For just that moment, I expect that I'll open my eyes and see the cell around me instead of my home, and I'll know that being free was just a dream, and I'm still in that same damned cage that I lived in for ten years.

My personal Hell is a real place on earth—that tiny prison cell where the lights would always glare down, shared with three other orange jumpsuits. In that Hell, even though I knew I could flatten any of them, two of the three would leave me with scars.

Every morning the remembered nightmare recedes into the darkest parts of my head—where it belongs. This morning I sit up slowly, rubbing my eyes as the comforter slithers down my bare chest. It takes a few moments for my heart to stop pounding.

It's cold in my trailer. I usually turn the heat off in the early hours and rely on my thick down comforters instead. That way I don't have to dig into my savings by the end of the month just to pay for propane. Fortunately, even without a woman in my life, I've got some help keeping the bed warm.

Moose looks up from the foot of the king-sized mattress barely squeezed into the trailer's sleeping alcove. The big dog yawns and whines, thumping his tail. I reach over and scuff his floppy, chocolate-colored ears. He's a bit like me: a giant, muscular mutt that finally got out of his cage.

First thing I did once I finished parole was rescue Moose from the pound, so I would always have company that understands me. He and I took a road trip Upstate to live in the trailer on land that used to belong to my buddy Jake. It’s tough to start over with a felony on your record, so I went back to the one place where people actually know I’m not a bad guy: the town I grew up in.

Phoenicia's a bitty touristy town in the middle of nowhere in the Catskills, so different from the halfway house in the Bronx and the Hell I left behind that I don’t really fit in here anymore. I’m a giant tattooed biker with a touch of a Bronx accent now; you would never know that I grew up here.

Fortunately, the owner of the local bar is an old friend from school, just like Jake. He even rides himself on weekends, and he was looking for a big, intimidating guy to be his bouncer. That job, along with the place to stay, saved my life as much as the dog and my friends.

Phoenicia is pretty—clean streets, a selection of restaurants, even a couple of spots that are open after ten, which is rare around here. I make some of the tourists nervous when I wander around, especially with the big dog, so I do my best to soften my image. Sit down, talk quiet, smile. Leave the armor I grew in prison—which I started forming on the road even earlier—aside.

It only works sometimes, so I spend more of my time alone than I would prefer. Especially when it comes to women. The ladies who go to Eddy’s bar know that, drunk or sober, they’re safer with me around than without. Now and again, I get to take one home. But it’s always a casual thing for them. Phoenicia considers itself high-end, so almost nobody wants a working-class boyfriend with a record.

Moose hops down and shakes himself, knocking me out of my reverie, and I scoot out of bed and stand up, stretching carefully. I tend to knock my knuckles on the trailer ceiling if I don’t watch it.

I’ve spent years taking practical steps toward rebuilding my life: fixing up the trailer, then buying it, then buying the land. Only then, did I move on from my original Harley and dog trailer to a big red cruiser with a sidecar, so Moose can ride in style. He even has his own helmet and goggles. The local kids love watching us roll through town.

I spend a good part of my days working now, too—sort of. Volunteering at the church every week is as much for me as anyone else. It’s hard to keep thinking of yourself as a complete piece of shit once you wear yourself out delivering meals, fixing a poor local’s window, or digging their car out.

I sleep whenever I get home, wake up in the late morning, and then spend some time volunteering at the church. I spend part of whatever’s left of my time riding with Moose or my friends and occasionally some of the local hobby bikers. This area has some of the prettiest wilderness east of the Rockies, and it all looks great when you’re zooming through on a bike.

That's my life now. Sure, it has its lonely spots, even though I have friends and Moose to help with that, but it’s also got its own routine. There's no woman in my arms most nights, and no one who wants to stick around when there is.

I’m actually okay with that, though. Not because I don’t want a good woman beside me—God knows I do after everything I’ve been through—but because my heart’s already picked one. One I can’t ever possibly have, but who I think about every night when I close my eyes.

As I shower in the tiny pod, I get my morning wood back just thinking about her: Julia, the preacher’s daughter, and the brightest light in my life.

The church I volunteer at is one of three in town, and the only one liberal enough for me to tolerate, and traditional enough that they take feeding the hungry and tending the needy pretty damn seriously. Reverend Alderson, the stiff, but kind pastor in charge of the place, doesn’t trust me too much. But he’s still given me a chance to prove myself, and so I work hard on his food drives and repair program.

However, he would definitely draw the line at me trying to date his daughter. Pretty, sweet, and sexy young Julia Alderson is an angel, but she’s barely old enough to drink—not that she ever would, I suspect. The girl has my heart—damn, she’s had it for the past two years. But her father thinks I’m dangerous, and she’s too young and too pure for me anyway.

She’s little—barely comes up to my shoulder. She’s got nearly a yard of soft auburn hair that she wears in a coiled braid when she’s working, or in ringlets when she’s feeling fancy. Modest, somber clothes barely do anything to conceal that robust young body of hers. And where her widower father’s soft gray eyes are sad and tired, hers gleam brightly, full of life.

I know she likes me, too. We’re buddies, working side-by-side at every church drive, chatting and laughing together. She likes my jokes. She loves my dog. And for some reason I can’t fathom, she thinks I’m a great guy who just got a shitty break in life.

I’ve fallen so hard for her that I can’t find my way back out to save my life. For two years now I’ve been her friend, worked with her to make Phoenicia better under her father’s watchful and slightly suspicious eye, and closed my eyes every night wishing she was beside me. No matter who I’m with, she pops into my head when I get turned on, and I can’t bust without thinking about her.

I open the trailer’s tiny closet and look in on a mass of leather and denim. I grab a clean work shirt in black plaid from the drawers below then hunt up a clean pair of jeans and my vest. I pull it all on over my thermal long johns; it’s maybe twenty degrees out.

Even Moose gets a vest before we go out: black leather lined in sheepskin, like mine. He whines when I put his paw covers on, putting up a little struggle that would flatten a smaller man.

“Oh, come on, don’t be a damn baby about it, there’s road salt everywhere,” I grumble at him pointlessly as I finish dressing him and give him a belly scratch to calm him down.

Moose is a good dog. He even looks it, once you get past his size. He’s as floppily enthusiastic as a puppy with his affection. He has a practically ear-to-ear doggie grin, and he’s incredibly gentle around small people and other dogs. But of course he’s going to cry a little about the weird doggie shoes that keep the salt and frost from his pads.

As soon as we step out of the trailer onto the thin crust of snow, the icy wind hits me like a slap in the face. “Damn!” I put my collar up and pull down my watch-cap with a sigh. The beauty of Upstate has a brutal side, but you either adapt or you get out.

Moose takes off like a shot across the field, chasing after one of the brave squirrels that’s being blown around by the wind. The fat little guy runs up one of my maple trees and stops barely out of reach, barking and chattering. They all know Moose by now, and they know that the one unfortunate squirrel he actually caught only received a slobbery bath—and that Moose dropped it and ran after getting a bite on the nose.

It’s hard to command fear and respect when even the squirrels know you melt in the face of cuteness.

I put my gloved hands on my hips and look around, the leather of my coat creaking slightly as I move. It still smells of the factory—like leather polish and lanolin from the sheepskin lining. The air has that particular dry-cold smell: sharp and almost dusty, tinged with woodsmoke.

My land is four acres and just across the creek from town. It’s lightly sloped, and is ringed and dotted here and there with maples, black walnuts, apple trees, and an assortment of evergreens. The land is stony and overworked, and I’ve spent time digging out the rocks, planting clover, and plowing it under with borrowed gear, slowly building on it as I can afford to buy materials.

It isn’t much to look at yet. The heavy duty fence is built from pallet wood and salvaged timber, bare now of its climbing vines, with a gate I built myself. The land is mostly bare, though I’ve started terracing the back half with bluestone I dug up. A salvaged stone path leads up to the trailer door.

Julia helped me lay the stones and gather moss to plant in between the cracks to keep out the cheatgrass. I told her she didn’t have to, that she’d mess up her pretty little hands, but she just laughed and pulled on gloves. She’s always trying to make me happy.

I wish she’d stop. It makes me love her more, and I can’t touch her. In fact, if I ever so much as kiss her, I know I’d end up doing whatever she asks after that. And then we would both be in trouble.

She’s twenty-one, hot and healthy. The way she looks at me sometimes makes me think I should get my eyes checked—those, or my head. It’s gotta be wishful thinking on my part, believing that I see an expression on her face that suggests that she not only likes me, but...wants me.

Stop torturing yourself. I go to check my bikes. That damned drunk of a building inspector gave me hell about permits, so I had to buy a prefab shed for my vehicles and workshop. It’s an ugly chunk of corrugated steel and plastic, and it sits on the windward side of the trailer. Most days it cuts the breeze and snow pile-up, but not today.

Today the winter wind is swirling, hitting from weird directions as it angles off the mountains. Sometimes it comes from the northeast, and it bites deep into my bones. There’s definitely a storm coming. I’d better get the spare propane tanks from the shed, in case I’m stuck inside for a while.

I’m headed for the shed, just stepping onto the gravel driveway in front, when my phone buzzes in my pocket. “Huh.” I check the time. It’s seven in the morning, two days before Christmas. Who is even up this early?

Then I see the number and smile before I can stop myself and take the call. “Hey Jules, aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?”

The voice on the other end is musical and full of excitement. “I can’t! The food delivery’s here early, and thank God, because they just upgraded the storm enough to give it a name. We have a damn blizzard headed this way just in time for Christmas!”

I stop dead. Oh shit. “Wait, wait, so we’re doing deliveries today?”

“We are doing everything today. Sorting, bagging, delivery. They sent too much stuff, and if we don’t get it distributed, it will go bad sitting inside.”

The church had been approved for food distribution the same year that I fell in love with Julia. Three months later, the local eccentric, Dr. Whitman, donated enough scratch for us to expand the church basement and turn it into a food storage facility. It’s pretty roomy, and stocked with enough stuff to cover the whole town for weeks if there was a disaster.

But the Reverend sees ongoing hunger as just as much of a disaster as a hurricane, and he’s right. People—fucking children—go to bed hungry right here in my hometown and all around it, every day. I might be a bad guy, but even back in the big house a lot of guys wouldn’t have liked that idea one bit. A lot of them went hungry as kids themselves.

My heart starts beating faster again, but this time it feels great. I’ll have to shuffle some things around to spend my afternoon there as well, but I don’t care. “Okay. What do you need from me?”

“You. The motorcycle with the sidecar. As many hours and as much gas as it takes.” Her voice is so warm. I really can’t stop smiling.

“Okay. I’ll be over as soon as I can.” I don’t care if I go straight from there to work and fall into bed exhausted tomorrow morning. Spending the whole day with Julia makes the whole thing worth it.

I hang up and look over at Moose. “C’mon, boy, we got families to feed.”