Page 52 of Making His Bones

Gray

“You’re lucky the bullet went through your obliques,” said Maddy, Ford’s old lady. She was also a nurse practitioner, a fucking lucky thing for the club.

Right now, she applied a large square bandage to the exit wound under my back rib. I lay on my side on her guest bed, one knee up, as though receiving an enema. We had all been part of Ford’s crew as kids, Ford and his dad Cropper moving in with Maddy’s psycho mom over in Cottonwood. Ford and Maddy were a match made in heaven. She was truly the epitome of what a Prez’ old lady should be like—gritty, steadfast, down to earth, and abso-fucking-lutely dazzling.

And a nurse practitioner.

I said, “Yeah. Leave it up to me, getting shot while wingsuiting.”

Maddy snorted, patting the bandage smooth. “Leave it up to you to be wingsuiting over the property of some moonshiners. You’re following in your dad’s footsteps.”

Maddy could say that, referring to my dad’s bizarre death four-wheeling in the desert, and get away with it. No one else could.

There was a soft, respectful knock at the open door, and I twisted my torso to see Galileo and Tiago tiptoeing in.

“Hi,” said Galileo timidly. “Ford told us it was okay to come in.”

“My man!” I cried. “Are you done?” I asked Maddy.

“Sure, for now. I’ll check the bandage later. You don’t want to show up at the hospital with bullet wounds unless you want the pigs involved in your beef.”

“No pigs,” Tiago agreed. “Especially not in beef.”

We all laughed. Maddy left us men to our business, and Galileo perched on the edge of the mattress. Weird red sores decorated his face and arms. I was pretty sure he hadn’t looked like that when I’d leaped off the cliff.

His hands fluttered as he spoke. “We don’t want you to think we abandoned you. When we saw you’d been shot down, we went down the cliff. We drove as close as we could to the Pitchfork property, then we went on foot.”

I hauled myself up against the headboard, shoving a pillow under my lower back. Maddy had offered me opiates, the usual prescription for pain, but I declined. “Who all went?”

“All of us,” Galileo said proudly, beaming underneath the red polka dots.

“Wolf and Tobiah?”

Galileo grinned. “They were bros!”

“For a little while,” chirped Tiago, apparently having been told the story.

I gave them skeptical side-eye. “Why,” I said slowly. “What happened?”

“Well,” said Galileo, clearing his throat and wringing his hands. “They started fighting.”

Tiago piped up. “Galileo says they are like abusive spouses.”

Galileo motioned for the kid to pipe down. “Well, Tobiah called Wolf a dill weed. Not sure why that’s bad, actually.”

“It is,” I assured him. “Go on.”

“So, Wolf called Tobiah a dweebie krelboyne, and it was downhill from there. Knoxie tried to tell them to shut up, that we didn’t need that guard hearing us, but they started throwing punches. It was such a ferocious fight, they almost made contact.”

Tiago spurted a lip fart, but I brushed him off. “And then what?”

“Well, eventually Tobiah shoved Wolf into a fallen cactus. It was a bad stroke of luck that it was a jumping cholla cactus.”

“Ai yi yi,” said Tiago.

“You’re fucking kidding,” I said. “Is that how you got all those marks on you? Those fucking spines are hard as hell to get out. You practically need a pair of pliers.”

Galileo continued. “Well, of course I went over to help Wolf out, but consistent with their name, some of the detached pieces of barbed spines jumped, or more accurately leaped out at me, hitting me in the face and arms. When I tried to swat them off, I, too, fell into the cactus next to Wolf.”