Chapter 5: Into The Creek Woods
We didn't take the truck, and we didn't use the main highway. Jax led me out through a rusted side door that opened directly into a dense thicket of cedar trees and overgrown blackberry brambles behind the salvage yard. The air smelled of wet pine needles, damp earth, and the distant, metallic tang of old car batteries. The ground was slick with morning dew, and my scuffed sneakers soaked through within the first hundred yards, but Jax moved with a silent, practiced stride that kept us hidden beneath the low-hanging pine boughs.
After walking for twenty minutes through the damp timberland, following the winding, muddy curve of a shallow creek, Jax finally stopped beneath the sprawling canopy of an ancient oak tree. The highway noise was gone here, replaced only by the burble of cold water rushing over smooth river stones and the sharp, scolding chatter of a blue jay high in the branches.
Jax dropped onto a moss-covered boulder, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his vest pocket. He didn't light one; he just turned the crinkled paper cylinder over and over in his calloused fingers, his eyes fixed on the muddy water swirling past our boots.
“You okay?” he asked, his voice rougher than usual, as if the cold damp air had settled deep into his chest.
“I’m fine,” I said, sitting down on a dry patch of pine needles and pulling my knees up to my chest to keep warm. I looked up at him through the tangled strands of hair falling into my eyes. “Why did that man look at you like that? Does he know about my mom?”
Jax stopped turning the cigarette. He looked out over the creek, his jaw tightening until the skin stretched white over the bone.
“Vince doesn't know anything,” Jax said quietly. “He just likes to smell blood in the water. That’s what clubs do, Leo. They look for weakness in each other so they feel stronger about themselves. Your mom... she wasn't part of that world. She never wanted to be.”
“She talked about you before she got sick,” I said, the words slipping out before I could stop them. My voice sounded thin and small against the rush of the creek. “Not every day. But sometimes, when the pain medicine wore off and the room got cold, she’d look out the window at the highway trucks and she’d say... she’d say you had eyes like a hawk and a heart made of river stone.”
Jax flinched as if he’d been struck with a switch. He dropped the cigarette into the mud, his large hands clenching into tight fists against his thighs, the dark ink on his knuckles stretching and twisting.
“She wasn't wrong,” he muttered, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “I left when she was six months pregnant, Leo. You know that?”
“Mom said you didn't know,” I replied, remembering the way she used to stroke my hair when the fever made me restless. “She said you were twenty years old and scared of your own shadow, riding a beat-up shovelhead with fifty dollars in your pocket and a warrant in three counties. She said you didn't run from us. You ran away from everything because you didn't know how to stay.”
Jax let out a sharp, ragged breath that sounded almost like a laugh, though there was no humor in it—only a deep, hollow exhaustion. He leaned forward, burying his face in his large, scarred hands, his long dark hair falling forward to shadow his face. For a long moment, the only sound was the creek rushing past our boots.
“That’s the lie I told myself every single day for twelve years,” Jax whispered through his fingers. “I told myself she was better off without a deadbeat with a criminal record and half an engine block to his name. I told myself I was doing her a favor by getting out of her way.” He slowly lowered his hands, looking across at me with eyes that looked suddenly old, tired, and completely broken. “But that wasn't the truth. The truth was I was a coward. And now she’s gone, and you’re standing here in my shop with her eyes, and I don't know the first damn thing about being a father.”
I didn't say anything to comfort him. I didn't have any comfort to give. I just reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out the small folded paper—the birth certificate with my name written in the county clerk’s neat cursive—and laid it flat on the moss between us.
“Mom said if I ever found you, I had to ask you one question,” I said, my voice steady, though my fingers were shaking slightly against the cold.
Jax looked down at the paper, his chest rising and falling in slow, heavy hitches. “What’s the question, Leo?”
“She said: Did you ever look back once before you crossed the county line?”
May you like
Jax stared at the paper for a long time. The wind rustled through the high branches of the oak tree, dropping a shower of cold dew down onto our jackets. When he finally looked up, his pale eyes were bright and clear, stripped of all the tough-guy armor, all the biker bravado, and all the years of hiding.
“Every single mile, kid,” Jax whispered, his voice cracking on the words. “Every single mile.”
