The Dust and the Roar
The Dust and the Roar
Cat Porter
Wildflower Ink, LLC
The Dust and the Roar
Cat Porter ©2019
Wildflower Ink, LLC
Editor
Jennifer Roberts-Hall
Content Editor
Christina Trevaskis
Cover designer
Lori Jackson Designs
Original Skull Necklace on cover photograph
Blue Bayer Design NYC
Visit my website at www.catporter.eu
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, nicknames, logos, and symbols of motorcycle clubs are not to be mistaken for real motorcycle clubs. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products and locales referenced in this work of fiction. The use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Epilogue
Author’s Notes
Preview - Lock & Key
Books by Cat Porter
Acknowledgments
About the Author
for Jo
This book was born of your enthusiasm. I’d never considered writing Wreck’s story. I wanted to leave him alone, because he always seemed to need to be left alone. But I listened to you, Jo, and the more time I spent time with Wreck, his and Isi’s story transformed into so much more than I’d ever imagined, and I realized I had to write it. It’s been the most amazing experience of my writer’s heart and soul, and I thank you, my dearest friend.
Prologue
Once upon a darker and meaner time, the Dakota Territory was labeled a “wild and angry land.” Little desired. Not fit for farming or habitation. But that didn’t stop the government from selling parcels of that land, “homesteads” they’d called them, in order to attract people to come populate it. Those brave souls came on their covered wagons when no one else would.
Eventually, towns were created and given names that were pleasant and dull, names not associated with Native culture, that notorious brand of Dakota savagery.
The government worked hard to push back the Natives, and a blood-chilling apocalypse erupted when the rest of the country was settling after the Civil War had ended. In the Dakotas, there were brutal massacres on both sides, one after the other. Years of defeats, victories, devastation. All the while, big business salivated over the Black Hills for its gold and minerals, and to suit that greed, the government broke their treaties, their promises, and divided reservations and people.
The ambitious, hopeful souls who came west found rough and tumble. Some found gold, some found coal, some created new dreams made out of gravel and dirt and grass. Others died here, others left and never looked back.
But some of them endured.
I was born here in the Black Hills, like my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents. Like this land, we can be unapologetic, defiant, harsh by turns.
I dig in, I don’t run.
The old Lakota Sioux leaders used to say that their sacred Black Hills were the “heart of the Earth,” pointing out that the area is in the shape of a human heart.
Yes, that’s true.
My heart is here.
Buried deep, beating on. Enduring.
My heart is here.
Chapter One
1975
The lock was rusted, scraped, and dented. The thick, heavy bolt hung low on the door handle. I shoved the key in but it wouldn’t twist smooth. I tried again, slower, and again. It moved, the bolt finally sliding loose. I shoved open the door to the trailer.
Home again. Back in South Dakota. Blood on my hands, napalm on my soul, and wretched cries still howling in my ears. But I was home. No longer a boy. A man. A man on my own.
I pressed my lips together as I stepped up inside the trailer. Dark, hot. Silent. That musty, stagnant smell of my yesteryears had been trapped in here for good. The only thing that had changed was that Dad was no longer here. My dad had moved to the trailer after the great flood of ’72 had wiped out half of Rapid City, including our neighborhood where we’d had a small house. A few years before that, my mom had left us and that house. The trailer had become my and Dad’s home. Ours.
I set my long, full duffel and my backpack down on the worn carpeting that had seen better days. My gaze fell on the small stove on which Dad would cook his favorite sausages. That faint smile that would crease his tired face blazed across my vision now. There, sitting right there on the cracked vinyl seat nursing his coffee and nodding at me as I’d head to meet my friends for a swim at the lake that last summer after graduating high school.
As he lay dying in the hospital of stomach cancer, he said to me, “Do better than me. I know you can—you got it in you.”
I’d always wanted him to do better where my mother was concerned. That had been painful to witness.
I pulled at the buttons of my jacket. Getting off the bus in Rapid in uniform, people had either quickly averted their gazes or stared. An odd feeling.
“That damned war turned out different than everyone expected. Times are crazy,” the bus driver had said.
People were already forgetting about the war, though. But to me, the world still felt like it was all upside down, and I didn’t think it would ever be right side up again.
Not for me. Not ever.
Chapter Two
The old lady
sank into the dirt, and the tiny boy tried to lift her up. An impossible task. His crying grew louder. He hiccuped through his sobs, pulling on the lady. Pulling…
My throat burned, I couldn’t breathe. My lungs ached in my chest as I tried to say something to them. Something. Struggling for air, I jacked up, hitting my head on the overhead shelf. “Fuck!” Swinging my legs out of the narrow bed, I groaned, raking my fingers over my damp scalp. My hair was growing in, but not fast enough.
The walls of the trailer were pushing in on me, and my skull ached. A dog barked outside, another barked back. I took in a deep breath and pushed myself to replace the nightmare with a good memory—that always seemed to help.
I closed my eyes again.
I was around ten and on the back of Dad’s bike headed for Spearfish where we’d go hiking and fishing. That day we saw an eagle soaring over us, and he’d gotten so damned excited.
“Richie, Richie, look! You see that? You see that eagle at three o’clock?”
“I see it.”
“Look good, bud, because odds are you aren’t going to be seeing that again.”
“Why?”
“There aren’t that many eagles left no more. People been shooting them for trophies, or they’ve been dying off with the chemicals they’ve been spraying everywhere.”
“Why are they spraying chemicals?”
“Big business, that’s why.” His hand gripped my shoulder tightly. “Shh.”
Both of us were transfixed on the lone bald eagle above us, his wings stretched out tautly, soaring, scooping gracefully, undaunted through the blue sky over us, over the tall, dark pine trees. He was a king, that eagle. He was grand, meant to be awed, feared, admired. A creature beyond simple explanation, like a superhero way up above the rest of us normal folk, slicing through the quiet, cold air. So effortlessly. This was his kingdom, and suddenly I felt small, like an intruder.
“Eagles mate for life, Richie. They even use the same nest from year to year. Making it stronger, bigger. Isn’t that something? They remember, they put value on that.”
The eagle vanished, and I raised up on my tiptoes, searching the sky for him. My dad’s arm slid around my shoulders, and he pulled me close. We didn’t say anything. We kept staring up at the empty sky, hoping.
“Richie! Richie, you in there?” a female voice hollered from the other side of the front door, and my eyes snapped open. I’d fallen asleep again. Sunlight streamed through the trailer.
“Richie? You alone?”
I knew that voice.
Rubbing a hand across my mouth, I got up from the bed and slid the lock and threw open the door. I gripped the door frame. The last person I ever expected to see. Or wanted to see.
Mom.
“Hey, honey. Aww, look at you! You’re … shit, you’re a man is what you are. So tall. So muscular…”
“What do you want?” My growl stopped her cold. My harshness was shocking, even to me.
“You got a girl in there with you?”
“What are you doing here?”
Slim and tall, her dirty blonde hair had been dyed blonder. Pink lipstick highlighted her mouth with matching painted nails, and cropped pants with heeled sandals gave her that young girl look she would probably always have. A little boy hung on her hand. Big dark eyes stared up at me. Fascination, fear, awe. Couldn’t have been more than two years old. In his other hand, he clutched a small, stuffed animal.
I dragged my gaze away from the kid. “What’s going on?”
“I heard you were back.”
“Yeah, I’m back.”
“I’d like your help.”
“Let me remind you, I haven’t seen you in years.”
“Are you going to let me in?”
“Who’s this?” I jerked my chin at the kid.
I knew the answer, though.
* * *
Of course, I’d known she’d had another kid. She’d told me herself in the one letter she’d sent to me in Vietnam.
The day my mother left us flashed through me. Dad and I had been on a bike ride: me on his chopper, him on a bike he’d finished fixing for some dude. We’d had the best time twisting through the narrow Needles Highway, the two of us eating up the road and the wind together. We came home and found Cindy in the driveway, packing her stuff in an Indian’s truck.
The sight of her bright blue and pink scarves sticking out of a plastic bag he was carrying shot a volley of nausea through my stomach. I instantly recognized the truck and the man from the county fair months before. He was a rodeo guy who’d made a name for himself doing a few stunts in Hollywood cowboy movies and was back trying to make it on the circuit once again—and not doing half bad. I’d seen him with his hand up my mother’s miniskirt on the back of that same pickup truck when I was standing in line for a cone of soft ice cream with my best friend, Noah. They were locked in an urgent hug, grinding against each other, mouths gnawing on each other. I never ordered that cone.
Affair.
Yeah, that was when I’d learned that word in all its glory. Affair.
“Cindy is having an affair with that Indian,” I’d heard a lady say in the supermarket when Dad and I had gone in to grab his beers and my soda and ice cream sandwiches one afternoon. Rohrich’s was a small market meant for bumping into your neighbor, not for zipping in and out with your quart of milk and cigarettes without anyone blinking. It was how-you-doing-today, did-you-see-the-game-last-night, you-making-that-potato-casserole-again kind of supermarket.
“Well, he is one goooooood lookin’ hunk of man,” came the reply. Giggles, snorts followed. My father froze, my stomach cramped.
A long sigh. “Oh, he certainly is, wouldn’t mind getting my hands on that, but phhh, what a mess. That girl … and now with an Indian … I tell you…”
My father’s hand landed heavily on my shoulder, and I clutched my six-pack of root beer deeper into my chest. “You got what you need, son?”
“Y-yes.” I stared at my sneakers.
He steered me to the checkout counter with an unusually quick stride, his grip an iron cuff.
My mother brushed past me to enter the trailer, hurtling me back to the here and now. The little boy let go of her hand and stumbled on the rug. I lifted him up, and he steadied himself, shoving a couple of fingers in his mouth, chewing. He stood taller, his eyes brightening as he took in the dark interior. He’d entered a fascinating playground.
My mother smiled at me. Her typical brilliant smile. “This is your baby brother, Miller.”
Chapter Three
“I thought we’d come over and say hi,” Cindy said as if it hadn’t been years since we’d last seen each other or spoken.
I lit a cigarette, letting out a stream of smoke, my sore eyes darting over the kid again. He didn’t look much like our mother. Shiny black hair that fell below his ears, bronzy skin like his dad, and big dark eyes that followed you, studied you, not Cindy’s eyes that darted all over a room searching, always searching. No, not those denim blue eyes of hers, like mine.
“I’m glad you’re good, honey,” she said. “Been watching the fall of Saigon on the news. All those people desperate to get on the helicopters and get out. Just tragic. So many left behind—”
“You watching the news now?”
“Sometimes, yes. I heard about Noah. Terrible.”
Noah had come home from Vietnam before me. I was planning on visiting him today.
I sucked on the cigarette. “What the hell do you want, Ma?”
She averted her gaze to the boy. “Miller’s going to live with his daddy.”
“Why?”
She squirmed on the edge of the vinyl seat, crossing her legs. “We haven’t been together for a while now, and—”
“You mean, you found something better?”
“What I found, young man, is someone who I’m in love with, and who loves me. We’re going to get married, but I can’t do that with another man’s baby on my hip.”
Miller traced li
nes over the old cabinets as he explored the trailer, the small, brown, stuffed animal still clutched in his hand.
“You mean a red baby, don’t you?” I said.
“My man has a big, important family in Oklahoma. I don’t want to make things difficult for him. He’s older, another generation, he wouldn’t understand. It would be frowned upon.”
“Oh, yeah. I get it.”
No, I didn’t get it.
Color made no difference to me. Meeting all the men and women who’d come from all over to my dad for their bikes when I was a kid, and then fighting for survival on the other side of the planet, side by side with black, brown, yellow, and red—nothing but loyalty made sense to me. “Frowned upon” made no sense to me no more. Not a lick. In fact, it pissed me the fuck off right now.