Free Finders Keepers by Nicole Williams

it
wasn’t so damn obvious which one of us was winning at the game of life.
    “Fine. Should you ever desire to move out of your ‘friend’s’
place, or should they decide to kick you out, you know you’re welcome at Willow
Springs, right?”
    “As welcome as the clap,” I replied.
    Jesse let out another sigh. His and Josie’s reactions to me
were lining up. “I already said I’ve missed you, right?”
    “Yeah, yeah. And I think I forgot to say fuck off .”
    “It’s good to have friends.”
    I tipped an imaginary beer at him. “Hell yes, it is.”

 

     
     
    EIGHT SECONDS OF glory. All a man
like me could ask from life.
    Clay had beat that phrase into me when most parents were
teaching their kids the alphabet. With Clay, it was all about the most
important eight seconds of a man’s life, the glory to be earned from it, and
not resting until I’d given the best ride of my life.
    In another life, Clay’d been a bull rider, too. From what
I’d gathered in between benders and the few pictures scattered around the
trailer, one hell of a rider. He’d even been a part of the pro circle for a
while. Then he met my mom, knocked her up with the little bastard known as me,
and had his kneecap stomped on by a two thousand-pound, pissed off animal.
Clay’s riding career had ended that day in the arena a month before I was born,
and even though he left it with his life, it wasn’t much of one. I’d never
known the man he was before the accident, and what I knew of the man after
didn’t make me want to know who he’d been. Clay could have been the fucking
Dali Lami of Montana and it wouldn’t have compensated for the man I’d known
growing up. Atonement just wasn’t in the cards for Clay Walker.
    Other than our looks, Clay and I never had much in common.
Rodeo was the one exception. I was trotting on a horse before I could walk, and
Clay tossed me up on my first steer the summer before kindergarten. Bull riding
wasn’t about a father bonding with his son. No, bonding was something Clay
reserved for his whiskey. Bull riding was about one man living vicariously
through another. It was about Clay living his eight seconds of glory through
me.
    Eight seconds of glory and a whiskey cap. That’s all the man
who’d conceived me had left me with. Not even a nickel more. It wasn’t a big
surprise Clay had never made out a will because, really, what was there to
fight over when he died? The macrame pillow coated with years of smoke and
whiskey fumes? The single dinner plate I’d glued back together so many times
I’d lost count? The trailer I’d been too embarrassed by to invite a friend or a
girl back to? No, there was nothing to fight over. Nothing to show for a man
who’d lived forty years of life other than a whiskey cap and a son who gave his
middle finger to life at every turn. Even if there had been stuff, there was no
one to fight with. I was the only family Clay had. Or at least the only family
he hadn’t severed all ties with. Talk about leaving a legacy behind . . .
    The fire department had determined the fire had started
thanks to a faulty space heater. My guess was that the main “faulty” part of
the fire had been Clay, but I guess even the fire department was worried about
me losing it if they told me the whole truth. Oh well. How it had happened
didn’t change that it had happened.
    By the calendar’s measure, it had been three months since
the fire. By my measure, it felt like a couple centuries. Clay was a distant
memory, along with so many pieces of my life. Working at Willow Springs and
bull riding were the only pieces of my former life that hadn’t changed. I’d cut
off contact with most of the people in my life, at least the ones who knew the
real me, not the person I wanted people to see when they looked at me.
    Well, I’d tried cutting them off. Josie showed up at
Willow Springs every now and then, trying to get me to ‘snap out of it,’ but
she’d been about as successful as