Golden Trail (54 page)

Then he walked downstairs, let the dog out
one last time, got the coffeepot ready for the morning, let the dog
in and secured the house. He said a last round of goodnights, went
to his room and heard the shower going.

He met his woman there, her hair got wet and
he made certain other parts of her got wetter.

In the end the water didn’t have to drown
out her moans since Layne performed that chore with his mouth.

Then he watched the News, shoulders against
the headboard with a sleeping Rocky’s wet, tangled hair splayed
over his chest as she pinned him to the bed.

Wisdom, Compassion and Strength

“Hi Tanner! You here to see Rocky?”

Sharon Reynolds had seen him when he walked
in the front doors of the school and she’d hightailed it away from
her desk to greet him before he even hit the office door.

Layne smiled at her. “Sharon. Yeah. She
free?” he asked but he knew she wasn’t.

“Nope, she’s teaching in the auditorium,”
Sharon answered.

“Need to talk to her, it’s kind of
important. Can you get a message to her?”

She waved her hand in front of her face. “Oh
no, don’t worry about that. I’m sure the kids won’t mind
you
interrupting.” She leaned in and gave him a wink. “Just go on to
the auditorium. You know where it is, don’t you?”

“Yeah, do I need to sign in?”

She smiled big at him. “I’ll do it for you.
Just promise to stop by to visit the girls in the office and sign
out, okay?”

Layne smiled back at her, just as big and
her eyes locked on his mouth.

“Promise. Thanks, Sharon.”

“Right,” she whispered, still staring at his
mouth and Layne didn’t hesitate, he turned and walked down the
hall.

It was Wednesday and it was
To Kill a
Mockingbird
week. Between working his cases, both paid and
unpaid, talking to his mother, keeping an eye on Gabby’s place as
well as Stew, hosting two teenaged girls at his house every night
and trying to fit in catching up with Rocky, the week had already
been staggeringly busy and he hadn’t had time to sneak in and watch
Rocky teach.

Luckily, Sharon Reynolds made the sneaking
in part easy.

The rest of it hadn’t been so easy.

Layne spoke to her but apparently Vera
wasn’t ready to lay down her weapons, but at least now her shots
were fired wide rather than Vera gutting Rocky with the
bayonet.

Jasper had got Layne the make, model and
color of TJ Gaines’s car but no address. As far as Jasper could
gather the intel, no one knew where he lived and no one had been
there. Layne had cruised the church a dozen times in two and a half
days and never saw a blue Honda sedan in the lot in order to stake
it out and follow him home. He’d also cruised by the teenage kids’
hangouts and still no go with the Honda. This meant Layne was on
duty that night to wait for Gaines to leave Youth Club and follow
him from there.

Layne found out that Jasper wasn’t wrong and
Keira
was
a nut
and
she liked boy bands and Jasper
liked her enough to let her play boy band music in the house and do
it loud. Layne did not see good things in the future because Tripp
didn’t like boy bands, Vera definitely didn’t like boy bands, Devin
seriously
didn’t like boy bands and Rocky detested them
nearly as much as Layne did. Jasper was going to have to shut that
shit down soon or there was going to be all out war.

And Monday night Layne discovered Giselle
Speakmon
was
the pretty blonde sitting next to TJ Gaines.
She also clearly thought of Raquel Merrick as her idol and her
parents did too seeing as Giselle’s younger sister had some kind of
very shitty cancer that was far shittier than cancer was on the
whole and Roc had done some charity event that made money for a
house for parents to stay in close to the hospital. The house was
about to be closed down and Rocky’s event had saved it. Giselle’s
parents didn’t live far but what amounted to two hour trip every
day for months was a burden they couldn’t bear on top of having a
really sick kid as well as a healthy one at home. That house was
next door to the hospital and one or the other got to stay in it
for six months while their daughter had inpatient treatments which
made life a whole lot easier and they fully credited Rocky with
this saving grace.

The sister was now in remission and the
Speakmon family was in awe of Saint Rocky. Therefore, because Rocky
was there, their sweet, very quiet, painfully shy daughter was
allowed to hang with Tripp at Tripp’s house. The parents dropped
her off and Rocky took her home. Monday night, she’d been silent
except she spoke a little to Rocky and a little to Keira. She gave
Vera a wide berth, probably because Vera was trying too hard with
Giselle at the same aiming bullets at Rocky. Jasper, Layne and
Devin openly scared the shit out of her. But she seemed at her most
comfortable huddled with Tripp and Layne knew why. Tripp made her
laugh and there was something about the kid, something that made
Layne’s gut get tight, because seeing her laugh he suspected she
didn’t do it often, as in,
at all
. Tuesday night, she
started coming out of herself, letting Vera in but Layne knew for
the rest of them it was going to be a painful process.

With a house full of kids, his mother and
Devin, Layne and Rocky didn’t find much time to connect, at least
not the way he wanted to connect. They had zero chance to talk
alone and by the time they hit the sack, she was out within
minutes. Luckily, his dream Rocky hadn’t abandoned him. She woke
him in plenty of time for Layne to turn to his real Rocky and wake
her with his hands and mouth. It wasn’t as much as he wanted but it
was always great, it kept getting better and it was a whole lot
more than nothing so he wasn’t going to complain.

Stew, at least, was keeping his distance and
Gabby, at least, was doing what she was told. She’d deposited the
two K and she was laying low with her friend Brandy.

Layne turned right at the end of the wide
front hall and walked down the corridor to the auditorium. Quietly,
he opened the door, entered and kept his hand on it so it would
just as quietly close behind him.

Then he stood at the back and watched Rocky
do her thing.

She was sitting on the edge of the stage,
her ankles crossed, her kids in the auditorium seats in front of
her, one of them talking.

“You think Atticus Finch is hot, Ms.
Merrick?” the girl asked and Rocky smiled at her and rested back,
her palms on the stage.

“Oh yeah,” Rocky answered, Layne grinned,
leaned a shoulder against the wall of the entryway to the
auditorium, settled in and listened.

“He doesn’t even have a woman,” a boy called
out.

“A man doesn’t need to have a woman to be
hot, Dylan. He just has to be
a man,
” Rocky replied.

“Yeah, I can see it,” another boy put in.
“He shot that dog. That’s
all
man.”

“No,” Rocky shook her head. “That wasn’t.
But
why
he shot the dog was.”

The kids were silent, waiting for Roc to
impart wisdom and she didn’t disappoint.

“You see, I read this book when I was young.
I’d read it before I even
had
to read it, like I’m making
you do,” she told them. “When I read it the first time, it was all
about Boo.”

“Boo’s cool!” a girl cried out. “I
love
Boo.”

“Lots to love,” Rocky said. “Boo’s pure all
the way through.”

“What do you mean pure?” another kid
shouted.

“What do you think I mean?” Rocky asked.

“He’s a good guy?” the kid asked back.

“Yep,” Rocky answered.

“He’s kind,” a girl yelled.

“Right,” Rocky stated.

“He’s shut up in that house but he still
cares about Jem and Scout. He lives his life through them,” a boy
called out and Rocky nodded. “He looks out for them, keeps them
safe.”

“All kids need folks to look out for them,”
she told her class. “But motherless kids, well, they can have a
great dad and they can have a great brother but, in the end, Jem
and Scout were lucky they had Boo.”

At her words, Layne felt his chest seize and
the auditorium got deathly quiet. She hadn’t talked about that when
she was telling him why she loved
To Kill a Mockingbird
twenty years ago.

“Did you…” a girl started then paused,
calling up the courage to go on, “did you have a Boo, Ms.
Merrick?”

The auditorium grew silent again, this time
it was uncomfortable because it was a personal question, asking too
much.

But Rocky didn’t hesitate with her response.
“No, Brittany, I never had a Boo. That’s why, when I first read
To Kill a Mockingbird
, it was all about Boo.” She leaned
forward and put her forearms on her thighs. “See, that’s the beauty
of books. We get to take what we want out of them and it can be
different for everyone. You get a good one, you may even find what
you need. I needed Boo when I read that book the first time and I
got him, so, in a way, I
did
have a Boo.
The
Boo. The
second time, I needed my mind opened. The third time, I needed
Atticus. That’s why this is such a brilliant book. Firstly, because
it
is
brilliant. Secondly, because every time you read it,
you get something new out of it.”

“You needed your mind opened?” a boy
yelled.

“Yep,” Rocky answered. “You taste injustice,
even if it’s fictional, really
taste
it, it has a way of
doing that. Sometimes, you can never put the shoe on the other
foot. We can’t go back in time and know what it was like to be a
black person then.” Her eyes scanned the all white faces of her
class and she went on. “Even today, when things are supposed to be
so much better, not one of you can understand what it’s like to be
black, to live with the knowledge of what happened to your ancestry
and still face injustice. But that book makes us taste it and,
reading it, we know how bitter that taste is and we know we don’t
like it. But that bitter wakes you up, and when you wake up, you
open your mind to things in this world, you make yourself think.
Then you’ll decide you don’t like the taste of injustice, not for
you and not for anyone, and you’ll understand that even though all
the battles can’t be won, that doesn’t mean you won’t fight.”

“Like Atticus,” a girl called out.

“Like Atticus,” Rocky repeated on a smile
and sat straight. “Atticus Finch is the most beautiful man I’ve
ever met in print. He’s a good dad and he does what’s right, not
what’s safe, not what’s popular. What’s right. He’s gentle. He’s
smart. He’s strong. He’s decisive and he’s willing to follow
through with his decisions, no matter what the odds. Even if it
means doing something heinous, like walking into a street and
putting down a rabid dog. Taking the life of another being to put
it out of its misery and make people safe. If you only read that
one scene, you’d know the beauty that is Atticus Finch. Lucky for
us, we had that whole book to get to know him.”

“Is that why you think he’s hot?” a boy
asked.

“Yes, Zach, that’s why I think he’s hot,”
Rocky answered.

“I liked it when he sat outside the police
station and faced down the crowd,” another boy called out.

“That’s good too,” Rocky told him on a
smile.

“I liked the courtroom scenes,” a girl
shouted. “They
rocked!
”

“Yes, Luanne, they did. Except for the
verdict, they definitely rocked,” Rocky agreed.

“The verdict sucked,” a boy yelled.

“Did it make you angry?” Rocky asked
him.

“Well, yeah,” he answered.

“How angry?” Rocky asked.

“It ticked me off,” the kid returned. “I had
to quit reading for awhile.”

Rocky smiled at him and asked, “And why did
it tick you off?”

“Because it was wrong,” he replied.

“It was more than wrong, Will. It was
injustice,” Rocky jumped off the stage, the movement liquid,
landing gracefully on her high heels and she walked to stand close
to the class. “Open your minds and learn from this tale. Do not
stand still for injustice. If you know something isn’t right, find
your strength and stand against it. I’m not going to kid you that
it’s easy, it’s not. If you think Atticus Finch went home at night
and slept easy because he knew he was doing the right thing, you’re
wrong. He worried. He worried for his children. He worried for
himself. He worried for his town. He worried for the world he lived
in and his children were growing up in. He worried for the man he
was trying to defend. And he knew he was going to lose. He knew it.
But that didn’t stop him. Because even one voice in a wilderness of
ignorance is a voice that is heard by someone. Because every woman
and man, no matter their color or their religion, is entitled to a
good defense. And because Jem and Scout would grow up to be like
their father, spreading his wisdom, understanding his compassion
and sharing his strength which are the only, the
only
weapons we have against injustice.” She walked along the front of
the class but her eyes scanned the kids while she did it and her
gaze was focused, piercing every last kid. “If you’re nothing else
in this life, be wise, be compassionate and be strong because those
three things are
everything.
”

There was utter silence until the boy named
Dylan shouted, “I’m strong, Ms. Merrick, I can bench press two
fifty.”

The other kids hissed, called insults, some
threw wads of paper at him and one yelled, “You’re so full of it,
Dylan, you can’t bench press a Barbie.”

Rocky was standing in front of the class,
arms crossed on her chest and a smile was on her face.

“Dylan,” she called and the kid yelled back,
“Yo!”