Rough Men (2 page)

W
ill Daniels was suffering through a severe case of writer’s block.
His publisher had recently rejected his new manuscript, not that he faulted them for the decision, but if he wanted to belly up to the queue and keep this full-time writer thing going, he needed a story, and he needed it now.

But he had nothing. Hour upon hour, day upon day—nothing.

That had never happened to him before. Ideas had come from the wellspring of his mind as though they were supposed to be there; he’d never had to ferret one out before. They just, well, they just came to him, and he’d never even bothered to say thank you.

It was almost funny. He’d always had such a cavalier attitude about his ideas and work. “Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block,” he’d said on more than one occasion, but those words left a mocking echo now, to say the very least. The cursor was teasing him, blinking over and over again. He’d tried just about everything to force an idea from his head, and nothing he’d come up with had been worth a damn.

Sure, Will had started stuff, gotten up to a few hundred words on some of them, but reading them later, it was clear that they had obviously been forced out by a man playing at being a writer. It was so damn frustrating! Every idea he had was either too similar to something he’d read recently or just plain old sucked. The worst part was that it wasn’t like his publisher had such high expectations for him. All they wanted was a manuscript that would be easy to market and sell. Really, he should
have the world by the balls. But Will felt like he’d taken a melon baller to his brain getting his first two books on paper.

Will’s first published novel had been a YA book titled
The Fort
. A clean little story engine, it had just popped, whole, into his head: Three boys find an old tree house in the woods, and while they’re playing in it one day, they look down and see a man kill a young girl. The boys tell their parents, and a massive search is called, but no body or evidence is recovered, and the boys are accused of lying for attention. Since no one else is trying to solve the crime, or even believes that one was committed, the boys decide to solve it themselves.

The Fort
had sold only moderately well, but the reviews had been amazing. Will hadn’t minded a bit that it had brought him only a pittance. He had created something of worth that both his publisher and the critical world at large agreed had merit.

The reception to the second book had been much different.
Broken Bottles
had been written as a supernatural horror novel about a bartender, his friends, and the things that they were losing while they ignored the reality of their collapsing lives. That book had come easily to Will as well, though it had cut closer to the bone. Like his hero, he’d been working as a bartender his entire adult life; the bartender in the book had a caring wife and a fuckup for a son, just like he did; and they were both desperate to escape the bar scene and make life right for their families. The bartender in the book, a man named Trent, had been unable to escape his demons, both real and those created by a mind poisoned by drink. Will had better luck.

Broken Bottles
earned lukewarm reviews—nothing crazy terrible or crazy good, just sort of “meh.” In a perverse reversal of his first book’s fate, though, his publisher had sold the hell out of
Broken Bottles
, tepid critical reception be damned. And the second book’s sales lit up the demand for his first one. Fewer than six months after
Bottles
had debuted on shelves and Kindles,
Will really did escape from his bartending job, a fate Trent was not to share in the novel.

Retiring from the bar, and the bar scene, had likely saved his life and had certainly saved his marriage. Alison was a fighter. She’d been there for him while he’d worked at all hours and drank like a fish, but she’d turned colder on both counts the older he got, and colder still after his fortieth birthday. The success of
Bottles
had been a miracle for them, or at least as close to one as Will would ever allow himself to believe in.

But now, if he didn’t get his shit together, he was going to need another miracle, and the prospects of that were dim as hell.

Going back to the bar after leaving with such fanfare wasn’t an option his brain could quite wrap itself around. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t get the job back; he’d likely be met with open arms. He’d created most of his bad memories there years earlier, back when he still needed cocaine to stay up late and was hitting on everything with a short skirt and a pulse, marriage or no marriage. Alison had never busted him—not exactly, anyway. But his sad, drunken misadventures with other sad drunks had cast a sheen of doubt over their struggling marriage like a caul.

It had never been just about the infidelity, the bottomless bottles of booze, or the work that never seemed to stop. Alex, his son from a long-gone former girlfriend, had been as much of a problem as everything else combined.

Will himself had run with a bad crowd when he was young, had done a lot of drugs and some worse things that he wasn’t too proud of. But the arrival of his son, the departure of the boy’s mother, and picking just the right night to bow out of an ill-fated smash-and-grab B and E—all occurring within a year of one another—had combined to shake most of the wild from him.

Nothing like that had happened to Alex.

Will had never gotten the right handle on his son. God knew it wasn’t Alison’s fault, though she blamed herself, despite the fact that he’d been five when they’d gotten married. Alex had just
always been off, and the resentment over his missing mother just never seemed to go away, even when it would seem like things were fine for weeks and even months at a time. The boy had gone from skipping school and smoking when he was only eight, to shoplifting and drug use before he’d dropped out of middle school, to finally wind up in the alternative high school a year early. Not that he stayed there, of course. At sixteen, Alex was gone.

Will and Alison heard from him on occasion in the five years after that, but they’d never been able to spare the money he was looking for, and the trips to see him in jail were always awful. Alex was piling up a record that would have made even a young Will pale and forced the older one to the bar—but also, to the keyboard.

Now, sitting before his pitiless cursor, Will felt as stumped as he had raising Alex. When those threads had come loose in his fingers, Alison had picked up the pieces and let him hide from his damaged son in work. Writing had come as a blessing in the years after Alex had mostly disappeared, but now, sitting with no muse, no contact with his son, and a wife almost certainly expecting him to come to bed soon, it was all Will could do not to drink.

He still did partake, of course, and even put on like he could still be the life of the party if he would just let himself cut loose, yet that drinking was tempered, an act for friends that was trying to say that he really could just have a couple and still have fun. Alison had long ago forbade alcohol in the house—a reasonable rule, considering his unreasonable past. He didn’t think alcohol would help—not really. But it would be a temporary tarred patch of gravel to soothe the raw road of invention he felt, as though he were carving into his brain.

It had all become a pretty straightforward situation in his mind, and one he was scared to even tell Alison about. In order for him to stay away from booze—or a twelve-step program—he
had to write. If he slipped on a brown bag of the good stuff, he was one day closer to working in the bar again, and working there was what had inspired so many benders in the first place. So to make it all work the way he wanted it to, he needed to write, stave off the demon on his own, and not work in the bar ever again. Yet, at the same time, he felt a terribly selfish need to hang onto liquor as well. He wanted more than anything to be the man he never had been, the guy who had a scotch with dinner and could stop right there. He wanted to be himself, a man that the bar wasn’t in control of, but for that, he needed a story, and stories can be hard to find when you go looking for one, rather than letting one find you.

Checking the clock on the bottom right of his laptop screen, Will considered the time. 12:30 a.m. Though there was nothing to wake up for tomorrow but the fucking ever-blinking cursor, he’d once again neglected his bed and his wife for far too long. He folded the laptop closed and trudged upstairs, depressed and a little shocked that, once again, he’d gone a day with nothing to show for it and certainly nothing to offer his publisher for the following year.

Will brushed his teeth, spitting into the sink and running wet hands over his face, then made the mistake of looking up. He was somehow still surprised on a daily basis just how old, how haggard and gray, that young man he used to be was getting. It was like looking into a mirror that broadcast the future. He certainly didn’t feel different than he had as a kid. More easily tired, maybe, and certainly with less of a temper, but despite his mirror’s insistence that he was slowly turning into an old picture of his father, he still felt like Will.

He shut off the water and then the light, flicked off the hallway light behind him as he walked into the bedroom, and slid under the sheets, feeling Alison’s warmth and smelling her, two things he could never imagine tiring of.

“Nothing?” she asked the dark. “No luck?”

“No,” said Will. “But how did you know, and why aren’t you asleep?”

“If you’d been writing, I’d have heard your fingers, at least a little bit, when your fingers really started attacking the keyboard. Or did you forget killing a laptop on the last one?”

He hadn’t forgotten. He’d felt like an idiot when the keys had started turning to dead zones under his fingers. Not that the machine hadn’t already been on its last legs—dead pixels speckling the screen like dirt, shutting off on its own whenever it felt overworked. He’d taken to writing at the library before shifts, which had only come to light when Alison told him she was leaving if he didn’t either come clean about the girl or tell him what the hell was going on. When he’d come home from the bar that night—bombed—a new laptop was sitting on his desk. He’d written until morning, drunk or not, and the chapters smashed into the new keyboard that night had forged a part of
Bottles
that was among those he was most proud of.

Alison switched on the bedside lamp and then turned, leaning toward him on an elbow, her nightie shifting in a way that would have been very enticing if Will had managed to expel even a few words downstairs.

“You know,” she said, “I could go back to school. I only need a few more credits, a year tops, and I’d be all set. We’ve got enough money now to get us there, and it’s not like they’re not still selling.”

“If you want to go back to school, that’s fine with me, but don’t do it on my account. I’m the one who thought he was a big shot and ready to get out of the fucking bar.”

Alison frowned, and Will was sorry he’d mentioned the bar at all. Some things, though in the past, will always show a person’s scars off for the world to see, and for Alison, those scars had been left by Will, with the bar as an unwitting accomplice.

“I’m not going back,” he assured her. “I’m just saying maybe I left a little early. Maybe my muse needs me to work to generate ideas.”

“If that’s all your muse needs,” smirked Alison, “tell her to get your ass out back and weed my garden.”

She smiled at him, the same smile that had made him notice her in the first place, that had made him fall in love with her, and that made him still love her. She wasn’t like him: her face was maturing with age, not suffering like his, not turning into the father he’d hated and respected right up until the old man put his hand over his heart, said, “I feel like shit,” and died right there at dinner. A quiet joke in the family that could still get some yucks if his brother Isaac and he were drinking—the only time Dad had ever dared swear at the dinner table and it had taken him fucking dying to do it.

“I’m going to get some beauty sleep,” said Alison, “and you, my writer man, you get some sleep and find that muse and tell her to give you some words. You’re good at this. Beating yourself up is just going to make it worse.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said as she turned off the light. “We’ll both get those winks we need to look and write good tomorrow.”

Nestling back into him, she said, “Well, I’m going to look good tomorrow, either way.”

“Fair point,” said Will as he closed his eyes, and just like every other night when he’d been positive he’d never sleep, he was out before he knew what had hit him.

“W
ill.
” Alison was shaking on his arm like she meant to tear it off.
Her tone charged with hushed, dead-of-night panic, she said, “Get up, right now! I think someone’s trying to break in!”

He was awake then, awake and moving: peeling off the covers, opening the drawer of his nightstand, taking out the loaded Sig Sauer 1911 and SureFire flashlight. Alison was holding a 9mm Sig of her own. She looked terrified but determined.
Is tonight the night that our son and his asshole friends break in?
They’d been worried about it for so long, had been readying themselves for it, though they’d never said as much to each other. What else would the guns have been for?