Page 248 of Fury

But I could see

Your waves crashed high

I heard the noise

That terrible, fantastic noise.

You, you are the storm,

Flourishing high,

Humming low,

Lifting me up.

Daring me.

Daring me.

You are the storm

And I want more

My hand in yours

I dance in your wind,

Sing in your roar

A roar that’s mine…”

His voice was deep but also had this odd, breathy quality. It looped and dipped, scraped against his beautiful words, lifting them with this raw simplicity and a sense of intimacy that was staggering. The entire room spun in his notes, soared on those lyrics.

Beck was gifted.

My hand gripped Lenore’s arm tight as she listened with everything she was. Beck nodded at his mother as he sang and she lifted her chin, moving to the steady rhythm of his music, hearing him on a whole other level from the rest of us mortals. I held her and her movement, her emotion rocking through me.

“…a roar that’s mine.” Beck’s eyes closed, his hands stilled, his last note hanging in the air.

A second of sacred silence. Butler’s sharp whistles tore through the room, slicing at the magic haze gripping us. Heavy applause thundered in the bar. Lenore jumped up and down at my side like a teen groupie, clapping wildly. Butler and Tania, Grace and Lock, Jill and Boner were all on their feet clapping and whooping. I gave Lenore a quick kiss, and she ran to Beck. He leaned down and hugged his mom, lifting her up on the small stage with him.

“I like being alive,”she’d once said to me in a clear, sure voice in a dank, horrible darkness a long, long time ago.“No matter what, I want to stay alive.”

She’d lived. Oh, how she’d lived. She hadn’t allowed the brutal past to define or mar her. She’d become what she’d chosen, her own design. And she’d given that fierce passion to her son. And although I would’ve liked to have been alongside her for that, that’s not the way it had worked out. I had played a part in it, though, and I was glad and proud of that for the first time in a very, very long time, and in a way that didn’t hurt so bad, in a way that was humbling and just plain good.

I stood up and clapped loud and hard for my woman and her son.

69

“Really? You’ve never been toNebraska before?” Finger asked me, adjusting his sunglasses.

“Except for going to your club that time,” I said. “Otherwise, no. Never had a reason to go. Until now.”

He grinned. He was planning something. “I want to take you somewhere special. Get on.”

I snatched the helmet he held out to me and climbed on the back of his bike, settling into the saddle, my pulse racing. I pressed against him and a deep noise rumbled through his back. We took off and he punched up his speed, my arms tightening around his taut middle. He let the roaring bike hang loose underneath him on the smooth road, keeping our center of gravity easily at his core and in his control. I hadn’t forgotten what this was like; I had kept it sacred in my shrine of shrines all these years. My limbs clung to man and machine, heat searing through me, heart pounding, flying through the wind, flying at the sun.

We left the Black Hills and the expansive farm fields of South Dakota behind, and passed into northern Nebraska. A sign for the Oglala National Grasslands shot by us. Vast sweeps of short grass prairie, waves of burnt yellow and pale green punctuated with small hills of towering dark evergreens swept by us. This used to be all prairie in the old days, but trees were encroaching everywhere now.

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