Stay Vertical by Layla Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page A

made Sadie concoct this elaborate lie—it was the fact that he rode a motorcycle ? “What the fuck, Kino? So just to get out of telling me she willingly fucked some motorcycle club guy, she lies that she doesn’t know who my real dad is? This is some seriously fucked-up shit. I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe this.”
    Lurching to his feet, Lytton paced the small office. He was beyond incredulous. He had just discovered that his birth father was much more like him than Kino ever was. Lytton rode a Harley. Lytton acted out. Lytton liked to be top dog. Lytton got into a lot of fights.
    “Son, you have to understand. The times were different. We didn’t want you to start idolizing Cropper Illuminati, to think that his lifestyle was glamorous, to start following that way of life like his other children did. We wanted you to focus on your Apache roots.”
    “Fuck my Apache roots!” There were a hundred times Lytton would live to regret these words, but now he loathed his Apache roots more than anything. Those fucking roots had brought him nothing but poverty, self-hatred, and now shame he hadn’t even known he had. “I’m only a fucking Tomahonky anyway, a fucking half-breed, and you want me to focus on my Apache roots? You know what? You and Sadie can just go fuck off and die.”
    And Lytton had stormed proudly out, knocking aside a dummy wearing a US cavalry uniform. Without thinking, he snatched a bugle off a display stand and angrily blew on it as he stomped to his ride.
    It actually helped him to work off some steam, and he wound up blasting a sort of lopsided, ironic, and supremely pissed-off reveille as he straddled his saddle. All sorts of nons wearing shorts and Ray-Bans and carrying Whole Foods canvas bags gaped at him as though he were performing some battle reenactment. The ones that wore the tribal design sweaters had figured out they were one-sixty-fourth Apache. They eagerly tried to highlight that by playing lacrosse and talking about “using every part of the animal.”
    Well, fuck that. Lytton thrashed it down the state highway, chucking the bugle with all his might. It clanged with a satisfying crash against a boulder, leaving all the tourists to wonder when General Crook would lead the charge.
    Lytton had ample time to work up a new head of steam as he rode north toward Pure and Easy. He had seen Cropper Illuminati a few times around town while buying groceries and shit like that. He had a tendency to look favorably upon the guy. Once Lytton had established the Leaves of Grass on Kino’s property, he had had nothing but hassles with The Cutlasses. But not once had any member of The Bare Bones tried to trespass on his farm or in any way harass him like The Cutlasses had.
    And of course he’d seen the Illuminati Trucking equipment around town, working on highway jobs, shoring up cave-ins from flash floods, fixing overpasses. He had even paused in front of The Bum Steer Bar and Grill to admire Ford Illuminati’s ’98 Harley Softail. He had respected their tough, supreme, and arrogant lifestyle. The Bare Bones always had much better sweetbutts than The Cutlasses did. The Cutlass sweetbutts all looked strung-out, with scabby faces and pencil-thin eyebrows. The Bare Bones club whores at least looked somewhat fresh, as though they had all of their real teeth. It was as if they’d all banded together and decided to stick with the studs of The Bare Bones because they were treated better over there.
    Or that’s what Lytton had assumed. It had even crossed his mind to patch in to a club like The Bare Bones, but you couldn’t just buy your patch in an outlaw club like that. You had to earn it, which meant “prospecting” for a year at least, doing the grunt work every fully patched member threw at you. No thanks . Lytton considered himself instead a nomad. He wore a leather jacket when it was cold, but of course no cut or rocker. He didn’t even wear boots, preferring the Nikes because he