“Look, my father, bastard that he is, is really pushing me to find your father . . . bastard that he is. I could use your help.”
“If he were here, you know I’d tell you. So would Charlie. But he hasn’t come near us since Charlie threw him in the street and he got run over by a truck. You know, after that funeral.”
Zé glanced off, not sure he’d heard that story correctly.
“All right, but if you do see him . . .”
“Wait.” Max looked at the house. “I’m gonna check the house. Stay here.”
She went to the back door of the house and let herself in. Lights came on in the kitchen and Zé realized that he could actually hear her moving around inside.
“Why are you smiling like that?” Dougie asked.
“I can hear her,” Zé replied, fascinated by all the new things he could see and hear and . . . smell.
He focused on Dougie. “What the fuck have you been eating?”
“Copperhead snake in a spicy black mamba sauce.” He grinned. “I was out for nearly an hour. Clinically dead for at least fifteen. Totally worth it.”
Max returned. She was munching on something from a bag, and he was relieved to see that the bag was a small plastic one. Not big enough for some poisonous viper. But, as she got closer, he saw that she had something hanging from her mouth.
When she was just a few feet away, he realized it was a scorpion. A live scorpion putting up a fight.
“He’s not in there,” she said, around the thing stinging her while she offered the bag’s contents to her cousin. He happily pulled out another live scorpion and immediately bit its head off.
“I appreciate you taking a look, cousin.”
“Well, I know MacKilligan luck. I swear all over the place he isn’t there, you leave, I go inside, and BAM! There he is.”
“Yeah, that is our luck.” He swallowed the rest of the crunchy scorpion. “But if you hear from him . . .”
“I’ll let you know. Unless Stevie sees him first.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You know how she is when it comes to our dad. And she knows what your dad is going to do to him. I can’t be the one who rats the fucker out if that happens. But if I see him and she hasn’t . . . I’ll call.”
“Thanks.” He motioned to the plastic bag. The one that, to Zé’s horror, he now realized was a wiggling plastic bag. “Can I have a few more?”
“Oh, here, take it. I have more in the basement.”
“Aw, thanks, luv.”
He walked off, waving as he went, another scorpion hanging from his mouth.
Max smiled at Zé. “So,” she purred, “where were we?”
* * *
She expected all sorts of responses to her very obvious offer, but “Nope. No way. Not in this life,” had not been one of them . . . or, in this case, three of them.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, following him into the house.
“I just watched you share a bag of scorpions with a man.” He stopped at the kitchen table and faced her. “Live scorpions! In what universe is that a normal thing to do?”
“We had this discussion at the restaurant. Remember? Different breeds and species eat different—”
“I get that. What I didn’t expect was to see you snacking on live scorpions! Like, ‘Hey, want a Twizzler? Maybe some M&Ms? How about a live scorpion?’ How are you not worried about dying? And before you say”—he dropped his low voice even lower—“ ‘I’m a honey badger,’ there has got to be more to it than that!”
“Uh . . . okay. When I was born, still in the cradle and, you know, before my mother went to prison, she used to give me live scorpions to play with. They’d sting me, I’d cry, but eventually I built up a tolerance for their poison. Now I eat them as a tasty snack because scorpion venom doesn’t hurt me. I barely feel their stings against my skin. And, to be honest, they are really tasty. And crunchy. Like tortilla chips. Tortilla chips that wiggle and attack me.”
When Zé didn’t say anything for almost a minute, Max guessed, “This isn’t helping, is it?”
“No. Not helping.”
She thought about storming away. Angry and insulted. But she wasn’t really angry or insulted. She simply understood he didn’t get it. So she took his hand and pulled him into the living room. She sat him down on the couch and grabbed all the controls for the television, the sound system, and the cable box. She made a few quick purchases on one of the streaming services and began playing the first one.
“What is this?” Zé asked.
Max sat down on the couch beside him. “The story of me. The next one will be the story of you.”
The documentary about honey badgers started and, after a few tense minutes during which she felt positive that Zé was simply going to walk out of the house and her life forever, he leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and his chin on his fists. For the next fifty minutes, he stayed glued to what was on the television. When the ending credits rolled, he leaned back again and looked at her.
“You guys are mean.”
* * *
Zé wasn’t sure what he’d expected to see in that documentary. But a small animal that challenged lions, hyenas, African wild dogs, cheetahs, leopards, African killer bees, and humans was not it.
But as he’d watched, he’d realized something very important: Max was definitely a honey badger. She didn’t seem as openly hostile as the wild honey badgers in the documentary, but everything else about her was like them.
Now, the question he had to ask himself was what did that mean to him? Was she someone he could live with? A not-nearly-as-hostile-as-a-wild-honey-badger woman with an amazing body, beautiful skin, and a healthy sense of humor. Or was Max MacKilligan going to be too much for him? He honestly didn’t know. At least not at this moment.
Seeing the documentary on jaguars might help because he still didn’t know exactly what he was about either.
“You want to watch this with me? ” he asked, pointing at the new credits rolling on the screen.
“I’m actually hungry again.”
She stood and began stripping off her clothes.
“Uh . . . Max. I’m, uh, going through a thing right now and . . .”
“Oh, dude, get over yourself,” she laughed.
She finished taking off her clothes. “I’ll be back later,” she promised before she shifted right in front of him, turning into what could only be called a giant version of a honey badger. Especially since most of them weighed, according to the documentary, no more than thirty-five pounds or so. This badger was a healthy one-hundred-and-twenty, just like Max.
Max trotted out of the house and Zé followed, curious to see if she could open the door with those ridiculously sized claws. She didn’t try, though. Instead she went to the window and opened it by using her snout. Then she jumped out and disappeared into the night.
“Yep,” he said to the air. “My life just keeps getting stranger and stranger . . .”
* * *
He continued watching the MacKilligan house from inside his vehicle. The man who’d come out earlier was no one. Definitely not the badger they were looking for.