Brass Knuckles & Tattered Wings: Brass Knuckles & Tattered Wings Boxset, #1

By Martin Svolgart

After a freak accident killed his wife and son, Pritchard slipped into alcoholism to drown his sorrows at a blue-collar bar nearby to avoid the dead and empty house. But then a teenage girl asked for his help, and it turned his entire existence around.

 

These four novellas offer fast-paced action, suspense, and dark humor as Pritchard is forced out of his rut to face himself, his past, and his future. If you like seeing the underdog win by creative ways, this is for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MarLau Publishing
• Release date: Dec 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9788793966253

Book preview

Table of Contents

Brass Knuckles & Tattered Wings (Brass Knuckles & Tattered Wings Boxset, #1)

Brass Knuckles and Tattered Wings

Best Foot Forward

Day 191

Day 192

Day 193

Day 194

Day 196

Day 198

Day 199

Day 201

Trailer Park Princess

Table of Contents

Day 21

Day 22

Day 23

Day 24

Day 25

Day 26

Day 28

Day 29

Day 30

Home Field Advantage

Table of Contents

Day 47

Day 49

Day 50

Day 51

Day 52

Day 53

Day 54

Day 55

Day 57

Five Fabulous Angels

Table of Contents

Day 64

Day 66

Day 67

Day 68

Day 79

Day 85

Day 94

Day 95

Day 96

Day 101

About the Author

Et billede, der indeholder tekst Automatisk genereret beskrivelse

Brass Knuckles and Tattered Wings

Season One

by

Martin Svolgart

Copyright © 2021 MarLau Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

ISBN: 978-87-93966-25-3

Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

Cover design by Juan Padrón

Edited by Laura McNellis

MarLau Publishing

Denmark

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Best Foot Forward

Brass Knuckles and Tattered Wings #1

Season One

Martin Svolgart

After a freak accident kills his wife and son, Pritchard slips into alcoholism and spends most of his time at a blue-collar bar nearby to avoid the dead and empty house.

A teenage girl sometimes comes into the bar to try to get her drunkard dad to come home, but it rarely works. One day, in his intoxicated state, Pritchard accidentally trips over her scooter, breaking it. He promises the distraught girl that he’ll pay for it, but she’s used to being lied to by drunk men. To follow through, he gives her his business card.

A few days later, she calls him out of the blue, afraid, begging for his help. Her dad has gotten into a card game with bad people, and the debt collectors aren’t stopping with him.

The selfless act of responding to the young girl’s plea upends his world, leaving him only one way out: A walk in life he knows well, but one he thought he’d left behind. A life of crime.

Best foot forward, his late wife would always say. That was how she urged a man with a spotted past to strive to become a better man.

With danger around every corner, Pritchard must decide, will going back destroy him, or will it bring him full circle?

Table of Contents

Day 191

Day 192

Day 193

Day 194

Day 196

Day 198

Day 199

Day 201

About the Author

Day 191

ONE-HUNDRED-NINETY-one days. That was how many days ago he’d lost his way. Like the truck whose tire blew out and crossed into oncoming traffic. Three cars were hit. One was pancaked between two trucks. One behind them, and the one whose tire blew out.

The middle car held his entire world. The middle car took the most damage.

They didn’t suffer, the coroner said. They never saw it coming.

One-hundred-ninety-one days of waking up, going to work, paying the bills, avoiding going home to an empty house, and drinking to dull the inevitable pain of meeting that emptiness anyway, to sleep and start the same inane cycle of pointlessness.

The grief counselor, appointed by his workplace, had urged him to keep a sense of rhythm. To not alter his day to day too much as he worked on finding his way back from grieving.

The shrink didn’t know how silent a house, once inhabiting an eleven-year-old boy, could suddenly be.

But he’d followed her advice and hadn’t changed his habits too much. He’d only altered one thing. Instead of hurrying home to be with his family, he parked the car in the driveway, walked down the street to the bar, and ordered a straight up whisky with a twist and a beer. Cheap stuff. He didn’t care. It was an acceptable numbing agent.

Around nine, he’d hear her voice.

Best foot forward, Pritchard.

So, he’d pay the barman and put his best foot forward to go home and stand in that silent hallway, his heart pounding as he willed a shrill child’s voice to sound from upstairs, followed by thundering footsteps and the weight of his son crashing against him for a hug.

But there was nothing but the ticking of the old clock on the mantle, the hum from the fridge, and sometimes a radiator pinging.

He hated going home to that, so there he sat, looking at another empty glass at the bar. He wondered how many of those he’d had over those one-hundred-ninety-one days. An average of three, but the first three weeks, he hadn’t come there. Three whiskeys, three beers, and half a pack of smokes. That was how long it took to get himself home. Except on what would have been little Zack’s twelfth birthday last month. He hadn’t stopped after three that night, and his boss hadn’t even call to ask why he hadn’t come to work or called in sick the next day.

Pritchard was on the second round of scotch and beer that evening, contemplating some of the others in the bar. He knew why he was there, yet sometimes he found it...pleasantly distracting to try to imagine why the others hung out there. He liked to think that he wasn’t the sorriest SOB there. He was probably the one feeling the most self-pity, though. In fact, he was more than aware of that. But he didn’t care because at least he didn’t share it like some of the others.

He didn’t get so drunk that he’d sit and bawl the same sob-story in the last glass of the evening every night. In fact, he rarely spoke or interacted at all, suffering his grief alone.

He wasn’t the only regular there, and he’d come to know more about some of them from listening in on conversations. There were mainly three kinds, not counting himself. Some were so damn social they came there for the friendships, and they really seemed close. All with rough edges, but they were inclusive, and he usually liked that bunch. Mainly because they quickly got the drift, left him alone, and sometimes included him in a round.

Sometimes, a younger clientele would come in and shout and play darts, loudly, and they’d drink too much and at times brawl over a girl.

Pritchard didn’t mind them, either. They reminded him of his own youth. He’d been a troublemaker, and his mother-in-law, rest her soul, had literally dropped her teeth when she opened the door to meet Monica’s new boyfriend.

He chuckled at the remembered sight and how many times he and Monica had laughed about that expression and dentures flapping out the lady’s mouth.

Pritchard flagged the bartender down for the last set of the evening. He’d been there enough times for the bartender not to have to ask what he wanted. Sam merely served a new cold beer and topped off the glass. He didn’t even ask for money up front anymore. He knew Pritchard would pay before he left.

The third kind present were the ones raised there. In another time, at least. But alcoholics raised their kids even when not being home. They raised them through their absence to think that sitting at a bar was the norm, so when the kids grew up and were old enough to enter, they’d finally have some time with mom or dad and sit there and share the last drinks before the parent’s livers exploded from alcohol consumption. And then they’d sit around like their parents did, repeating the cycle.

Pritchard knew because that was how he’d started out as one of the young loudmouths. It was to see his parents.

And then there’d been Monica. She’d been like a unicorn. There was one of those at this bar, too, yet not old enough to change a life yet.

Frank, one of the social ones, always played a few games. Cards, dice, didn’t matter. He seemed a sociable guy, not the one to get mean when drunk, not aggressive, just...a happy drunk until he slid off the chair with a goofy smile on his face, and the others would carry him to a sofa to sober up for half an hour and then support the man in staggering home to her.

The pattern breaker.

His teenage daughter, looking like she belonged in a middle-class home with enough income for tuition. Bright brown eyes revealed intelligence and purpose. 

Monica had been the same, and once Pritchard had fallen for her, she’d hauled him out of the muck, telling him best foot forward, Pritchard, and we can do anything.

Resentment at the happy drunk once again waving off his daughter, as she tried to get him to come home and eat, filled Pritchard up for the umpteenth time.

Pritchard never got involved in anything there, though. 

Like so many times before, she gave up and left her dad to gamble, and like so many times before, he didn’t even seem to register that the five minutes he’d asked her to wait sometimes became thirty before she left, her shoulders slumping from yet another defeat at another drunken promise lost in an alcohol-drowned mind’s ability to tell time.

Someone had taught her to put her best foot forward because she seemed like she had things under control. Nice but cheap clothes, pretty, well-groomed. She certainly didn’t look like the daughter of the man with three days’ worth of old sweat stains on his olive green wifebeater. Was it even originally green?

None of his business, so Pritchard kept to himself and continued to glare at the scuffed-up man in the mirror. He wore a suit at work. Office job selling auto parts. Nothing fancy. And he drank in that suit. Alone. Always alone. He rarely stumbled upon people he wanted to have a chat with except for one of the bartenders. He’d seen things in life, too. It was easy to tell by his eyes. The way he weighed loud voices or body language. And his silence. Also, the way he held a bat when drunken customers got into it enough for him to have to break it up.

Pritchard always stayed out of those, too.

Like so many nights before, the girl waited more than five minutes while someone at her dad’s table lost a round, and the drinks were served.

In the mirror, usually telling Pritchard he looked more and more like he belonged, he noticed the glances she sent her dad as he emptied one bottle and received the one he’d just won.

How old was she? Sixteen? The glance she sent Frank could have belonged in the eyes of a mother, sending her child a disapproving look and weighing when and how to best correct their behavior.

As always, her gaze returned to her phone, her thumb working the screen, scrolling.

Another game? someone asked.

Yes, Frank said.

Dad! Her body language seemed to deflate. You promised.

I can play this one while I drink my beer.

She returned her attention to the screen, shrinking in on herself.

The game continued, and by the time they’d finished, Frank had lost the round. Accompanied by cheers and friendly banter, he got up, laughing, going to the bar, while the other three at the table shouted their winnings. Apparently, shots.

Frank returned with four shots and another beer for himself.

The girl threw out her arms and left, pushing the door open, hard, kicking it. Frank didn’t even look up.

Pritchard’s resentment grew, and he emptied his bottle, paid, and left, withholding the angry glare he felt like sending the incompetent father.

It wasn’t his business to meddle in.

Like the girl, he pushed the door open, hard, the fresh air hitting him, giving a momentary clarity of mind before the alcohol gave the last kick to the numbness he needed to face that dead house.

He turned and tripped over something, struggling to catch his footing, while the noise of something crashing to the ground resounded.

Hey!

A scooter.

The girl stood against the wall with her phone, staring at him and her scooter.

Oh, shit, I’m sorry. He managed to coordinate himself to get it upright, while the girl came over to protect her property.

You broke it!

The mirror hung limply from a few exposed wires, and a part of the body had broken away from the frame, exposing what looked like delicate parts of the engine.

Fuck.

I need this to get to school, she said, her tone giving away just how much the misfortune would set her back.

I’ll pay for it.

Yeah, right. He’d heard that tone from her every time she answered her dad, and it cut into him. He wasn’t like that. He was nothing like her dad.

Here, look. He fished out a business card and wrote his private cell number on the back. He had enough coordination skills to do that even in the limited light from the lamp post. Give the mechanic this and have him call me with the price. I’ll hash it out with him before he starts so you don’t get stuck with a bill. He handed the card over, earning a skeptical glance.

She snatched the card, looking it over. Auto repairs?

Yeah, and if you find a mechanic handling our brand who can fix a scooter, he’ll know he’ll get his money.

She tugged the card under the cover of her phone, then pocketed it.

Pritchard felt guilty. You want me to help you haul it home?

No! I’m afraid you’ll fall over with it again and break it completely. A bit of tape and I might be able to make it in tomorrow on time.

I really am sorry, Pritchard said. She rolled her eyes, shaking her head. What’s your name?

Why? she asked incredulously.

So I know who’s referring the mechanic with a bill.

She sighed. Rose.

Rose. That’s pretty.

I hate roses. I like lilies, though.

Lilies...Lily, then?

She snorted.

He waved off his own attempt at smoothing the situation a bit, and she dragged off with her broken scooter, a panel rasping against the ground. He’d suggest she follow just up the road and he’d help tape it together in his garage, but he was sure she was too mad at him, and he was an old fart at forty-three that she probably didn’t think it a good idea to follow anywhere.

So, he left it at that, hoping she’d contact a mechanic like he’d asked her to.

The trip home from the bar always seemed three times as long, and it wasn’t because he was so intoxicated that he zigzagged enough for it to be true. He was numb and uncoordinated, not skunk-drunk. And, to be fair, that scooter had stood just behind the door and far enough onto the sidewalk for there to be almost no way of seeing it.

He could argue that, but he didn’t plan on it. That girl had more than enough trouble on her hands, and her focus had been on getting to school on time. He respected that.

And there it was. The empty house, looking dark and uninviting.

He stared at it for a moment, then looked down at his feet.

Tomorrow still seemed irrelevant, yet the grief-councilor kept insisting that it would get better. That time indeed did heal all wounds.

One-hundred-ninety-one days.

How much time did she expect would have to pass? He’d asked her that to have some sense of how long he’d merely have to survive through the steps of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and at some point, with time...acceptance.

Her answer was useless, though. She had a degree in this stuff, so she had to know something. Grief is individual. That was her vague answer. Someone could get over having his family killed on a Wednesday morning in a few weeks, and he was six months out feeling as emotionally dazed as the day the police had come to his office to bring him the bad news.

His heart had stopped. That was how it had felt, anyway. Heat had spread from the center of his chest to incapacitate him, and numbness had followed.

That was all he remembered. The rest didn’t make sense. It wasn’t clear anymore.

The numbness remained, though, and that was what he tried to cancel out with alcohol. He wanted to stop feeling dead in his heart by blunting his senses.

Unlocking the door, he met silence and darkness.

Sometimes, he didn’t even turn on the lights. He didn’t want to face it all. He just shuffled inside, kicked off his shoes, and shrugged out of his jacket.

How he managed to clean the entire house every Saturday before going to the bar he didn’t know, but Monica had been a proud housewife, and he felt like he owed it to her. Everything was left exactly like when she’d walked out that door. Every Saturday, everything got done. And at four pm when he was done and looked around at the shrine to her, he left it and ordered more than three sets of scotch and beer so that he could sleep Sunday away and start another week of passing time toward healing.

Tonight, he merely hung his suit jacket on the coat hanger and climbed the stairs in the darkness. He brushed his teeth in the night-light installed. Monica had liked that, thinking it would be easier to fall back asleep if you weren’t blinded by light when having to take a piss in the middle of the night.

Finally ready for bed, he tossed himself under the covers and relished in the buzz that kept everything just outside of cognitive reach.

It never took long to slip into slumber under that buzz.

Day 192

SITTING ON THE EDGE of the bed, he rubbed his face, then glanced at the clock radio. He’d sat there longer than usual, feeling more hungover than normal.

He figured it to be sleep drunkenness. He hadn’t slept much that night, thinking about the girl whose scooter he’d knocked over. He’d pay for it, and she’d gotten his details, so why did she keep him up?

Finally, he reached the conclusion that it was the lack of faith in her eyes when he’d apologized and promised to pay. That drunkard dad was probably the reason. She didn’t believe him because he was slipping into alcohol abuse, and she took it as nothing more than another drunk’s promise never to be fulfilled.

That teenage girl had grown up way too early to tend to a household while her dad drank. No kid needed that.

Pritchard forced himself up from the bed and took a shower. A fresh shirt and a shave, and he was almost ready for a new day of existing. While the coffee ran through, he took out the trash, mostly consisting of containers from precooked meals for microwave reheats.

As the aroma of coffee made it to his nose, he wondered when he should expect the call from a mechanic. It would have to be after school. Good thing, considering he’d forgotten his phone in his jacket pocket that night.

He fetched it, putting on his jacket, patting the three pockets from habit to check that he had phone, wallet, and smokes.

He’d quit when Monica became pregnant. One week after they’d been killed, he started up again. Maybe to have something to pass the time? To numb? It was what ultimately brought him back to alcohol, he guessed. He’d diverted to what he’d known before her except he’d stopped training, too.

But he hadn’t slipped all the way back into bad patterns.

That was why he cleaned the house every Saturday. To focus on her and what they’d ultimately managed to build just like she promised they could if he’d just trust her and see what she saw in him. The possibilities of him being so much more. A good husband. A good father. A good man.

If he could see, too, that a life of crime wasn’t the only path in life, then they could have it all. The American Dream.

Best foot forward, Pritchard, and you can achieve anything.

She’d been right, and even though he’d lost his way in some cases after no longer being able to see her eyes filled with trust in him, he stayed in Glens Falls and kept his mundane job to be...more. For her.

The coffee ran through, and he filled his thermo cup, grabbed the keys, and drove off to work.

COME QUITTING TIME, he hadn’t gotten a call from a mechanic. Maybe Rose hadn’t trusted him to pay the mechanic. He’d have to see about that when she came to see if she could get her dad to come home for supper.

But as that thought entered his head, he sat behind the wheel of his car, the key in the ignition, ready to drive home.

The knocking over her scooter and learning what people, or she at least, saw in him should make for a lesson or something that impacted him enough to not go to the bar after work.

But he didn’t have a kid to disappoint anymore. He didn’t have a wife to come home to and be someone for. Just an empty house, sounding dead whenever he stepped through the front door.

He started the car and took it out of the lot, but something urged him to swing left and not right at the intersection.

Aimlessly, he drove around for two hours, his thoughts a constant battle to figure out whether he should go see if she came to the bar or go home. If he went to the bar, he was going to drink, he knew that. She was just the excuse. He’d done what he could to take responsibility for knocking over her scooter.

At some point, he pulled to the side of the road, wondering what the hell he was doing, driving around in circles. He felt the need for a drink. His body craved it. Not the hands shaking from withdrawals or anything—he hadn’t fallen that deep—but he wanted one, and going to the bar to see if she stopped by so he could hear about the scooter was just a lame excuse cooked up by his brain wanting a drink.

And, he guessed that was the point of driving around. Trying to break the pattern and not become what she’d seen in him the night before.

Monica had always looked at him and made him feel like he could do anything with her by his side. He guessed that was the deciding factor of it all. Her. By his side. Yet he didn’t like what he was becoming, and he could even imagine her disapproving glance. The way she’d lower her head and arch her brows.

All it took was a look, and he wasn’t the only man seeking approval from her. Hell, even her own dad had once sighed, nodded, and said, you’re right, my dear. Just from that look.

And the girl? She reminded him of Monica, except her disapproving look didn’t work on her dad. Pritchard snorted at the fact that, for him to sit in his car and contemplate it, then that look had worked on him. It helped him find the last determination to at least not go to the bar and drink three sets.

He needed to go through those steps the counselor kept talking about. Yeah, he wasn’t there. Coming home to a dead house was depressing as hell, and a bottle prolonged the inevitable every day.

Of coming home to nothing.

Yet he was left with two options. He could drive around until bedtime and face that house sober, or he could go home and...exist purposelessly until bedtime, haunted by memories he wasn’t ready to face.

His gaze landed on a liquor store on the opposite side of the road.

Dammit. Had his alcohol deprived brain made him stop there or was it a coincidence?

He couldn’t just go home and sit there for three more hours until bedtime, yet he was determined not to go to the bar. Guess he’d have to sit in his car until it was time to go inside and go to bed.

Yeah, that was the halfway there, he reasoned, so he got out of his car, bought a bottle of scotch, some soda, a few disposable cups, and a bag of salt pretzels. He then drove home and sat in the driveway in silence, having a few drinks and a pretzel, while contemplating whether to sell the house or keep the one place he had memories of Monica and Zack.

The feel of her wedding band on his pinky soothed him only a bit, and he knew the whole bricks and mortar speech. Like that was all a home was. Walls.

It wasn’t.

It was where he and Monica had sat at each end of the sofa and stared in marvel at the tiny human she’d built in her belly.

It was where he’d chased his son around the kitchen island while Monica wailed about flour going everywhere. But they’d finished and baked that ready to collapse gingerbread house.

It was where Pritchard had played Santa, where him and Zack had fought light-saber battles to get first dibs on the bacon, and where Monica had taught Zack to love epic fantasy stories by reading to him. It was where Pritchard and Monica had made out on the couch while Zack slept, constantly stopping to listen if their amorous sounds had woken the boy up.

It was where they’d tried for a second baby.

Come bedtime, Pritchard hadn’t made up his mind, and he simply brought the bag inside, put it on the floor, and kicked off his shoes, once again making it upstairs and to bed without turning on the lights.

Day 193

THE ENTIRE NEXT DAY was consumed by similar thoughts and the search for the willpower not to go to the bar to look for Rose. Again, the expected call from the mechanic hadn’t come in, and Pritchard drove around from quitting time until seven.

He then decided to work on some of those steps to change the man he’d seen in the girl’s eyes. The man he hadn’t noticed slowly change in the mirror behind the bar that he’d stared at every evening since going there the first time.

Monica believed he could do it—he knew she did. If there was a Heaven and one’s loved ones sat somewhere and looked down on people, then she’d be scowling at him. He knew that. He’d seen that in Rose’s eyes as she’d looked at just another dead-beat drunk with no future but the next drink.

So, he drove home and sat in the car for about half an hour, staring at the dark house. Maybe he should change the bulb in the light by the door and make the house seem less...dead?

Finally, he brought the ready meal he’d bought on the way home inside and turned on some lights. He popped the dish in the microwave, hating how the hum from the machine substantiated loneliness. Nothing else would prompt a man to stand around and wait for food to come out of it.

He ate it, standing in the kitchen, not seeing a point in sitting down since he didn’t enjoy the slop. It was just a necessary evil.

They’d always cooked together. The three of them. The stool to elevate Zack still stood pushed under the center island in the kitchen where he usually stood and cut the vegetables. And they’d sit down together every night and have dinner, talking about their day.

He’d help Zack with some of his homework, and when it turned to math and stuff, Monica would take over. Not because Pritchard couldn’t do math at that level—she was just way better at explaining it. And she was way better with numbers than he was.

Once he’d finished eating, he tossed the container and went into the living room.

He couldn’t remember when he’d last sat on the couch that he and Monica had welcomed the little human being home on. He knew for sure that the TV hadn’t been on since the morning of the accident, and Pritchard could still remember the