his two male cousins. Also, he thought it was funny that he was moving to a town with the same name as his last name...Clay Jackson from Jackson.
Clay never really knew what had happened to his father after his arrest. He asked Uncle Matthias soon after arriving in Jackson, but Matthias simply said that his father had been put in jail and was never coming back. Clay was glad about that.
Unbeknownst to Clay, Wade Jackson just so happened to be residing in Jackson as well, locked up in the state penitentiary. Even more coincidentally, Matthias Grant just so happened to be an officer in the Michigan Department of Corrections. Matthias’s career in the prison system had made him a firm believer in the “what goes around comes around” principle. Therefore, he personally arranged to have Wade Jackson placed in the worst cellblock of the prison. It was the cellblock specially reserved for the most uncontrollably violent murderers, rapists, and thieves within the Michigan penal system. It was poetic justice, Matthias thought, that Wade Jackson now spent his days and nights on the receiving end of a brutal sexual relationship with his African-American cellmate, a very large and rather psychotic inmate with a horrific violent streak, who was serving 10-20 for the aggravated assault and attempted murder of a female police officer who had pulled him over for speeding. The police officer was still in a coma.
Clay’s cousins turned out to be identical twins that were four years older than Clay. Isaac and Isaiah Grant were big like their father. They were only fourteen years old, but they stood nearly six feet tall. They were built like Matthias, strong and solid.
Isaac and Isaiah were the best cousins a boy could have. They looked out for Clay each and every day. One time soon after Clay had arrived at their home in Jackson, a neighborhood punk tried to pick on Clay, making fun of his light skin. Isaiah jacked the punk up against a building wall, holding the punk two feet off the ground with his forearm pressed firmly against his throat. Isaiah had a look in his eyes as if he were criminally insane, and he spit in the punk’s face with every other word he said while describing in graphic detail what would happen to him if he ever fucked with Clay again. Word soon got around the ‘hood that there would be no messing with the kid with light skin.
Isaac and Isaiah loved Clay like a brother. Even when they went off to Western Michigan University, they always made a point of coming back to Jackson to spend time with him. Isaac and Isaiah were all-state high school football players and each received a four-year free ride to Western, and sometimes they would invite Clay out to Kalamazoo to watch one of their games.
The Grant brothers were brutal. They were fan favorites of the Broncos’ football team, notorious for their ferocious tackles and sacks. During the season opener of their junior year, Western took on their conference rivals from Bowling Green State University. They fired up the crowd with their devastating defensive play, and the poor quarterback of the BGSU Falcons ended up spending eight weeks in traction after the brothers blindsided him, one high and one low.
They were good, solid players, but unfortunately the Broncos finished toward the bottom of the Middle Atlantic Conference every year the brothers played. Pro scouts never gave them a second look. So when graduation day arrived and they left WMU with worthless degrees in Psychology, they knew that gainful employment was not in the cards. They realized then and there that it hadn’t been such a good idea to let football groupies do all their homework and write all their papers for four consecutive years.
Matthias, who loved his sons dearly, wanted to kill them. Instead, he threatened to take them to the local Marine recruiting office the day after graduation. Isaac and Isaiah, who had no strong desire to spend the next several years in Afghanistan, promised their