by Paula Cox
Seeing her like that, oil washing off her hands and into the plughole, just makes me want her all over again.
“You’re still the grease monkey you always were, Brat, even with your fancy new hair.”
She flicks her hair. “Is that your way of saying you like it?”
“Ha-ha. We need to get goin’. We’ve got another long ride back to Denver, and I don’t reckon Grizzly is just patiently waiting. Maybe we oughtta call him.”
“Maybe,” she says, but neither of us makes for the phone.
I come up behind her, wrap my arms around her shoulders, and kiss her on the cheek. “You’ve already called,” I say. “I heard you, last night.”
She bristles, avoiding my gaze in the mirror. “That wasn’t Dad. That was Heather. I was checking on Charlotte.”
“Our daughter,” I say. For some reason, after last night, the idea of Charlotte being my daughter ain’t such a bad thing. The fear, the terror, doesn’t grip me. I want to meet her. I want to be there for her. I want to try and make something good of myself. I thought killing the Skulls would make me feel better, but it didn’t. Maybe being some kind of father will.
“Our daughter.” Brat nods, giggling, and disentangles herself from me. “Let’s ride, Sky.”
“Let’s ride, Brat.”
And so we ride. The twenty-some-hour ride back is just as grueling as it always is, and I’m constantly shocked to see that Brat is not only keeping up, but outpacing me in some areas. We stop a few times along the way, since there isn’t the time crunch there was on the way here, but mostly we just ride. Morning turns to night, and then to deep night, and then to early morning, and we just keep riding until the clubhouse comes into view. We pull up in the parking lot and climb from our bikes. Brat removes her helmet, showing her flushed cheeks, red and glowing in the moonlight.
“Wow,” she says, grinning. “I don’t think that’d ever get old. I can see why you have all those tattoos now. And let me guess,” she goes on, when she sees me looking down at the piece-of-shit junker, “you’re going to blame the bike for those parts where I outpaced you.”
“Nah, Brat,” I say, turning away from the bike. “That was all you. You’re a goddamn devil on wheels.”
She giggles, and I’m about to laugh before I see Clint and Grizzly come walking from the clubhouse. Brat sees my expression and turns around. Soon the four of us are stood in a crude huddle, me and Brat on one side, Grizzly and Clint on the other. Clint makes this bitchy tutting noise which makes me wonder for the millionth time how he’s climbed so high up in the club. How does a man like that get the respect of the men? But the answer is obvious. Violence. In this life, it’s always violence.
“So you’re home,” Grizzly mutters, looking at Brat. “Don’t you think it’d be a good thing to call your old man and let him know you plan on going to a fuckin’ suicidal trip, Brianna? Don’t you think a man who’s already lost his wife might not like the idea of losing his daughter, too? Don’t you think your daughter deserves better than a mother who goes out of her way to put a goddamn gun barrel between her eyes?”
Brat just stands there under this tirade, all the while Clint grinning this shit-eating grin which makes me want to turn his nose into a mess of blood and bone. But I can’t, not with the President here.
Grizzly rears up like an old bear, as grizzled as his name, and points his finger down at his daughter like a claw. “Don’t you reckon it would’a been a good idea to think of your fuckin’ child before thinkin’ of—of him , Brianna? I know you’ve got a soft spot for Slick. Fine, I may not like it, but fine. But Slick knows what he’s doing. Slick was briefed. Slick knew the danger. You didn’t. You could’ve gotten yourself killed—”
“I’ve already heard all this from Slick!” Brat cries, shaking her head, stepping back. “What do you think the first thing he did when we got into that motel room was? Do you think it was to make sure I was okay? No, it was—” She stops, realizing she’s mentioned the motel room, and seeing her father’s face. I see it, too; Grizzly knows, or at least guesses, what happened in that room. Staying in a room together alone might not be damning on its own, but when you take into account that time outside the Irishman , and the trip into the mountains, it don’t look good.
“I want you away from the club for a while, Brianna,” Grizzly says, face hardening. “You’re going somewhere else for a while, to get your head on straight. If you come by here, you’ll be turned away.”
“What are you talking about—”
“And you,” Grizzly goes on, turning to me, “follow me. We need to talk—about respect, about honor, about a hundred other things you don’t seem to give a shit about.”
Bri makes to protest, but then Grizzly cuts in. “If you don’t leave, I’m gonna have Clint and his men make you leave. I know. You don’t think I will. You don’t think I have it in me. Test me. The mood I’m in, I won’t think twice about it. Go and see your daughter.”
Despite the threats, she’s about to protest again when I place my hand on my shoulder. Grizzly doesn’t look too happy about it, but he’s going to work me over anyway, so fuck him. “It’s okay,” I say. “Do as he says, Bri. Go and see Charlotte. She needs you. I’ll be fine.”
She turns to me. I can see it in her face, what she wants to do. She wants to throw her arms around me and kiss me. She wants me to hold her. She wants both of us to run away, get Charlotte and run far, far away. But she knows I can’t do that. This is my club, my father’s club, and I’ll always be loyal to it. Even if they have got assholes like Clint playing puppeteer.
“I’ll go and see Charlotte,” Brat murmurs. And then, throwing a look at Grizzly, she says, “And I’ll tell her you say hello, Slick.”
Grizzly don’t look none too happy about that comment, but before he can reply, Brat is on her way, and Clint and Grizzly are leading me into the club. Clint’s grin is so self-satisfied, so oily, that all I can think about as we walk through the bar to Grizzly’s office is if he would be grinning so much with a bullet in his head. Spike is in the bar, shooting pool. He raises his eyebrows, asking me what’s going on. I just shake my head.
In Grizzly’s office, Clint stands at his shoulder whilst he sits in his throne-like chair. I take the small chair opposite, and wait for it to begin. Bri shouldn’t have said anything about the motel room, that’s for damn sure, but it’s like Grizzly doesn’t even recognize what the fuck I just did for the club. I tell myself not to get angry, to calm down, but I can’t help but grip the arms of the chair so hard I reckon they’d snap of if I did it much harder.
“I’m basing you in the clubhouse,” Grizzly says, in a matter-of-fact tone. “You’re not gonna leave the clubhouse until I say you can. I’ve sent Brianna away for a while, so with you here, there’ll be time for you two to come to your senses.”
“Fuck that,” I say. It’s more like I hear myself say it. Clint bristles. Grizzly clenches his jaw.
“The fuck’d you just say to me?” Grizzly snaps.
“This is bullshit,” I say, trying to keep my tone steady. “You’re goin’ to put me in prison again, and for what? You know what I just did for this club.”
“Or for yourself,” Clint cuts in smoothly. “Maybe you blew those pricks to kingdom come because you were scared of what they might say about you, if they were allowed to live.”
I slam my hand down on the desk, sending pens and papers lurching. “After everything I’ve done for this fuckin’ club!” I roar.
Clint has his gun out, and Grizzly has his hand near his waist, where his gun is holstered.
After a few moments, I lean back, realizing that attacking the President and the VP, even if they’re being unreasonable assholes, is no way to get ahead.
“You’ll stay here until I say you can leave. I’m damn sick of seein’ you paw all over my daughter like some kind of fuckin’ animal.”
I’m about to speak—not even sure what I’m going to say, but reckon I need to say something—wh
en Grizzly lays his fists flat on the desk and stands up, leaning over me. This is the man who raised me. I’ve seen him angry hundreds of times. But this is different. This is more than anger.
“If you don’t leave my daughter and granddaughter alone, I’ll put you in the fuckin’ ground.”
Chapter Fifteen
Bri
Spring turns to summer and Dad doesn’t let me see Slick, not once. For the first few days, I call the clubhouse almost nonstop, sitting in the back of Heather’s consignment store on the office phone hitting redial. Mostly nobody answers, but when they do, and they hear it’s me, they hang up. When that doesn’t work, I spend the next week or so going by the place. From circling the clubhouse on my bike, I see that Dad has really lost it; he has Slick barricaded in one of the back rooms, with bars on the window. When I try to approach, one of Clint’s goons appears as though from nowhere and just shakes his head. He wouldn’t touch me, I know, but he would tell Dad. I ask myself, what would Dad do, really? What can he do? And then a hundred scenarios come into my head. He could cut off my money. That’s the main thing. Since I’m technically his employee, he could fire me. He could cancel our health insurance. He could make it so I couldn’t pay Heather for babysitting. Before all this, I never thought he’d do that. But now, after locking Slick away? I’m not so sure.
It doesn’t help that Heather is firmly on Dad’s side. I work in the store with her, sometimes in the back sorting clothes people bring in for donation, and sometimes in the front stocking or serving customers. The store is a small, cute place on the end of a row of independent restaurants and record stores. Heather calls it No Chain Street, because there isn’t a franchise store in sight. When it’s quiet, Charlotte in the high chair in the back, cooing on the baby monitor, or out on the shop floor playing with blocks or books, Heather chooses her time to go on one of her legendary tirades.
“Say what you want about Grizzly . . .”
This is how she starts it, every time. I’ll be hanging up blouses, sorting shoes, counting cash, checking stock, labelling items, dragging in bags of donated clothes, or sitting in the back eating a cheese sandwich, and she’ll appear at my shoulder like some warped version of an angel and mutter, “Say what you want about Grizzly . . .”
When she says this, I know that some twisted, Slick-hating, life-hating argument is on its way.
“Say what you want about Grizzly,” she says one day, as I’m collecting clothes from the floor after helping a customer with a miniature fashion session, “but you have to admit, Brianna, he has a point on this one. I think so, at least. Think about it, give it some real thought. What is Slick, really? What are any of them? Come on, now. Let’s be real.” She lowers her voice. “He’s a killer, a—”
“Leather-wearing bandit. I know, Heather. I get it. You’ve said that before.”
She rolls her eyes. “Just because I’ve said it many times, it doesn’t mean it’s not true.” With this display of logic out of the way, she goes on, “So isn’t it really in your best interest for you to sever this—I suppose you would call it connection—with him? Is it really necessary to hold onto him like that, to pine and fuss?”
“I don’t pine,” I mutter, taking the clothes into the back, where she can’t follow me. I sort them, set Charlotte down for a nap in the cot, make sure the baby monitor is functioning, then return to the shop floor. When I walk back out, it’s like the conversation never stopped, even though around forty-five minutes have passed.
“You do pine,” Heather says, in her I-know-best tone. It seems everything she says this summer is in that tone. “You don’t think I see that look in your eye, Brianna? Every man that comes in here, fat or old, black or white, you think it’s Slick for a second. I see it.”
“You’re imagining things,” I say, making sure to keep my back to her and praying for a customer. She’s eerily right, and it freaks me out that she can read me like that. I’ll be watching the door and a man will enter, usually trailing his girlfriend or wife, and for a split-second, I’ll want to run over to him and wrap my arms around him. And then, out of the mirage, an old ginger guy will appear.
“I don’t think so,” Heather says.
Then a customer enters. Gratefully, I go and serve her. Working here, despite Heather’s constant yammering, I’m starting to realize that I might have a joy for fashion. I can’t say an eye for fashion or a skill in it, not yet, anyway, but there’s something strangely peaceful and fulfilling about looking at a woman and then at an assortment of clothes and asking myself, What would suit her best? The most fulfilling part is when someone comes in who isn’t a complete fashion model, who thinks that nothing will ever fit them. Seeing their face light up when I’ve found an outfit which accentuates their best features. It gets to the point that I begin to have repeat customers who come by at least once a week. Heather starts calling me the Little Fashionista (when she’s not berating me, that is). Sometimes, when the store is closed in the evenings, I’ll walk between the racks before going home and study the clothes, mentally compiling outfits. And sometimes, as I’m doing this, I’ll catch a glimpse of myself in the shop window: shoulder-length hair, summer dress, short heels, face enhanced with makeup. Is that really me, the tomboy who rode dirt bikes with Slick and spent most of her childhood flecked with oil?
I start to entertain the idea of a life outside of the club, a life in which I don’t spend my days in a garage, surrounded by killers and robbers. I love the club and I would never betray it, but when Heather says that it’s leather-wearing bandits who go there, she’s not wrong. I start to wonder if perhaps she’s right, if I should take Charlotte and find our own home, stop pretending that I’m just a temporary employee, and go to school at the community college. Maybe study fashion on the side. I have a taste for it; I could learn. I want to learn. Maybe, in a few years, I could open my own store. Or since Heather’s store is doing so well, she could open a second branch and I could manage that. I like choosing the outfits, layering the clothes, but I also like talking to the customers when they bring in donations. It’s a simple, easy, civilized life. A civilian life. I sometimes even dream about it—but then I dream about Slick far more.
It’s the same every time. I’ll be dreaming about this picturesque, simple life in which I am the manager of a consignment store, a fashion student, and a mother, and everything will be perfect. Life will be free of those huge, dramatic moments that fill up club life. There will be no explosions, no bike races, no patching up wounded club members. The dream will linger on this for a time, but then I’ll think of Slick, and it will all come crumbling down. Without Slick, it means nothing. Without the man I love—and I do love him, I’ve always loved him—without the father of my child, what’s the point? I could sink gracefully into this life if Slick was allowed to sink with me. But nobody wants that to happen. Heather thinks he’s too rough. Dad thinks he’s too—too what? Too much like him, perhaps? The world is determined that we can’t be together, and that just makes me all the more determined to be with him. Even if I wanted to forget about him, I couldn’t; every time I look into my daughter’s sky-blue eyes, I see my Sky.
“You pine,” Heather goes on, after I’ve dealt with the customer. “I see you staring off into space. And don’t think I don’t know about your phone calls and your trips to the clubhouse. I know all about them, missy.” She folds her arms, pouts at me. Heather’s the only woman I’ve ever met who can make a pout vicious. “I’ve talked to your father about it.”
“Hitting on my dad again, were you?” I shoot back.
Heather grumbles, and falls quiet. Saying that she wants Dad is the only way to make her be quiet sometimes. Maybe it’s because she really does have an interest in him, which is complicated for a whole host of reasons. It would make her a hypocrite, wanting to be with the leather-wearing bandit. And it would be awkward, since she and my mother were best friends. It’s good ammunition to have.
But it doesn’t stop her.
Heather’s apartment is a three-bedroom with ample room for all of us. The living room is the crowning achievement: a huge open-plan space with hardwood flooring, a massive seventy-inch television, an even bigger bookshelf, and a ping pong table off to one side. It looks like the living room of a much younger person, but it turns out Heather loves ping pong, and loves cranking up the surround sound and watching big dumb action movies. We’ll be sitting in front of this massive TV, in the middle of some stupid action movie, and she’ll blurt out from nowhere: “You haven’t even played the field properly.”
I hate this argument, really despise it. It’s like, okay, so I haven’t fucked every man from California to New York. Does that now mean that I don’t have the right to choose who I want to be with, especially if the person I want to be with is the father of my child? Because I haven’t been out with Tim Programmer and Michael Editor and James Commuter, does that now mean that I can’t choose who I want to love? When I voice all this to Heather, she just gives me that same I-know-best look, a look I am quickly coming to associate with the urge to slap her across the face.