The Biker's Brother

by Peter Edwards

  “Just listen!” Jamie is saying. His voice has that high pitch it takes on when he’s really worked up. That’s how he sounded the night he drove Dad out of the house for hitting Mom. At that moment, Jamie’s eyes reminded me of Dad at his worst. There was something burning and dark deep inside of him, something dreadful to stare into. Most of the time, Jamie’s eyes are soft and hazel and gentle, like Mom’s. Not that night. Not tonight either.

  Jamie definitely wouldn’t want me barging in now.

  I slowly pull away, hoping they don’t see me.

  Mom has already gone to work at the dollar store by the time I get home. After her late shifts, she sometimes gets a ride home from a friend, and often those friends are guys, but I try not to overthink things. She gets home when she gets home.

  The rowhouse where we live is no mansion, but I’ve got the attic pretty much to myself. I plan to move out at the end of the school year. That’s when, if all goes well, I’ll be getting ready for my first university training camp.

  I’m greeted at the door by our dog, a lap-sized Cairn terrier named Eddie who struts around like he’s a full-grown rottweiler. What he lacks in size he more than makes up for in attitude.

  Eddie’s somehow always at the window wagging his tail when I pull up in the Cruze. He doesn’t jump around and wildly run up and down the stairs like he used to during his puppy days, but he still makes a pretty good fuss. I know Mom is surprised by how much she loves him but she does. Part of it, I think, is just the feeling of having another loving heart beating under our roof. I’ll miss Eddie when I finally move out.

  I slip off my shoes at the front door and wait. Eddie sneaks behind me and takes one of them in his mouth. Then he darts past me and deposits the shoe in the living room. It’s our little ritual: he loves it when I chase him as he races by. Then Eddie heads back for the other shoe and tries to bait me into chasing him again. If I shout at him, it’s even better. I know he won’t really hide or ruin my shoes, and he knows I’m not really trying to catch him. We all like our games, I guess.

  I go to the fridge for a bottle of water before I head toward the attic and my bed. That takes me past the spot in the kitchen that always makes me flinch—the corner next to the dishwasher where Jamie dropped Dad with a crisp left to the chin that night, a decade ago. I’m not sure who was more surprised, my brother or my father. The expression on Dad’s face as he looked up from the linoleum was one of absolute shock. He stared at Mom as if he expected some sort of support, and then realized it was all over.

  Dad’s long gone now and I guess that’s best for all of us. He married a woman with a couple of kids of her own that he met in his new apartment building and we haven’t seen him much over the past few years. He now lives in Byron, on the edge of London, which means we could see each other if either of us wanted to make a little drive, but we don’t.

  Dad deserved that shot in the mouth that day, but he wasn’t always so bad. In fact, I can remember a time when he was my hero. When I was really young and afraid of shadows and the dark, Dad would look under my bed to check for monsters and then smile and reassure me that everything was going to be okay. I believed him. That feels like so long ago.

  Dad’s a bricklayer and he did some work as a stonemason too. All that manual labor took its toll on his back and knees, so he never played sports or even spent much time outside with me when he got off work. He just tried to relax, and often relaxing meant drinking.

  It has been a long day. It’s late and I need rest. I know better than to wait up for Mom. She won’t get off work for a couple more hours, and by the time she gets home, I’ll be sound asleep.

  It’s a little before midnight when my head hits the pillow. But when I’m finally lying in bed, I can’t sleep. It hits me just how uneasy I feel about what I saw in the townhouse garage between Jamie and Trent, and I think again about all the strange vibes at the barn earlier today. There’s always drama with bikers. Drama’s part of the reason they’re in the club, I think. Sometimes they have to do stupid things to make their lives seem interesting and to get attention, and it can be hard to tell how seriously to take the theatrics. Then there are the Popeyes. There’s something cold about them, even icy. They just hung around in the background at Trollop’s party, taking it all in. They didn’t seem to want attention at all, and this scares me even more.

  Chapter

  6

  I sleep in the morning after the party, in preparation for the night shift I’ve pulled at work. When I get out of bed, my body’s a bit tight from the workout, which is a good feeling in a way. I’m wondering what Brenda and Jamie have been up to since I last saw them, but I try not to dwell on troubling thoughts.

  Mom’s in the kitchen when I stumble in around nine.

  “Can I make you an omelet?” she asks. “Scrambled eggs? My boy needs his protein.”

  “Wow. Western omelet would be great.”

  “Coming right up.”

  She’s extra cheerful this morning. It’s sweet she’s in her homemaker mode, but I suspect she’ll serve up some questions along with my breakfast.

  “You saw Jamie yesterday?”

  Here we go.

  “Yup. At Trollop’s.”

  She doesn’t like Trollop, but over the years she has learned to tolerate him.

  “He look okay?”

  She’s talking about Jamie, not Trollop. Trollop never looks okay.

  How do I answer that? That last time I saw Jamie, he definitely didn’t look okay, and at the moment, I’m just hoping he didn’t pound the crap out of Brenda’s big brother. But I can’t say any of that.

  “Yeah, seemed okay, but I didn’t talk with him much.”

  Mom gets the code here. I don’t want her mining me for information about Jamie. I avoid eye contact as I turn on the coffeemaker.

  “Maybe I’ll give him a call,” Mom says.

  “Sure,” is the best I can do as I attack a protein shake along with the omelet.

  I appreciate that Mom’s trying, and I hate to see her worry about Jamie—but I’m worried too. Things seem more tense in Jamie’s world now that the Popeyes are hanging around.

  To be fair, Jamie has worried about us too. Things were pretty awful right after Dad left. Mom started to crumble. There was crying and anger and, sometimes, I got the feeling Mom resented Jamie for driving Dad away. Other times, she seemed to treat him like a hero. In those days, Mom had no trouble attracting boyfriends. She just couldn’t keep them. There were construction workers and a teacher and a couple of guys who I think were in sales. Once or twice, I came close to having a half brother or sister courtesy of a new blended family, but those situations always fell through. Jamie showed up at the house in his Annihilators colors on occasion, when he wanted to send one boyfriend or another on his way. He didn’t threaten them; he didn’t have to. He just didn’t smile much and they got the message.

  I remember one of Mom’s boyfriends walking into the living room when I was about eleven. I was watching one of those corny TV sitcoms where a wise father gives valuable life advice to his kids. “That’s not real life,” the boyfriend said. “Real people don’t talk like that.” I was happy when he moved on.

  Once I got to know Jake Doyle’s family, I realized that guy was wrong. There are families that talk like that! Jake’s family lives in a tidy subdivision where the appliances are new and functional. At Jake’s place, they don’t panic when something doesn’t work. They just fix it themselves, call in someone to repair it, or get a new one. I should head over to their place sometime soon for a shot of normalness. The Doyles have told me I’m always welcome, and they actually mean it.

  “What’s up for you today?” I ask Mom.

  “I have to wait around for the Internet guy. Why can’t they just give you a time when they’ll come by?”

  Mom tends to look at everything that goes wrong in our
lives as a personal insult or failure or attack, but that’s not the way it is at Jake’s place. Jake’s mom doesn’t blame God or the universe or karma or the government or herself or someone else when things don’t work. She just takes care of it and keeps on smiling.

  There was a time, back in grade nine, when Jake and I were at his place for a sleepover and he decided to empty the dishwasher, without being asked. I helped out and it only took five minutes or so.

  You would have thought he’d given his mother a new fully loaded Volvo.

  “You’re such a good son,” she said, and hugged him.

  Then she gave me a little hug too. That actually took my breath away.

  After breakfast, it’s off to the park for some stretches and running drills. I love how I can lose myself in football and all the training that goes with it. I started working out with our school’s track team a couple of years ago, and while I’m no sprinter I found that working alongside real runners helped my acceleration on the field. I lift my knees higher and swing my arms more efficiently now. Hurdling has also taught me to stretch my hips, which really helps.

  Today, I run a series of seven sprints with a twenty-second rest in between. The sprints range from twenty to forty yards, simulating a drive in a game. By the time training camp opens, I’ll have it down to fourteen-second rests between sets, and I’ll increase the number of sets to nine.

  I don’t go flat out today because I’m still testing my leg. Once I’m done, I’m a bit gassed but the leg feels fine. I switch to a series of drills running around cones. That forces me to change direction at speed and get low, a bit like during a game.

  There was a time when I would get self-conscious working out alone in the park. Now I don’t even think of anyone else.

  Mom’s out when I return home for a little nap but I’m okay with that. It’s not like we constantly check in with each other. Eddie’s full of pep as usual and makes his presence known, scooting off with my shoes again. It’s hard to feel alone with him around. My nap turns into a fitful six-hour sleep. I dream of something that leaves me with an unsettled feeling when I finally awake.

  I switch on the TV news. There’s nothing too shocking locally, so I guess Jamie couldn’t have done anything too horrible with Trent. This eases my mind, if only a little. Then I switch over to cable sports and allow my thoughts to drift back to Brenda. I wonder what she’s been doing all day, if she has plans tonight, if she’s thought about me at all. It’s a much better way to kill time than worrying about Jamie.

  But I can’t get rid of those thoughts completely. Around nine in the evening, I start getting ready for work. My shift doesn’t start until eleven, but I like getting places early. As I’m figuring out what to wear—it comes down to a choice of what’s clean and not too wrinkled—I think again about the scene outside the townhouse. The anger in Jamie’s face and the look of fear on Trent’s. My mind also drifts to Carlito and Brenda, and I wonder again what the history there is. Carlito has a baby face that girls find cute but is totally at odds with how I see him. There’s an unwanted image in my head of Carlito leaning over Brenda in an intimate way and it makes me sick and angry. Another image: her feeling safe with his tough-guy act. Wanting him. Smiling. Submitting. Encouraging. That makes me feel even worse.

  Chapter

  7

  I work overnight shifts at our local newspaper, the Sun-Sentinel. I got the job a couple of weeks ago through the defensive-line coach, who’s also my old English teacher. He used to play college ball with one of the editors there and he put in a good word for me. It’s the first time anyone in my family has worked at what could be considered a white-collar job.

  I’m a radio room night stalker, and I work from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., three nights a week. I monitor ambulance and fire department scanners and various police and community Twitter feeds and anything else of local interest I find on the Internet. I also copy links to trending stories in other media and send them around to our reporters and editors. The pay is okay, the job is often interesting, and I’m left with plenty of time for the gym.

  Part of my job is fielding random calls from the public and summarizing their complaints and suggestions for the editors. Often, I make notes about possible leads for the daytime reporters. It’s a good feeling when they take my tips seriously and follow up on them, and I see the resulting stories in the paper and on the webpage.

  It’s solitary work and that suits me. Sometimes I think the newsroom’s like a lighthouse—a silent sentinel watching over the whole world, overseeing everything and taking note of only the most interesting, meaningful things—though I definitely don’t talk like that when I’m there, and neither does anyone else. Thoughts like that feel like delicate little bubbles; beautiful but easily destroyed.

  In the newsroom tonight, it’s just me, an older police reporter named Bill Taylor, and the cleaner, a Portuguese woman who is just starting her shift.

  Bill took a buyout from the Toronto Star a few years ago after working there for decades. His cop daughter who lives in London had recently given birth to a daughter with Down syndrome and he wanted to be closer to them. He’s not snotty about working here, even though he has worked in far better places.

  There’s a big electronic board in the newsroom that tracks the number of “clicks” for each story on the paper’s webpage. The top items on today’s board include “Passenger turns violent after being told he can’t do yoga on plane,” a video of a trio of waterskiing albino squirrels from somewhere in Europe, and another of a monkey riding a pig like a horse, but backward. The most popular video this week is a semi-tasteful item about a group of women roller-skating topless past a local construction site to make some political point about nipples. Close behind it is a bikinied Swedish cop tackling some lout during an off-duty arrest on a beach. Further down the popularity board are stories on the high costs of housing for seniors, delays in cancer treatment, and the election of a new school board chairperson.

  “You’re working late,” I say to Bill, pointing out the obvious.

  “Late-breaking nipple-skating update,” he replies. Then he mutters, “Responsible sensationalism.”

  Another pause, and then Bill adds: “We do what we have to do so we can do what we want to do.”

  Bill reminds me of Ripper somehow. Maybe it’s that they both seem to know when to keep calm and accept things and when to fight back.

  Bill’s desk is organized chaos. I’m sure he has a pretty good idea which papers and files are piled where, and he doesn’t seem to care what the rest of us think. Over Bill’s desk is a sign that reads, Illegitimi non carborundum, which I’m told translates roughly to “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” Under that is a saying attributed to English poet John Milton: “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

  “Can I ask you a question?” I ask.

  “You just did. Want to ask another one? Sure.” Bill loves his corny jokes. Someone has to. Come to think of it, he and Jake would get along great.

  “Heard anything about what’s going on with the Annihilators?”

  I’m a bit anxious that I haven’t heard from Jamie since the party. And Bill is surprisingly knowledgeable about cops and bikers, although I’m not quite sure why. He’s also cool about sharing his information and expertise with me.

  “Yeah. Tense times. Popeyes are moving in. This could be the summer they set up a clubhouse of their own here.”

  “Yeah. Just seems tenser. Different.”

  It certainly had looked like something was about to snap between Jamie and Trent at the party, and at Goldberg’s townhouse. No matter how hard I try, I can’t push it to the back of my mind. And Trollop was obviously trying to impress the new bikers who were at the party, but why? I can’t shake the feeling that something horrible is about to happen; maybe it already has. It didn�
��t just feel like the usual rude fun at Trollop’s party. It felt like a powder keg about to explode.

  Bill holds my gaze a little longer than he needs to. He must know who Jamie is, although we’ve never discussed it. Our town is a small enough place.

  “How would the Popeyes coming to town affect the Annihilators?” I ask.

  “The big club could quietly swallow them up. Biker version of a hostile takeover. Or a python eating a pig. Or a rat.”

  Again the word “rat.” An image of Trollop’s T-shirt pops into my head; I force it out and listen to what Bill is saying. “Crystal meth is cheap and pays big. You don’t have the bother of sneaking it past borders. You just cook it up yourself. Some of the Annihilators have been dealing in meth, just on a small-time basis so far, but that could change. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Popeyes try to step in and take it all over.”

  “What’s the big deal about St. Thomas?” I ask.

  Bill stuffs a couple of folders from his desk into his briefcase, pushes his chair away from his computer, and slips his glasses into his shirt pocket. Enough writing for today.

  “Nothing really. Except that it’s close to London, and London’s a good market. It’s on the highway. It’s got a university and a college, which means lots of potential customers. The Popeyes like universities and colleges and highways. It’s also small enough that they can get cozy with the local cops.”

  “But why would the Annihilators just let them move in? And invite them to parties?”

  “Not all of the local club members want the Popeyes here. It’s dicey. It’s basically Trollop’s group that’s pushing for it.”

  “Why now?”

  “That skinny guy that the Annihilators have found is a good cook. The Julia Child of the meth world.”

  He’s obviously talking about Trent. He grins like he has just told a real knee-slapper, but I don’t have a clue who Julia Child is.