The Biker's Brother

by Peter Edwards

  What’s interesting about the meeting is that, according to Bill’s sources, it took place at the time when Trent was killed. My brain kicks into overdrive. Anyone at the meeting has an alibi for the murder. Was Jamie there?

  I keep reading:

  Security was extremely tight for the Guelph meeting, as the local members of the Annihilators and Spartans are leery of betrayal from within their own ranks.

  Meanwhile, police have ruled out suicide as the cause of Trent Wallace’s death. While not a member of the Annihilators, Wallace was an associate of the club.

  Wallace’s body was found hanging from a beam of a club hangout where he was staying in St. Thomas.

  His death was originally believed to be self-inflicted but is now under investigation by the police homicide unit. Police haven’t yet commented about a suspect who has been taken into custody.

  A picture’s starting to come into focus. This supposed “secret meeting” happened during the time I lost contact with Jamie, and maybe it explains why Jamie has been so super-secretive. Talking about the meeting could get his friends killed by the Popeyes. It could get him killed too. While it seems crazy to say, a life sentence, in this case, would be better than what could happen on the streets. If you’re not breathing, not much else matters.

  Hopefully the story will push the police to investigate Trent’s death more rigorously and also make the Popeyes feel like they’re being watched. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking, but I need something to hang on to.

  Chapter

  23

  The article’s nice but Jamie’s still behind bars. There’s a big difference between providing interesting reading and digging up enough evidence to set someone free.

  I drive by the clubhouse minutes after reading the article, hoping I might bump into Ripper. I feel like he’s one of the few people who could give me some advice about what I should be doing. I’m at loose ends, restless; I want to keep things moving and know I have to stay active so I don’t get sucked into negative thinking.

  But it’s not Ripper I see when I pull up. It’s Brenda, sitting on the porch on a cheap collapsible lawn chair, looking abandoned and drained. It’s unusual to see women just hanging around outside the clubhouse alone, but I’m sure Brenda’s not worried about appearances. I get out of the Cruze and walk over to her, finally catching her eye when I’m just a few feet away. We haven’t seen each other or even spoken since Jamie’s arrest.

  “Hey.”

  Her voice sounds different. Vague, like she’s talking to a stranger. Distant. And a bit sharp. I’ve never heard her like this before.

  “Hey, I didn’t expect to see you here,” I say. I fidget with my keys, not quite sure what to do with my hands, or what to say next. “I’m a bit stressed,” is what comes out.

  She just stares. Not a warm stare.

  “Why?” she asks after a moment or two of awkward silence.

  “I feel like I’m doing what the cops should be doing—trying to prove that Jamie is innocent, I mean.”

  There. It’s out. She barely acknowledges that I’ve spoken, just stares at me again. No cute bunny rabbit eyes today. That seems like so long ago. Her eyes are hard and focused and a bit angry.

  When she finally speaks, it’s not anything I want to hear. “Maybe they’re just doing their job.”

  “Huh?”

  I’m stalling, trying to figure out how to respond. This is what I was worried about—that she’d believe the worst, and hate me for it.

  “Maybe they did their job.” Her voice is soft but firm.

  “Jamie didn’t do it. I know he didn’t.”

  A long pause.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  That’s not exactly a vote of confidence. If it were anyone else, I’d be angry—and I admit I’m gutted by her words. But my emotions clearly aren’t her top priority at the moment. And—and this is what I’m hanging on to—she stopped short of coming right out and saying he was guilty. I can work with that.

  Brenda knows about club business, probably more than she realizes. She’s hanging around the clubhouse, and between Trent and Carlito—no matter how squirmy thinking about her with him makes me feel—she’s had access to more insider talk than I have. I can’t afford to make her angry right now by defending Jamie. I have to take a different approach.

  “I need your help,” I finally say.

  “Huh?” She looks at me like I’m out of my mind.

  “I know you probably think I’m just sticking up for Jamie because he’s my brother,” I say, “but I really don’t think . . .”

  I’m desperate and I know it. It’s painful to ask my next question.

  “Can you ask around?”

  Her answer is even more painful.

  “I can ask Carlito. He’s in the loop.”

  Is that a note of pride I hear in her voice? Will asking him for information mean flirting with him? Who am I kidding? Bikers want more than flirtatious talk, and Brenda and Carlito already have a history.

  How will Carlito react? Will he tell Brenda about his relationship with my mother? If so, will Brenda laugh at Mom? Or be disgusted by her? Or by me? Will Carlito act like I owe him a favor? Can this go any lower?

  “You say you want the truth?” Brenda says.

  Now I’m the one staring. Her face is so much colder and more severe than when I daydream about her.

  “I think we’re all capable . . . ,” she begins. Then there’s what feels like a long, long pause, though it probably only lasts a second or two. “Of anything,” she finally finishes.

  I must look surprised or hurt or both.

  “Carlito’s not perfect but maybe he can help,” she says. “He’s not all bad.”

  “He’s . . .”

  I’m struggling to finish my sentence. If she cares for me at all, she must know how deeply her words are cutting. Her face hardens, and she glares at me for a horrible second.

  “He’s not the one charged with killing Trent,” she says.

  I can’t believe she just said that. Even she looks surprised. But it’s out there now.

  There’s nothing left to say—nothing that I wouldn’t regret forever. I get in my car and drive away.

  Chapter

  24

  I lie on the couch at Jamie’s house and try to calm down. I have the place to myself. It’s too early to go home; seeing Mom will just make things worse.

  My mind floats back to the spring after Dad moved out. I’m riding the school bus home and we pull up directly across the street from our house. I am carefully stepping off the bus when the other kids start to scream, “Fight! Fight!”

  Through my fuzzy dream vision, I look out toward our house and see a man charging up our driveway with a big knife in his right hand. Another man is running away. He crashes through the hedge and disappears. They both look like giants to me, but anyone who was angry and holding a knife would have seemed ten feet tall back then. They are both older than my brother, too, in their midtwenties at least. One has long, wild, scraggly hair, the other a shaved head and a goatee. I have never seen either of them before.

  Next I see Jamie on the front walkway, his fists clenched. He’s the age I am now—seventeen.

  What follows is like some crazy slow-motion scene from an action movie: first, the goateed stranger hoists the knife over his head and aims it down at my brother. There’s a collective gasp from the kids on the school bus. A few turn their heads away so they don’t have to see blood.

  I stand in stunned silence on the steps of the bus as Jamie glides to his left, toward the knife, and raises a forearm to protect his head. He doesn’t look at all scared or even surprised. It’s as if he’s been waiting all of his life for this.

  I feel like I’m watching some movie-screen commando, not my big brother. His right leg sweeps up and his shin
connects hard with the man’s right inner thigh, freezing him where he stands. A slight pivot and then Jamie delivers two more blows directly into his groin, with the studied arc of a punter sending a football high into the air. The man crumples to the ground like he’s melting. I am too far away to hear much but I can imagine his groaning.

  The kids on the bus, especially the boys, let out a collective moan. On the playground, we call striking the groin “bagging someone,” and no one ever finds it funny when it happens to him. As we watch the real, adult version, I can feel some of my classmates’ eyes shift toward me in a combination of fear, disgust, and awe.

  Jamie scoops the man up by the underarms and drags him into the garage, oblivious to our stares. I’m off the bus now, standing alone under a tree across the street, and can only gawk as Jamie backs out in the family car and drives away. I can’t see the guy, but I guess he’s in the car somewhere. I’ve wondered about that more than once in the years since, but I’ve never asked Jamie about it.

  Over the next few hours, I keep expecting the cops to arrive at our door but they never do. The next I see of Jamie is later that day, when he praises my mother for the roast chicken she’s made for dinner, insisting it’s as good as a meal at Swiss Chalet, the local restaurant where, he tells us, he took his first date years ago. As dinner conservation goes, it’s painfully normal, even dull, and all I can do is watch him in amazement. I love Jamie, but for the first time I realize there are parts of his life he cannot or will not ever share with me.

  After that day, the rough kids at school seem to warm up to me and the straight-arrow kids give me a wide berth. Fear and respect aren’t the same thing, but they are at least close cousins. Soon, Jamie announces he is moving out on his own.

  Years later, my brother was my biggest and loudest fan during school football games. I loved seeing the look of pride on his face when I ran out onto the field and hearing him cheer when I made a tackle. We’ve talked a lot about football over the years, but never about that man with the knife in our front yard. We’ve talked about girls too, usually at Jamie’s instigation.

  Once he told me, “The best advice I can give you is this: don’t fall in love with a girl who can’t generate her own self-esteem.”

  “Huh?” I remember replying. I think I was twelve at the time.

  “You need someone who already feels good about herself. If she needs you to make her feel happy and you’re not around, she’ll go looking for someone else to do the job.”

  It didn’t mean much at the time, but I can see now that he thought these were some seriously wise words.

  When I think back to those days and months after Dad left, the smell of beer and stale wine and tobacco comes rushing back. So does the memory of Mom with glassy red, vacant eyes. I had never felt embarrassed about her before, but that’s when things started to change.

  It was Jamie who picked up the slack, making my lunch for school and teaching me how to ride a bike and stressing the importance of eating carrots and spinach and not just potato chips. In time, his fight with the man with the knife on our lawn became like something out of a dream, or a particularly scary bedtime story.

  I have always believed that I know the real Jamie. The real Jamie tucked me into bed and didn’t tease me if I cried at night because I still missed Dad sometimes. The real Jamie defended people. He didn’t attack them.

  The real Jamie also often wandered away and got lost. Now it’s my job to bring him back.

  Chapter

  25

  Maybe I’ll crash here at Jamie’s for a few days. The image of Carlito lounging around in our living room is stuck in my mind; the last thing I need is a repeat performance, or a scene with Mom.

  The idea comes to me late that night, when I’m on the verge of nodding off. Wherever I’m crashing, one thing is for sure: it’s time to have a serious talk with Ripper. For all of his hippy-dippy Zen master talk, Ripper can be surprisingly practical and clear-headed when the situation calls for it—and this situation calls for it. Jamie will be back in court again soon and we need a lawyer. That means I need Ripper to get the club to help with the legal bills. I don’t want to beg but I’m feeling desperate. If all else fails, I’ll stay home with Mom next year and work at whatever job I can get, but I know this will mean saying good-bye to my football dreams. Jamie might get a life sentence behind bars. I might get one in this town.

  Traffic is pretty light the next morning as I drive to Ripper’s place, which sits next to an auto body shop a couple of blocks from the clubhouse. I imagine he’ll make time to talk with me, but I know there’s plenty he won’t tell me. For example, the meeting in Guelph. I’m sure Ripper knew all about it, maybe even attended or planned it, but I’m not going to hear about it from him. He probably also won’t tell me anything about why Jamie was arguing with Trent that night, although I’m sure he knows something about the bad blood between them. And I don’t think I can ask him about which members of the Annihilators want to patch over to the Popeyes and which ones are actively resisting an alliance. My guess is that Ripper’s supporters are all resisters and Trollop’s supporters would love the power of a Popeyes patch.

  As I drive, I think of how furious Trollop must have been to see the photo of Ripper at Trent’s funeral in the Sun-Sentinel, after he’d discouraged the Annihilators from going. Trollop doesn’t seem to get that he’s no longer president; Ripper just humors him, but in Trollop’s mind, at least, there’s a power struggle going on between them.

  A connection with the Popeyes could be lucrative in terms of potential meth-trade profits, and Trollop likely sees Ripper as getting in the way of that. As Bill explained, nearby London’s a big fat market just waiting to be tapped. But Ripper’s almost prudish about drugs. He doesn’t like anything used to excess; he told me once that he didn’t trust anything that doesn’t grow in the ground.

  Ripper lives in a small, detached two-and-a-half-story brick house with a garage that he added on one side. It’s not posh, by any stretch, but it is cozy in its own way. When I pull up, Ripper is on the front lawn, looking grubby and holding a shovel.

  “What’s up?” I say.

  “Moving Jimmy Hoffa.”

  He’s referring to the old Teamsters boss who went missing under mysterious circumstances back in the 1960s. A lot of Ripper’s jokes assume you’re at least fifty years old.

  His neighborhood is in the midst of a slow gentrification, though things are moving particularly slowly on Ripper’s street. There are Volvos and Subarus in the driveways now, although you don’t have to look too far to see rusted-out vehicles on front lawns and uncut grass. And at Ripper’s place, it’s like the calendar stopped sometime back in the 1960s.

  “I was hoping to pick your brain a bit,” I say. I may feel desperate but I’m at least trying to be cool.

  “If you can find it, you can pick it.”

  “I’ve got a bunch of things I’d like to ask you.”

  “Such as?”

  I really need to ask about a lawyer for Jamie, but I decide to ease toward that. “What’s the problem between you and Trollop about?”

  Normally, this might be too forward, but these aren’t normal times.

  “So many things. One example: once he and a couple of his buddies showed up at the London Pride Parade waving Confederate flags.”

  Ripper maintains a poker face but his eyes seem to roll for a second. I stifle a sigh. So this is how it’s going to be? I’m going to have to wade through all of the nutty stuff before I get anything real? Fine, I can play this game.

  “When?”

  “Ten years ago or so.”

  I would have been in grade two. Jamie wasn’t in the club yet. No wonder I’ve never heard about it.

  “What was his point?”

  “He doesn’t need a point.”

  “Huh?”

  “His point is that he need
s attention. That’s generally the way things start and end with him.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere. Ripper’s opening up. I need to keep him talking.

  “So what happened?”

  “Me and a couple of other guys really called him out on it. Thought we were going to fight it out right in the clubhouse.”

  “You were really that mad?”

  “I was furious. We’re a nonconformist lifestyle. Outsiders. We’re supposed to be cool about things, not jerks.”

  It’s kind of funny to think about Jamie’s biker friends as committed social dissidents, but Ripper is deadly serious.

  “I told him the people marching in that parade had more parts than he does,” he says next. He smiles at that memory and then continues. “That was what really got him. Plus, he did it wearing club colors. He dragged all of us into his stupid drama. Made us all look like idiots. There’s a reason we don’t talk a lot publicly.”

  “To keep the police guessing?”

  He just rolls his eyes, like a wise, cranky uncle. “Sure. But also to keep a certain image. If you keep your mouth shut, people might at least think you have something smart to say. If you’re screaming like an idiot at a parade, waving a flag that has come to be associated with racism, it’s public knowledge you’re a moron. Especially if you wind up in the paper like he did. Better to keep some mystery. Things were never the same after that between me and Trollop.”

  “I get it.”

  “Can you really get me something?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m dying for a coffee.”

  He’s joking, but not really.

  He’s sitting on the front porch steps now, looking his age for a change. The digging can wait.

  “Not a problem. Why don’t I run over to Starbucks? I could use a jolt myself.” I’m more relaxed now. “What kind?”