by M. O'Keefe
I grabbed her, yanking her into my arms, and she put her strong, strong arms around my neck and held on. She held on as tight to me as I was holding on to her.
And that had never happened in my life before.
ANNIE
The explosion rocked the trailer, yanking Annie out of a dream about being lost on a college campus, wearing corn-detasseling clothes.
“The fuck?” Dylan cried. He dove over her in the bed, squashing her into the mattress.
The silence after the explosion was heavy, and after a long minute the breeze coming in through the screens smelled funny. Acrid.
“What was that?” she whispered against Dylan’s shoulder, still trying to sort out reality from dream. His heart thundered against hers.
“Stay here,” he said, and rolled off her. He pulled his pants on from the floor. Shoved his feet into his boots. “Annie? Promise me you’ll stay.”
“Okay.” She pulled on her own clothes and shoved the curtains aside, trying to see something through the window. “I’ll stay here. For a few minutes.”
Dylan left, and she went into the dining room to try to see something out those windows. But all she saw was black sky and Ben¸ slowly coming out of his trailer, a flashlight in his hand.
Dammit, she thought. He needed to be in bed. She didn’t think he slept much on Friday night and all day today he’d been outside on his porch, smoking joints, trying to keep the nausea away. She grabbed her phone, dialed 911 but didn’t hit send, then she went outside.
There was a group of people standing in the middle of the path past the rhododendron, looking up at the sky. On the horizon, over the edges of the tree line, the sky was a shifting collage of purple, orange, and yellow.
“What happened?” she asked, stepping up next to Dylan.
“It’s a fire,” he said.
“What’s over there?” someone else asked¸ a woman in a robe whom Annie hadn’t seen before.
“The strip club,” Ben and Dylan said at the same time.
Annie hit send on her phone and lifted it to her ear.
“What are you doing?” Dylan asked.
“Calling 911.”
“What?” Ben looked at her, too, and she realized they were worried about Max and cops. Once an outlaw, always an outlaw, Annie guessed.
Well, too damn bad.
“People could be hurt,” she snapped at them.
“911, what is your emergency?”
She told the dispatcher about the fire and gave her the highway exit number, and within a few moments there were sirens splitting the quiet of the night.
“What do you think happened?” she asked, putting the phone in her pocket.
“Nothing good.”
“Do you want to go?” she asked. “I mean, there might not be much you can do, but at least you can see for yourself—”
“Don’t go, Dylan,” Ben said. “There ain’t nothing you can do for him. He’s either in there and dead, or he’s gone.”
“Yeah.” Dylan sighed, his eyes on that far horizon. “You’re right.”
He wrapped his arm over her shoulder and leaned, just a little, into her. As if to say, Help, I can’t hold all this.
She grabbed his hand and held on, as hard as she could.
“That ship is going down,” Ben said, the sky illuminated by flames they could not see mirrored in his eyes. “All the rats will be swimming away.”
Ben gave Dylan a look she couldn’t quite decipher.
The sirens stopped. A thick column of black smoke was billowing into the air, over the trees, drifting on the wind toward them.
“Pops,” Dylan said, suddenly. “You’re moving in with me.”
“The fuck you talking about?” Ben asked. Ben and Annie both turned to Dylan with their mouths open.
“You’re moving in with me and Annie, to my house near Asheville. The hospitals are better.” Dylan shot Ben a hard look. “Fewer rats.”
“Are you speaking in code?” Annie asked.
Ben sucked his teeth for a second and then nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “Keeps everyone safe.”
“Hey,” she said, pushing against Dylan. “Not that I’m not thrilled with this, but what rats are you talking about?”
The sound of a car rolling over gravel very slowly made them turn, and a shitty blue sedan came into view on the far edge of Joan’s old trailer. The lights were off, and everything about that car screamed trouble.
Dylan pulled Annie behind him and Ben shifted sideways, making the wall of male shoulders complete.
The driver’s-side door opened and Annie fought the urge to hide her face in Dylan’s back, expecting Max. Or that guy Rabbit, or any of the other players Joan had mentioned that day in the café.
But it was Joan.
In dark jeans and a black sweatshirt. Her face filthy, her hair covered in a dark cap.
“Joan!” Annie cried, stepping past Dylan, shaking off his hand when he tried to grab her wrist. “She’s my friend,” she said to him, but he looked dubious.
“Are you okay?” she asked, coming to a stop a few inches from Joan. “Are you hurt?”
“Fine,” Joan said, her face tense and still beneath that ash and dirt. “I am. Really.”
“You were in the fire?”
“Barely got out. Look, I don’t have time to talk. I need my bags from my trailer.” Beneath her skin, Joan was frantic. A manic terror pulsed out of her.
“Are you in trouble?” Annie asked.
“Not if I can outrun it. Please, get my bags.”
“Yeah. They’re…they’re actually in my trailer. Let me go get them.”
DYLAN
I watched Annie go, but Joan watched me. The edge of her lips beneath that ash were white and her hands were in white-knuckled fists.
The woman looked about as guilty as an arsonist could.
“You start the fire?” Ben asked her. The old man must have been reading my mind.
“Nope.”
Hmmmm. Pops shot me a look that told me he wasn’t sure if Joan was lying or telling the truth.
“You sure seem nervous,” Pops said.
“Yeah, well, I got Max in the backseat of my car.”
I bolted past her and grabbed the passenger door handle, but she got around me, leaning her weight against the door so I couldn’t open it without jerking her out of the way. Which I put my hand on her wrist to do.
“Listen to me,” she said, hands up. “Rabbit tried to kill him—”
“What?”
“He’s been shot. Twice, actually. Flesh wounds. The one in his calf, I need to take the bullet out.”
“Get the fuck out of my way!” I jerked her sideways and opened the door. My brother’s half-conscious body nearly toppled out onto the ground.
“Jesus,” I groaned, catching him before he landed in the dirt. Pops was beside me, useless and frail, but trying. I had to give him that.
“I tried to tell you,” Joan said.
This is how it ends, I thought, with my brother bleeding out in the backseat of some shit car, shot by his own fucking “brothers.”
God, what a fucking cliché.
Annie came back out holding a duffle bag and a half-full black plastic garbage bag. “Oh my God,” she cried and then dropped the stuff, bolting across the dirt to help me.
It took some work, but we got him back inside the car. I shut the door and ran around to the other side and opened that door. Pops followed as fast as he could.
Max was bleeding from a head wound and from his calf. The wound on his calf was tied off with a red bandana that was totally saturated with blood.
“Max,” I said, crawling as best I could into the car. “Max, are you all right?”
His eyes fluttered open and fluttered shut again.
Pops leaned in beside me. He made a soft groan in his throat at the sight of his oldest boy. The rope that tied this moment, this awful blood-soaked moment, to my father, to the way he raised us and the choices he
gave us, was strung tight around his neck. I could say something about the sins of the father, wrap my fist in that rope, and pull. But one look at the old man’s ravaged face and I could see that he was already doing it.
“Annie,” I said. “Go get some towels.” Her eyes wide in a white face, she nodded and darted off again, and I tried to see under the bandana tied around Max’s leg.
“The bullet is buried in the muscle. No bones,” Joan said. “I can get it out and I can stitch it up. I’ve got materials in my stuff. But we need to get out of here.”
“He needs a hospital,” Annie said, arriving with an armful of towels.
“Hospital won’t work,” Pops said. “It’s a gunshot. There will be too many questions.”
“And we can’t stay here,” Joan said, shoving her bags in the trunk. “I’m not sure if anyone survived that explosion, but if they did, they’re looking for Max.”
“You mean they’re looking for you,” I said.
“They might be.”
“Who did this?” Pops asked.
“Rabbit,” Joan said.
“He dead?” Pops asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s total chaos over there. But Rabbit wasn’t alone. He had the whole MC on his side. This wasn’t an assassination. It was a coup. You have to believe me. He’s not safe here.”
“Where are you going to take him?” Annie asked.
“Someplace safe,” she said. I stood up and stared at her. “I swear to God.”
“What about his head wound?” Annie asked. “He’s probably got a concussion. It might be serious.”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” Joan said, slamming the trunk down.
Max’s legs spasmed and I looked back down into the backseat of the car. His eyes were open but unfocused. He looked like a character out of a slasher movie, covered in blood.
He was shaking his head at me. “D…E…A. Not. DEA.”
“What’s he saying?” Pops asked.
“ ‘Not DEA,’ ” I said, looking back at Joan. “You taking him in? Gonna make him turn rat? Because he’ll be staying here if that’s your plan. We can take care of him.”
Joan took a deep breath.
“I’m not DEA,” she said. “I never was.”
Annie gasped. “But the badge?”
“Fake. I got about twenty fake badges in that bag. I’m not DEA, I’m not…anything.”
Holy. Shit. This drama kept getting worse and worse.
“Then what are you doing?” I asked.
“Trying to stay alive,” she said. “And trying to keep your stupid brother alive. Listen to me—we don’t have much time. But where I’m taking him, he’ll be safe. He’ll be away from the club, which,” she licked her lips, “you know he wants.”
Guilt pierced me.
“How do you know?” I asked. Max wouldn’t have walked around broadcasting that fact; it would have gotten him killed even faster.
“Because I do. Because your brother and I are…friends. Sort of. You have to trust me.”
I knew what kind of friends Max had. Liars. Cheats. Killers.
This woman had proven to be a liar. Was I just supposed to believe she wouldn’t kill him?
“We trust you,” Annie said, speaking for all of us. She glanced over at Pops and then at me.
Fuck. This right now, this moment, in the backseat of Joan’s car. This was the best shot my brother had. If he stayed, he’d be killed or behind bars.
“Go. Go,” I said. I looked back down at Max, whose eyes were shut, but he was still shaking his head.
“Sorry, man,” I said to him. “But you’ll figure this one out. You always do.”
I shut the door, and Joan went around to the driver’s side. Annie wrapped her arms around Joan before she could get in the car and Joan just stood there. Stunned.
“Be careful,” Annie said, and let her go.
“Take care of him,” I told Joan, meeting her eyes over the hood of the car.
“I’ll try,” she said.
And that was the best I could do for my brother: let a con woman drive away in the middle of the night with his body bleeding in the backseat.
I pulled my old man back as I stepped aside and let the car drive away.
Pops sagged in my arms, and for a second I felt like I was the only thing holding him up.
It was me and the old man in the darkness of the wide world.
And then he shook me off and took a lurching step toward his trailer.
“Ben,” Annie said, going after him, and I almost told her not to waste her breath, but if anyone was going to get through to him, it would be her. “Let me help you,” she said, and reached for him.
Pops stepped away from her touch and turned to face us. I had to look away. The pain, visible and real and crippling, was all too much.
“Annie,” he said, his voice gruff. “I beg you, if you feel any affection for me, any…kindness. Leave me alone. Go with Dylan. Live a life that looks nothing like the one you had before. But leave…leave me here.”
Oh fuck. Annie was crying.
“But you’re moving in with us,” she said.
“There’s no need anymore—you heard Joan. Rabbit is dead.”
“We don’t know that for sure—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he cried. “Don’t you get it?”
“No!” she yelled back. “I don’t get it. Because you need someone to take care of you. I’m going to take care—”
“I’m not Smith,” he said, and glanced over at me. “You don’t get a second chance. None of us do. This is how I want to die, Annie. Alone. You…Dylan…Max.” An awful sound broke out of his throat, an emotion so thick and wild he couldn’t keep it down. “It just hurts too much.”
Tears spilled from the old man’s eyes. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him cry. He sucked in a deep breath and shuffled away. Annie looked at me like I should do something, but I didn’t know what to do. I had no resources for this.
“Really?” she asked. “You’re going to just let him go?”
“For right now I am,” I said. “Come on.”
I could feel her wanting to resist me. Wanting to punch and smack. And I could give her that place to let that out. I could let her take a swing. As many swings as she wanted.
She could take that anger and that pain and fuck it out of herself. I could be the tool that she used to make her body feel so much that the pain in her heart went numb.
I knew how to do that. I’d been doing that all my life.
The minute I got out of jail I found ways to make the pain in my heart smaller and smaller and smaller. But it never went away. Never. It came back, found new avenues. New ways in. And it was the same old shit, every time. And fuck. Fuck if I didn’t realize, looking at this beautiful woman, that sometimes you just had to feel it. Sometimes you had to let the terror and the anger and the fear tear you apart.
So you could feel what came next.
And like that, just like that, I was blown open.
“I love you,” I said.
She blinked and reeled back. “What…what are you talking about?”
“I love you.”
Saying it again I only felt it more. This feeling in my chest, wild and fire-breathing, it gained shape. Edges, soft ones that didn’t hurt.
“I love you.”
That time I smiled.
She glanced over her shoulder at the smoke, and then over at Ben’s trailer, where he’d disappeared. “Now? You realize this now?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “I don’t know how this usually happens. But this…right now, I looked at you and thought of a dozen ways I could help you not feel this. I could fuck you. Or let you hit me.”
“I don’t want to hit you!” she cried. “Or frankly, at this moment, fuck you.”
“I know,” I said. “But those are things I’ve been doing for years so I don’t have to feel the shit. All the bad, nasty, awful shit that life brings. And I’v
e gotten so good at not feeling that shit that I don’t feel anything. Do you get that?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “I…totally get that.”
“And I just realized, baby, right now, thinking of how I could take this pain away from you, I just realized that you have to feel it. You gotta make your way through all the bad stuff to get to the good.” I was standing in front of her now, my hands in her hair, my thumbs on her lips. Tears were gathered on her lashes and I brushed them with my finger so they fell down on her cheek. A silver trail.
I sucked one off my finger and it was salty and sweet and bitter. Maybe as all the best things were. I didn’t know; I was so unfamiliar with the best things.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said and wrapped her arms around my neck.
For a few seconds we just stood in the slowly gathering light. It came from the east, from behind pink clouds, and it rose to take over the darkness, to push it back, bit by bit.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I guess I feel like fucking you now.”
ANNIE
The next morning Annie was camped out on Ben’s front stoop. He’d opened the door about twenty minutes ago and told her to leave. That he wasn’t coming out again. And so far he was as good as his word.
She knocked and banged and yelled, but he was totally silent inside his trailer.
And Annie’s heart was breaking.
“Hey.” Dylan came to stand in front of her, wearing his jeans and a red button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“Hey,” she said resting her head against the hard planes of his stomach.
“He’s not coming out?”
“He’s not even yelling at me.”
He sighed and stroked back her hair. “Well, let’s leave him alone a while.”
“And do what?”
“It’s Sunday,” he said, and she glanced up at him in time to see his smile, crooked and endearing. A shot right to her heart. “And you owe me a dare.”
For a second it didn’t register and then she laughed at him. “You want to go to church?” she asked. “Now?”
“Well, it’s church time, so yeah.”
Truthfully she didn’t need much convincing. Her heart was heavy and the world seemed like a dark and cold place right now. Annie didn’t know if church could help. She didn’t know if anything could. But she had to try.