by Paula Cox
I return to the living room and drop onto the couch, stretching my legs out before me and staring at my feet. The other choice …I am not opposed to it, in principle, but there is just something that makes me unsure about the idea in the physical. And Rust …I throw my head back and let out a groan. I have to tell Rust before I do anything, don’t I? I’ve read about women who’ve gone ahead and had abortions and later the men have found out and—I don’t think I could do that to Rust, even if Rust is just supposed to be my taste of an alpha, even if I have spent the last month avoiding him.
I try and picture the scene in my mind, how he will react, but the truth is, though I think there is something more there than just the sex—a little something, a whisper of something—I don’t know him well enough to imagine precisely what he’ll say or do. He’ll be surprised, of course, but will that surprise turn to anger? Will he simply ignore me? Will he tell me to go away and do whatever I want about it?
I swallow, somewhat shocked by the way that thought makes me feel, as though already I am forming a connection with this fledgling life inside of me, as though already I am starting to become attached.
“I have to tell him.” I murmur, going through into the bedroom and lying on the bed: the bed in which I have woken countless times imagining that he is beside me, naked, horny, ready to fuck like animals again just as we did in my office.
I think about where to find him; I don’t know where the club is and, anyway, the idea of rocking up to a motorcycle club on my own without knowing if he’ll be there makes me nervous. Perhaps that bar? What was it called…yes, the Englishman. Maybe I’ll ask the barman for Rust’s number.
I think back to how he offered me his number and how I brusquely refused him, wondering if he’s going to forgive me. Wondering if he’s already moved on.
Chapter Fourteen
Rust
Zeke and I, Shackle, and a few of his lieutenants sit in the bar as the doctor operates on one of the pledges in the dormitory wing. Even from here, we can hear his screams: high-pitched, full of disbelieving pain. Zeke winces each time the pledge screams; the kid’s a pledge Zeke brought on himself. Shackle gets a bottle of whisky and places it on the table, and one of the lieutenants collects some glasses and begins handing them out, all to the soundtrack of a screeching pledge.
When we’re all sipping our whiskies, Zeke mutters: “Fucking unpatched.”
Everybody nods in agreement.
“Fucking unpatched,” Shackle agrees. “Trent was supposed to be a fuckin’ tick we could just flick away, no problem. But I’ve been hearing some troubling shit. First of all that Trent is gathering more and more unpatched to join him; and second of all that they’re getting into hard shit, like heroin.” He scratches his jagged scar, his mouth set into a grim line.
I know how he feels. Say what you want about The Damned, but we’ve never been into hard shit like that. We’re into weed, bootlegged booze, cigarettes, protection, counterfeit electronics, but never hard shit like heroin, shit which ruins lives. Looking around the table, I can see that the men feel just as I do: this Trent fuck has gone too far. The pledge lets out another scream, this one louder, penetrating the walls of the bar.
“Can’t the doctor give him something?” Zeke murmurs.
“Probably has,” I grunt. “Gunshot hurts like a sonofabitch.”
“The fuck would you know?” Zeke says.
“He was shot, before you joined,” Shackle says quietly. “Back when Mouse was in charge.” A small smile touches Shackle’ lips, despite the screaming. “Tried to take on three guys yourself, you crazy bastard.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “Young and stupid. It was just a grazing shot to the thigh, Zeke, but it still hurt like fuck. That kid in there has got a—what is it? A flesh wound to the torso?”
Shackle corrects me, telling me he’s got a slug clean through his bicep muscle.
“Fuck,” Zeke says. “Yeah, I bet that hurts a damn lot.”
We drink our whisky, and then one of the lieutenants asks who did the shooting.
Shackle shakes his head. “No clue who it was exactly, but it was unpatched, that’s for sure. The kid told me when the doctor was bringing him in that the guy who shot him shouted: ‘Trent says hello.’” Shackle growls, his face twisted with rage. “This unpatched fuck thinks he can blow a hole in a Damned—a pledge, but still a fuckin’ Damned—and get away with it …he’s a fool.”
“He’s got a lot of support,” Zeke points out. “More than he did a month ago. Me and Rust have been doin’ what we can, but it’s difficult. I think we’ve failed.”
I offer a sideways smile. “Yeah, tell the boss we’ve failed, Zeke, great fuckin’ idea.”
Everybody laughs darkly.
“It isn’t your fault,” Shackle says, speaking a little louder over the sound of the pledge’s screaming. “It’s my fault. I should’ve sent the whole club after this fuck the moment he started bothering us. I just never thought he’d have the balls to really go after one of ours. Rust, when you told me about how you chased off him and his, I thought the bastard was green; I thought he’d stay green. How long’s it been—a month, two? And he’s gone from a scared leader of a bunch of rodents to having the balls to slug a Damned.”
“He’s insane,” one of the lieutenants says. “’Cause when we find him, he’s dead. He must know that.”
“Maybe he thinks he’s got enough gun power to take us on.” Zeke shrugs when the lieutenant shoots him an angry look. “I’m just speaking about what could be,” he goes on. “If he’s dealing heroin, he’s got a supplier, and if he’s got a supplier, maybe he’s got enough pull to form a proper club. We all know that once you put a patch on a group of men, pretty soon they start thinkin’ more of themselves. And that can be used for good, like we do. Or it can be used for bad, like so many other clubs do.”
I think about Trent running a club and clench my fists under the table. I think about the way he leaned over Allison, the first time I ever met her; I wonder why I didn’t just end it then and there. But back then, he was just a creep bothering a beautiful woman. Back then, he was just a weirdo, a nuisance. Now, everything’s changed. The kid screaming from the other side of the building is proof enough of that. Allison …I almost shiver at the thought of her. I need to keep her out of my mind. I need to kill that part of me. She rejected me. It’s over. Done, over, done. I need to remember that.
“Rust?”
Shit, Shackle is talking.
“Yeah?”
“I said, what do you think their chances are in a straight-up war?”
I shrug. “No idea. Before, I would’ve said it’d be like stepping on an ant-hill, but now, who the fuck knows?”
“Think you’d have a little more faith than that,” a lieutenant mutters.
“We’re The Damned, don’t forget,” I reply, to a round of throaty laughs. “I don’t know, Shackle. I’d need to know more about them: their numbers, their bases, their operation.”
“Then that’s what we’ll need to do.” Shackle nods. “I’m tired of these fucking insects moving in on us. I’m tired of their fucking arrogance and I’m tired of that kid’s screaming.” He points at his scar. “It was a fuckin’ gang that did this to me, boys, five of the fucks. Do you know what I did to those bastards when I got my hands on them?”
We all grow quiet, because we all know. None of them are alive today.
Shackle stands up and walks to the bar, where he leans and lights up a cigarettes. Some of his lieutenants light up too. Zeke and I remain sitting, sipping whiskey. For ten or so minutes, we wait in silence: a silence punctuated by the screams of the kid in the next room. The screams rise and fall as the doctor picks pieces of bullet out of the wound. I look around at the men, all of them seeming grim and focused, and wonder what they’re thinking about, if their thoughts are honed on Trent and the unpatched and nothing more. Or if they stray.
This thought occurs to me ’cause my thoughts keep straying. Here I
am, sitting with my club, one of my brothers screaming and bleeding, the leader of the club smoking a cigarette and staring off into space, and Allison keeps resurfacing in my mind. Goddamn Allison, like some kind of magical woman, with the ability to captivate my thoughts when she should have absolute no place in my mind. During this past month, I have banished her. I have accepted that I’m never going to see her again.
A voice calls out in my mind: “Liar! Liar!”
I swallow, lean back, on the surface looking nonchalant as ever, but inside an invisible hand squeezing my chest. I’ve wanted to banish her, is the truth, but banishing her isn’t so simple when I’ve been visiting Joseph. It’s too difficult to visit the kid without asking him how she’s doing, if she’s okay, if she’s seeing somebody else…that last one is important to me even when I know it shouldn’t be. I haven’t touched another woman since Allison, which is about the strangest thing I’ve done in a long, long time. Me, Rust, enforcer, lady’s man—that’s how the men know me—hasn’t touched another woman just ’cause I fucked some chestnut-haired deer-eyed woman in her office. Was the sex that good? Was I really that captivated by it?
I lean my head back, hardly hearing the glugging of the whisky now, the occasional muttered word of one of the other men, the crisping of the cigarettes. All I hear is Allison. In my mind, she is leaning over me, those perfect pert breasts pushed together, wearing only her panties and waiting for me to snap them away with my teeth. In my head, she whispers, and here in the bar I feel the whisper on my neck: “Why don’t you come and visit me, baby? I know I told you I didn’t want it, but I lied. I lied, baby.”
I pour a whisky, sip it, willing it to not only burn down my throat but burn away the thoughts, too. Allison pushed me away. She doesn’t want me. Allison made her choice. We fucked and now we’re done; that’s all. I don’t need to worry about her anymore. It makes me angry that I can’t just shrug and forget her. How many women have I been with who, afterward, I’ve never thought about again? How many times have I even forgotten the name of a woman after we’re done? And here I am…I want to growl, but I’m surrounded by the men so I make sure to keep myself calm. But I need something to help me get rid of some of this tension. I’m fuckin’ furious with myself. She pushed me away, and yet I still want her. Goddamn it!
I almost gasp when I realize that I’m not just furious with myself. I’m furious with her, too. I’ve never felt furious at any woman except Mom, back when she looked me directly in the face and told me to get out of her house because she was starting a new family. After that, I’ve made sure to be indifferent toward women. But Allison…under the table, I clench my fist. She did the same thing to me; she reeled me in and then told me to go fuck myself. She completely rejected me. She might as well have slapped me in the face. I wish I could go back and scream at her, and then I’m ashamed by the wish; all it would accomplish is showing her the effect she’s having on me.
I’m glad when the doctor walks into the bar, his worn scrubs flecked here and there with blood, wiping his hands on a towel.
All the men turn to him, and Shackle stubs his cigarette out on the bar and approaches him. The two men talk quietly for a few moments before the doctor turns around and walks back into the dormitory section.
“He’ll live,” Shackle says, and I see Zeke breathe a sigh of relief. “But it was closer than it ever should’ve been.” Shackle begins pacing up and down before us like a general pacing before his assembled men, hands behind his back. “It’s time we found out where Trent is and put an end to him. These unpatched men want to assemble around Trent. They think Trent is their savior. They think Trent is going to make them something. Let’s show them how wrong they are. I want all of you out there—lieutenants, tell your men—in groups of two, looking for Trent, or the unpatched men who might know where he is.” He nods shortly. “Dismissed.”
Zeke turns to me. “The bartender at the Englishman has been having some trouble with unpatched,” Zeke says. “I told him to keep an eye out. Let’s go stake the place out. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
I shrug, stranding. “Alright. Let’s go.”
Zeke tilts his head at me, looking closely. “Are you okay, man?”
Fine,” I reply gruffly…unless you count the social worker constantly bouncing into my mind. “Fine,” I repeat, as much to convince myself as him.
Chapter Fifteen
Rust
We take the pickup truck, ’cause nobody wants to sit on a bike for hours on end for a stakeout. Zeke drives, and I sit in the passenger seat, window open, hand out the window. I open my fingers and let the wind move through them, letting it caresses the calluses and the old scars and the new cuts. I watch the passing scenery, the tight-packed buildings, the graffiti-covered walls, moving swiftly by. I see men and women hunched over in doorways, passing around brown paper bags; and all through this I cannot help but think of Allison, wondering if today she’s helping men and women like these. I grind my teeth, feeling an ache in my jaw, wishing the ache would travel into my skull and blot out my thoughts. I feel that anger resurfacing: anger aimed directly at Allison. I don’t want to be angry at her; I don’t want to be anything at her.
Zeke stops the car in an alleyway opposite and down the street from the Englishman, where we can watch the entrance, see who’s coming in and out. Zeke drums his tribal-tattooed fingers along the steering wheel, humming to himself, and I just sit here, trying to ignore the way he looks at me out of the corner of his eyes. All this past month, Zeke has been sensing that something’s the matter with me. His chameleon’s face changes from concerned to impatient and back again, all whilst we watch each other out of the corners of our eyes. I find myself wishing I was with one of the other men, one of the less concerned men.
I light a cigarette and dangle my hand out of the window, watching the smoke, thinking about how it dissipates into the air just as easily as my relationship with Allison dissipated into nothing. Relationship…I can’t help but smile at that. We never had a relationship; goddamn, I need to get a hold of myself.
I’ve half-smoked the cigarette when Zeke says, “What’s going on with you, man?”
I don’t reply at first, hoping he’ll just let it drop, but I feel his eyes staring into me. “The fuck you mean?” I respond.
“The fuck I mean?” He laughs, but there’s little humor in it. “All this past month, you’ve been gazing starry-eyed into the distance, as though you’re someplace else, doing something else. It’s that girl, isn’t it? Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’ve been at parties, turning away all the clubs girls; with you it’s easy to notice when you consider what you’re normally like. A goddamn pussy hound.”
“A pussy hound? That sounds strange coming from you, Mr. In Love All the Time.”
I laugh, but Zeke doesn’t laugh with me.
“If the unpatched show up today, we need to be focused.”
“I haven’t let anything slip this past month,” I say, with a hint of defensiveness in my voice.
“I know that,” Zeke says. “But you haven’t been completely focused, either.”
“How would you know? You’re not a mind reader. I really wish you’d stop with this heart-to-heart shit. It’s tiring.”
I smoke my cigarette down to the filter, throw it to the ground, and then light another one.
I feel myself grinding my teeth, anger moving through me. First Allison rejecting me, and now Zeke nagging me like he’s a woman and not a six-foot-tall enforcer. People are so damn complicated, it seems to me. They never just do what you expect them to—what you’d like them to.
I watch the bar, watching the entrance as day drinkers walk in and out, a few old men with caps and suits which looks like remnants of the past, caps pulled low over their ears and shoes shiny, and a couple of groups of women, arms linked, cackling loudly into the afternoon sunshine. I wait for an unpatched to walk in, or out. The question of how to spot an unpatched was a difficult one at first…after all, they�
�re unpatched. But when you’ve worked as an enforcer for long enough, you learn to notice patterns. And one of the patterns is the arrogance of the unpatched, the way they swagger, the way they talk, and also their habit of unnecessary violence…. all of which would result in a volatile, dangerous club, if they were allowed to form one.
“Rust,” Zeke says, as though he’s been repeating it for a while.
“What?” I reply.
“I get if you don’t want to talk about it, but could you at least goddamn listen? I’m saying that if you can’t have her, you need to forget her, otherwise she’s going to be haunting you for years.”
“Haunting me? A woman, haunting me? I barely fuckin’ know her, Zeke. Leave off with this horseshit.”
Zeke sighs, shrugs, and then turns to the bar. Good, I reflect, ’cause I was getting angry there. He’s hitting way too close to home: way, way too close. He’s hitting right on the sore spot where Allison lingers, still lingers like some kind of parasite. He’s right; she is haunting me. But I can’t admit it. Again, I feel that anger, anger aimed like an arrow at Allison. I feel my fist clench, my teeth grinding, a pulsing in my temple. I put myself out there like a fool. I hear my voice, pathetic, like a teenager: “Ooh, do you want my number? Ooh, please take my number.” I want to jump back in time and take that too-eager man by the throat and smash his head into the desk. I want to punch the wall. I want to take a sawn-off shotgun and blow a hole in something. I want to take a Desert Eagle handgun and blow several holes in something. I just want to forget. Why can’t I just forget about the green-eyed social worker? Why can’t I just forget about the woman who pushed me away?