“Now that’s an old song,” she said. She didn’t care, as long as this lovely interlude and their insularity lasted. And as long as they stayed lovers forever, the way they were meant to be.
Chapter 25
Something Wicked This Way Comes
I fear for you
I fear for me
I fear of what
Will come to be
*[ Densley, Matthew, “Fear”]
Maitland, June 13, 1972:
Six weeks passed before they came for him. When Dace had been Inside, she had mentally catalogued all his letters and treasured everything he said. When he came out she could practically read his mind. Somehow she never figured he would let them get him, no matter what he said. Surely he could resist them. How hard could that be? But he went off with the bikers so fast it looked to her like falling.
“We’re going to meet some friends,” was all he’d said earlier in the evening when he picked her up at the residence. That should have tipped her off right away. He rarely said where they were going. They just went and she liked it that way. She was tired of making life-altering decisions. Please, she thought, just tell me what to do. Not that Dace had any idea where they were going either, usually.
The bikers were waiting with their big black machines on the side of a dirt road just outside of Maitland, down by an old roadie bar. Judging by their disgruntled expressions, they’d been waiting a little too long. They got off their shiny, well-loved Harleys and sauntered over, their meaty hands hanging by their sides.
Dace stiffened when she sucked in her breath. “Be cool,” he said, although his lips didn’t move.
Common sense warned her to stay on the Harley, but when he turned off the ignition and nudged her with his hip, she swung her right leg back over the bike and slid to the ground. He got off the bike too, but he didn’t take her hand. Because it’s not cool, she thought crossly. Not cool if you’re one of them: a biker, a real man. Seven bushy-haired, bearded bikers surrounded them. A relatively small club, she later learned. Liza wasn’t about to challenge anybody. She lowered her eyes until all she could see were boots.
One man reached out and touched her arm. She automatically shied away, repulsed by his tattooed forearms.
“Meet Sal “Dirt Beard” Perazzi,” somebody said. “Eye-talian. One of our lady charmers.”
Looks more like Dopey to me, she thought.
“What’s the matter?” Dirt Beard challenged, his eyes measuring her protector’s reaction. “Too good for me?”
Smiling nervously, she lifted her gaze to the bikers and held her ground, taking her cue from Dace. He said nothing to Dirt Beard. She almost died when he let it go.
At first glance the bikers looked as muscular as he was, but the older ones were also overweight, more like beer-bellied trolls than men. Three of the men, including Dirt Beard, were a bit taller and looked like they might be nearer Dace’s age. The rest were in their late thirties and early forties. She was a little surprised by that, probably because she had always subscribed to the romantic notion that bikers were young men. Especially outlaw bikers.
The colourful insignia of three wolfhounds on their backs caught her attention. The men wore other insignia as well, but she didn’t know what the symbols meant. She studied the wolfhounds and swallowed nervously. She had no great love of dogs, especially large ones. Granny Debo’s dog had always tried to hump her leg. It had also liked to nip. If Granny hadn’t been there she would have run. Oh, Dace, she thought, trying not to stare. That same impulse to run shoved at her. Some friends.
His friends were filthy, probably because they couldn’t help perspiring in leather vests and knee high boots. Their hands looked as if they were permanently covered in motorcycle grease. The yeasty smell of beer oozed from their pores. Dace was always scrupulously clean. Obviously showers had been at a premium in prison because now he couldn’t seem to get enough of them. He showered morning and night and sometimes in between. When the bikers met Dace and Liza, they were all smoking in an apparent attempt to ward off the black flies swarming in the swampy bulrushes by the road. She checked stealthily over her right shoulder but there wasn’t another vehicle in sight, not even the Crown Vic that had tailed Dace off and on for the past six weeks. Where the hell had that cop gone?
Reluctant to take her eyes off the bikers for even a moment, she took another deep breath. She decided to pretend they were the seven dwarves. Dopey, Happy, Grumpy … what the hell were the rest of those names? Dace still hadn’t said anything, but she wasn’t going to be afraid because he wasn’t. Besides, it was pretty clear from the moment they shook hands, thumbs up, forearms almost touching that they weren’t strangers. They had all met before.
In the Pen? She hoped not. He wasn’t supposed to fraternize, to mix. Maybe they’d met here in Maitland when she was working. Then it was her fault. She’d had to work, though. She sagged a little at the thought, but it didn’t matter. A part of her was resigned, for he had warned her and somewhere in the back of her mind she had always known she wasn’t the only person waiting for him to come home. If it hadn’t been the bikers, it would have been somebody else, maybe somebody even worse, if that were possible. She watched, mesmerized, as a man wearing a blue checked bandanna around his head, sneezed, wiped his nose with his fingers and spat on the ground.
“Jeez, Boo-Boo,” somebody said. “You keep doing that, Princess is gonna puke.”
People need friends. Dace was no exception. If he had been, he would never have reached out to her in the first place. She had to accept these were simply that: his friends. Also, he’d probably been bored. For some reason he still wasn’t working, and he needed something to do.
She must have missed a signal because suddenly the bikers got back on their bikes and she climbed back on Dace’s, wrapping her arms around his waist. For a moment she was almost relieved. Then she realized they were supposed to follow. When nobody was looking, he cupped her hands.
Don’t be scared, little darling, she heard him say, almost as if he had spoken aloud.
“Hey, Bro, is that your cuz?” the grey beard at the front of the pack inquired. His eyes raked Liza up and down, covering her damp T-shirt, her blue jeans and her black leather boots. At the same time, the man leaned off his bike and lifted her hand from Dace’s thigh. He raised it to his own bearded lips and kissed the back. She smiled a little before she withdrew her hand. He looked as if he might pass for a banker if he were cleaned up and dressed in a suit. Or whatever. Doc, she decided, This one’s Doc.
A cloud of black flies hovered over his head, though strangely, none of them seemed brave enough to land. What was he wearing, bear grease?
He must be the leader, she thought, surreptitiously wiping her hand on the back of her jeans.
Well, not the leader exactly, Dace explained later. That’s Billy, the Road Captain. Tiger, the leader, he’s in lockup downtown. He had some kind of beef with the law.
God, it was hot. She stretched up one slender arm to remove her silver helmet and her hair spilled down her back, flashing pinpoints of light like fireflies in the dark.
“What a mane!” Somebody whistled. “Let’s get back to the clubhouse, man, and we’ll have a few.”
“Any other ladies there?”
“You’re not sharing? That’s cool. Our old ladies are back there having a little party of their own.”
Sharing? Liza straightened, trying to hide her disgust. As if! Who did they think she was? She wasn’t sure what was happening, but she knew she didn’t have much of a choice. Without meaning to, she had followed Dace, stepping over yet another invisible boundary.
Clutching him even tighter, she rode with him to a boarded up clapboard building five miles outside of town. Insignia flags flew in the dark windows where curtains should have been. They pulled up way too soon to Liza’s way of thinking. Billy the Road Captain got off his bike, unlocked a metal gate topped with barbed wire, and ushered his gang inside the compound. A pack of wolf
hounds growled greetings, but it was the floodlight that startled her. Dace was the only man who didn’t laugh when she darted behind his back.
The building looked dark inside, but somebody whistled and a trapdoor opened up from the dirt ground. Inside she spotted stairs. She followed Dace as he took the stairs down into a dank cellar, then up to the rest of the house. The place was basically a few rooms with a cluttered table and several chairs, three or four filthy mattresses on the floor, fly-infested garbage in every corner, and some Nazi memorabilia interspersed with a dying Jesus on the north wall.
She also saw a rudimentary kitchen where she imagined they prepared the kinds of treats that kept them happy. A rusty, temperamental toilet teamed up with an outhouse in the back.
Liza’s memory of that first evening in the Clubhouse was always fuzzy. She got drunk enough that after a while some of the bikers actually started to look appealing. When the club treasurer, Barry “Strangeman” Wilcox, an older man in his forties and the only one with glasses, asked, “What are you going to give me if I give you this, little lady?” she accepted the first Labatts with alacrity, desperate for the self-confidence only alcohol could bring.
Regardless of his moniker, Strangeman seemed all right, showing a glimmer of intelligence in his small, crinkle-cornered eyes. Or maybe he was just less high than the rest of them. This one’s Happy, she thought. She drank the warm beer straight from the bottle, uncomfortably aware of the bikers staring at her lips. Across the room from her, the Road Captain swept everything off the chrome-legged table, dumping the mess onto the floor, then doled out a well-thumbed pack of cards decorated with busty mermaids.
The men started playing poker and Dace joined them, leaving her perched like a bright little pet parakeet on the edge of a mattress. By the time she’d downed a couple of beers, she felt more like a brainless sparrow. Her head swam and she wished she were back in her dorm, reading a book. Anywhere but here. God, she hated parties.
True to the Road Captain’s word, several other girls were there, wearing skin tight jeans and teased, bouffant hair: differential girls full of bravado. The place reeked of dampness and mouse droppings and urine; other women might have felt compelled to push a broom or do some simple tidying of the ramshackle Clubhouse. These women milled from room to room fetching drinks, stopping occasionally to drape their arms around their man’s neck as he studied his cards, looking as serious as if he held the future in his hand.
The men appeared indifferent to their feminine charms and gruff with any responses, but each girl seemed more territorial than the last. They either ignored Liza or cast blatantly dirty looks her way. They had nothing to say to her, and she had no idea what to say to them. They were as blond as the girls at school, although only one, Dagmar, was a natural. Her eyes were so blue she looked almost otherworldly. Three other girls had been named for objects: Crystal, Sherry and Tiffany. They were as young as Liza, except for a heavier-set one. She looked like she belonged to Billy the Road Captain and bore the more dated name of Doreen.
“Who’s the long-haired bitch?” she heard Dagmar say when Liza finished her first beer and accepted a second one from Strangeman. Her English wasn’t fluent. Probably his girl, Liza thought. Liza had no idea the smile of thanks she flashed Strangeman when he handed her a beer had lit up the room. If she hadn’t been drinking, and if Dace hadn’t been there, she probably would have feared for her life. She wondered if the bikers’ ladies acted jealous because that was what passed for love in their world.
At least Dace was happy. He took little breaks from the card game, trying to pull Liza out of her shell and spinning all the girls around in time to Rolling Stones tunes on a transistor radio.
“It’s okay, little darling,” he murmured, bending down to whisper in her ear. He was inebriated enough to risk taking her face in his hands. “There’s nothing bad going down here. These guys just wanna have some fun.”
“Yeah, we just wanna have fun,” one man agreed. A couple of guys snickered, but Liza melted anyway. She loved it when Dace touched her that way. If only he’d joined a more recreational bike club, she thought as the evening wore on. She grew more tired by the hour and tried not to drape herself over him, tempting as it was.
Crystal’s man had taken her into a side room and they were going at it. “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” they heard her shriek. Liza looked nervously around the room, noting a couple of the guys looked a little too interested in the cries, their glances flicking briefly on her. Please stay there, Liza thought primly, glancing at the rattling door. Drunk or not, group sex really didn’t appeal to her.
She took a third beer from Billy the Road Captain, who was still eyeing her. Crystal had revved things up and the energy in the room had definitely taken on a lusty edge. Three beers was over Liza’s limit and everything began to make a boozy kind of sense. She even smiled enough that Billy seemed to think he had a special rapport with her.
“Your cousin,” he cajoled, “if that’s what he really is, he’s a real stand up guy. We’ve never had anybody like him in our place. He makes us all look good. And you, you could improve the place, too. Dace—Ironhorse—he’d do anything for his brothers. How about you?”
Well, what did she expect? Liza thought. She laughed and shrugged as diplomatically as she could. Dace had always been excessively loyal, something she could almost understand. At one point during the night he’d told her he knew some of the bikers from his teenage street life. He’d met the rest in prison. They were the brothers he’d never had.
Dace finally noticed the way both Strangeman and Billy were looking at her, slumped on the bed with her T-shirt hiked halfway up her torso, her smooth white skin glowing in the half dark.
“Like fresh meat,” Dace muttered, coming over to the mattress and yanking down her shirt. Nobody else seemed to have noticed the two older bikers’ interest, except maybe Dagmar. She stomped around the Clubhouse, waving her arms in the smoke-heavy air, yelling something about a stuck-up bitch and what she wanted to do to her.
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you crazy broad?” Strangeman suggested, trying to pacify her. He looked pleased both with himself and with the cards in his hand. At least he was still in the game. To his right, Dirt Beard had passed out, a scatter of cards across his lap. Probably should have called him Sleepy, Liza thought. Meanwhile, two of the younger men, Boo Boo and Tank, were having a fist fight outside the back door. Something to do with way his brother had looked at him, although nobody was exactly sure what had happened. As Liza was the only one who seemed even a little anxious, it must have been a common occurrence.
By now she was on her fourth beer. The floor was sloping up to meet her face, and although she still had a couple of dwarves’ names left, the mental effort required to make any more matches was simply too great. Dace stopped dancing, took another slug of his beer, all of his attention finally on Liza. She looked away, almost daring him. The moment she scrambled to her feet and started dancing by herself, he came over, grabbed her by the shoulder and pushed her towards the back door. He gave her a smart slap on her rear and she laughed, too numbed with drink to feel a thing.
“Way to go, Ironhorse,” Tank called, applauding. “Keep her in line.”
She had a woozy concern Dace might follow up with more slaps, so she caught his hand to her mouth, kissed the palm, then sucked in his thumb for several seconds. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at her, mouth partway open. He slung his left arm around her, pulling her closer.
“Liza,” he said weakly. For the briefest of seconds he closed his eyes. The room went silent as the Clubhouse waited to see what Dace would do. Even Dirt Beard stopped snoring.
“You little …” he whispered, extracting his digit from her mouth with a pop and almost carrying her out. “Not here. You can’t do stuff like that in front of these guys or they’ll—”
“What? What’ll they do?” she asked as he deposited her none too gently onto the back of his bike.
; “Nothing I’m not going to do to you when I get you home.”
“Marie,” she sang, the roar of the Harley ruining her performance. “Marie, Marie, hold on tight.”
That was the first night, but they went back in the weeks to come. By then it was clear whose girl Liza was. None of the men would touch her. Dace was something else, though. In the clubhouse, the proprietorship of the bikers’ girls applied only to themselves and their men. He—their talisman, their prize—would always be fair game.
Chapter 26
Waking Up
It’s okay, she told herself, and it was, as long they stayed mellow with beer and each other. As long as they made love. There was a faint undercurrent of unease whenever they discussed his growing involvement in the gang, but Dace wasn’t really interested in what she had to say about it. By now she had done research—lots, in fact.
She could talk about butterflies or books or whatever the hell she wanted and he’d listen, but according to Dace, this was none of her business. “A prospect—a striker? Where do you get such crap? Have you been reading Joe’s trash again? Those guys are my friends. We like to party, that’s all. C’mon. Why don’t you try it yourself? Loosen up and have some fun.”
“But Dace they have those emblems on their jackets.”
“Colours, Liza, colours,” he said, grabbing her face and kissing her. “Give it a rest,” he said when she went too far.
She knew she was trespassing. There was a protocol in any relationship, of what could and could not be said. Dace was an ex-con who not only needed, but demanded privacy. On their trips to Toronto, he knocked down the bold-faced drunks who verbally assaulted him in bars. She was well aware he would never have allowed anybody else to talk to him the way she did.
On the one trip they took with the bikers to see the Falls, they stopped at a bar in St.Catharines and it was the same thing. So you think you’re a tough guy, some loser had said. Biking was nobody’s business but Dace’s. As far as he was concerned, Liza was wasting time worrying about stupid stuff like one per centers and ex-cons, and he told her so.
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