by Paula Cox
I stop outside of Hope’s apartment. She climbs from the bike, and then stands uncertainly, stubbing her foot on the pavement. I turn to her, tilt my head. “Kiss, pretty lady?”
She smiles, leans in, pecks me on the lips. That’s what she needs, I think. To know that everything is normal. To know that everything makes sense. To know that we’re still close.
“I’ll see you later?” Hope says.
“Yeah, course,” I reply. “Just got to sort a couple of things out first.”
My bike rumbles, quakes, and then growls away from her apartment building toward the clubhouse.
When I enter the clubhouse, the first thing I see is one of Hope’s paintings, hanging above the inner entranceway door, the woman in the hospital gown. Two more of the paintings hang inside, one over the bar and one over the pool table. I go into the bar, take off my jacket, and throw it over the chair. A few of the men sit in the bar, two of them in the corner, drinking. They stand up and mutter, “Boss,” when I enter. Another stands behind the bar, ready to pour the men drinks. Finally, Declan sits in the corner seat.
I take out my cell and text Patrick: Clubhouse, now.
A few moments later, his reply arrives: On my way. Gunny is with Dawn.
I wander over to where Declan sits, chin slumped against his chest. He blinks up at me, his eyelids saggy, fluttering. “Hello, boss,” he says, smiling slowly, lips twisting as if with a great effort. “I was waiting for you.”
“Is that so, old man?” I ask.
He nods. “I wanted to tell you how much I like those paintings. They’re beautiful, very beautiful. They professional?”
“Yes,” I say. “They’re professional. They were painted by my girlfriend.”
Girlfriend!
“That’s not like you,” Declan comments.
I sit beside him. “No,” I agree, “it’s not. Let me ask you something, old man—”
“All I’m good for these days.”
“Were you ever in love?”
“Love?” He rubs his gnarled hands together. “Love? Yes, I was in love. Twice. First, to a woman who was as fierce and angry as me. Second, to a woman as sweet and delicate as a rose. Both times it ended because I didn’t have it in me.”
“Have what in you?” I ask eagerly.
“I didn’t have the ability to love and be an outlaw. It’s too hard, my boy. Too damn hard. One night you’re hugging and kissing and the like. The next you’re aiming a twelve gauge at some punk’s head. Maybe you pull the trigger; maybe you go back to your lover with blood spatters on your face. The fierce ones push you to do more, to make more. The delicate ones are disgusted. Either way it’s hard. Or you can pretend that the other life does not exist. When you’re with them, you’re not an outlaw. But then what do you have? A husk. A half-life. A movie.”
“Yeah,” I mutter. “Yeah, old man, that makes sense.”
“Don’t listen to me, Boss. I’m just talking.”
I stand up. “You’re a good man, Declan.”
“All men are good men when they’re old, aren’t they? Or so people think. Don’t forget that once I was just as tough as you.”
“Never could forget that.” I tap him on the shoulder. “I’ve got to go. Patrick’s on his way.”
“Trouble?”
I shrug. “Something like that.”
I lean back in my chair, boots resting on the desk, hands behind my head, staring at the door. He met with the leader of The Headsmen, I think in disgust. The bastard went behind my back and met with the leader of The Headsmen.
There’s a knock at the door and I say, “Come in.”
Patrick shuffles into the room, smiling at me, oblivious. “Dawn is doing amazing, brother. I’ve never seen anyone recover as quickly as her. I think she’s better, really better. She’s so full of life. She’s like a child sometimes, giggling and playing. I think I like—”
“Sit down,” I say, my voice hard.
Patrick drops into the chair opposite me. “Is something wrong?”
I lower my boots to the ground and lean forward in my chair, leaning my arms on the desk. “Tell me,” I say, looking directly into his eyes, eyes which are mirrors of mine. “You tell me if something is wrong. You tell me if you think it’s necessary that we meet with the fucking Headsmen!” At the last words, I thump the desk. My knuckles make a crack noise against the wood, and a piece of paper flutters to the floor like a feather.
Patrick flinches back. “Dammit,” he whispers. “Who told you?”
“Who told me?” I laugh darkly. “It doesn’t matter who told me, does it? All that matters is, is it true? Did you meet with another club behind my back?”
Patrick looks around the room, like he’s searching for an escape route, like he’s a rat stuck in a maze and he’s desperate to find somewhere he can scamper to. When his search fails him, his chest deflates. He picks at the arm of his chair, his jaw becomes defined and then hidden as he clenches and then relaxes the muscle, over and over.
“I met with them,” he sighs.
I keep my eyes locked on him, ready to leap across the table and take him by the throat if I have to. My body is trembling. My hands are aching. My head is heavy and hungover, but also heavy with rage. “Why?” I growl through clenched teeth. “Tell me that. Why?”
Patrick throws his hands up and jumps to his feet. “You know why!” he exclaims, before pacing up and down the office. “You know exactly why! Don’t play dumb with me, brother!”
“Because I won’t let you fuck up our operations?” I snarl. “Is that it? Because I won’t let you go off the rails?”
“Because you won’t let me work!” he fires back.
I jump to my feet, pound my knuckles into the desk, tense my muscles, lean forward so much that I could topple over the desk at any moment. But I try to keep my voice level, try to get through to him. “This job is not about cowboy shit,” I say. “You knew that, before you went away. This job isn’t about feeling like a big man. This job isn’t about being the big bad wolf. This job is exactly that—a job. This job is for money. That’s it. Just money. We make money when we don’t take stupid risks. Don’t you understand that? Can’t you get that through your fucking head?”
“You made me deliver flowers, Killian,” Patrick says, looking at me with his forehead creased in confusion. “You made me deliver flowers. Me, the man who took a goddamn bullet for you—”
“Lower your voice,” I say. “If you want to talk about that, lower your voice.”
“I went to prison for you,” Patrick says, voice low, leaning over the desk. “They found those drugs and I said to myself, ‘No way, not my brother,’ and I went to prison for you. I did that time. Years, I rotted in a cell for you. Years. I love you. Don’t you get it, brother? I love you.”
I want to follow my anger, but at these words I feel about ten again. I fall into my chair and Patrick does the same, so we’re staring across at each other, both tired, both somewhat lost. “I’ll always be grateful to you,” I say. “But just because you did that for me, it doesn’t mean you can do anything you want. This is a business. Not your playground.”
“I just needed something to do,” Patrick laments. “That’s it. Just something. And you weren’t giving me anything—”
“I’m the boss,” I say. “I’m the boss. If I don’t give you anything, then you do nothing. You don’t go behind my back.”
I cover my face with my hands and close my eyes. I wish this was simple. I wish Patrick had never gone to prison for me. I wish I could just be angry at him. I wish I didn’t understand why he went behind my back. I wish I didn’t love the big lumbering thing so much. I wish I could just be tough and nothing else.
“I need your word that you won’t do it again,” I say. “And that whatever deal you made with them, you’ll cancel.”
“There was no deal, anyway,” Patrick says. “They just tried to get information on you and the club. I told them to go to hell. Then they tried to get
heavy, so I had to tool one of them up. They backed away after that.”
“Never again,” I say. “I need your word, Patrick. Never again.”
“Never again,” Patrick agrees. “I’ve got no problem with that. It was a stupid plan to begin with.”
“Okay, good. Fine.”
I lower my hands from my face. Patrick is smiling at me.
“What?” I ask.
“You’ve had your hands on your face for half a minute. You sounded like Donald Duck.”
He smiles at me, and I can’t but help to smile back at him, my big brother.
Then we’re laughing.
“Dammit,” I say. “We’ll talk about this later, not now. You say Dawn’s doing better?”
“Much better.”
“Think she’s up for a celebration dinner?”
Patrick grins. “I think she’ll love that.”
“Okay, good. A party is just what we need. Tonight, at the restaurant.”
“Berelli’s Gourmet?”
“Yeah, I’ll have a word with that pervert Lucca. Bring Dawn by at around seven o’clock.”
Patrick stands up.
“You’re eager to get back to her,” I comment.
“I am,” Patrick agrees.
“Go, then,” I say. “It seems neither of us can resist the Jacksons, eh?”
“No, it seems neither of them can resist the O’Connores.”
“See, brother? Always the optimist.”
Patrick leaves and soon I leave, too, on my way to the restaurant to make the arrangements.
Thirty or so people sit around the long table—really two long tables pushed together—all of them from the club. Hanging from the backs of dozens of chairs are dozens of Numb sigils, as if it’s Halloween and these are our decorations. Declan sits to one side of me, Hope sits on the other. Opposite us, the Remington brothers, Gunny, and Patrick and Dawn sit. Patrick and Dawn seem close, laughing loudly at each other’s jokes, smiling brightly at each other. If somebody were to say they were a couple, nobody would question it. Down the other end of the table, the men laugh and drink, like bikers will do. Apart from us, the restaurant is almost empty. Lucca stands behind the bar, glowering, but there’s jack he can do and everybody ignores him.
“How did you get him to agree?” Hope says, close to my ear, her breath a sweet feeling like a breeze in summer.
“Get him to agree, pretty lady?” I smile, turning to her. She looks gorgeous in her polka-dotted dress, her breasts pushed up, her legs flashing. They’re under the table, but I know how voluptuous and made-to-grab they are, and just thinking of them drives me crazy. “I didn’t have to get him to agree. Even a man like Lucca understands money. Anyway, what the hell is he going to do with us here? Kick us out?”
“That wouldn’t go so well for him, would it?” she says.
“That’s one way to put it,” I say. “No, it wouldn’t go so well at all. I think he’d end up in hospital by the end of the night. Some of these men get rowdy after a drink.”
“Bikers, you’re all just animals, aren’t you?” She raises her eyebrows playfully, sarcastically, as if she’s pretending to look down on us.
“Oh, yes,” I say. “Just monsters.”
“They’re getting on well,” Hope says, nodding to Patrick and Dawn.
“Yeah, they are.”
In truth, seeing Patrick and Dawn close like that makes me nervous. It makes me wonder what a relationship between the two of them could become. Sure, it might start out full of love and innocent and idealistic and all that stuff. But Patrick has had drugs problems before, and so has Dawn. And what happens when you put two druggies together? I try to tell myself that I’m worrying needlessly, but it’s difficult when I know Patrick, and I’ve so recently seen Dawn screaming in pain from withdrawal.
Hope must sense something in me. She places her hand on my leg and squeezes. “It’ll be okay,” she says. “Whatever happens, we have each other.”
“I just can’t stand drugs,” I reply. “It’s a firm no for me. I can’t deal with anyone who does them, who touches them. I just can’t. When Patrick was using, I didn’t even talk to him. My own brother.”
“They’re both clean,” Hope whispers, resting her head on my shoulder. “You don’t have to worry.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I say, though I have a difficult time believing it.
As the night moves on, Patrick and Dawn move closer and closer together.
And when the dinner ends and the dozens of bikers pick up their dozens of leathers, Patrick and Dawn leave the restaurant together, hand in hand. Lucca stares knives at the messy tables, but we just ignore him. Fondling waitresses, talking down to people, making them feel small . . . I’m glad to give him a taste of his own fist.
Hope and I stand in the car park, next to my bike. “What now?” she asks.
I jump on the bike and nod for her to do the same. “Come on,” I say. “The night’s not over yet.”
I ride Hope west out of the Cove to the boardwalk. The night is clear, the sky cloudless, and stars shine down on us making it seem like late afternoon instead of late evening. Hope clutches my hand, her fingers interlocked with mine. No matter how many times we hold hands, I’m still amazed by how small and delicate her hands are compared to mine.
“This is beautiful,” she says, as we sit on a bench which looks out over the beach, and the sea. To the right there is a dock with around ten ships floating on the waves. “I don’t come here enough. I’ve lived in the Cove all my life, with the ocean a mere mile away, but I never seem to have time to come here.”
“Me neither.” I lift my arm, and as though we are communicating without talking, she falls into me. I lower my arm and bring her into me.
“It’s so peaceful,” she says. “So, so peaceful.”
“Before you, peace never made much sense to me,” I say. I should be embarrassed to speak words like these: words which reveal some inner part of me, but I’m not. Not with Hope. Because, I realize, she’s the person closest to me. Out of everyone, it’s her. “Before you,” I go on, “I hated peace. But when I’m with you, pretty lady, I think I could get used to it.”
She leans up and kisses me on the cheek. Such a simple gesture, but it makes me shiver with the feel of it. “Me and you, yeah?” she says.
“Me and you,” I say. My voice is choked, as though I’m one of those soft men who can’t speak to a woman with getting all emotional. Man, what has she done to me?
Hope looks up at the stars, a thousand of them glittering down. “Do you ever just look at them?” she asks. “I never do, not anymore. When I was a kid, before Mom and Dad, I used to. Dawn and I would lie side by side in the grass and look up at them and talk all sorts of trash.”
“I know about them,” I say. “The constellations, I mean. Dad made me learn them all just in case I was ever lost at sea.”
“You’re joking?” Hope sits upright and gazes at me. “Do you really know the constellations?”
I nod. “Yeah, I do.”
“Prove it!” she demands.
Laughing, I point up at the sky. “Follow my finger. See that one, it looks like two backward triangles? That’s Orion. And there, the chair, see there’s the cushion and there’s the back. That’s Aries. And see the horns on that one, and then the legs? That’s Taurus. And over there is Lacerta, and just there is Auriga, and over here, pretty lady, in Lepus. And there we have Sculptor and Fornax. Caelum and Delphinus.”
Hope claps her hands frantically. “So you’re not just a bag of muscles then?” she squeals. “There really is something underneath all of that.”
“I guess so.” I smile. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
She kisses me on the cheek again, a quick peck. I look down at her legs, shimmery in the starlight. Damn, those legs, that dress cut high on her thighs, leading to that beautiful place of pleasure.
I leap to my feet. “Follow me!”
Then I pace toward the do
ck. Hope jogs after me, and then walks with quick steps to keep up with my large strides. “I hope you’re not taking me out here to drown me,” she says.
“Oh, don’t tempt me.” I smirk.
She shoulders me and giggles when I pretend to fall over.
When we reach the dock, I take her down the wooden platform to a smallish boat covered with a tarpaulin. I kneel down and grip the tarpaulin, and then pull it away, like a magician pulling away a tablecloth from underneath dishes.