Bear

by Zahra Girard

  “Did I do something wrong last night?” I say, and instantly regret it. It makes me feel like I’m back in high school, fumbling around with my first boyfriend under the covers.

  But I’ve never had a relationship like this. Hell, I doubt most anyone has. This man threatens me in so many ways; he threatens my life; he threatens my preconceptions, my loyalties; he threatens to consume me.

  “No. Fuck, Roxanna, you wrecked me,” he says, and, though he doesn’t take his eyes off the road, he smiles a little. I smile, too. “For a while I was worried I’d had a stroke or something — my brain hurt and my balls feel empty. I thought it might’ve been part of your plan to take me out. Death by pussy.”

  “Even if I was still planning on that, that’s not how I’d take you out.”

  “Sure. It’s just one more weapon in your arsenal. You’ve got nail clippers, beer bottles, and now…,” he says, his eyes pointedly staring between my legs.

  “No. Just. No.”

  Something about that rubs me the wrong way. Not that I even want to take him out any more, but if I did, I don’t want it to be through sex. I’m capable of more than that.

  “If that’s what you say.”

  “That’s not why I had sex with you. I had sex with you because you keep twisting me around. I know I’m supposed to hate you — and sometimes I do, mostly when you point that gun at me — but…”

  “But what?”

  “You’re not as much of a bloodthirsty evil asshole as I thought.”

  “I’m flattered. Shit, Roxanna, I might even be blushing.”

  “You’re not. Don’t even start with that fucking attitude. It’s kind of sweet how much you love your daughter. Sometimes it seems like a lot of you guys, bikers, are just big old teddy bears.”

  A smirk surfaces on his pale, hungover face, and then just as quickly disappears. “She’s my daughter. How else am I supposed to feel about her? A wonderful little girl that somehow came from a messed up son of a bitch like me. Blows me away every time I even think about it.”

  “Well, it’s nice seeing that side of you.”

  He lets out a low chuckle. “Keep it to yourself, alright? And don’t go jumping to any conclusions. It could all be a front.”

  “If you say so.” There’s no hint of a front about it — Nash, this burly, stubble-faced brute, melts every time his daughter comes up.

  Chuckling again, he doesn’t answer.

  I settle back in my seat, get comfortable, zone out and stare at the endless flat land while we drive along and he fiddles with the radio, searching for something that isn’t some apocalyptic AM radio talk show. He’s not successful.

  The empty land is great for my hangover — just miles and miles of nothing, no features, no hills, nothing that requires me to actually make my pounding head think.

  We drive for a few hours before we pull off the highway to get food. We’re maybe a dozen miles from the Montana-North Dakota border, we stop in the depressingly-misnamed town of Beach, North Dakota.

  There’s no beach here.

  There’s not much of anything.

  Just emptiness, cold, and dust.

  We don’t stop long.

  We order a few burgers from some place called the Sunny Cafe. There’s nothing ‘sunny’ about it; it’s sandwiched between two liquor stores and across the street from a cigar and liquor shop with a convenient drive-through window. I start to think this whole town is just one big misnomer.

  We get back on the highway as quick as we can. The greasy food does exactly what it should and, by the time we’re half an hour into Montana, I’m feeling more alive again.

  The road takes us through blasted mountains, rugged prairies, and towns so small and barren they look almost post-apocalyptic.

  I doze through most of Montana and it’s probably for the best.

  My eyes open as we cross into Idaho.

  It’s midday, my head’s clear, hangover’s gone. We grab some more food from a drive-through and get back on the road without any break.

  “I can drive, you know,” I say, looking over at Nash.

  He looks like he needs a break.

  “I’m sure you can,” he says.

  “No, really. I’ve done long distance drives before. Hell, I’ve done this drive before. In high school, my friend Maria and I would road trip from Tacoma out to Pullman — which is almost Idaho — most every weekend our senior year.”

  An eyebrow raises and he looks over at me. “What’s a high-schooler doing in a college party-town?”

  It’s my turn to smirk. “What do you think?”

  “Getting a leg up on your studies?”

  “It was football season. Parties. I needed some kind of break, and when your dad’s a judge, you have to get out of town to have fun.”

  “Remind me again what you do for a living.”

  “Forensic accounting.”

  “I don’t believe it.” He looks over at me. “I might’ve taken a math class if I’d known there was a chance I’d sit next to a girl like you.”

  I shrug. “Don’t see how it would matter — I have standards.”

  He clutches his chest. “Stabbed again. Through the heart this time.”

  “I learned quick that college guys are still guys, you know? Even as just a senior in high school, I could see that they didn’t want anything real. The furthest ahead most of them thought was to next week’s party and whether they’d be able to drink more than last week’s party.”

  “I’ll bet you were just the life of the party.”

  “I set the ladies record for longest kegstand. 54 seconds,” I say. “And nobody — nobody — could dance like me when 80’s music was on. You start playing Billy Idol, INXS, Tears for Fears, Michael Jackson, and it’s over.”

  “Well, that just shows you have good taste. Billy Idol’s the shit,” he says.

  “He is.”

  “But you still can’t drive.”

  “What? I’m not going to turn the truck around. You can trust me.”

  “Anyone that has to say that you can trust them, isn’t trustworthy. And this isn’t a case where I’m going to give you a chance to prove yourself. You did just stab me in the back less than 48 hours ago.”

  “You’re still holding that over me?”

  “Just for a few more days.”

  I feel like stabbing him again.

  “You’re hung over, you look like shit, let me drive. I’ll feel safer.”

  “I’m fine,” he says.

  “No, seriously, you look like shit.”

  “You said that already,” he says. “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”

  “I said that because it’s true. You look like someone put a corpse in a microwave.”

  “I’ve driven in worse condition,” he says, then he takes a look at himself in the rear view mirror. “I’ll be fine.”

  “That just shows you make poor decisions. Just because you got lucky with the odds once, doesn’t mean you’ll get lucky again.”

  “More than once.”

  I punch him in the shoulder. He can be so damned frustrating sometimes.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel more comfortable?” I say. “Riding with some habitual hung-over driver?”

  “It means I know how to handle hard rides and feeling like shit. Relax.”

  “Oh? Is it some sort of biker thing?”

  “In a way, yeah. Though it’s more like a ‘fucked up person’ kind of thing. We get a lot of ex-military in the Kings,” he says. His pupils widen a bit, like he’s seeing both the road and a memory, and a smile lifts his lips. “Before any prospect patches in to the club, we send them on a ride. A long ride. Alone. They pick somewhere known for riding — whether that’s doing something cross-country like Route 66, or the Pan-American highway, whatever — and they go, and they use that time to decide if they’re really ready for what the club’s going to require of them.”

  “So, it’s like some kind of spiritual quest? I
s Jean Claude Van Damme involved? Is there a montage?”

  “Shut up,” he says. “If someone becomes a full patched member of the club, they’re going to have to do some serious shit at some point. We need to be sure their head’s in the right fucking place.”

  I roll my eyes but bite my tongue. It still sounds like Jean Claude Van Damme should be involved, training his biker pupils to do splits spanning two bikes speeding the highway. “Ok, fine. So, where did you go? And how is any of this supposed to make me think that you driving exhausted and hungover is ok?”

  His smile shifts, turning wistful. “Vietnam. My dad served there. He came back, but, the way my mother told it, that man wasn’t my dad. Mentally, emotionally, the only time he was actually present in the fucking room was when he was angry. He left when I was ten. They found him in the tub of a motel two states away – gun in his hand and his brains on the tile wall. I don’t have many memories of him, but I’ve got plenty of scars.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He lets out a great gust of a sigh. White lights up his knuckles around the steering wheel. “So, when I was about to be patched in, I went over there. Rode from North to South. I wanted to see it all, to find out why and what fucked my dad’s head up so much that he’d ditch his family and swallow a bullet in the bathroom of a roach motel.”

  I don’t say anything, but I reach out and put my hand on his leg. It seems to calm him a bit.

  “You want to know what I found?” he says. “Not a damn thing. Except some of the best fucking riding I’ve ever seen — endless white sand beaches and the greenest forests — and plenty of people that suffered more shit than my dad. People with missing limbs and people fucked up from Agent Orange. But they still kept living. Built families and lives from the fucked-up wreckage of their country. Most every night, I got blasted on rice wine and snake whiskey with old men that’d seen the kind of shit that’d make you put lead in your brain, but they kept going.”

  There’s this look on his face and this note in his voice that’s distant. He’s hardly in the truck, he’s thousands of miles away. “What did you learn?” I say, my voice so weak I can hardly hear it, I don’t want to pull Nash out of whatever place he’s in.

  His eyebrows furrow, his lips curl down. “I learned you don’t ditch your fucking family. You get closer to them. They’re the ones that lift you out of the shit.”

  “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Me too.” He shrugs. “But he deserved what he got for being a cowardly piece of shit.”

  I settle back in my seat and watch through contented, half-lidded eyes as Idaho slides by our windows. I keep my hand where it is. On his leg. Comforting.

  He doesn’t seem to mind.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nash

  Tacoma grows on the horizon as the asphalt zips beneath our tires. A dirty, gritty mess of concrete. It ain’t as dirty and gritty as it used to be, there’s people and money moving in and the old train station is now a courthouse and across the street from it is some museum filled with colored glass. But it’s still the kind of place where a wrong turn can lose you your car, your money, or your life. It’s got neighborhoods where people look after their own and keep out any pigs with badges. It’s got character.

  Over the years, some of these neighborhoods have been refuges for us Wayward Kings, places with customers for our guns or our protection services, and some years you’d be safer stepping into the jaws of hell.

  With three years and change in prison, I don’t know which way the winds blowing and press my foot harder to the gas. I need to get home.

  Lights flash behind me, headlights, on and off, on and off.

  I keep my foot on the gas and keep driving, and we hit the bridge across the Puget Sound. Choppy water, whitecaps, swift currents, wave-swept rocks lurk below us.

  Lights flash again.

  “Keep your head down, Roxanna,” I say. I reach over and put a hand on her shoulder, trying to keep her calm.

  “What? Why?” She says. She doesn’t sound very calm.

  “Just do it, alright? And open the glove box.”

  She reaches for it, yanking it open. “A gun? What the hell is going on?”

  “Give it to me. And remember to keep your fucking head down.”

  We cross the bridge.

  It’s late, the sun’s set, the pistol’s on my lap, and the lights behind us flash again.

  I tap my breaks. Once, twice, and drive a little ways past the bridge and take the first turn onto a side road. It’s lined thick with trees — pines, mostly — and dark as hell. The canopy’s so thick, not even the moon or the stars shine here.

  The road’s empty.

  This spot will do.

  I pull onto the shoulder.

  The lights flash again as the car pulls up behind me. A late Cadillac, black, dropped low, and where it’s not seen it’s share of bullet holes and scrapes, it shines bright with the reflection of my truck’s taillights.

  Two doors open. Two men get out. Sagging pants, swagger, and the colors of the Hilltop Mob, one of the half-dozen or so gangs back in Tacoma that were sometime friends, sometime enemies, and all-the-time assholes.

  “Stay calm,” I say.

  “Stay calm? Any time anyone says that, it’s bad news. And you’ve said it a lot,” she replies.

  “True. But stay calm, this might be nothing, or this might be bad.”

  “You do so much to make me feel confident.”

  “Relax.”

  I go quiet and, thankfully, she does, too, as the two guys get next to the truck, one at each door. I roll my window down.

  I think I recognize this guy. Got drunk with him once after selling him a few assault rifles. If he’s the man I remember, he ain’t half bad. I think I even know his name.

  “Jamal, been a while,” I say.

  “Bear, been more than a while. Been a few years,” he replies.

  “Bear? What?” Roxanna says. “Who’s Bear?”

  Jamal looks from her to me, amused. “She don’t know about you?”

  “It’s a nickname,” I say to her.

  “What kind of a nickname is that? How’d you get it?” she says.

  I flinch. This isn’t how I wanted this conversation to go.

  “It’s cause your big friend here is all cuddly like a teddy bear,” Jamal says, laughing.

  I grit my teeth. “That isn’t it. I used to have a beard.”

  “A beard?” Roxanna says, arching an eyebrow, smiling. “You got your nickname from a beard?”

  “It was a big beard,” I answer.

  “Would’ve made that Ron Swanson guy hard if he saw it,” Jamal adds. “It was some serious shit, lady.”

  “Made him look like some sorta homeless, wilderness man,” the guy at the other window says.

  “What happened to it?” Jamal says. “You’ve just got some stubble, man. What the hell? I liked that thing.”

  “I’d heard about it,” the other guy at the window says. “I was hoping to touch it.”

  Jamal and I both look at that other guy. “What the fuck, Leroy?” he says.

  “They shaved it when they put me away,” I explain.

  “Fucking shame, Bear. Everybody liked it. It was something to be proud of.”

  “Sounds like an absolute tragedy,” Roxanna mutters. “Bear.”

  “I’m with you when it comes to most beards, lady,” Jamal says.

  “Roxanna,” she interjects.

  “Roxanna,” he says. “But at a certain point, once they grow long enough and you groom them right, they just get downright majestic. Like, you just look at them and you feel more manly by association. And that’s how Bear’s beard was.”

  I grumble my agreement. I’m almost feeling a bit flattered by Jamal’s compliment. Roxanna rolls her eyes.

  “Did you really just pull us over to check to see if Bear still had his beard?” she says.

  “Nah, lady,” Jamal says, his voice sinking. “That ain�
��t it. We got some work to do.”

  I catch the flickered reflection of headlights on gunmetal. A shift in the other guy’s posture, movement as he reaches for something.

  Fuck. I’d kind of liked Jamal.

  The night gets quiet. Still. Like the world around us is holding its breath. I let out a yell and pull the door release, kicking it open. Heavy steel crashes into Jamal and sends him sprawling backwards. I turn towards the other man, still yelling, and snatch the gun from between my legs. I shove it right into Leroy’s face.

  His pupils dilate.

  I pull the trigger.

  Crack.

  Lead splits his lips, shatters teeth, cracks jawbone, and sputters out the back of his skull, sending gouts of steaming red into the cool night air.

  Roxanna screams. A shrill noise that cuts through the pounding chorus of blood ringing in my ears.

  Gravel crunches beneath my feet.

  Jamal scrambles in the rocks and dirt, trying to find his feet, a red gash gushing from the bridge of his nose where the door took him.

  A boot to the face sends him backwards.

  He cowers in the dirt.

  I pick up his gun and shove it into the back of my pants.

  With a knee to his throat, I crouch down next to him. He gurgles as I lean into him, larynx collapsing under my weight. Eyes bug out and spit dribbles from the corner of his mouth.

  “I’m going to let you breathe in a moment, Jamal,” I say. “You’re going to talk. But first, I’m going to show you just how fucked you really are.”

  I strike.

  His face makes a satisfying crunch as my knuckles crack into his jaw. Bone gives way with a bend and a snap. The gravel shifts and screes behind him as his head bounces into it.

  I pull back and unleash another punch into his face.

  It caves.

  His lip splits. Deep. His mouth a bloody hole in his face.

  I hit him again.

  A tooth twists and stabs through his upper lip. A thick trickle of blood runs down his cheek.

  I ease my knee back a little, allow him to breathe.

  He spits blood, a wet gurgle of thick red and mucus that trails down his chin. Sucking air, eyes bugging out, he squirms again.