OUR SURPRISE BABY

by Paula Cox

  “Yeah,” I mutter, thinking that it’s damn strange seeing a huge man like Mountain laid out like this. And thinking about Lana, too, about how she might be gone one of these days. I shouldn’t be paying that any mind at a time like this, but I can’t help it. Lana is the one thing right now that makes all this shit worth it. No matter how hard my day is, I can come home and join her in bed. If I can’t do that, I reckon I’ll go mad. Focus. I have to focus. But Lana . . . Fuck, man, this caring-about-women shit can really screw with your head.

  I think about this past week, all the times we’ve fucked, every night now. I don’t know what I was doing for the weeks before that. Now, no matter how tired I am, I find the energy to fuck her until we’re both panting and sighing, until both our eyes can’t stay open.

  “Boss?” Earl raises a grey eyebrow at me. “How do you wanna play it?”

  “We’ll tell the men,” I say. “Can’t lie to them. But I’ll be damned if we’re goin’ to let them see Mountain like this. We’ll tell them what happened but we’ll keep this grisly shit to ourselves. Mountain’s people need to be told, too.”

  “Only people he had was an old aunt down in Baltimore he hasn’t seen for a decade,” Earl mutters. “The club was his life.”

  There’s anger in the man’s face. The same anger which must be in mine.

  “I know,” I say. “The Italians have crossed the fuckin’—”

  “What have we done, my friend?”

  Suddenly, the clearing is full of Italians. At least twenty of them, emerging from the trees with pistol and rifles and sub-machine guns trained on us, three Tidal Knights stuck in the middle of all these Italians. Scud goes for his gun, but Earl and I do not. We know there’s no chance of out-shooting this. I lay a hand on Scud’s arm, stopping him.

  “No,” I say.

  If the Italians wanted to straight-up execute us, and if they’ve gotten the drop on us like this, we would never have seen it coming. Shot, fade to black; that would be all. But this . . .

  There’s no question about who Enrique is. He’s the only one not holding a gun. He’s holding a machete instead. I look down at Mountain, at the hacked-at flesh. At the torn red flesh. Then back at the machete, which has hair and blood clinging to it. Fuckin’ animal. I wish I was back in bed with Lana; I wish I never left.

  “Guns, please,” Enrique says, gesturing with the machete.

  We throw our guns onto the ground.

  Enrique nods at his men. “Don’t do a thing until I tell you to,” he says. He speaks with the quiet authority of a man used to being obeyed. He speaks like me. The thought makes me angry.

  “Get on with it, if you’re going to do it!” Scud cries, voice high and girlish.

  Earl sighs, showing no sign of fear. “Shut the fuck up, Scud.”

  Enrique walks right up to me, so close I could dart my hand out and crush his neck. And I would, if it were not for the Italians all around us. He’s a head shorter than me, with gelled black hair and a gold chain hanging between an open-buttoned white shirt. No, not white. Red-specked white. Blood-specked white. His face is open, calm, the face of a butcher going about his business. But his lips twitch as though he’s struggling to hold back laughter. There’s an aura of violence around him, as though any second he could start hacking.

  He lifts the machete to my face, places it against my cheek. I feel Mountain’s blood and hair against my skin. Goddamn, why did I ever leave Lana’s bed? Why would a man be that stupid?

  He looks into my face. “If you shivered, or showed any sign of fear, I would kill you.”

  “You don’t scare me.” I shrug. That’s not true. Of course it’s not true. I’m scared, alright. I’m scared ’cause if I die here I’ll never get to see Lana again. Never get to run my hand through her hair again. Never to get to feel the warmth of her naked body again. Never get to listen to her faint nighttime breathing again. Never get to hear her panting moans again.

  But a man doesn’t show fear.

  “I should,” Enrique says, stroking the machete up and down my cheek. “I really should.”

  “Alright.” I just stare at him.

  Enrique giggles, takes a step back, swinging his machete like a cane. He dances over to Mountain and kneels down next to him. “What do you think, big man? Should your boss be scared of me?”

  “The theatrics won’t impress us,” Earl says. “We’ve seen worse’n you.”

  “I doubt that,” Enrique says matter-of-factly.

  He jumps to his feet and walks slowly around the clearing, looking each of his men in the face. It freaks me out ’cause the way he looks at his men is exactly the way I look at my men, gauging them for grit, for fight, seeing if they’ll stand tall when the time comes. Duster could do that without looking into a man’s face, he used to say, could tell just by listening to the tone of his voice. Said if a man spoke too loudly or growled and blustered and snapped he was a coward. Don’t know how close to the truth Duster was on that one.

  Finally, Enrique stops next to a man—more of a boy. Shorter than the others with a reddish wind-burned face. He wears a pale blue suit, but no jewelry, and his hair is not slicked backed but a mop of jet-black curls. He holds a pistol, a small handbag type thing, and his hands shake.

  “This is my son,” Enrique says, patting the boy of the shoulder. “He is a good boy, aren’t you, Pablo?”

  The boy, still shaking, nods.

  “He is a fine, brave boy. He is my only son, my only family now that you dogs killed my big brother. My last remaining family member, here to learn the business, here to get down and dirty with the men. I love him. I love him dearly.”

  We watch, waiting. I have no clue what kind of point Enrique’s trying to make until he reaches into his pocket with his free hand and brings it out gripping a knuckle-duster, glinting gold. He stares at me directly in the face for around ten seconds, the boy trembling and dribbling, trying to hold back tears.

  “This is my son,” Enrique says.

  Then he punches the boy across the mouth so hard the gun goes flying from his hand and the boy lands in the dirt with a squeal. Enrique gives him two more jabs in the nose, the first shattering it in a bloody explosion and the second pommeling the broken cartilage into his face. The boy’s arms go limp and flop at his sides.

  I look around at the Italians. “This is the man you follow?”

  My hope is to get some of them to realize that this goes against everything they apparently follow. All their codes of blood and family and all that mafia shit. But the looks in their faces are mean, sadistic, or scared and beaten. They’re not standing up to Enrique anytime soon.

  Enrique dances back across the clearing to me, swinging his machete.

  “Now listen,” he says. “I could cut you up into little bitesize pieces right here and everything would be done and dusted neatly and cleanly. But the thing is, I’m a hunter. I enjoy hunting. Deer, rabbits, birds, I like the tracking and the chasing and then, finally, the kill. Take your friend.” He kicks Mountain in the side. I half expect the man to groan and roll over. “He was a coward and died easily and I was bored. Too bored. So now I have put the fear of God in you I would like you to return to your little clubhouse and your little biker life with the knowledge that sooner or later it will be you lying blood-soaked in the dirt. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds like you’re a fuckin’ fool for not killing me now.”

  I step forward so that we’re staring into each other’s eyes, with me staring down at him.

  I expect anger, but he grins.

  “I will be seeing you, tough man.”

  I want three things right now. The first is to hook the man across the jaw and fall upon him on the ground and keep hitting and spitting and fighting until he is as dead as Mountain. And I want to be back at the clubhouse with Lana and I want to just sit with her and kiss her and fuck her and be with her. The third thing I want is for Duster to be standing at my side and make a funny comment that’ll make
Enrique look stupid.

  But a man’s wants don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things.

  Enrique walks calmly from the clearing, and after a few minutes the Italians retreat, too, a couple of them dragging Pablo’s unconscious body.

  “What do we do?” Earl says.

  “Nothin’ we can do,” I mutter. “Except be careful from now on. I want you to let the men know, we’re traveling in groups of two wherever we go now. And don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

  “Like a buddy system?” Scud laughs.

  “Nothin’ funny here.” I kneel down next to the body. “Now help me get him up.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lana

  “I always forget what small town America is before I come to a town like this.”

  Terry and I sit in a café, a proper café with the baristas wearing pants and T-shirts. They rush around behind the counter, steaming milk, folding napkins, doing all the things most customers won’t notice unless they, too, have been that side of the counter. Terry and I sit near the window overlooking the park and the town hall.

  “It’s peaceful,” I say.

  “But you want to move.”

  I massage my eyelids, lean back, and then lean forward and sip my decaffeinated sugarless coffee. Terry watches the entire routine impassively, just waiting for me to talk.

  “You got your notebook?” I ask, trying to change the subject.

  “Yeah.” She reaches into her bag and takes it out. Terry’s wearing a flowing purple dress, the sort of fabric that both hugs and drifts around a person. She taps her pencil against a blank page and smiles a time. “Don’t you want to talk?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrug. “It’s difficult. Life is difficult. Nothing’s simple. Nothing’s black and white. Take my mother, for example. I hate her for the way she throws herself into her headaches, desperate to be a martyr, and yet when I hear her groaning—feigned, more often than not, Terry—I feel bad for her. And then think about the Twin Peaks. I hated the way some of the guys looked at me, like Chester. But then there would be men who just smiled and looked me up and down. You know as well as I do that you get a thrill from that some days. Nothing’s as simple as it seems. And now the Tidal Knights are on high alert.”

  “I can see that.”

  Terry nods at the window into the street, where two Tidal Knights members sit in a pickup truck, watching the café.

  “It’s serious,” I say, when Terry grins as though it isn’t.

  “I’m sure it is,” she says. “But I’m not here to talk about the Tidal Knights. I’m here to talk about you.”

  As she speaks, she sketches.

  “I’m here to ask how you’re feeling, hon.”

  “I am feeling like a woman with a baby on the way without the father knowing about it. In short, great.” I roll my eyes. “Fantastic.”

  She pushes the paper across: it’s me, oversized belly, peeking over my shoulder fearfully as Kade approaches from behind. She’s drawn Kade as more beast than man, muscles ripping out of his leather.

  “You’re getting quicker,” I say.

  “More work.” She nods. She hands me the pencil. “But I need the speech bubbles.”

  I look down at the sketch and wonder what to write. I look down at it for so long that by the time I’ve decided, my coffee is cold. I write above Kade: I’ll stand by you, Lana And above me: I know you will.

  When I slide it back to Terry, she makes a vomiting noise and covers her mouth. “I’m going to—barf. Really, I am. Jesus. Ah! Help me!”

  I lean across the table and punch her in the arm. “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Lana! Ladies do not curse!”

  “I never claimed to be a lady.”

  “But seriously. What are you going to do?”

  “Let’s stop talking about me!” I protest.

  I stand up and go to the counter, get another sugarless decaffeinated pointless coffee, and then return to the window table.

  “What do you want to talk about, then, drama queen?”

  “You. How are you, Terry? How’s the work?”

  “Fun but challenging.” She stares blankly at me.

  “That’s all you’re going to offer. No detail?”

  “We get free coffee in the kitchen at work.”

  “Terry!”

  She tilts her head at me, grinning. “I’m not here to talk about me. I’m here to talk about you.” Her pencil moves quickly and almost absentmindedly across the paper; she glances down at it between sentences. “How’s your book coming along?”

  “It finally is. I’m ten pages in and each one is a victory.”

  She pushes the paper across to me. It’s a sketch of me and Kade and a bundled baby sitting on a couch, Kade’s arm around me, my head on his chest, the baby cradled between us. She’s drawn a love heart around it and then a giant question mark.

  “What do you want me to say?” I ask.

  “I want to know if a scene like that appeals to you.”

  “So what if it does? The way things are right now, I can’t have it.”

  “Pretty soon, you’ll have to make a choice. Pretty soon, that bundle inside of you is going to start growing—growing and showing.”

  “Oh, thank you, Terry. I had no clue about that. I would like to sincerely thank you for explaining to me the arcane process by which life is formed in the womb.”

  “I hope you don’t use odd words like that when you write,” Terry says. “I certainly won’t be reading your book if you do.”

  We meet eyes, and then giggle.

  “Anyway,” Terry says, taking the paper back, “your breasts are getting ahead of your belly, hon.”

  “What do you mean?” I look down at myself. I’m wearing a summer dress, flowing, the sort of dress which makes it difficult to see where flesh starts and fabric ends. “They’re fine, aren’t they?”

  “How are your bras fitting?”

  I blush. “Tighter,” I admit.

  “You’re in denial!” Terry cries theatrically. “They’re fine, aren’t they? And then you tell me your bras are tighter!”

  “I’m not in denial,” I say defensively. But she’s right, I know. I am.

  Terry starts another sketch.

  “Of course not,” she says. “So what do you do when you’re not writing?”

  I think about that for a second, and then realize that the only things I’ve been doing these past weeks is writing, walking the town, and waiting for Kade at night—and reading now and then. When I tell Terry, she laughs. “You’re living a bohemian lifestyle. I almost feel guilty for trying to pull you away from it all. That is, if you make good on your promise and give me a firm date for when you’ll move in.”

  “Sometimes Scud brings me lunch,” I add.

  “Who’s Scud?”

  “Kade’s VP. He’s . . . I don’t know, he’s odd. He’s friendly enough but—You know when you go to a club with your friends and you just want to hang out, get a little tipsy and dance? And then there’s this one guy who sort of lingers too long, is overfriendly, and you can tell just by looking at him that he expects something for how nice he’s being?”

  “Yeah, honey. They’re the worst. Give me an outright pig any day over one of those sniveling, whining wretches.” She shivers. “The worst is when they send you texts right after breakups: If you need a shoulder to cry on . . . It’s like, man, I’m not going to bounce on your pogo-stick after I’ve seen you collecting my snotty tissues.”

  “Well—he’s like that.”

  “But he hasn’t tried anything.”

  “No. How could he? Kade would . . .”

  I don’t finish. Terry nods.

  “Tough man, that Kade, as tough as his name.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  She slides the paper across. Now she’s drawn me with a toddler behind me. I’m hiding the kid from Kade, who tries to peek over my shoulder to see the child.

  “That’s cruel,” I say. “I wouldn�
��t let it go on that long.”

  “That’s what everybody says. And then one day becomes another and another until you look back and realize that the days have become years and you’re still in the same place.”

  “Are you a philosopher, or an illustrator?”

  “A bit of both, maybe.” She stares at me. Staring at Terry is like staring at a teacher you respect. You want to look away and tell them they have no right to probe into your life, and yet you know they only want the best for you. “Come on, Lana. What’s going on? Why haven’t you told him?”