Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7)

by Susan Fanetti

  The people who hated him didn’t hate him because there’d once been oil under his family’s land. They were too stupid to know about that. They just hated him because he was darker than they. Period. They just saw ‘Injun.’

  At best, the people who knew a bit more and tried to be less assholey, they just saw ‘Native American’ and still placed him apart from them. That term, ‘Native American,’ made white people feel a whole lot better about themselves, but it wasn’t really any better, or any more correct, than ‘Indian.’ ‘Native American’ lumped hundreds of different tribes together and suggested that the land was ‘America’ at its essence, but that was a word colonizers had laid on it, when they’d ‘discovered’ it thousands of years after people had made their lives on it.

  It came down to one thing for Caleb: this was the world he lived in. It was a white world, and hating it did nothing to help him make his way in it. Levi and Grampa stayed on Osage land and made their lives there; that was their world. But Pawhuska and Hominy held nothing for him. They never had. He wanted something more than Osage Nation could offer.

  The white world wasn’t his world. Osage Nation wasn’t his world. It was a hard way to live, standing with each foot in a different place, when those two places hated each other.

  Unbidden, words to Cecily’s poem rolled over the curves of his brain. He’d lied to her when she’d asked if he’d read her poems. She’d been so angry and defensive and freaked out, he hadn’t thought it safe for either of them if he’d told her the truth.

  The truth was, he’d not only read every page, every draft, he’d also copied down the one he liked best. It had the ring of a story to it, and he’d thought it might be cool to set it to music, in the style of his ancestors, or of hers.

  He dug out the folded page from his nightstand drawer and smoothed it out on his bed. Written in his scratchy handwriting, in pink ink because that was the only pen he’d been able to find that night at Ox’s, the words didn’t seem quite as beautiful as they had in her round, girly penmanship, but it was a good poem, he thought. For all he knew of such things.

  It made him feel a way, at least, and that seemed to him to be the most important thing about making something—to make people feel when they saw it or heard it.

  ‘Nowhere Girl,’ she’d called it. When he’d first read the title, he’d thought of the Beatles song of a similar name, but they were nothing else alike.

  The girl walks.

  The road is flat and black,

  winding through flat grey dirt.

  And black trees stretch out

  black arms like claws searching

  through the flat grey sky.

  “Where are you going, girl?”

  The voice is dark thunder, and shakes

  the flat road. It cracks and gaps beneath

  the hard soles of her weary feet.

  The girl stops in her path and turns.

  She looks deep into the face of nothing,

  and replies.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Nowhere?” laughs the Shadow Man,

  showing pointed colorless teeth

  and a mouth that swirls down and down.

  “Well then, girl, you are here.”

  The Shadow Man spreads out his clawed arms,

  draped in shade and abyss,

  hung with the ice of a thousand longings.

  The girl searches deep and finds nothing.

  “Is anyone there?” she calls.

  Her timorous words bounce down and down,

  into shade and abyss, beyond icy longing.

  They are answered only by themselves.

  The Shadow Man laughs again, sending blades

  of black humor to slice the grey sky.

  “I am full of no one, girl. I hold all the nothings.

  I am Nowhere, and I am where you are.”

  He beckons with branchy claws,

  The girls spreads wide empty arms.

  She walks forward, into shadow and shade,

  into longing and nothing,

  to Nowhere.

  With a sigh and a swallow, he welcomes her into himself.

  Yeah, it made him feel a way. Like he was full of that black abyss himself. And it made him worried for Cecily, too. He didn’t think he understood all of it, but it seemed like the girl in the poem—Was that Cecily? It probably was, right?—had given up. She was tired, and it seemed like Nowhere was already all around her. That was what the Shadow Man meant, right—that he was where she was. He meant always, everywhere, not just there, in that one place.

  Yeah, it made him feel a way.

  He picked up his guitar again and tried to put it to music.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Like dis, Cissy.” Duncan snatched the Lego from Cecily’s hand and snapped it onto his clump of blocks. “Like dis.”

  She peered at the random construction as if she meant to really study its workings. “Oh, I see. And what is this?”

  He rolled his eyes and shook his head like a fifty-year old man trying to teach a slow student. “Moke-do-cy-do,” he said, slowly and emphatically, enunciating every syllable so that she might finally catch on. “Moke-do-cy-do.”

  “Oh, a motorcycle. Of course. Now I see it.” It had about a dozen wheels, none of them pointing in the same direction. “Silly me.”

  “Yeah. Silly Cissy.” He patted her shoulder consolingly, then pushed a pile of loose Legos at her. “You try. Try is get better. Daddy says.”

  “Your daddy’s a smart man.”

  “Uh-huh. I smart, too.”

  “Yes, you are.” She hooked her arm around his little rear end, his jeans puffed by the diaper beneath them, and tried to pull him close, but Duncan rarely wanted to be held unless he was tired, and he wasn’t tired now.

  Leaving her to her assignment, Maverick’s little boy trotted away from the plastic picnic table. He went to the patio and tried to run his motorcycle on the stones, but that didn’t work. The grass offered not much more success. For a minute, he knelt there beside the zinnias, his dimpled little hands on his thighs and his soft brow puckered in concentration. A thought occurred, and he took his motorcycle to his sandbox, where it didn’t matter if the wheels were in the right place. On his knees in the sand, he pushed his creation smoothly around, supplying an assortment of engine noises.

  Cecily sat and watched him, enjoying the pleasant calm of an early May day. A warm sun shone high over the Helms’ back yard, and a light breeze kept the sting from its heat. The spring had been lovely since the break of winter, and the grass and flowers were already lush and vivid. The leaves of the big tree chattered quietly, as if they called for someone to play in the tire swing. Miss Shorty, their huge tabby, stretched out across the flat top of the wood fence, her tail flicking as she glared down at Mr. Chunk, their new pit bull puppy, who wanted nothing in the world as much as he wanted to slobber on the cat.

  Eventually, he bored of disappointment and trundled over to the sandbox, plunging his little nose into the sand and barreling into Duncan. Duncan shoved him away, and the puppy charged back in, and then the sandbox was a wrestling ring, as the babies rolled over each other.

  With one mindful eye on their shenanigans, Cecily opened up her notebook and jotted down some words. Not a poem or even a thought of a poem. Just observations. Tree beckons softly, offering the delights of its swing in the hopes of a moment’s companionship. That might be a line, or maybe an idea that might spark a poem. There is always a way forward, but you must see beyond your eyes.

  As long as she could remember, her mind had worked itself out in snatches like that. Her mother thought her decision to major in creative writing had been a ridiculous waste of a college education and the funds for it, but her father had understood. Cecily would never have made it as a business major or something like that, setting her life on a path in the corporate world, dooming herself to a career in a cubicle. She’d never fit comfortably in the normal world, and a tight box like that would have
choked her to death.

  She’d had friends, and a vibrant social life, and she’d found a place to stand in the worlds of high school and college, but the fit had been snug. Being an outlaw’s daughter had roughened her edges. It was a truth she couldn’t escape, and it made her different from the rest. Not that other parents were so moral and upstanding, but there was an acceptable kind of wrongdoing, and then there was the outlaw.

  Clara had dealt with that fact of her life the way she dealt with everything uncomfortable: like it wasn’t true. She’d behaved as if their father had been nothing more than a manager of a service station. She was so good at pretending the Bulls weren’t part of their story that she almost managed to believe it. She cultivated friendships that made it easy not to face the truth, even while she loved and embraced their father, even as they’d spent most of their big family events with men in kuttes, even as their father had been killed by one of his own ‘brothers.’

  Her father had managed to understand them both—Cecily’s sharp edges were like his, but so was Clara’s blithe but intractable will to make the world into her own image. Clara saw what she wanted to see, and she turned away from anything that didn’t fit that design.

  Now, since their father’s death, she behaved as if she didn’t have parents at all. Soon, she might believe that, too. Maybe someday, she’d pretend she didn’t have a sister, either.

  But Cecily didn’t have that talent. She couldn’t pretend real wasn’t true, even when she desperately wanted to. When she’d discovered that there was an actual major at her school, a concentration in the English major, that allowed her to read and write poetry, to revel in all the true things, and prepare for grad school and a not-normal career as a writer and teacher, she’d felt saved. It hadn’t occurred to her before that there was a career that would allow her to feed the prowling beast in her brain that constantly demanded that she make sense of her feelings, that pelted her with words and images and filled her head in a clamor until she made them real on the page. During high school, she’d filled almost thirty hundred-page spiral notebooks with poems and pictures and feelings the beast wanted in ink.

  Most of her poems were dark, full of death and pain, driven by the need to explore every dark corner she encountered, in her head or outside it. Most of them were crap, too.

  But she managed to get a good one out every now and then, even before she’d had any training. After learning how to shape language, how to give it form, she understood that few attempts were ever total wastes. As Duncan said, as Maverick had taught him, ‘Try is get better.’ There was always a way forward, always a way to make the wheels turn.

  If only she could apply that wisdom to her life now. But she was trapped and sinking. The earth had become quicksand.

  Mr. Chunk yipped—he’d figured out he could bark a couple days earlier—and jumped from the sandbox, tearing around the yard. Duncan stood, snowing sand from his hair and clothes, and called, “Chunk! Come Chunk! Come Chunk! CHUNK!” When the puppy ignored him in favor of trying to climb the fence and get to the cat, Duncan began to wail. He had this way of crying that Cecily found fascinating. It was hoarse and effortful, full of fury instead of sorrow.

  She could get behind that kind of rage.

  “Come on, Dunc. You want to go in and help me make lunch?”

  “NO! CHUNK!”

  “We could make dinosaurs.”

  His cry cut off at once. “Dinos?”

  “Yep. Dinos with ketchup, and trees with cheese, and juice.”

  He crossed his arms and cocked his head, considering. “Appa juze?”

  “Apple juice. We have to wash up first. I don’t think I can do everything myself. Can you help me?”

  “Okay, I hep.” He held out his arms, and she swept him up to rest his solid heft on her hip.

  Kids were so much easier than grownups. In just about every way.

  ~oOo~

  She had Duncan down for a nap and was rinsing the goop left from his cheddar cheese and broccoli off the Buzz Lightyear plate when Jenny came into the kitchen from the front of the house.

  “How was he?” she asked, and Cecily heard the rustle of plastic grocery sacks hitting the countertop.

  “Really good.” She shut off the faucet and turned around—and her smile died out before it could reach her cheeks. Mo Delaney stood beside Jenny. Aunt Mo. Brian Delaney’s wife. Uncle Brian, president of the Brazen Bulls.

  Had Jenny fucking told her? No, wait—they were friends. Family. Maybe it was just coincidence. Maybe Jenny hadn’t broken her trust. Or maybe Caleb had run his fucking mouth. Or Apollo. Or Maverick. Had he spilled her secrets?

  Before the echoing panic could get its fingers into her brain, she said, “Hi, Aunt Mo.”

  “Hello, love.” Mo smiled, and Cecily knew right then that she knew. “How are you?”

  “Fuck. Fuck you, Jenny. Just fuck.”

  “I had to, Ciss. You know I did. The club knows—that had to happen, too, and you know that, too.”

  “She’s right, Poppy.”

  Mo hadn’t called her ‘Poppy’ since she was in grade school. Little that had happened in the past few days—almost a week now—drove the point home quite so sharply that nobody thought she could take care of herself as Mo Delaney calling her that little-girl’s name.

  On Tuesday, after Clark had helped her work out that she’d been dosed, Cecily had managed to get through the rest of her work day, plowing through the echoing whine and dredging up willpower she hadn’t known she’d had to focus and get through a staff meeting and two classes. Then she’d done what Maverick had wanted her to do that morning—she’d driven to his house, this house, and agreed to stay with them for a few days, until she could get her head together.

  That night, she’d told Maverick everything. By the time she got all the new details out—there weren’t many—he’d been shaking with rage, but he’d stayed calm and held her. If she were honest with herself, she’d known at the time that he would take it to the club. If she were brutally honest, she’d wanted the club to fix it.

  But she wasn’t ready for that kind of honesty. She didn’t want to want the club that had killed her dad and ruined her mom.

  “Did you tell my mom, too?” Of course they had—and what a shitshow that would be.

  But Mo’s head was shaking. “Not yet. I want to talk to you. It’d be better if you told her yourself, I think, yeah?”

  “That’s not going to happen. She doesn’t need to know.”

  “Cecily…” Mo started, but Cecily raised her hand.

  “No. I’m an adult, and I get to decide how deep my mother is in my life. I don’t want her that deep. I didn’t want you that deep, either. Jesus, I wish I’d never made that fucking phone call!”

  “You don’t mean that,” Jenny said. “If you hadn’t, who knows what they would have done to you!”

  That was true. God, it was true. The motherfucking, father-killing Bulls had saved her.

  The past few days, staying with the Helms, playing with the kids and the animals, having ice cream in the living room in front of the television every night, had been good. They’d been therapeutic, even—which, she thought, had been Maverick’s point. She’d felt more okay than she would have thought possible on Tuesday, and had only been taking hits here and there off the vodka in the freezer.

  But right now, the world was loud and hard and bright. Cecily raked her hands through her hair, snarling her fingers at the band around her ponytail and dragging it angrily loose. “Fuck. FUCK!”

  “Hey.” Mo stepped close and grabbed her hand. “You and me, let’s have a chat while Jenny unpacks the groceries. Yeah? We’ll take the pup for a walk.”

  “Chunk isn’t sure what he thinks about the leash yet,” Jenny warned.

  “Then I won’t be the only one getting dragged around the neighborhood,” Cecily grumbled as she opened the pantry and took down his new studded-leather leash.

  Mo gave her an imperious look but said nothing
. She scooped the writhing lump of pit bull up, and Cecily clipped the leash to his matching collar.

  ~oOo~

  Chunk knew exactly what he thought about the leash: he hated it. Halfway down the sidewalk, he pulled and rolled and threw his head around, whining like he was being burned at the stake. Mo and Cecily took turns cajoling him, calling him, offering his little training treats to get him to scoot despairingly on his little spotted belly.

  Then he found a dandelion to bark at, and their progress stopped entirely.

  The pup’s antics served, at least, to break the frosty tension Cecily felt, and she turned and faced Mo. “Please let me keep this from mom. Nothing good can happen if she knows.”

  “She’s a dear friend, and I know this thing about her daughter. This painful, awful thing her little girl is going through. How can I not tell her?”