Delaney gave his SAA an angry glare, then turned his attention back to the table. “I talked with Irina today, to get some clarity about how the change in runs changes the business. It took some doing, but she finally told me. She’s in position to make her move. It’s what we thought—she’s throwing her weight and a couple tons of Russian steel behind a Mexican cartel, the Perro Blancos. We can expect the Mexican underworld to be on fire soon. When it catches, the runs won’t be easier for us. Her big performance in the Panhandle was her message that she will play just as dirty and leave just as much of a mess as any cartel lord, and that she can do it in the middle of the fucking United States and brush off her hands and go home. Runs will be hotter until what she does plays out and settles down.”
“Shit,” grumbled Maverick. “And there’s no out?”
“Everything she ships west of the Mississippi hubs with us,” Apollo said. “We’d leave a huge hole in her transport line.”
Delaney nodded. “Exactly. She’d like us to think we’re replaceable, and technically we are, but right now, she’s vulnerable. She can’t take the time to find a new crew and get them up to speed. She needs us to get this done, and she’s ready to flip the switch.”
“This all sucks ass, but we’ve faced fire for her before.” Simon leaned forward. “There’s something else going on.”
Delaney stared at the gavel before him, playing his fingers over the turned wood handle. “You’re right. Beck and Rad and I were having it out before the meeting, and that carried into church. It’s this: I want out. I’m hanging up my kutte, boys. This is my last meeting.”
Caleb took that news like everyone else at the table: as if it had been said in a language they didn’t understand.
“What?” Gunner finally asked, when air entered the room again.
Delaney turned to him. “I’m tired, Gun. I’m so fucking tired. I’m still not all the way back from getting shot.”
“So take some time off, Prez,” Apollo suggested. “You’re more than owed it.”
“That’s what I’m doing, son. I’m sixty years old, and I feel ninety. I’ve buried all my closest friends and more brothers than I can bear. I almost died myself.” He paused, still fingering his gavel, and no one spoke into his silence. “It’s more than that. I don’t think I’m the right man to sit in this seat anymore. I think it’s been a while since I have been.”
“It’s your seat, D. Nobody else’s.” Maverick said that, and frankly, Caleb was surprised. Maverick fought a lot with Delaney. If anybody would want a new president, he’d have thought it would be Maverick.
Delaney was surprised, too. His eyes flew up, and he considered Maverick for a long time. “I appreciate you saying it, Mav. But the Bulls aren’t the club Dane and I founded anymore.”
“You led us where we are.” Now Maverick was challenging. “We are the Bulls you made.”
“I know, and maybe that’s not such a good thing. I think I pulled us off track somewhere. But there are a lot of voices at this table. Young men with big ideas. Do you see that Rad is the only man here that I’m not old enough to be a father to—or a grandfather? I’m leading from too far back. All I can see is history. It’s time for fresher eyes than mine to see ahead.” He sighed and pushed the gavel away, toward Becker. “I didn’t come to this lightly. I’ve been thinking about it since I woke up in the hospital. No. I’ve been thinking about it since Dane died. When Ox went off with Maddie, it started to become an idea. When I got shot, then it was a plan. The best thing I can do for this club and for myself is to step down and let it move on without me. I’m gonna try out retirement. Go home to my old lady, buy an RV and get one of those yippy little mutts to ride in it with us. We’ll tow the bike and drive around the country like the old farts we are. I’m gonna stop living like this while I’ve still got some years to enjoy life. That is what I’m telling you. The only thing I’m asking is if I do it with my ink or not.”
Suddenly, but not quickly, he stood, creaking up to his feet like the old man he said he was. “I’ll have a drink while you decide that.” He pushed the gavel all the way to Becker. “Beck, you’ve got the meeting. As for who should replace me permanently, I think it should be you, but that’s for the table to decide.”
With that, he walked to the door and out of the chapel.
The Bulls sat there, all of them wearing the same expression of shock and dismay.
“That’s what you were feelin’, Si,” Rad said at last. “Beck and me fightin’ that out with him. We made the same arguments. He won’t budge. He wants out.”
Gunner dragged his hands through his hair. “He’s led the club since 1975. He made us. He can’t just walk away.”
“Another way to look at it is he’s led the club for almost twenty-seven years,” Si said. “If he wants to walk away, he’s earned it.”
“He’s made his choice,” Becker said. “I wish he hadn’t, but it’s his choice. Do we need to vote on letting him keep his ink?”
“I think we should,” Maverick answered, and when Rad scowled and opened his mouth, Maverick held up his hand. “I hope it’s unanimous, but that should be on the record, that every one of us spoke for him.”
Several heads around the table, including Caleb’s, bobbed at that. It would be a message to Delaney that they understood and still had his back.
Becker called the question. “All in favor of sending Delaney to his retirement with his ink intact?” A chorus of ‘ayes’ went around the table, and then they were quiet again, numbed by the unexpected and momentous change about to happen to the Bulls.
After maybe a full minute, Becker spoke again, quietly. “We’ll need a new president. I’ll sit in as we figure it out, but I don’t know if I’m the right man to take the flash. I’ve only been VP for a year.”
“That’s a year longer than any of us, bro,” Caleb said.
“Yeah, true. But there’s a man sitting right here whose worn the patch longer than me. And Mav’s right behind me, and smarter than I am.”
“Seniority’s not that important,” Rad said. “As the oldest patch at this new table, I’m where I want to be. I don’t want to lead. I never have. If the next president doesn’t want me at SAA, then I’ll sit down the table as a soldier.”
“I don’t want it, either,” Maverick said. “This Russian shit, I’m in the minority on it every time, and that would drive me fucking crazy at the head of the table—and it’s no good for the president, anyway. D’s right, and you’re selling yourself short. You have the seniority as an officer, you have more experience than any of us, and you have a level head. If you want it, I think it should be you.”
“So let’s call the vote,” said Fitz.
“No,” Becker barked. “No. If you want me at the head I’ll do it, but we do not vote to replace our one and only president at the same meeting we voted to retire him. No. Let’s take a week. Think about it. If somebody else wants to throw in, do it. Let’s do this right. And that’s not right now.”
The table agreed readily. Caleb thought the Bulls had just seen their new president make his first directive—and it was a good one.
Rad set his hands on the table and pushed his chair back. “Okay. Let’s go tell D the vote and have a drink with the man who made us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“The rumpled old lady left without another look, and the man on the bench turned back to his book.” The paper had been shaking in Karen’s hands while she read. Now she set it before her on her red folder and looked up. As always, when it was her turn to workshop a piece of writing, her cheeks and neck flamed as red as that folder.
Cecily had never felt embarrassed to read her work aloud—the stuff she’d written for assignments, no matter how personal it might have become in the writing, had always been composed with an audience in mind. It took up a different place in her psyche than the work she wrote for herself. Answering a prompt meant expecting an audience, and she’d been confident sharing that work, even if
it needed a lot of revision, and even if it touched on personal matters.
It was the stuff she wrote to look into her own soul and mind that she didn’t like to share.
Still, she felt sorry for the writers, like Karen, for whom workshopping was a special kind of hell.
“Thanks, Karen.” She scanned the circle of seven other students in this creative writing seminar. “Who would like to start with first thoughts?”
As usual, silence greeted her question.
She’d developed these seminars herself. They were free to residents of the city, like everything else here at the Tulsa Ed Center, and open to residents in Tulsa County for a small fee. Writers hadn’t been beating down the door, but each term had a few more people—all of them writers who scratched poems in little notebooks they kept in their handbags or pockets, or wrote weird science fiction stories after work. Nobody so far had been a breakout star, a Maya Angelou just waiting to be discovered. Of course, neither was Cecily. She could craft a solid poem and had a handful published, but she wasn’t changing the world.
None of her students had had any experience with writing workshops before now. She opened every new term with a unit on how to be a good writing partner—how to read works in progress and drafts and offer feedback a writer could use, and how to do it with compassion. And how to hear critique and take it mindfully.
So she didn’t mind the silence as students thought about Karen’s poem and read the copy before them. Karen, however, as usual, was getting antsy, and she got defensive if left too long. So Cecily stepped in and asked, “Any comments about the structure of the poem?”
Travis, a guy about Cecily’s age—which was about half Karen’s age—said, “I like the rhyming couplets”—he glanced at Cecily—“Right? Couplets?”
“Right.”
“I like those a lot. They’re like…I don’t know…punch lines at the end of the verses.”
“Stanzas,” Joe, a laborer who came to the seminar in his uniform, straight from his job at a printing plant, corrected.
“Right, sorry. Stanzas. Punch lines isn’t right, because it’s not funny, but…I don’t know how to say it.”
Now that his tongue was primed, Joe offered feedback. “They make the stanzas more powerful.”
“Exactly,” Travis agreed. “But…this last one…I like what it says. I like the way after that encounter, they just go back to what they were doing, like it didn’t happen. Man, that’s intense. Like you can both be part of this huge thing, and then just…fade back into your bubble.”
Karen nodded. “What I was trying—”
“Karen,” Cecily cut in. “Wait.” They had a rule, one Cecily had learned herself, that the writer couldn’t speak until the workshoppers had had all their say. At this stage of a workshop, it didn’t matter what the writer meant to do. It mattered what the readers understood the writer to do.
Her bright red cheeks practically caught fire. “Sorry.”
Travis picked up his point again. “Anyway, that’s deep. But something about that last couplet is hanging me up. I can’t see what.”
“The rhythm’s off,” suggested soccer-mom Shelly. “All the other couplets have the same number of syllables, and about the same meter. I think it’s…iambic pentameter?”
Cecily thought Shelly was onto something, so she took over for a minute. She stood and went to the chalkboard. “Not quite. Let’s take a look at the last line: ‘and the man on the bench turned back to his book.’” She wrote it on the board as she said it aloud. “I think that’s the same meter as most of the other lines in the couplets. Do you agree?”
They all hunkered over their student desks and counted syllables and stresses, checking that line against the others. After a minute, she had the nodding heads she expected. “How many syllables?”
“Eleven,” Travis said.
“Yes. How many feet?”
That took them longer. It was Joe who answered. “Four?”
She smiled. “Okay, how are they broken up?”
“And the man…on the bench…turned back…to his book.” As Joe recited the lines in feet, Cecily put marks over the words on the board, indicating the stressed and unstressed syllables.
“Do you agree about the stresses?” she asked, turning back to her little class. Everyone nodded.
Drawing a line under the first foot, she asked, “What is a foot of two unstressed and one stressed syllable called?”
“Anapest!” Travis called out, exactly as if he’d shouted Eureka! The class laughed at his enthusiasm. Cecily did, too.
“Good, good.” She underlined all three anapests in the line. “That leaves ‘turned back’—what’s a foot with two stressed syllables?”
Nobody answered that one right away. They all riffled through their notes, looking.
“Spondee?” Shelly asked. “Spondee. It’s a spondee.”
“Good! Now, read through the couplets again and see if you think their meter is consistent: anapest, anapest, spondee, anapest.”
They were into this detective work. Karen sat there, shaking, but this was good for her—and Cecily knew she probably hadn’t dug so deeply into her own words. This was the work of revision. Taking the wet clay of words and emotion in a first draft and molding it into a sculpture of intention. Oh, that was nice—sculpture of intention. She jotted the line in her own notebook while her students scanned the couplets.
A sculpture of intention. Cecily looked up and studied the arc of novice writers before her, each one here in this room for no other reason than their own drive and desire to shape a sculpture of their own, to form the ideas and images in their heads into something they could understand. It was in the revision that it became sense they could share and be understood by others. Something beautiful and meaningful made of clay from their own souls and offered to the world. Something intentional and real.
This was what she’d wanted, why she’d gotten a degree in creative writing, why she’d wanted to be a professor. To spend her life making sense of her own mind, and to help others do the same. She wasn’t, and would never be, a professor. The sculpture of her life was not as she’d imagined it; the form had changed in revision. But she had the life she wanted.
Her life now was better, fuller, more complete than anything she’d imagined. It made more sense. She had love and family and purpose. She had everything.
“They’re all like that except for the first line of the last couplet.” Travis said, pulling Cecily from her reverie. “‘The rumpled old lady left without another look’ doesn’t fit the rhythm.”
Cecily moved away from the board and sat back at her student desk in the semi-circle they’d made. “You see how form is crucial to poetry. The line itself is a good one. It’s descriptive and evocative. It suits the mood of the poem and is part of a powerful statement. And sometimes, breaking rhythm is a good thing—like when you’re suggesting a disruption. But here, the speaker seems to be saying that things have simply gone back to normal, that the moment didn’t last. It needs a line that conforms, not one that disrupts.”
“So how would I change it?” Karen asked, looking like the only thing in the world she wanted was for this experience to end. She’d been struggling all session with hearing critique productively.
“This is your poem, Karen. Your words are the only ones that matter. You’ll find the right ones.” Cecily glanced up at the clock on the back wall. “We’re over time, sorry. I’ll see everybody next week. I think Joe and Dina are up next time, right?”
~oOo~
Cecily stayed late in the classroom with Karen, talking over the workshop and Karen’s revision plans. Mostly Cecily did cheerleading, which, honestly, irritated her pretty quickly. She wasn’t a natural hand-holder. She’d never had a professor hold her hand. They’d been more likely to cut it off. But this was a community center workshop, not a college course—her purpose here was encouragement as much as education. So she shored up her limited patience and gave Karen as many smiles and
verbal head-pats as she needed.
Most of the building was empty and dim by the time she got back to her office, and she expected the office to be the same, but Clark was still there, packing up his nerdy Samsonite briefcase. He’d been teaching an English-language class tonight.
“Hey. Becca called. She wants to go out tonight. We thought we’d grab something to eat and maybe hit a bar or two. Ginger’s in. How about you?”
“Thanks, but I’m going home.” She put her workshop folder away and packed up the papers she had to grade for her GED class.
Clark sighed and sat on the edge of the desk. “You never go out anymore. It’s been months. Is it Caleb? Does he not like us?”
Caleb didn’t like them, in fact. He blamed them for letting her get dosed last year. Cecily didn’t blame them, but there was nothing like getting dosed and raped to take the luster off the club scene. She’d gone out a couple times since, but it had not been fun. She’d been afraid to drink, afraid to dress in anything other than a sack, afraid to be there. And Caleb hated clubs and didn’t want her to be there, either.
Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7) Page 35