by Lena Pierce
I spit onto the concrete and push all this from my mind. I have to stay focused. I have to stay Diesel. I can’t start getting overly emotional about shit. That’s not the way this life works.
The burger joint has been boarded up, quickly by the looks of it. Two of the boards are on sideways, one of them hanging from two nails at the top, the bottom flapping in a light breeze. I lead my bike around the back, prop it on the stand and knock on the boarded-up door that leads into the alleyway. There’s some rustling behind the door, the sound of movement, and then the nails are being smashed from the other side, landing at my feet. I step back as the board collapses into the alleyway.
Grimace is standing in the doorway, filling the frame, his shoulders almost brushing either side. “Come on,” he says. “I need your help.”
He leads me through the kitchen into the dining area. We stand by the counter looking over at the dead Skull Riders. There are four of them. I’m not close to any of them, but I know them. I’ve played cards with them. They all lie dead in a pile in the middle of the room, their corpses splayed atop each other, eyes dead, mouths wide open, tongues hanging loosely. Blood decorates the floor and the walls, splatters on the walls and big streaks on the floor from where the bodies have been dragged. Their throats have been slit viciously, cutting deep into the bone, and one man has had his eyes squished in the sockets.
“Shit,” I mutter.
“Shit is right,” Grimace says. “Fucking shit. Fucking bastard. There’s a couple more, too.”
“These are our men.” I don’t know what else to say.
“Thanks for telling me,” Grimace says. “I might not have known otherwise.”
I bite back a retort. “What happened?” I ask instead.
“Chino.” He says the word like a curse. “Fucking Chino. What else? I got a message a while ago, said this: Chino would like nothing more than a greasy burger. Arrogant fucks. I came by here and found this, so I quickly boarded up the windows and the door, and here we are. These are our men. They need to be taken to the clubhouse. And this place needs to be cleaned.”
“All right.” I roll up my sleeves.
“All right?” Grimace turns to me, squinting. “These men were your brothers, and you say all right?”
The urge to punch him in the face comes to me. I swallow it down, along with the urge to headbutt him and spit in his eye. “I’m here ready to help you out,” I say. “That should be enough. I’m not going to fall to my fucking knees as well.”
Grimace darts forward, but the sad truth is he’s older and slower than me. I dart aside, grab his arm and push it up behind him, paralyzing him. “Get your fuckin’ hands off me, boy.”
“I will if you calm down,” I say. “I can’t if you’re gonna come at me again.”
“I won’t.” He lets out a melodramatic breath. “See? I’m fuckin’ Zen.”
I let him go, stepping back. He turns to me, smiling. “Damn, boy. You’ve outgrown me.”
“Seems that way,” I say quietly, part of me wishing I could be the same kid who looked up to this man and that was that, no complicated emotions, no confusing feelings. But that kid’s dead. He probably died in prison, if he ever existed at all.
Grimace shrugs, and then nods at the bodies. “Why don’t you get these back to the clubhouse, and I’ll start cleaning up?”
“I’ll need a car.”
Grimace tosses me his keys. “My jeep is parked out front. Bring it around the back and I’ll get moving these bodies.”
“All right.”
I go to the front of the takeout place, start the jeep, and drive it quietly around the back. There was a time where I’d feel like a real bigshot behind the wheel of Grimace’s car, but now I just see Willa in the blackness of the night, her shadow on the windscreen. Grimace and I carry the men into the trunk of the jeep, piling them up and then covering them with black tarpaulin.
I know I’ve got the riskier job as I drive toward the clubhouse. All it would take is a single cop car and I’d be screwed. But I make it back to the clubhouse without a problem, and soon the four men are laid out on the tarpaulin in the garage, ready for one of our police contacts to come and sort out. We can’t ditch the bodies, because then we wouldn’t be able to have funerals. I arrange the men, wondering if I should care, wondering if it’s fair for me to feel so much for Willa and almost nothing for these men, men who are supposed to be my family.
As I leave them there and go and wait in Grimace’s office, I don’t feel like I’ve left family. I just feel like I’ve left four dead men. That’s all.
Grimace barges into the room an hour or so later, shaking his head, looking like all he wants is to have Chino right here in front of him. He kicks the chair and looks up at the ceiling, as though wanting to get at God, too. “We need to send a message to this bastard,” he says. “We need to send one loud and fucking clear. We’re the Skull Riders, Diesel. Do you know what that means? Do you have any goddamn clue? We don’t step aside for bastards like Chino. We’re the big bad wolves.”
“Okay,” I say.
He turns to me, looking like he wants to come at me again. But something has changed between us. He knows I’m not a kid anymore. He knows he can’t scare me anymore. “Okay,” he echoes. “I’m talking about the life and death of our club here.”
And I’m thinking about Willa. My thoughts are consumed with her. One track of my mind is in this room, sure, but the others, however many exist, are somewhere else, all focused on Willa. I’m sleepwalking. My real life is with her.
“All right,” I say. “What’s the plan?”
He scowls, looking disappointed. Maybe he wishes the old Diesel was here, the one who’d go crazy and punch the walls and rant about how this was my brotherhood and nobody was going to threaten that. Maybe he wishes the Diesel who’d parrot whatever he wanted to hear was standing in front of him. I just stand there, waiting. I’m not here to make him feel like a boss.
“I have the address of a warehouse,” he says. “We’ll make him pay.”
I sigh. Of course he has the address to a warehouse. That’s the only damn thing I’m good for in his eyes, so of course he does.
I ride out to the warehouse, thinking the whole time about Willa, about how she just left me there, and all because of what I’m about to do. I do my normal check of the warehouse, going through with a flashlight and calling out to make sure nobody’s in here. I’m about to leave when some homeless guy emerges from the darkness, wrapped in a dirty brown blanket.
“What’s going on?” he stutters.
“How many of you are here?” I ask him. I can’t hide the anger in my voice, even if it’s not anger at him. It’s anger at Grimace, and Chino, and the whole situation.
“Six, seven, including me, sir.” The homeless man bows his head. “We was quiet when you were calling but that last bit … what you mean there’s gonna be a fire? Here?”
I look over his shoulder. A woman, about Willa’s age, just as grimy as he is.
“That’s my wife, mister,” the man says, moving so that he’s standing between us. Maybe he thinks I want her. “What d’you mean, sir?”
“Nothing,” I say, dropping my matches into my pocket. “I don’t mean a damn thing, friend. Go back to sleep.”
I walk away without looking back. It’s the first time I’ve been sent to burn a place down and haven’t seen flames in my rearview mirror when I’ve ridden away.
Chapter Sixteen
Willa
As the weeks go by and summer gets even more brutally hot, I wonder what I am. I don’t ask myself who I am, but what. What, exactly, am I in relation to Diesel and Peter? I left Diesel lying in bed, looking down at him and feeling like my body was going to break in half because I wanted to stay with him and I needed to go in equal measure. When I arrived on Peter’s doorstep, he smiled and welcomed me in like a real gentleman. He had a spare room, and the door even had a lock on it. So I felt safe. I felt alone. I could tell myself I
was just a tenant, nothing more.
But this question keeps occurring to me. Was I Diesel’s girlfriend? Am I now his ex-girlfriend? Does Peter think that he and I are boyfriend and girlfriend, or are at least going to be soon? It’s clear that he wants that. I spend most of my time here in my room. When I take a shower, I take my clothes with me and get changed in there. When I eat, I make my food quickly and take it to my room. I do everything in my power to remain isolated—I need time to think, to reason all this out, and to deal with these pesky insurance people—but Peter still makes it clear what he’d like to happen.
He crumbled around the three-week mark, stopping me on my way to the kitchen one evening. He was sitting on the couch watching TV. “Hello!” he said, way too loudly. “How are you doing, Willa?”
I offered him a smile. “Fine, thank you.” When I made for the kitchen again, he patted the space next to him.
“Come and watch some TV,” he said.
“Uh—”
“Come and watch TV,” he repeated. This time his voice had a desperate note in it.
I felt sorry for him. He looked and sounded so pathetic. So I went and sat next to him and we watched TV for a while, some drama about cops in Baltimore. Neither of us was watching the TV, however. He was watching me out of the corner of his eye and I was watching him watch me, getting pretty creeped out.
His eyes kept locking onto my legs. I wanted to wear pants every day but it was so hot. Part of me suspected Peter purposefully set the AC to be warm, knowing I’d be wearing a skirt or shorts. When Diesel looked at my legs, I got wet, horny. When Peter looked at them, I felt cold and stale. I felt like I wanted to take a shower to wash the look away.
“I’m going to make some food now,” I said. “And then try and get some work done.”
“Right … okay … right …”
He squinted at me as I went into the kitchen. I felt his eyes on me as I started preparing the food, and when I looked over the divider which separated the kitchen from the living room, sure enough he was staring at me, pouting like a little kid.
I’ll always remember that pout. Even today, sitting in the office at work weeks later, I remember it. It’s seared into my memory because it was so pathetic. I tried to ignore it as I put the frozen meal into the microwave, but then I had to wait three minutes for the meal to nuke, giving Peter an opportunity to come into the kitchen with his empty glass and head for the sink. I pressed myself against the wall, wishing I could make myself completely flat.
He mumbled something. It was clear he wanted me to ask him what he’d said, so I kept my mouth firmly shut. For the umpteenth time, I asked myself why I was waiting on the insurance people. I should be doing something else, anything else. Maybe I should go to a homeless shelter. But the idea of being on the streets terrified me more than Peter’s pouting did. He filled up his glass and then turned to me, the hum of the microwave the backing track.
“I thought we’d watch a movie together tonight,” he said. His eyes strayed to my bare legs. I took a step back, as if that could hide them. “You can pick. It’d be nice, don’t you think, for roommates to watch a movie together? Isn’t that what roommates do, instead of hide in their bedrooms all the time?”
I imagined the night he wanted to have: sliding his hand up my leg, wrapping his arm over my shoulders, kissing me on the forehead, falling into bed together. Worms, maggots, spiders crawled over my body, up my neck, into my mouth. I felt like I wanted to gag. Being with Diesel was so, so wrong, and yet it felt about one hundred times more right than this.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I want to do that.”
Peter gripped his glass, and then laughed and smiled without humor and placed the glass on the counter. “I’ve been nice to you, haven’t I?” he asked. “I’m sure I’ve been nice to you. I let you stay here. I let you … Come on, Willa. Watch a movie with me.” He closed the distance between us, standing way too close to me. “I can be romantic if you give me a chance.”
“No!” I snapped, taking my microwave meal into the bedroom, not caring that it scalded my hand.
Sitting at my desk, I reflect that it wasn’t that bad. He didn’t outright try to kiss me or anything like that. And since then he’s been okay, even if his eyes do still stray. I’m saving up my pittance from the station job to try and pay for a motel for at least a month while I figure out what to do. Hopefully the insurance people will stop messing me around by then. So I just have to ride it out a little longer. I think about how easy it would be to return to Diesel’s place, to fall into his arms, easy and satisfying and incredible. But apparently I’d rather dodge around Peter than fall into the arms of the man I can’t stop thinking about.
I click away from my Word document for a moment and go onto the news website. I refresh the page for my LA fire newsfeed and glance down the results. There have been four fires that fit Diesel’s pattern since I split with him … four buildings turned to charred frames. Nobody has been killed, but two families have been forced to move from their homes. And people could have been killed. I stare at the page, reminding myself why I’m staying clear of him. This is why. This is what I have to do. One day I’ll forget Diesel. One day I’ll forget living with Peter. One day I’ll be living alone, far away from either of them, and all this will seem like—
I barge through into the bathroom, stumbling into a stall and falling to my knees just in time to vomit violently into the bowl. I grip my belly. It feels like there’s something alive in there, twisting my insides. I vomit again, again, splattering the bowl, my mouth tasting like acid. I slump down on the floor, leaning against the wall, wrists on my knees, and breathing heavily. I don’t know what the hell just happened to me.
“Willa?” It’s Brittany, sounding annoyed and kind of concerned in the way only Brittany can. “What’s going on in there?”
Since our argument about me moving in with her, we haven’t talked much except small talk. But right now she seems like the only friend I’ve got here. “I don’t know,” I say. “I was just working and then I was going to be sick, like, right that second. No warning or anything.”
“Oh.” I can hear Brittany stroking her chin. I imagine makeup scraping beneath her fingernails. “Oh,” she repeats. “Willa, when did you last have your monthly?”
Monthly, I wonder. Is she talking about a magazine? Then it hits me. I count back. When did I last have my period?
Shit.
“Over a month ago,” I whisper.
“What’s that?” Brittany calls.
“Over a month ago,” I say, louder. And then the sickness returns and I’m hunched over the bowl, dry heaving.
“Over a month ago,” Brittany repeats. “I’m going to run to the store for you. Over a month ago … silly, silly girl.”
I don’t have a chance to respond because the sickness hits me again. I manage to flush the toilet and splash water in my face just in time for Brittany to return, a small plastic bag clutched in her hand. “Over a month ago? How long?” She looks at me over the top of her glasses. “Two weeks, three, four …”
“I’m not sure.” I take the plastic bag from her. “I don’t know, okay?”
“It’s your period!” Brittany throws her hands up. The multicolored fabric of her flowing dress flutters around her. “How can’t you know?”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” I say, knowing that my real mom never would have reacted like this. She would have helped me without the scorn. “Can I have the test now, oh mighty one?”
“Do not talk to me like that,” Brittany says, glaring. With her big glasses, her glare is magnified. “I am helping you and you talk to me like that? What is the matter with you? There must be something wrong with you.”
She holds the plastic bag back, almost as ransom.
I sigh, and then say, “I’m sorry, okay? Can I just have the test?”
She gives it to me and then goes and stands by the door. “I’ll stand guard,” she says.
I’m not sure
I need anybody to stand guard, but I don’t have the energy for another Brittany argument so I nod and go into a stall, a different one, one that doesn’t reek of vomit. I hear Brittany clicking her tongue outside, making it distracting as hell as I take the test from its box and hold it in the bowl. My heart is thumping in my mouth, through my tongue, right into my eyeballs. Pregnant, pregnant with Diesel’s baby … pregnant with Diesel’s baby! I force myself to calm down, take a deep breath. Maybe I’m just late.
