Nolan: Return to Signal Bend

by Susan Fanetti

  “Whatever. Look, it’s late, and Christian’s flight gets in early tomorrow, so I’m signing off. Keep your mouth shut about Mom, Iris. This isn’t Daddy’s business—and it’s not yours, either. You left, I’m here, and Mom wants to be here. So drop it. And Nolan is fine. Just chill. In general. Okay?”

  Christian was allowed in Little Rock. He wasn’t allowed to stay in the house while Ray was around, but he could be close and give Rose support. Their mom didn’t like him—he was metal guitarist and looked the part, with tons of piercings and lots of ink—but he didn’t wear a Night Horde patch, and he’d been with Rose for a couple of years, so he was tolerated.

  Iris wondered how things would have been different right now if she’d been able to bring Nolan to Little Rock with her. Or if Ray hadn’t knocked their mother down the stairs in the first place.

  If wishes were horses, their mother often said, and never finished the sentence. Iris hadn’t even been able to guess at what that meant until she was in high school, and she’d been in college before she’d known the rest: If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.

  “Yeah. Fine. Whatever. I’ll talk to you soon.” She closed her laptop before Rose could respond.

  Irritation layered over her steady state of restless worry and made it difficult for Iris to be still. She got up from her bed, set her laptop on her dresser, and grabbed a pair of sweats off the floor. She was off tomorrow, so she didn’t have to wake up early. She’d go downstairs and watch television or something.

  She was halfway down the staircase when her phone began to ring. Uncharacteristically, she hadn’t brought it with her, so she turned and trotted back up the steps. As she hit the landing, it occurred to her how late it was. Nobody called her this late.

  Realizing it could be Nolan, she ran down the hallway and careened around the doorway into her room and grabbed her phone.

  The number was unfamiliar but the area code was local. Nolan didn’t have his phones, but maybe he had a new one. She answered. “Nolan?! Nolan?!”

  Country music blared in her ear.

  “Nolan! Is it you?”

  “Iris?” No—not Nolan. A girl’s voice. Iris dropped to her bed and put her head on her hand. She felt a thunderclap of disappointment so keen and brutal that it was grief.

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “It’s Gia. Gia Lunden?” As if Iris would have known any other Gia.

  It was two o’clock in the morning, and Gia was fifteen years old. Why was she somewhere so loud? And why was she trying to whisper?

  “What’s wrong, Gia? Are you at Tuck’s?”

  “No. I’m at…um…that place in Millview. The biker place?”

  Iris sat up straight. “You’re at Moe’s? Gia, what are you doing?” Iris had learned that Raider Moe’s had a terrible reputation, especially in Signal Bend. It was a really rough place, and not in the way that Tuck’s got rough. People got hurt at Moe’s. And it was like a shark pit for women. Gia wasn’t a woman yet, but she looked like one—and that made it even more dangerous for her.

  “I need help. I can’t call home. My mom and dad will…I can’t call them.”

  “What happened? Can you tell me?”

  “I snuck out with some friends, but now it’s weird, and I don’t have any way home. I just need a ride. Can you give me a ride?”

  “It’s weird how, Gia?” Iris was already getting dressed, finding a sweatshirt to pull over her camisole and slipping her feet into the nearest pair of boots. Not a great look with her grey sweats, but who cared. “Can you get away?”

  “I need help. Don’t call Daddy. Or Uncle Show. Please don’t tell anybody.”

  Jesus Christ, she was tired of stupid females keeping terrible secrets. “I’m on my way right now. Stay someplace as public as you can. By the bar. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  But Moe’s was like fifteen miles away.

  As she left her room, she stopped in the hall and stared at the closed door at the end, where her father was.

  She should tell him. It was the right thing to do. But she also knew the way he would overreact if it were she in trouble, and she knew that Isaac would go in even hotter. Gia only needed a ride. Maybe she could just drive to Millview, pick her up, get her home, and keep everything calm. Then they two would talk after a good night’s sleep.

  With that plan in mind, Iris left her father sleeping and hurried from the house.

  ~oOo~

  Raider Moe’s had once been a barn. It still looked like a barn, but now it was surrounded by a gravel parking lot and had a big, flashy, flashing sign where the hayloft door had once been. As Iris pulled in, her heart drummed an erratic beat against her ribcage. People were drinking and partying around the trucks, and more than a few cabs had steamed windows.

  Half the lot was lit with bright dusk-to-dawn lights, but the rest of it was in darkness. Iris searched until she found a spot near a light.

  In the pocket of her sweats, on her keychain, was a collapsible baton. It was small but heavy. She knew how to shoot; her father wouldn’t have it any other way. And she had a small pistol of her own. But her father had also taught her a lot about gun safety, and she knew that knowing how to shoot and knowing how to use a gun were two different things. She was terrified, and she wouldn’t be steady enough to use a gun in a place like this. She’d end up disarmed and in deeper trouble. Or she’d accidentally hurt someone innocent. So she had her baton—another gift from her father.

  There was a long line of motorcycles near the building, but it seemed odd to Iris. All the bikes were different—cruisers and choppers, sportbikes, touring bikes, bobbers. They were all different colors, their contrasts standing out in sharp relief under the glare of the lights. When the Horde parked, all their bikes were so similar, though they were all different, that the line had a kind of beauty. Even at a rally or somewhere a lot of bikers congregated, Iris had noticed the fluid coherence. This line seemed disorganized and kind of ugly.

  The walls thumped with the music coming from within. When Iris put her hands around the door handle, she could feel the vibration.

  She went in—and through a metal detector. Couldn’t have used a gun, anyway. Nobody stopped her when she went through it, so her baton must not have made it do whatever it did.

  She’d never been here before—the Horde hated the place and warned everybody away from it—but standing just inside, it seemed like a normal bar to her. A big bar stood in the center, square, with two bartenders that she could see. Most of the light in the place was concentrated over the bar. The rest of the lighting was composed of plain metal hanging lamps, except in the back corner, where there was a stage behind chain link and a dance floor.

  The chain link suggested it wasn’t the world’s nicest place.

  But there was no band now. The music was blaring from a juke or a sound system or something. People were dancing. Some women were dancing like they were on the job.

  Mostly, though, people were drinking. A lot of the tables were full, and the atmosphere was rowdy but, as far as she could tell, not hostile. She’d been to frat parties that made more warning bells clang in her head.

  She couldn’t see Gia from where she stood—five-foot-three was not the kind of vantage that made scanning crowds easy, unless it was a crowd of preschoolers—so she wended her way to the bar, where she’d told Gia to wait for her.

  For the most part, people left her alone. She was wearing an old, lightweight hoodie and sweats tucked into cowboy boots, and her hair was piled on her head in a big clip—and she had no makeup on. She looked like a woman who’d been ready for bed, not ready to party.

  But she still got a couple of leering stares. Some guys just leered at anything with boobs.

  She wished she’d thought to put on a bra.

  At the bar, she took a turn, searching the people sitting and leaning there, as well as the people nearby. No Gia. Right in front of her, somebody left their stool, and Iris took it. She pulled her phone fr
om her sweats pocket and tried Gia. Nothing. That could be really bad—or it could simply mean that it was too damn loud in here.

  “What’ll ya have, darlin’?”

  The bartender was a big, older guy, with a long, thin, grey ponytail and not much on top. A walrus of a mustache moved around his words. Iris leaned over the bar so he would hear her. “I’m looking for a…my cousin. She called from here for a ride.”

  She thought he smiled, but it was hard to tell, with his mouth buried in yellowing grey mustache. But his cheeks rose a little. “Lots of chicks in here, darlin’. Gotta be more specific.”

  “Tall, thin. Long dark hair. Straight—with bangs.” She swiped her fingers across her forehead to demonstrate, in case the guy didn’t know what ‘bangs’ meant. It crossed her mind to say something more about the way Gia was built, but decided that could be counterproductive.

  He gave her a noncommittal shrug. “Sorry.”

  “She’s underage.”

  That got a raise of bushy eyebrows. “I’ll keep an eye out. You orderin’?”

  She shook her head, and with that, her help from Mr. Walrus was at an end. Iris shook her head and left the stool. She’d have to search.

  She found Gia at a cluster of pushed-together tables near the back of the bar. She was with three other girls, one of whom was Mindy Jasper’s little sister, Hilary. The other two, Iris didn’t know. Hilary Jasper was underage, too, but not like Gia. Hilary was eighteen or nineteen.

  All four girls, including Gia, were dressed for a night out. Iris had never seen so much makeup on Gia’s face. She’d tried, and mostly failed, to do winged eyeliner. And she was wearing a top that her father would have burned to ash if he’d ever seen it. Nothing but loosely knitted lace, and a bra underneath. Holy hell. Gia already had way too much body for that to look like anything but an advertisement.

  Iris was all for women dressing the way they wanted to dress and having the right to be safe in whatever that was, wherever they went, but this was not the kind of place where many other people agreed with that stance.

  The worst part of the scene was the men—men, not boys—they were with. Six of them, all of them very hands-on. It was practically pornographic. Gia was clearly in trouble. She was being held on one man’s lap, and she was slumped against his shoulder—conscious, but barely. He had a hand between her legs. Another guy was forcing her to drink.

  Iris would lay her savings down on a bet that it wasn’t just beer in that glass. It hadn’t even been half an hour since Gia had called, and now she was almost comatose. She’d been drugged.

  No one had noticed Iris yet. With her hand in her pocket, clutching the baton, and with her heart leapfrogging around in her throat, she pushed her way to stand at the table, so that she was between the two guys, next to Gia.

  “Gia. Come on.” She kept her face from showing too much emotion—she hoped—and made her voice as loud as she could without sounding hostile.

  Gia’s eyes focused a bit and lit up with relief, and she struggled weakly against the hold of the guy who had her on his lap.

  “Hey, baby. Don’t be a bitch, now. There’s plenty of room for you. Have a seat. Butch’ll pour you a beer.” The guy who held Gia nodded toward another guy, who leaned over to a pitcher on one of the tables.

  “Hey, Iris. You should party.” That was Hilary, slurring her words and staring with glassy eyes. She might well have been drugged, too, but for all Iris cared, Hilary Jasper could get fucked. All she wanted was Gia out of here.

  “Nope. Just here to pick up Gia. We’ll leave you to your fun.” She reached for Gia’s arm, meaning to try to lift her away from the guy who held her, but the other one, the guy who’d been making her drink, grabbed Iris by the hips and pulled her down to his lap.

  “Now I’ve got one of my own,” he crowed and shoved his hand between her legs.

  Iris had pulled her hand from her pocket as he’d grabbed her. Now, she gave her wrist a sharp pop, and the baton in her fist went long and locked. She swung her arm and cracked the guy right in the face with it.

  She’d acted from instinct and fear, and she hadn’t played out the near future at all. The reality that there were six men in this group hadn’t been part of her thinking. A guy had grabbed her, touched her in a way she hated, and she had reacted. The day with Daisy and her mother had flowered into a full memory, in vivid detail, and she’d simply fought back.

  He jumped to his feet and grabbed his head, yelling in rage and pain. Iris fell to the floor, taking one of the small tables down with her. A pitcher of beer landed on her. Before she could get back to her feet, somebody yanked her up by her hoodie.

  And then she was punched in the face. She felt her nose break. Another punch, and another, and Iris started to forget what was happening.

  Her last clear thought before everything went dim and quiet: she should have told her father.

  ~oOo~

  Her senses came back, she thought, pretty quickly, and Iris found herself on the floor while chaos seethed around her. A full-on brawl had broken out. For a while, she could only lie where she was, her face throbbing, blood running down her chin, and down her throat, while legs flew about around her.

  Then somebody kicked her in the belly, probably accidentally, and agony blasted through her. Realizing she needed to get out of the way, she rolled to her knees and tried to crawl toward a wall. Her hand landed on something sharp, and she thought she’d put her palm down on broken glass, but when she looked, it was her keychain, the attached baton still extended.

  She’d been just as stupid about using the baton as she would have been about a gun. At least she hadn’t accidentally hurt anyone else, though.

  Grabbing her keys, she hobble-crawled toward the wall, stopping and recoiling each time somebody or something crashed in her direction. She’d almost made it when she caught a glimpse of an arm in loose black lace, and she remembered why she was crawling on the beer-soaked floor of this bar.

  Gia. She was unconscious on the floor. Still not thinking clearly, but knowing that she had to help her, Iris changed course and crawled to Gia instead. Her first thought was to help her up, but she didn’t know how she could lift the dead weight of a girl who had at least six inches on her. Her head hurt too much, and she was having to think too hard about breathing, to leave room to solve such a problem.

  With no other idea, Iris simply lay over Gia and used her body to shield the girl as best she could. What good that would do, Iris couldn’t say. What would happen when the brawl was over, she couldn’t say, either. They were in trouble, no matter what.

  As she cowered over Gia’s inert form, her old memories churned into a foam in her head. She could feel the ropes that had bound her and Rose. She could hear, even in this din, Daisy’s screams and the end of them. She could see her mother’s eyes, both cold with despair and hot with rage, while the man raped her. She was in that place. Like she had never left it. The brawl around them in the present was just an overlay.

  Clutching Gia close, struggling past her fear and her pain and her broken face to pull air into her body, Iris wept.

  And then she heard a sound she’d never heard before but recognized at once. It was joined by another just like it, except in a different timbre. Roars of rage, in two voices she knew and loved: Her father and her Uncle Isaac.

  The tempest around her instantly became even wilder. Iris tried to lift her head to see her daddy, but all she could see was legs and rubble.

  A pair of legs ran right toward her and crouched next to her. It was Lilli. Saving her again.

  “Fuck. Fuck!” Lilli yanked Iris back and laid her fingers on her daughter’s neck. When she found a pulse, her head dropped in relief. Then she grabbed Iris’s chin and gave her a sharp-eyed instant of a once-over. “Can you walk?”

  Iris hoped so. She nodded.

  “Okay. Let’s go. Fuck!” Somebody must have kicked her or hit her or something, because she flinched, then leapt back to her feet and swung her fi
st. It was hard to see more than that, but she must have connected, because she came back down, and her hand was bleeding.

  Lilli pulled her daughter into her arms and stood, lifting the girl like she weighed nothing, then grabbed hold of Iris’s hoodie and dragged her out of the bar. Iris let her. She was too scared and confused even to know where the door was, her eyes weren’t working very well anyway, and the brawl was still in full swing. Somehow, though, Lilli got them through the bar without even slowing down, and then they were in the humid night air.

  Outside, people were streaming to their trucks. Without a word, Lilli carried Gia and dragged Iris straight to her SUV.