by M. O'Keefe
“You deserve—”
“What do you deserve?” she interrupted.
He blinked as if she’d just punched him. Just stunned him. “What are you talking about?”
“Do you deserve to be happy? To be loved?”
“This isn’t love,” he said.
Oh, it hurt. It hurt that he might actually believe it. That one day down here with his family and he was sure somehow that there was no more of the two of them. Together.
I think it is love, she thought, but could not say. Not yet. Maybe not ever. She wasn’t brave enough in the face of the impassivity he was able to put on and take off at will.
Flip, flip.
“Good night,” he said.
Holding his gun, she watched him get into his car and drive away. For too long she’d done what other people told her to do. She’d acquiesced and surrendered.
His brake lights flashed red as he left the trailer park, heading out to the highway and the strip club past that.
Not this time, she thought.
This time she was going to fight.
DYLAN
The Velvet Touch parking lot was full of minivans and big rigs. No motorcycles to be seen.
Last night I sat out here, across from the front door, because of Annie. Because it felt wrong to go inside. But tonight, I didn’t have time to waste; I had to go in and talk to people. Find out if anyone here had seen my brother.
The minute the doorman looked me up and down I was acutely aware of my scars. And the thing with my scars in this situation, combined with my size and my general anger—they made me a guy to be wary of. A guy to watch.
“Hey,” I said to the doorman.
“Two-drink minimum,” he mumbled at me, staring at my face like it was magnetic and he had no choice.
“I’m looking for a guy—”
“Then you’re in the wrong place,” the bouncer said.
“A biker. People call him Logsy.”
“Two-drink minimum.” That was it. All he said. He took my money, stamped my hand, and I walked into the club feeling like the shit creek I’d somehow stumbled into was way deeper than I’d thought.
Inside, The Velvet Touch was like every second-rate strip club I’d ever been in.
The girls looked the same, so did the chairs and the stage. The bouncers with black glasses and leather jackets with worn gray seams. Their practiced sneers very nearly made me smile.
I knew before I went in that my brother wasn’t going to be here. Not now. Maybe not at all.
But I couldn’t go back to the trailer park. Not without knowing something.
I stepped up onto the small raised seating area in the back of the club, hoping I had a good angle to watch everything without drawing too much attention to myself.
“Hey, sugar.” A woman in red lingerie approached me with a tray of shots that glowed in the black light. Behind her a blonde flipped herself upside down on a pole. “Want a drink?”
“Club soda with lime,” I said.
“You bet,” she said, the smile turning down at the corners.
A few minutes later the waitress came back with the club soda. “Tab?” she asked.
“No thanks.” I gave her a twenty and held up my hand when she began to give me change. “Spread the word, I’m not interested in any company.”
“Sure,” she said, slipping the twenty into the Hello Kitty pencil case on her tray.
“I’m looking for a guy named Max—they call him Logsy,” I said. “Part of the motorcycle club that comes in here.”
The girl’s face was utterly still. Carefully benign. She shook her head, pursing her lips. “Don’t know the guy.”
She was lying to me. And not very well. Her hands on her tray were white-knuckled.
“Black hair. Blue eyes? Tall and thin?” I asked, giving her a chance to tell the truth.
“Doesn’t ring a bell, baby,” she said.
I wasn’t going to force the issue. If I was going to have to come back tomorrow night and the night after that, it would be better to have a friend here.
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem. You should think about getting a lap dance.”
An hour later she brought me another club soda and my phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket and kept it low under my table. There were a lot of “no cellphone” signs posted around the place and I didn’t need any trouble.
It was a text. A picture from Annie.
It took a second, but then I realized the pale objects were her legs. And her arm was stretched down her naked belly, her hand buried beneath that blue underwear of hers. Her wrist created a gap between her belly and the top of her underwear and I could see her hand, her fingers, a blur, against the shaved skin of her pussy.
She was touching herself. Making herself come.
Thinking of you, she texted. Only of you.
I put my phone back in my pocket. Like it was a loaded gun, I put it away.
But that picture was burned into my brain, no matter how I tried to get rid of it.
I was shaking. The urge to get back to her nearly had me on my feet.
I should pay a woman to take off her clothes, to sit on my lap and grind her ass against me. I should pay her more to take me back into that VIP room and suck my dick. Or let me fuck her.
I should do all of that and take it home to Annie. Tell her what kind of guy I am. Let her smell it on my skin. My fingers.
It would work, too. It would hurt her enough to make me pushing her away stick.
I closed my eyes, tired of the music. Of the strange floral/musky smell of this place.
“Hey, baby. You want something else?” The waitress was back, her red lingerie glaring under the lights. Her skin glimmered like gold, like she’d dusted her whole body with something, and everything about her was carefully constructed to be appealing. To be the most basely sexy. From her tits to her hair to her mile-long eyelashes and skyscraper shoes.
Everything fake, a hard shell of a costume. A disguise.
And I ached for Annie. Deep inside my bones I ached for her.
What the fuck am I doing? I wondered. Finally, I get something real in my life, something totally authentic, and I push it away.
“I’m good,” I said to the waitress. I handed her a few more bills and stopped fighting. I headed for the exit.
And Annie.
The bouncer from before was still there, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Good night,” I said, giving him another shot to stare at the side of my face.
“Around back,” he said as I pushed open the door.
“What?”
“Guys you’re looking for, those motorcycle assholes, they just got here and they’re out back. But listen, if I was you, I wouldn’t go looking for that kind of trouble.”
Lucky for me, what was around back was exactly my kind of trouble.
I nodded at the man in thanks and gave him a twenty, hoping that if I needed some help that would be enough to pull him onto my side. I headed left once I was outside. The thumping bass line of the music inside the club could still be heard. I felt it on the bottoms of my feet.
My life would become better if Max was there. I could sleep through the night without worrying about Rabbit and Annie, and the starter ulcer in my gut might go away. But there was a big part of me that did not want to see Max.
Not now. Not ever again.
It had taken a long time for the wound to heal. For the scab to get thick enough that it didn’t split open every time I saw a kid riding bitch on the back of an older boy’s bike. Or ate hot cornbread with too much butter.
And seeing him again—I didn’t know what would happen. What fucking garbage would come spilling out.
The asphalt of the parking lot gave way to loose gravel as I walked to the end of the building. I could hear something happening back there, just around the corner. Men were yelling, some were laughing. I recognized a few of the voices.
Clock and
Grapes and BLJ—they’d been Pops’s best friends. His “brothers.”
I’d grown up with them in my home. Their thunderous hands patting me on the shoulder, or shoving me out of the room.
One of them sold Mom drugs behind Pops’s back, at least twice. All of them might have slept with her.
Fucking brothers.
I was getting good and pissed off, which probably wasn’t the best head space for walking into a group of stone-cold outlaws, when a man stepped out from around the corner.
A hand-rolled cigarette glowing in the darkness.
I couldn’t see his face or his body. Just his hand, the rings on his fingers as he lifted the smoke to his mouth. But I knew.
Max.
The first time Max went away to juvie, I’d been twelve. And it had been hard for me. Not that I didn’t understand, because I understood jail. I’d grown up with the people in my life leaving and coming back from jail all the time.
No, it was hard because for my entire life I’d been Max’s kid brother. Not Big Ben’s son, or Maria’s boy. But Max’s brother. And when he went away I didn’t know who I was. Every night, I climbed the fire escape and shimmied up to the roof of our apartment building and I tried to feel him out there in all the darkness, behind the cement and iron that kept him away from me. And when he came out, I didn’t let him out of my sight. I sat outside the bathroom for him.
I followed him on dates. Tagged along when he started stealing cars.
Which was how everything started.
It wasn’t until I started racing that I figured out who I was without him.
Then that was taken from me, too.
So then I sat alone on that mountain, so full of holes and hurt I had no idea who I was. Until Annie answered that phone.
“Max?”
The hand paused, the cherry of the smoke went bright red, and then Max stepped out of the shadows and faced me.
He was lean. Like he’d been whittled and worn down to the essentials. To bone and sinew and survival. His eyes, blue like Mom’s, were fever bright.
“Dylan?”
I just stared at him, absorbing the reality of my criminal brother. His hair was long and black, tied back at his neck. He had a close-cropped beard that grew into a longer point at his chin. Like one of those drawings of Shakespeare in textbooks. His face was the same, those cheekbones and jawline. He was almost pretty. Elegant.
I looked like a thug with a nice mouth. Max looked like an angel on his way to hell.
Actually, he looked like Mom. Acted like Mom, too. All impulse. No Plan B.
Whatever Rabbit was afraid of, whatever worst-case scenario he envisioned in his little brain, there was a really good likelihood it would happen. Because Max had a burn-it-all-to-the-ground gene.
But he was here. For the first time in nine years, it was my brother standing right in front of me. And I was pissed. I was.
But I was a lot of other things, too. Way too many to count. And the memories, they fucking swarmed. Jumping the fence at the Sixth Street pool so we could go skinny-dipping on hot summer nights. Stealing fireworks from that stand down by the beach and nearly blowing our hands off on the Fourth of July. Sleeping on the couch at his girlfriend’s house when shit got bad between Mom and Pops. Or if he didn’t have a girlfriend, we’d take blankets out into the woods and build a fire and pretend to be camping.
Stealing cars. Winning races. The weight of his arm over my shoulder and the pride in his voice when he called me brother.
This guy standing in front of me with the tattoos and the silver jewelry, the president patch on his cut. This guy used to make sure I did my homework. And that I got to school on time.
He stepped toward me and I backed up, unsure of what he was going to do.
Max was, after all, the first person ever to beat me up. I’d been eight, he’d been twelve. And he broke my nose.
“Scared, little brother?” He flicked the smoke down into the gravel and stepped on it.
Grinning, he turned toward the wall, unzipped his pants, and had a piss against the building.
I glanced away, and for a second I nearly smiled.
“Where have you been?” I asked, as if a lifetime hadn’t passed since the last time we saw each other. I didn’t know how to sift through that shit, how to talk about it. So, I didn’t.
The now was easier. Simpler. In the now, this guy wasn’t my brother. I hadn’t loved him, missed him, and mourned him for years.
He was just some asshole complicating my life.
“Road trip,” he said, zipping back up.
“And you couldn’t let anyone know?”
“I don’t need to let anyone know,” he said. “It’s my life and I do what I want.”
“Rabbit thought you split, like, for good. The deal—”
Max took one step closer to me; his eyes narrowed and my bones got cold. “You don’t know nothing about any deal. Not one thing. You got it?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“I don’t know anything about anything,” I said, lifting my hands.
Max took a deep breath and reached into his pockets for another smoke.
Suddenly I wondered how bad things really were here. If he’d left so he could save himself. And I’d pulled him right back in.
But that wasn’t Max’s style. Self-preservation wasn’t a word he understood.
“Where the hell did you go?”
“I went to visit Mom’s grave.”
“What?” Of all the things I might have guessed—three-day bender, drug-running trip to Mexico, torturing a Rotten Bastard soldier in a Smoky Mountain cabin—none of them had anything to do with Mom.
He shrugged and lit his smoke. Took a long pull and exhaled a thick plume.
The now was shattered and the asshole was my brother again.
“Why?” I asked.
“Never been. Have you?”
“No.”
It never occurred to me to go. She left when I went to jail and she never looked back. I did the same.
“It’s nice. Aunt Louisa shelled out some cash. Tombstone doesn’t say ‘beloved wife and mother,’ though. I guess she was only a sister there at the end.”
“It’s…she’s buried in Arizona.” He must have gotten there, seen the grave, and turned back around to make it in three days.
Max nodded, kicking a rock up onto the asphalt a few feet away. He did it again. One after the other, each rock landing on the asphalt. “Long days on the road. Not much time for phone calls.”
“But you got my messages?”
“Yours. Rabbit’s.”
“Would have saved us a lot of trouble if you’d just called that asshole back,” I said.
Right in front of my foot there was a stone, about the right size. I nudged it with my toe and then kicked it toward the asphalt. It landed about a foot short.
Max grinned at me. “You gotta give it some lift.”
The next one I kicked landed on the asphalt.
Max kicked again and I took a step to the left, where there were bigger stones.
“So, I guess Pops called you, too? That’s why you’re here?” he asked. “Gotta say, I never thought you’d give a shit about Pops and cancer.”
“I don’t give a shit,” I said. I kicked two stones at the same time, both of them landed on the asphalt. “I’m here because Rabbit threatened to kill everyone in my life if I didn’t find you. Make you come back.”
“That’s a little extreme, even for Rabbit.”
“I’m not laughing, Max.” We weren’t kicking stones anymore. We were staring at each other. I had about twenty pounds on him, but there was no question who’d win if we got into it. Max fought dirty and I’d long ago lost the instinct.
But I wanted to fight him. I wanted to hurt him.
“Yeah, I got that. Well, good work, Dylan. You found me. Everyone in your life is safe.” He stepped away like we were done, like after nine years that was all he h
ad to say to me.
I grabbed his arm and both of us froze.
“Are you safe?” I asked.
“You want to be careful, hermano,” he whispered, all threat and menace. He would slice me open, brother or not. “Very careful.”
“Rabbit says you’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Isn’t that what we’re all doing?” he said with that lunatic smile of his. “Some of us are just better at it than others.”
“I’m rich, Max. Like richer than you can even believe. I can send you away, so far away from this shit—”
Max took one gliding step toward me, so close I could smell the tobacco and fire on his breath. The burn of whiskey he must have had before. “Get in your fancy car, take that pretty blond girl you’re fucking, and go back to your mountain. Go back to forgetting about me.”
“How do you know…?” I stopped, suddenly scared of revealing too much. Because while he was my brother, he was also the king of these cutthroats and I couldn’t trust any of them.
“About the girl?” he asked. “Rabbit told me—strippers and bikers are all a bunch of gossips. Said she plugged her husband after he stabbed you. That’s some hard-core shit, right there.”
“It was.”
“You like her?” Max asked, revealing another glimpse of the guy I used to know. The brother I loved. And the impulse to tell my brother everything—how she made my heart stop, and she made me wish I were different and she taught me to reach into the world with some care and some grace—was hard to fight. But I did.
And I was glad, too, when he blinked and the glimpse was over and the killer was back. The temptation to unburden myself vanished with him.
“Don’t answer that,” he said. “Just take her and go, Dylan.”
“No,” I said. Maybe because I’d never said no before. Nine years ago when he pushed me out of his life for good, I should have said no. But I didn’t. Because it was easier. Because I wanted something better for myself. Because I was tired of wanting more from him than he ever wanted from me.
But I was saying no now.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asked. “Shit is happening exactly the way it should. Mom, dead. Dad, dying. You’re living large as some hotshot engine builder. Get your head right and realize everything is exactly the way it should be.”
