BABY WITH THE BEAST

by Naomi West

  I ride back to the clubhouse, thinking of that bottle of whiskey. The plan is formulating in my mind, the logistics slotting together. This man killed my girlfriend. She wasn’t my fiancée, or even a woman I loved, but she was my girlfriend, and the principle of the thing can’t be ignored. Even without Christina’s death, though, I can’t let Snake roam around Sunnyside doing anything he likes to Viper territory. I can’t let Snake rob our stores and trash our bars. I can’t let Snake put my men at risk, men with wives and kids and bills and rent and responsibilities.

  I sit on the edge of my bed, whiskey bottle in hand, taking slow, long sips. The whiskey is liquid fire down my throat, burning in my belly. I roll my head from side to side, clicking my neck. It’s time we did something. It’s time we stopped letting the Scorpions walk all over us.

  I go into the bar, where the partying has reached the lazy stage, music playing low, the men dealing cards, the women sitting on their laps.

  “Officers!” I shout across the room. “My office. We’ve got shit to discuss.”

  Cards scatter. Women scatter. Whiskey glasses drain and slam into the table.

  And then we’re in my office, talking about the sexiest woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.

  “First thing’s first; one of you needs to get to the Scorpions’ clubhouse. I want that place under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”

  Chapter Two

  Yazmin

  Mom is dead. I say it to myself every day but it’s still difficult to believe. Mom, who raised me on her own, who took me to ballet practice and then understood when I told her I wanted to quit, who baked pumpkin pie every Halloween even when she had to work a double shift at the hospital, is dead. Mom is dead. Lying in bed, my face buried in the pillow as though that means the world doesn’t exist, I giggle madly. Mom is dead, but it doesn’t seem close to real. I keep expecting her to knock on the door and sweep in, demanding to know why I’m here, in the clubhouse, surrounded by cruel men.

  The knock comes at the door, but it isn’t Mom. It’s Christopher Michaels. He’s around fifty-five years old but for some reason he brings me my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He has no hair except for a few wispy gray bits. His bald head is covered in purple veins. He always smells of cigarettes and stale sweat. I pull my blanket up around my chin, covering my chest.

  “No need to get nervous around me, baby doll,” he says, placing the tray on my bedside table. “We’re friends, ain’t we?” He licks his lips. His lips are always dry and his eyes are always watery.

  “Sure,” I say, keeping my voice neutral. “But the last time I checked, friends don’t stare at each other’s tits.”

  “You’re a snooty one, missy.” Christopher points a long skinny finger at me. “You need to learn how to take a compliment. I’m not staring at your tits. I’m appreciating your form.”

  “Okay, fine. Sure. Call it whatever you want. Can I eat my breakfast now?”

  “Ungrateful slut,” he mutters, dragging his feet from the room like a teenager.

  I want to shout after him, to demand that he apologize, to tell him to never talk to me like that again. But Christopher has more power here than me, the president’s daughter. I have no power at all. I pick at the toast, eating some crust, but I’m not hungry. I keep thinking of Mom whisking eggs and milk, sprinkling seasoning, smiling at me with eyes bluer than mine.

  I go for my morning jog at nine o’clock every morning, jogging around the winding, tree-shadowed roads of outer Sunnyside, wondering if anybody would care if I kept on running. That’s a stupid question, because I know the answer. Of course they wouldn’t. As if reading my mind, when I get back to the clubhouse one of the girls comes to tell me that Dad wants to see me.

  A strange feeling hits me every time I’m told Dad wants to see me. He killed Mom, and yet he’s the only person who’s stopping me from being homeless. I hate myself for being here, and yet I’ve got nowhere else to go. I feel like a coward, staying with the man who killed my mother, or at the very least who had my mother killed. I am a coward. And yet I have little work experience and no credit. I was always going to go college but I put it off twice, working part time and reading and partying and trying to figure stuff out. Then life figured it out for me.

  I walk through the clubhouse, ignoring the men who leer openly at me. Most of Dad’s men are ugly, gruesome thugs who lick their lips or wink when they see me. A few are just men doing their job, getting on with their lives. But as I walk through the bar, I feel like I’m walking through a house of mirrors where each mirror is a man’s face grinning stupidly at me, mad hunger in his eyes.

  I go into Dad’s office and wait on the opposite side of the desk as he finishes some work up on his computer. I was shocked the first time I saw Dad, which was only eight months ago after Mom died. Mom died, I repeat in my head bitterly. But she didn’t just die. What the hell am I doing here? What the hell is wrong with me? Am I that desperate for a father? Am I that screwed up? I force these questions away, sensing that I won’t like the answers. I was shocked when I saw Dad for the first time because he looks nothing like me or Mom. Mom was blonde, blue-eyed, short, and curvy like me. Dad looks like a weasel with beady brown eyes and a gaunt, whiskery face. He has a small, mean mouth and sweat constantly drips down his forehead, making it glisten. He leaves me waiting for five or so minutes, acting as though I’m not there. Anger twists in my belly, but somehow I manage to keep myself calm.

  Finally, he leans back and gestures at the chair. For the past eight months since I’ve lived here, I’ve come to learn that Dad is a cruel man who does cruel things to those who disobey him. On my second day, I saw him order a man whipped for talking back. On my fifth day, he made a man twice his size stand still as he punched him over and over in the face. Women, too. He’s beaten more than I can count. Maybe that’s why my anger is quickly replaced with cold fear. What am I doing here? I ask myself for the hundredth time. This man is no father.

  He lays his hands flat on the desk, squinting at me with weasel’s eyes. “You haven’t really been pulling your weight, Yazmin, have you?” he says. “Everyone under this roof works. The women clean and cook and suck and fuck. The men fight and bleed and die and ride. But you just sit in your room, or go running, or read, or whatever the hell it is someone like you spends their time doing. Are you an invalid? Is that it?”

  “No,” I say stiffly. “I’ve just . . .” I pause, wondering how to best describe myself. “I guess I’ve just been trying to find myself, and then Mom died and—”

  He waves a hand. “I don’t want to talk about your mother.”

  Suddenly the anger I’ve been able to keep repressed for months rises up. Even a few nights ago when he called me unreasonable for not wanting to sit on one of his friend’s laps, I was able to keep it repressed. But now, watching him wave away my mother’s death as if it’s nothing, it explodes.

  “Why? Because you don’t want to talk about how you killed her?” I snap. “You don’t want to talk about how you left her on her own and then killed her? You don’t want to—”

  “Enough.”

  “You know what confuses me about you?” I go on, raising my voice. “You made her call me Lafayette, like you. She had her maiden name and you wanted nothing to do with us, and yet you made her call me Lafayette.” I look around the office, guilt like acid, chewing through me. “I shouldn’t be here. I’m disgracing her memory.”

  “Go, then.” He waves a hand, meaning to make me homeless as casually as he killed Mom. “I never asked you to come here, girl. I made her give you my name because a man’s children ought to have his name. At least I thought so once, twenty years ago. But now? Do what you like. Change your name to any damn thing you please. But let me tell you something, girl. You’re not getting a free ride here anymore. I won’t stand for it.”

  “You’re going to kick me out,” I say. Even now, despite everything, part of me wants to beg him to let me stay. I’ve never been on my own.

  “I
won’t kick you out,” he says. “I’d like you to leave, but I won’t kick you out. But I won’t have you here for free, either. I ordered your mother killed, yes. I did that because I loaned your mother ten thousand dollars and she didn’t pay it back.” He stares at me coldly. “I don’t give free rides, girl, never have, never will. So here are your choices. You can work at our strip club in town. I’ll put in a word for you with the manager. Or you can become one of our guys’ old ladies. Christopher has said he wouldn’t mind taking you on.”

  My skin crawls when he mentions Christopher’s name. I think of all the times he’s brought me breakfast, his eyes moving all over my body. I think of the time he walked in on me while I was getting changed, how he just stood there, staring at me in my underwear, before trying to kiss me. I managed to fight him off, but if I was forced to marry him . . .

  “Mom told me who you were a week before she died. She said I might need to know in case something happened. She said you were a cruel man but you had your own sense of honor which would stop you from hurting me.” My voice is devoid of emotion. I realize now that no amount of anger or tears will break through to a man like this. I realize now that this man is evil, pure and simple. “Where’s the honor in this? You think nothing of selling your only child to a man twice her age. You don’t even care.”

  “Those are your choices,” he says. “Take them or leave. It’s up to you. But if you haven’t decided by tomorrow evening, I want you gone. I won’t pay for your food and board anymore without getting something in return. That’s just not how the world works.”

  “I hate you,” I whisper, coughing back tears. I won’t cry. I have to stay emotionless.

  “What did you say?” He squints up at me. He’d kill me, I know. He’d kill me and think nothing of it. “You better not have just said what I think you did. Did you?” He closes his fist around a silver letter opener. He’d open my throat right here and bury me in the back next to the dead flowers. “Well?”

  “No,” I say, wiping my eyes. “I didn’t say a thing.”

  Back in my room, I start packing. I look back over my life, watching as all my friends go to college and I put if off a year and then another, watching as I spend the meager money from my meager part-time jobs on silly, useless, frivolous things. And then watching as I’m left alone with no money and no family, no option other than to shack up with the sick man who is half of me. I watch, and I regret. I never should’ve come here. I’ll leave, roam the states. Maybe I’ll be homeless and lost. Maybe I’ll have a rough time of it. But at least I won’t have to strip as a prisoner or be shackled to an old man.

  I shove my clothes and a few toiletries into a rucksack and leave it up against the door. Sometimes when I go jogging, I take my rucksack with me, keeping water in it. Tomorrow morning I’ll go jogging as usual with my rucksack, only this time I won’t stop running. I’ll run until the clubhouse is a memory behind me. I’ll run until my legs hurt. I’ll run until I collapse and there’s nothing left for me to do but get up again and start anew.

  I want to be hopeful, but as I lie down a feeling of dread creeps over me.

  All I ever wanted was a family.

  Chapter Three

  Spike

  “It’s almost jogging time, Spike,” Justin says.

  “You know, you’re the only one who doesn’t call me ‘boss’ all the time.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve—”

  “No need to apologize. It’s good to forget you’re the boss once in a while. Part of me misses the days when I was just a grunt with only myself and my friends to think about instead of one hundred some men and their families.”

  We wait at the end of the road, leaning against the car. Danny smokes a cigarette, standing near the rear wheel, looking through the binoculars at the Scorpions’ clubhouse. Knuckles and Red-Eyes are at the other end of the road, just in case she changes her route. I don’t think she will, though. We’ve watched her for three days and each day it’s been the same. Nine o’clock she goes for her run, looking sexy as hell in her tight-fitting jogging pants. And then she goes back to the clubhouse and does whatever she does. Once I saw her drawing on a notepad through the window, but she has her curtains drawn most of the time.

  “Think this will work?” Justin asks.

  “Every man wants to protect his family.”

  Justin nods. I see a look in his eyes. He has an open face, the sort of face which doesn’t know how to obey a lie. His lips could be going a mile a minute to weave some lie, but his face wouldn’t play along.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he says, shifting. “What do you mean?”

  I think about pushing it, but drop it. It’s probably nothing, after all. Just a look.

  I join Danny at the rear wheel. “Can I get one of those, kid?”

  He gives me a cigarette and together we smoke, watching the clubhouse. Half past nine and then ten o’clock comes and still no daughter. Danny and I get through eight cigarettes between us. Justin joins us at ten past ten, climbing out of the car where he’s been tapping away at his laptop, handling some business for me. “Do you think she’s bailed?”

  “No idea,” I mutter. “She’s normally on time.”

  “Wait,” Danny says. “Look.”

  He hands me the binoculars. Today she’s wearing black leggings and a pink sports top, looking like a model from a gym poster. It takes me a moment to realize what’s so strange about her, but then I notice the bag, see how full it is. Usually it’s a tiny bump on her back. Now it’s like a pregnant belly bulging from the wrong side. She turns toward us and starts running. I hand the binoculars back to Danny.

  “Back the car up,” I say. “I’ll come in from here.” I point to the tree line, a half mile of woods before it opens up to road again. “And you guys will be ready with the trunk. We need to do this quickly and quietly.”

  “Okay, boss.” Danny and Justin get into the car.

  I run across the road and crouch down behind a tree trunk, waiting. Crouching here reminds me of crouching in ditches overseas, bullets whizzing by me, men dying and shitting all around me. I close my eyes against the memories. I have to focus. I sink one fist into the summer-hard dirt, small stones biting into my skin. I can smell the woods all around me, leaves and plants and wildlife. Birds tweet and the ground rustles with life. And then, coming quietly at first, I hear the daughter’s breathing. She’s breathing far quicker than she has any cause to. She’s breathing like people breathe when they’re panicking. I think of that big pregnant backpack and wonder if this is the last time she’ll run this route.

  Of course it is. I’m going to make sure of that.

  And yet I don’t feel good about the kidnapping as I slide from my place behind the tree, stalking toward the road. I tell myself I won’t hurt her, but I can’t promise that. What if I hurt her as I’m restraining her? My club, my men, their families. I repeat it in my head as a mantra. My club, my men, their families. I move to the edge of the road, standing behind her as she jogs away, and then break into a sprint. I move quietly, but at the last second she hears me, spinning around with wide, startled eyes.

  “Calm down—”

  I make to grab her. She lashes out with her fingernails, cutting a gash down my arm. I curse and spit, trying to wrap my arms around her. From the corner of my eye, I see Justin stepping from the car. She lashes at me again, cutting a gash across my neck. I swing at her, meaning to wrap my arm around her torso and move her to the ground. Squealing, she ducks, turns, and starts running. She’s running way faster than her jogging pace as she sprints into the woods, looking behind her with wide, frantic eyes. Her eyes are sea blue, part of me notices before following her.

  I watch her carefully, making sure not to lose her in the trees. She ducks left and right, leaping over fallen trunks and weaving between the foliage. She’s fit and fast, not at all like those blonde boards in movies who trip over the first twig they encounter. I run after her for what m
ust be ten minutes, a good mile and a half, breaking through the road and into another patch of woods. She disappears into a clearing. When I break through, smashing through dangling breaches with my fists, she’s nowhere to be seen. I turn in a circle, swearing, panting.

  I stop, becoming still, and listen as I listened in the army, as I listened on countless jobs afterwards. That’s when I hear it, the rustling to my left. She’s crouched in a bush, eyes peeking between the leaves.

  “Wait—”

  She bolts, sliding beneath a crossbar branch. I have no choice but to sprint after her.

  I run, cursing myself for the whiskey and cigarettes last night. This woman moves like the wind. Ducking under branches and diving around tree trunks, I pick up the speed, determined to get to her. I think of Sonny, the last MC who took me in after my whole world went to shit. I think of the time Sonny knelt before me when I was a kid, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “You get a job; you do it. No questions. No second guesses. Most of all, kid, no excuses.”