BABY WITH THE BEAST

by Naomi West

  Yazmin snatches my pistol and marches to her father, pressing the gun into the back of his head. “She was innocent!” she cries. “Mom never did anything wrong. She borrowed money from you because she thought you loved her! She never dreamed you’d hurt her!” Her voice is thick with tears, her words obscured by them. I can only pick them out because I’ve spent so much time with her.

  “Yes, she loved me,” Snake agrees. “And I killed her anyway. Go on, girl. Do it. Do it!”

  “Wait.” I go to Yazmin’s shoulder, standing close to her. “Listen to his voice, Yazmin. He wants this badly. Think. Why would he want this?”

  Tears slide down her cheeks. Her hand trembles. “I don’t know,” she whispers. “All I know is there was a bed so soaked with blood the mattress was red. All I know is Mom is gone forever because this man is a sadistic fucking psychopath. All I know if I hate myself for ever thinking he could be my father. All I know is he needs to die.”

  “Yes, yes!” Snake roars. “Then do it—”

  “Shut him up,” I tell Knuckles.

  “Boss.” Knuckles clamps his hand over Snake’s mouth, crushing his jaw. He screams, but they are muffled screams.

  “Think,” I say. “He wants to hurt you. Killing him will hurt you. It’ll be his final revenge.”

  I’ve never seen a woman with so much anger seething out of her, and I’ve made some women pretty damn angry in my life. She strokes her finger up and down the trigger, shifting her feet slightly as though restless. She doesn’t seem to be hearing my words. She just stares at her father, her blue eyes turned dark like a summer sky suddenly stormy.

  “Yazmin.” I touch her arm, give it a soft squeeze. “Listen to me. If you kill him, you’ll come to regret it. You’ll lie awake at night thinking about how he looked when you pulled the trigger. The bastard will haunt you. Not because you care about him or don’t want him to die, not because he doesn’t deserve to die, but because you’re a good person and good people can’t kill without having it weigh heavy on their conscious. I’m your man now. Let me handle this for you.”

  “He killed her,” Yazmin says. “And he would’ve killed me. He would’ve killed my baby.” She presses on the trigger, not hard enough to fire the bullet, but hard enough to make Snake shiver like every man will before death, even if he says he wants it. “He killed her.”

  “This isn’t your job,” I say. “It’s mine.”

  “I don’t love him. I don’t like him. I hate him.” She lets out a breath. “But you’re right. I can’t kill him. Dammit.” She hands me the gun and takes a few steps back, watching us.

  “Let him go, Knuckles.”

  Knuckles releases him. Immediately he goes for me, lashing at my face with as much speed and viciousness and deadly intent as a snake backed into a corner. I catch his wrist and punch him in the jaw with his own fist, sweep his legs and kick him to the ground. He lands on his back, making a hollow, gasping sound as the air is pulled from his chest. I kneel down next to him and press the gun to the side of his head.

  “Turn your face to the sun,” I say. “It’s time to go, you piece of shit.”

  “Wait!” he blurts.

  “No.” I start to pull the trigger.

  “Wait!” It’s Yazmin now.

  I turn to her, still with the gun pressed against his head. Yazmin approaches us, kneels down next to her father, and looks down into his face. “I’ve never been much into heaven and hell, but now I hope there really is a hell.” She stands up, turning her back to us. “Okay.”

  “Okay.” I pull the trigger. All the things which usually happen to a man’s head when you put a bullet in it happen to Snake. It deforms into a shape unlike its original, becoming a mess of blood and matted hair and twisted flesh. I stand up and hand the gun to Knuckles.

  “Throw him into the fire,” I say. “Make sure there’re no remains. The police don’t care none if we go at each other, but anybody driving through ought not to find a mass grave, all right?”

  “Boss.”

  “Oh, and Knuckles. You’re my number two now.”

  “Boss.”

  I join Yazmin, who’s standing at the foot of the small hill looking up into the woods. I lay my hands on her shoulders, thinking that this will be our moment of closeness, the moment when she rests her head on my chest, the moment where we finally let go of all the argument bullshit and just be together. I’m surprised when she flinches away, stepping out of my grip.

  “You just killed my father,” she says quietly.

  The men head toward the clubhouse, waiting for the fire to burn itself out, leaving us alone.

  “I just killed your father ’cause you wanted him dead,” I reply.

  “I know that, I know. But . . . do you expect me to just fall into your hands after you just used those hands to kill my dad? I know it makes no sense, okay? I’ve—I’ve hardly slept and I just want to—Oh, I don’t know what I want!” She throws her hands up.

  “Let me take you home.”

  “To the basement, you mean.” She has her back to me, but I can hear that she’s pouting. “You want to stow me away and keep me as your own personal toy again. I suppose you’ll make me deliver our child in there, too, won’t you?”

  “No, let me take you home,” I say, ignoring her outburst. I have to believe that we’ll be okay. I have to believe we can get past this, whatever this is. “I’ve got a house just outside town.”

  “Oh.” She pauses, and then nods her head up and down. Her hair is sweaty and tangled. When she nods, it shifts like an animal rising from rest. “Can we take the car? I don’t feel like riding. I want my own space.”

  I bite down acid words at this. I tell myself she’s just tired and confused. I tell myself that soon she’ll remember how close we are. “Sure,” I say. “Whatever you want.”

  I climb behind the wheel of the jeep and wait for Yazmin to climb into the passenger seat. I want to help her up, but I can’t stand the idea of her snatching her hand away from me so I let her clamber into it on her own.

  “Yazmin, I . . .” I don’t finish. I want to tell her I love her, but she might not say it back. Even if these months with her have changed me, they haven’t changed me so much that I can put myself out there without getting something back.

  I start the engine, leaving the smoldering husk in the rear-view mirror, wondering if that means I can leave the other smoldering husk in the rearview of my life.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Yazmin

  I sit in Sunnyside Park, watching as the girls dance around the sandpit, flinging sand at each other and giggling. Their moms are sitting on the bench opposite, a couple of them watching, a couple more checking their phones. Overhead, a flock of birds calls into the clear blue sky. A man beside me is reading the newspaper, the front page declaring, Fire Caused By Faulty Oven, Inspectors Report. I’ve already read the article five or six times now, reading how the infamous Scorpions biker gang were out on a ride when their clubhouse caught fire, and then how they fled Sunnyside and made for New York (the reporter doesn’t explain how he knows this), and how everybody can agree Sunnyside will be a better place now. A week has passed, and yet I don’t know how to deal with these feelings which dance around inside of me.

  One little girl in pink dungarees hands another little girl, this one with big frizzy black hair, a flower. The mother goes aww and smiles at the girl. I watch them sadly, wondering if I’ll ever have that with my child. I’m not upset about my father’s death, but it has left me feeling strange. Even if I hated him, really hated him, even if I wanted him to die, he was still my father, which means now that he’s dead I’m an orphan. Maybe being an orphan shouldn’t feel different to having parents, not at my age, but it does.

  I stand up and walk away from the park, heading down Main Street, the storefronts bright and sunny and decorated, the world with a smile on its face, the universe beaming. Everybody is happy and I feel numb, or unsure of how to feel. I’m staying with Spike but
we’re sleeping in separate rooms. He killed my father with those hands . . . that’s the thought which comes to me every time he tries to touch me. It annoys me, because I don’t want to feel that way. I have nightmares where I can never get over that notion, where the next year and decade is tinged by the ugly idea that since he killed my father I can never be close to him. It terrifies me.

  I end up at the town hall steps. I sit down, watching the town. A group of school kids skips past, giggling about something I can’t hear. I’ve been sitting for a few minutes when a shadow falls over me.

  His face is tight as he smiles. I can tell he’s strained by all this as well. Perhaps he’d like it if I just smiled and acted nice and was pretty and did all the things he wanted me to do. Perhaps he’d prefer it if I hid how I feel, but I can’t. He sits down beside me on the steps, leaving a distance of about six inches between us. Six inches, but it may as well be six miles. After all we’ve been through . . . I want to reach out and touch his hand, to give it a squeeze, to feel the reassuring pressure of flesh on flesh.

  “Yazmin,” he says, after several minutes of personal silence.

  “Yes?” I turn my face to him, trying a smile.

  Everything has felt phony this past week, like we’re acting every time we’re together. When we sit down for a meal, I feel like I’m sitting on a stage. Part of me is beginning to be scared that we’re not really in love, that all of this was pointless. Part of me is beginning to be scared that we’ll have to part ways soon.

  “I’ve never been good with words, but I reckon I understand you well enough to try.” He smiles, a small smile, a hesitant smile, but a smile all the same. “You know this is hard for me.”

  “I know.” And now I should reach across to him, but something stops me.

  He sighs, and then speaks. “I think what’s going on here is that you’re scared of gettin’ close to me ’cause your mom and dad are dead. I’ve been thinking on this for a week and at first that made no sense to me, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. You don’t wanna get close to me because you’re an orphan now, and if you get close to me I could be taken away, and then what’d you be? A woman without her man, too. Maybe—I don’t know, I ain’t a psychiatrist—but maybe that’s why you flinch when I touch you.”

  We sit in silence for a time. I think about his words, turning them over in my head. “That’s part of it,” I say, stunned by how accurately he was able to tell me what I was feeling. “But I think there’s more to it than that.”

  “Okay, what?”

  And my heart almost breaks then, because he’s really trying. I know a man like Spike doesn’t usually try like this. He’s wearing a checkered red shirt and jeans and boots and his beard is growing a little long and he’s recently had his hair clipped short. He looks handsome and devastating. He looks like a man eager for his woman to be in his arms.

  “I think part of it is that I need to be on my own. That’s the contradiction which is driving me crazy. I think what you said is true—it explains a lot—but that’s not all of it. I used to think being on my own meant running away. But maybe it doesn’t have to be as literal as that. I need to be a person, Spike, a person apart from who I am in relation to other people. I can’t just be your girl and a mother. I know that’s enough for some women and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. For me, though, I just . . . I need something, you know, something that proves I’m really here.”

  “What is it?” Spike asks. “Whatever it is, I’ll break this world in half to get it for you.”

  I feel awkward about saying it aloud, even to Spike. Maybe that’s the way it always is with newfound dreams. I’m scared that he’ll laugh at me, or quietly tell me why that isn’t possible, or explain to me that he won’t have his woman entering into a profession when she’s got a baby to take care of. All of this and more flits through my head as I sit there trying to summon the courage to share a piece of my soul with this man. Around us the town breathes, people walking to and fro, people laughing, people living, but sitting here we’re in a world all our own.

  “Yazmin?” he says.

  “I want to go to nursing school,” I say, turning away from him and staring at Main Street. “I keep thinking of my mom coming home, tired but with a smile on her face. She didn’t talk about her work much except to teach me a few simple things. When she did talk to me about it, though, I always thought it sounded terrible, just awful. People bleeding and screaming and dying. But the more I think of it now, the more I feel drawn to it. Maybe I’m being silly.”

  “No,” Spike says at once, voice firm. “You’re not being silly. Not at all. If this is what you want then you’ll have it.” He stands up, offering me his hand. “Come with me, Yazmin. I want to show you something. I want to show you why you don’t have to choose. You can be on your own and have a family at the same time. Hell, what d’you think I’ve been doing all these years? I’ve been lonely as hell and I’ve still had the club as my family.”

  I look at his hand for around half a minute. It’s a manly hand, calloused and hard, the hand of a man who’s held rifles and ridden bikes his whole life, the hands of a man who’s killed and will kill again. The more I stare at it, the more I realize that he was right. It’s not that I care he killed Dad. It’s that the idea of an orphan girl giving herself to a man is frightening, because sooner or later the orphan girl may be alone again. I swallow that feeling down, forcing it to the pit of my stomach. I take his hand.

  He pulls me to my feet and together we walk through the town to his jeep.

  “Where’s your car?” I ask.

  He grins. “I knew I’d be bringing you home this afternoon, so I brought the car.”

  I climb into the passenger seat beside him. “How did you know I’d come with you? Maybe I’d want to take the bus home.” For the past week, I’ve been doing exactly that.

  “Because I knew I’d hit on something real with all this thinking about feelings shit.” He laughs as he starts the car. “I swear, Yazmin, you’re the only damn woman in the world who could make me think on feelings for this long.”

  “I consider myself blessed.” I giggle, and as the car winds down the road, the giggle turns into a full-fledged laugh. I realize it’s the first time I’ve laughed since that morning outside the clubhouse.

  Spike laughs along with me. “You better,” he says.

  Spike’s house is a three-bedroom detached nestled in the middle of the woods, the road which leads to it partially hidden by the trees. When I first saw it I thought it looked like something from a storybook. The paneling is painted a light red, so that when the sun is setting it’s difficult to tell the difference between the glow of the sky and the color of the house. We park outside and walk up the gravel driveway to the big colonial front door. Spike told me a few days ago that he bought it just after becoming president. He said, “Sonny always said a president needed a presidential place to live.”

  Inside it’s like an old cabin in the woods, the floor and walls wooden paneled, with beams rising to the ceiling.

  “Follow me,” Spike says, heading up the staircase.

  I follow him, smiling and feeling pretty good about it. Why shouldn’t I smile? When I’ve got a man like Spike, when the future seems more open than it did yesterday, surely I’m allowed a smile. He leads me past his bedroom and then my bedroom—sleeping separately seems silly now—and finally to the empty room at the end of the hall. I peeked in it once, curious, and saw that it was full of boxes of bric-a-brac.

  He has transformed it.

  The walls are painted a pale blue with pictures of birds and clouds. In the corner there is a box of toys with a child lock on them as well as a play mat. The cot sits in the corner, the moon-and-star mobile spinning above it. There’s a tiny chair so small it makes me want to weep and another child-proof box with books inside it.

  “I didn’t know if you childproof kids’ books,” he says, grinning tightly. I can tell he’s nervous about wh
ether or not I’ll like it. “So I just thought better safe than sorry—Yazmin? Yazmin?”

  I’m on my knees, tears sliding down my cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Spike. I want to be with you. You’re my family. I love you. I love you.” I leap up and grab his face with my hands, bringing my lips to his, kissing him firmly, hungrily, kissing him like I should’ve kissed him the first night he brought me here. Breaking it off for a moment, I tell him I love him again.

  “I love you, too,” he whispers, wrapping his hands around me. “I love you so damn much.”