by Genovese, CM
The deposit was only one month’s rent and was initially provided by AFTY, but I had to agree to have portions of my check used to pay it back each month. Rent was super cheap with the government-employee discount.
The first thing I noticed when stepping out of the car was how quiet it was. Anchorage was nothing like any other place I’d lived. I couldn’t hear any birds at the moment. There weren’t dogs barking or people milling about on the sidewalk. Other than the cars speeding down the highway a hundred yards from where I stood, I couldn’t hear a damn thing.
“It’s so quiet,” I said.
“Ha,” Sue replied as she walked around to open her trunk. “Wait until Saturday night when the VFW behind our building has the music blaring.”
Something about a Veterans of Foreign War building being in the area seemed absolutely normal. I wouldn’t expect anything less. I imagined, in a place with so many military installations, a lot of the retirees had probably formed long-lasting friendships and stuck around the area long after being released from service.
“I think that would make me feel closer to home,” I said.
With my suitcase in hand, we made our way to the staircase. Sue helped carry the few things I’d picked up at the store. The crisp cool air felt wonderful and wrapped my breath up in mist. I blew it out the way a kid might, slowly and with great joy. Winter wasn’t new to me, but this new wonderland was, and I felt ecstatic about my decision to do this. My new friendship with Sue made me feel even stronger about it. I’d be okay. If nothing else, Anchorage offered me plenty of space to grow.
“And this is you,” Sue said as she handed me a key and nodded toward door 326.
The frame around the door was old, cracked, splintered, and looked like it might fall off at any moment. I put a palm against the door and pushed. It crackled as it threatened to give way and crash inward.
“It’s an old building,” Sue said. “Don’t worry. It’s locked.”
“It looks like someone broke in,” I said.
“Mine does too, but it’s fine.”
“Where do you live?”
“Downstairs. Second floor. 218.”
I hesitated with the key in the lock. For some reason, I felt this was the moment it would all become real. Like I hadn’t already left home and embarked on this solo, personal journey. Opening the door was like cracking the seal on a brand-new life. It clicked as I pushed it and squeaked as I swung it inward.
Inside smelled like orange cleaning products and old furniture.
“It’s furnished, as promised,” Sue said.
“When?” I joked.
“That I don’t know,” she said with a snicker. “But you’ve got a couch, coffee table, TV stand, bed, dresser, and that’s about it. The rest you’ll have to pick up on your own. I know some great secondhand shops and some fairly priced new-furniture stores too. We can do that this weekend.”
“This is great,” I said as I dragged my suitcase into the dining room and left it there.
I turned around in place to get a feel for the room.
“Why don’t we go out tonight?” Sue suggested. “Doesn’t have to be a late night. We’ll have a drink or two.”
“Sure,” I said, my mind suddenly hit by an overwhelming feeling of loneliness.
“You have my number, sweetie,” Sue added. “Shower, get some rest, and we’ll have some fun later.”
I nodded. She placed the store’s plastic bags on my kitchen counter and turned toward the door. Her final words on her way out of my apartment were, “Just ride it out. Don’t let it overwhelm you. You’ll feel normal here in no time. I promise.”
Then she closed the door, and panic set in. I breathed deeply, feeling that old musky air seep into my lungs. Frantically, I crossed the living room and opened the window at the back of my apartment. Cool air swept in over me and with it that familiar sense of freedom.
You’ve got this, girl. New life, new experiences, and a new future. No old baggage. Nobody knows you here. You’re starting anew.
But that was the scariest part. I was starting over new. No friends, no family, no… no car. I didn’t even have my own set of wheels.
What were you thinking?
Alaska wasn’t exactly the best place to be without a vehicle. Glancing around my apartment – my apartment, as in mine and nobody else’s – I took inventory of the place. The building was old, that much I was sure of. The ceramic tile on the kitchen floor was yellow, and I wasn’t sure it started out that hue. The counters were that old wood-paneled shit like you used to see on the sides of 70s station wagons.
My refrigerator was white with some rust around the handle, but at least I had a dishwasher.
An orange corduroy sofa sat in the center of the large living room, facing a wooden cabinet meant to hold a TV that I’d need to buy myself. In front of the couch was a coffee table which, for some reason, held one copy of the National Enquirer dated six months ago. I later found a second copy from five months ago on the bathroom counter.
It’s nice to know exactly five months ago someone sat his or her ass on your toilet and read goofball news stories while taking a crap.
My mind worked like that. Ridiculous thoughts all the time. It was probably another reason I was single.
In the bedroom, I found a surprisingly clean mattress on a frame. Of course, I’d need to buy my own pillows, sheets, and blankets, but at least I had a place to sleep.
You never realize the little things you take for granted in life until you walk into an empty space and notice each and every thing you normally use throughout the day that you no longer have at your disposal. I hadn’t even packed a towel. I’d need to hit that Walmart tonight. I couldn’t wait for this weekend.
Fuck, it’s chilly in here.
This could be a long winter.
3
Rain
“Bury him face down so when he finally comes to, he’ll be diggin’ in the wrong fuckin’ direction,” BP said.
“I don’t think he’s going to come to,” I argued, my voice coming out too soft spoken for my own liking.
Ever since getting my throat slit open in the slammer, I sounded like Steven Segal, or so the rest of the guys in the club liked to joke. The truth was, my vocal cords barely made it through the surgeries, and in the end, I was lucky to sound like anyone at all. At least I didn’t need one of those voice boxes.
Then again, you might sound like Darth Vader, and that would be pretty badass for a biker.
No, I was definitely better off speaking without any mechanized assistance.
“He’ll come to,” BP disagreed.
I’d known BP for a long time, longer than most of the guys in the club, but his coldness still shocked me sometimes. There was a reason he was called BP, Bi-Polar Bear, and the asshole we were burying was on the receiving end of that reason. Pimping out women to the highest bidder wouldn’t fly in the cold north, but this, burying a motherfucker so he’d purposely dig himself deeper into the ground? Now, that was some next-level shit.
I’d knocked him out with a tranquilizer used for baby moose, so he wouldn’t be waking up for a while. Even the frozen ground wouldn’t bring him out of it. He was a fucking goner.
What if he does wake up?
I’d read once about these Alaskan Tree Frogs. Something like sixty percent of their bodies froze solid during the winter. Supposedly, they stopped breathing, their hearts stopped beating, but, at some point, they woke up. They sprung back to life like fucking zombie frogs. What if this Russian bastard was like one of those frogs? That’s all we needed was for him to go running back to his buddies to tell them we were on to them.
Nah, he’s dead.
If it were up to me, I’d put a bullet in the back of his head and double tap that bitch just to be sure of it, but it wasn’t up to me. BP made the rules. I followed orders.
Nugget and Basket worked the shovels, leaving BP and me to carry the guy’s comatose body to the hole.
Nothi
ng’s more depressing than carrying a motherfucker by his boots to toss him into his grave. Stop being a pansy, Rain. This is what you do. It’s what you all do.
As the Royal Bastards MC Anchorage, AK Chapter Sergeant-at-Arms, it was my duty to uphold the rules and regulations. On the outside, I was all business, but on the inside, I was dealing with some shit. Ever since being locked up, cut up, and then barely making it through the appeal – probably only winning the appeal out of sympathy for the state being unable to protect me within seconds of entering lock-up – my mind was a bit of a mess.
It wasn’t my first time behind bars, and I doubted it would be my last. But it was the only time I’d ever let somebody get the best of me like that. All through my hospital stay, I thought about it. That sinking in my gut as I realized I was about to die, and it was all because I’d acted before thinking, tore me up inside.
It was like the one time I’d foolheartedly stolen a buddy’s girlfriend when I was in the military. I hadn’t meant to. We’d all been drinking when someone suggested we watch porn. He passed out. I practically had. I was too drunk to keep my eyes open, and at one point, I opened them to find her riding my cock. Whiskey dick was a strange thing. Sometimes it rendered you useless. Sometimes it made you Superman. When I realized what was going on and tried to throw her off me, she held on tight and whispered, “He didn’t want to fuck me, so I guess that makes you the winner.”
Immature thoughts convinced me it wasn’t my fault, yet, I’d let her finish the act. I didn’t complain. The next day, I knew I’d fucked up bad. He didn’t even know about it. He never did. He married the chick. And I couldn’t find it in my heart to tell him the truth. It was a moment of weakness on my part, and since then, I strove to never feel that way again. Having my fucking throat slit out of sheer stupidity brought back those old feelings of weakness.
If my dad were still alive, he’d be right here with us as we tossed this piece of shit into his frosty grave, and he’d undoubtedly say something along the lines of, “You’re lucky you’re still alive, jackass.” And he’d be right. He was never one for sweet words, and he never forgot a damn thing. He not only beat a dead horse, he tied it to the back of his bike and dragged it around all over town, kicking it and stabbing at it every chance he got. My weakness would definitely be his rotting pincushion mule.
He’d hated me, but in his own fucked-up way, he’d loved me, too. Dwelling on it for too long made my stomach burn. Dad was dead. He needed to stay that way.
Trying to understand my own personal demons and make sense of seemingly nonsensical horseshit was wearing on me.
Depression is the devil’s wad of tobacco spit right into your fucking eye. Try to rub it, and it gets muddy. Try to fight through it, and it stings. The only way to win is to wait until you find someone to help wash it off.
I had nobody, and my personal madness started long before I joined the brotherhood. I should have never enlisted in the military. Not because I wasn’t proud of my country, but because certain people were built for it and some most certainly were not. I was not.
The woman I was supposed to marry cheated on me when I was overseas in Saudi Arabia – I guess it served me right. One, for sleeping with my buddy’s chick that one time. Two, for planning to marry a stripper. I was there getting a mouthful of sand while she was back in Anchorage getting a mouthful of cock.
That was the problem with this city. There were too many dudes. The ratio of men to women was like five to one. The odds got a whole lot better for civilian pricks when Uncle Sam sent troops on foreign deployments.
“Hey, Hard to Kill,” BP yelled – his favorite Segal movie reference for its double meaning in my case – while gripping the Russian’s ankles. “You want to lift this motherfucker, or you want me to do all the work?”
I grabbed hold of him under the arms and hefted him. The piece of shit pissed me off now that he was out cold because I got stuck carrying his sleazebag ass. I wanted nothing more than to drop him in the hole and go grab a beer at Cubby’s.
First, we bury this Russian.
Then what?
Stick around and wait for him to either reemerge or stay down there long enough that we know he’s an icicle?
As he usually did, BP decided to let us in on his plan as we dumped the asshole into his white-powder sarcophagus. I leapt into the hole and flipped the guy over onto his stomach. His face was mashed against the ground. It was perfect. The others were already shoveling snow into the hole before I even hopped out.
“You fuckin’ mind?” I asked.
“What?” Nugget replied, tugging on his earlobe.
He’d fucking heard me.
“We’ll leave him in there long enough to be sure he’s dead,” BP informed us. “Then we’ll send his bosses a nice note that says: Dear motherfuckers. Your friend Andrei told me he’d rather go to hell than give me information. So, I got the info from him anyway. Then, I made him dig his way to Hades. You’ll find him at this address.”
Everyone laughed. He’d gotten the information from him the old-fashioned way. It was nasty, it was mean, but it was fucking funny. If you’ve never seen a butt-ass naked man forced to sit with his balls in a food processor, you should give it a try sometime. Our enforcer, Slitz, was a sick fuck. He could write a book on unique ways to hurt people.
Andrei, the guy in the hole, wasn’t the first Russian we’d roughed up. We’d gotten word from the lower forty-eight chapters, not that we had forty-eight chapters, but the chapters located in the states that weren’t Alaska or Hawaii. Russians were running some shit they called the Black Market Railroad. We had a feeling it was landing on our doorstep. Local girls were going missing the same way they were in other cities, and we frowned upon that.
We’d once been on good terms with some of the Ruskies. We even helped with security at some of their clubs back in the day. Things went sour, as they often did in the criminal underworld, and that’s when I had to get my hands dirty, which is what landed me in the slammer and in turn saw me getting my throat cut open. So, when BP talked about sending a message to the Russians, he meant the club owners in the area. They’d know we were on to them. If they weren’t involved, they wouldn’t understand the threat. If they were, they’d know exactly why we did it.
BP’s phone buzzed in his pocket. If he’d had the volume up, I was sure it would have rung to the tune of Georgia Satellite’s ‘Battleship Chains.’ He didn’t set the tone himself. His part-time girlfriend and damn near ol’ lady, Toni, from the Hell’s Alleycats MC down in Seattle, did. She joked that she wanted everyone in the clubhouse to hear it when she called him, so they knew his cock belonged to her. He’d never admit it, but it damn sure did. She had his ass tied down with battleship chains. He’d been on the straight and narrow ever since they started hooking up. Now, the old bastard would sneak off to their shared cabin in Canada, the halfway point between the clubhouses, for week-long fuck fests whenever possible.
“You better answer that,” Nugget suggested.
“And if I don’t?” BP replied.
“Your funeral, Pres,” Nugget said with a shoulder shrug. “You know how she gets.”
BP pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the screen. “Hell, it ain’t even her. Shows what you fuckin’ know. It’s Nawlins.”
“Nawlins?” I asked.
“Nawlins,” he repeated.
He put his phone to his ear and said, “Yo, Colt, what’s up, brother?”
Leaving the rest of us to finish up at the hole, he stepped away and continued his conversation with the VP of the Royal Bastards New Orleans Chapter. It wasn’t until we were headed back to the pickup and van that he finally filled us in.
“Get a load of this shit,” he said. “Jameson’s coming home.”
“It’s about damn time,” Slitz called out as he climbed behind the wheel of the van.
“There’s more,” BP continued. “They caught that creepy motherfucker, Rancid, getting payouts from the fuckin’ Ru
ssians. Here we are up here trying to nail down things on our end, and we got motherfuckers in our own club swappin’ girls with this uh… whatever the fuck they’re callin’ it.”
“The Black Market Railroad,” I reminded him.
“That,” BP said. “Sounds like a fuckin’ train to that wizard school in them Harry Potter movies.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Nugget argued. “I done seen all them movies and ain’t none of ‘em mention black markets.”
“Shut up, Nugget,” Slitz said.
“What?” Nugget replied. “All I’m sayin’ is the only market was that Diagon Alley.”
“Nobody gives a shit,” Slitz replied.
Nugget climbed into the van with him.
“Good news is Jameson’s back,” BP said. “I always disliked that Rancid motherfucker.”
We both slammed our doors shut, leaving us alone in the pickup to finish the conversation.
“He was bad for New Orleans,” I agreed. “Bad for the club.”
“Bad for any chicks not wanting Russian cocks in ‘em,” BP said. “Toni’s gonna lose her shit when I tell her somebody in our club was involved.”
“So, don’t tell her,” I said.
He turned to look at me and added, “Brother, when you find the right woman, you’ll learn that’s one thing you don’t do. You don’t keep shit from her, and you don’t lie to her.”
That’s two things.
Of course, I didn’t say it. In his mind, they were one and the same. I’d never had a woman who deserved that kind of loyalty. All I’d ever hooked up with were hood rats and club whores. I wasn’t even sure the right one existed. The last chick I messed around with, a house mouse named Sadie, was riding the dick of one of our nomad brothers the second I got locked up. And the one woman I’d fallen in love with since getting cheated on in the military… well, she couldn’t hack it in Anchorage and ran home to be closer to family, taking my heart with her in the process. Since then, I was convinced there wasn’t a woman in the world who was worth a damn.
