Eighteen

The span of time between Felix showing up in the clearing with a Lean Dogs’ cut and Harlan’s eighteenth birthday seemed to last decades. An interminable drag during which he executed his failed attempt at hunting, and went through two stepfathers, the second of which was thankfully too drunk most of the time to hit as hard or as often as the first. But, finally, the day arrived. He turned eighteen, and he spent an hour in the bathroom styling his hair and tweaking the cuffs of his denim jacket, turning this way and that and working on his Tough Guy facial expressions.

Today was the day he was going to march right up to the front door of the clubhouse and proclaim his intention to prospect. The president – a man he’d glimpsed around town, his rank marked in the patches sewn to his cut – would be so impressed with his cool, laid-back swagger than he would hand him a cut of his own on the spot, and welcome him aboard with a hearty slap on the back. He would excel at every task he was given, more capable and hardworking than the other prospects. He would endear himself to Felix early, and become his indispensable right-hand man. It would be Felix who would put his hand up at church and recommend that the usual year-long wait be waived for Harlan. He would be invited to patch early, and earn his own road name, something like Blade or Killer, because in this fantasy, Harlan had overcome his squeamish incompetence and be a dab hand with a knife and a gun by that point.

It was a fantasy he played out cinematically in his mind while he was at school, while he was scrubbing the kitchen floor; while he was struggling to fall asleep each night, listening to the animal grunts and groans of his stepfather having his way with Harlan’s mother through the thin walls. A fantasy that left him aching and nauseated with how badly he wanted it, interspersed, on occasion, with the fantasy of bursting through the underbrush, standing tall in the clearing, and declaring with sweet viciousness that he’d fucked Felix’s mother. In that fantasy, Colin and Tucker laughed and mocked Felix, and Felix flushed dark and stormed away, utterly humiliated.

It never occurred to Harlan that both of these fantasies were childish in the extreme.

And then the day arrived – Prospect Day – and he spent so long primping in front of the mirror, trying to perfect an aura of Don’t Give a Damn, that it was after three when he stepped out of the bathroom, the day more than half gone.

“Shit,” he said, when he caught sight of the kitchen clock, and then it hit him all at once what he was about to do, and he puked in the overgrown azaleas out front on his way out of the house.

His stepfather was passed out, so he borrowed his truck, a rattletrap old Isuzu that stalled on every hill. His hands shook on the wheel, and his foot juddered on the pedal, and though he’d mastered the thing months before, he stalled out so badly at a stop sign he thought he might have to push it off the road. It got him to within a half-mile of the clubhouse, though, where he pulled onto the shoulder and parked it, not wanting any of the Dogs to see him driving the rusted, wheezy thing.

It was a warm day, and though the sun was past its midpoint, it beat hot and throbbing against the back of his neck. Sweat was pouring down his body when he reached the chain link fence that marked the edge of the Dogs’ property. He hadn’t brought anything to drink, and he thought the black spots flickering at the edges of his vision were a combination of stress and dehydration.

He was a dripping, ragged mess by the time he reached the gates; swiped his hair off his slick forehead and tried to stand up straight and put his shoulders back.

The gates were open, to his shock and delight – a delight dampened by the way he was shaking and sweating and thought he might hurl again, all over his own boots. The driveway that led between them was short, and gravel, and fed into a broad, uneven parking lot of the same. A few trucks, vans and cars were parked off to the right, some of them pulled up into the weeds and kudzu, junkers that looked like their motors hadn’t turned over in a decade.

The bikes, though, gleamed beneath the afternoon sun, lean, wicked shapes all in black and chrome, lined up neat as dominos across the oddly-shaped building’s porch. Each was unique – different handlebars, different saddles, or bump seats, or tailpipe configurations. Some had intricate designs airbrushed along the tanks, but all were some variation on black. Each clean, shining, front wheels cocked at an angle so each sat perfectly parallel to its neighbor. It took skilled handling to get them all arranged like that, and would take more skillful handling still to back one of them out of the line without sending all of them crashing one into the next with an ugly jangling of steel on steel.

“In or out, kid.”

Mesmerized by the bikes, their beacon-like glow, Harlan hadn’t noticed a man – a Lean Dog! – approach him from the side, and he startled hard. When he jerked, his feet slid on the gravel, and his already-dizzy state nearly sent him to the ground. He floundered, arms waving wildly, and swallowed his lurching heartbeat, finally regaining his footing. But not before making a total jackass of himself.

When he’d blinked the haze of black spots from his vision, he saw that the Lean Dog now standing opposite him was of average height and build, with a scraggy length of beard hanging to the middle of the Rolling Stones concert t-shirt he wore beneath his cut. He wore sunglasses, and a skull cap, and rings glittered on his fingers as he pulled a cigarette from a packet and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. Harlan scanned the patches sewn to the front of his cut, looking for some mark of rank, but found none, only little symbols that meant nothing to him.

“Kid. You deaf?” the Dog said, and Harlan startled all over again, because he’d been asked a question, and the man before him expected an answer.

If only he could remember the question.

“What?” he asked, intelligently.

With the beard and the sunglasses, it was difficult to read the man’s expression. His mouth plucked to the side around the cigarette and he produced a lighter. “You’re standing in the gate.” Dumbass went unspoken, but heavily implied. “Are you in or out?”

For one petrified second, Harlan wanted to bolt. Out , and he would whirl, and go sprinting back down the road to his pilfered truck.

But he swallowed his rising gorge and stammered out, “I-in.”

The man shrugged, hooked a thumb over his shoulder, and said, “Go on, then.”

Harlan went. He stumbled his half-delirious way down the driveway, and up onto the porch, where he was startled by yet another Lean Dog, slumped down in a rocking chair in the shade. He had a trucker cap propped over his face, one that he lifted when he heard the clump of Harlan’s boot soles on the porch.

“Hey, see if–” he started, and then fell silent when he spotted it was Harlan standing there frozen in front of the door, and not one of his club brothers. His gaze, a pale seawater green, sharpened and narrowed immediately. He was younger than the first man, clean-shaven, handsome in a movie star sort of way. “Who’re you?”

Harlan didn’t know how he was going to get through this ordeal – and no matter how badly he wanted to join, it was an ordeal – without passing out. “I’m here to see the president.”

“Alright,” the man drawled, still reclined in his chair, but his body taut with readiness. “Who are you?”

“H-Hank. I’m Hank.”

The seawater gaze moved down to the toes of his boots – used, and not name brand – back up to his face, inscrutable. “You tryin’ to prospect or something?”

“Y-y-yes.” Harlan took a deep breath and stood up straighter; willed his posture to something confident. “Yeah.”

The man smirked. “Is that ‘yes,’ or ‘yeah?’”

Harlan frowned, and the spike of anger in his gut cleared up his wavering, spotty vision. “ Yeah .”

The man waited another minute, then heaved himself up out of the chair with the theatrical groan of someone much older. He raked a hand through his hair, resettled his hat, and shooed Harlan away from the door. “Alright. I’ll take you to him.” He smirked in a way that Harlan didn’t like, that suggested some nasty practical joke might be afoot. But when he opened the door, Harlan followed.

The interior was cool – shockingly so, the AC turned up so high Harlan felt its breeze against his face – and dim. His vision went spotty again, this time flecked with white, as he blinked the sunshine glare of outside away and adjusted to the low light here. The door let directly into a wide, wood-floored room that had clearly been remodeled and retrofitted beyond the original specs to house what was essentially a honky-tonk. There was a horseshoe-shaped bar in the center of the space, a living area to its left, with couches, and chairs, and a big-screen TV, and a series of pool tables and round dining tables to the right. A bored-looking girl was filing her nails and cracking her gum behind the bar, and didn’t spare them a glance.

Three men were playing pool, balls clicking quietly together. Someone let out a dismayed shout, and someone else laughed and snatched up the cash laid on the edge of the table. Harlan glanced at them – and then glanced again. Two were average and inconsequential, but the third…

The third towered over the others, his shoulders – bared by the cut-out sleeves of his shirt – broad and heavy as a door lintel.

Felix Lécuyer.

Harlan ground to a halt, breath catching in his throat. Excitement flooded his system, chased quickly by nerves so acute he almost gagged. He’d expected to see Felix here, but not until after he’d been allowed to prospect. Not until he had his new cut, and was safely a part of things.

Felix didn’t notice him. He slipped the won cash in his pocket, grinning, and lined up his next shot. “Double or nothing?”

“Not on your life,” the loser muttered, and the third man laughed.

The man with the seawater eyes realized Harlan wasn’t following, and turned back. “You coming, chickenshit?”

His voice was loud – too loud – and drew the attention of the bartender…and Felix and his friends. They glanced over curiously, propped on their pool cues. Harlan met Felix’s gaze for one heart-stopping moment, but of course Felix didn’t recognize him. How could he? Harlan had never slipped from his cover of underbrush and introduced himself.

I fucked your mom , he thought, and was able to exhale.

“Yeah,” he told the man leading him, and forced his feet to follow.

~*~

The president – the half-jovial, half-threatening Bob Boudreaux – was nearly as big as Felix, and just as Cajun. He laughed at Harlan, and not in a kind way, but he also said that they were looking to take on some prospects, and that if Harlan was willing to wash bikes and scrub toilets, he could spend the next week proving himself, and then Bob would make a decision one way or the other. He didn’t shake Harlan’s hand, and Harlan was glad of it; Bob struck him as the sort of person who might break your fingers with a hard squeeze for the fun of it.

Felix was no longer playing pool when he walked back through the common room on his way out.

The week that followed was grueling and humiliating. Harlan washed the bikes, and scrubbed the toilets…and mopped the floor, and hand-washed dishes and shot glasses; did dorm laundry, and ran errands, lugging Cokes and water bottles and beers in by the case. While he was using a hand truck to maneuver a keg from the truck – a club truck, a beat-up Chevy he’d been charged with returning in the exact condition in which it was loaned, under pain of physical harm – he hit a crack in the pavement, dumped the keg on his foot, and had to sit down in the shade until he could stem the flow of tears. One of the toilets kept clogging up, and he finally found the kitchen sponge someone must have flushed on purpose to sabotage him.

That day, jeans damp nearly to the knees with more than water, he’d caught a glimpse of his harried face in the mirror and wondered if it was possibly worth it. He hadn’t seen Felix all week, and by Wednesday, he realized the Dogs were purposefully tossing handfuls of dust on their bikes to force him to wash them again.

He asked the man with the seawater eyes – Frenchie – if the guys had it out for him, to which he’d earned a snort, and a sneer. “It’s called hazing, man. What’d you think was gonna happen?”

There was another possible prospect in attendance, but he and Harlan were rarely tasked to work together. His name was Marvin, and he had a narrow, ratty face, and mouse-brown hair, and by Thursday, he’d stopped coming around.

“Most people can’t cut it,” Frenchie said, like a challenge, so Harlan wiped his face, and swallowed his pride, and buffed chrome tailpipes until they blinded him in the noonday sun.

Finally Saturday, the day of judgement, arrived, and Harlan threw himself into party prep. The whole chapter would be in attendance to welcome the Tennessee vice president, someone named Ghost, who was spoken of with mixed reverence and fear. In his week of bustling around, washing windows and folding towels, he’d heard dozens of stories about the man. He was apparently a hardass, and a badass, and just an ass in general. He’d painted a vivid mental portrait of the man, steely-eyed and unforgiving, and he was more than a little nervous about his arrival. If he was scarier than Bob, Harlan didn’t want to meet him. But the party was one last chance to prove his worth, so he spit-shined the clubhouse, helped the girls – Lean Bitches, he’d learned: groupies, housekeepers, and bedwarmers, none of whom wanted a damn thing to do with him beyond his ability to schlep stuff – stock the fridge and pantry with enough food to feed an army of bikers.

By five p.m., all the Louisiana bikers were in house, drinking, shooting pool, shouting at the TV. A few were arm-wrestling, and the winner challenged Felix, who waved him off good-naturedly with a quip about not wanting to anger the man’s wife when he inevitably broke his wrist. The comment earned big laughs, and Felix’s smile was small, and pleased in a way it never had been in the clearing.

It was funny, Harlan observed from the kitchen doorway: Felix fit here in a way he never seemed to among his friends in the clearing. Colin and Tucker were the only friends he’d ever seen Felix hang around with – though, to be fair, perhaps his swamp spying wasn’t the broadest view of Felix’s life as a whole – and he didn’t seem to like either of them. At all. Just as they didn’t seem to like him. Felix had struck him as terribly lonely, when he watched him; the way he occupied the same space as the others, but the way he never smiled or laughed; the way he tucked his big shoulders, and made himself smaller – save for the times when he stood to his full, staggering height and forced Colin to take a step back.

But the Lean Dogs clearly liked him. They ribbed in a good-natured way, laughing with him, rather than at him. When they remarked on his size, it was with awe; when they asked his opinion, it was with genuine interest and respect. Even though he carried poetry books under his arm, and was homeschooled, and called a freak by his peers, he seemed perfectly at home amidst this motley crowd of outlaws.

“Take this,” one of the girls, Jessica, said behind him, and he turned to collect the tray of shots she held.

Harlan was rushed off his feet seeing to the Dogs’ needs, and didn’t have a chance to observe, let alone get close to Felix.

The Tennessee Dogs arrived around eight. The door didn’t squeak – Harlan had oiled its hinges on Tuesday – but a sudden, raucous cheer went up. Someone threw up his hands and knocked the glasses Harlan was carrying to the ground, where they shattered and sprayed bright shards out in a bomb-like radius.

Someone shouted at him – “Pick that up, you idiot, there’s glass everywhere!” – but Harlan turned toward the door, and stared.

The man who’d come through the door had the sort of trim, well-muscled physique that worked a simple white t-shirt to best effect. His cut was festooned with patches of all sorts, the most prominent those of rank above the left breast pocket: Vice President . And beneath that: Legacy . He was dark-haired, and lean-faced, with stark cheekbones and jawline, a scruff of beard on the flat planes of his cheeks. It was a mean face, Harlan thought. Harsh, sharp, his gaze dark and cold beneath his black brows. The difference between a wolf’s stare and a golden retriever’s smile.

“Ghost!” the Louisiana Dogs chorused, and the man himself reached to accept the first offered hand, before being pulled into a hearty, back-slapping hug. He grinned, and that was mean, too; Ghost was the sort of man, it seemed, whose face wasn’t softened by a smile.

Dog after Dog stepped up to greet him, the clap of hands on leather-covered backs like firecracker bursts through the room. Ghost accepted every shake, and every hug, but Harlan noted the way it was the others coming to him, the others leaning toward him, and never vice versa.

Belatedly, he saw that Ghost hadn’t come alone. A second, slighter man, hair a wind-swept tangle of golds and wheats, slunk along in Ghost’s shadow. Younger, quieter, hands jammed in his pockets. But when he scanned the room, his eyes alighted on Harlan for a brief, heart-stopping second, and they were the brightest, eeriest shade of blue Harlan had ever seen.

He shivered, and turned away, and went back to work.

~*~

As it turned out, Harlan did get the chance to speak with Felix that evening, but not in the way he’d originally hoped or expected.

By the end of the night, he was ragged with fatigue and tamped-down nerves. His adrenaline, singing at the start of the evening, had frayed and frayed until he felt like he had a hangover, head throbbing and gut shivering inward against itself. Felix had been ensconced in a corner with the two Tennessee members – he thought the blond was called “Walsh,” based on snippets of overheard conversation – for the past two hours, talking quietly with serious looks on their faces. Harlan had long since given up on having a shot at engaging with Felix, and was concentrating now on mopping up spills – some beer, some vomit – and trying not to look at the trio of girls who had traded drink duty for dancing topless on the tables. There was something…repulsive about it, to him. That sick, excited, oily churn he’d felt in his stomach when he visited Dee Lécuyer on Burgundy Street returned tenfold when he watched the first girl unlace the corset top she’d been wearing, and he’d found himself turned away, face flaming, as nauseated as he was aroused.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want women – he did, sometimes so acutely he woke from a dream in the middle of the night and found he’d come messily in his boxers in his sleep – but he didn’t…he supposed he didn’t want to want them. Didn’t want that biological weak spot to exist for him. He had goals, he had dreams, and a woman would only get in the way of them.

So it was with his head down, and his gaze fixed forward, that he made his way down the back hallway to the supply closet, opened the door, and attempted to stow the hand truck without paying close attention to the heavy crates of bottled beer stowed precariously on the overhead shelves. His first clue that he was about to get concussed into next week was the rattle of glass shifting against glass.

He flung his head back. “Shit–!”

And a pair of huge, tanned hands caught the crates and shoved them back into place. A broad, warm chest pressed firm against his back in the process, and Harlan shrank away from it, shocked, face-planting into the lower shelves and catching a mouthful of feather duster.

The hands and chest pulled back, and Harlan fumbled his way around so he faced his rescuer. He already knew who it was – the hands, scarred across the knuckles from fishhooks, the fingers long, the nails blunt and white in contrast to the copper of his skin – but he still found himself biting back a gasp when he came face to face – or, well, face-to-throat – with Felix.

“Whoa,” Felix said, hands hovering in front of him. “You alright?”

The harsh, black slashes of his brows were drawn together in concern. He didn’t seem snide, or mocking, or dictatorial, the way all the other Dogs had been with him. Harlan’s heart lurched and swelled and filled his mouth, and for a moment, he couldn’t respond.

“Hey.” Felix waved his hand back and forth in front of his face. “You good?”

“I – yeah. Yeah, I’m good.” Harlan cleared his throat and stood up straight. “Yeah. I’m good. Thanks.”

“Sure.” Felix nodded, and made to step back – but then he paused, and his frown deepened, and grew thoughtful. “Are you the guy who wants to prospect?”

Oh God. Oh hell. Felix had heard of him. He knew who he was! Again, Harlan’s pulse nearly strangled him. He swallowed it down and said, “Yeah–” His voice cracked like a pubescent boy’s – Felix’s lips twitched and stilled, in a held-back smile that made him wish the bottles had indeed crashed onto his head. He tried again. “Yeah, that’s – that’s me.”

Felix’s brow smoothed. He jammed his big hands in the back pockets of his jeans, and despite his size, and the harshness of his features, he looked boyish in a way he never had in the clearing. He looked at ease, comfortable in his own skin. It was a good look on him; Lean Dog Felix was far more settled than Clearing Felix.

“You’ll do fine,” Felix said. “For what it’s worth, the place looks cleaner than it has in a long time. In fact.” He leaned in, tone going conspiratorial, gaze flitting over his shoulder. “The guys said Ghost is real particular about housekeeping.” His eyes got big, like get a load of this guy . “He said the bathroom looked better than the last time he was here.”

Harlan didn’t realize he’d grinned like a loon until Felix grinned back.

And then, miraculously, Felix clapped him on the shoulder . Like they were friends . “Hang in there. Bob’s just making you jump through hoops.”

“Thanks,” Harlan said, “I will.” But Felix had already turned and headed off down the hall toward the restroom.

~*~

Late that night, into the wee hours, really, when half the Dogs were passed out in the common room in various states of post-coital undress, Bob called Harlan in back, and put a shiny, black leather cut with the word PROSPECT stitched into its bottom rocker in his hands. “It takes a year,” he said, sober and wakeful despite the condition of everyone else. “Most can’t hang that long. Maybe you’ll be different, but maybe you won’t.” He left it at that, with a shrug.

That was how Harlan Boyle began his stint as a Lean Dogs MC prospect.