Bri
With Dad’s help, I take Slick through to the dormitory wing and lay him on the bed. He looks up at me through his mask of blood, smiling. “Bastard fuckin’ hit me enough times to shake some cobwebs loose,” he says. “Reckon I know what’s what now.”
“Is that so?” I say from the bathroom, filling a basin with water and going to him.
I kneel down beside him and begin cleaning his face, wiping the blood away. There’s a bruise on the side of his head, nasty and yellow, but the skin hasn’t broken. He has a couple of cuts below his eyes, but once they’ve been cleaned, they’re nowhere near as bad as the blood made them look. I leave him and go into the bar—Dad is untying the men, and Clint and the traitors are nowhere to be seen, probably outside being sent on their way—and return with a first-aid kit.
He winces when I pour the cleaning fluid over the cut. “Don’t be a baby,” I say.
“Baby.” He smiles again. It looks like it hurts him to smile, but he does it anyway. Maybe he thinks it’s worth it. “Baby. Baby Charlotte. I reckon I’ve earned a meeting with her, ain’t I, Brat?”
“I reckon you have,” I agree. “But why don’t we get you patched up first?”
“Alright. Nurse knows best.”
I stitch one of his cuts, but he won’t let me start on the next before I’ve got him some whisky. The next time I go in the bar, all the men are untied, and Dad is telling the men who were tricked into being on Clint’s side that they need to make it right with the others. They’ll probably agree to some system where half their pay goes to those who were loyal for a few months. The men won’t like it, but this is a club, and in a club if you haven’t got loyalty, you haven’t got anything. When I bring Slick his whisky, he’s sitting up, pillows propped behind him.
“The pain starting to wear off now?” I ask, returning to my seat.
“Not the pain. Just the dazed feelin’. Never get used to that in a fight, no matter how many you’ve been in. Dazed like your head is just gonna spin right off your shoulders and float into the sky. Damn strange.”
“Well, don’t get too excited,” I say, handing him the bottle. “There’s still another to go, yet.”
He takes a slug of whisky and I start stitching the other cut. When it’s all done, he looks like a different man to the blood-covered barbarian he was an hour ago. He drinks down half the bottle of whisky, and then asks for a cigarette. I get one from the bar and return to him. He lights up, blowing curling wisps of smoke and smiling tiredly.
“What happened?” I ask.
“When’d you get here?”
I tell him I rode here after getting a bad feeling. “Maybe it was our psychic connection,” I joke.
Slick doesn’t laugh. “Maybe it was,” he says. “Alright, so this is what went down.”
He tells me about talking Clint into a fight.
“Wow,” I say, thinking about all the ways that could’ve gone wrong, thinking about how the men could’ve just shot him down the moment he threatened their new leader. “That was risky.”
“Damn risky,” he agrees. “But what else was I gonna do? Let Clint ruin my father’s legacy? Let him ruin your father’s legacy? Fuck that.”
I bring my hand to his face, lightly touching it. “You mentioned you wanted to meet Charlotte. I think it’s about time you did, for real.”
Slick swallows, staring straight ahead.
“What is it?”
“I just . . .” He hesitates, and then gestures to his face with the whisky bottle. “I’ll scare her, Brat. Look at me. A kid don’t wanna see that.”
“But there’s more to you,” I say, reading him. I think I could read Slick better than I could ever read anybody else, maybe even Charlotte. There’s a connection there that goes beyond mere emotion; it runs as deep as time. It’s like Slick is my best friend, my lover, and the father of my child all rolled into one. Slick is a man who cannot be replaced. Slick is another part of me. “Tell me, Slick.” I stroke his stubbly cheek.
“I’m scared I’m not good enough for her,” he whispers, and I know that as he stares around the room, he’s not really staring around the room. He’s staring into the past, into what he was made to do. I think it’ll be years before her really gets over it. How long does it take a man to get over hell? I have no idea. “I’m scared that I’ll hurt her, which is damn weird ’cause the last thing in the world I wanna do is hurt her. But what if I do—by accident? My hands are killer’s hands, Brat. My hands are outlaw’s hands. My hands ain’t meant for holding children.” To my shock, I see that his eyes are teary. He takes a long swig of the whisky. “These hands are meant for snapping necks, nothin’ more.”
“You’re wrong,” I say firmly, “and I’ll prove it.”
“How?”
But I don’t reply. I stand up and walk out of the room, ignoring his questions. I get on my bike and ride to the city, to Heather’s apartment, and then Heather, Charlotte, and I return to the clubhouse. All the way, Charlotte is bobbing in her seat. When I told her she was going to meet her Dadda, she could barely contain herself. When we reach the clubhouse, she jumps out of her car seat into my arms the moment it’s unbuckled, pawing at my face, saying over and over, “Dadda, Dadda!”
“I can’t go in there,” Heather says, staring at the clubhouse, but then Dad appears in the doorway.
“Heather?”
“Jacob?”
They stare at each other for a time, and then Heather makes for the clubhouse. I follow her, but split up with her when Dad leads Heather toward his office. Charlotte squeezes my nose, squealing, “Dadda! Dadda! Dadda!”
I knock on the door, making sure Slick is ready. His voice is croaky when he calls out, “Come in.”
I don’t think tears will ever start streaming down my face so quickly and so unexpectedly ever again in my life. As soon as Charlotte sees Slick—sitting in a chair now, probably so he doesn’t seem hurt—she squirms out of my grip, drops to the floor, and pads over to him. I watch as she tilts her head up at him and murmurs, “Dadda?”
Slick grins shakily, and leans down. “I reckon so, little lady,” he says, as I cry in the doorway. He picks her up and places her on his knee, facing him. When he looks to me for support, I give him a smile of encouragement. “I’m your Dadda, alright, if you’ll have me.”
He’s careful with her, handling her as though she’s made of glass, but then Charlotte jumps up and throws her arms around his neck. “Kiss Dadda!” she squeals, kissing him on the unbruised side of his face. “Kiss Dadda! Kiss Dadda!” She kisses him over and over, each kiss making me cry all the harder, and Slick laugh all the louder.
“Look,” Slick says, when she’s stopped. He takes a small pocket-mirror from the bedside cabinet, and frames him and Charlotte in it. “Look at our eyes, princess.”
“Same,” Charlotte says, grinning.
“Same,” Slick repeats, grinning in exactly the same way.