Damien
When I wake up and the first hazy moments of sleep still have me, I wonder if all that was a dream, wonder if maybe I got too wasted at the clubhouse and really I’ve just been lying passed out for the past dozen hours. But then I lean up and look around the room, at my Eagle on the TV stand, at the clothes on the floor, and then down at me and Callie. At some point during the night, we climbed under the sheets. I wake with her naked leg draped over me, her hand on my chest; her hand is small and warm, like a little hot-water bottle.
I lean back, propping my arm behind my head. I told her, I reflect. I told Callie about the man and the syringe and the killin’ and about what almost happened to me. I have never told anybody, never dreamed telling anybody would be possible, and yet I told her. I just came out and told her. And she understood. She understood right away.
Damn, last night, that sex . . . my mind returns to the way she lay on her front, legs together, messy hair spread over the sheets, the way my cock slid in between those perfect round ass cheeks. Just thinking about it is making me hard.
I just lie with Callie in my arms for a while, staring at the motel room’s cracked ceiling, thinking about how much of an asshole I was for waiting this long to find her, thinking how much an asshole I was for letting her go in the first place. For the past year, I’ve thought about her every damn day, anxiety and agitation my constant companions. Now I’m with her, the anxiety is gone. It seems strange that I ever felt like that. Callie makes it all make sense.
After a while, she wakes with a sleepy smile on her face, looking up at me. Pale winter sunlight shafts through the curtains, resting on her forehead.
“Morning, Blackbeard,” she says. She glances at the bedside clock, which tells us it’s one o’clock. “Afternoon, I should say.”
I laugh; she giggles. I swear, that giggle is the sweetest sound there is.
“Morning, Miss Horny.”
She blushes, and then kisses my chest.
“I’m not Miss Horny,” she says, but her brown eyes get wide as she stares at me, and I know just by looking at her what she’s thinking. But then she says, “I need to get back. I have . . .” She pauses, and I get the sense there’s more she wants to say, and then she finishes, “I have stuff to do.”
“Okay,” I say, confused. “Sure.”
We get dressed, picking our clothes up off the floor and pulling them on. Callie looks damn sexy as she gets dressed, more confident than I’ve ever seen her, none of those signs of embarrassment that marked our time together before. She’s finally at ease. I can see that just by watching the way she wriggles into her pants, completely oblivious of my watching eyes; before, she would often make me turn away, or she’d wait until I was in the bathroom.
I shove my Desert Eagle in my waistband, and together we walk out into the winter cold, the wind whipping tiny flakes of snow into our faces.
“Can I drive?” she asks.
I laugh. “Callie, it’s your car.” I toss her the keys, take a toothpick, and start chewing, though this time the chewing is less about distraction and meditation and more just for the hell of it.
We sit in the frigid car, our breath fogging around our faces, as the car judders to life. Slowly, the radiator comes on, filling the car with weakly blowing heat. I reach across and wrap my arm around Callie as we wait for the windows to thaw their ice, and then she pulls out of the parking lot.
“Do you want me to take you back to your bike, or—”
“Let’s get breakfast,” I say, not wanting to leave her just yet. I’ve spent an entire year thinking about her. One night isn’t going to satiate that. I don’t think one-hundred would.
“I have to get back, but, well, uh . . . I guess we could get breakfast at my place.”
I shrug. “Works for me.”
I look across at her as she weaves through the sparse traffic, brown eyes fixed straight ahead despite the ease of the drive, as though she cannot bear the thought of even glancing in my direction. I lean back, chewing on the toothpick, wondering what’s gotten into her. A few hours ago, we had the best sex either of us has ever had, long-time-waiting sex, fucking-hell-finally sex, and it was worth the damn wait, and now she sits there like there’s ice in her bones.
“You alright?” I ask, thinking as I say it that she’s changed me. I never would’ve asked a question like that in the pre-Callie days.
“Yeah, fine,” she mutters. “Fine, just . . . you know my employer, Gertrude?”
I nod, waiting for her to go on.
“Well, Gertrude, she’s . . . uh . . . she’s seventy years old.”
“Right,” I say.
Callie lets our an exasperated sigh. “You’re not connecting the dots!”
“Connect them for me, then. Goddamn—this is a fancy place.”
Callie drives through a snow-wreathed gate, down a snowy driveway, and toward what looks like a ten-bedroom house. It looks like one of those old houses from movies about the aristocracy, way too big, the sort of place you could imagine being converted to apartments when the current owners are gone. I reckon around thirty of Alice’s trailers could fit in this house. As we get closer, I realize something is wrong. You get that sense in the life. It creeps up your neck like ghostly hands before finally squeezing down on your neck. Now, when it squeezes my neck, I see that the tall, stately door has been kicked in, and that an old woman wearing nothing but a bathrobe is limping out of the house.
“Gertrude?” Callie says, more bemused than panicked. She stops the car, climbs out. I climb out with her. Callie stands completely still for a few moments, and then screams, “Gertrude! Where’s Alice? Gertrude! Where the hell is Alice! Alice! Alice! Alice!”
Alice . . . and this woman is seventy years old, and Callie had a little baby with her yesterday, and we both know the name Alice; that name is meaningful to both of us. Callie lied to me. Callie lied to me yesterday in the supermarket. This old woman is not that child’s mother. Callie is. And if Callie is the child’s mother, and if Callie has named the child Alice . . .
“Callie?” I say.
She wheels on me. “Yes! Yes!”
And that’s all the confirmation I need.
She doesn’t need to say anymore. She nods rapidly, chin smacking her chest, eyes pleading with me to find our daughter.
“Fuck.” I take out my Eagle. “See to the old woman.”
The timing makes sense; yes, yes, the timing makes all kinds of goddamn sense. And the name makes sense. And it would explain Callie’s awkwardness in the car just now. She was trying to tell me the truth. My baby is unsafe. My child is unsafe. Dammit. Goddamn it! I point my Eagle in front of me, heading for the door, and call over my shoulder: “Where is her room, Callie?”
Through waves of tears, she manages to tell me.
I head through the house quickly, checking the corners, listening for sounds of the invader. But I don’t hear shit, and when I finally reach Alice’s room, it is a mess, the crib smashed in the corner, the baby mobile thrown onto the floor, wallpaper ripped away. But no blood. No sign of death. I look around the room carefully, looking for any sign of who did this, and when I see it my chest tightens.
There, resting on the pile of debris which was once a cot, rests a flower. A thorny flower. Exactly the kind of flower which was there that night I saved Callie . . . and exactly the kind of flower which grows just outside the clubhouse.
I take a step back, reeling, head spinning.
The flower was not just similar. It did not just remind me of the flower. It was the flower. It was the flower. It was the flower.
“It was the flower,” I say, realizing that I’ve been saying it aloud this whole time.
Somebody in the clubhouse . . . Jesus Christ. It all begins to slot into place and I can’t believe I was ever so stupid, so naïve, so absurdly trusting. I can’t believe that the day I learn I have a baby is also the day I learn that Ogre has kidnapped her. Because it has to be Ogre, doesn’t it? Who else amongst my men would kill Tinhorn and the Specters without my say-so? Who else would kidnap a child? That was why Ogre killed that guard, because he was going to say too much. It wasn’t just some Ogre thing. All this time, I took his efficiency for loyalty, seeing in his squashed face a semblance of loyalty to the club, to the life. But no, no—
And he has my kid. And he killed the Specters. And he is most likely the one behind kidnapping Callie in the first place.
I take out my cell straightaway and call Gunner. It rings for half a minute. I cancel the call, and dial one of the other guys. No answer. Another. I dial the club and one of the pledge’s answers.
“Where’s Ogre?” I bark.
“Um, don’t know, Boss.”
“Gunner?”
“Not sure, Boss.”
“Have you seen them this morning, though?”
“Yes, Boss. Ogre was in early, around eight, and Gunner was in before that, around half seven. But they’re both out now.”
“How did Ogre seem, kid? Stranger—stranger than usual?”
“Difficult to tell, Boss. You know how he is. He said something about a land flowing with milk and honey and some shit. You know, one of his Bible things.”
“Alright. Call me if you see them.”
I dial Ogre, but of course he doesn’t answer.
I pick up the flower and return to Callie and Gertrude. Callie is trying her best to be brave, but when she sees the flower, and when she sees I don’t have our daughter, she breaks into tears and begins to shake, her face bright red with the pain. She says to me through sobs: “It happened late in the n-n-n-night, D-Damien. Around f-f-f-four o’clock. But G-G-G-G—” She keels over, clutching her chest, crying violently.
“I was too scared to come out of the closet where he put me,” Gertrude says. “But when I heard the car . . . Oh, it’s all my fault!”
“What did he look like?” I kneel down next to them. They are sitting in the snow, seemingly not feeling the cold.
“Big, scary, ugly,” Gertrude says. One of her eyes is a purple welt, and blood drips down her neck. She trembles as she talks.
“Did he say anything?”
Gertrude swallows. I can tell she wants to turn to Callie, who is weeping now as though her body is about to erupt. She claws the snow with her fingernails, dirt and flakes of snow getting beneath them, and her sobs are so loud Gertrude has to raise her voice.
“Just something strange about lambs, I think it was from the Bible.”
“Son of a—”
I rise to my feet, take out my cell, and dial 911. “Ambulance.” I give them the address and then hang up.
Ogre, one of my men, all this time working under my nose. I think back over this past year and a half, since I started looking for the Tinhorn’s killer, since I started looking for the man who now owes me his debt. Ogre, sitting right there, most likely sabotaging my leads. Yeah, he was efficient alright, efficient when it came to returning emptyhanded and telling me he’d had a good look. And now he has my child. My child. It doesn’t seem real. I can’t have a kid, especially not the kid I saw at the supermarket: she was too precious. I cannot have made somethin’ that precious.
I go to the car, crank the heating up, and then return to the women. I pick up the old lady and help her limp to the car, laying her in the driver’s seat. Then I go to Callie, but when I try to grab her, she shrugs me off, staring at the ground and pulsating with sobs. Tears steam continually down her cheeks and her chest vibrates. She clutches handfuls of snow, over and over, until she has torn through layers of dirt.
“I c-c-c-c-c-can’t—”
I kneel down in the snow next to her, prying her cold hands away from the snow and looking into her eyes. “Callie,” I say. “I know you can hear me. I need you to listen to me, for your daughter.”
That gets her attention, I can tell, but it isn’t enough to stop the panic.
“I want you to close your eyes, alright? Can you do that for me?”
She manages a nod, and then closes her eyes, though tears still squeeze out of her closed eyelids.
“Now . . .”
I think. I don’t know what to do. She’s either having a panic attack, or she’s on the urge of a panic attack. I search my mind for ways to help her. I hate to see her like this, especially after seeing all her hard-won strength. I hate to see her hurting. The mother of my child . . . that adds a fresh significance to our relationship, and it is a relationship now, I reflect. The mother of my child is hurting. I need to help her.
I feel like the world’s biggest moron as I take a toothpick from my pocket, take her hand, and place the toothpick in it.
“I want you to chew on the end of this, Callie. I want you to chew on the end of this and just keep chewing, alright?
She manages to nod again, takes the toothpick, and starts chewing.
“The chewing is all that exists, Callie,” I say, feeling like the biggest fool who ever lived. I need to calm her down, ’cause I need to get back to the clubhouse and find Ogre. So Ogre stole the kid around four in the morning, drove back to Missouri. To what? To make it seem like he had nothing to do with it? But then, why leave the flower? I know the answer even as I ask it: because he’s a fuckin’ psychopath and he couldn’t resist it, and he had no way of knowing I’d make the connection with the thorny flowers outside the club. All this time, he’s been playing me.
“The chewing is all that exists,” she says, as ambulance sirens fill the air. “The chewing is all that exists.”
After a minute or so, the end of the toothpick snaps in half, and Callie is able to look up into my face.
“You need to save her, Damien,” she says, struggling to hold back another wave of tears.