Xander

 

“What do you think, X?”

 

“About what?” I ask him.

 

He sits on the swing, his hair flowing in the wind, wearing beat-up sneakers that are two sizes too small. We’ve always been dirt-poor but it still breaks my heart to see him like this. All around us, other kids are playing, but their parents tell them to avoid the swing set. Those kids are dirty. Those kids are dangerous.

 

“What if we just killed him?” he asks, ten years old, staring at me without a hint of emotion in his face.

 

“You don’t know what you’re saying.” I kick off the swing and walk toward some nearby bushes, go around them, and light a cigarette out of view of the park. “You’re just talking.”

 

“I’m not!” he protests, waving at the air to dissipate the smoke. Kid wants to kill someone and he can’t even stand a bit of smoke. “Why should we let him hurt us all the time? It isn’t fair. He’s a mean old man and I hate him.”

 

“That’s not what you were saying a few months ago.”

 

“That was when I was little!” he snaps. “All my friends love their dads so I thought I had to love my dad but now I know that I don’t because—because he’s mean and he’s not very nice.”

 

“Have you seen him, Arsen? He’s three times the size of me, and I ain’t small. He’s probably five times the size of you. He’s a goddamn giant. How would we kill him? Tell me that.”

 

“It’s not hard,” he says, lowering his voice. “We just get one of those big knives he uses to cut meat and wait until he falls asleep, you know, when he’s been drinking too much. Then we stab the shithead right in the heart, just keep stabbing. He’ll die then. People usually die when you stab them over and over in the heart.”

 

“What if he wakes up? What if you miss?”

 

“What if I miss?”

 

“What?” I flick my cigarette to the ground, where Arsen stubs it out, ever the conscientious one. “You puttin’ this on me? Our old man is a fucking monster so I’ve gotta kill him? It’s your plan, so if you really wanna do it, you’re gonna have to be the one to do it.”

 

“Now you’re just being silly,” he says, walking to the fence and then vaulting over it. “You’re just saying this because my black eye has healed. You even said it was really bad. You’re just being a shit, X. Just a big shit.”

 

I open my eyes, groaning as the first waves of the hangover come crashing down on me. I rub my eyes, rubbing away the memory, although it plays in the background as I go into the bathroom and gulp water from the faucet. We never enacted Arsen’s grand plan. We never even got close. Instead, we rode out his beatings until his drinking and smoking caught up with him and he dropped dead of his own accord. But I’ll never forget the way he looked at me, all the anger in the world in his face but none of the grit, too much empathy, too much squeamishness. He’d never do it. But he wanted me to do. Maybe I should have. At least then I wouldn’t feel so shitty about this whole thing. At least then I could say to myself: I did that one thing for him, at least, I’ll always have that.

 

I nuke myself a pizza in the microwave, wolf it down, and then take a shower. When I’m washed and changed I sit on the couch, staring at the TV and trying not to think about the whisky under the sink. The sun has almost set, the apartment is dead quiet, and suddenly the rest of the night seems like a long, long time. It’s half past eight o’clock, which means I have at least a few hours of sitting here sober. I guess I could go to the clubhouse, but all that’d mean is hearing shit from the fellas about drinking, Christopher asking me if I’m coming to the next meeting, did I read his pamphlet. I pick up the pamphlet now, but before I can go over it the apartment buzzer rings.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“It’s me. It’s Kayla.”

 

“You spent that money already?” I snap, though I don’t mean to. Why would she come here again, especially after the kiss? She knows we want each other. She must know it. There’s no way in hell she’s that naïve. She knows I want her and she knows it’s wrong. “I gave you a grand. You want more money? How much? Two? Three?”

 

“This isn’t about that!” Her voice trembles. She sounds like a pledge in his first gunfight, like she’s ready to cry or run at any moment. “I need your help. Please.”

 

“What sort of help?”

 

“Can you just let me up?”

 

I take my hand off the intercom button and let out a groan. I want to let her up. Hell, I’m pretty sure I’m going to let her up. But that don’t mean that the guilt isn’t somethin’ savage. “All right.” I press the door button, unlock the apartment door, and then go into the kitchen and take five quick sips of whisky. As soon as it hits me, my body fills with its warmth, its rejuvenating energy. I feel like this is what waking up really is. That shit about getting out of bed and showering is just a preview to real waking up.

 

I take the bottle into the living room and sit on the couch. A few moments later, she knocks on the door.

 

“Come in!” I call.

 

She shuffles in behind me. I don’t turn, but I hear her. I hear the kid oohing and ahhing and her light footsteps. She walks to the couch and switches on the lamp, and then sits on the couch next to me with the kid on her knee. “Hello,” she says.

 

“Hi,” I reply. “How’s it going?” I take a drink.

 

“Thank you for letting me up.”

 

Her eyes are wide, full of the fear of someone who’s just encountered something grim, something they ain’t used to. She’s wearing the same clothes as earlier, and her hair is even wilder.

 

“Sure,” I mutter. “Why not?”

 

“Have you gotten any sleep since earlier?” she asks.

 

“A little.”

 

“So this is your second drinking session of the day, then?”

 

“I didn’t invite you up to be lectured.”

 

“No.” She shrugs. “I don’t want to lecture you, anyway.”

 

“Are you gonna tell me what happened?”

 

That’s my nephew sitting on her knee. The little kid in the park had a kid of his own and he’s sitting right across from me. I won’t look at him, ’cause if I look at him there are gonna be some emotions I can’t properly handle, and I’m in no mood to battle with emotions. I’m tired of it. I’m done with it.

 

“Okay …”

 

She tells me about Connor, about being with Connor before she was with Arsen. She was at a bar and she was feeling low and the spidery motherfucker walked in and told her everything she wanted to hear, and before she knew it she was in his clutches. Just like a fly trapped in the web, she couldn’t get free, although this web was made of words instead of silk. She lived with him for almost two years, two years in which he turned her into his lapdog. Then she tells me about today’s meeting and his threat to Cormac. By the time she’s finished I’m on my feet, at the window, taking deep breaths because all I want to do is hit something and I don’t think that’d be a good idea with the woman and the kid here. I want to let out a roar. My whole body trembles.

 

“Fucking Connor.” I take a drink and click my neck from side to side. “The world is a strange, strange place.”

 

“What do you mean?” she asks. “Xander, talk to me.”

 

“Connor, that prick. You’re right. He does look like a spider. Acts like one, too. He’s an animal, for sure.” I want to hurl the whisky bottle at the wall, but somehow I restrain myself. The three slugs help. “Connor … Connor!”

 

“Xander!” she snaps. “Talk to me. Please.”

 

I take a deep breath and turn to her. I can’t stop thinking about how cute her face is, her lips, her wide eyes, and her body, too … And the way she looks at me. It’s right there, behind the eyes, a lust neither of us wants to acknowledge. I push it aside. “Connor has been an enemy of the club for a long time. He’s a bigtime outlaw, Kayla, though he ain’t an outlaw in the riding sense. He’s more of a businessman, only a businessman who deals in drugs, guns, women, whatever comes his way. But that’s all a front for what he really enjoys, which is hurting folks. He gets a thrill out of it. You know that. You’ve seen it.” I close my eyes. “And there’s something else, too.” I see a blackened corpse, pitted eyes, no nose. “He’s the one who set fire to that bar when Arsen was inside. He’s the one who blocked the doors. We’d just fucked him over on a heroin deal—we don’t mess with that shit, and we don’t want it here—and he didn’t take too kindly to that. So he found out one of our boys was in a bar, and he decided to take his revenge. You might be wondering how I know that. The bastard left a calling card at the crime scene.”

 

“Oh,” Kayla says, shoulders slumping. “So my ex-boyfriend killed the father of my child.”

 

“That’s pretty much the size of it, yeah.” My shoulders slump too.

 

She raises an eyebrow, nodding at my whisky bottle. “Can you get me a glass, please?”