From the Chrysalis (37 page)

“Well, not a biker girl,”
she’d reply, pleased to hear him laughing. No, she was definitely not a biker girl. Some of their men cleaned up okay, so it wasn’t that. It was just that biker girls always did what they were told … or else. The only time she liked a man to tell her what to do was in bed.

“Were you with the bikers before you went away?” she asked him once.
 

“No,” he’d replied, sounding a little edgy. He hated talking about
away
and she knew it. She kept asking anyway. “But I always loved bikes and there was a biker in the next cell, Grumpy—”

“Jesus. Maybe you and those guys really are the seven dwarves.”

“What?” he asked, lightly slapping her face. “Anyway, Grumpy told me stories about the parties and their life on the road.”
 

Hmm
, she thought, rearing up and nudging him onto his back so she could be on top. He hadn’t liked her doing this at first, but he did now. She always came quickly that way and was ready for him again.
Maybe he just wants to be number one somewhere
, but that didn’t bear thinking, never mind saying, so she pushed the thought away and rode him on a dark, humid carpet of night air.

He was too smart and too gorgeous to be some stupid biker.
Please don’t let him rise through the ranks of a motorcycle gang.
She wasn’t sure how motorcycle gangs worked, but this much was certain: she wasn’t going to end up some gangster’s moll. Not even for his love. He would have to change first.
 

Too bad his biking bros, those beer guzzling men with their tattooed limbs and wild hairstyles, wouldn’t let him alone, but any fool could see why they didn’t. From the first evening they’d spent with the bikers in their trash-strewn clubhouse, she’d realized his acceptance was a
fait accompli
. He was their ace to excitement and glamour; he was their rising star. Dace didn’t have to do a damn thing to qualify. Striking, prospecting, associating—this job was his for the taking. His criminal record was the only assurance the Wolfhounds needed that he was a real wild one too. He’d spent time in the Big House. He’d earned their respect. That was all that mattered in their world.
 

Their limited world,
she narrated for the unfinished novel she kept under her bed.

There came a time when Liza almost felt sorry for the Wolfhounds. Their lives had been curtailed by poverty and poor education. Like most men, they wanted to be stars in their own realms. And their women, they were like women everywhere. They wanted love. Maybe they weren’t that bad after all. As long as they didn’t do really bad stuff, like deal drugs or rape and murder ordinary people, maybe it was okay. So what if they liked wheeling around on their fat, cumbersome bikes, the wind blowing through their matted hair, the pavement threatening to splatter their bullish faces? Now they even had a uniform of sorts: they had taken to wearing T-shirts that said,
If you don’t have a Harley, you ain’t shit.
 

Yes, they were ugly but from what she’d seen so far, a simple shower and shave would have helped some of them. Or even a change in venue, for they all worked intermittently at the local auto plant. By midsummer she could take some of them in small doses. Especially the family men who loved their children. Billy the Road Captain was one, the doting father of three girls in their early teens who had accompanied them on the trip to Niagara Falls.
 

Maybe it was just that biking was more of that
male bonding
stuff, she rationalized. And gang activity provided Dace with all the excitement he craved, hard on the heels of the sensory deprivation he’d endured during his incarceration.
 

He knew a price must be paid when a man died, no matter what the reason, but he’d missed so much during his adolescence. Not that he ever said, though. Like her, he almost never talked about his past. But it made sense. What could any reasonable person have expected? What had she expected and, more importantly, what did she expect now?
That he stay out of prison.
Was that too much to ask?

She was never afraid of the bikers, not then. She was Dace’s cousin, a Viceroy butterfly, protected by her kinship and the bikers’ assumption that whatever her irritating little peculiarities, she must be similar in nature to Dace. As long as she and Dace stuck together, she was good. There was a little review movie house in Dublin where she’d seen Marlon Brando in
The Wild Ones
at least six times. If only the police hadn’t hassled those guys. Take Johnny, the wild one Brando had played. He’d had good stuff in him. He was handsome, too. Too bad he was set up. If he hadn’t been, he might have married that young girl.

There was something else, too. Reluctant as she was to admit it, she had become almost as crazy about bikes as Dace was now. She loved the feel of a machine between her legs, whether she rode behind him on his Harley in a borrowed jacket and her black leather boots, or by herself on Uncle Norm’s loaner.
Free,
she’d exult, her hair streaming behind her as she went downhill, the road rushing up into her face, the future stretching ahead.

 
By now her Uncle Norm, whose full head of hair was now totally grey, would have made her an honorary daughter and a beneficiary in his will, as long she kept Dace grounded and out of jail. And she would, she promised him. Rosie, his real daughter, was almost never there. She was expecting her first baby and Norm had to believe her family was all right.
 

“Don’t worry,” Liza always whispered in his ear when she said good-bye. “I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll make him behave.”
 

Back out on their bikes, the road opened up before them. Soon the rest of world would, too. Really, this biker stuff, surely it was just a phase. Dace was right. Everything was going to be all right. She would go back to school in the fall and the minute he got off probation they would head out of town.

Time evaporated. People worried about bikers in Maitland and got all pumped up about the Hell’s Angels moving into southwestern Ontario, too. Sure, the Wolfhounds were on their own turf right now, but if they didn’t merge there was going to be an all out war. Maybe it was all because of Joe’s articles. Maybe just the sight of Harleys swarming the local bars, especially the roadhouses down by the lake, was enough to set people off.
 

S
o pathetic,
Liza thought. She sat on a bus on the way to the Y.M.C.A. camp, gingerly reading somebody else’s discarded morning paper. What the hell were they trying to prove? They must have watched too many biker movies. The authorities were so antsy they had even put an Ontario Provincial Police Officer, Jon Anson, in charge of a special biker intelligence unit. That was
the news
all summer long, blown out of proportion, especially in the
Maitland Spectator
. That, and a lot of hype about drugs. Not pot, but crystal meth. Although some of the stoners, the ones who smoked several times a day when they were fifteen and woke up at fifty, probably didn’t notice much of a difference.
 

Just a little media coverage. That’s all it took in this redneck army town to make “biker”
synonymous with “drug pusher”
.
Liza, who hadn’t trusted anything she’d read in the news for so long, might have been awed by the procreative powers of the local press, except she
was a little worried. Those guys at the Clubhouse had to be up to something else at those Sunday meetings they didn’t allow women to attend.
 

Then Dace started to change, although the changes were subtle at first, like the end of summer. And like so many lovers, she thought he must have a good reason. It was ages before she acknowledged that something was eating him alive. Maybe it had always been there waiting, like a genetic time bomb. He couldn’t concentrate on anything she said and began to act peculiar, almost like he’d lost interest in her, although when he touched her she knew it wasn’t so. He was always going to want her. He swore he loved her more than drink.
 

“More than those stupid Wolfhounds?” she asked, pressing her luck.
 

“Damn your eyes,” he said, leaving a trail of kisses on her face and unhooking her bra. “They’re my brothers, for Christ’s sake. Would I do this with them?”
he asked, dropping to his knees, lifting her dress, and cupping her behind.
 

“Smart girl
,
”
he said, coming up for air, “wearing a dress for once.”
 

Uncle Norm left them alone in the house now and Dace was almost insatiable. Now she worried too much sex was wearing him out. He looked as if he were losing weight; his already deep-set eyes had sunk farther into his bony face and his once well kept-hair escaped its leather tie.
 

It was only when he asked her for a favour that she realized how much he’d started to look like the rest of the gang. He wanted her to hide a small, irregular sized package behind a false plywood front under her residence bed. The moment he was out of the room she peeked inside the package and wasn’t surprised to discover more white crystals. She didn’t mind for herself; she loved him so much her sense of betrayal was almost immaterial. She had never said no to him before, and she didn’t now. Not at first.
 

Another day he asked her to stow three thousand dollars in one hundred dollar denominations. Grasping the phrase
the lure of easy money
, she fanned the bills and gazed at him. He was sitting in her chair, his feet up on her desk, drinking a beer. He reached for her, rolling the cold bottle across the tops of her breasts, but he looked so agitated she knew she had to do something for him, and she had to do it fast.
 

Down, his eyes said. Dropping to her knees, she unzipped his pants, almost sick with excitement. It was the wrong excitement, though. She was scared. It must have been the money—that funny coloured paper stuff. She had never seen hundred dollar bills before. She raised her head,
Where did you get this?
she wanted to ask, but when she looked up, his eyes stopped her cold.
 

He relaxed a little once he came, but he was still staring at a poster of Marlon Brando on her wall, his fists clenched. My God, she thought, please let crime pay.

It was weeks before she found the courage to refuse taking the little packages for him, and doing it almost broke her heart. She wanted him to be happy and stay home with her, no matter what. He could look so damn explosive, although his usual tactic was to withdraw from arguments as well as implicit judgments about his lifestyle. Like his father, he rarely raised his voice. And she wasn’t worried about him hitting her. He would never strike her, no matter what. Whatever happened, he wasn’t the kind of man to displace his anger. Long ago, he had reserved his fury—all his fury—for something else.

“All you have to do is say no, little straight arrow,” he said with disgust. “What am I, some bad guy? I don’t need this song and dance.” Then he bolted down the nine flights of stairs in her student residence, bypassing the elevators, fists balled at his sides.

And always there were rumours. People stopped her on campus. “Don’t you know what he did to those poor buggers?” they’d ask.
 

If only she could make them understand Dace, she thought, trying to set his accusers straight. “He didn’t do that stuff. He’s not that way.”
 

No matter what was in those packages he’d asked her to hide, she knew he’d been redeemed. He’d made one big mistake in his life, and he never would again.
 

Life was still so good when they went for long rides on his Harley, her legs wide open, her arms wrapped around him, her head on the back of his shoulders, her hands resting on his thighs. They flew up and down the empty concession roads around Maitland, avoiding full stops. They also got lost a lot because neither of them had any sense of direction. So they’d stop to make love and talk about their plans, because soon, somehow, they
would
get out of this place. They’d forget all about those stupid little packages then.
 

“Everything’s going to be all right,”
he promised, his hands holding her face, his hard body sinking into her soft, compliant flesh. There were just a couple of hitches, though, things he had to do first. For the time being, even though the American border was less than fifty miles away, he planned to lay low.
 

In August they had to stop sneaking off to Toronto, where they’d been going to the Riverboat. It was getting ridiculous. The goddamn police wouldn’t let him alone, even when she was right there. Her presence had protected him at first, but no more. She’d have her womb pressed up against the small of his back and everything would be fine until a red cherry whined and a Maitland police cruiser pulled them over.