Page 38 of Resilience

“I’m sorry I didn’t let you come to the cabin. I should’ve. I’ve been feeling like a butt about it since.”

Mason looked at him for a second. “Thanks. I’m sorry it turned out to suck—and I’m sorry I jammed you up over the ticket. I didn’t know it would get you in so much trouble.”

He’d gotten pulled over doing 109 on I-44 in the middle of the night. Because he’d been on his bike and wearing his prospect patch, he hadn’t gotten hauled in and had his bike impounded, but he’d gotten a very large ticket. Being a prospect paid nothing and working at the station paid minimum, so he hadn’t been able to afford the whole fine. He’d borrowed money from Mason—who had turned right the fuck around and told Dad about it.

Because Sam had been in that fucking prospect kutte when he’d been pulled over, Dad had been ... call it angry. He’d reported him to the club, and they’d fined him, too. He’d be paying that off for a minute.

So yeah, Sam had been pissed and hadn’t wanted his narc brother at his birthday party.

“Water under the bridge,” he said now. “I gotta go.”

“See ya,” Mason said.

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

As a prospect, Sam worked about full-time at the Bulls’ Sinclair station, next-door to the clubhouse. Most of the Bulls considered it grunt work and complained whenever they had to take a shift to fill in for the prospects and hangarounds who primarily worked the shop and the pumps outside. Every prospect he’d ever known had been eager for the day they could put the shop behind them, at least as their main gig.

Sam actually liked working the shop. It was familiar to him, not much different from working Mom’s produce market. Most of the traffic in the store itself was from the neighborhood, and he enjoyed making small talk with the old ladies who came in for milk and bread, and the old men who bought tallboys and packs of cigarettes and sat outside the shop bullshitting all day. He especially liked the kids who rolled up on their scooters and boards and came in for snacks and sodas—though he’d learned early on that it was unwise to leave them unattended in the candy aisle.

He didn’t even mind working the pumps. It was probably dumb, but he found it interesting to see so many different people doing their thing, living their lives. But his very favorite part of working the shop was listening to the guys in the bays. They talked all through the work day, and hardly ever about anything deep. Just giving each other shit, sharing jokes, talking out mechanical problems, whatever. Sam felt like he was getting a peek into what made the Bulls a brotherhood. Not in the clubhouse, where things were either very serious or very not, but here, where the Bulls were mechanics, doing regular work.

Though it wasn’t a rule, officially, it was assumed that a Bull’s on-the-books job would be at the station. It made sense; no other job would put the work of the club first. Subsection A of that not-rule was that a new patch would move on from the shop to the bays—that he would get certified and become a mechanic.

Sam was good with engines; most of the Bulls’ kids were. It was probably impossible to grow up with these men and not learn at least enough about cars and bikes to keep one well maintained. But he wasn’t all that interested in becoming a mechanic. He liked being able to handle his own repairs, but he didn’t enjoy being hunched under a car’s hood for hours at a time.

It wasn’t half the pay the mechanics got, but he thought he’d be fine working the shop permanently. The real bank wasn’t on the books, anyway.

He was crouched at the refrigerators, refilling the single-serve bottles of flavored coffee drinks (and marveling that people actually bought that swill), when the electronic chime at the front door went off, and he looked up to the nearest security mirror to see three neighborhood girls come in. They looked around in a way he’d grown to understand—an extremely unsubtle casing of the joint—so he left the half-full carton on the floor and stood up. Those three were unapologetic little criminals, always trying for the big candy score.

“Hey, ladies.”

They looked at each other before any of them responded. Arielle, the ringleader, smiled and popped a hip, as if her middle-school body had hips to pop. “Hey, Sam.”

“I just stocked out a bunch of bubble gum. And the Good Humor guy came this morning, too.”

“Strawberry shortcake?” Malika asked with real enthusiasm.

“Yup. And Creamsicles, ice cream sandwiches, and some new stuff, like Oreo and Reese’s.” He grinned. “If you promise not to try to pinch anything today, you can each have one ice cream on me.”

All three girls hurried to the ice cream case. Sam picked up the carton of coffee drinks and carried it to the counter so he could keep an eye on Ocean’s Three over there.

Then the back door opened and Maverick walked in. He hadn’t been working in the cramped office in the back, so he must have come over from the clubhouse.

The girls saw him and immediately began acting like they’d been caught doing something naughty. They clustered together and closed the ice cream case, empty-handed.

These girls were from the neighborhood and regulars at the shop. They knew the Bulls, and Sam had never seen them behave as though they were intimidated. Arielle’s dad, Malika’s uncle, and Carly’s cousin were hangarounds, and Arielle’s cousin was a sweetbutt. But these girls looked nervous to be so close to Maverick.

Curious, Sam considered Maverick. Maybe his perspective was skewed, having lived his whole life surrounded by—loved by—these men, but Mav didn’t seem intimidating to him. He was tall, a little taller than Sam, and still visibly strong. He was somewhere around Dad’s age, in his fifties or may pushing sixty, and he looked his age. His hair and beard were iron grey, heading toward stainless steel. He also looked like he hadn’t lived an easy life. Definitely a leathery complexion. Lots of scars on his face, his hands. Elsewhere, too, probably.

Was that intimidating? Sam didn’t know. Literally every Bull of that generation could be described in the same way. The only one who intimidated Sam was Eight, but that was because he roared like a hungry bear when he was angry or just felt like fucking with somebody. Mav was one of the nice guys.

But Mav didn’t smile at the girls clustered protectively together. He walked by them as if they weren’t there and came to Sam at the desk.

“I’m gonna go into the bays for a minute,” he said as he approached. “Gimme a shout when you got a sec.”

---