Page 103 of American Hellhound
“Are you shitting me?”
“…bloodeverywhere…”
“…heard he got shot outside of Little Rock…”
“Fuck you, asshole!”
The air smelled of wood smoke, and charcoal, and beer, and sweat. Hints of road dust and unwashed male bodies.
Ghost opened his hand against her hip, cupped it around the bone there, felt the warmth of her skin through the fabric of her skirt. Held her close, felt the frailty of her ribcage against his arm.
Please, please.
When he opened the front door of the clubhouse, the noise from within rolled out and assaulted them. Air heavy with cigarette smoke, clouded with competing layers of perfume and sweat. The place was louder and rowdier than a strip club. Dogs never needed to go to those kinds of places because the strippers always came to them.
Ghost pulled Maggie in even tighter, he was probably suffocating her, and stepped inside.
When he was a little boy, when Duane was just a spitefully cheerful uncle who visited the farm on occasion, resplendent in leather, his bike shiny in the driveway, Ghost hadn’t understood why his mother seemed to hate the man. Her mouth would press into a thin white line and she’d shake her head the second Duane was out the door.“That man.”A curse. To a seven-year-old boy, the sight of bikers riding in formation was a vision, the stuff of fantasies. But then he was a teenager, and he attended his first party, and he understood what his mother had been on about.
Tonight was no different. Music blared – it would be a mix of Southern rock and heavy metal – and the bar was already tacky with spilled drinks, crunchy from spilled peanut and chip bowls. Brothers, more than the usual crew, shot pool, smoked, sat around on couches and chairs, talking too loud in an attempt to be heard over the stereo. A girl in a black bikini danced on a table; another lay across two chairs, this one topless, while Bruno sucked tequila out of her bellybutton. Desi was getting a blowjob. Justin was snorting a line off yet another girl’s thigh. Sampson and Brutus practiced with throwing knives at the dart board, a game they’d invented and creatively dubbed “Knife Darts.”
Hound was tending bar, and that was where Ghost headed, fingers digging into Maggie’s hip as they wended their way between bodies.
“Just don’t look,” he told her. “Stick close.”
If she responded, he couldn’t hear.
~*~
An older man with a kind smile and keen eyes handed two whiskeys across the bar to Ghost and gave her a wink. “Don’t think too badly of us, darlin’.”
It was a little late for that.
Maggie had been here less than three minutes and she’d decided three things about the Lean Dogs.
One: they were a grizzled, sunburned, ill-kempt, unattractive lot. Beards, and greasy bandanas, and beer guts.
Two: they were all going to die young, be it from overdose, liver failure, bike crash, or syphilis.
And three: they were fucking disgusting.
The floor was sticky and crumb-covered; she thought she caught puddles of cat litter, no doubt poured over things she didn’t want to think about. Cobwebs danced up in the corners, fluttered at the edges of decorative signs and mounted deer skulls. The place reeked of pot smoke and BO. And then there waspublic sexhappening. She knew kids in her classes who went on double and triple dates, making out and feeling up together in cars, or darkened living rooms, but it was nothing compared to this flagrant display.
Ghost put his arm around her and steered her toward a shadowy corner, and she went willingly. The farther they were from the fray, the better.
A black leather love seat sat beneath a neon Coors Light sign and Ghost pulled her down to sit beside him, arm never leaving her waist. She took a deep breath and wished she hadn’t, coughing on the smoke. It burned her eyes, her nose, her throat. When Ghost smoked at home, she thought it was sexy, that sharp smell and the way his mouth curved around the cigarette. This, though, was a wall of smoke. She couldn’t keep it out of her lungs, couldn’t turn her head away and wait for it to dissipate.
“Drink,” Ghost said, nudging her hand with his glass. “It’ll help.”
With the smoke? No. But she guessed it would make this whole experience more tolerable.
She was used to drinking it with Coke, and the first sip moved over her tongue like fire. The second sip was easier. And the third.
Maggie took a shallow breath through her mouth and scanned the crowd, withdrawing into herself the same way she did at cotillion, letting the scene come to her in a sequence of easily-catalogued details. If she could break something down, she could understand it; and to understand something was to find that it wasn’t as scary as she’d initially thought.
So she catalogued. The bottle-red hair on a woman – a groupie, a Lean Bitch – whose head bobbed over a man’s open fly, the same red as the lipstick on her stretched-open mouth. The gap in the smile of a man throwing small knives at a dartboard. The intricate dog tattoo on another man’s arm, the way it stretched and rippled and seemed alive with he lifted his beer bottle to his lips. The way a young member in a featureless cut that readProspectacross the bottom fetched beers and mixed drinks and carried them to the tables. The way the man doing body shots overfilled his groupie’s navel and tequila ran everywhere, all over the floor.
This was what happened, she thought, when no one told men what to do. Not mothers, not wives, not polite society, not the law.
