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“Ugh, fuck off,” Sam chuckled darkly. “I gotta piss.”
Duncan waved him off. “Don’t need the announcement, my guy.”
Sam struggled out of his sleeping bag and stood. He trudged sleepily toward the forest. Duncan sat where he was and watched the fire.
A couple minutes later, just as he’d clocked Sam’s return, Duncan heard a tent zipper coming down. He looked over and saw his father working his way from the tent he shared with Eight.
Dad closed the zipper, then stood facing the tent, stretching his body loose. When he turned, he saw Duncan at once and came over.
“Hey, boys. Not sleepin’?”
“I am,” Sam said as he settled into his bag again. “Just needed to piss.”
“Yeah, me too,” Dad said. “Dunc, what’s up?”
This was the first opportunity he’d had to talk to his old man about their plans for the Nameless. It was after three in the morning, but if he put it off to a more reasonable hour, the privacy would be gone. “Can we talk?”
Dad frowned and peered sharply at him. “Yeah. Let me take care of business, and yeah, we’ll talk. You okay?”
“Yeah, fine. Just need to work some shit through.”
Dad set his hand on Duncan’s head, a lifelong gesture of love and comfort. “Be right back.”
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~oOo~
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He was gone for about ten minutes. When he got back, Duncan was up and standing near the picnic tables.
“You want to sit?” Dad asked as he came up.
“Can we walk a little?”
Dad looked around. “I don’t want to go far. There are full-on bears and mountain lions in these woods. Maybe wolves, too, for all I know. Best we stay in sight of the fire and the lights.” He squinted at Duncan, who realized he’d made a frustrated face. “But yeah, we can step off a little. Let’s head to the bikes.”
They walked in silence to the cluster of bikes and the Tulsa van. When they’d each sat astride their own rides, Dad asked, “What’s goin’ on, bud?”
“I’m trying to get my head around this job. I never expected we’d do anything like we’re planning.” He swallowed and said something else he’d been thinking. “I never expected you to be okay with something like this.”
Dad’s first reaction to that hesitant criticism was a sharp, chopped chuckle. “Assassins,” he muttered, and Duncan registered, after a beat, that he was repeating his own word back to him.
“Yeah. That’s not what I thought we were.”
“What we are, son, is Bulls. We do what we have to do for our club and our family.”
“And this is something we have to do?”
Dad looked him dead in the eyes. “Yes.” Then he took a deep breath, turned to stare toward the dark woods, and said, “For a long time, I fought for the club to be something different. When I went inside, the club was barely outlaw. We did some shit for the Volkovs back then, but it was little shit. We weren’t in bed with each other. We were just taking jobs that would pay. But D and Dane hooked up tight with Irina while I was away, and when I came back out, everything was different. The Bulls were real one-percenters when I came back to the table. I didn’t want that. I fought it for years, but I never won.”
Duncan knew a lot of the history his father was recounting now. But something in Dad’s tone was different from other times he’d told these stories. Duncan sat quietly and let his father find his way to his point.
“There were a lot of times, over a long stretch of years,” Dad went on, “where I thought maybe there wasn’t a place for me in the club anymore. That scared the shit out of me—the Bulls are the only family I’ve ever had. But I couldn’t get right with the road we were on, and I couldn’t get enough brothers to agree with me. The most I could do was make everybody think twice, try to do what we were doing safely, take it all seriously. Every time I thought I’d hit the end and I had to walk away, somebody—Becker, or Eight—would talk me out of it. They always said they needed me to keep them honest. That was just enough handhold to keep me at the table, I guess. That and loving these fuckers all the way through. Even Eight. I hated that fucker for a long time, but I loved him, too, even back then. Leaving the club would have meant walking away from my family, and I don’t know I would’ve survived it, even with your mom and you kids. I had to get right with who the Bulls had become. I had to figure out where my place was in that.”
“I know this stuff, Dad,” Duncan said. His father seemed to be wandering off into old memories, and none of this seemed relevant to his own worries.
Dad turned back and focused on Duncan. “Yeah, I know you do. I guess I’m saying it all again because it sounds like you’re having your first struggle like I used to, where the club is taking a road you don’t want to travel. I’m real glad to know you are, Dunc. It says a lot about the man you are. You should have doubts. You should fight against the dark. You should say your worries out loud, with your chest. That way, when you follow the club anyway, you know you, and everybody else, have really thought it out. We all understand the reason, and the price. That’s how I finally got right with the club and my place in it: I saw that being the speed bump is my place. It’s not my job to stop the club from doing what it needs to do, but it is my job to make the club know for sure that we need to do it. That’s why Eight tapped me to stand at his side. He knows he’s a hot-headed asshole who hates not getting his way, and he knows that’s no way to wield the gavel. He knew I’d be his leash.”
