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“Hey, you need a hand up there at your place?” he asks, lifting his chin toward the road. “I got some time if you want another set of hands.”
“Nah, thanks, I’m good,” I tell him. “But you can help me load some sand to bring back up there.”
“I can do that,” he says easily.
We get to work heaving bags into the bucket. I’m thankful for the assist, but even more thankful for the relative silence from Mal. He’s a talkative motherfucker — could chat the ear off a statue. And even though he’s one of my closest friends, that non-stop conversation can get on my damn nerves sometimes. That’s part of the reason I’m not accepting his offer of help. I like working alone. I like the quiet of it. And if it’s one thing Mal usually ain’t, it’s quiet.
When the sand bags are loaded and the bucket’s full, Mal asks me again if I’m sure I don’t want a hand, and again I tell him I’m good. “You stay here and make sure the prospects don’t fuck anything up,” I tell him, nodding toward Mensa and Weasel.
He chuckles. “Not to worry. Axel’s got ‘em doin’ shit that can’t hurt anything,” he says, referring to our club president.
“Don’t tell them that. Those two idiots will take it as a challenge.”
“Ah, Weasel ain’t so bad,” Mal grins. “At least he knows how to follow orders and shut his trap.”
The irony of Mal implying Mensa talks too much isn’t lost on me. I’m about to rib him about it when Axel himself comes out the front door of the clubhouse.
“Mal!” he calls. “Need you to get over to the shop.”
“The shop” is Ironwood Car and Truck Repair, the club’s main legit business. Like our clubhouse, it got torched, too. But unlike the old clubhouse, we decided to rebuild the shop on the old property. And take advantage of the extra room to build on and expand it, bulldozing the old clubhouse to make more space to park the vehicles we’re working on.
“What’s up, Prez?” Mal calls back.
Axel approaches us. “Dante needs to go pick up Tori and take her to the hospital,” he says. “Guess Tori’s having some unusual contractions. She doesn’t think anything’s wrong, but Dante’s taking her in just to be sure.”
Dante is our club’s Enforcer. His old lady Tori is five months pregnant with their first kid. She had a rough time of it at first, with morning sickness and I don’t know what else. I guess that’s better now, but Dante still worries a shitload about her. I guess I get that. This is their first kid, after all, and Dante loves Tori like nobody’s business. She’s tough as they come, but I guess growing a whole ‘nother human inside yourself is no joke.
“Hey, before I go, a bunch of us are goin’ to the Viking later on,” Mal says to us. “Since the clubhouse bar ain’t completely set up yet, thought we’d go over there and cut loose a little. You up for it?”
The Viking Bar has been one of the club’s main haunts in town for a long time. Late last year, the owner decided to retire and put the place up for sale, and the Lords decided to buy it, to diversify our revenue streams some more. Mal co-manages it with a long-time employee named Vince. Vince, or Vinnie, does most of the hiring and day-to-day shit. Mal keeps an eye on the place and makes sure it stays community friendly and shit doesn’t get out of hand. After all, the fine people of Ironwood are our paying customers. We gotta make sure they keep coming in.
Axel nods. “Yeah, I’ll probably be over in a while. Gonna be an early night for me, though. Eden’s gettin’ back from visiting her sister up in Tanner Springs tonight. Wanna be home when she gets there. Who all else is going?”
“Me, Matthias, Rourke,” Mal says. “Maybe a couple of the other men later.”
“Sounds good.”
How about you, Rogue? You up for it?”
“Maybe. I’ll see how I feel after I’m done for the day.”
Mal climbs on his bike and takes off for the shop. I head back to my place, relieved that Mal’s not gonna be here to bug me more about helping out today. Much as I love my club and my brothers, I’m more of a loner by nature. Or at least by habit. I only started thinking about it when the MC secured enough land for any of us to be as secluded out here as we wanted. There’s a part of me that wonders whether it’s a good idea to be building a place for myself in the club compound. But it’s a good choice for me, in the end. No mortgage. Enough room to do what I want. Very few neighbors, and the ones I do have will be men I trust.
That suits me fine.
Back at my place, I lower the bucket of the loader and tip it. I dump the bags of sand on the ground to the side of the kidney shaped patio area in the back of the cottage. I’ve already laid and leveled the paver base, so the sand is next up. I spend the next hour or so pouring the sand, then dragging a 2 x 4 across it to smooth and level it. I’m sweating harder in the unseasonably hot day now, so I pull my shirt up over my head and use it to wipe my face and my beard, and under my arms. The work is hard, but it’s the kind of labor that suits me. As a landscaper by trade, I’m usually working for paying customers. Laying out an environment that matches their vision, not mine. This is the first time I’ve ever done a job like this for myself.
By the time I’m done leveling the sand layer, it’s late afternoon. I worked straight through lunch without thinking, and my gut is yelling at me for it. Inside, I make myself two sandwiches in the sparse, half-finished kitchen, on the plywood countertop that will have to do until I get time to install the real thing. I grab myself a glass of cold water from the jug in the fridge and go back outside to eat, leaning against the front porch in a patch of shade.
I’m halfway through the second sandwich when off to my right, a rustling in the brush catches my attention. In the shadows, I see the the head of what I think is a dog, peering out at me.
“You spyin’ on me?” I ask it around a mouthful of bread.
The sound of my voice sparks something in the critter. He lets out a loud bark and jumps out of the trees into the yard. Now that he’s out in the open, I can see just how huge he is. He looks to be some sort of Mastiff mix, maybe with some German Shepherd mixed in. He’s gotta weigh easily at least a hundred pounds. His coat is tan, with some black around his muzzle and his large, floppy ears. Even as big as he is, though, he’s a little thinner than he should be. Looks like he’s had to skip a few meals lately.
He stops cold, then cocks his head, like he’s trying to figure out whether I’m a friend or an enemy. But the way he’s looking at me, mouth open and tongue lolling, tells me he’s not feral. He might be a stray, but he wants to come up to me, that’s obvious.
“I got a little food for ya, if you want,” I offer. I breaking off a crust of my bread and toss it on the ground a couple feet in front of me.
