Chapter 2
Austin
The workshop smells like grease, cold air and something faintly chemical that I've never been able to name.
At five in the morning, it smells like that more than any other time because there's nobody else in here to cover it.
Just me, the overhead strip light that flickers if you look at it wrong, and three bikes that need cleaning down before the day crew arrives.
I've been a prospect for eleven days.
Eleven days of being the first one up and the last one in bed.
Eleven days of yes sir and no sir and I'll get that and not once has anyone said thank you, because that's not how this works and I knew that going in.
When you're a prospect, gratitude is the patch at the end of it. Everything before that’s just the price of admission, and the price is high on purpose because the club needs to know you mean it before they give you the brotherhood that they welcome you to.
I drag the cloth along the length of a Dyna's tank and work the grime out of the chrome fittings.
I don't think about Savannah. I think about the carburetor on the Fat Boy in bay two that's been giving trouble since last week, and whether it's a needle jet problem or a float issue, and what I'm going to need to pull it apart properly. I think about that instead.
I've been thinking about carburetors a lot this week.
The side door opens and I hear boots on concrete.
I know it's Brick before I see him because he walks with a particular weight that I've been hearing my whole life.
He crosses the workshop and stops a few feet behind me.
I feel him looking at the state of the place without him saying a word about it.
"You've been in here since when?" he asks.
"Four thirty."
"Gate duty last night?"
"Midnight to four."
A pause. "So, you slept for thirty minutes."
"Twenty. I couldn't settle." I move to the next section of the tank and don't turn around. "The Dyna's had someone going at the tank with the wrong polish. Left residue in all the seams. Whoever did it should be told."
"It was Bri."
"Someone should tell Bri."
"Someone will." Brick comes around and picks up a clean cloth from the bench and crouches down by the rear wheel, and he starts wiping down the spokes without being asked. That’s not something I expected. We work in silence for a while. The strip light flickers twice and settles.
"You know the rules," Brick says eventually, not looking up from the spokes.
"Yeah."
"Tell me them anyway."
I keep my voice level. "No phone in Church. No talking back to patched members. Last to eat, first to work. Gate duty when asked, no questions. Run errands without being chased. Keep my personal business outside the gate."
"And?"
"Don't embarrass the man who vouched for me."
Brick stops wiping the spokes. He straightens up and he looks at me properly for the first time since he came in.
I've known that face my whole life, the jaw that doesn't give anything away, the eyes that are sharper than people expect.
He's my mother's brother and he was at my fifth birthday and my high school graduation and every Christmas in between, and right now none of that’s in his face.
Right now he's just a patched member of the Black Saints MC looking at a prospect.
"You're behind on the Fat Boy," he says.
"I know. I'll have it sorted before noon."
"You'll have it sorted before nine. Razor wants it out this morning." He drops the cloth on the bench. "And Austin?"
I look at him.
"You want the patch, stop thinking about her. She's gone. You're here. Act like it."
He says it the way he says everything that matters flat, without drama, as if it's simply a fact of the situation that I need to account for and move on from.
He doesn't wait for a response. He pulls the side door open, letting the cold morning air come in for a second before he's gone.
The door swings shut and I'm alone again in the workshop with the flicker of the strip light, the three bikes and the cold.
I pick up a fresh cloth, and I go to work on the Fat Boy.
She's gone. I'm here. Act like it.
He's right. That's the annoying thing about Brick.
He's almost always right, and he doesn't soften it enough to make being right feel like kindness.
Which means there's no cushion to resent and no argument to make.
Just the fact of the thing, laid out plain.
No room to argue. No room to sulk. Just the work and the cold and the strip light flickering overhead.
I crouch down by the Fat Boy's primary case and run my thumb along the seam where someone has been sloppy with their cleanup.
There's buffing compound dried in a ridge around the lower edge and it'll take me twenty minutes with a detail brush to get it out properly.
I grab the brush from the shelf above the workbench and get into it.
The thing about bikes is that they don't care how you're feeling.
You could be in pieces on the inside and the engine doesn't know it.
A stuck float is a stuck float whether you're heartbroken or happy. Figuring out why it’s stuck requires the same thing either way: your hands on the problem, your brain on the problem, everything else set aside.
I learned that from Brick when I was fourteen and I spent a summer in his garage learning to strip and rebuild a Sportster.
I've never forgotten that lesson. The work is honest. The work doesn't have an opinion about your choices or your grief or the quality of your reasons.
I work through until six thirty, when the compound starts waking up around me.
I hear Pops crossing the yard first, because Pops is always up early, and always moves the same unhurried way regardless of the hour.
A few minutes later I hear two of the younger patched members I don't know well yet, their voices carrying across the yard before the door opens.
Then the smell of coffee from the main building drifts over to me, which means Cam is in.
I clean my hands and carry the Fat Boy's service sheet to the whiteboard at the front of the shop and mark it done.
All three bikes were serviced and cleaned.
Two hours forty minutes of work, most of it in the cold and dark, and no one is going to notice except to take it for granted, which is exactly how it's supposed to go.
That's the hardest thing about being a prospect. Not the hours or the grunt work or the being last in line for everything. It's learning to find satisfaction in invisible effort. Learning to do the job right because it's right, not because anyone's going to see you do it.
I'm still learning that part.
But I'm learning it.
Four days later I'm on my first run.
It's a courtesy call to the Harte County chapter, who ride out of a town about forty miles east and who the Black Saints have had a standing arrangement with since before most of the current members were patched in.
Razor goes twice a year, once in spring and once before winter sets in, just to maintain the relationship.
They share information and make sure there's nothing brewing on either side that the other needs to know about.
It's not dramatic. It's business, the way all the most important things in this club turn out to be business when you look at them straight.
I ride at the back.
Prospects always ride at the back, which I knew going in, but knowing it and experiencing it are two different things.
The formation stretches out ahead of me on the highway, Razor at the front with Braxton on his right, then Knuckles and Shadow side by side.
After them is Cash and Ramsey who ride with such automatic synchronization that it looks choreographed.
Behind them is Pops, then Seb just ahead of me.
Eight bikes in formation in front of me, with mine at the tail.
The sound of it is something I wasn't prepared for.
I knew what bikes sounded like individually.
I knew what two or three bikes sounded like together because I'd ridden with Brick before I ever started prospecting. But eight bikes at highway speed in formation is a different thing entirely. There’s a layered rolling thunder that you feel in your chest, your seat and in the bones of your hands on the bars.
It fills up the air around you and it fills up the inside of your head, and it doesn't leave room for much else.
Which turns out to be exactly what I need on a Tuesday morning when my brain has been too loud for fifteen days straight.
I ride and I breathe. I listen to the sound of the club moving as one body, and a part of me settles that's been unsettled since the beginning of all of this.
This. This is what I wanted.
Not the patch, though I want that too. Not the parties or the reputation or any of the things that people think an MC is about when they're on the outside of it.
This, right here. The formation, the sound, and the feeling of being on the back edge of something that knows where it's going and doesn't apologize for the space it takes up on the road.
Nine people moving as one with nothing between them and the sky.
I let myself have thirty seconds of Savannah.
I give it to myself deliberately, a controlled burn rather than a wildfire, because I've learned in fifteen days that trying to wall it off completely doesn't work.
Trying to build walls just means it comes up at the worst moments.
So I give it thirty seconds. Her laughing on the back of my bike on a summer evening two years ago.
I feel the way she'd had her chin on my shoulder and her arms around my waist while she'd shouted something in my ear that the wind took before I could hear it.
I'd shouted back asking what she’d said and she'd laughed again before she said it didn't matter.
It had mattered. I'd wanted to know what she’d said.