From the Chrysalis (36 page)

The men started playing poker and Dace joined them, leaving her perched like a bright little pet parakeet on the edge of a mattress. By the time she’d downed a couple of beers, she felt more like a brainless sparrow. Her head swam and she wished she were back in her dorm, reading a book. Anywhere but here. God, she hated parties.

True to the Road Captain’s word, several other girls were there, wearing skin tight jeans and teased, bouffant hair: differential girls full of bravado. The place reeked of dampness and mouse droppings and urine; other women might have felt compelled to push a broom or do some simple tidying of the ramshackle Clubhouse. These women milled from room to room fetching drinks, stopping occasionally to drape their arms around their man’s neck as he studied his cards, looking as serious as if he held the future in his hand.
 

The men appeared indifferent to their feminine charms and gruff with any responses, but each girl seemed more territorial than the last. They either ignored Liza or cast blatantly dirty looks her way. They had nothing to say to her, and she had no idea what to say to them. They were as blond as the girls at school, although only one, Dagmar, was a natural. Her eyes were so blue she looked almost otherworldly. Three other girls had been named for objects: Crystal, Sherry and Tiffany. They were as young as Liza, except for a heavier-set one. She looked like she belonged to Billy the Road Captain and bore the more dated name of Doreen.

“Who’s the long-haired bitch?” she heard Dagmar say when Liza finished her first beer and accepted a second one from Strangeman. Her English wasn’t fluent. Probably his girl, Liza thought. Liza had no idea the smile of thanks she flashed Strangeman when he handed her a beer had lit up the room. If she hadn’t been drinking, and if Dace hadn’t been there, she probably would have feared for her life. She wondered if the bikers’ ladies acted jealous because that was what passed for love in their world.

At least Dace was happy. He took little breaks from the card game, trying to pull Liza out of her shell and spinning all the girls around in time to Rolling Stones tunes on a transistor radio.
 

“It’s okay, little darling,” he murmured, bending down to whisper in her ear. He was inebriated enough to risk taking her face in his hands. “There’s nothing bad going down here. These guys just wanna have some fun.”
 

“Yeah, we just wanna have fun,” one man agreed. A couple of guys snickered, but Liza melted anyway. She loved it when Dace touched her that way. If only he’d joined a more recreational bike club, she thought as the evening wore on. She grew more tired by the hour and tried not to drape herself over him, tempting as it was.

Crystal’s man had taken her into a side room and they were going at it. “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” they heard her shriek. Liza looked nervously around the room, noting a couple of the guys looked a little too interested in the cries, their glances flicking briefly on her.
Please stay there,
Liza thought primly, glancing at the rattling door. Drunk or not, group sex really didn’t appeal to her.

She took a third beer from Billy the Road Captain, who was still eyeing her. Crystal had revved things up and the energy in the room had definitely taken on a lusty edge. Three beers was over Liza’s limit and everything began to make a boozy kind of sense. She even smiled enough that Billy seemed to think he had a special rapport with her.
 

“Your cousin,” he cajoled, “if that’s what he really is, he’s a real stand up guy. We’ve never had anybody like him in our place. He makes us all look good. And you, you could improve the place, too. Dace—Ironhorse—he’d do anything for his brothers. How about you?”

Well, what did she expect? Liza thought. She laughed and shrugged as diplomatically as she could. Dace had always been excessively loyal, something she could almost understand. At one point during the night he’d told her he knew some of the bikers from his teenage street life. He’d met the rest in prison. They were the brothers he’d never had.
 

Dace finally noticed the way both Strangeman and Billy were looking at her, slumped on the bed with her T-shirt hiked halfway up her torso, her smooth white skin glowing in the half dark.
 

“Like fresh meat,” Dace muttered, coming over to the mattress and yanking down her shirt. Nobody else seemed to have noticed the two older bikers’ interest, except maybe Dagmar. She stomped around the Clubhouse, waving her arms in the smoke-heavy air, yelling something about a stuck-up bitch and what she wanted to do to her.
 

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you crazy broad?” Strangeman suggested, trying to pacify her. He looked pleased both with himself and with the cards in his hand. At least he was still in the game. To his right, Dirt Beard had passed out, a scatter of cards across his lap.
Probably should have called him Sleepy,
Liza thought. Meanwhile, two of the younger men, Boo Boo and Tank, were having a fist fight outside the back door. Something to do with way his brother had looked at him, although nobody was exactly sure what had happened. As Liza was the only one who seemed even a little anxious, it must have been a common occurrence.
 

By now she was on her fourth beer. The floor was sloping up to meet her face, and although she still had a couple of dwarves’ names left, the mental effort required to make any more matches was simply too great. Dace stopped dancing, took another slug of his beer, all of his attention finally on Liza. She looked away, almost daring him. The moment she scrambled to her feet and started dancing by herself, he came over, grabbed her by the shoulder and pushed her towards the back door. He gave her a smart slap on her rear and she laughed, too numbed with drink to feel a thing.
 

“Way to go, Ironhorse,” Tank called, applauding. “Keep her in line.”
 

She had a woozy concern Dace might follow up with more slaps, so she caught his hand to her mouth, kissed the palm, then sucked in his thumb for several seconds. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at her, mouth partway open. He slung his left arm around her, pulling her closer.

“Liza,” he said weakly. For the briefest of seconds he closed his eyes. The room went silent as the Clubhouse waited to see what Dace would do. Even Dirt Beard stopped snoring.

“You little …” he whispered, extracting his digit from her mouth with a pop and almost carrying her out. “Not here. You can’t do stuff like that in front of these guys or they’ll—”
 

“What? What’ll they do?” she asked as he deposited her none too gently onto the back of his bike.
 

“Nothing I’m not going to do to you when I get you home.”

“Marie,” she sang, the roar of the Harley ruining her performance. “Marie, Marie, hold on tight.”

That was the first night, but they went back in the weeks to come. By then it was clear whose girl Liza was. None of the men would touch her. Dace was something else, though. In the clubhouse, the proprietorship
of the bikers’ girls applied only to themselves and their men. He—their talisman, their prize—would always be fair game.

Chapter 26

Waking Up

It’s okay
, she told herself, and it was, as long they stayed mellow with beer and each other. As long as they made love. There was a faint undercurrent of unease whenever they discussed his growing involvement in the gang, but Dace wasn’t really interested in what she had to say about it. By now she had done research—lots, in fact.

She could talk about butterflies or books or whatever the hell she wanted and he’d listen, but according to Dace, this was none of her business. “A prospect—a striker? Where do you get such crap? Have you been reading Joe’s trash again? Those guys are my friends. We like to party, that’s all. C’mon. Why don’t you try it yourself? Loosen up and have some fun.”

“But Dace they have those emblems on their jackets.”

“Colours, Liza, colours,” he said, grabbing her face and kissing her. “Give it a rest,” he said when she went too far.
 

She knew she was trespassing. There was a protocol in any relationship, of what could and could not be said. Dace was an ex-con who not only needed, but demanded privacy. On their trips to Toronto, he knocked down the bold-faced drunks who verbally assaulted him in bars. She was well aware he would never have allowed anybody else to talk to him the way she did.
 

On the one trip they took with the bikers to see the Falls, they stopped at a bar in St.Catharines and it was the same thing.
So you think you’re a tough guy,
some loser had said. Biking was nobody’s business but Dace’s. As far as he was concerned, Liza was wasting time worrying about stupid stuff like one per centers and ex-cons, and he told her so.
 

When he was in a good mood, he might acknowledge her comments with implied agreement. “You’re thinking that associating with such losers is a parole violation.” Then he’d explode, demanding, “Do we have to talk about this shit again?”
 

Mostly he tried to distract her. Those times were the best. “You think too much,” he would say, his hands sliding through her hair.

“I’m not thinking anything,” Liza would murmur, trying not to force her smile.

This was her Dace,
she reminded herself, wrapping her arms around him and pulling him down towards her student bed, and she loved him. She had always loved him. Even when she was trapped in Dublin and her goddamn life was going nowhere. She loved him here in Maitland, her legs wrapped around him, her fingers digging into his back and her mouth making sounds she hadn’t known a girl could make.

His lifestyle wasn’t going to destroy them. Nothing, absolutely nothing could do that. But what if his choices destroyed
him
? What if he got hurt? Bikers were dangerous and unpredictable. They even carried knives. She didn’t think they had guns, but … This wasn’t some suburban recreational biking club, that was for sure.
 

Somewhere in the intervals between their rare disagreements, she mourned the earlier summer. By midsummer, a drought had leached the grass until it was yellow. Already the maple trees looked tired, less green. Some of the birds and the bigger, smarter monarchs had flown south. Dace still hadn’t started his bike shop. He was living off his father’s handouts, he said, except there were also mysterious phone calls and assignations. Strange young men dropped by her university residence and asked for Dace, all the while checking her out: a slim, black-eyed girl in a white T-shirt and cutoff jeans. Janice would have had the good sense to send the strangers packing, but she was busy picking tobacco.

Most of the time none of this mattered. She was captivated and she always would be, as long as she was fertile
,
by him, by sex. She was happier than she’d ever been, even if Dace seemed happiest when he was riding with his gang. She had hoped the love and sex she gave him would have been enough, but knew they weren’t. That was made painfully clear to her every time she had the misfortune of phoning his place and hearing Uncle Norm say, “Dace is out, dear.”
 

Hearing this, she’d take the small motorbike her uncle had loaned her and track Dace down at a local bar. He never minded. His eyes lit up the minute she swept, wild-haired, into the room. Pulling her towards him by one hand, he’d whisper into her ear,
My darling, my life
. He was usually with a large group of people, including women who thrust their breasts forward as they laughed up into his face. Some she recognized from school.

“Your old lady is here,” some joker would say.

Somebody else was bound to protest. “They’re cousins, for God’s sake!”

He would leave the bar, almost dragging her, the second he’d downed his draft. Because whatever else he was doing, he couldn’t seem to get enough of Liza.
 

“Poor Dace,” she’d tease him post-coitally when he was still astride her, down at the lake. “It must be
so
exhausting. Everybody wants to make love to you. All those silly little co-eds and sad-eyed biker girls
.
” She didn’t mention some of the boys would have been happy to love him too; she’d seen it in their eyes.

“And which are you? A little co-ed or a biker girl?” he’d ask, rubbing the tips of her nipples with his thumbs. She’d thought she was sated, but if he pushed it she’d go again and this time she knew it would be even better than the last.