I hear the men around me say, ‘to Chief!” loudly. Their voices echo around the edges of the room, but I can’t bring myself to raise the bottle in my hand. It’s Ryan’s fault my best friend is lying in a goddamn box, well overdue for his final burial. The kid’s been making a mess of shit since he was small. He’s selfish and narcissistic and never thinks of how his actions affect anyone else. Not that he’d give a shit even if he did.
The men around me quiet down, and I find myself continuing to focus on those fucking drops. Finally, I drag my eyes up Ryan’s cut and past his ROAD CAPTAIN patch, up his throat and to the scowl on his face. The scowl that never really leaves falls for a moment when he catches my eye. All emotion disappears from his face, his eyes don’t leave mine, and he gives me a quick nod, like we’re tight or some shit. We’re not.
“Clean up your mess,” I say. He doesn’t budge, but he does give the drops a moment’s worth of attention before his brows furrow and he stares at me like I’ve got two heads or something. “Your mother cleaned this table. Don’t be a prick. Clean up your fucking mess.”
From across the table, Duke, our secretary, says in disbelief, “Since when do we give a shit about making a mess?”
“Seriously,” Trigger says. His annoyance is profound. Nothing I say is going to make him understand or give a shit. The only thing I have is the potential of pissing him off to get him to fight me. The urge to fight, to do something, runs through my bones and thuds loud and hard in my veins.
“Why don’t I have that bitch of yours lick it up?” I say, knowing damn well that talking about Alex is going to piss him off. I barely have the words out of my mouth by the time he’s on his feet. His glass falls to the floor beside him, and his chest heaves in agitation. Slowly, I rise to my feet and meet his stance. The men around us—our brothers—push their chairs back and stand. Nobody says a word when I deliver the first blow, nor the second. When Trigger, who’s a good decade my junior, lands a blow to my gut, it knocks the wind out of me. Still, nobody interferes. Eventually he works out his aggression and stops fighting. Laying into him isn’t appealing once he stops fighting back, and I give up. And, unfortunately, the room now looks ten times worse than it did before.
This is how we work through our shit. We fight it out and when we’re done, we go back to dealing with whatever we were before someone had the sudden urge to lay it down. But this time, it’s not going to fix a fucking thing. The pain helps slightly. Blow by blow, it numbs out all of the goddamn feelings I’ve been having lately. I haven’t had this many mixed emotions since the day my daughter was born. But it’s been a damn long time since then, and I’m too old to feel shit this strongly. Despite having spent years numbing shit out, I’m feeling this—Chief’s death—in a way I hate to admit. It makes me feel like the fucking pussy I’ve spent my entire life making sure I’m not.
I met Chief even before I hooked up with Layla, my estranged wife, and long before the best fucking thing in the world came along—my daughter, Cheyenne.
And now he’s gone.
And it’s because Trigger just had to get his dick wet.
“Our brother is dead, but his spirit will live on.” Wyatt reaches to the center of the table and grabs the good scotch that we only break out when shit gets this bad. Our previous president, Jim’s father, Rage, used to say that when your spirits are high, cheap booze is all you need, but when everything’s gone to shit, good liquor is the only thing you’ve got. Rounding up the ten empty glasses, Wyatt breaks open the scotch and pours each glass full, then he slides them down the table, sloshing all the way. He meets my eyes, daring me to say a word about the mess he’s making.
The ten of us raise our glasses in the air and shout, “to Chief,” at once, then we toss the liquor back.
The scotch burns as it slides down my throat. When I set the glass down, black fabric with red and white stitching stares up at me, taunting me, from the table before me. Chief’s memory patch. The patch we wear in honor of a fallen brother. The patch I lift from the table and hold between my calloused fingers. It can’t be more than a few ounces, but it feels like lead in my hands—the ever-lasting reminder of this loss.
Fish stands from his seat and strides across the room. He returns with a wooden chest that he sets in the middle of the table. My brothers and I stand and carefully dig into the chest to retrieve needles and black thread. Then we sit down and proceed to sew our patches onto the back of our cuts, above the seam, tucked into the left side.
When we’re done, we each stand and return our supplies, then walk out into the main room, which is filled with family.