Buck: A Motorcycle Club Romance

I painted flames on his bike. My father wants him dead.

I’m a waitress at a cantina in Palomas, three blocks from the border, with a sketchbook under the counter and my dead mother’s journal in my apron pocket. I read a page a day. I’m up to 1997. She’s twenty-two, waiting tables at this same cantina, and in love with a man she only calls R.

The big quiet biker comes in on Tuesdays. Sits in my section. Tips like he’s paying off a debt. He’s the biggest man I’ve ever seen and he talks like every word costs him, and when he finally asks if I’d paint his tank, it takes him two tries to get the sentence out.

I wait. He notices that I wait.

His name is Buck. He’s a Kingsnake. He rides a sixty-five-year-old Harley across the border so I can paint it, and sits on an upside-down bucket in the dirt all day while I work, and nobody on that street comes near me. He doesn’t say much. He doesn’t have to. He stands close enough that I can feel the heat off him, and when I get paint on my jaw he wipes it off with his thumb and leaves his hand there a second too long, and I forget what color I was mixing.

Then the men in the truck at the end of the block start watching me back. Buck doesn’t tell me I’m safe. He tells me to ride in the middle of his pack, where everybody can see me.

Then I get to the November pages. Mom finally writes the name. Not R. Cleaver.

President of the Buzzards. The man the Kingsnakes have been at war with for ten years.

I should burn the journal. Instead I show Buck the page, and he reads it twice, and he says my name, all of it, no stutter, and tells me it changes nothing.

It changes everything. My father doesn’t even know I exist. The war’s coming to Perdition either way, and I’m standing in the middle of it with a man who’d take a bullet before he’d let me get close to one.

I thought I was reading my mother’s story.

Turns out I’m living it.