Page 9 of Sprog
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'snothing 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.
Thirty seconds. Then I put it away and look at the road and the formation ahead of me. I breathe in the sound of nine engines and I ride.
The Harte Countyclubhouse is a converted farm building twenty minutes off the main highway, down a road that doesn't appear on any map I've ever seen. Their Prez is a man called Darnell who is approximately the size of a refrigerator and who greets Razor with a handshake that turns into a briefshoulder-grip that tells me these two men have history going back further than any formal arrangement.
The brothers spread out the way they do when they arrive somewhere that isn't hostile but isn't home either. They’re alert without looking alert, comfortable without being careless. I've noticed this is a skill the patched members have that I don't have yet, this particular way of occupying a space that reads as relaxed and is actually anything but. I make a note to myself to watch it and learn it.
Seb appears at my shoulder.
"You're doing the hovering thing," he says quietly.
"What hovering thing?"
"The thing where you stand slightly behind everyone else and try to look like you belong without committing to actually doing anything. It makes you look like you're waiting for permission." He nods toward where the Harte County brothers are gathered near the far wall. "We're not guests. We're Black Saints on a courtesy call. Stand like that."
I adjust. I put my feet a little wider and my shoulders a little back and I stop looking for somewhere to be and just am somewhere. Seb glances over and gives a small nod that means better, and then wanders off to find something to lean against.
Twenty minutes into the visit, one of the Harte County brothers asks which of the Black Saints wants a run to the diner down the road to pick up food for everyone. There's a beat where nobody moves, and then Cash looks at me with his eyebrows raised, just slightly, and I understand.
"I'll go," I say.
"Good man." Knuckles doesn't look at me when he says it. He's already turned back to whatever conversation he was in. But he said it, and Knuckles doesn't hand out those two words to people who haven't earned them, even in small ways, and the warmth of it goes somewhere it probably shouldn't, somewhere embarrassingly close to pride.
I take the order from eight Black Saints and four Harte County brothers, which is twelve separate opinions about what constitutes a decent sandwich. A few minutes later, I ride down to the diner, and I get it all right on the first try without having written any of it down.
When I get back, Pops spots the bag in my hand and crosses the room as he holds out a twenty-dollar bill. "For the tip," he says. "You always tip on a run."
I take the twenty and I file that information away alongside everything else I'm filing away. Every instruction, every observation, every unspoken rule that I'm picking up by watching people who've been doing this for years. There's no manual for being a prospect. There's just attention, and either you pay it or you don't.
I'm paying it.
On the ride back the formation is looser, the business done, the mood easy. Cash and Ramsey drop back and ride either side of me for a few miles. They say nothing before they go back to their positions, which I realize afterward was their version of a welcome. Shadow catches my eye in his mirror once and gives a nod that could mean anything or nothing. Pops rides past me on the outside when we come off the highway and gives me a look that on a different face would be a smile but on Pops' face just means he noticed you did something right.
I watch Cash and Ramsey slot back into formation ahead of me and I think about what Seb said the first week. He’d told me that those two operate like one brain in two bodies, that they've been riding together so long they don't need signals or words. It shows. When Cash leans into a curve Ramsey is already leaning. When Ramsey eases off the throttle Cash has already read the reason for it in the road ahead. Watching them ride is like watching something that's been refined past the point where you can see the effort anymore.
That's what years inside this club looks like from the back of the formation. Not the patches or the reputation or anything you'd see in a photograph. Just two men on bikes who know each other well enough to share a mind on the road.
That's what I'm working toward. That's the thing that can't be rushed or faked or shortcut. You just have to show up, every day, until you're part of it.
Seb pulls level. "First run," he says.
