Title: Father's Son
Rating: K+ (Refrences to Jax's life, club life and the lot. I don't even think I swear though)
Summary: "I remember almost nothing of how he looked but I know he smelled like wind." Jax's son finds his way home.
I remember my father by the way he smelled. Leather. I have a vague memory of my cheek pressed into his leather kutte. Of how his skin and clothing always smelled like it. I found a pair of black leather gloves in a box my mother kept in the garage. She would kill me if she knew I took them. As far as she knew, neither my brother or I knew about those boxes. It was the things she couldn't bear to part with. He had been buried in the clothes he died in, vest included. His brothers took care of that. As far as I know, my mother didn't take my brother and I to his funeral.
I remember him in oil, of grease and gasoline and the way the air smells after a bike goes by. Afterwards I cried every time a bike went by but by the time I was six it was a long out grown habit. As a child I would beg to go along with my uncle Nero when he took his vehicles in for a tune up or when my mom took the oil to get changed. I just wanted to be close to him. To know and understand him the way they seemed to.
I remember almost nothing of how he looked but I know he smelled like wind. My brother and I agree about that, though neither of us is quite sure what exactly the wind smells like. We take comfort in that smell. We breath more freely when the wind is beating against our cheeks. As we grew we always begged to drive with the windows down. My mother watched us through the rearview mirror as we hung our heads out like dogs.
Sometimes I remember that he smelled like stinging hot smoke. Of gun powder and blood. One night, while my brother slept in his bed next to me, I snuck down the stairs eager to feel more grown-up and to hear what my mother and Nero were talking about. I don't remember why he had come over for dinner that night or why he stayed so much later than normal but as I hid in the hallway and peeked into the kitchen, my mother was crying at the table. She talked about how my father would come into my room without even taking off his shoes. How he always watched me sleeping, sometimes with tears in his eyes, and kissed me before locking himself in the bathroom to clean up.
My mother threw out blood stained white t-shirts and jeans with splatter across them. She cried to my uncle and told him how he'd kiss her cheek, thank he for looking after my brother and me, then go to bed. She learned not to ask for an explanation.
As long as I've been old enough to remember, I've been able to recite my father's rap sheet. Murder, assault, grand theft, smuggling. Once while doing a school assignment, I decided to see what I could find about him. There was a list as long as my arm when I searched up his name. I was eleven and there were far more deaths associated with my father than years I had been on this planet. His death was marked by a three hour long police chase ending in a bloody smear on the highway after he drove head first into a transport. The report said that he had probably known that he was going to kill himself when he started to drive away.
He murdered my grandmother. She had been running from him and he caught up with her outside my great-grandfather's house. He shot her from behind in the garden after killing her friend, a retired police officer.
My father was not a good man. His footprints left a trail soaked in blood and pain and suffering. He smoked and drank and probably did drugs. He had sex with many women. He cheated on my mother while out on bike runs. He stuck close to his brothers and was killing to murder for them. He was willing to kill for his family.
That is what I remember most strongly.
I've long ago forgotten what his face really looked like. I can not remember his eyes save for the mugshots posted online and a wrinkled photo my brother and I got when we went on a roadtrip back to our hometown. I was nineteen and my brother and I wanted to see my father's brothers. We went first to our mother's grave. The mother that had loved us as babies but carried only one of us in her womb. A mother that our mother agreed with in only the sense that we did not need to be raised around the blood and violence. The mother who had died trying to get us out of that life.
We betrayed both our mothers by finding the club house. By standing at the gate of TM Motors and telling the tattooed man who were were, we broke both their hearts. The gang still owned the shop. They had bought it up and eventually, after five years, torn down and rebuilt the burned out clubhouse. Though my brother and I were both underage those men had the girls bring us beers and sat us down to talk about our father.
They spoke with the love we still felt for him and watching my brother's eyes shining as he walked around and ran his hand along mug shots and the carved and black stained table, I felt suddenly as if we were home. The man they called Chibs was scarred and his voice was rough. He had a tank of oxygen and his hands curled as if he held his handle bars even when there wasn't a bike in sight. He spoke of my father fondly and called him brother. The young men in the club knew his name and spoke in his memory. They talked of the old days. How he had ridden with Tig who'd left the club and gone Nomad. How Opie and my father were the best of friends. How my father had literally given his life for the club. They spoke of Mr. Mayhem and how my father was to be given to him before he ran.
They said he wanted to meet Mr. Mayhem on his own terms and wouldn't let his brothers put that blood on their hands.
As they say this, the old man Chibs scratches at his eyes.
A bald man, stubble white on his chin and arms covered in tattoos shows my brother the bullet scar on his arm and slaps his back as he gives him another beer. He wears a smile on his forearm beneath the scar for my father. He had become president.
For dinner the families come. A man called Rat with his three little ones and a wife so pregnant she can barely stand. He is vice to the man Happy.
We are both drunk when they show us to the dorms. We both have our own rooms but we end up sleeping in the same double bed. For the first time since my childhood, I sleep under a reaper. The blanket is soft on my skin, my naked arm presses against my brother. In our intoxicated state we hug each other as our eyes burn. We fall asleep, both bare chested and down to our boxers.
In the morning a woman with blonde hair smiles at my brother and I. Her name is Ellie and she wears a crow on her bare neck and the club initials on her wrist. There is a line of dates on her shoulders. Her boyfriend is called Monkey. Her brother arrives later, also wearing a patch. He goes by Winner.
She looks like the man hugging my father in the photo Chibs has given me. He brother sports a long scraggly beard.
We spend a week before leaving. Our spring break over, we return home before our mother worries.
My brother stops cutting his hair. He wears it pushed back with grease. Sometimes lose and around his shoulders. He starts with a dirt bike. Spends a second week in California. Makes my mother cry. Even as I watch her fall apart, I know that I am not far behind him.
My first bike sits heavy between my legs. My hair brushes my ears, starting to grow out. I make my mother cry.
By the time I am twenty, I want to prospect. I celebrate my first legal drink with two crow eaters. My uncle Tig comes to town and brings his woman with him. She is beautiful and I understand why he followed her to the edge of the world, leaving his brothers behind. I understand why he comes home. We are family here.
The older men call my brother Junior. He wears rings my uncles kept for him. With his hair long he looks like like the man we only remember from photos. He learns to take apart engines and to manage the books for our aunt's porn buisness.
They call me Doc. One night my brother and I trades punches with a few yellow. He took a bottle to his side and I patched him up at the clubhouse using a needle and thread brought to us by a crow eater. My brother got the girl. I went to college to get paramedic training. I said it was to follow in my mother's footsteps but I knew I would never use these skills legally. I had to hand up my kutte at that point. Even though we started riding at almost the same time, my brother patched in long before me.
When I finally picked up the vest again, I knew I was making the right choice. I spent the night sleeping next to the highway, a name and date spray painted in faded red on the rocks. There is another name smaller below it. Someone has left candles.
My father was not a good man but he was not evil.
My family is stretched far and wide. We have chapters and stories to tell. My brother and I have broken my mother's heart. We have done exactly what both our mothers wanted to keep us from. While she was carrying me, my mother wrote me a journal. She talked of everything that happened since she had met my father. She wanted me to know who he was. She left nothing out and yet, the picture she painted was not one of a mad man. My father was lost. My father was broken. My father was my father and I am my father's son.
When Abel held my rockers out to me I laughed. Then I cried. I held my brothers in my arms. Felt the sun hot leather on my skin as the men around me hugged me. I have not spoken to Wendy in months. She claims that I would have destroyed my father. That he never wanted us to ride. That we should hate him. Uncle Nero is quieter about his displeasure but his only response is that he didn't think it would take this long.
"You're both so much like him. Abel his wild streak and you have his quiet way of thinking things out."
Chibs finds me up on the clubhouse roof, a cold beer next to me as I write.
"Ya ready fer this, boy?"
I nod, pen still touching the notebook.
"Useta fin' yer da up here. Scratchin' away at the page same way." He shifts, finger reaching out to brush the words I've written so far. "Son?" He whispers, voice catching on old memories. "Yer havin' a boy?"
I nod again. "Kenzie found out this afternoon. I'll have a son in the new year."
"Christ." The old man sinks into sitting on one of the raised crates that Abel and I have dragged up here. There's a mattress in the corner. This dip in the roof is flat. Though he won't admit it, I think Chibs had the little deck like space built for when my brother and I came home. "New little Teller prince."
I nod and swallow. My father could not live and be a father to me. I worry that I will meet the same fate. That the family I have chosen will kill the family I was given. There is fresh ink on my arm.
"This above all: To thine own self be true."
It took me a long time to get here but my brother and I, we are our father's sons.