RIDE (A Stone Kings Motorcycle Club Romance) (34 page)

“
L
et’s ride
!”

Grey Stone’s call to the rest of the Stone Kings was met with loud hollers and whoops of affirmation. The brothers and I all straddled our bikes and started our engines. Grey, as president, moved to the front of the line, our road captain, Repo, beside him in the formation. Behind Grey was Trigger, the VP, and next to him the secretary, Winger. The rest of the officers fell in behind, two by two, then the other patched members, until it came to me. As Sergeant at Arms, I rode in the last row and to the right of the regular membership. We didn’t have any new prospects at the moment, which meant that I was at the back of the formation.

It was a beautiful, cloudless Saturday morning. A few of the guys, myself included, were nursing hangovers from the night before, and I kept my dark glasses on against the glare of the sun. It was a perfect day for a ride, and if it had been one of many other Saturdays in late April, some or all of us would have been heading out to enjoy it the best way we knew how: with the wind in our hair and the engine rumbling beneath us.

But this was no ordinary Saturday. And this was no ordinary ride.

The Stone Kings were headed to Grand Junction, to form an honor guard for an Air Force member who had been killed in Afghanistan, and whose funeral was scheduled to be picketed by the Southbend Baptist Church.

Yeah, you’ve probably heard about the “church” I’m talking about. The one whose human excrement members hold up the “God hates fags” signs. The ones who show up at funerals and all sorts of other events with the goal of spreading their cancer far and wide. They say that our men and women in uniform dying is God’s punishment to America for being a nation of sin and filth. Or some shit like that. “Divine retribution,” they call it.

Picketing a goddamn service member’s funeral.

Fuck that.

The Stone Kings MC, like a few other motorcycle clubs did from time to time around the country, was about to offer our services to protect the mourners and family from harassment from these pieces of shit. It was our job to make sure they wouldn’t have to hear or see the disgusting things being said about their loved one. We were doing this at the request of one of the residents of Grand Junction, a neighbor of the deceased’s family, who had been a friend of our club president’s father growing up. The man had contacted Grey a couple of days ago out of the blue and asked whether the club could help out.

Grey had been only too happy to oblige.

What few details I knew of the dead serviceman’s life had been told to us by Grey following his conversation with his dad’s old friend. His name was Evan Kramer. He had been a young man, not even twenty-six yet, when he died. He had grown up the oldest of three children just outside of Grand Junction, in a small town that didn’t amount to much, barely meriting a dot on the map. Grey’s contact said Evan had dreamed all his life of being in the military. At seventeen, he got accepted into the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, which was quite a feat. Free tuition to the Academy for all admitted students meant that a boy like him from a poor background had a chance to succeed that not many of his income level could afford. He had graduated with distinction from the Academy, and went on to serve as a commissioned officer for the Air Force. He did active duty in Afghanistan, and served two tours of duty before being killed in an indirect fire attack on Bagram Airfield. He was, by all accounts, a dedicated airman and an American hero.

It just so happened, he was also gay.

It was likely this last detail that had attracted the attention of Southbend Baptist.

And we were not about to let them fuck up this day for Evan Kramer’s family.

As we rode the 120 or so odd miles from Lupine to Grand Junction, my idle mind drifted to the question of what makes some people evoke God’s name as justification of their hatefulness and need to control others. It was a subject I’d thought about a lot over the years, partly as a result of personal experience. We all had dark sides of us, I knew. Hell, I’d be the first to admit that, living the life that I did. But I didn’t need to use a leather-bound book to claim moral authority to do whatever the hell I damn well pleased. I wasn’t that much of a fucking hypocrite.

In some ways, the very reason I had ended up the Sergeant at Arms in the Stone Kings MC was the direct result of the same kind of cancerous villainy we were on our way to protect the Kramer family from.

My name is Levi. My full name is Leviticus Josiah Wolff.

I grew up in a religious fundamentalist cult called the Waiting For Zion Ranch.

WFZ is a community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It’s a polygamous sect that broke off from the main FLDS Church and left Utah in order to settle across the border in Arizona. They did this to get away from scrutiny by the Feds, who were starting to crack down on polygamous practices in Utah.

I was born and raised in the WFZ community. I spent my entire life in that shithole, until I was seventeen and finally ran away, never to look back.

If you know much about the Bible, you know that Leviticus is the book about don’ts. It was written to tell the Israelites how God wanted them to act. This is the book my parents named me for.

I’m sure the Southbend Baptist Church probably loved the hell out of Leviticus. They seemed like pretty hard-core Old Testament types. Leviticus has got all sorts of shit in it about sexual immorality, idolatry, and the like. The thing is, it also has stuff about not wearing clothing made of two kinds of material, and not eating shellfish or pork. I’m pretty sure at least a few Southbend members are gonna burn in hell if Leviticus is God’s last word on living a holy life, ‘cause I see a hell of a lot of stretchy polyester blends in that crowd.

Then there’s my favorite Leviticus verse. Leviticus Chapter 19, Verse 28. I like it so much that I have a tattoo on my right shoulder that says, “Lev 19:28”. It was the first one I ever got.

What’s Leviticus 19:28, you ask?

“You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead nor tattoo any marks upon you: I am the LORD.”

King James Version.

My entire body, and all the ink on it, is one giant “fuck you” to all that hateful bullshit and everyone who uses the Old Testament as an excuse to hurt and judge other people.

If there is a God out there, I can’t believe He would waste His time trying to police whether we ate shrimp, or whether someone has ink. And any God worth believing in would never condone what the Southbend Baptist Church does in His name. A God who would require that of His followers is no God I could ever believe in.

As I rode with my brothers to protect the family of a man who had died for our country, I thought about the so-called “family” I had left behind at the WFZ Ranch all those years ago. To my actual family and everyone else I had grown up around, I was good as dead, I knew. I was shunned, and my name would never be mentioned again by my parents or my siblings. For them, it was as though I had never existed.

And no one who knew me now as Levi Wolff, Sergeant at Arms of the Stone Kings MC knew my background, where I came from or what I left behind. And that’s the way I liked it. No past, no future. Only the present. No one’s laws but my own to uphold. And the laws of my club.

W
e arrived
in Grand Junction about two hours before the funeral was supposed to start, to make sure we got there before the Southbend people did. St. Mark’s Catholic Church was on the north side of town, a small church in a style I didn’t know the name for but that made me think of Mexico, like a lot of architecture in the area. Another chapter of the Stone Kings club, from Las Cruces, was there to meet us, too. Grey greeted the chapter president, whose name was Slayer, and the two of them took off to meet with their contact. A few minutes later, they came back, and Grey clapped a hand on Slayer’s shoulder before they separated to go over the plan with their prospective clubs.

Grey came over to the parking lot across the street from the church where we had parked our bikes. “Slayer’s guys are going to set up a perimeter around the church in case any stray assholes decide to try to get too close or go inside,” he said, nodding back toward the church. “We’re gonna push back the protesters, make a wall of ourselves to make sure they don’t get close enough for the mourners to hear or see them. Rev our engines to drown out what they say, so no one has to listen to their bullshit. After the funeral, we’ll ride behind the procession to the cemetery and mount a guard there.”

I nodded and turned to Trig and Repo. “Sounds good. Let’s not let these demented fucks soil this service member’s final goodbye.”

We set up the perimeter and the blockade. Not long after cars began to arrive filled with downcast people in dark, somber clothing, a group of six middle-aged men with signs approached and began to walk toward the church. When they were about twenty feet away from us, Trigger yelled out, “That’s close enough. Stay right where you are.”

One of the men, who held a sign that said, “Pray for more dead soldiers,” made a move as though he intended to come closer, but one step forward by Trigger stopped him. “I said, that’s as far as you’re going,” Trigger said calmly, but there was an unmistakable warning in his voice that conveyed that he expected to be obeyed.

“Or what?” the man sneered. “How you gonna stop us? You ain’t the cops.”

I had never wanted to hit a man so badly before, and I had hit plenty of people. I could imagine the satisfying crunch it would make when his teeth broke under my fist. Barely resisting the impulse, I walked forward until I was mere inches from the man. I had at least six inches on him, and though he probably weighed in at ten to twenty more pounds than I did, most of his weight was in the considerable paunch hanging over his belt. I saw his eyes widen as they went to the tattoos that went up and down my arms.

I leaned in just enough so that I towered over him slightly.

“Most of us have been to prison at one point or another,” I said through clenched teeth. “In the majority of cases, it was for assault. On the off chance that the cops don’t send us all fruit baskets for beating the life out of you bunch of miserable shits, I think I’m speaking for all my brothers when I say we would be more than happy to take the risk of getting arrested for stopping you from going any closer.”

The fat sign-holder blanched. He threw a nervous glance at his buddies and stepped back far enough to try and gain back a little of his dignity. “I sure as hell ain’t gonna waste my time on a bunch of biker thugs,” he spat out.

I could feel my right hand curl into a fist, but stayed where I was. As much as I wanted to escalate this, our duty was to the dead serviceman and his family right now, and that meant keeping the peace if at all possible.

The sign-bearers moved into a shitty little cluster and talked among themselves, and a few more people began to arrive with signs of their own, until there were about twenty people there to picket, including one child, a little boy of no more than eight years old. He held a sign that said, “God bless 9/11.” I felt my gorge rise in disgust that anyone could teach such hate to such a small child. The boy looked like he hardly knew what was going on. I couldn’t help but think of myself at that age, and how confusing I must have found the world and what those around me said about how it worked.

The picketers tried their best to disrupt things, but there were a hell of a lot more of us than there were of them, and they seemed pretty intimidated by our considerable presence. They tried to start chants from time to time, and one of them even had a bullhorn, but every time they’d start making noise, a few of the brothers would rev their engines so loud it was impossible to hear anything they were saying. After a while the bullhorn guy, a scrawny meth-head looking guy with wild eyes and shitty teeth, was the only one shouting anymore, and so Repo just kept his engine revved up until the guy got hoarse and eventually gave up trying to yell.

After the funeral was over, we got back in formation and followed the funeral procession out to the cemetery. Someone had figured out to bring a bunch of American flags, and each of us fixed them to the backs of our bikes to fly behind us as we rode to the grave site. Just in case, we posted men at all the entrances to the cemetery and mounted a perimeter around the graveside service, but I guessed the Southbend Baptist fucks had gotten tired of being drowned out, because they didn’t show up.

I watched from a distance as a rank of Air Force servicemen marched to the back of the hearse to serve as pallbearers for the young man they were about to bury. I watched as they carried him to his grave site, and as they folded the flag that covered the casket and presented it to a woman who had to be Evan Kramer’s mother. I listened as the priest murmured some words and prayers of comfort to the bereaved. And finally, I watched as the casket was lowered into the ground, with the friends and family watching in silence.

A few people stepped forward and placed flowers either next to the site, or tossed a single rose in on top of the casket. A man whom I figured to be Evan’s father took his mother by the elbow and led her away as she sobbed quietly. A teenage boy and a slightly younger girl trailed behind them, looking shell-shocked. I took a deep breath and let it out, a wave of sadness washing over me. A young life was gone, leaving pain and emptiness in its wake.

As people made their way from the graveside, Evan’s parents walked toward us, coming to a stop in front of Trigger and me. The woman lifted the veil she was wearing to look at us. She was pretty, despite her pallor and the expression of pain etched in her features. “Thank you,” she whispered, her lip trembling. “Thank you.”

“Ma’am,” Trigger nodded. “Sir. It was an honor.”

They turned away, then, and we watched the friends and family of Evan Kramer slowly walk back to their cars. They were mostly silent, except for an occasional low remark from one to another. From here, they would probably be going back to the church basement, to push around food on their plates that members of their congregation had prepared for them. Or maybe they’d gather at the Kramers’ house, where well-wishers would bring them casseroles and take care of cleaning up afterwards.