Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(69)
“Please come to order.”
I was finally able to say those words I’d heard Papa Ewey say so many hundreds of times.
Looking back now, at first I felt like a total ass. Who was I to presume to run a sit-down at a brand new table? This table wasn’t even carved, like our Bullhead City mother chapter’s was. It was actually a long picnic table so bashed in I’d bought a plastic table cover at Target to hide the scars. Though to my credit, I had a member of Lazzat Un Nisa carving us a new one.
At least I had a gavel, which I banged. “We’ve got a lot of area to cover today.” Men murmured in agreement, as we had so many times at Papa Ewey’s table. “The big agenda item today is the foundation of Mahalia’s new nonprofit corporation, Save the Child Brides.”
“Could it have a better acronym?” asked Dust Bunny. He was nominally a Prospect, but seeing as how he’d been around outlaw clubs for so many decades, we made an exception and let him sit in at chapel. We needed a quorum. “STCB doesn’t roll off the tongue.”
“What do you suggest, dumbass?” snarled Yosemite Sam. He was thrilled to be here, in at the ground level of a new charter. He just always snarled. He’d had a rough life. “We could call it Help Our Baby Brides, just so we could say HOBB.”
Sledgehammer sucked thoughtfully on his marijuana pipe stem. Since I’d quit smoking finally, with the help of a nicotine patch, I’d decreed no smoking at all, not in chapel, and not anywhere in the High Dive, which we’d bought and taken over for our clubhouse. It was still a working bar during non-chapel hours, and we’d kept on Skippy Cavanaugh. Most people hated him, but I reasoned he could come in handy with his Cornucopia connections. We couldn’t pretend Cornucopia didn’t still exist. We were operating in their backyard. And I had a feeling we’d be dealing with them again on many levels, for better or worse. “SOBB. Save Our Baby Brides.”
“Hey, that’s not bad, actually,” I said. All six of us nodded. I wondered if I should bang the gavel. I looked to Slushy McGill for advice. A former book cooker for a major Sonoran cartel, Slushy had been the Bare Bones’ lawyer for awhile now, guiding them to their current heights of financial viability. Since he was close to the founder of The Bent Zealots, he worked for them, too. Slushy knew about the rape of Zealot Ormond Tangier by Tim Breakiron. He’d smoothed the way for me when it came time for Papa Ewey to find out about Breakiron’s demise.
Sax had loaned Slushy to us for a couple of weeks as he’d set up our new bylaws. Slushy now gave me the minutest nod possible, so no one would see I wasn’t completely in charge and knowledgeable about all aspects of being club Prez.
I banged the gavel. “Decided. Mahalia’s new corporation is Save Our Baby Brides.”
“I’ll start with the letterhead,” said Slushy brightly. “I can see it all now. A girl in a wedding dress behind prison bars.”
“Well,” I said, “we might not want to get so graphic about it. We’ll be looking for donors, for benefactors. Don’t want to scare them off.”
“Why not?” said Slushy. “We’re calling a spade a spade here. People need to be grabbed by the balls, have their faces dunked in it.”
If Slushy put it that way, it did make sense. “Well, show me some rough drafts first. Dust Bunny, write all that down.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Dust Bunny still wasn’t used to being both Secretary and Treasurer for our new chapter. No one else wanted to be either. I knew Yosemite Sam had questionable reading skills, if any, so I’d made him Veep. Many was the time I’d seen him scanning the photos of a newspaper, back when we’d used them as blankets to sleep under in Salt Lake. And Sledgehammer, although a seasoned Marines combat vet like myself, well, I’d seen him reading a milk carton once, so I’d made him Sergeant-at-Arms. Dust Bunny, with his Stanford geology degree, was a much better fit for the other two positions. He was already training Dingo to take over the secretarial part of the job once Dingo became fully patched. “The big agenda item is using club funds to purchase the house on Little Wing Street. Everyone knows most of it’s your own money, Gideon, so I don’t foresee any big roadblock.”
I nodded. “Everyone in favor of the new safe house for Save Our Baby Brides.”
Everyone nodded and said aye, of course, except for Slushy, who wasn’t technically a member. Slushy brought up a new agenda item now.
“It’s these Pleasure of Women guys. Frankly, they seem like a bunch of airheaded whiners to me. Present company excepted.”
The white-haired silver fox, Maximus, nodded. “No offense taken. They’re good men, Slushy. What’s your beef?”
“Well, on several occasions they’ve approached me complaining that we’ve taken over ‘their’ clubhouse. Now, in the old days of the Bare Bones, this whining would’ve been taken care of at the end of a tire iron. I understand that things are more touchy-feely these days. But we still can’t let them run around sobbing into their beers. We need to show them there’s a new kid in town.”
Yosemite Sam harrumphed. “A new club in town, more like.”
Slushy explained patiently. “It’s a saying, Yosemite. Means there’s a whole new game. A whole new ball of wax.”
“A whole new ballgame,” said Sledge.