Phoenix

by Trent Jordan

  About twenty minutes later, Cole came over. Cole was my ideal kind of customer—non-threatening, willing to drink, friendly, and rarely in a bad mood. He’d gotten a little edgier and sterner over the last couple of months, but compared to the rest of his biker friends, he was like the cheerful, bouncy schoolkid.

  “Thanks for taking care of us today,” he said as he took a seat, his beer still half-full.

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s a pleasant surprise to see you down here. I honestly thought I wouldn’t serve but a random biker here and there when I came down to Ashton.”

  “Well, I certainly never thought I’d get to see you again after what happened at Brewskis,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, don’t we? What’s new besides escaping Brewskis?”

  I smiled and shook my head. No one asked me these questions. No one, it seemed, except Cole Carter.

  And part of the reason no one asked these types of questions was that the answer was the same as it was for most people who lived in this part of California—nothing much. People didn’t live in Springsville or Ashton just for the thrill of it or because they wanted to experience a wild nightlife. They moved there—or, perhaps better said for a significant portion of the population, they stayed there—because they didn’t have any prospects outside of it.

  Maybe that was why I wanted to move somewhere new, somewhere random. Because I just wanted a new place. Because I just wanted to be able to answer Cole’s question with a fun answer and have it have actual value.

  “Nothing, really,” I said. “What about you? It seems like you’ve made a lot of new friends here.”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess,” Cole said with a casual laugh. “I’m just trying to build up this club to be like how my father ran the Black Reapers.”

  “I can see that. I always liked your father when he came in.”

  Roger Carter had been an unmistakable presence at Brewskis. It was no surprise that it was like combining the best of Cole and Lane. It was something of a surprise that he really didn’t have many flaws, either. He wasn’t rude, and he wasn’t aloof, although part of that may have just been remembering him favorably and comparing him against his sons and the Fallen Saints; compared to the general population, his personality may not have stood out as well.

  “Yeah,” Cole said, looking like he was getting lost in thought. “In a way, though, I’m kind of glad he’s gone now. I mean, not glad, but like, we’re here because of the funeral for Phoenix’s father. So, it’s like… like the passing of the older generation brings the current one closer together.”

  “I see,” I said. “Which one is Phoenix, sorry?”

  “Phoenix is that guy... right there,” Cole said, pointing to... Pink Raven?

  “I thought he had a different name,” I said casually.

  “Oh, no, he had an old club name when he was with the Black Reapers, but now he’s a Gray Reaper.”

  Black Reapers, Gray Reapers. Are the White Reapers coming next? Maybe the Red Reapers?

  Long as it’s not a Fallen Saint Reaper.

  But I just nodded like I knew exactly what was going on. Engaged but distant; curious but detached. That was the life of a bartender, and I just stayed above the drama.

  I had an idea of what was going on by this point. Maybe Roger Carter had split the club into two and given one chapter to Cole and one to Lane. Maybe the brothers had split the club apart, whether by mutual decision or by violent force. Maybe Cole just took some members of the Black Reapers for himself?

  I had to admit, my curiosity went far beyond what I showed, not the least because Pink Raven, or rather, Phoenix, had captured my curiosity and empathy. But unless something truly ridiculous happened, like me hooking up with Phoenix or one of the other club members, I’d have to content myself with just making up the details of the story in my head.

  And of all the truly ridiculous things that could happen, the idea of me, a bartender, hooking up with one of my male customers was pretty high on the list of the unlikely.

  “Anyway, I’ll let you get back to work,” Cole said, raising his Blue Moon to me. “I appreciate you taking care of us today.”

  He pushed a twenty-dollar bill forward before turning on his heel and walking back to the rest of the club. And that was why I liked Cole and why I didn’t like Cole—he was so nice and so sweet, but I wasn’t really sure that he was as tough or daunting as a guy like Phoenix.

  But that didn’t mean I was going to pass up a twenty-dollar tip.

  The hours passed, and despite the reputation of MCs coming in, getting drunk, destroying everything in sight, and then hightailing it out of town, the Gray Reapers remained in control. They definitely drank their worth, but I never worried about one of my pool sticks shattering or a table breaking in half or any other nonsense like that. I worried about one of them getting into a drunken wreck on the way home, but in a town like Ashton, the sheriff probably had a deal of some sort set up with them.

  Such a setup wouldn’t have surprised me. Cole may have been a little too nice, but applied properly, that charm could get a lot of things done in his favor. And realistically, the streets were hardly ever full enough to have swerving drivers present serious risks.

  The only person who still seemed sullen and withdrawn was Phoenix. It wasn’t like he was Eeyore, always moping and low-energy, but whenever my eyes caught him, he seemed to be gazing to the ceiling, to the ground, or with a thousand-yard stare, not really present. Who could blame him?

  But he didn’t approach me again for the time that many of the Gray Reapers were there, even when his drink ran low, leaving me scant on details. He’d simply have one of the other club members fetch him a drink. Maybe he just didn’t want to engage in heavy dialogue.

  I understood. When I was at Brewskis, it was how all but a handful of my customers preferred to operate. Get a drink, sit in silence, watch a game on TV, and leave after paying an hour or two later.

  As the crowd thinned and only a few bikers remained, though, I noticed his eyes drifting in my direction, even when he had an unfinished bottle in front of him. I smiled the first time he looked my way, but when he quickly turned away, like a middle schooler caught in the act, I stopped reacting to him looking at me.

  Finally, when Cole left and it was just him and two other guys, he excused himself and approached the bar.

  “Hey, Jess,” he said, his voice sounding weary and heavy.

  “Hey, Pink... I mean, Phoenix, sorry, sorry.”

  I felt mortified. Calling him by a name he probably hoped to leave behind forever was about as bad a sin as I could commit to a biker. But, fortunately, Phoenix just let out a stilted laugh and waved his hand.

  “You’re fine,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect someone outside of the club to get it.”

  I just nodded, taking a look at his drink. It was still three-quarters full. He hadn’t come to get a drink for himself. I looked over his shoulder at the other two club members. They were standing up and getting ready to leave. He’s just looking to talk. Doesn’t mean anything more.

  “You changed your hair color.”

  I looked back at Phoenix in surprise. Yes, my hair was a lot more “normal” than when I had worked at Brewskis, but I never, ever, ever, ever would have guessed that one of the bikers would have noticed it, much less a guy that wasn’t a regular patron of the bar.

  And I decided to take a risk.

  “And you changed your club color.”

  Much to my enormous relief, Phoenix laughed. It was not a fully engaged laugh, although I didn’t think that Phoenix could emit such a laugh today.

  “Yeah, I had my reasons,” he said. “I take it you had yours?”

  “Well, let’s just say when you spend every day wondering if the Fallen Saints are going to take your head off for a beer not being cold enough, you need a stress outlet of some kind. Mine just happened to be hair color.”

  Phoenix pulled his lips back into a grimace. I would have killed to know
what he was reacting to and thinking about.

  “You know,” he said, but then he paused. I leaned back, trying to give him the space he needed. He looked like he was afraid to ask the question that danced on his tongue, but eventually, looking down at the bar top and not at me, he spoke. “Is your father still around?”

  Wow, really asking the hard questions today, huh? There was no way Phoenix could have known about my relationship—or lack thereof for much for the last few years—with my father. I knew he was probably just wanting to commiserate or tell me to call my father, to tell him I loved him because we only had a short time left in this life. But...

  “No,” I said.

  I almost said “not really,” but I felt like that would have opened a whole new can of worms that I just didn’t want to deal with. Better to be curt and answer a question like this with as little room for interpretation as possible.

  “I’m sorry,” Phoenix said. “I just... it’s fucking hard when you know you’ll never see your father again. You know?”

  “Yeah,” I said empathetically, though I couldn’t say I really understood. If I never saw my father again, I would regret losing the chance to see him become the man I thought he could be. But I would not regret losing the man that he was.

  “I knew he was an old man and in the second half of his life, and I knew he wasn’t going to be around forever, especially the way he smoked and drank,” he said. “But shit... I didn’t think that it would end like this.”

  He took a sip of his beer, his eyes still failing to meet mine.

  “How do you do it? How do you cope knowing your father isn’t around anymore?”

  I was glad that Phoenix phrased it like he did, giving me the leeway and the freedom to elaborate within the boundaries of his phrasing.

  “I just do my job and try not to think about it, honestly,” I said. “I’m sure some psychoanalyst would tell you that that’s not the healthiest approach, but I don’t care. I think the most important thing is to show up and to do your job.”

  “I guess so,” Phoenix said. “Do you still try to remember him?”

  Boy, talk about a hard question.

  “The good parts,” I said, which was true.

  “Makes sense.”

  A brief pause came, and I thought that would be that. But to my surprise, he kept going. And to my surprise, I found myself equally engaged in the conversation.

  It was a good thing that there was no one else in the bar, because I wasn’t sure I would have paid them a lick of attention given the way Phoenix had my eyes and ears. At one point, one of the Gray Reapers came to grab Phoenix, but he shooed them away, saying he needed alone time. It was unexpected, but at this point, it was not exactly unwelcome.

  The conversation wound up going for what felt like another full hour. It was less a bartender and a customer talking and more just two curious, lonely, and wounded people opening up to each other. I never revealed that my father was still alive, but for the purposes of the conversation, considering that my father was so absent from my life as to basically be dead, it didn’t matter.

  “You know, Jess,” Phoenix said when he finally finished his beer. “I’m damn glad you’re in this town now. I’m not going to say that I’m happy Brewskis burned down, considering you were in it when it went down and you could have died... but I sure am glad that you’ve made the most of the circumstances and that it has brought you here.”

  “I don’t know about making the most of my circumstances,” I said with a wry smile. “I mean, I needed work. It was more like ‘I just need a place before my bank account burns down too.’”

  Phoenix chuckled a little harder than I would have expected for a minor joke.

  “I’m glad you’re in this town too. If I’m going to serve bikers, I’m glad that I’m serving the ones that aren’t going to burn my bar down for show.”

  “Hah! Yeah, as if I’d ever be a Fallen Saint. Or go back...”

  He didn’t finish his words.

  “In any case, Jess, I really appreciate the conversation on a day like this,” he said, shoving not one, but two twenties forward. It was almost too much, like he was somehow thanking me for the conversation with cash instead of with just more conversation. “I am sure that we will talk again soon. Your words have helped me enormously.”

  “I could say the same back to you,” I said, and I wasn’t speaking as a charming bartender. I was speaking as a vulnerable human who didn’t know how to relate to her family. “I hope you come back soon.”

  Phoenix gave a coy smile my way, like he figured that there was a little more to the hope than just wanting some more tip money. He nodded, stood up, and walked out the door without another word. A few moments later, I heard his bike roaring to life, and he kicked out of the lot.

  I knew I had to tread very carefully with Phoenix. I knew that I was feeling things in that conversation I shouldn’t have been feeling with any customer. I knew that engaging him like this was a risky affair.

  But you know what?

  It was kind of meaningful.

  And, on a simpler level, it was kind of fun.

  And if I was going to stick to my promise to myself to move out of California within the next two months to go someplace else, why not have a little fun? Why not break some unspoken rules?

  Why not talk to someone who understood me better than he ever realized?

  Phoenix

  Two Days Later

  Off a gravel road, on the outskirts of Ashton, past an old-school gas station and behind a chain-link fence, stood a building that looked like it had once been a warehouse for car parts. The outside didn’t have much going for it; it was rusty, with window frames hanging either by their edges or on the ground completely. If someone passed by it, it would have looked like an abandoned building.

  But if they looked a little closer, they would see several bikes surrounding it. And if that someone took the steps needed to move in even closer, they would see that the interior was actually decently active, although it was still very much a work in progress.

  Today, five of us sat at a wooden table that did not fit in with the interior design of the place—as if someone had lifted it from their grandmother’s home and plopped it down as a placeholder. Unlike the Black Reapers’ table, which made it clear who the president was with its oblong shape, the circular table made it seem like everyone was on equal footing.

  There was, of course, Cole, the President of the club, its founder and the long-lost Carter; there was Owen, a former member of the Black Reapers who had served the dual roles of Vice-President and Sergeant-at-Arms before I had offered my services as the latter; there was Thor, a tall, thin, blond-haired man who looked exactly like his movie counterpart and served as the club Treasurer; and Beetle, a man with a necklace that had such a thing inside and who served as the club Secretary.

  And around us, in the open space, were other members of the Gray Reapers, either listening closely, doing other activities while listening, or just being within earshot in case anything else needed to be done. Cole had deliberately set up this club to resemble an open office environment, the better to make it clear that anything discussed between the officers could be heard by the club members and that any and all club members—even prospects—were welcome to contribute.

  While I could certainly appreciate the club being more open and inclusive than the Black Reapers, I had to admit that this felt like a step too far. Sometimes, leaders had to make decisions based on complex information that the younger or less experienced members could not understand; it wasn’t fair to include them in the process of decision-making when they didn’t know any better. Plus, I just disliked the idea that anything I said could be overheard.

  But it was Cole’s club, and if I was going to be his SAA, then I damn well needed to keep my mouth shut about such matters and act as his do-everything and do-dirty-work man.

  “All right, gentlemen, welcome to tonight’s meeting,” Cole said, tapping the tabl
e with his pen.

  I looked not just at the officers but at the club members around the table. It was staggering how many of them were former Black Reapers. In fact, the entire officers’ corps was made up of former members. Of all of those in the club, I think two members did not have ties to that organization.

  It was like no matter how hard we tried, we could not escape our pasts. We were Black Reapers on some level. No, stop, that’s absurd. You are Gray Reapers now, and that is what matters.

  “So,” he said. “We’ve already had a couple of meetings with our influx of members, and that is great. I’ve been trying to build the club to be in line with the vision of my father, and I think we’re doing a great job of that. But, as much as it pains me to say this, because I know how strong you all are... I don’t think we have enough numbers to deal with the Fallen Saints when they come.”

  A silence fell over the room. The Fallen Saints? That was the Black Reapers’ problem.

  The Saints were back in Springsville. We operated out of Ashton. True, many members of the Gray Reapers still lived in Springsville, but we generally avoided attacking each other at our houses.

  “You mean if they come,” Owen said.

  That was another thing that I was not used to. Cole not only allowed dissent during his meetings, he welcomed it. For him, getting interrupted in the middle of a meeting was a sign that someone had something important to say, not that they were being rude. Lane would have lost his shit if someone had interrupted him like this in a meeting, or at the very least, he would have looked very annoyed. It wasn’t hard to hear his outbursts in church.

  While I didn’t agree with Lane’s reactions, I tended to lean toward finding it obnoxious and chaotic than beneficial. There needed to be a hierarchy in place, and that meant when the President spoke, only he spoke. A good President would give everyone the chance to speak their mind, but otherwise, these meetings would have a tendency to turn into kindergarten classes of people screaming and shouting over each other.