Phoenix

by Trent Jordan

  “I will not tell you why, because the why for me will differ from the why for you,” he said. “I will only share with you what I had shared with me. Afterward, if you still believe your father is innocent and a good man, then believe it with all your heart. I am not saying this condescendingly, my son. I am saying this out of the search for truth. There is the truth of what you see on the video. And then there is the truth that you will know in your heart that is unexplainable.”

  No, no, I already knew that fucking truth. I already knew...

  That your father might actually have been a traitor?

  That Father Marcellus would never make such an accusation without some serious planning?

  “This is too much,” I said, fuming. “You’re supposed to be on my side, Father. You’re supposed to be the person from the Black Reapers I could trust no matter what happened.”

  “I would like to believe that I still am.”

  I shook my head.

  “I know you’re a good man,” I said, trembling. “But I think you’ve made a terrible mistake. I know my father. I know my father! Fucking hell, I know him!”

  “You know him better than all of us ever have,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that you know everything about him. No one knows everything about anyone. Including themselves.”

  Well, if the knife to the gut was still there, that was the twist that just increased the agony ten-fold.

  Did he really have to say it like that? Did he really have to say that there were things about the only person I loved that I didn’t know? I knew my father. I saw him in moments he didn’t think I saw him. Fuck...

  But...

  “This is too much,” I said, putting my head in my hands.

  “Then I will leave you be,” he said. “I encourage you to check your email whenever you can. I will send what I saw to you. Do yourself a favor, Austin. When you are of sound mind and are able to watch the video alone, do so. And don’t pause it at any point, at least not on first viewing. Then, once you’ve listened to it once in its entirety, you can dissect it closely and carefully. But an informed soul is a saved soul.”

  No. No. Not when he’s informed that his father was something he swears he’s not.

  Father Marcellus turned around and started to leave. I heard him stop, presumably to see if I was following him, but I was not. I had my head buried in my hands. I was almost in a state of shock, unable to move or do anything but mourn the fact that everything I had thought about my father could very well be wrong.

  When I knew Father Marcellus was gone, as evidenced by the sound of his motorcycle driving off, I stormed back to the clubhouse and grabbed a beer. On the outside, I looked the part of pissed-off biker—heavy breathing, flared out nostrils, wide eyes, shaking hands.

  But the anger was merely the blanket I had put over myself to hide the truth. I was afraid. I was afraid that what Father Marcellus had said was, in fact, the objective truth.

  If he was the one saying it... if he was the one who had come all this way to Ashton to say it...

  He had an ulterior motive. The Black Reapers got attacked last night. He’s just trying to cover his ass.

  But if you won’t help them because of unjustified anger... what will that result in?

  The way I saw it, if my father was, in fact, a rat... I couldn’t even get past that thought. I couldn’t play out the chain of logic to try to guess what would have happened if that was the case. It was just too ludicrous a scenario for me to consider.

  Austin Smith Sr., also known as Red Raven, the oldest member of the club, older than the founder Roger Carter, the eldest member of the club... would betray the only group he’d loved his whole life for their mortal enemies?

  And yet, you know how he looked just before he got shot. When he stared at Butch and Axle.

  Pissed.

  And not the annoyed pissed off. Hatefully pissed off.

  But why? Why did he look that way? Was he pissed off because Axle and Butch were preventing him from getting to Lane to warn him about the Saints?

  Or...

  Because they were preventing him from getting to Lane to kill him?

  And then more memories started to come back.

  The memory of how, at Roger Carter’s funeral, my father had privately leaned towards me after a speech from Lane and said, “If that’s our leader, we’re fucked.” He had said it with a smirk after Lane had stumbled over his words, an expression I had taken then as a poor attempt at humor, but looking back on it now...

  Or how, after the first club party that Lane had thrown, one that was actually pretty damn wild—albeit one Lane didn’t particularly indulge in—my father had said, “The boy knows how to throw parties, but I don’t know if he knows how to throw Fallen Saints out.”

  Such remarks were the kind of words that only I heard. My father was far too smart to ever speak ill of anyone within club earshot, and he was far too cautious to undermine leadership.

  And maybe that was why my fears were so strong. Because if my father had the capability of hiding things...

  This is fucking stupid. My father is a good man. I’m letting my paranoid side take over me. I know what I saw. I saw Butch murder my father. I never saw my father try to hurt him or anyone else. I heard plenty of other snide remarks about Lane that I never gave any thought to.

  Just... fucking take care of yourself and enjoy this party.

  If only it were that easy.

  And it only got harder when my phone buzzed, alerting me that I had a new email from Father Marcellus.

  The clubhouse slowly began to fill with girls and bikers. To my pleasant surprise, while there was certainly a fair share of girls who had once gone to Black Reaper parties, there were also plenty of new faces that I had never seen before.

  I couldn’t say that I was a total recluse, refusing to party or associate myself with anyone there. That was ridiculous. I laughed and flirted and offered up a few witty lines.

  But when it came time to shift up the flirtation from casual to heavy, I never found the desire or drive to do it. I just...

  Only Jess can make me feel excited.

  When the thought hit me, I felt silly. I was a biker, not a Mormon. I didn’t become attached to one girl and never fuck anyone else. I hadn’t had an exclusive relationship since I’d started at the Black Reapers.

  But Jess...

  Maybe my father’s death was making me think of life a little more seriously. Or maybe being at the bar with Jess, in the quiet space of Tom’s Billiards, was the one time that it didn’t feel like I was the son of Red Raven, a biker destined to be around bikers for the rest of his life.

  Either way, after a couple of hours of flirting and deciding that I just wasn’t feeling it tonight, I retreated outside to the California night. I found a private spot away from a member making out with one girl, pulled up my phone, and opened the email from Father Marcellus.

  “Decide for yourself.”

  It was all that he had put in the text, but he had attached two things—a video and a screenshot.

  The screenshot was the easier of the two to figure out. It looked like a conversation on my father’s phone—one that suggested he had spoken to Lucius about a meeting spot a couple of days before his death. This just seemed stupid; how would the Black Reapers have unlocked my father’s phone? And even if they had, this was the kind of shit that anyone with half a brain for Photoshop could have created. I refused to believe that this was valid.

  The second was a video of a little over a minute. I started to play it.

  And immediately, I heard my father’s voice and the voices of two Fallen Saints.

  I knew it to be true.

  “... fucking double-crossed us?”

  “I told you, I think they’re on to me!” Dad. “I couldn’t say anything. And no one important got hurt.”

  “Except our fucking bikes!”

  I knew exactly what they were talking about. While the Fallen Saints were at the hospi
tal to tend to Lucius, we’d launched a strike to take out their bikes. We may have had some tech-savvy guys in the club, but there was no way this was faked.

  “Look, I know, it’s not a great look. But play the long game. The long game involves some potholes—”

  “Save your smartass speech.”

  Dad loved his fucking metaphorical speeches.

  My father let out a gasp, suggesting one of the Saints had punched him. I wanted to reach through the camera and break the neck of the Saint who had done that.

  “We didn’t pay you so you could cover your own ass. We paid you so you could set up the rest of the assholes to die faster.”

  “I know! But—”

  But? Dad...

  “No buts, old man. We gave you a pass after the brother came in. But we don’t care if the fucking Marines come in to help them next time. If the target isn’t dead by Sunday night, then you will be.”

  And that was the end of the audio portion of the recording.

  It was Dad.

  No...

  No...

  No, no fucking way. No. No. No!

  “No!” I yelled, throwing my phone to the ground.

  I gasped for air. This was too much. This... this fucking shit had to be photoshopped or video shopped or whatever the fuck the term was. There was no way. No fucking way!

  My father was a good man. A great fucking man! He’d raised me all on his own, and I had certainly never done anything this bad. I was a good guy... my father was a great guy...

  This had to be fake. It had to be. Damage fucking control. Whatever the fuck you wanted to call it.

  I grabbed my phone. It had landed on grass and had not suffered any damage. I found the email and deleted it.

  This was a problem that I was not going to deal with right now. My father’s final days with the Black Reapers were not something I needed to worry about.

  No. No. I was a Gray Reaper now. I was their Sergeant-at-Arms. I had a club to protect.

  And I had a woman I liked that I needed to pursue in a couple days.

  That was where my focus deserved to be.

  I made a vow right there to not think about the Black Reapers. If that video came to mind, I’d purge it. I would not let this become a distraction.

  You can’t escape this.

  It’ll haunt you.

  Jess

  One Day Later

  It was the kind of week that made me wonder just why the hell I was giving serious thought to moving.

  Even aside from my ongoing interest in Phoenix and our building toward something with that, work went well, the Fallen Saints stayed away from my apartment, and tensions remained low. I think at one point, a fight broke out between the Fallen Saints and Black Reapers, but the noise was so distant that it could have just as easily been bikes revving to life as gunshots erupting.

  And as it was, as fucked up as it might have sounded, I was so used to gunfire and skirmishes breaking out in this town that when one wasn’t almost literally outside my front door, I just didn’t think much about it.

  All of this, indeed, made me wonder why I wanted to move.

  It certainly wasn’t to move toward something. I hadn’t even figured out where I was going to go—hell, I hadn’t even figured out which direction I wanted to go, north or south or east.

  So, if I didn’t know what I was running toward, that only meant that I was running away from something.

  But from what? The danger of this town? My past?

  Myself?

  In an ideal world, I would know myself enough to know that answer, but the funny thing about being a runaway at age fourteen and having to fend for yourself is that survival doesn’t really allow much room to “learn about yourself.” Having to work jobs to literally make ends meet, to have enough cash and only enough cash to pay your rent and put beans and rice on the table, and to make it to the next day didn’t allow for much psychological reflection.

  All I knew was that I had a date on Sunday that I was excited about. The rest was one big mystery to me.

  So why not start with what you ran from in the first place? Start with the person that caused you to run off. See if you can find something more stable there.

  Standing out the window of my second-floor apartment, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was really a good idea. My father had driven me away, and even his attempts to bring me back in felt more like a half-hearted attempt to not live with a heavy burden on his conscience than an actual attempt to make things right. But...

  If it was that simple, why did I think about him constantly? Why did I think about how I had answered Phoenix’s question about him so much?

  Maybe it just wasn’t as easy as I thought it was. Maybe it was something I had to address.

  I pulled up my phone and waited for it to unlock. I didn’t need to go to my contacts page to pull up my father’s phone number; I had it memorized from my childhood days, and it had never changed. I dialed, my breath hitching when I made the call.

  “Jess?” he said in surprise, but not a pleasant kind of surprise. “What are you calling for?”

  Well, that’s a way to start a call.

  “I...”

  I actually didn’t know. I mean, I knew why I’d picked up the phone—to try to move toward something, toward a better relationship with my father. But once I was on, what was I supposed to do? Just ask how he was? Try to do small talk first? Or jump right into the big stuff?

  I had given this no thought, and it was showing pretty obviously right now.

  “I just... wanted to see how things were,” I said, but my voice was too weak to suggest I really wanted to know.

  “Oh, well, things are great!” my father said with a laugh. “Still working at the Walgreens here. Dating a new waitress in town. Real cute girl. Great—”

  “OK, Dad, that’s, that’s great,” I said before I learned more than I ever would have wanted to. “How are you, though?”

  That’s it. Just push him on it a little bit.

  “I mean, like how are you. Not the things you’re doing. How are you?”

  “Me?” he said, the hesitation painfully obvious. “I told you, I’m great! What could you possibly mean otherwise?”

  I sighed. There was no getting through to my father on this. I guess maybe running away from something worked if the “something” wouldn’t want you any closer.

  “Tell me what you are up to, my little Jess,” he said. “You don’t need to know about me. It’s all boring and nonsense over here anyway.”

  Might as well. It’s not like he’s going to say anything of great significance to you here.

  “Well...” I said.

  Funny, wasn’t it, how for as much as I was judging my father for not revealing more about himself and how he was feeling, I was suddenly finding it all but impossible for me to open up about my world.

  “I, um, well—”

  “Spit it out! Unless it’s nasty, in which case, maybe find a sink.”

  I rolled my eyes, but the joke was enough to get me to lighten up.

  “I have a date tonight.”

  “A date?” my father said. “Like the fruit?”

  I should have known.

  Even something as light and simple as a date would draw sarcasm and joking from my father. But he wasn’t saying those things to make me feel comfortable or laugh. He was doing it because he was too scared to ever really get to know me. Because if he did, he’d have to own up to all of his failures with me.

  “Like, a real date with a man, Dad,” I said. “And I’ve got to get ready for it. But it was... it was good talking to you.”

  “I sure hope it wasn’t bad!”

  Oh, Dad…

  “You know what else wouldn’t be bad?” he said, his voice still joking. “Visiting me.”

  Those last two words were still said with a dash of too-lighthearted humor, but it was very obvious that such humor was a shield. He couldn’t completely control his tone, and his anxiety and
nervousness were apparent.

  It was, I suspected, as much as I would get out of this call.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  And then I hung up.

  I wasn’t in a mental frame of mind to just say yes. I had too much history with my father to do that. Maybe that was hypocritical, but I couldn’t care much.

  And then, as I realized that I had lied about getting ready for a date that wasn’t happening until Sunday, it hit me.

  That was the first time since I had run away that my father had asked me to come and visit him.

  It had been over ten years since I had run away. We’d talked for a couple of years now, ever since he got sober, but he’d never, ever made that request. It had felt like a barrier that would never come down.

  And now, it finally had.

  I bowed my head, put my chin in my hands, and started to cry.

  My father had finally extended an olive branch.

  And I wasn’t ready.

  I had said no.

  Sunday Evening

  I was ready, however, to finally see Phoenix.

  Although talking to my father had temporarily put me into a minor tailspin, feeling like I wasn’t ready to be the kind of person that could be loved or could give love, in time, it had made me feel a little better about myself. If my father was reaching out to me, even if I felt I wasn’t ready, maybe I was more ready than I believed.

  Sure, it was a huge maybe. But it was something.

  For our date, Phoenix had only told me to dress casually for a walk at a nearby hiking trail. We had both jokingly agreed that going to a bar for a date would be like me going to a biker’s shop for a date—sometimes, it was just good to get away from work.

  The setup for the date had me excited. I didn’t go on dates very often, but when I did, they fell into the same coffee-tea-snacks-dinner-movie-drinks routine so easily that it was almost boringly predictable. I didn’t want predictable, at least when it came to the activities.