Chapter Nine
Effortless, Pure
Jagger
At a little after six that night, Jagger strolled
into S.I.L.
The first thing he noticed was that Marley’s “Stir It Up”
was playing over the sound system.
And he approved.
The second was something he couldn’t miss.
A petite Black woman with blonde dreads skidding to a halt
sideways in front of him.
He stopped.
“Wassup?” she asked nonchalantly,
even if her entrance was the opposite of that.
“Everything,” he answered.
She smiled before she brazenly looked him up and down.
Inspection complete, she caught his eyes.
“I’m Joany.”
“Jagger.”
“I know. And seriously, it’s all about Disney World, man.”
Jagger busted out laughing.
He’d done that so hard, he’d closed his eyes doing it. And
when he opened them again, Archie was there.
She did not come to him and give him a kiss or even say hey.
She stood next to Joany and stared at her, declaring,
“You’re supposed to take my back.”
“Not when you’re one hundred percent wrong,” Joany retorted.
Archie didn’t get into that.
She asked, “Was it necessary for you to race through the
store to get to him first?”
Joany replied simply, “Yes.”
“Why?” Archie demanded.
“I wanted an unadulterated view. If you were close, my
verdict might be skewed by your loved-up vibes. I had to experience him
undiluted. This, I have done. My takeaway, by the way, is he…is…fine.”
Archie looked to the ceiling.
As funny as this was, and as cool as it was to meet one of
Archie’s crew, Jag was done with it.
“We don’t do this,” Jagger said to Archie.
She turned her attention to him. “Do what?”
“I show and you don’t come right to me and give me your
mouth.”
“Oh…my…God,” Joany groaned. “He’s a bossy hot
biker. That’s more than fine. So much more, I think I just came a little bit.”
Fortunately, Jagger didn’t have to respond to this since
Archie walked to him, put both hands to his stomach and tipped her head back.
He dipped in and kissed her, a stroke of tongue, and that
was it, seeing as she was at work and they had an audience.
“Yup, just came a little bit more,” Joany declared when he
lifted his head.
“I like her,” Jag told Archie.
“That’ll fade,” Archie replied.
“Excuse me,” a new voice entered the mix.
Archie moved to his side, Jag threw an arm around her
shoulders, and they both saw that a customer had approached Joany.
“Do you work here?” she asked Joany.
Joany looked down at the nametag on her cropped tee.
The tee said It’s a beautiful day to leave me alone.
Her nametag said, Hi, my name is…but didn’t have a
name, though it did have a black piece of that shiny tape you could punch
letters in. There just weren’t any letters.
And although the nametag declared her employment, even if it
had no name, Jag read the two as Joany being someone you didn’t approach to do
anything but take your money at a cash register.
The customer didn’t have this same bead.
She lifted up a lamp and asked, “Will you take ten dollars
for this?”
“Oh shit,” Archie mumbled.
But before Archie could do more, Joany reached out, nabbed
the price tag on the lamp, inspected it, dropped it and asked back, “Does this
look like a flea market?”
“All prices are as marked,” Archie called out quickly.
“Sorry, we don’t barter.”
“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” the woman said to Joany.
Joany opened her mouth.
“Joany,” Archie warned.
Joany shut her mouth.
Archie relaxed.
Joany opened her mouth again and said, “Do you haggle when
you’re at Pottery Barn?”
“I don’t shop at Pottery Barn. I only do vintage. It’s about
reusing. It’s about the environment,” the woman returned.
“Well, shit. Now I gotta like
you,” Joany replied.
“We can hold that lamp for you at checkout if you want to
keep shopping,” Archie offered.
“Cool,” the woman said to Archie, then to Joany, “I want
your shirt.”
“Well, girl,” Joany started, taking the lamp from her and
extending it Archie’s way without looking at her. “We happen to have these in
stock. Allow me to lead the way.”
Archie moved forward to grab the lamp.
Joany took off with the customer toward the clothing
section.
Archie came back to Jagger.
“I would have texted, but you were already on your way. Fabe
had a situation and he had to take off. I’m down an SA and I can’t leave Joany
alone to close. We lock the doors at seven. You cool to hang?”
“Absolutely,” he replied.
She grinned at him and moved.
He followed, and they hit the checkout area that was to the
left of the front door.
They walked up the two steps behind it and she set the lamp
on the back counter.
He pulled his ass up on it.
She then rested her back against it close enough her body
was touching his knee.
From their perch, they both studied the store.
“Any trouble with the twins?” he asked.
“No,” she answered.
“Mal doing okay?”
“Far as I can tell.”
“Otherwise good day?”
“Some days, I’m lucky I own the building. Other days, I
rejoice I’ll be able to upgrade my yurt when I go to Big Sur. Today’s one of
those own-the-building days.”
“Sorry, baby,” he muttered. Then, “Big Sur Yurt?”
“As noted, today was slow. I did some adventure research.”
“Ah.”
“You been to Big Sur?” she asked.
“No,” he answered.
“Wanna go?”
“Will you be there?”
He looked down at her profile, watched her cheek move with
her smile and she didn’t push for a further response seeing as she already had
the one she wanted.
“Is this before or after Iceland?” he asked.
“This is for whenever we feel like bagging on life for a few
days.”
“So, tomorrow.”
She laughed.
Then she queried, “Your day?”
“Think we licked the rust on the Bronco. May be able to make
a stab at getting that fucker running next week.”
“Awesome.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “You need me to go up and start dinner?”
She looked up at him. “Are you hungry?”
“Not overly, but if you are…?”
“I’m making sweet and sour shrimp. It’s a shortcut recipe.
It takes half an hour. Work for you?”
He nodded.
She turned back to the store.
He looked to his side, saw a turntable with a record
spinning, then up on the wall above it, a Plexiglas shelf on which was the Catch
a Fire album sleeve with the Zippo lighter on it.
“Can I pick the next album?” he requested.
She twisted her neck and tipped her head back again, and he
saw her lips turned up.
“Sure.”
“Can I have a cherry Coke?”
The lip curve turned into a big smile.
“Sure,” she repeated.
Jag bent and kissed her before he hopped off the counter and
headed to the album section.
“So, there was a lot of baggage there,” Archie was
saying.
They were both sitting on stools at the bar to her kitchen,
their dirty dishes shoved away, and there were a bunch of those old square
photographs scattered in front of them.
“And it never left,” she went on. “Mom was never tight with
her grandparents. It wasn’t just Grandma’s white parents, it was also
Granddad’s Black ones. No one ever came to terms with them being together. Sign
of the times, I guess. It still was fucked up.”
He didn’t have to agree to the indisputable.
Because it was totally fucked up.
Jag took in the handsome Black man and the pretty white
woman—Archie’s grandparents on her mother’s side—and he saw hints of both in
Archie.
But it was the more recent photos that were mingled with the
rest where he saw a lot of his girl.
In the pictures of her mother.
“And making this weirder still, Granddad was not a big fan
of Dad,” she continued. “He saw Mom being with a white guy as her rejection of
him as a Black man. Though, eventually, he got over it.”
“They didn’t kick in when your mom passed?” Jag asked.
She shrugged. “We were all rocked, obviously. But Mom was an
only child. I remember thinking they seemed to age twenty years from the last
time I saw them before she died, to the time after.” She turned her head and
looked at Jagger. “They never recovered. Neither of them were old-old
when they died. After she was gone, I think they just gave up and did their
time until they were gone too.”
This info made Jag both pissed and sad.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” he murmured. “It would have been good
one adult in your life took your back.”
Slowly, she turned her attention back to the photos,
reaching out a hand and scooting them around.
“I’ve taken some time with this, and I don’t blame them. I
don’t hold any anger,” she said softly.
She shifted her gaze to him again and kept talking.
“They fell in love. That’s one of the simplest, most
beautiful things people can do. Of course, life makes it complicated, but the
emotion isn’t complicated. It’s effortless, pure. But they couldn’t have that.
They had to fight for their love. They had to explain it. They had to defend
it. They couldn’t go out together without getting looks, assholes saying shit.
But your family is supposed to be about no conditions, and they couldn’t even
be in love and be around the people who were supposed to love them. That’s gotta wear a soul down. They were together fifty years.
That’s a success story. Something to celebrate. But they were forced to lose
important things to gain each other. Then they lost their only baby. So no,”
she shook her head, glancing again at the photographs, “I don’t blame them.
Enough does tend to be enough.”
Jag reached out, caught her at the back of the neck, and
squeezed.
She turned to him and started, “Sometimes, bikers have a
reputation—”
He knew what she was saying.
There were MCs that were racist, some implicitly, others
explicitly.
“Chaos is not about that. I can’t say we’re poster children
for diversity, because I think my mom’s Apache blood is the only diversity we
got. But you will not feel shit like that with my family.”
She nodded and then asked, “I’m living, breathing proof it
works, Jag. Why don’t people get that?”
“If I had that answer, baby, I’d win a Nobel Prize.”
“One of the issues, and they are numerous, is that it’s a
Black thing with Elijah. Along with other garbage, he’s putting that between
him and Dad.”
Well, fuck.