Page 74 of Apex of the Curve
I was excited for a couple of reasons. One, as much as I loved riding with Dump Truck and Little Bird, I’d always sort of felt like a third wheel on the occasions we took a Sunday ride or whatever. This time, I was glad to have a lady of my own pressed to my back. The fact that lady was Aspen, was all the better.
I’d warned her about the rough parts of my world, but everybody’s world had those. All of them different, some of them higher stakes than others but all of them equally high in the eyes of the people who lived them.
Just like with the bad, there was a lot of good. And one of the good things was the feeling of the ride. The wind rushing over and through you, the freedom and the feeling like flying. The excitement, the rush, the times you were a man on top of the world.
I wanted so badly for Aspen to feel all of those things and to know it wasn’t always violence, grit, and mayhem. Just everything had its price.
She got onto the back of my bike, behind me, and I started it up, engine rumbling, Dump Truck’s roaring to life just behind mine in a sweet, bass, rumble. We nodded at each other, me and DT, indicating our ready, and the girls tightening their holds on us, we let out the clutch and carefully wheeled around to leave, maneuvering carefully over the loose gravel and not for the first time I thought to myself, I really had to finish paving this drive around the fuckin’ farm.
My pops and I made more progress every summer, but if I was gonna have precious cargo behind me, I needed to step up my game around here.
We rode up through the hills around Auburn along the Auburn-Black Diamond road. It was a bit dodgy going around wet, fallen leaves in certain spots, but not too bad. I was way more anxious than I ought to be with Aspen behind me without her being properly geared up, but we would fix that as soon as possible. Dump Truck was right, though. We needed to eat first, and we wanted to show the girls a good time.
We pulled up outside the Black Diamond Bakery and Café pretty much at the start of the Sunday rush. Church people coming in droves in their Sunday best, mingling with families from the surrounding area, that just like us, were looking for a decent breakfast and to get out of the house on a nice fall day.
We went up and put our name in with the hostess, little kids staring up at us in unabashed awe and the girls giggling at their expressions. Their giggles ceasing when parents snatched their little darlings away, scolding them for staring around death glares shot in our direction.
Aspen looked a little wilted around the edges and I massaged her shoulders. She was sweet. Sweet as the doughnuts and cakes in the bakery’s glass cases, that we went over and looked at next while we waited to be called for our table.
“I’ve never been here before,” Aspen said, looking over the fresh baked breads on the shelves behind the bakery counter.
“They’ve got good stuff,” Little Bird said. “I like their Crystal Mountain bread.”
“Tell you what,” DT said. “Let’s get some of that, and a few other things, then when we’re done eatin,’ we can wander down the other end to the Smokehouse and get some meats and things. Make some sandwiches and shit for lunch later.”
“Sounds good, my brother.” I nodded, and we put in an order for a few things.
“You got any of that Coal Candy?” I asked and the bakery lady looked dejected.
“No, the guy at the Firehouse that made it retired, and we haven’t been able to source it anywhere else.”
“Damn,” I muttered. “That was some good shit.”
The bakery lady smiled and nodded. “I really miss it, too.”
Aspen asked, “What’s that?”
“Oh, Black Diamond used to be a mining town,” I explained. “Coal.”
“Black Diamond, coal, makes sense,” she said nodding.
“Right, so they used to have this shit called ‘Coal Candy’ here, and it was just black rocks of sugar that tasted like black licorice. Used to love that shit. Before my dad got sent up, he used to bring me up here, and we’d leave suckin’ on that stuff. Mom used to hate it.” I laughed. “Turned our mouths all black and made us look all ghoulish.”
Aspen smiled, and I loved having someone to tell this shit too. My mom fuckin’ hated those trips for a lot of reasons. The coal candy was just one more thing to spread her dislike to. She would go to work on the weekends, and my dad would put both me and my sister on the back of his bike to come up here when we were small enough but old enough to hang on. She thought it was dangerous, and it was, but fuck it. It was a different time, you know?
“Um, Dump Truck? Table of four?” the hostess called and me and my brother grinned at each other at the note of confusion in her voice.
“Yeah, that’s us,” DT grated and limped her way; Little Bird trailing behind him. I put Aspen in front of me and brought up the rear as we threaded through tables towering above the craven citizens around us that shrank in their seats or in some cases, studiously avoided looking in our direction as though if they didn’t acknowledge us, we wouldn’t actually exist.
That shit put a smile on my face, not gonna lie. These idiots didn’t have the first clue about what it meant to really live. They never would, and that was no skin off my testicles.
We took our seats, DT and I both seeing to our women’s comfort before our own, making sure their jackets were hung on the backs of their chairs, their purses accounted for, and that ever-present annoying shoving their chairs into the backs of their knees because it was the right thing to do. I asked Aspen, “You want I should get your chair for you, or you in the future? I always feel bad knocking the shit out the backs of a lady’s knees.”
She laughed and smiled at me, her green eyes luminous. “I actually don’t mind. I even like it,” she said. “Call me old-fashioned that way.”
“Never,” I said with a grin. “It makes you feel good, I’ll keep doing it.”
She blushed at the double entendre which made my smile grow. Little Bird looked back and forth between us at the exchange, her smile infectious and causing DT to smile himself.
