by Brian Hart
The sponsors provided coolers of beer and strippers/models for the photo shoot. He skated with the boys and groped the models and bled and did burnouts on the deck with his motorcycle. It was a party and the girls were pretending to be into him or they were into him but his thoughts were now with Karen.
So without telling Tony or anyone else that he was leaving, he hopped on the CB and rode into the sunset with a stupid grin on his face, his head working double duty with a monologue about why and why not to read Karen’s letter. He could swerve eight feet to the left and get a face full of Peterbilt, or eight feet to the right and launch the mesa, pick his exit, go big, two hundred feet to a rock pile, a one-way no-chance Evel Knievel.
He was going fast now, passed two semis blind on an uphill, hit triple digits at the crest and the wind caught him broadside and tipped him just enough and he had a moment of wobble that made his blood go cold. Tank slapper, they called them. High side. Who died? he imagined the cop asking him when he got pulled over, standing over his twisted corpse.
He dropped a gear and swooped into a long corner, taunting the red in the tach. He was low enough to drag peg and the suspension had been rebuilt but it was still as old as he was and the bike porpoised at the apex but he was used to that too. He felt that nothing could surprise him but he also knew the danger in that kind of thinking.
He saw the snake for about as long as it took him to think: I see the snake, and then he ran over it, tunk tunk, like a garden hose. He couldn’t see it in his mirror. He wasn’t stopping. Look where you want to go, not where you don’t want to go. Motorcycle wisdom. Don’t look at the snake. He felt that Rasheed was with him and then he wasn’t. He clicked into fifth and rolled the bike wide open, felt the music of the inline four find its harmonies. He did his best thinking on a motorcycle. He also did his best non-thinking.
At dusk he topped the tank and wandered across the lot to some blistered desert roadhouse on the banks of the Gila River and before he’d even had time to get properly buzzed he’d gotten stomped and had his motorcycle stolen.
“Apparently, there are real bikers,” the cop said to him in the ER as he was being stitched up. “And then there are guys like you. Bad timing. Wrong town, wrong bar, wrong bike. Wrong outfit. Do they call it an outfit?”
Roy didn’t bother with a response.
The cop was young and capital-N Native, ex-military judging by the USMC tattoo on his forearm. “We have some suspects, but you’ll have to ID them. I mean, there’s footage from the gas station across the street but you can’t really see any faces but yours. Can’t even see them make off with your bike.”
“I just want my bike, man,” Roy said. “I don’t want to press charges.”
The cop nodded, like, good idea. “We won’t find your bike. It’s gone. Did you have anything with the bike, like saddlebags or anything?”
“No. I was traveling light. Just the bike.” He wasn’t about to say that he had a dopp kit under his seat with the toolkit and a skateboard on the back.
“Do you have insurance?”
“Liability.” He didn’t have insurance.
“Well, there you go.”
The doctor finished tying the knot on his stitches and snipped it. “You’re all done.”
After that, the letter from Karen was the only thing he had. They’d taken his wallet and his phone. Another tooth gone, broken nose, fourteen stitches. He had a picket-fence thing going now, he’d have to see a dentist and get some falsies. Old age falls on you like snow from a roof.
Tony wired him money and FedEx–ed him a phone and a charger. He stayed in the Desert Chalet motel, shaken, hurting, wary to move. Someone was supposed to drop off a rental car for him but they were fucking around. New Mexico was fucking around. New Mexico couldn’t be serious. He sent the desk clerk, a skater kid who recognized Roy, for food and beer. At one point he went outside and drank ice-cold Tecates by the pool but he couldn’t go swimming because of the stitches, not to mention the wonky pain in his ribs made it so he couldn’t breathe deeply. His tongue was raw from squirming around in the hole where his tooth had been. He was ashamed. Ashamed that he couldn’t defend himself, ashamed that he was prey when all this time he’d thought of himself as, if not a predator, definitely not somebody to fuck with. Wrong and wrong again.
Tony texted that the video from the gas station had gone viral. Roy opened the attachment and watched himself backing away from four men with his hands raised, helmet in his right, and as the first guy came at him he swung at the last second and brained the guy with his helmet and the guy fell down but the other three were on him in an instant and he swung a few times but mostly missed and his helmet was taken away and tossed and they just beat the shit out of him until he was wadded up in the dirt. He watched them take his wallet and shove him underneath a semitrailer, before helping their buddy to his feet and walking out of the frame.
“Sick intro footage, couldn’t be better,” Tony said happily, when Roy finally answered his phone. “I’m sending you a new version of the video. Check out the side of the truck. Seriously, man, Roy Bingham v. the fucking world. Epic is too small a word. You’re my champ. The people’s champ.”
“I gotta go.” Roy hung up and watched the new version of the video. The logo on the side of the truck had been altered digitally from whatever it had been—Mayflower or whatever—to the shoe-company logo. After the fifth time through he started to get used to it and take a bit of pride in the one solid shot he’d gotten off. At least he’d fought back.
“They stole my bike,” Roy texted Tony. “Yano gave me that bike.”
“We’ll buy you a new one. Two.”
“Is there video of me waking up?”
Five minutes later, “C attached. UR like honey badger! Will edit down time to add Lazarus to the end. He lives! Cheers.”
The complete clip was seven and a half minutes long. The fight section from beginning to end took all of twenty-two seconds. Lights swept over the tractor trailer, no logo on the side, a plain white truck. Another semi pulled through and blocked the shot for a minute or less and kept going. Nothing moved but shadows. Roy tried to remember what he’d read about being knocked out cold, severe concussions, long-term damage, depression and anger, substance abuse problems. At four minutes, forty-three seconds Roy’s leg moved and he rolled to his stomach and crawled out from under the trailer. It took him a few tries to get to his feet and a minute or so to get steady enough to walk. His face was black from the blood coming from his scalp and his cheek, his mouth, and his hair was loose from its tie and all over the place. His eyes were that crazy night-vision green, and with his fists hanging at his sides he looked insane. He was scanning the parking lot for his bike, but to the lay viewer it probably seemed like he was looking for another fight. He spat a mouthful of blood into the dirt, then bent down and picked something from the wet spot. A tooth. And that was where Tony or whoever cut it, him standing there peering at the tooth in his bloody hand.
Afterward he’d gone back inside the bar and the bartender had called him an ambulance. She poured him a beer and gave him a bar towel to clean up with and a shot glass to put his tooth in.
“Who the fuck were those guys?” he’d asked her. He’d remembered their motorcycle jackets. “What the fuck is a Bandido?”
“I didn’t see anybody,” the bartender had said. She was in her fifties maybe sixties. Didn’t look like she’d made the best decisions in her life but she was apparently wise enough not to make another bad one.
“I didn’t say a word to them,” Roy said, whining a little. “I didn’t say a word to anybody.”
She took the bloody towel in her hand, not worried about the blood, and passed him a fresh one. “Maybe they were offended by your silence.”
“How far is it to walk to the hospital?”
“Too far for you. Ambulance won’t take but a minute. My ex-son-in-law will be driving it. He’s an idiot. I bet he’ll let you play with the lights.”
&n
bsp; He drank the beer even though some part of him knew that he shouldn’t be drinking after he’d been knocked out.
The ambulance driver came in and said, “Hi, Ma,” to the bartender and Roy dumped the tooth from the shot glass into his hand and shoved it in his pocket and followed him out to his rig.
He opened the bay doors and had Roy sit down on the bumper while he rooted around in the back. He returned and opened a thick compress and pushed it roughly to Roy’s head wound and told him to hold it there, then he took his blood pressure and shined a penlight in his eyes. “You pass,” he said, and led Roy to the passenger door and opened it for him and motioned him inside.
“You can sit in the front of the bus with me tonight so’s you don’t dirty up the back.” The EMT had to help him into his seat.
“Thanks,” Roy said.
He’d forgotten about handwriting. Only his grandmother had sent him handwritten letters and they’d been more or less indecipherable, not worth Roy’s effort. He’d shake out the pages looking for the check, then chuck it. He was surprised at the joy it brought him to see where Karen’s wrist or the edge of her hand had smudged the ink, or where she’d crossed out a misspelling, then mauled it with further changes and iterations until nobody outside of a forensic lab could say she didn’t spell it right somewhere in there. They’d been apart for most of a decade but her voice rose clearly from the page, maybe more than it would have through a phone, and he couldn’t even begin to understand why.
He’d half-expected to read that he had a child and that she, it would have to be a she, was in grade school now, but that wasn’t the case. Karen was where he’d left her, in her old house. She said Mace had come while she was in Reno and left his truck and five thousand dollars in an envelope with his keys and a signed title. He’d taken his guns and most of his stuff from the basement, kind of trashed the place, left in a hurry. The mystery of Mace, still crazy. Maybe he’d joined a monastery. She’d used the money that Mace had left, along with the money from the sale of his truck—she’d driven it for a while first—to open a drive-thru coffee stand like the one she’d worked in on Stark. She had two employees now and was thinking about opening another location just for weekend traffic. Through Aaron and April she’d met people, made new friends. At first she’d thought Roy would come back.
She’d been married but her husband, Aaron Simmonds’s brother-in-law, April’s brother, had died in an accident. He had been a truck driver for FedEx and his truck had gone off the road and he’d been killed. Not instantly, he was in the hospital for two weeks before she and April pulled the plug. They had a kid, Wiley.
Her sadness spilled into his self-pity and made him feel so small that for a moment he was overwhelmed with emotion. He could still hear Toots and the Maytals—I want you to know that I am the man who fights for the right, not for the wrong. Helping the weak against the strong—playing in the van when the van had died.
He opened another beer and let the suds work into the holes where his teeth used to be. Mouth breathing, he caressed his worthless broken nose.
He’d gotten in the habit of looking for Karen in every woman he saw. Onto every woman he got together with, he’d not so subtly superimpose the recollected parts of her. Results were mixed and then they were bad—just bad, not good. You couldn’t change a person, a woman, you couldn’t will them into something they weren’t. But wasn’t that what people did, attempt to reshape others, along with everything else, to their will? Or died trying. Roy had often wasted months searching for the depth, the mystery, in whatever woman he was dating, looking for their heart, and then, not liking what he found, not finding Karen, he usually split quietly or, if he was bored, he’d set the charge and stand back, wait for the boom. Whatever worked. There wasn’t anything about most people. Most people were filler. Karen wasn’t. This part of him, this emotional drag, was unique in that he couldn’t destroy it, couldn’t unhitch it. No matter how he tried.
[24]
R<25
NV 89501, CA 96118
After he’d left the parking garage in Reno and taken the cab to the bus station—after Karen had hung up on him—he called his pal Yuri in Oakland and found out from Yuri’s girlfriend, Sue, that their other friend Neko was out of town and wouldn’t be back until next week. They had an extra room, though, and they would let Roy and Karen borrow their car if he wanted.
“I’m by myself,” Roy said.
“Why?” Sue said.
“It just happened.”
He could practically hear Sue shaking her head and glaring at him. “I can’t believe you.” She passed the phone to Yuri.
“You got my guitar?” Yuri said.
“No, man. Fuck. I forgot about that. I don’t have it.”
“Where is it?”
“You know where it is. It’s in the same place as it was before.”
“Unless someone bought it.”
“Unless someone bought it.”
“You told me you’d get it back.”
“C’mon, man.”
“Asshole. Pawned my guitar. Not just a guitar, a Gibson L6S. You’re an asshole.”
“Listen,” Roy said, “I can hear you going Yeltsin on me so I know you’re pissed and I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”
“You fuck,” Yuri yelled, sounding very much like someone impersonating a crazy Russian. “You fucking turdhammer, you selfish lowdown sack of dead cats.”
“Take it easy. I’ve had enough already without getting it from you.”
“You’ve had enough?” Yuri’s voice doubled in volume. Here we go, Roy thought. “You’re like Kurtz going upriver, working for the government scum and wagging your ass around the campfire and high-fiving the fucking golden-hearted quote unquote savages.”
“What does that even mean?” Roy said.
“It means you’re a double-dealing son of a bitch. It means, who the fuck are you, man? Are you my friend or are you just some shitbag?”
“OK, I’m a shitbag and I’m your friend. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, OK.” Yuri cooled off quickly, always had. “You know, we both read the same books but apparently I’m the only one that can retain information.”
“Or a girlfriend,” Roy said.
“You don’t even know,” Yuri said. “You don’t even know how fucked you are. You might as well have a brain tumor. Cancer of the ass. You without Karen is like what’s the point?”
Roy told him basically what had happened: the van, Aaron, Reno. Yuri softened his tone.
“Sue’s pregnant,” he said.
“Oh shit,” Roy said. “What’re you gonna do?”
“What’d you think? We want kids, man. We planned it.”
“Cool. That’s cool. I didn’t know that, you know, you guys were doing that already. I thought you’d wait or whatever.”
“OK, so we kind of planned it. We figure if not now, when.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway, she isn’t showing yet. I haven’t told a soul but Neko. Sue told her sister, but that’s it, so if blabbing happens, I’ll know it was you.”
“I won’t say a word.”
“Things are gonna change soon,” Yuri said, “but when you get here we can find something to do. There’s a new indoor park outside Sacramento, we could meet there, or since you already bought your ticket you could ride the dog all the way in and we could make dinner at home and maybe go watch some crappy band or something.”
“OK.” Roy didn’t care. He didn’t have any place else to go.
Yuri was working full-time as a plumber’s apprentice and going to night school three nights a week. All of it sounded like a nightmare to Roy, but he wasn’t about to say it. Yuri and Neko were part of the old Death Said/DEK8D crew, Roy’s best friends, and they had the tattoos, not to mention the scars, to prove it. If they were doing something, he’d back them.
Roy turned off his phone and checked the bus schedule one last time. With his jean jacket for a pillow he tried to sleep. T
oo paranoid. He looped the shoulder strap of his pack around his ankle so no one would walk off with it. The Reno teen spawn lurking at the south entry had clocked him, noted his position. They’d be over if he stayed awake. They wouldn’t be able to help themselves. Sup, they’d say to each other. Sup, with their arms out like they might curtsy, gangster stepping and picking their zits, hauling saggy pants up with their undersized pale hands. An overweight cop in a tan polyester getup and a cowboy hat was watching the door crowders. Something would happen. Sup, juggalo. Sup, dawg. Roy wanted to watch it happen but he wanted sleep more. He wanted the fat cop to open fire. If everybody in the bus station died, he wouldn’t care. The world wouldn’t care.
The speakers were blown on the PA and every time there was an announcement Roy’s head throbbed.
A man in a blue tracksuit was standing over him, listing slightly from the weight of a bulky leather satchel. When their eyes met, Mace set down the bag and gave Roy a strange look.
“You’re not here to meet me, are you?” Mace was confused or angry, his facial expressions switched back and forth like a weak signal on the radio station being overtaken by a stronger one. “Where’s Karen?”
“What are you doing here?” Roy was on his feet, the usual amalgamation of old hip and knee injuries needling under his weight.
“Where’s she? Where’s Karen?”
“She’s gone. She—we split, man. I’m here by myself.”
“If you hurt her, I’m gonna crack your fuckin’ skull.” He smiled and his lip was split and oozing pink blood and it made Roy’s stomach ache.
“So, separately, solo, where are you going now?” Mace said. “Karen writes me and says you two are staying with me through Christmas and now you’re gone?”
“I’m leaving. She’s staying. I give no shits about Christmas. Not one.” Roy felt like he should be absolved of explaining things to Mace. “You bailed as soon as we walked through the door,” Roy said.
