by Patti Abbott
Everything starts slow in the beginning, so when he saw the blue strobe, Rex stopped the bike as quickly as he could. It gave him enough time to pull the leather pouch from his jacket pocket and give an underhand toss. The pouch arced into the tree line, Mile Marker 7. He’d come back tomorrow.
When the white Chevy Impala pulled behind him, the vehicle's blue strobe and headlights lit the scene. There was Rex covered in homemade tattoos of the finest dirty-kitchen quality. He wore a sleeveless denim jacket with $3 SOULS embroidered on the back in champion-yellow and had a head full of soap-hating black hair. And then there were the two police officers that got out of the car. One was older, shorter, and broader than the other.
The older one said, “Where you going? The moon?” His partner didn’t say anything. “If this was Memphis, there’d be guns drawn.” They got on each side of the motorcycle. The older one continued, “Have I had run-ins with you before?”
He had. The older cop was Jerry Powers, and when Rex was a teenager, he once rode in the back of Jerry’s cop car after being caught trying to steal beer from the Little General convenience store. He remembered the car's radio tuned to the oldies station, the volume so low he could only make out the choruses. He also remembered how the night lights of the town rolled in the dark backseat. On the way to the police department, the officer glanced in the rear-view mirror, trying to talk sense to the sixteen-year old. The standard lecture; “What’s your family going to think about this? Better straighten up because I know exactly where you’re headed if you don’t.”
But that was almost ten years ago, and Rex knew by Jerry’s face he didn’t remember. “Don’t believe we‘ve met,” Rex said.
“Well, license, registration, proof of insurance?” Jerry asked. Rex pulled the information from his wallet. The officer didn’t look at it and handed it to his partner. “Tip, run that for me.”
Rex didn’t know Tip. The younger officer was tall with buzzed dark hair. Unlike Jerry, his forehead was free of wrinkles. Rex could tell Tip hadn’t been with the J.P.D. for long by the way he had followed Jerry out of the car and waited for his partner to talk. He didn't even rest his hand on his holster like Jerry had.
Rex looked at Tip’s badge, the Jackson Police bald eagle with its open-mouth and unfurled wings in the blinking blue lights. Underneath the badge, a nametag that read Ofc. Carrington in engraved letters. Rex knew a Carrington from somewhere, but the name lost itself as Tip went back to the vehicle, leaving Jerry and Rex alone. Jerry walked in circles around the motorcycle. The hand that wasn’t resting on the gun holster carried a flashlight that surveyed the bike like a silver baton, the light traveling between the crannies of the engine, muffler, and spokes.
“Why you going so fast?” Jerry asked.
“Didn’t realize I was,” Rex said, but he knew he had been. The longer he drove the faster he accelerated. Sometimes he imagined being in a race with his father’s '69 Pontiac GTO. Richard Fowler called it The Goat, already a classic by the time Rex was born. Taking night-rides with his father as a boy, Rex tried counting the yellow rectangles that lay in the road, but he could never get a good count going. His father simply drove too fast. While Richard raced beyond 60 miles per hour, and then beyond 70 miles per hour, Rex could only get to numbers like thirteen or fourteen before the markings passed him at speeds faster than he could count, a pace beyond memory and comprehension. Rex would give up, the velocity of The Goat taking his mind elsewhere.
However, those rides only happened on occasion. When Richard was in one of his rare moods, he’d ask his son to take a ride, and without a thought, Rex always went.
Richard brought his son outside the city limits. “The cops don’t really care out here,” he said. And in that country darkness, trees became another component of the night, another shade of black. Rex’s father pressed down on the gas pedal, and the Goat’s engine yelled violence at deafening levels. The father tightened his hands around the steering wheel, gripping it so hard his only tattoo on his right shoulder moved. The tattoo depicted a cobra striking a panther. When he wore sleeveless tops, his son watched the snake stir with wrath against the cat. And if Richard got really excited, he screamed with the engine, “It’s the speed that matters. The speed.” Rex nodded, giving a weak smile.
But those memories of his father were the only ones Rex remotely appreciated. He had come to believe that when he was a growing boy, his father couldn’t accept being grown. Richard was rarely home. And if he was home, he didn’t pay much attention to BeBe or Rex.
BeBe had told her son that when Richard clocked out of his factory job, where he manufactured car door handles for Toyota, he wandered off to other places. “He likes going to John-Ray’s,” she said, “where he smokes pot from a glass bong and enjoys feeling trashy.” When BeBe was pregnant with Rex, she had told her husband no more of that in the house, so Richard went elsewhere.
She also claimed Richard dined in bars where he took a few sips and let strange women borrow both a cigarette and a light. “But he don’t go to places like the Drink Box or the Fishing Pond to just beer-up and talk to women,” she said. “He likes visiting those places because of the attention his GTO gets. He thinks when he pulls up in the parking lot with the engine cranking in demon power, all the bartenders and barstoolees say, ‘There’s Richie Fowler, hollering at hell.’ Or when he leaves, ‘There’s Richie, rip roaring away.’ He thinks people want to watch The Goat’s red paintjob go in and out of sight from the parking lot.”
But most of the time, Richard didn’t go to any of those places. When he came home on those nights, he didn’t smell like John-Ray’s sweet leaf, nor did he have the attached film of bar smoke on his factory-blue overalls. He smelled like nothing.
“Where you been?” BeBe asked, while Rex hid in the hallway and listened.
“Nowhere,” Richard replied.
Rex imagined Nowhere being a place where everything was much different than home. Nowhere had no edges or boundaries. His father drove his GTO in a planet of black and anti-everything, like one of those motorcycle cage-spheres made out of steel he had seen in movies. And instead of a dirt bike, his father drove the GTO forwards, backwards, down, up, left, right, diagonally, and in other directions too. All in darkness. Nowhere was where Richard truly wanted to be, where he was truly happy, where he was truly himself. And when Rex was thirteen, it was where his father went when Richard suddenly packed his bags, left in his car, and never came back to BeBe or Rex again.
*****
Jerry kept walking in slow circles around the motorcycle. He had stopped shining the flashlight on the bike and put it to Rex’s body, the orb rotating around his chest, arms, and back.
“Where you coming from?”
Rex wasn’t about to lie just yet. “The bar. Only had one and a half before you ask.”
Jerry stopped walking and shined the flashlight into Rex’s eyes. “Which bar?”
“Snow White’s.” Rex began to squint.
“Light hurting your eyes?” the officer asked. He brought the flashlight down and saw the tattoos on Rex’s hands. “What in the hell’s on your knucks?” The cop picked up Rex’s hands and read the tattoos aloud, “An Upside Down Star, E, A, T, G, O, D, Upside Down Cross.” Jerry made a sound with his tongue and continued, “What drives you to put something like that on your body?”
Rex didn’t say anything.
“Well, I tell you what’s interesting,” the officer said, letting go of the tattooed hands. “It’s interesting you coming from the bar. We just heard a call about Snow White’s on the radio. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Don’t have a clue.”
“Don’t know anything about a fight?”
“No fight happened while I was there.”
“Yeah? There was a fight sure enough. A report that some kid got it good,” Jerry said. “By a biker.”
“That’s something.”
“Something alright. You’re coming from a biker bar. And you�
��re a biker. I ain’t fooled, I know what a Three Dollar Soul is,” he alluded to the patch on Rex’s back. “I know you fashion yourselves a motorcycle club,” he said. “Coincidence is something.”
“I wasn’t the only biker there. I didn’t see a fight. I haven’t thrown a punch all night, and I ain’t got nothing for you,” Rex said. However, he had seen the fight…real good.
Who knows how it got started. One of the Young Boys could’ve said something smart to Pettin, K.J. or Killer Juice, Endless Frank, or any of the Three Dollar Souls. Maybe Big Cody threw a beer at one of the Young Boys for getting too close. Or maybe it was none of that. Perhaps a wind came into the bar, pushing smoke from any of the numerous lit cigarettes in the face of T-Boy who hated the smell of “that bullshit”, which in turn made him mad as a hornet and ready to start something with any of the cocky-shit Young Boys playing a game of darts adjacent to the Three Dollar Souls’ pool table. It wasn’t that difficult to get a fight started in Snow White’s on a Friday night with the Three Dollar Souls.
“Oh, shit. You knocked him cucumber-cold,” Pettin said as he came from behind, shaking Rex by the shoulder. Everyone knew that when one falls like that it’s over. “You boys came on the wrong night.” He started dancing around with his right middle finger in the air and his left hand on his crotch. “Y’all didn’t know Rex here got the fist from Hell.”
Rex watched the Young Boys drag their friend out the door, the boy’s feet pointing to the ceiling like a body in a morgue.
“Anyone got a toe tag?” Pettin asked as if he read Rex’s mind.
The Young Boys weren’t a motorcycle club like the Three Dollar Souls. They weren’t a neighborhood gang either. They were only called the Young Boys because that’s what they were—young boys. Boys that just graduated high school and came to Snow White’s on weekends for the 75 cent-a-game pool tables, the jukebox that played anything from Merle Haggard to Danzig, and the bar-mothers who might just partake in serving a minor if the boys “acted nice.”
Five of them came into Snow White’s on this particular night, all wearing tight t-shirts that showed off their youthful weight-bench biceps. Rex watched them walk around with their chests cocked and shoulders wobbling. He knew the night would end with dramatics because the Three Dollar Souls didn’t stand for Young Boys acting like Big Boys.
Before the fight started, Rex was sitting at the bar by himself until Pettin came along from the pool table. Pettin was a long-time member of the Three Dollar Souls and Rex’s roommate.
“Them Young Boys ready for some stuff tonight,” he said.
Rex nodded. “They usually are. What’d they do?”
“Saying it was their turn for the pool table.”
“But there are two pool tables.”
“That’s what I told them, but they said we knew damn well the one we were on was the flattest. Just horseshit, you know.” He began laughing, “And when they dribbled that mess, fucking Big Cody, straight-faced as a metal pole, said, ‘Looks like y’all gotta get a new set of rules then.’”
“What’d they say back to Cody?” Rex asked
“Nothing. Probably mumbled out their ass.” Pettin waved his hand to alert Vickie the bartender. Rex smelled the combination of leather and body odor from Pettin while he moved.
Vickie came over, grinning, and said, “What you want, sonbitch?”
“Damn, woman. Always got something smart to say, don't she?”
“Don’t I know, could barely get this,” Rex said, holding up his beer.
“Oh, don’t turn on me. I pay attention to you.” And she did. They had a thing for each other that hadn’t come to fruition, partly because Rex wasn’t good at flirting. They were getting there though.
“But when I deal with the likes of him,” Vickie pointed at Pettin, “I gotta be smart. Now what you want?”
“Bad bitch,” Pettin said. He looked behind the bar, searching for something. “I want uhhh…”
“We ain’t got Uhhh,” Vickie said with the snap of a comedian.
“You’re on one tonight. Just get me a Bud L.”
“What about you?” she asked Rex.
“I’ll take another,” Rex said. Vickie nodded and gave him one of those winks that said the beer was free.
“Boy, that bird's got something for you,” Pettin said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“You don’t, but I do. Her red-hair and freckles shake when she talks to you. You’ll be the stud of the parking lot if you get that. Ready for a girlfriend?”
Rex looked Pettin dead in the face and said, “You're nuthouse crazy.”
“Which means yes. I ain’t ever known you with a girl before, but you ready.”
Rex had had women, but only the type with faded tattoos down their thighs and skin sun-colored to the likes of a penny. Biker Bitches, that’s what they were called. Those types of women were always around, and neither Rex, nor anyone else in the club, wanted a Biker Bitch as a girlfriend, significant other, or wife. Maybe as a pet, but that’s about it.
Vickie was different though. He didn’t think she’d ever been with a biker before, and he imagined her coming to his apartment after a long night at Snow White’s. And when she came home from work, he’d ask if she had enough energy to go for a ride. She would. She’d put on her helmet and jacket he had bought for her and sit behind him on his bike. He’d feel her breasts on his back, her leather-sleeves wrapped around his leather-torso like a nut and a bolt. And he’d go fast, but they’d do it together, so fast that the gravity tried to pull her away from him, her arms trying to slip off his waist while the motorcycle’s speed pulled faster and stronger than gravity could take and---
“Here y’all go,” Vickie said, pulling the tab for each of their beers. The can’s lip made a hollow sound when it cracked. “I'll check back in a bit.”
But it wasn’t long after Vickie served the beer that everyone heard “Hey! Hey, hey!” coming from the pool tables. Rex turned and saw T-Boy, Big Cody, Endless Frank, and the rest of the Souls grabbing the Young Boys’ shirts, throats, and arms.
Without thinking twice, Rex went straight into the thrall of youthful muscles and biker tattoos. He pushed and punched until he squared evenly with one of the younger Young Boys. The showdown didn’t last long because Rex went off first, slamming his tattooed fist into smooth chin. The Young Boy fell like a shoddy bomb. But it wasn’t just the punch. It was the way he smacked against the floor too. On the way down, his arms, legs, and spine were already stiffed by the blow, so when the Young Boy hit ground, his hands didn’t break the fall. His head sounded like a baseball hitting a field made of concrete. Rex had heard rumors of people dying like that.
*****
“So you’re telling me you don’t know anything about a fight?” Jerry asked.
“That’s what I’m telling.”
“Okay then.”
“Don’t believe me? Hell, take me to Snow White’s. Get what you call an I D,” Rex said.
“Think I don’t know how it works up there? All of you, the Dollared Souls, the bartenders, the patrons, thicker than a tribe. Ain’t worth the time.”
Rex knew he didn’t have to worry about the Young Boys either, too cocky to report an ass-whooping.
“Looks like my partner’s getting out of the car now though,” Jerry said.
Tip walked towards the two, staring at Rex and shaking his head. Rex was reminded again of Tip’s last name—Carrington. Once more he tried to grasp where he knew it from, the name clear in his head. He saw it spelled perfectly clean, yet it was like the bottom of the letters had roots. Roots that went deep, but eventually connected together in the deepest of layers. He’d have to dig get it.
“Cheryl looked. Nothing on him,” Tip said, handing the information back to Jerry.
“We’ll see.” Jerry studied the driver’s license and said, “Rex Fowler? I do know you. When you were younger, you tried to steal a Corona from the store on Huntingdon that ain’t ther
e no more.” He turned to Tip. “I remember because it wasn’t liquor, wasn’t cigarettes, and out of all the beers in the world, a single Corona. I still think about it every now and then. Why didn’t you say anything, Rex?”
“Who said I remembered you?”
Jerry gave a laugh. “True.” He went back to the license. “Got a birthday coming too. You’ll be what, twenty-six?”
Rex nodded his head, looking off somewhere.
“Tip, what you think of all this tattoo and biker stuff?”
“Oh hell, Jerry, I don’t know,” he responded as if scared of giving the wrong opinion.
Disappointed in Tip’s response, the older officer went back to Rex. “So when’d you join this rag-tag crew of yours?”
“Eighteen” Rex said, a year after he dropped out of school. BeBe had tried to set him straight. She told him what an education could do, talked about actions and consequences, tried saying that life’s a slot-machine and there’s only so many quarters. BeBe said all these things to Rex, but he paid her no mind. Destroying school property led to fistfights at the ballpark, and fighting turned into stealing beers from the Little General. Indian-ink tattoos started showing up on his forearms. BeBe couldn’t do anything for him. She got tired of trying.
A little before joining the Souls, Rex got a job as a dishwasher at Bailey’s Southern. He still lived with his mother and had no bills to pay, so he saved every paycheck. BeBe thought it was a good sign—responsibility. And four months later, he scoped the BuySell section of the newspaper and saw an ad for a 91 Honda Nighthawk. Black. Only one rider before. Great-shape. $2000-FIRM. Rex got the bike for $1,500, his first motorcycle. He quit his job the next day.
Rex dedicated every minute to learning how to ride the bike, how to lean with the curves and bend his body against the wind. He wasn’t afraid to try and pass the 110 mph marker either, where the speedometer quit counting because it was scared of going beyond. He mostly rode at night when the back roads were deserted. He’d come home early morning, get a bite to eat, and go to sleep.
