Unexpected Dismounts

by Nancy Rue

  Yeah. Until I followed Chief and Desmond into a now-deserted parking area at the Fort Matanzas Monument, rounded the curve, and felt the bike slide. There was no changing her mind. Even as I was going down, thigh meeting the pavement, I wondered crazily what a mini–sand dune was doing this far back from the beach.

  Chief squatted beside me. “You all right?”

  I had no idea, unless mortified was the same as not all right, in which case I was half-dead.

  “Hey—I said, are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Just help me up.”

  “Right after I get this bike off you.”

  Well, yes, my 760-pound motorcycle was halfway on top of me. There was that.

  Chief squatted with his back toward the seat, gripped the back fender and the lower handlebar, and raised the whole thing with his butt, at least as far as I could tell, without so much as bulging a vein. That probably took all of about twenty seconds, but by then I’d determined that the only thing hurt was my riding esteem.

  “You done took a dive, Big Al,” Desmond said.

  “Ya think?” I said.

  Chief let down the kickstand and squatted again to look over the bike. “Tell him what happened, Classic.”

  I folded my arms so Desmond couldn’t see them shaking. “I used the front brake and not the rear.”

  “Kinda weird, huh, how you know what you doin’ wrong but you do it anyway.” Desmond gave a sage, helmet-clad nod. “That happen to me all the time.”

  Chief stood up and dusted the sand from his gloves. “You bent your back rest, but other than that—”

  “My what?” I said.

  Chief slanted his eyes briefly toward Desmond and back to me. “Your sissy bar,” he said between his teeth.

  “Hey,” Desmond said. “Don’t be callin’ it that, Mr. Chief, sir. I ain’t no sissy. Matter of fact, I could ride without that thing, ’cause I got me some serious balance. Sissies don’t got no balance.”

  “Thanks,” Chief said to me.

  I needed to brush up on my Harley-equipment terminology.

  “Can we just walk down to the beach?” I said.

  “She tryin’ to get outta that lecture you ’bout to give her, Mr. Chief,” Desmond said.

  He took off ahead of us, bouncing back and forth between the railings on the wooden walk that wended its long way down to the dunes. Chief folded his fingers around my upper arm and pulled me along beside him.

  “I’m going to get one anyway, aren’t I?” I said.

  “One what?”

  “Lecture.”

  “Yep.”

  “I know what I did wrong.”

  Chief slanted a glance at me. Another one of those mannerisms I could have recharged my phone with. “You don’t want to know what you did right?”

  “That would be a first.”

  “Once you go into a slide like that, you can’t stop it. So you let it go and go down with it.”

  “That’s what I did, all right,” I said. “Will you be less impressed if I tell you I didn’t do it on purpose?”

  “Basically, you have to feel the bike, sense what it’s going to do.”

  “Feel it,” I said. Wonderful, seeing how my feelings had always been the last thing I could trust.

  We reached the first landing on the walkway, just before it turned and buried its last steps in the dune. Below us, Desmond chased the ocean back from the sand and then turned and ran like a spindly-legged fawn to keep it from nipping at his heels. Fortunately, he’d already parked the boots up near the grass and stripped out of his leather pants, but his jeans were water-darkened from the knee down. I could hear his shrieks over the surf.

  “I bet you’ve never dumped a bike in your life,” I said, still watching Desmond cavort.

  “I’ve had my share of unexpected dismounts.”

  I grinned at Chief. “How is it that a lawyer can make the lamest thing sound acceptable?”

  “It came in handy when I was a public defender,” he said.

  He didn’t grin back. Chief seldom parted with a smile. But the mirth was in his eyes as he gave my face a perusal.

  “There are two kinds of riders, Classic,” he said. “Those who have dumped a bike, and those who will. Now you know which category you fall into.”

  Yeah. I’d heard that before.

  “So does this mean I’ve reached my quota and I’m good to go?” I said.

  “It means you need to stick with me and I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

  Yes. Please.

  We now had very little moonlight between us, just enough for me to see that Chief was looking at my lips. Close enough to make it safe for me to close my eyes—

  “Hey, Big Al! I just seen a shark!”

  “Really?” I could feel Chief’s breath on my mouth. “Really?”

  I backed away to lean over the railing. Desmond was flailing an arm toward the black horizon and dancing in the shallows like a marionette with a couple of strings missing.

  “How could you see a shark?” I yelled to him. “It’s dark as pitch out there.”

  “I seen it! It had a—”

  The rest was lost in the crash of a wave that took him down and washed him, sputtering, up onto the beach. Chief emitted a rare guffaw.

  “He can’t swim,” I said, and made a move toward the steps, but Chief caught my sleeve. “He’s fine. He’s too ornery to drown.”

  Desmond was indeed back on his feet and again gesticulating at imaginary fins. I looked up at Chief, but the moment had passed. It had a way of doing that. One kiss on Christmas Eve was the extent of our physical relationship so far. The way my neck was burning under my scarf … maybe that was a good thing.

  “Let’s walk,” I said.

  Chief let go of my sleeve and followed me down to the beach, though he might as well have thrown me over his shoulder. Just being on the same planet with the man made me positive he could hear me thinking, Come over here and—do—something. His face that near me, his eyes seeing into me that way—it was a miracle I hadn’t crawled inside his jacket, Desmond or no Desmond.

  Or not. Because in all truth, I couldn’t. Not with the risk of Chief backing up and saying, “Are you serious? Is that what you thought this was?”

  I stumbled into the sand and almost had an—what did he call them?—unexpected dismount right there. We were in serious need of a topic change.

  “Desmond!” I called over the wave smashing. “We’re walking, we’re walking.”

  “Once a tour guide, always a tour guide,” Chief said, eyes twinkling at me. Curse the man. He knew exactly what I was doing.

  “I’m going to have to brush up on my spiel,” I said, and launched too fast into a rendition of my conversation with Erin O’Hare while Desmond loped ahead of us, shaking moonlit droplets from his hair. When I included the dark drawing Desmond had wanted to rip off the display, the sparkle in Chief’s eyes disappeared.

  “That’s not like him,” he said.

  “Can we even say that? I mean, seriously, do you realize how little we really know about what happened to him before he came to us—me?”

  Nice. Talk about your unexpected dismounts.

  “You know what Geneveve told us—you,” he said.

  Did he miss nothing, this guy?

  “But how much time did I actually have with her once she got sober?” I said. “A month? The Sisters have told me some, mostly Mercedes. I sure don’t get much out of Desmond.”

  “Oh, you get a lot out of him, just not about his past.” Chief did grin then. “One thing you have to say about the kid: He lives in the moment.”

  As was currently being proven by the amount of wet sand that bagged down the seat of Desmond’s jeans. The fact
that the child had no hips didn’t help.

  “Should I tell him to pull his pants up?” I said.

  “Nah,” Chief said. “He’ll figure it out.”

  “Hopefully before he steps out of them. Did his grandfather ever tell you anything about him?”

  “All old Edwin ever said was that he was a good kid inside, but he couldn’t take care of him anymore.”

  “That whole family had so much potential,” I said. I had to fight down the thickness that always set in when I talked about Geneveve. “Except Geneveve’s sister who took off and left her in the street with her kid. What’s her name?”

  “I don’t think I ever heard it.”

  “Something pretentious sounding—like Daphne or—was it Millicent?”

  “Moving on,” Chief said.

  “Yeah, well, she did, to Africa or someplace. Anyway, it’s just hard with nobody to ask about what all he’s been through.”

  Chief stopped and nodded my gaze to the wiry half child, half adolescent who was currently on all fours, digging in the sand like a dog.

  “I don’t know, Classic,” he said. “Maybe his past is better left right where it is. It’s his future we’ve got to focus on now. You remember we have a meeting with the adoption people tomorrow. Liz Doyle and Vickie—”

  “Rodriguez. It’s on my calendar.”

  One side of his mouth went up. “I hope you handle them better than you did Willa Livengood.”

  “Have I mentioned that you are slime?”

  “Not so far tonight.”

  I actually opened my mouth to do it, but Chief put his fingers in his mouth and gave the Desmond whistle. Desmond turned like a drill bit in the sand and lunged toward us. I should have that kind of influence on the boy.

  Or the man.

  I managed to stay vertical all the way home, and then spent the first ten minutes after Chief left getting the sand out of Desmond’s and my leathers, although Desmond had enough in the rolled-up cuffs of his jeans to make the whole kitchen floor look like Crescent Beach itself. That was helped along by the fact that he was all over the room. I hadn’t seen him that agitated since the last time I took away his helmet.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Nothin’,” he said.

  And then proceeded to open the snack drawer, paw through the options, and shut it—which made me want to check him for fever. He went from there to the phone I’d had disconnected months before, listened like he was expecting a dial tone, and abandoned it for the basket of apples on the bistro table, fruit being a food group he’d never shown the slightest interest in, and didn’t now either. The whole time, his long fingers traveled arachnid-like across the counters, and his eyes glanced off of everything and landed on none of it.

  I considered telling him to light someplace, but wedging a word in was impossible, the way he was muttering under his breath. I folded my arms and leaned against the counter until he finally hiked himself up on one of the stools, lanky legs dangling, and said, “Here’s the deal, Al. I keep gettin’ this thing in here.” He jabbed at his temple. “It’s tellin’ me this ain’t gon’ work out, you adoptin’ me.”

  “Des—”

  “It makes me wanna use the D-word and the S-word, which I ain’t gonna do ’cause I done give that up. Also the B-word—”

  “Got it—”

  “But I got to just chill, ’cause it is gon’ happen. I got you and Mr. Chief.” He stopped again to flash me a grin and tapped his palm, “and I think I got that Liz lady right here.”

  I opened my mouth to say, “Undoubtedly,” but I wasn’t quick enough.

  “I gotta tell you somethin’, Big Al,” Desmond went on, eyes wise.

  “What?” I said.

  “You a real good listener.”

  He held out his fist to bump mine and then crossed the kitchen with a new lease on the snack drawer.

  For a good listener, I didn’t feel all that relieved at what he’d just talked himself into.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Desmond was in bed, I retreated to my second-best place to let God in. The red chair-and-a-half in the living room had been the site of Nudges and whispers in the past, so I curled up there with my Bible and an afghan and tried to close the gap that seemed to be widening between God and my growing list of questions. Zelda. All of Sacrament House, for that matter. Chief. Now Desmond, who apparently had a gap of his own that he was trying to fill by drawing threatening creatures with eye patches and ramming around the kitchen having conversations with himself.

  But at first, I just stared at the wall of Desmond art that now hung above the couch. The house on Palm Row was in its third evolution of decor, at least in my lifetime. Who knew what had hung on these walls from the 1800s until my parents bought it before I was born? Since then, it had gone from my mother’s dreadful reproduction of a golden age that never existed, to the bright, overstuffed comfort zone Sylvia had transformed it into when they left it to her. Its current look was Essential Big Al and Desmond.

  His drawings in the bright-colored frames that HOG friend Stan had made for us. My favorite, the one that sort of looked like Chief but was Desmond’s vision of God.

  A red and black Harley-Davidson throw Chief had given Desmond, which the boy insisted needed to be spread on the green striped chair.

  Plants Jasmine was growing for me, in pots Sherry made in the class her NA sponsor took her to weekly, placed in front of the long windows facing Palm Row and the side of Owen’s place.

  My life had become the people who reached out to me in this house.

  The people you virtually dropped one by one on my doorstep, I said to God. So—is it too much to ask for a little help with what to do for them now that I’ve let them in?

  I shifted uneasily in the chair, feeling like I was in Vice Principal Foo-Foo’s office. I didn’t expect ask-the-question-get-an-answer-move-on. God may have worked that way with some people, but clearly not with me. I’d learned to search the Nudges and whispers given to prophets long before me, guys who were clearly better choices for the job than I was. And I knew to center myself and leave space where I could be moved. I had even figured out that some healthy venting about the situation God had plopped me into could leave me more willing to hear his side.

  I did all of it that and still nothing. Nada. I remained Nudge-less. Which usually meant to keep going with the last Nudge. But wasn’t I doing that? Wasn’t I helping the Sisters move toward their baptisms? And Desmond toward his, though he was admittedly several miles behind them, due to the side trips he made along the way. That was the last thing I’d clearly heard from God.

  Unless you counted Wash their feet.

  I didn’t. That one had to be the result of sleep deprivation. Maybe early menopause. Or the insanity I always suspected was lurking just around the next bend.

  Yeah. I woke up Thursday morning, an hour late, with a crick in my neck.

  I’d left the van with Mercedes so she could take Zelda to the dentist, which meant I had to cart Desmond to school on the Harley, not the most comfortable ride with a behind bruised by last night’s dismount. I made Desmond cling to me like a koala bear because Chief had removed the bent sissy bar. Another thing I had to take care of in an already crowded day.

  I checked for voice mail as I watched Desmond stroll toward the school building. Our one-sided talk the night before seemed to have soothed his fears about the adoption. I could have sworn I heard him cry out once in his sleep, but when I’d peeked in on him in his room off the kitchen, he was in hibernation. Maybe it was just the Oreos he ate before I discovered he’d consumed half the package.

  There was a message from India: “Honey, call me as soon as you get this,” which I did before I pulled away from the school. She picked up with “Darlin’, you are not gon’ believe
this.”

  “There’s not much I wouldn’t believe,” I said. “Try me.”

  “Willa Livengood wants to meet with you again.”

  “That I don’t believe.”

  “She called me yesterday evening, and now, I’m not saying she wasn’t on her second glass of sherry, but she was lucid.”

  “How lucid?”

  “Enough to say she liked your spunk.”

  “Then she must have been on her third glass. Last time I saw her she was about to throw a piece of Yardbird at me.”

  “Yardbird?”

  “Whatever that stuff is in the china cabinet.”

  “My soul, we have a lot of work to do.” I could picture India re­arranging her expression. “Now, listen. Ms. Willa told me she started thinking about it and she decided that you couldn’t possibly be that much like your parents, and maybe she ought to give you another chance.”

  I shifted my helmet to my other hip. “What does that mean?”

  “I guess we’ll find out. But we definitely gon’ find a different venue for it. We’ve got to get her off her throne. So, what if I set up a luncheon-slash-fund-raiser and have her as the guest of honor?”

  “Tell me some more,” I said. Any time lunch became a luncheon, I immediately had visions of my late mother serving up crustless cucumber sandwiches in the dining room on Palm Row. Not my favorite memory. Or menu.

  “We’ll need a program to draw people in,” India said. “I could do a fashion show, maybe find us a nice string quartet.”

  What about a footwashing?

  The Harley wobbled on its stand, and for a second I thought I’d said it out loud, but India went brightly on. Even though she was now my staunchest supporter, she was still adjusting to God telling me to buy a motorcycle. This last message, if it even came from God, was going to require some serious leading up to.