by Joe Hill
There followed a stretch of high open desert, sage and saguaro, cliffs off to the right, striped in chalky shades of yellow and red. They were riding into the sun now, pursued by their own lengthening shadows. Houses and a few trailers whipped by as they blew through a sorry excuse for a township. The bikes were strung out across almost half a mile, with Vince and Lemmy riding close to the back. But not far beyond the town, Vince saw the rest of the Tribe bunched up at the side of the road, just before a four-way intersection, the crossing for Route 6.
Beyond the intersection, to the west, the highway they’d been following was torn down to dirt. A diamond-shaped orange sign read CONSTRUCTION NEXT 20 MILES—BE PREPARED TO STOP. In the distance Vince could see dump trucks and a grader. Men worked in clouds of red smoke, the clay stirred up and drifting across the tableland.
He hadn’t known there would be roadwork here, because they hadn’t come this way. It had been Race’s suggestion to return by the back roads, which had suited Vince fine. Driving away from a double homicide, it seemed like a good idea to keep a low profile. Of course, that wasn’t why Race had suggested it.
“What?” Vince said, slowing and putting his foot down. As if he didn’t already know.
Race pointed away from the construction, down Route 6. “We go south on 6, we can pick up I-40.”
“In Show Low,” Vince said. “Why does this not surprise me?”
It was Roy Klowes who spoke next. He jerked a thumb toward the dump trucks. “Bitch of a lot better than doing five an hour through that shit for twenty miles. No thank you. I’d rather ride easy and maybe pick up sixty grand along the way. That’s my think on it.”
“Did it hurt?” Lemmy asked Roy. “Having a thought? I hear it hurts the first time. Like when a chick gets her cherry popped.”
“Fuck you, Lemmy,” Roy said.
“When I want your think,” Vince said, “I’ll be sure to ask for it, Roy. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
Race spoke, his voice calm, reasonable. “We get to Show Low, you don’t have to stick around. Neither of you. No one’s going to hold it against you if you just want to ride on.”
So there it was.
Vince looked from face to face. The young men met his gaze. The older ones, the ones who’d been riding with him for decades, did not.
“I’m glad to hear no one will hold it against me,” Vince said. “I was worried.”
A memory struck him then: riding with his son in a car at night, in the GTO, back in the days he was trying to go straight, be a family man for Mary. The details of the journey were lost now; he couldn’t recall where they were coming from or where they’d been going. What he remembered was looking into the rearview mirror at his ten-year-old’s dusty, sullen face. They had stopped at a hamburger stand, but the kid didn’t want dinner, said he wasn’t hungry. The kid would only settle for a Popsicle, then bitched when Vince came back with lime instead of grape. He wouldn’t eat it, let the Popsicle melt on the leather. Finally, when they were twenty miles away from the hamburger stand, Race announced that his belly was growling.
Vince had looked into the rearview mirror and said, “You know, just because I’m your father doesn’t mean I got to like you.” And the boy had stared back, his chin dimpling, struggling not to cry but unwilling to look away. Returning Vince’s look with bright, hating eyes. Why had Vince said that? The notion crossed his mind that if he’d known some other way to talk to Race, there would’ve been no Fallujah and no dishonorable discharge for ditching his squad, taking off in a Humvee while mortars fell; there would’ve been no Dean Clarke and no meth lab, and the boy would not feel the need to be out front all the time, blasting along at seventy on his hot-shit jackpuppy when the rest of them were doing sixty. It was him the kid was trying to leave behind. He’d been trying all his life.
Vince squinted back the way they had come—and there was that goddamn truck again. He could see it through the trembling waves of heat on the road, so it seemed half mirage, with its towering stacks and silver grille: LAUGHLIN. Or SLAUGHTERIN, if you were feeling Freudian. Vince frowned, distracted for a moment, wondering again how they’d been able to catch up to and pass a guy who’d had almost an hour’s lead on them.
When Doc spoke, his voice was almost shy with apology. “Might be the thing to do, boss. Sure would beat twenty miles of dirt bath.”
“Well. I wouldn’t want any of you to get dirty,” Vince said.
And he pushed away from the side of the road, throttled up, and turned left onto 6, leading them away toward Show Low.
Behind him, in the distance, he could hear the truck changing gears, the roar of the engine climbing in volume and force, whining faintly as it thundered across the plain.
THE COUNTRY WAS RED AND YELLOW STONE, and they saw no one on the narrow, two-lane road. There was no breakdown lane. They crested a rise, then began to descend into a canyon’s slot, following the road as it wound steadily lower. To the left was a battered guardrail, and to the right was an almost sheer face of rock.
For a while Vince rode out front beside Lemmy, but then Lemmy fell back and it was Race partnered beside him, the father and the son riding side by side, the wind rippling Race’s movie-star black hair back from his brow. The sun, now on the western side of the sky, burned in the lenses of the kid’s shades.
Vince watched him from the corners of his eyes for a moment. Race was sinewy and lean, and even the way he sat on his bike seemed an act of aggression, how he slung it around the curves, tilting to a forty-five-degree angle over the blacktop. Vince envied him his natural athletic grace, and yet at the same time somehow Race managed to make riding a motorcycle look like work. Whereas Vince himself had taken to it because it was the furthest thing from work. He wondered idly if Race was ever really at ease with himself.
Vince heard the grinding thunder of a big engine behind him and took a long, lazy look back over his shoulder just in time to see the truck come bearing down on them. Like a lion breaking cover at a watering hole where a bunch of gazelles were loafing. The Tribe was rolling in bunches, as always, doing maybe forty-five down the switchbacks, and the truck was rushing along at closer to sixty. Vince had time to think, He’s not slowing down, and then LAUGHLIN slammed through the three running at the back of the pack with an eardrum-stunning crash of steel on steel.
Bikes flew. One Harley was thrown into the rock wall, the rider—John Kidder, sometimes known as Baby John—catapulting off it, tossed into the stone, then rebounding and disappearing under the steel-belted tires of LAUGHLIN’S truck. Another rider (Doc, no, not Doc) was driven into the left lane. Vince had the briefest glance of Doc’s pale and astonished face, mouth opening in an O, the twinkle of the gold tooth he was so proud of. Wobbling out of control, Doc struck the guardrail and went over his handlebars, flung into space. His Harley flipped over after him, the hardcase breaking open and spilling laundry. The truck chewed up the fallen bikes. The big grille seemed to snarl.
Then Vince and Race swung around another hard curve side by side, leaving it all behind.
The blood surged to Vince’s heart, and for a moment there was a dangerous pinching in his chest. He had to fight for his next breath. The instant the carnage was out of sight, it was hard to believe it had really happened. Hard to believe the spinning bikes hadn’t taken out the speeding truck, too. Yet he had just finished coming around the bend when Doc crashed into the road ahead of them. His bike landed on top of his body with an echoing clang. His clothes came floating after. Doc’s sleeveless denim jacket came drifting down last, ballooning open, caught for a moment on an updraft. Over a silhouette of Vietnam in gold thread was the legend WHEN I GET TO HEAVEN, THEY’LL LET ME IN BECAUSE I’VE ALREADY BEEN TO HELL. IRON TRIANGLE 1968. The clothes, the owner of the clothes, and the owner’s ride had dropped from the terrace above, falling seventy feet to the highway below.
Vince jerked the handlebars, swerving around the wreck with one boot heel skimming the patched asphalt. His friend of
twenty years, Doc Regis, was now a six-letter word for lubricant: “grease.” He was facedown, but his teeth were glistening in a slick of blood next to his left ear, the goldie among them. His shins had come out through the backs of his legs, poles of shining red bone poking through his jeans. All this Vince saw in an instant, then wished he could unsee. The gag muscles fluttered in his throat, and when he swallowed, there was a burning taste of bile.
Race swung around the other side of the ruin that had been Doc and Doc’s bike. He looked sideways at Vince, and while Vince could not see his eyes behind his shades, his face was a rigid, stricken thing, the expression of a small kid up past his bedtime who has walked in on his parents watching a grisly horror movie on DVD.
Vince looked back again and saw the remnants of the Tribe coming around the bend. Just seven now. The truck howled after, swinging around the curve so fast that the long tank it was hauling lurched hard to one side, coming perilously close to tipping, its tires smoking on the blacktop. Then it steadied and bore on, striking Ellis Harbison. Ellis was launched straight up into the air, as if bounced off a diving board. He almost looked funny, pinwheeling his arms against the blue sky—at least until he came down and went under the truck. His ride turned end over end before being swatted entirely aside by the eighteen-wheeler.
Vince caught a jittery glimpse of Dean Carew as the truck caught up to him. The truck butted the rear tire of his bike. Dean highsided and came down hard, rolling at fifty miles an hour along the highway, the asphalt peeling his skin away, his head bashing the road again and again, leaving a series of red punctuation marks on the chalkboard of the pavement.
An instant later the tanker ate Dean’s bike, bang, thump, crunch, and the lowrider that Dean had still been making payments on exploded, a parachute of flame bursting open beneath the truck. Vince felt a wave of pressure and heat against his back, shoving him forward, threatening to lift him off the seat of his bike. He thought the truck itself would go up, slammed right off the road as the oil tanker detonated in a column of fire. But it didn’t. The rig came thundering through the flames, its sides streaked with soot and black smoke belching from its undercarriage but otherwise undamaged, and going faster than ever. Vince knew that Macks were fast—the new ones had a 485 power plant under the hood—but this thing . . .
Supercharged? Could you supercharge a goddamn semi?
Vince was moving too fast, felt his front tire beginning to slurve about. They were close to the bottom of the slope now, where the road leveled out. Race was a little ahead. In his rearview Vince could see the only other survivors: Lemmy, Peaches, Roy. And the truck was closing in again.
They could beat it on a rise—in a heartbeat—but now there were no rises. Not for the next twenty miles, if his memory was right. It was going to get Peaches next, Peaches who was funniest when he was trying to be serious. Peaches threw a terrified glance back over his shoulder, and Vince knew what he was seeing: a chrome cliff. One that was moving in.
Fucking think of something. Lead them out of this.
It had to be him. Race was still riding okay, but he was on autopilot, face frozen, fixed forward as if he had a sprained neck and was wearing a brace. A thought struck Vince then—terrible but curiously certain—that this was how Race had looked the day in Fallujah that he drove away from the men in his squad, while the mortar rounds dropped around them.
Peaches put on a burst of speed and gained a little on the truck. It blasted its air horn, as if in frustration. Or laughter. Either way, the old Georgia Peach had only gained a stay of execution. Vince could hear the trucker—maybe named Laughlin, maybe a devil from hell—changing gears. Christ, how many forward did he have? A hundred? He started to close the distance. Vince didn’t think Peaches would be able to squirt ahead again. That old flathead Beezer of his had given all it had to give. Either the truck would take him or the Beez would blow a head gasket and then the truck would take him.
BRONK! BRONK! BRONK-BRONK-BRONK!
Shattering a day that was already shattered beyond repair—but it gave Vince an idea. It depended where they were. He knew this road. He knew them all out here, but he hadn’t been this way in years and could not be sure now, on the fly, if they were where he thought they were.
Roy threw something back over his shoulder, something that twinkled in the sun. It struck LAUGHLIN’S dirty windshield and flew off. The fucking machete. The truck bellowed on, blowing double streams of black smoke, the driver laying on that horn again—
BRONK-BRONK! BRONK! BRONK-BRONK-BRONK!
—in blasts that sounded weirdly like Morse.
If only . . . Lord, if only . . .
And yes. Up ahead was a sign so filthy it was only barely possible to read it: CUMBA 2.
Cumba. Goddamn Cumba. A played-out little mining town on the side of a hill, a place where there were maybe five slots and one old geezer selling Navajo blankets made in Laos.
Two miles wasn’t much time when you were already doing eighty. This would have to be quick, and there would be just one chance.
The others made fun of Vince’s sled, but only Race’s ridicule had a keen edge to it. The bike was a rebuilt Kawasaki Vulcan 800 with Cobra pipes and a custom seat. Leather as red as a fire alarm. “The old man’s La-Z-Boy,” Dean Carew had once called the seat.
“Fuck that,” Vince had replied indignantly, and when Peaches, solemn as a preacher, had said, “I’m sure you have,” they all broke up.
The Tribe called the Vulcan a rice-burner, of course. Also Vince’s Tojo Mojo el Rojo. Doc—Doc who was now spread all over the road behind them—liked to call it Miss Fujiyama. Vince only smiled as though he knew something they didn’t. Maybe he even did. He’d had the Vulcan up to one-twenty and had stopped there. Pussied out. Race wouldn’t have, but Race was a young man, and young men had to know where things ended. One-twenty had been enough for Vince, but he’d known there was more. Now he would find out how much.
He grasped the throttle and twisted it all the way to the stop.
The Vulcan responded not with a snarl but a cry and almost tore out from under him. He had a blurred glimpse of his son’s white face, and then he was past, in the lead, riding the rocket, desert smells packing his nose. Up ahead was a dirty string of asphalt angling off to the left, the road to Cumba. Route 6 went past in a long, lazy curve to the right. Toward Show Low.
Vince looked in his right-hand rearview and saw that the others had bunched and that Peaches still had the shiny side up. Vince thought the truck could have taken Peaches—maybe all the others—but he was laying back a little, knowing as well as Vince did that for the next twenty miles there were no upgrades. Beyond the turnoff to Cumba, the highway was elevated and a guardrail ran along either side of it; Vince thought miserably of cattle in the chute. For the next twenty miles, the road belonged to LAUGHLIN.
Please let this work.
He let off the throttle and began squeezing the handbrake rhythmically. What the four behind him saw (if they were looking) was a short flash . . . a long flash . . . another short flash. Then a pause. Then a repeat. Short . . . long . . . short. It was the truck’s air horn that had given him the idea. It only sounded like Morse, but what Vince was flashing with his brake light was Morse.
It was the letter R.
Roy and Peaches might pick it up, Lemmy for sure. And Race? Did they still teach Morse? Had the kid learned it in his war, where squad leaders carried GPS units and bombs were guided around the curve of the world by satellite?
The left turn to Cumba was coming up. Vince had just time enough to flash R one more time. Now he was almost back with the others. He shot his hand left in a gesture the Tribe knew well: Follow me off the highway. Laughlin saw it—as Vince had expected—and surged forward. At the same time he did, Vince twisted his throttle again. The Vulcan screamed and leaped forward. He banked right, along the main road. The others followed. But not the truck. LAUGHLIN had already started its turn onto the Cumba spur. If the driver had tried to corr
ect for the main road, he would have rolled his rig.
Vince felt a white throb of elation and reflexively closed his left hand into a triumphant fist. We did it! We fucking did it! By the time he gets that fat-ass truck turned around, we’ll be nine miles from h—
The thought broke off like a branch as he looked again into his rearview. There were three bikes behind him, not four: Lemmy, Peaches, and Roy.
Vince swiveled to the left, hearing the old bones crackle in his back, knowing what he would see. He saw it. The truck, dragging a huge rooster tail of red dust, its tanker too dirty to shine. But there was shine fifty or so yards in front of it, the gleam of the chromed pipes and engine belonging to a Softail Deuce. Race either did not understand Morse, didn’t believe what he was seeing, or hadn’t seen at all. Vince remembered the waxy, fixed expression on his son’s face and thought this last possibility was most likely. Race had stopped paying attention to the rest of them—had stopped seeing them—the moment he understood that LAUGHLIN was not just a truck out of control but one bent on tribal slaughter. He had been just aware enough to spot Vince’s hand gesture but had lost all the rest to a kind of tunnel vision. What was that? Panic? Or some animal selfishness? Or were they the same when you came down to it?
Race’s Harley slipped behind a low swell of hill. The truck disappeared after it, and then there was only blowing dust. Vince tried to catch his flying thoughts and put them in some coherent order. If his memory was right again—he knew he was asking a lot of it; he hadn’t been this way in a couple of years—then the spur road ran through Cumba before veering back to rejoin Highway 6 about nine miles ahead. If Race could stay in front—
Except.
Except, unless things had changed, the road went to hardpan dirt beyond Cumba and was apt to drift across sandy at this time of year. The truck would do okay, but a motorcycle . . .
The chances that Race would survive the last four miles of that nine-mile run weren’t good. The chances of his dumping the Deuce and being run over were, on the other hand, excellent.