by Darrel Bird
***
His, or rather Jim Dugan’s, Kawasaki finally gave up the ghost from too much hard riding and being put away wet, so he got off and rolled the thing into a ditch. So here he was, without wheels on a concrete road, with no place to go, and no means to get there.
He had walked about five miles when he saw a nice Harley sitting on a guy’s front lawn, and went for it. It belonged to a long, lean, beat up, buck-toothed Vietnam veteran by the name of Larry Skaggs, who allowed back talk from no man. Larry was so tall and skinny you could have read a newspaper through him if he turned sideways. He had been in the Vietnam War and had been shot at so many times he swore that all of Vietnam was out to get him, including the women and the kids.
So as Jessie was working at the wiring on Larry’s bike, Larry walked out of his living room with a baseball bat in his hand. “Boy, what you aiming to do with that bike?” said Larry.
“I was going to steal it, sir,” said Jessie, just as polite as could be. After all he was fresh off the Mississippi, and his daddy had taught him to be polite to his elders. The old grayed-haired Vietnam vet just stood and looked at Jessie, but if Jessie had moved a hair, he would not have gotten up. Larry Skaggs was still quick as a ball of greased lightning. Some of his friends said that’s the reason he didn’t get shot over in Vietnam; he just dodged the bullets.
“Boy, don’t you know better than that? Didn’t your daddy teach you anything?”
“My daddy taught me, but it didn’t save him from getting murdered by a no-account snake.” Larry sensed the kid was downright dangerous, but there was something else about him he couldn’t put his finger on.
“Can you even ride that hog, boy?”
“You quit calling me boy, or I’m going to beat the hell out of you.”
“Looks like I am the one that’s got the bat, son.” Larry just stood and looked at Jessie like he was talking to the old lady next door. “You going to answer my question?”
“Yeah, I can ride; my ride quit on me a way back down the road.”
“Why don’t you fix it, instead of trying to steal mine then, boy; are you that dumb?”
“I ain’t dumb; I just don’t know how to fix it. I try, but I just can’t wrap my mind around the mechanics of a bike; I can ridem’ but I can’t fixem'.”
“Well, do you want to learn, or go on stealing other folk’s property and end up in the pen?”
“Yeah, I’d like to learn, but I got no one to teach me, and I can’t figure out the manuals neither.”
“Where is your bike at?”
“My bike is…well it really ain’t my bike, I stole it from Jim Dugan ’bout a year ago.”
“So where is Jim Dugan’s bike then? And would you mind telling me who Jim Dugan is while you’re at it?”
So Jessie told Larry where Jim Dugan’s bike was and who Jim Dugan was. “Let’s get the truck and go get your bike or Jim Dugan’s bike or whose ever it is; come on boy!”
Larry led him around to the back of the house where his old Ford pickup sat. He got in and pumped the gas about a half dozen times. The old pickup started with a large billow of smoke emanating from the rusted-through tail pipe.
“Get in, son.” Jessie climbed in, Larry floored the old pickup, and they went bouncing out onto the street.
“If you’re such a good mechanic, how come you don’t fix this truck?”
“Boy, I don’t waste my time on this pile of junk.” They got onto the 205 freeway and headed south until Jessie pointed off to the side of the road at a glint of chrome lying in the ditch. Larry proceeded to the next exit, and then turned the truck back north. When they arrived back at the spot Jessie had indicated, he pulled to the shoulder of the road. He threw open the driver door and walked around the truck to where the bike lay on its side in the weeds and tall grass. Jessie followed him to where the bike lay.
“Pitiful, just pitiful.”
“What’s pitiful?”
“That!” Larry pointed toward the Kawasaki.
“I told you, that’s why I rolled it in the ditch! Its wore out!”
“No, boy; the motor’s tired, but frames don’t wear out. Help me get her up.” Jessie helped him get the bike back on its wheels, and roll it to the back of the truck. Larry swung a davit arm out over the bike, pulled the cable down, and wrapped it around the frame. “Ok. While I crank, you guide the bike up into the bed.” Larry worked the crank, and the bike began to lift off the ground. Jessie guided the bike as Larry swung the davit in over the truck bed.
“That’s pretty slick.”
“Yeah, I made it myself, saves a lot of back work.” Jessie began to look at Larry with new eyes. Before long they had the bike on the ground, back at Larry’s place. “Let’s go inside and get something to eat; my stomach just came up to see if my throat was cut.” Inside the house Larry began to open cans of food. “The bathroom is down the hall, you might want to wash up, seeing as you’re a filthy bugger. Now you go on while I fix us something to eat.”
Jessie started to argue about the wise cracks aimed at him, but instead he turned down the hall. He came out in a few minutes with a clean face, and his long hair combed. Larry gave him an approving nod, and then went on heating the cans of ravioli on the stove. At length the food was prepared, and Larry sat two plates on the table, with eating utensils lined up like three dead soldiers. “Sit boy, don’t just stand there gaping!”
Jessie shyly pulled the chair back from the table and sat. He reached for the bread. Larry reached his hand out to stop him, “Boy what you doing?”
“Well dammit! I thought we was going to eat!” All of a sudden Jessie was a dangerous man, out of nowhere the danger roared and sat and stared out of cold eyes at Larry.
Larry had seen the butt of the gun in Jessie’s jacket, but Larry looked back into the face of death as calm as a cucumber. “We got to ’turn thanks first kid, before we eat at this table.” Larry bowed his head and began to pray, “Dear Father, Jessie and I, we done a lot of things we shouldn’t of, and we ain’t much, but with your help we can become better people. This boy here sure ain’t much that you sent down here, but I know you know what you are doing. Please bless this food, even though we don’t have it coming, in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Dig in, son.” Jessie dug; he hadn’t eaten a good meal in a week and a half, and he dug. After the meal Larry and Jessie sat on the porch smoking and staring at the bike. Larry cupped the fingers of his two hands together and looked at the bike through them, as if he was taking a snap shot.
“What you doing that for, Larry?”
“You’ll see son, you’ll see. Tomorrow we start work on it.”
“You don’t know me from Adam; I might just kill you tonight while you sleep and take the Harley.”
“Are you going to kill me, Jessie?”
“No, I reckon not.”
“Then if the Lord lets us both live, tomorrow we will start on the bike, you sleep on the couch, ’cause you ain’t getting my bed.”
“Do you really believe that prayer you prayed?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I got acquainted with Jesus while they was shooting at me in Vietnam. There ain’t no atheist in a war, boy. I had plenty of time while I was laying in paddy water up to my neck to think about things real good.” Larry’s eyes closed as he recalled the war, a medic hauled him out of a hot landing zone when he took a bullet through his left leg, just a kid, really. The medic hauled him to safety, and if it hadn’t of been for the medic, he would have bled to death right there in that rice paddy. Jessie resembled that medic. Larry pushed thoughts of the war back, “let's turn in; we got a hard day ahead of us tomorrow.”
Jessie lay on the couch a long while thinking about this strange man. He saw the key laying on the end table, and was tempted to take the key, crank the Harley, and run, but some unidentifiable thing about Larry held him in check.
The next morning he woke up a
bout nine to the sound of a hammer on metal. Larry had the bike on a stand, and was beating at a stubborn bolt that ran through the frame and the engine on the Kawasaki. Jessie walked out to the shop where Larry was already taking the engine out of the bike. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I just like to get started early, and you looked tired.” Larry looked like a flexible fence rail as he knelt on the concrete floor and folded himself around the bike like a pretzel. Larry showed him the bolts to pull, and soon they had the engine lying out on the floor. Larry then began stripping the cables and the wiring from the frame of the bike. At length, the frame sat stripped of everything, and Larry got up and eyed the frame.
By the time evening came around, Larry was busy cutting and grinding away on the naked frame. “Let’s call it a day.”
They fixed sandwiches for supper, ate, and walked out on the front porch and sat down.
“You don’t eat very good do you?” Jessie said.
“I eat a sight better than you, out on the road like that,” Larry retorted.
“Tomorrow is Saturday, and we have a meeting over in Oregon City. We’ll take the truck since you don’t have a ride yet.”
“What kind of a meeting?”
“I belong to an organization called C.M.A., which stands for Christian Motorcycle Association. We have a prayer breakfast every Saturday.”
“What’s a prayer breakfast?”
“Oh, just mainly a time of fellowship. I want you to meet someone who will be there. He is going to give his testimony tomorrow.”
This got Jessie’s curiosity up. “Who is it?”
“You just wait and see.”
“I should have killed you and took the bike just to keep you from driving me nuts; you know that?”
“But you didn’t; you could have taken the bike, but you didn’t; and you couldn’t kill me if you tried, unless the Lord allowed you.”
Jessie looked at him doubtfully, he had shot the Angel with no problem, yet he felt there was a force in this man to be reckoned with, a something that he was not familiar with.
“Put your clothes in the washer tonight; you stink.”
Jessie raised his arm and smelled his arm pits, “I guess I am getting a little rank.”
“A little! Boy they can smell you coming a mile away!”
The next morning Jessie appeared from the bathroom with clean clothes, a shower, and some of Larry’s after shave on, although he didn’t shave. Larry appraised him with his long hair, his beard, and his eyes, which were cold as the grave. He had prayed at length for Jessie the night before, and whatever else Larry lacked, he did have faith in God, so he was prepared to sit back and see what God was going to do with this life the Lord had dropped in his lap to care for, for a season.