Ride Away Home

by William Wells

  Silence.

  Then Tom, the Harvard Business School professor, grins and says, “The tax attorney quotes the United States tax code!”

  “I bet he can cite chapter and verse,” Vic says.

  Everyone looks at me expectantly. I instantly regret this nerdy, show-offy slip, it’s the gin fizzes talking, I’d like to think, and not the real me coming out, but I admit the clause is from “Title 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Subchapter B, Part IX, Section 274.”

  “Here, here,” Langdon says, raising his glass. “He’s telling us that this trip is not deductible. Very useful info!”

  At three A.M., we call it quits and turn in. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this tipsy; passing out and falling asleep is a distinction without a difference.

  14

  I wake up at seven A.M. to the aroma of bacon frying, which reminds me of boyhood Saturday mornings when my father took over breakfast duties. Dad was a marketing executive with 3M in Saint Paul, mom taught history at Saint Thomas Academy, which I attended, and I was their only child. We lived in the Highland Park neighborhood, which is very much like Edina.

  Dad’s standing Saturday menu was blueberry pancakes with melted butter and heated syrup—one of my cakes always formed into the letter “J”—plus thick-cut smoked bacon, freshly squeezed OJ, and creamy whole milk, none of that thin, fat-free, 1-, or 2-percent stuff of today. The syrup came in a metal can the shape of a little log cabin. These cabins were rinsed and lined up on a shelf in my bedroom; I must have had a north woods village of thirty of them by the time I graduated from high school and left for college.

  I HADN’T thought about any of that for decades. So far this ride to Key West seems more a trip down memory lane than a transformation of any kind. I’m still good old Jack Tanner, as far as I can tell. Perhaps the most effective thing I can do to Slater Babcock is to turn him in to the IRS—in my experience, every taxpayer has something to hide—or hit him with a briefcase, as Pete Dye suggested. Of course, my briefcase is at home, but I understood what Pete meant by that: I’m a lawyer, not a fighter.

  I swing my feet onto the floor, feeling a bit dizzy. I pull on a tee shirt and jeans and go to the kitchen. There I find Vic, shirtless and shoeless, wearing boxer shorts, a Red Sox cap, and a chef’s apron, making waffles, bacon, and link sausages.

  “Wow,” I say. “Is this a beach house or a cruise ship?”

  “Welcome aboard the SS Purcell!” he says. “I can offer you coffee or espresso, regular or unleaded.”

  I perch on a stool at the center island.

  “A cappuccino would be great, but I’ll make it,” I tell him. A fancy espresso machine sits on the counter near the juicer. It’s got more controls than my motorcycle.

  “Let me do it. You could hurt yourself with that thing.”

  Soon the whole gang is gathered around the kitchen table, feasting on Vic’s spread and chatting happily like kids in the dining hall at summer camp.

  “So what’s today’s agenda?” I ask.

  Alan explains, “We always start with a ride up and down International Speedway Boulevard through the city. Then we head over to the beach and take a stroll for a little exercise.”

  “Exercise being defined as ogling the topless babes,” adds Miles.

  “The trick being to savor the view without getting stomped by their boyfriends,” says Tom.

  “Sounds like a plan,” I tell them.

  Langdon pushes back from the table.

  “Dinner is at a seafood place we like a short ride up the coast in Ormond Beach. Basically one does not want to be in downtown Daytona after dark. That’s when the vampires come out, if you catch my drift.”

  I do.

  “How bad does it get?”

  “The great majority of Bike Week attendees are well-behaved,” Harold answers. “But there are some who come looking for trouble and find it. Often they’re not the bikers. You get your survivalists, rednecks, gangbangers, and Florida crackers who don’t like outsiders taking over their town. And everyone’s armed. Florida’s gun laws are pretty much the same as Dodge City’s in the days of Wyatt Earp. They’d just laugh at Langdon and his little pistol. These fuckers are armed like a SEAL team. Best for the likes of us to steer clear.”

  “Law enforcement does a good job, but they can’t be everywhere all the time,” Vic adds. “There were three shootings last year, one a fatality, all after midnight. And some years ago, we heard, a guy ran his Ford F-150 right into a crowd on a sidewalk. Killed three people before the truck hit a building, or something. The crowd dragged him out and stomped him to death. Although that might be an apocryphal story.”

  IT’S SUNNY and hot, no wind off the ocean to mitigate the humidity. We’re strolling the beach, shirtless, the others in shorts or bathing suits; all I have are my jeans. I’m feeling relaxed. Earlier, Victor Purcell and I had coffee out on the deck of the beach house while the others were in the kitchen.

  “I lost a son,” Vic said.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  “The summer before Brian’s senior year in high school, he was staying at a friend’s house on Cape Cod, in Wellfleet. It was late August. Football practice had started. Brian was a wide receiver. He was much more than that, but that’s what he was in football. The other boys with him were team-mates. Some of them were swimming, not far offshore. Brian was on the beach, tossing a football. There was a rip current. One of the boys, Jerry Docherty, was caught in it and started yelling for help. He apparently didn’t know you had to swim parallel to the beach to get out of it instead of heading directly in. Brian, who was a good swimmer, went out to get Jerry. I guess he panicked, and grabbed onto Brian. They both drowned.”

  The only thing I can think to say is, “Do you have other children, Vic?” I regret this instantly, as if having another child can somehow mitigate his loss.

  “Yes,” he answers. “We are blessed with another son, Matt, who is an architect, and he works with me designing our shopping malls; and a daughter, Gina, who is an investment banker in New York.”

  “That’s a blessing,” I said, and we finished our coffee in silence.

  A MODERATE wind has come up and is raising whitecaps on the water, good enough for the surfers and Boogie Boarders. I think about young Brian Purcell. One thing about being consumed by your own troubles is you can forget that others may be hurting, too.

  And then, all of a sudden, there she is, Hannah the felonious hitchhiker, wading out of the surf, topless, bikini-bottomed, then strolling toward a group of men and women, obviously a hardcore biker crowd, set up with coolers over by one of the lifeguard stations. Some are boisterously watching a beach volleyball game, others are just grab-assing around; all are drinking from plastic cups and beer bottles.

  I stop. My companions keep walking down the beach. I move closer and see it’s not Hannah, it’s another girl who could be her sister. One of her nipples and her navel are pierced.

  One of the bikers in the group walks my way. He is tall, shirtless, with the carved physique of a serious weightlifter.

  “Like what you see, amigo?” he says. He must have noticed me staring at that girl. “That’s Linda, and she’s for rent. Five hundred for a half day, twelve hundred and she’ll stay the night.”

  Smiling as he says it. Just two guys discussing a business transaction.

  “Thanks,” I answer, “but I have other commitments.”

  The man shrugs and heads back toward his group. “Well, whatever floats your boat, dude.”

  Thanks but I have other commitments? How lame is that? What a big bad biker dude I’ve turned out to be.

  AT SEVEN P.M. we are at the Green Dolphin Inn, the roadhouse Langdon mentioned. There appear to be no outlaw bikers in the place, which is precisely why the Disciples make this one of their regular stops. We’re seated in a booth having beers and studying the menu when a woman comes hurrying through the entrance door and asks the bartender, “Who owns the cycles out in the lot?” />
  “They’re ours,” Harold says.

  “Well there’s a monster truck rollin’ right over the whole lot of ’em. Someone should call 911.”

  As someone does, we hurry outside, along with a number of other patrons. A big black pickup truck with a raised chassis and huge tires is plowing back and forth over our motorcycles as the Steppenwolf song “Born To Be Wild” booms from the truck’s sound system.

  “Christ, it’s that idiot from the truck stop Langdon faced down,” Alan says. “He must’ve recognized our bikes, or come in the bar and spotted us.”

  Langdon pulls out his Derringer and fires two rounds into one of the truck’s tires, but the little .32 caliber slugs just bounce off. Hearing the gunshots, Bigfoot grins, hits the brakes, and points a long-barrel revolver out of the driver’s side window.

  “Gun!” Miles shouts.

  Everyone scatters, some running back into the bar, others, including me, taking cover behind cars, as Bigfoot begins firing off rounds, not seeming to actually aim at anyone, then guns it out of the parking lot, tires spewing gravel, and roars off down US Route 1.

  Minutes later, two Volusia County Sheriff’s cruisers, lights and sirens, come barreling down the highway from the other direction and squeal into the parking lot. Four deputies slide out and crouch behind the doors, guns drawn. Seeing only the wrecked cycles and people hiding behind cars, one of the deputies reaches into the cruiser, pulls out a microphone and says over the cruiser’s PA system:

  “Everyone face down on the ground, arms stretched out front!”

  A moment of confusion, no one moving.

  The deputy’s amplified voice shouts again: “On the ground now! Grab the gravel!”

  Only when all of us are lying on the ground as ordered do the deputies ease out from behind the car doors.

  “Nobody move till I say,” another of the deputies orders. He walks over to a man in his twenties and says, “We got a call about a truck running over motorcycles, and then another call about shots fired. First thing is, who was doing the shooting?”

  “The guy in the truck,” the young man answers. “He drove off just before you arrived.”

  The deputy moves over to Langdon.

  “That right, sir?”

  Langdon starts to turn over as he answers; the deputy puts his boot hard on Langdon’s back, pushing him back down. So much for the “sir.”

  “Didn’t say turn over. I asked if that’s what happened.”

  “Yes,” Langdon answers. “We saw the guy a few days ago at a truck stop in Virginia. We didn’t get along all that well.”

  As this deputy has been asking questions, the others have been moving from person to person, patting them down. One by one they all say, “Clear.” No guns. Langdon has thrown his Derringer into a trashcan, where the deputies don’t look. Later, he will recover it.

  “Okay, y’all can stand up,” a deputy wearing sergeant’s stripes says.

  As we get to our feet, Harold asks, “Where’s Tom?”

  “Somebody missing?” the sergeant asks.

  “Got a man down!” one of the other deputies calls out.

  I look over and see Tom Jarvis, the Harvard professor, lying motionless on the gravel, with crimson blood pooling beneath his head.

  THE NEXT morning we’re in the beach house kitchen, seated around the breakfast table. We are the Magnificent Six now. Tom is dead. A bullet ricocheting off something hit him in the left temple. Someone got the license number of the truck. Calvin T. Laloosh, aka Bigfoot, is now in the Volusia County jail, charged with murder in the first degree, which any competent defense attorney should be able to deal down to second degree, intent being hard to prove when you’re high on alcohol and dexies and apparently not aiming at anyone.

  Laloosh has been in trouble before, Harold learned from the sheriff’s department, with assault convictions and firearms violations on his rap sheet. He did a three-year stretch in Raiford, the prison, Harold was told, where the state’s death chamber is located, offering the condemned a choice of lethal injection or electrocution—a choice Laloosh may now have to make, depending upon the skill of his lawyer. He is employed by a coast-to-coast moving company, and lives alone in a trailer park in Deltona.

  He was arrested in his trailer without resistance. The SWAT Team found his pistol in his pit bull’s doghouse behind the trailer. The dog is now in the care of the Volusia County humane society. The duty sergeant, sympathetic, told Harold all this.

  None of us slept last night. We were at the sheriff’s headquarters until midnight, giving statements, along with the other bar patrons who witnessed the event. Then Harold went to the county coroner’s office to identify Tom’s body. Afterward, he called Kathy Jarvis in Cambridge to break the tragic news. She is flying to Daytona Beach later this morning, and their two sons are flying in separately in the afternoon.

  Vic has made scrambled eggs and toast but no one is very hungry. We’re drinking coffee and dividing up the necessary tasks.

  “So it’s agreed,” Miles says, checking the yellow legal pad on which he’s been taking notes. “I’ll coordinate with the funeral home in Cambridge on transportation and arrangements. Harold, you’ve got the family, Kathy and the boys, arriving at the airport at various times today. Alan is booking us on Tom’s flight back to Boston. Vic is handling any follow-up with the sheriff’s department. Langdon will stay in touch with the Volusia County district attorney’s office about testifying at the trial.”

  “I can see about the cycles,” I offer.

  “Probably nothing there to salvage, but the insurance adjusters will want a look,” Vic says.

  I tell them I’ll arrange to have the cycles taken to an auto or motorcycle repair shop and give everyone the address for their insurance people.

  Everyone falls silent, left to our own thoughts about what has happened to our friend. I envision a “missing man” formation, as pilots do for a lost comrade, if these men ever ride together again.

  THE FOLLOWING morning I’m standing at a car rental counter at the Daytona Beach International Airport, wearing a golf shirt, khaki slacks, and running shoes, my cycle rider attire stowed in my saddlebags. I am a motorcycle man no more.

  I’m with Harold Whittaker, who is signing papers for a silver Taurus. The car is for me, but I can’t rent it because I don’t have a driver’s license. It was in my wallet, which Hannah took.

  Harold and I go out to the lot, get into the Taurus, Harold driving. He shows the rental papers to the attendant, and drives down the street to where he is parked. He gives me a hug and says, “God speed and keep you safe Jack. You’re a good man. Call me when you get back home.”

  He’d given me his business card back at the beach house, as had Alan Dupree, Miles Standish, Langdon Lamont, and Vic Purcell. They wished me luck and apologized for being unable to stay with me on the rest of my journey, but with Tom Jarvis dead, they’re needed back home. And at some point they’ll have to come back here for Calvin Laloosh’s trial, unless there’s some sort of plea bargain. I feel that I’ve become as close to these men in our brief time together as any other friends I have, like soldiers who’ve been through combat together. We’ve promised to stay in touch. Maybe we will.

  When I was packing my saddlebags, I found Langdon’s Derringer tucked in it. I thought about returning it, then put it back. I understood that Langdon meant this as a gift from one friend to another, without thinking that the Jack Tanner he’d come to know would shoot anyone with it, except possibly in self-defense.

  15

  As I approach the entrance ramp to I-95 heading south out of Daytona Beach, I notice a girl wearing a backpack, hitchhiking. She’s holding a cardboard sign reading “Key West,” and turns it toward me, raising her eyebrows in expectation. She is pretty, with her brown hair twisted into braids, in her late teens or early twenties, wearing jeans and a University of Florida “Go Gators!” tee shirt that exposes her belly.

  Yeah, right. Fool me once …

/>   Maybe she really is a college girl, like Hope, whom I should rescue from the possibility that a serial killer will be driving the next car that comes along. Or maybe the Gators tee shirt is a ruse, and she is another highway predator, like Hannah. Harold didn’t opt for the extra car rental insurance. Does the basic package cover theft by renter stupidity? By honey trap?

  I nod and smile as I pass her by. No hard feelings. Sorry, sweetie, but I have my reasons. I see in the rearview mirror that she’s giving me the finger.

  I accelerate onto the highway, running up to eighty before I check the speedometer, then ease back down to seventy. This rental car has GPS and satellite radio. I find the Beach Boys singing “409.” Nostalgic and nice. I was good at school, I had the school thing down pat, the academics, sports, and the social life, all through high school, college, and law school. Too bad a person can’t remain a student forever. It’s what happens after graduation that can be so very problematic.

  Four hours down I-95 I impulsively swing onto Exit 2D toward Miami Beach. I’ve been there on several family vacations and an occasional business trip. I’m feeling exhausted, even after a relatively short drive in a comfortable car. No wonder, given all that’s happened, and the uncertainty about what might happen next.

  I’ll check into the Loews, one of the nice oceanfront hotels on Collins Avenue, and use it as a staging area before driving on to Key West—or as a rest stop before catching a flight home. Whichever seems right at the time. I’ve begun to understand what it means to go with the flow, as they said in the sixties. I feel that I’m pretty much drifting now, as if floating in the Gulf Stream, headed to wherever the current takes me, as if someone or something else is in charge of my fate, which is a relief, because I’ve not been doing so great at being in charge of myself.

  It’s early afternoon, sunny, and seventy-eight degrees according to the digital thermometer readout on the dashboard instrument panel, with a cloudless azure sky. I cross the MacArthur Causeway onto the island city of Miami Beach. Huge cruise ships are moored in line on a long pier to my right, their stacked decks rising up from the hulls like layers on a tall cake.