by Brian Hart
“Don’t start with a lie.” She gave him a hug but she kept her distance and stepped away quickly. “I never thought I’d see the day when my hair was the same length as yours,” she said.
“I was going for Iggy.”
“You’re no Iggy.”
“Yeah, probably not,” Roy said. “Wiley, do you like motorcycles?”
“She does not like motorcycles.”
“I do, Mama. I do like motorcycles.”
“You do? Well, you better come over here and have a look at mine. Maybe you could sit on the seat for me and make sure everything’s OK. You could do that for me, couldn’t you?” He held out his hand and the little girl took it. “I need a mechanic.”
“She’ll need her boots,” Karen said. “Wait here.”
“She doesn’t need boots,” Roy said. “What kind of hippie commune is this requiring shoes?”
“It’s the exhaust pipe on your bike I’m worried about.”
“Right.” Roy stopped on the stairs. “We need to wait for your mama to bring your shoes.”
“I want my boots.”
“She wants her boots,” Roy yelled. “A biker needs her boots.” The little girl was scowling at Roy, mad-dogging him. “How old are you?”
“I’m three.”
“How old am I?”
“You’re six.”
“I’m six. Feels like I’m six. I’ve been really excited to meet you. I’ve missed seeing your mom. She’s about my favorite person in the world.”
“That sounds like lie number two to me,” Karen said, passing over a tiny pair of cowboy boots.
“Wait, hold it. You lied to me,” Roy said. “You said you had a little boy. You said in your letter that Wiley was a boy.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Mama, I’m not a boy,” Wiley said.
“I know, sweetheart.”
“You did. Look.” He retrieved the letter from his inside pocket and handed it to her. She opened it. He watched Wiley put her boots on the wrong feet while she was reading.
“Put those on the right feet,” Karen said.
“I am.” Wiley took her boots off and switched them. “I am, Mama.”
“See?” Roy asked.
“You misread it.”
Roy took the letter back and reread it. He’d made a mistake. The little girl was halfway to the bike by the time Roy put the letter away and caught up with her. He lifted her onto the bike but she was too small to reach the grips without lying down on the tank.
“Does everything seem OK?” Roy said. “It was riding kind of weird on the way up.”
“It’s OK. Mama, it’s stinky. I’m done.”
Karen picked up her daughter and Roy followed them inside. The living room was furnished simply with bookshelves like a library and wood floors, no TV but a nice stereo, LPs, toys and paper and colored pencils scattered everywhere. The sun shone in the south-facing windows and there was a cat sleeping in the warm spot on the floor. “That’s Wiley’s cat, Sample, that isn’t supposed to be in the house.”
“He’s sleeping, Mama.”
“When he wakes up, put him out,” Karen said. To Roy: “There were these people—your people, dirty skater people—passing through town that were selling kittens but they’d taken the sign from someplace else that said free samples and had crossed out the words and written five bucks and kittens. We freed this one.”
The little girl curled up beside her cat and gently touched the hair on the tips of its ears.
Karen led him into the kitchen, butcher-block counters and cabinets with no doors, a green-and-black checkerboard floor like a diner, a chrome-edged table in a breakfast nook, hanging pots, magnet bar knife rack, a commercial oven with six burners and a griddle.
“I guess I can give you a beer,” she said, as she opened the fridge. “Even though you might get drunk and do some stupid shit.”
Coming from the solitude of the bike to any social situation could be jarring but he was completely unprepared for how easily Karen could knock him off balance. He wanted to apologize but he probably just looked scared.
“Too soon?” Karen smiled without malice and passed him an unopened beer. “You better be tougher than that showing up at my house unannounced.”
“I should’ve told you I was coming.”
Karen shrugged.
They each opened their beers and clanked them and had a drink.
“This isn’t the same house,” he said. “I looked at it for a while from the road before I turned in because it didn’t look right. It was like a box, none of the covered deck or dormers or anything. Was there even a barn here?”
“I sold the old house, just the house, like, the structure, and they came and took it away on a truck. Apparently it’s on some billionaire’s mega-ranch now, north of here, by Frenchman Lake. I always picture it being used as hunting quarters for chubby dudes, fat rich guys farting the night away, spooning.”
“And you built this?” Roy said. “Why didn’t you say anything about that in the letter?”
“I guess I didn’t see that it mattered. In the grand scheme, you know.” She looked toward the living room at her daughter.
“It’s really nice,” he said. “A fresh start.” He didn’t intend to sound bitter because he wasn’t, at least not with Karen and her life, but there was sand between his words.
“How about you?” she asked, passing right by his petulance.
“Nothing fresh about my starts,” he said. “Same old shit. Living, skating, contemplating the view from nowhere.”
“At least you have a motorcycle now.” She pretended to flip her hair. “Sexy locks.”
“Yeah, and here I am getting mileage out of what? Being older and crustier than everyone else?”
“It’s still just skateboarding,” Karen said. “Try not to overthink it.”
He took a step toward her and she held up a finger and cocked her head, no no, and stopped him. “One of Aaron Simmonds’s buddies built this house,” she said. “Remember Aaron? The other motorcycle guy? The OG motorcycle guy?” She gave Roy a sideways look and Roy stupidly shook his head but he remembered—and was sure she knew he did.
“I broke his window in Reno,” Roy said.
There was a sadness in her eyes but it went away quickly and the brightness returned. “He’ll be thrilled to know you’re back in town,” Karen said, smiling, scrunching her nose cutely. “What really happened to your face? Did you do that skating?”
“No, I got my ass kicked and my motorcycle stolen.” He smiled to show her his missing teeth. “I got it back. Some bikers rolled me. There’s a video, it’s all over the Internet.”
Karen opened a laptop on the counter and quickly found the footage. She covered her mouth and shut the laptop.
“Why did they do that?” she asked. “What’d you do to them?”
“Nothing. The cop said, wrong place, wrong time. Actually, he said wrong place, wrong outfit.”
Karen gave him a sad smile.
Roy laughed, couldn’t help it. “They brought the bike back after the video got out,” he said. “Told me they’d been on a bender and didn’t know who I was or they wouldn’t have rolled me.”
“Precious,” Karen said. “Outlaws with hearts of gold. Dirtbags loving dirtbags. Did y’all have like a ‘mama tried’ moment?”
“They said they used to skate.”
“I’m the only hell she ever raised.” Country accent, cock-eyed grin. “Yer famous, right? Can we be nice to you for no reason?”
“I get it.”
“To me, all of you are a bunch of poseurs, bad actors. Where have all the good men gone?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
She nodded. “As if you or anyone else can even tell the difference anymore. Shit is sad.”
“OK,” he said, but she was right. Smith and Jones probably sold meth and were involved in human trafficking. That’s what real bikers did, right? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. A good man would.
“All right. Listen.” Roy took a breath and bobbed around a bit to pump himself up. Emotional calisthenics. “The whole thing, getting my ass beat, it’s kind of why I’m here. I was in a motel room with nothing but your letter and I realized, this has been still happening, this thing with me and you, for a long time.”
She smiled and it was suddenly obvious that he’d made a mistake, that he’d misread her letter completely—more than just thinking that Wiley was a boy—that she’d just been saying hello and that now, standing in her kitchen, he sounded a lot like a crazy person, a stalker.
“I haven’t seen you for ten years,” Karen said.
Roy shook his head. He could explain, he could try. “One of my friends—Rasheed—he was on the team with me. He wrecked his motorcycle. He died.”
“Sorry. But I still don’t see what that has to do with me, or us.”
“That’s only part of it, though. There’s this other part.” He leveled his eyes at her. “I started thinking I could be dead or I might as well be, like, what does it matter. Like death was a state of consciousness or something, like getting high or something. And when I read your letter, I thought, I’m, you know, doing a half-ass job of being alive if you aren’t in my life. I need a reason.” Roy wouldn’t feel more exposed if he removed all four axle nuts and dropped into a thirteen-foot bowl.
“I’m sorry about your friend and that you got beat up, but I was drunk when I wrote that letter.”
“Drunk when you mailed it?”
“No, I was sober by then but I was so mad at myself that I sent it anyway.” Another earth-tilting Karen smile. “Postage is pain leaving the body.”
He touched his stitches to see if they were bleeding but they weren’t. “When we were together it was the happiest time of my life,” he said. “I fucked it all up.”
Karen put her hands on her cheeks and shook her head. “What have you done with Roy?” she said. “Where is he?”
When he smiled his face hurt, stitches stretched skin, bruising sloshed fluid, scabs tore loose. Now he was bleeding. He could see Wiley in the living room, carefully drawing on an oversized piece of paper. He let out a long breath. “My point is,” he said. “I don’t know what my point is. Maybe when I bailed, let’s say I got half, like we got divorced.”
“I should’ve got a lawyer because you didn’t deserve half,” she said, the hurt filling her eyes. “You deserved much less.”
“I didn’t deserve shit,” Roy said. “I deserved a kick in the head. I still do. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for what I did to you. But I’ve always known that the half I got, it wasn’t the half that mattered. And sitting in that motel room reading your letter, rereading your letter, I realized that since we split I’d kind of pretended like you were always there, like you were still with me.”
“I wasn’t. You were fooling yourself.”
“I know that.”
“And you think you can just roll up on me like this? Because you’re going through a rough patch? You don’t know what a rough patch is, bucko.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Oh, shut up and keep your puppy eyes in their sockets.” She looked toward her daughter in the living room.
Roy lifted his beer and took a drink, nodded OK, took a step back. “Didn’t you tell me once that you wanted a kitchen like this, legit, commercial grade. A cook’s kitchen. You always had the cooking shows on.”
“Did I?”
“I think so.”
“Maybe you’re thinking of someone else.”
“I’m not,” Roy said. “It was you.”
There was a hummingbird at the feeder outside the kitchen window and they watched it come and go and come back.
“Did you think I’d let you stay here?”
“I can go.”
She gave him a look that he would describe as depthless, without end. “You can sleep in the barn tonight but that’s about as far as I’m willing to trust a stranger.”
“I’m not a stranger.”
“You’re the definition of a stranger.”
“To myself.”
“Gross.” She shook out her hands, drying the paint on her nails, making him smile. “No self-pity or pseudo self-examination in the kitchen, whatever the hell that was.”
“OK.”
“You can have dinner with us. There aren’t any options in town so don’t ask to take us out to eat or something. We eat here.” She turned at the quickening sound of Wiley’s approaching footsteps.
“Sweetheart,” Karen said to Wiley, “can you help me make a bed for our friend Roy in the barn?”
“I want to sleep in the barn, Mama,” Wiley said.
“Not tonight,” Karen said. “Roy needs to spend some time alone. He has a head problem.”
“Like the man at the bowling alley?” Wiley asked.
“That’s right,” Karen said.
“What happened to your brain?” Wiley said to Roy. “The man at the bowling alley hurt his brain and now he’s mean.”
“I’m not sure,” Roy said. “But it’s not as bad as that. I’m not mean.”
Karen smiled at her daughter but spoke sharply to Roy. “If you’re thinking this is a two-way street,” she said, “you’re wrong. You’re walking on, like—” She used her hands to give him the approximate dimensions. “Like a dirt trail with feces, human and animal, and oil spills instead of mud puddles and you’re the only one on it. You’re all alone on your turd road.”
“When you put it like that,” Roy said, “it doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Turd road?” Wiley said, laughing. “You don’t want to be on a turd road, silly.”
They had hamburgers and kale salad for dinner and afterward watched an animated movie on Karen’s laptop about a little girl named Rosalita and her big red rooster and the adventures they had on their avocado farm. Roy gave Karen a shocked look when Wiley leaned against his shoulder and held on to his arm. The movie ended and Wiley went to bed and Karen sent Roy to the barn with a glass of water but no contact of any kind.
He stayed up, sitting on the army cot Karen had set up for him, and listened to the stinking goats moving around and breathing. He stayed up thinking about Karen’s life and Rasheed’s ending. He felt incapable of being honest with himself unless it was self-hatred. He needed more out of himself. He needed to evolve.
Later, he went outside to piss and purely by accident caught a glimpse of Karen undressing in her bedroom window. He didn’t look away or try to hide. She couldn’t see him. He didn’t think she could. Her light turned off and he watched the stars, the rising moon. Irrigation pumps droned in the night. He felt like he’d never sleep again. He felt the earth under his feet and it was moving.
[26]
M<55
CA 96130
The dog wakes him and he rolls to his stomach.
“Who’s there?” he asks, steady as he can manage but his voice still breaks groggy and thick. No answer and his blood drops cold. “Listen, I say the word and my dog’ll chew your face off.” He has the militiaman’s rifle at his shoulder, scanning for movement. The scope is worthless. If it’s militia, they’ll kill him. They could be hunting him. Of course they are.
Silence. Then footsteps. “I don’t mean to bother you,” a man’s voice, East Coast accent. “Smelled your fire from the road.”
“You alone?” He can’t make out anything except the slightest shuffling of feet.
“I am. I’m not anybody that’s gonna hurt you.”
The stranger steps from the shadows of the trees into the moonlight and the dog lowers his head and shifts its weight to its back legs. The man keeps the rifle leveled at center mass. The visitor is black and lean, dressed in all khaki with an army-issue boonie hat pushed far back on his head. His eyes sparkle in the firelight and his smile isn’t trying to sell anything.
“Will it bite?” he asks.
“N
ot if I don’t tell him to. God help you if he does.”
“When’s the last time God helped anyone?”
The man lowers the rifle. “If you hurt me, the dog gets you. If you hurt the dog . . .”
“I’m not hurting anyone.”
“Grab some wood and we’ll build up the fire so we can see each other. Take it from there.”
“You don’t look so good,” the visitor says. “Are you hurt?”
The man touches his face. “I’m fine.” His whole body is stiff and aching from the explosion, yesterday morning he could hardly move, and the ringing hasn’t faded in his ears.
The visitor smiles. “I might have something for you.” He turns and disappears into the darkness and the man and the dog move into the shadows and wait for his return.
From the darkness, a tube of Neosporin and a bottle of ibuprofen pitched onto his sleeping bag. The visitor returns with arms loaded and dumps a mess of twigs and limbs onto the coals. He stands and stretches his back, removes his hat, bald on top, bushy at the sides, and runs a hand over his scalp before dropping to a knee and blowing the embers to life. There’s a pint of vodka or gin sticking out from his back pocket.
The man squirts a worm of ointment onto his finger and works it into the meat of the bigger scabs on his face and arms, where he’d had to dig the splinters out. “Which way you headed?” he asks, pops four ibuprofen.
The stranger ceases his huffing and puffing and blinks the smoke from his eyes. “North, you?”
“North.” The man chases the pills down with a drink of ashy water. He can see the glint of the stranger’s bike frame in the firelight.
“Are the J’s still holding Lassen?” the stranger says. “The national park?”
“The feds had it, but last I heard they gave it up.”
“It’s right around the corner, right? Like a few miles.” The man nods. The fire leaps up all at once and the visitor gets to his feet and offers his hand. “I’m Sol.”
“The dog is Pecos,” the man says, taking his hand. “I don’t care what you call me.”
Sol clutches his hat to his chest and smiles. “The world’s going to shit and I meet a man with no name.” He holds out his hand for the dog and it comes forward to sniff and Sol gives him a scratch. “I thought it was the horse that was supposed to have no name.”