The Reluctant Prophet

by Nancy Rue

  Somebody pulled it off of me. Somebody else—I thought it was the twenty-five-year-old kid who’d sat next to me in class—got me to my feet. Ulysses stood there nodding, for no apparent reason.

  “Okay,” he said as his assistant—Darrell or something—wheeled the bike away. “What did you do wrong?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

  “What did she do wrong?” he asked the rest of the class who had managed to keep themselves vertical. They were more than willing to attest to the fact that I had clutched when I should have given it gas, and turned the wheel when I applied the brake. No one seemed to consider that I might have road rash sizzling up my leg, and I wasn’t about to point that out.

  “You ever ridden a horse?” Ulysses said to me.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know the best thing to do now is to get right back on.”

  No, the best thing to do would be to go home and forget this whole thing. God had just better not whisper something to me right then, or I would lose my religion. Literally.

  The five guys rode back to the starting cones, and Darrell returned the Buell to me, reset and ready to go. With my heart throbbing in my throat, I got back on. I could do this. It couldn’t be rocket science. The other students barely had a set of teeth among them, right? Okay, that wasn’t entirely true, but I had to tell myself something so I could think clearly enough to find the ignition button and rediscover neutral and force myself to get the bike to the cones. Maybe I did want God to speak to me now—and tell me which one was the clutch again….

  I stalled twice before I made it back to the starting line. I never did get up to ten miles an hour, but since my classmates were ready for Exercise 2, I nodded that I was up for it, too, and tried to listen to Ulysses.

  He might as well have been explaining the principles of nuclear fission.

  “All right. Let’s try it,” he said, engines roaring to life. Mine sputtered and stalled but finally began to move me forward, but by then I’d forgotten what we were supposed to be doing. I couldn’t have done whatever it was anyway, because my hands shook so hard that I couldn’t hold the brake or the clutch in. Which was probably why the bike and I leaped forward and screamed across the range. Ulysses yelled something, which, of course, I couldn’t hear because my engine was winding up like a frantic psychopath. I had no thoughts at all—God’s or otherwise—as I bounced off the pavement and onto the grass. Sheer panic has no mind—it is only slapping branches and screaming engine and barbed wire coursing through your veins. There wasn’t a single thought involved at all, until I flew from the bike into a creek and lay there with green algae soaking through my jeans. Then my only thought was: Bonner was right.

  I was going to kill myself.

  It would be better than suffering this humiliation.

  “You okay?” Ulysses said above me.

  “I’m swell,” I said.

  He crouched and nodded. “Good thing you landed in a creek bed. You sure nothing’s broken?”

  “Only my pride.”

  “Nah. Your crash train’s just a little longer than most people’s, that’s all. Now tell me what you did wrong.”

  I lifted the visor on my helmet and stared at him.

  “You sure she didn’t bust her skull open?” Darrel said behind him.

  Ulysses shook his head at me. “You’re just thinking too much. That’s the problem. You just have to go with—”

  “It’s not a matter of thinking too much,” I said. “It’s a matter of thinking the wrong thing.” I took off my helmet and showered us all with sweat, including my fellow trainees who had gathered for the wake. “Not to worry, guys,” I told them. “I’m counseling myself out.”

  I didn’t sleep much that night either, although some of it could be attributed to my sitting on my Classic, in my garage, for hours, talking out loud to God. Was there a punch line to all this? Or was it just a lesson in knowing my limits? That couldn’t be it. I never stretched farther than the next day. Which was why this was so disappointing. I’d thought that at last I was being led in a direction.

  I dragged myself into bed around three a.m., but when I did fall asleep until nine, I woke up feeling like I’d …

  Oh yeah—been in a motorcycle crash.

  I counted the bruises in the bathtub. Eleven on one leg, thirteen on the other, and a long, run-together one down each arm. I decided it was a good thing I couldn’t see my backside.

  The soak didn’t help the pain. In fact, I could hardly hobble down to the kitchen to make coffee. When I leaned over to the freezer drawer to pull out a bag of French-roast beans I’d been saving for the next time was in a funk, it took me a good thirty seconds to stand up again.

  I wasn’t going to church, that was for sure—a decision confirmed when I made the mistake of peeking in the mirror in the downstairs powder room. The deep circles under my eyes made me look like I’d been on a three-day drinking binge. No, I would’ve looked better if that had been the case.

  I also determined that coffee was too much of an effort, and that escaping to my favorite red chair-and-a-half in the living room would make me imagine Sylvia there, saying, “What were you thinking, Allison?”

  So at about eleven I put on shorts, prepared an ice bag and a glass of sweet tea, and shuffled my way to the open porch on the side of the house facing Miz Vernell’s. On the way the phone rang, and I stopped to listen to the answering machine.

  It was Bonner. He’d missed me at church. Was I all right? How did the lessons go? Oh that’s right, they were scheduled to go all day Sunday, too. He’d forgotten.

  Yeah. Right now I was supposed to be learning to stop on wet surfaces or something. The rest of the class would be taking their test in a few hours and posing for the group graduation photo. Why did I feel like I’d just been dishonorably discharged from the armed forces?

  I closed the kitchen door behind me and ignored Bonner’s request that I call him when I had a chance. I didn’t feel like eating crow right now. I could barely get my ice tea down.

  The air was warm, in the eighties, but not heavy. I propped my legs up on the porch railing, draped the ice bag over them, and leaned back into the slouchy navy blue canvas chair where I liked to pray.

  Except that today, even the Pathetic Pleading Prayer gave me no peace. “Okay, so I heard you wrong. Maybe you meant, ‘Go buy barley.’ Do you want me to open a bakery?” My only answer came from the goldfinches in the live oak tree, who I could have sworn were mocking me from behind their curtains of Spanish moss. I was definitely getting it wrong—as each throb from some new part of my body reminded me.

  “What happened to you?”

  I stifled a groan and didn’t open my eyes. “Hi, Owen,” I said.

  I heard him take the steps in his Top-Siders. Next the porch swing creaked under his weight. He was staying a while.

  “Your horse do that?” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “It wasn’t your date, was it? I’ll break his neck. Who is the—”

  I put up a hand before he could turn the air blue.

  “I fell off a motorcycle,” I said.

  “You what?”

  “Long story,” I said. “But I just took a handful of ibuprofen, so I’ll probably drop off here any minute.”

  “I won’t keep you. But we do have a situation.”

  I opened one eye. Owen’s bushy gray eyebrows were hanging over his eyes like hoods, he was frowning that hard.

  “What’s going on?”

  “That guy that bought the house on the corner, next to Miz Vernell’s?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The son of a gun’s going to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast.”

  “Oh,” I said without enthusiasm. “Just what we need around here is another B&B, huh?
”

  “Not on Palm Row! You know what kind of traffic that’s going to mean. People parking in the road, blocking our driveways.”

  “We don’t really have driveways, Owen.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  Was it me, or was he making no sense? I couldn’t trust myself to tell the difference.

  “People partying at all hours,” he went on. “They’ll turn this place into the Las Vegas strip. It’s going to be Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street. We might as well be living right in the middle of Broadway.”

  My head was spinning, geographically speaking. “The kind of people who stay at a bed-and-breakfast don’t party. They have the Early Bird Special down at Barnacle Bill’s and turn out the lights at ten. Trust me—they end up in my carriage the next day, telling me how great the soft-shell crab was.”

  “It would change things, Ally, and you know it. We just don’t want that here.”

  “We.”

  “You, me, Miz Vernell—and the Jablonskis behind me—and the Fisks behind Miz Vernell.”

  “What are we supposed to do about it?” My body hurt more with each word. Whatever it took to get Owen to shut up and get off the porch, I’d do it.

  “I’m putting together a letter for all of us to sign.”

  “Great. Let me see it.”

  “I’ll bring it around when I’ve got a final draft. I just wanted to make sure you were in.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because it could make a difference in whether the sale goes through.”

  “You don’t want it to go through.”

  “But Bonner Bailey does. I know you—”

  “Owen.” I came up on my elbows and felt my whole back wince. “You don’t ‘know’ anything about Bonner and me because there’s nothing to know. Just bring me the letter and I’ll sign it.”

  He gave me the dentured smile. “I knew I could count on you.”

  “Good,” I said. “Now go away and let me suffer in peace.”

  “You need something stronger than that,” he said, nodding at my glass. “Let me bring you some single malt scotch. That’ll fix you up.”

  “I don’t drink, Owen.”

  “I know, and it’s a shame at times like this.” To my utter relief he stood up. “You call me if you need anything.”

  “I need peace and quiet,” I said. “Good luck with your campaign.”

  He was already down the steps, on a mission to get around the corner to the Jablonskis before the neighborhood went up in smoke, down the tubes, and around the bend.

  I had barely closed my eyes again so I could try once more to get connected with the God who had obviously not sent me the last message I’d thought I’d heard—when an unmistakable sound, and a recently familiar anxiety, roared right up my spine. There was no other sound like the thundering rumble of a Harley-Davidson.

  I did some deep breathing and waited for it to roar on past the palm trees, realize it couldn’t get out the other end of the alley, and turn around. If the driver had passed his Rider’s Edge class he could do it without—

  The engine muttered to a stop. Every muscle hollered, “What are you doing?” as I sat up and craned to see over the porch railing. A silver blue—what was that, a Sportster?—was being parked on the short stretch of concrete in front of my garage, by a short, chunky woman in a blue bandana do-rag and a denim jacket that strained across her ample bosom. I watched as she hung her rose-crested white helmet on her handlebars and dropped her gloves inside it as if it were a pocketbook. Her every confident move around that bike made me feel more inadequate by the second.

  She walked toward the house and gave me a stubby wave. “Hey,” she said. “You Allison Chamberlain?”

  “Who wants to know?” I said. “Little Auggie from Detroit?”

  Her square face broke into a grin. “No. Little Hank from Harley-Davidson.”

  I pulled my legs from the porch railing and looked around for a place to hide them. With my bruises in full view, I wouldn’t be able to convince her I was not guilty of crashing one of her Buells, not once but twice.

  “You got a minute?” she said from the steps.

  She had a voice that made me think of gravel and Harvard Yard. She clearly wasn’t the type you avoided.

  “Why not?” I said. “Come on up.”

  She took the steps with surprisingly light feet and crossed to my chair. “Don’t get up,” she said. Her dark eyes widened at my shins. “Not that you could anyway. They didn’t tell me you were hurt this badly. Have you seen a doctor?”

  “It looks worse than it is,” I said. “You should see the other guy.”

  “I did.”

  Which was exactly why she was here. I’d thought about that too while I was sitting on my bike half the night. How was I going to pay for the damages to the training bike? The no-brainer, of course, was to sell my Harley.

  The woman nodded toward the porch swing. “Mind if I—”

  “Of course. Sit. I’m sorry,” I said. “Can I get you some sweet tea?”

  “No, you can’t. Literally. I’m surprised you were able to get yourself any. I’m Hank D’Angelo.”

  “Hank?’” I said. “Great name.”

  “It’s short for Henrietta, but don’t call me that or I’ll have to deck you. You’re in enough pain already.”

  “Duly noted. Look … Hank … I’m sorry about the Buell. Just tell me how much I owe and I’ll write you a check.”

  She scanned the porch, the side yard, the entrance to the kitchen. Probably assessing how much the place was worth. Good grief, were they going to sue?

  “The bike’s fine,” she said, bringing her gaze back to me. “That stuff happens all the time. That’s why we don’t have students ride their own bikes when they’re learning.” She settled back against the red, white, and blue stripes, appearing to be as comfortable in my swing as she was in her own skin. “I heard you bought a nice one.”

  I grunted. “Probably a mistake, seeing how I’ll never be able to ride it.”

  “Why not?”

  I looked from her to my battered appendages and stopped short of saying, “Du-uh.”

  “There are two kinds of Harley riders,” she said. “Those who have dumped a bike, and those who will. You’ve established which kind you are.”

  She smiled. I didn’t.

  “Look, I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but if you’re not here about the bike I crashed …”

  “I’m the director of the Rider’s Edge program for this area,” she said. “We don’t like for anybody to have a bad experience in one of our classes, so when I heard what happened yesterday, I thought I’d stop by and see how we can help you get back on a bike.”

  “You have quotas to maintain?”

  She shook her head. A fringe of blunt-cut black hair at the base of the bandana shook with it. “Was Ulysses a jerk to you?”

  I’m sure my surprised showed. “No. His jokes leave something to be desired, but—I just knew I couldn’t do it, so I counseled myself out.”

  She scratched absently at her cheek. “We’re not always our own best counsel.”

  “Now, you do have a point there,” I said. “I shouldn’t have listened when I told myself to buy an $18,000 motorcycle without even knowing how to start it up—”

  My breath caught. Hank slid to the edge of the seat.

  “You okay?” she said.

  I didn’t know how to answer. It wasn’t my own counsel I’d listened to. But if it wasn’t God’s, whose was it? The not-knowing suddenly bordered on anger.

  “I don’t know what I am,” I said to this perfect stranger.

  “Who does? But let me ask you this.”

  “What?”

  “Why did you buy
a bike?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”

  I gave it one more beat, one more glance at my battered body, and then blurted out, “I felt like God was telling me to do it. More than once.”

  Everything was quiet for a moment. Even the birds seemed to stop laughing in the tree, and I watched Hank sink back into the swing, her feet sticking out several inches off the porch floor. Her face was impassive, but I was sure I could see the thoughts lining up in formation behind her eyes. It almost didn’t matter what they were. What else could they be except, “Wow, you really are a nut bar, aren’t you?”

  It was okay, though. It had sounded awkward and halting coming out of my mouth—but, at last, very right.

  “So,” she said, “was it an audible voice?”

  “No,” I said. “It was much louder than that.”

  Hank shrugged her stocky shoulders. “Then I don’t see how you can stay off the thing, Al. I think we have work to do.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Work wasn’t quite the right word for what Hank put me through on a Buell over the next four days. Not to put too fine a point on it, but she wore my fanny down to the bones.

  “Don’t let my domicile fool you,” I told her Monday when we met on the now-empty range at the dealership after I got off work. “I’ve looked at my finances, and I can’t afford private lessons.”

  “Who mentioned anything about paying me?” she said. “We’ve got God down our backs, so fuh-get-about-it.”

  I did, because the only thing I could think about during our four-hour sessions—besides how weird this was even for God—was exactly what she was telling me, in increments so tiny a four-year-old could get it. Or a panicked woman whose antiperspirant continued to fail her.

  We spent the first two hours getting me in control of clutch-brakes-throttle.