Biker

by Baron, Mike;

  Last time Pratt went to Sturgis the Hells Angels had the nitrous concession. The Sons of Baal had the marijuana concession. And the War Bonnets had the meth concession. Bike Week began on Monday. Pratt had mixed feelings about Sturgis. There were good memories and bad. Over time, the good had become tainted with the bad. He hadn’t been to Sturgis since before he went to prison.

  Pratt was stuck. So he did something he never would have done in his previous life. He called a cop. He called MPD Detective Heinz Calloway. Calloway was on the Gang Task Force. His specialty was outlaw motorcycle gangs. Go figure.

  “Calloway,” the detective answered on the second ring.

  “Heinz, it’s your favorite biker. I’ll buy you lunch if I can pick your brain.”

  “What about?”

  “A missing person case involving the War Bonnets.”

  Beat.

  “The War Bonnets. Ain’t heard that name in years. Well it just so happens lunch is open tomorrow. You can meet me on the Union Terrace at one.”

  Pratt worked on the basket case engine in his living room, fitting the new S&S pistons by hand while American Idol played in the background. He turned the television off at ten, washed his hands and face and knelt by his bed as he had every night since his release.

  Except last night.

  “My Lord, I want so many things I’m ashamed. This is just a general all-purpose prayer to let you know you are in my thoughts, I’m trying like hell to love my neighbor, and please have mercy on that good woman Ginger Munz. Amen.”

  He waited a minute.

  “And please let Cass and me turn out well.”

  CHAPTER 10

  In the morning Pratt flexed his ribs. Not bad. He had to run. He’d been putting it off and putting it off. After a breakfast of cold fruit and a banana, he put on his sweats, running shoes and Brewers tank top and clipped his iPod to his belt. He went out to his driveway to stretch. George and Gracie yapped savagely at him from the top of Lowry’s drive.

  “Yap, you thankless bastiches,” Pratt said, feeling the pain in his ribs crackle throughout his body like static discharge. He took off down the road in long, easy strides listening to The Shazam at top volume. Every step brought a jolt flashing strobe-like through his body. The pain lessened as he ran. Or maybe he became used to it. It wasn’t severe enough to keep him from running. He was used to pain.

  Run it off.

  He passed a mini-mansion rising a quarter mile down the road. A mile further on, ground was broken for a strip mall. Civilization on the march. It wouldn’t be long before it was solid megalopolis from Chicago to Milwaukee to Madison.

  He gave it two miles before turning around, the pain a familiar throbbing presence. An old friend. The trip back was slower. He stripped the duct tape off in the shower, put on fresh jeans and a Badger T-shirt that covered the dragon. A few crude jailhouse tats peeked out from under the sleeves. He’d been meaning to have them lasered but never seemed to find the time. They might prove useful.

  He spent an hour cruising the web, stopping at his favorite sites, chatting with friends he’d never met.

  At twelve-thirty Pratt saddled up, locked the joint and headed into town. He found a motorcycle parking place directly across from the Student Union and backed in between two plastic-sheathed crotch rockets. Frat boys loved to cruise in shorts and flip-flops. First responders scraped them up off the pavement with spatulas. The Union was chock-a-block with students, faculty and downtown workers looking for shade on the broad terrace overlooking Lake Mendota.

  Pratt went up the broad steps past the Socialist Workers Party, Vegan Sisterhood, Committee to Eradicate Capitalism and the Freedom From Religion Society. In the crowded lobby students and businessmen lined up for a scoop of Babcock Hall ice cream. He walked through the Stithskeller and the Rathskeller, studious moles with their noses in laptops, Germanic heraldry on the wall, out the double doors to the patio where a hundred people lounged at round green tables beneath the shade of a towering oak. Two toddlers played precariously on Paul Bunyan’s chair while their mothers laughed and talked.

  Calloway raised a hand from a table beneath the oak. Pratt put the valise on the table and sat. “How’d you get this table, Heinz?”

  “Got lucky. Now you want to feed me before you ask what you’re gonna ask? My stomach thinks my mouth has died and gone to hell.”

  “What are you having?”

  “I’ll take a cheeseburger with a side of kraut and a Capitol lager.”

  Pratt went down the steps to the outside grill where four students did a steady business in charcoal-grilled meats and drinks. He stood in line. A girl with a diamond nose stud took his order. He returned to the table with a platter containing their food.

  Calloway waited while Pratt sat and folded his hands. “Thank you Jesus for this food we are about to eat.”

  “Amen.”

  Calloway grabbed the burger in both hands. “Give a man a minute.” He wore a white short-sleeved dress shirt, a red tie with a gold pig tack and pants so sharp you could cut cheese in the crease. He chowed down with gusto. No drop of ketchup landed on his shirt.

  Heinz Calloway was a six foot five black man with a drifting eye. It wasn’t lazy. Nothing about Calloway was lazy. The eye looked disconcertingly to the sky while the other eye pinned you. Calloway used the eye to masterly effect during interrogations. As a youth he’d briefly joined the Jitterbugs, an all-black Milwaukee based MC. The initiation involved smoking a bowl of crack at one hundred miles per hour. Calloway got out before he committed a felony and enlisted in the Army, where he’d trained as a military policeman.

  He had a PhD in criminology and rode a Victory.

  Pratt dug into his cheeseburger. He finished half before coming up for air. While Calloway ate Pratt filled him in on the job. “I figure my best bet is to find Moon.”

  Calloway pushed the tray away and took out a spiral pad. “Eugene Moon,” he said while he wrote. “The War Bonnets are so fucking crazy even the Hells Angels give them a wide berth. Keyser Söze crazy. They had a feud going with the Sons of Baal in Pueblo. Sons of Baal vowed to kill the local War Bonnet prez’ family. Wife and two kids. So he killed them himself before the SOB could find them. Strangled the wife and drowned the kids in the bathtub. Then he went to war on the SOB and killed three of them before he was gunned down in a House of Pancakes parking lot. I’ll try to dig that up and send it to you.”

  “Eugene Moon?”

  Calloway shrugged, eye on the sky. “That was a long time ago. Rotsa ruck, as they say. I’ll run it through the NCIC. Gimme a call tomorrow.”

  “Sturgis starts on Monday. The War Bonnets have the meth franchise at the Buffalo Chip.”

  “I would rather crawl a mile through broken glass than spend a night at the Buffalo Chip,” Calloway said. “You might check with the hospital where the boy was born. Some of them take fingerprints of newborns.”

  “Is that legal?”

  Calloway shrugged. “Who knows? Sixteen years is a long time. Good luck with that. You going to church?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What church?”

  “Resurrection Life. It’s out near New Glarus.”

  Calloway held his hand out. They did the soul clasp. “Stay strong with Christ, brother.”

  Calloway heaved himself to his feet. Putting the spiral pad in a hip pocket, he headed toward the visitor’s parking lot along the lakefront.

  Pratt found a pay phone in the Union, which he preferred to his cell phone for sound quality. Included in the papers Ginger had given him was Eric’s birth certificate at Our Lady of the Redeemer Hospital in Beloit. He bounced from administrator to administrator before landing with a woman in Records.

  “Excuse me, what is your interest?” the woman said.

  Pratt explained.

  “Well there’s a problem. The hospital moved in 1998 and the old building was demolished. A lot of records were lost.”

  “Didn’t you put the records on a compu
ter?”

  “They should have, but I’m not finding anything. They could be in there but who knows under what program or heading? I’m sorry Mr. Pratt. We don’t have the time to conduct an exhaustive search. We have our hands full just keeping up with the flow of patients.”

  Pratt thanked the woman and hung up. He stopped at the bank on the way home, deposited his two checks and took out two thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. When he got home he phoned Ginger. She sounded weak.

  “Hello?”

  “Ginger, Josh Pratt. Sorry to bother you.”

  “No bother. What can I do for you?”

  “You said Moon was an Indian.”

  “He claimed to be part Lakota, and he did have an Indian cast to his features. The dark hair and complexion. He used to scare the bejeezus out of grown men with his crazy Sioux witch doctor act.”

  “Did he mention what tribe? Any relatives?”

  “No. He never said. All I know it was in South Dakota somewhere.”

  “Thank you.”

  Pratt was feverish with excitement. It was almost as if Jesus had given him this assignment to pull him out of his funk and point him in the right direction. To find a little boy stolen sixteen years ago. It was a hell of a lot more satisfying than finding a couple of schnauzers or even the Ducatis. Pratt’s own father had abandoned him at a Bosselman’s truck stop one frigid December evening in Nebraska when he was sixteen, the year Eric was born.

  It was one-thirty in the evening and they were on the move, running from angry women, bill collectors and the police. Omaha. Duane had been running his roofing scam, duping little old ladies out of their life’s savings in exchange for little to no work on their roofs. They lived out of Duane’s old F-150. Duane got drunk, got in a fight with a bouncer at the Dew Drop Inn, got his face smashed in and his ass thrown out the door. Pratt watched it all from a booth in the deepest part of the bar, trying to withdraw in upon himself, trying to be invisible.

  Pratt followed Duane out the door, helped him up from the trash-strewn gutter. As Pratt seized his father’s arm and lifted, Duane looked up with an expression of hatred and disgust. An icicle pierced Pratt’s heart. His father was no good.

  “You!” Duane spat, shoving Pratt away and regaining his feet. “Why the fuck did I bring you along? Remind me.”

  A couple late-night tokers watched from the front of the building. Pratt wished he could pull in upon himself and disappear like a singularity.

  Duane stumbled for the truck. He’d narrowly avoided arrest that day when he saw the OPD car pulling into the trailer park where he rented space.

  Time to blow this town.

  Pratt barely made it around and into the passenger seat before Duane goosed the engine. The old Ford sounded like Pratt felt. It sounded like it was about to tear itself apart. Duane paused once to snort meth off his thumb and then they were outta there, endless Interstate 80 where the plains stretched to infinity on either side of the road. At night, with truck stops and towns appearing as gleaming jewel cluster mother ships against an onyx sky, it was easy to believe they were a spaceship traveling through an infinite void.

  Pratt turned on the radio, found a country station. Duane lit a Marlboro and swatted his son’s hand away. “I don’t want to hear that sad-ass country shit! I want some fuckin’ rock and roll!”

  Duane twisted the dials, the truck describing a serpentine pattern in his uncertain grip. Pratt was sure they were going to roll over into the ditch. An outraged semi blasted them with air horns as Duane barely avoided a head-on, swerving back into his own lane at the last minute.

  “Hand me that peppermint schnapps in the glove box,” Duane said.

  Pratt stared at him fearfully.

  “Do it, you little piss-ant! What the fuck are you good for?”

  Pratt opened the glove compartment. A stack of maps spilled out on his knees. He reached in, found the slick glass container and handed it to his father, who snatched it up greedily, clamped the cap in his teeth and unscrewed it one-handed.

  Duane found an oldies station playing the Rolling Stones. “Factory Girl.”

  “Yeah, I know that bitch,” Duane snarled, tipping the schnapps back. Pratt hoped they would get busted. He’d seen Duane drive drunk before but never like this. His old man appeared naked in the moonlight, a drunkard, a coward, a liar and even though Duane had attempted to beat the nascent belief in a superior being out of him, Pratt offered up a prayer right then and there that they somehow survive the night.

  Drunkard or not, Duane was Pratt’s old man and he loved him.

  The signs said GAS, FOOD, LODGING, next exit. Bosselman’s reared its logo fifty feet above the pike. Duane took the exit abruptly, cutting across two lanes of traffic like a madman, outraged truckers laying on the horns. For a second on the curve the old truck lost traction and began to hang its tail out but Duane turned into the curve and regained control.

  “I gotta take a shit,” Duane said. “Might be awhile.” He reached in his pocket and removed his turquoise and silver money clip. He peeled off a twenty and handed it to Pratt.

  “They got video games, get something to eat.”

  Despite the late hour the truck stop was hopping. Pratt could see truckers in ball caps through the windows of the café. Duane pulled up at one of the self-serve pumps. “Go on. I’ll come lookin’ for ya when I’m ready to go.”

  Pratt got out of the truck and started for the truck stop.

  “Wait a minute,” Duane said, taking off his cheap digital wristwatch and handing it to Pratt. “Twenty minutes! Don’t forget.”

  Pratt rolled toward the truck stop, the twenty burning a hole in his pocket. It was the most money he’d had in his hands in years, possibly ever. It hadn’t occurred to him that ol’ Duane was ditching him like he’d ditched women, jobs and friends.

  So when Pratt suddenly realized a half hour had gone by, he looked for his father. He looked in the men’s room and the café. He looked in the store and the parking lot. He ran frantically around the Bosselman’s until a trucker the size of a polar bear held out a telephone-pole arm. His gut loomed over a belt buckle the size of a dinner plate. He wore an “I’m Irish Kiss Me” T-shirt.

  “Hey kid, you all right?”

  Pratt stopped, gasping. He burst into tears.

  Even today the memory drew a cloak of crimson shame over him like a burka. He’d acted like a little pussy bawling his eyes out to a stranger. He hadn’t seen it coming. His father never loved him.

  Pratt didn’t like to go there but it was always in the back of his mind. Chaplain Dorgan told him there comes a point in every man’s life when he learns to stop blaming his parents and take responsibility.

  Back online. There were five main tribes of the Lakota: Oglala, Hunkpapa, Sans Arc, Brule and Blackfoot. Each had its own website plus there was a United Lakota website. Moon was a common Indian name but there were no Eugenes.

  His cell phone sang “Sweet Home Alabama.”

  “Pratt.”

  “Hey, man,” Cass said huskily. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. Want to come over?”

  “I was thinking about bringing you some dinner. You like Thai?”

  “Yeah sure. That would be great.”

  “Okay, lover. See you in about twenty minutes.”

  The things he did for pussy. Pratt hated Thai.

  CHAPTER 11

  Cass burrowed into Pratt’s armpit, her hair splayed across his chest. The radio was turned down pumping out jazz so blue you could smoke it.

  “Can I ask you something?” Pratt said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “What are you doing with those dogfights? You seem like a warm person to me. I just don’t get it.”

  Cass sighed and turned over, moving away so she could look at him. She reached for her vodka tonic on the bed stand. She’d brought both vodka and tonic. “Don’t judge me, Pratt. I like you and you like me. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Dogs used to
lick Lazarus’ sores. They are holy to the Lord, just like you and me.”

  “I knew this Jesus crap was going to rear its ugly head.”

  “I haven’t exactly been preaching the gospel to you have I? There are lots of things I could say. ‘The Lord is good to all, Compassionate to every creature.’ Psalm 145:9.”

  “I knew it!” Cass snarled, sitting up and grabbing her drink and pack of American Spirits. She got up naked and stalked out of the bedroom. A moment later he heard the back door slam.

  “Way to go, Pratt,” he said, looking around for his jeans. He did not want Cass to go. On the other hand, her behavior reminded him of past relationships that hadn’t ended well. None of them did.

  “And God said, let us make man in our image,” Pratt muttered under his breath. “Male and female created he them.”

  He pulled on his jeans and followed Cass out to the rear deck, where she stood furiously smoking a cigarette staring at the trees, arms crossed over her breasts. Guiltily he glanced around to make sure none of the neighbors was watching. He had no neighbors, yet. A yellow bulb over the back door kept the mosquitoes at bay.

  He went up to her and put his arms around her from behind. “Come on, baby. I promise not to preach.” Why am I apologizing?

  “I had an old man once,” she said taking a long draw on the cig. “He used to quote scripture while he beat me.”

  “I’m not like that.”

  Gradually she began to soften.

  “I have a temper.” She turned and put her arms around his neck, cig dangling. “Let’s go back inside. Just don’t quote scripture to me.”

  “I won’t,” he said. Her anger was like a summer storm. It flashed and thundered and then it was gone. Lord, how am I going to bring this woman to you if I’m forbidden to speak your word?

  Maybe he shouldn’t try. Maybe he should just enjoy it while it lasts, like his old man said.

  Cass went into the bedroom, found his old plaid robe and put it on. She made a beeline for the kitchen. She opened the liquor cabinet and reached for her vodka. “Want one?”