by Lara Zielin
Okay—good enough for now. It was time to set up camp and get my first interview.
A few minutes later, with my tent staked into the ground, I stepped over to the Harley camp. The smell of charcoal and wood smoke drifted by, as heavy as incense.
“Excuse me,” I said to the group, and five heads—four bald and one blond—looked up from where they’d been concentrating on roasting hot dogs.
“May I help you?” asked the man with the knitting needles.
“Yeah. I mean, yes. Please. My name is Emma Goiner and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions. I’m doing a story for the Paul Bunyan Press—or at least I hope for the Paul Bunyan Press—about the campout. It’ll only take a few minutes of your time.”
The massive man stood up. He loomed like Mount Rushmore (except with one face instead of four) and was built like the strong man in a circus. I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if he’d torn off his leather jacket to reveal a leopard-print unitard underneath.
“I think we can entertain a few questions from this young woman, don’t you?” he asked his gang.
Entertain questions? This guy sounded like a lawyer addressing a jury. Take away the earrings and give him a suit, and he could probably stand before Judge Judy.
The one woman smiled. “Sure, I think we can handle that.” Her voice was low and gravelly, like she’d smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes every day since birth.
“My name is Bear,” said the giant, setting down his knitting and taking two steps forward with his hand extended.
That certainly was fitting.
I held out my hand and tried not to wince as his enormous paw engulfed it. Instead of crushing all my fingers in a death grip, he shook it gently. I noticed his hands were soft—not rough and gnarled like I thought they’d be. His face was round but lined, and the scratchy five o’clock scruff on his jaw had little flecks of gray in it.
“And may I please introduce Wichita, Rex, Tex, and Anita.”
“It’s nice to meet you all,” I said, trying to remember my manners. Which wasn’t easy. The group was intimidating to say the least. They reminded me of vultures in a circle. Even Anita, who was blond, had thin, patchy hair, like the wind had sucked it away during many hours of soaring for carnage.
“I appreciate this a lot,” I managed to say.
“We’re happy to have you,” said Bear. “Please, sit.” He motioned to the chair he’d just vacated.
“Oh, no, that’s okay. I’m just going to ask a few—”
“No sirree.” That was from Rex or Tex. One of them had a mustache so thick it reminded me of broom straws, but I couldn’t remember who it belonged to. “Sit.”
This issue was not up for discussion. I sat. Bear pulled up another folding chair next to mine and stuffed his bulk into it. I pulled out my notebook and pen from the green knit bag around my shoulder and got comfortable.
“Honey,” said Anita, “just put that notebook down for a while. Ain’t no hurry here. You hungry?”
“Um, I—” The truth was I was famished. I’d only had a granola bar for dinner.
Bear handed me a stick and a soggy pack of hot dogs. “Please, partake.”
When in Rome, I thought, and took both from him. “Thank you.”
“Are you from the area?” he asked, cramming his knitting back into his Just Say No bag. I speared my dog and put it into the fire and, glancing over, noted that one of the books falling out of his bag was Personal Finance for Dummies. What in the world was a Harley biker doing reading a book on budgeting?
“Um, yes, actually,” I answered, tearing my eyes away from Bear’s bag. “I live in Birch Lake. How about you guys?”
“No,” said Bear. “We arrived here from New Orleans. We’ve been residing there since the hurricane went through.”
“Really? Why?”
“At first we were helping the Red Cross and volunteering where we could. Then we began working on construction crews to rebuild the city.”
“You’re volunteers?” I asked, trying to keep the surprise out of my voice.
“Something like that,” said Rex-maybe-Tex.
“Why ’d you decide to come to the donut campout?”
“We felt called,” said Anita.
At this statement, the hairs on my neck stood up. I knew evangelical-speak when I heard it, and “felt called” was straight out of the Bible Beater’s Dictionary. It meant “I felt called by God to go to X place and do X duty.” Could this Harley gang really be a bunch of evangelical Christians? Surely not.
I had to keep going, so I played dumb. “Called by who?”
“By the Lord,” said Bear.
Bingo.
I stuffed a big bite of hot dog in my face so I wouldn’t have to talk. I also made a mental note to God: THIS IS NOT FUNNY. Why couldn’t I go anywhere without finding myself surrounded by people who thought choosing which item to get out of a vending machine required prayer? And come on—I came to the donut camp to get away from all that, not to plow into it headfirst.
This was turning out to be a hard-won scholarship. Still, I had a dog to finish and some questions to ask. I wasn’t leaving yet. I swallowed.
“What’s the name of your gang?”
“The Angelfire Witnesses,” said Bear.
I now had my notebook out and was writing furiously, balancing my hot dog at the same time. “Where’d you meet?”
“Wichita,” said Wichita. Only, because he had a little bit of a speech impediment, it came out like “Wichithaw.”
“We tore that town up,” said Anita. “I mean, back in the day, when our gang was called Death’s Screamers. We were bad news until the night Wichita got loaded and crashed into some old lady ’s front porch with his motorcycle. He was cut up pretty bad, and she took him inside, cleaned him up. We all were there when it happened and, of all things, she invited us in after him. There we were, sittin’ around in her fancy parlor, wondering when she was going to call the cops on us, but she never did. Said she figured we could handle this thing like grown-ups, without the law, and we did.”
“She made me cut her grasth,” said Wichita. “And she made us clean thuff too. And go to churth.”
“Let me guess,” I interjected. “An evangelical church?”
“How’d you know that?” asked Rex-maybe-Tex—the one with the broomstache.
I shrugged. “Just a guess.”
“We all found the Lord,” said Bear.
“Mmm-hmmm. But it don’t mean we’re perfect,” said Anita, who lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
“I still can cuss like a sailor,” laughed Rex-maybe-Tex, who now had crumbs stuck in his broomstache.
“And I still enjoy the racetrack,” said Bear. Anita glanced up quickly when he said that, then looked down again.
I appreciated their honesty, actually. So many of the people in my parents’ church were just plain fake about their lives and their struggles and never came to terms with what was really going on. Like when Lionel Nelson lost his job at one of the local factories, everyone just told him to “believe God” and “have faith” that everything would be okay. No one told him to look for a new job, or reminded him that his wife and kids were depending on him. Lionel took a liking to sitting on the couch, and he and his family eventually lost their house. They stopped coming to church, and once I overheard someone say that Lionel’s wife had left him for someone else.
The blind, fake “church-speak” even got under Nat’s skin when her grandpa died last year. Everyone tried to tell her that her grandpa was in heaven and that she should rejoice that he was now with Jesus.
“I either want them to leave me alone, or tell me how they got through it when they lost someone,” she’d said on the phone one night. “This ‘now he’s in heaven’ stuff is the worst.”
At the camp, it was refreshing to meet Christians who weren’t hung up on the same kind of thing.
“Bear,” I said, “I hope you don’t take this question the wrong way, but
you sound very, um, refined. What’s the story there?”
Bear looked down at the ground like he was embarrassed, but Anita wasn’t having any of it. She tossed a pop can at him.
“Aw, come on now. Say what you gotta say.”
With some more prompting from Wichita, Bear finally said, “I was raised in Detroit. In the 1960s.”
“In case they don’t teach you ’bout that in school,” interjected Anita, “that was a real bad time to live in Detroit.”
“I lived on the poverty-stricken side of town with mostly black neighbors,” said Bear. “Rich whites literally built walls to trap the poor people and the blacks in that part of town, and it made the whole city volatile.
“My escape from the situation became reading,” he continued, “and my favorite book was the dictionary. I started expanding my vocabulary and doing crosswords.”
Just then, two kids with donut boxes on their heads raced within inches of the Angelfire Witnesses’ camp, their bare legs flashing. “Donut monster will get you!” cried one of the kids, while the other squealed—a sound that melted away as the kids ran on.
Oblivious to the interruption, Anita continued. “Bear doesn’t always use big words, but every word he uses, he uses right.”
Bear laughed, his voice rumbling over the campfire and out into the campground. “Thanks for the compliment,” he said. “I think.”
Anita flicked a stick into the fire. “Aw, now, that was most certainly a compliment. Cuz you know what they say, don’t you?”
“What?” I asked.
“It’s not the size of the word, it’s how you use it.”
The Harley gang broke into whooping hysterics that seemed to reverberate in the cool night. I giggled so hard, I almost lost my hot dog.
After a few moments, Anita wiped her eyes. “How about you just finish that story of yours now, Bear? I think we got the laughing fits out of our system.” Nodding, Bear started up again.
“My family lived in Detroit until 1967, when the riots broke out,” he said. He explained that their apartment building caught fire, and that some people started firing bullets at the firemen who were trying to put out the flames, since the firefighters were white. “My father tried to stop them from shooting,” said Bear, “but it was hopeless. Some of the people started asking why my father was sticking up for ‘the establishment.’ He was white, and that’s all they saw. They didn’t care that our family had lived in that neighborhood for years. In an instant, an angry mob had turned on us. We had to jump in our car and drive away as people threw bricks and rocks at us. One cracked our windshield so badly that my dad, who was driving, had to slink low in his seat just to see.”
After that, Bear said, his family moved to Chicago.
“My mother’s sister, my aunt Bonnie, had lived there for years and she took care of us. At least until we could figure out what to do next. Which we did. My father and mother both found work in a slaughterhouse. It wasn’t a facile existence, but it was enough until I left home at age sixteen.”
Wasn’t a facile existence. I imagined there were other ways to describe what happened when both your parents worked in a slaughterhouse, but Bear was ever polite.
“What did you do when you left?” I asked.
Bear smiled at me. “I joined a motorcycle gang.”
I could say at that point that I might have done the exact same thing if I’d lived through such an experience. I’d never heard of the Detroit riots before, which was embarrassing, but Anita was right: that kind of stuff didn’t make it into the Birch Lake curriculum. We learned about William the Conqueror in AP history, not the Motor City.
Even so, I forced myself to sit up a little straighter and swallow the last of my hot dog, which went down like cement. I smiled, even though I was certain I had bun stuck in my teeth.
“Thank you all so much for your time—” I began.
“Naaaw, you’re not leaving already,” said Tex-maybe-Rex—the one without the facial hair.
“Really. I should go. I appreciate the hot dog and your time. You’ve been very kind.” I didn’t mean to bail so quickly, but I figured I had what I needed if I was going to write about them for my Press story. Plus, my meeting with Jake was right around the corner.
Bear put his hand on my shoulder. It felt like the weight of a small cow. I half expected to hear mooing. “Please come back anytime,” he said. I realized then I still didn’t know what—or why—he was knitting. “When we see you again,” he continued, “we’ll turn the tables. You can tell us your life’s story—and why you’re at the camp.”
I looked him square in the eye and thought, Brother, that’s a story you don’t want to know.
Chapter Eight
Under cover of darkness, I started for the Java Nile café. I knew I’d be early for my meeting with Jake, but that was okay. I could sip a mocha while I thought about my Press story. Could the Angelfire Witnesses really be it? Could such a ragtag group help me win the scholarship?
I tried out some headlines in my head: Three-Hundred-Pound Man Uses Words Well. Gang Cooks Hot Dogs, Shares Stories. They were so awful, I wanted to coat my brain with Wite-Out.
My writing teacher, Mrs. Sloan—who also supervised us at the Chieftain after school—always said the best stories were the ones that combined character and obstacles. I had thought it would be easier than it actually was to spot both characters and obstacles at the Crispy Dream camp, but not so much. Still, Mrs. Sloan was also the one who said I had “great potential” as a journalist, and if she were at the camp now, she’d probably peer at me over her red reading glasses and tell me to tough it out, suck it up, and make the story work. That’s pretty much what she’d said after my first story as associate editor of the Chieftain had run and I’d been upset by my parents’ reactions.
I’d been assigned a story on Birch Lake’s new biology hon ors class, where some of the kids were able to do high-level science experiments after school, like injecting mice with viruses and watching how their DNA changed. I’d done a slew of interviews to cover the story, talking to everyone from the kids doing the work to the teachers in charge of the curriculum, all the way up to the superintendent.
When I’d brought the paper home to show the story to my parents, my dad, who read it first, cleared his throat about five times before he said anything. His fingers drummed out an uneven beat on the table. Eventually he raised his head and said he was disappointed that I’d write about evolution and paint it in such a favorable light.
“Evolution?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“The article says it right here,” my dad said, tapping the paper. “Students are studying evolutionary biology. Isn’t that just another name for manufacturing connections between humans and apes?”
Here we go again, I thought. “You’re missing the point,” I said defensively. “In this case, most of the students are looking at how viruses work—how they change under different conditions. That’s what the mice are for. No one’s studying Neanderthals or Lucy or anything.”
But my dad wasn’t swayed. I’d written the “e-word” and hadn’t condemned it, and that was enough to make him think the article was on par with the trash at the supermarket checkout aisle.
The next day, when I’d explained the situation to Mrs. Sloan, she’d coolly reminded me that any article I wrote would probably make someone mad. “And then you know you’re doing a good job, because you know you crafted your words in such a way that they were powerful enough to make someone feel something. And that’s a good thing.”
Then, without skipping a beat, she told me to pull myself together and handed me my next assignment. Just like that. Which was probably just as well, since the truth was I couldn’t think of anything else I’d rather do instead. Journalism was about the facts—about things that could be verified, cited, proven. When there was so much in the world that was made up, and so many people who based their ideas off of speculation and conjecture, I wanted to be part of a wo
rld that didn’t operate that way. I wanted to spend my time in a field where the facts were on my side.
So I stuck with it, and wound up storing all my copies of the Chieftain under my bed, only showing my mom or dad grudgingly if they asked to see what I was working on. The upside is that I was able to fill my brain with facts (the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France; Fuller Field is the oldest baseball diamond in the United States; Brazil produces one third of the world’s coffee . . .) and I also became a better writer, which is why I believed I really had a shot at the Paul Bunyan Press scholarship.
Maybe my article can be about the process of writing an article, I thought. It could be an experimental, arty piece. Like those movies about making movies.
Except that was dumb.
But what else could I do? What could I possibly say about born-again bikers? Because who ever heard of such a thing? Though I’d listened to enough preaching in my life to know anyone could be saved—even murderers and thieves and certainly bikers if they really wanted to be.
“Saved” is what you call believing that Jesus was the son of God and that He died for your sins. I personally was saved when I was eleven years old, and these days, even though I still considered myself saved, what I didn’t do so much anymore was pray.
Ever since the baptism, it had been really hard for me to have conversations with God, since obviously God wasn’t going to just dole out religious experiences so I wouldn’t be such a pariah at church. Though I couldn’t say that was enough to make me stop talking to God entirely. I sometimes swore at him, and other times I stuck my middle finger in the air and extended it as far as I could toward heaven. Because what a liar God had turned out to be. There was the scripture about not being confused, which I still totally was, and somewhere in the Old Testament, I know God had said, “Call onto me and I will answer thee.” I had been calling like a telemarketer—asking for tongues, a vision, or a heavenly experience—but instead of answering my prayers, God sent a nut into the water at my baptism. Some great Almighty One indeed.