“Hey,” Heck said, climbing into the cab of the truck. He eyed a Sheriff’s Department cruiser as it glided into the parking lot. “What is your problem, man? You that pissed off I got a little fucked up and got in a tussle? Shit, Jethro, we’ve been doing that since we were both thirteen.”
Roadkill shook his head. He pulled his own sunglasses off the visor above the driver’s seat. He slammed the door to the truck’s cab and started the engine. “Gear is in the hospital,” he said quietly as they drove out of the parking lot and started to drive down Bain Street.
“Wha … what happened?” Heck said.
“We had a hunt last night,” Roadkill said. “That beastie that’s been ripping people out of their cars on I-140 and leaving their intestines up on the Dan Cameron Bridge? We’d started calling the thing Meat Tinsel. Well, we got a lead on it, and we sent out every warm body we could get ahold of. That wasn’t you, Heck. Your ass wasn’t answering your phone. Again.”
They turned in silence onto West Cornelius Harnett Boulevard. Heck smoked his cigarette and stared out the open window. They were passing suburbia: Dollar General stores, Food Lion grocery store, McDonald’s, Advanced Auto, KF-fucking-C. He had ridden up and down streets like this most of his life. When he had been over there, all he could think about was how much he missed all this … bullshit. Bullshit, and stuff, and normalcy. Boring things that you took for granted until they weren’t there anymore. No, that was wrong. They were there, far away, a mystical place called “back in the world.” You were gone, on the moon.
For a moment, the thing in the Afghan desert was laughing in his mind, his memory. Its laugh was everywhere, and Heck was back there. He smelled the smoke—the greasy, charred pork smell of Abe’s and Rich’s and Javon’s flesh burning; he heard them screaming. The smell of hot brass and the clatter of the M249 machine gun as the bullets passed harmlessly through the laughing, growling, living pyre. It cooked them, cooked his friends, his crew. The things the fire said to Heck in the ruins as the bodies burned … He closed his eyes behind the sunglasses. He saw his old friend Gear burning with his brothers, burning in the laughing, immortal fire. He swallowed hard.
“I was busy,” Heck finally said through a dry throat. His palms were wet. He took a long drag on the cigarette.
“Jesus Christ, Heck!” Roadkill said. “Gear was the one that kept that asshole jumper in Newark from blowing a hole in you? Remember? He took that bullet for you? Seriously! What happened to you over there that has fucked you up so bad, man!”
“Nothing,” Heck said. “I’m good. What the hell happened?”
“We were down three guys already,” Roadkill said. “Muzz, Ed, and Billie were all down in Tallahassee on that five-hundred-thousand-dollar bail skip. And since Ale passed … well, everyone was expecting you to step up and take over as president. Gear shouldn’t have been on point last night, man—it should have been you.”
Heck exhaled a stream of thick smoke that was caught by the wind rushing past the car window and carried away. “Back the fuck off me, Jethro,” he said, his voice low and gravelly.
“Gear lit the thing up with that old surplus M2 flamethrower we traded Mullet’s old Panhead bike to the skinheads for,” Roadkill continued. “The thing ashed pretty good, but Gear got too close, got caught by the claws—god, they were like damned hedge clippers—foot and a half long, at least. Then he was on fire, screaming. Third-degree burns over a quarter of his body, and a collapsed lung, man. So, no, fuck you—I will not back the fuck off. This MC, it’s your and my family’s legacy, Heck, and our future. A lot of people have bled for it, and keep on bleeding for it.”
“What do you want from me, exactly?” Heck said, flicking the butt of his cigarette out the window. “Ale is gone. We’re scattering his ashes today. I’m home, but I’m clearly not the guy who needs to be running the Jocks.”
“That is bullshit,” Roadkill said as they turned left onto Lillington’s North Main Street. “You are. Everyone’s known it since you were, like, twelve, Hector. Hell, even you.”
“Well, everyone was wrong,” Heck said. “Clearly.”
“Since you got back you’ve blown off most of your friends, your family, and the club,” Roadkill said. “You stay drunk and pick fights with any mouth-breather you can provoke. You’ve been in the pokey twice in the last month, Heck—”
“Three times now,” Heck corrected with a grim smile.
“Look, if it’s about losing Ale, I understand,” Roadkill said. “And I’m here if you need me, man. Or is this some kind of post-stress psych thing?”
“Shut up and shut up some more,” Heck said. “I’m okay.”
“Hmm,” Roadkill said. “Look, my friend, you keep that shit bottled up and it’s going to blow sooner or later. You need to come to terms with it.”
Heck looked over at Roadkill, shaking his head. “What, you’re Dr. Phil now? Tell me why the hell I’m being lectured on how I should live my life by a fucking werepossum.… I mean, c’mon!”
“Now, that is just straight racist,” Roadkill said. “And it’s half werepossum on my mama’s side, thank you very much, and you know that!”
“I know that you can turn yourself into a scuttling little garbage-eating vermin,” Heck said.
“You know what?” Roadkill said, lurching the truck over to the side of the road. It stopped in a cloud of dust. “You are an asshole, and I’m done trying. Get the fuck out of my truck. Walk.”
Heck threw the door open and climbed out. He slammed it behind him. “Okay,” he said.
“Yeah, walk,” Roadkill said again. “Run, you jerk. See if you can outrun yourself and everyone who wants to help your stubborn, stupid ass.” His voice cracked a little as he said it. “I’ve been making excuses for you and apologizing for you for months, man, and I’m done.”
Heck heard the hurt in Roadkill’s voice. He recalled when they were both nine and he had made fun of Jethro accidentally shifting into a possum when they were playing by the creek in Heck’s backyard. Heck had teased Jethro as he climbed up the hill, naked, a giant possum’s tail still grown just above his butt, clutching his wet clothes like armor against the laughter. He fought against tears, claiming that his eyes got wet when he fell in the creek.
Suddenly, Ale had been there, all tall and strong with a mane of gray hair, a thick, long beard the same color, and those kind, strong, stern eyes. Odin, Zeus, the Lord Almighty, and Ale. Ale wrapped an old army blanket around Jethro and turned to Heck.
“What to do you think you’re doing?” Ale said to the boy. The smile slid away from Heck’s face. “You going make fun of your best friend because he’s different? You need to rethink that, boy. One day it might be you who’s the different one, Hector, and who’s going to be there for you when everyone is pointing? We’re all on the outside sometimes, Heck.”
Heck put his hand on the open window of the passenger-side door of Roadkill’s truck. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “Thanks for sticking up for me. I’ve been an asshole, and I’m sorry. I’ll see you at the clubhouse for the ride.” He started walking. The truck crunched gravel slowly as it pulled up to accompany him.
“Well, stop being an asshole and get in,” Roadkill said. “I’ll take you home to clean up. Your mom’s been worried about you.”
* * *
They rumbled down Market Street, the throaty growl of big V-twin engines announcing their presence to the pedestrians the way a lion’s roar announces its arrival to the scavengers at the water hole. Gasoline-fueled thunder pealed down the street as the Blue Jocks cruised toward the Road to Nowhere. They were forty riders strong, headed out of the Jocks’ Wilmington clubhouse. They crossed the Cape Fear River on Route 76. They picked up a half-dozen more members joining the pack by the time they were opening up and hauling down U.S. 74 toward Bryson City.
At the center of the procession, Heck was driving Ale’s old 1941 Harley flathead with a sidecar. In the sidecar, Heck’s mother and Ale’s old lady, Elizabeth Sincla
ir, sat like a reigning queen in black leather. Her long white hair, pulled back and tied in a ponytail, fluttered in the wind. She wore aviator-style sunglasses but refused to wear a helmet. Clutched in her arms, to her chest, was a small wooden cask. The Blue Jocks’ colors were burned into the cask. It held Ale’s ashes.
Heck did not wear conventional headgear. He wore a matte-black, open-faced helmet with a polished, stainless-steel face mask that was sculpted to look like a grinning Japanese demon—an Oni—with a leering, tusked smile and short, blunt horns.
They crossed over into South Carolina and picked up another dozen riders when they passed through Florence, as that city’s chapter of the MC joined the ride to honor one of its founders. Thirty more riders joined them as they rode through Columbia on U.S. 20. The procession also gained other followers, bikers from other MCs who were friends of the Blue Jocks, riding respectfully at the rear of the procession.
The cities and towns gave way to lush, cool forests of tall, proud trees as they rode through the southeastern tip of Sumter National Forest, a cathedral of green. They picked up a few dozen more riders as they moved through Spartanburg and Hendersonville. They were well over a hundred strong as they headed up I-26. The Asheville chapter, fifty strong, awaited them on the final ride into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Cool, green woods covered both sides of the road as the procession, swelled to close to two hundred riders, now approached the end of Nut Hill Road. A large sign, weatherworn and hand-painted, greeted the bikers as they approached. The sign said, WELCOME TO THE ROAD TO NOWHERE—A BROKEN PROMISE! 1943–?
During World War II, the Tennessee Valley Authority, under the auspices of the federal government, announced plans to construct a hydroelectric dam that would flood eleven thousand acres of land, much of it inhabited. In true bureaucratic fashion, the TVA purchased or seized almost sixty-eight thousand acres in Graham and Swain Counties, displacing more than thirteen hundred families in the name of the project, and progress. These families included women and children whose husbands, fathers, and sons were off fighting Fascists in distant lands. It also included elderly folk who had lived on their families’ lands their entire lives. These families received no assistance from the government in relocating. Those who refused to sell their ancestral homesteads were forced off their land.
The government promised to repay the state for the loss of Highway 288, which would be flooded in the project, and to build a road and a bridge so that the families that had been driven from their lands could visit the more than twenty-eight cemeteries that would survive the flooding. Burial grounds where generations of their kin had been laid to rest were now isolated by the sweeping away of the land. Again, in true bureaucratic fashion, the promises were not entirely kept. The state received some funds to compensate for the lost highway, but the road to the grave sites was never completed. Six miles of road, a bridge, and a quarter mile of tunnel was all that came to fruition—a true road to nowhere. To the Blue Jocks, this place was hallowed ground.
A few miles down the unfinished road, the procession slowed and came to a stop at the yawning entrance to the massive tunnel. Everyone made a path, and the old Harley, with Heck and his mother riding, was allowed to move through. Heck shut off the engine and pulled off his demonic protective mask and helmet. He helped his mother out of the sidecar. He was wearing a kilt with the tartan of his and his mother’s clan, the Sinclairs. Roadkill took a massive sword out of the sidecar after Elizabeth departed and slipped the strap of its sheath over his shoulder. The blade was a good two feet longer than him, so he had to angle the sheath.
Elizabeth pushed the few stray strands of white hair that had flowed free during the long ride out of her face and removed her sunglasses. She was an imposing woman. Age had given her features more character but had taken away none of her striking beauty. She shared the same color and intensity of eyes that Heck possessed—burning emeralds. A few inches shy of six feet, Elizabeth was taller than her son, and she knew how to use her height to add to her overall, regal presence. She turned to address the procession—an endless sea of chrome pipes and bars, black leather cuts and tartan kilts, beards and tattoos. The unruly crowd grew silent when Elizabeth raised an arm for attention.
“It would have meant a lot to Ale that you all came out for him,” Elizabeth began. “He would have cussed you all like a sailor with a sore tooth, and then he would have teared up when he thought no one was looking. That was the kind of man Ailbert Mckee was. Strong, fierce, uncompromising. But with a good, kind, heart.” Her voice faltered; the tears were close, but Elizabeth refused to let them take this moment from Ale. “He was a loving father to our son, Hector. He treated me as an equal, a wife, a friend, a counsel, and always, always like a lady.” She laughed a little, using it to fight back the sadness. “Even a few times when I didn’t deserve that.” Laughter murmured through the crowd.
“Ale was always a gentleman. He was a wise president to the MC. He was unstoppable in battle, forgiving in peace. He lived by the code of the knight, of the samurai, of the outlaw. Ale always believed that if you lived outside the law, especially if you lived outside the law, you had to have honor.” Elizabeth glanced briefly at Heck, who lowered his eyes.
“A very, very long time ago,” Elizabeth said, “Ale and my father, Gordon, and the other founders—the originals of the Blue Jocks—came to this place, this Road to Nowhere. They dreamed their dreams here. For all the Blue Jocks, for all outlaw knights, this road is the beginning and the end. They swore the first initiation oaths of the MC here. Every prospect is made a member on the other side of that tunnel, every man who wears our cut passes through the underworld, endures the darkness, and comes out into the light.”
Night was beginning to fall, and the sun was filtering through the dense foliage above and beyond the great dark tunnel, golden bursts of radiance through the green. At a slight nod from Elizabeth and a gesture from Roadkill, the two surviving original members of the Blue Jocks stepped forward. One of them was Glen Hume, Roadkill’s father, and the other was Reggie Haney. The men were old, their faces carved thoroughly by life and experience, but they both looked as if they were made of fire-hardened hickory, worn but never worn out. Both still proudly wore their cuts and their clan kilts. The MC’s piper, Jim Gilraine, a burly bear of a man with a beard that made him look like a dangerous Santa, also stepped forward and prepared his pipes to play. As sergeant at arms for the club, Roadkill moved to stand beside, and slightly behind, Heck. Roadkill could see the pain hiding behind Heck’s lidded eyes. He nodded to his old friend, and Heck nodded back. Elizabeth continued, clutching the small wooden box to her breast.
“At the end of their time, each of our men comes here to rest,” she said, her voice growing stronger, carried on the wind of the approaching night. “Today, we honor our fallen, we honor the best of us, what every man who calls himself a man should seek to emulate. Ale McKee was a standard, not just for the MC but for how we should conduct ourselves in this life. His like will never come this way again, and he will be missed—but never forgotten.”
The tears were hot on Elizabeth’s cheeks. She could hold them no longer. “Goodbye, my love,” she whispered, clutching the cask tighter, her tears darkening the wood. “Goodbye, my heart.”
Reggie and Glen stepped forward. Elizabeth kissed the cask and then handed it to the two men. As solemn as soldiers folding a flag, Glen and Reggie draped the box with the blue-and-black tartan of Ale’s clan and then folded and placed his cut on top of that. Glen walked with the draped cask to Heck and offered it to him. Heck noticed that Glen’s eyes were filled with tears, as he presented the box with his stepdad’s ashes to him. Heck nodded and accepted the burden with open arms. Why did he feel nothing? No tears, no sadness … nothing. He had loved Ale, even if the past few years had tested that love. He should at least feel guilt … anything. There was nothing except a vague anxiety.
Heck turned to his mother, and they both walked solemnly toward the dark mouth
of the tunnel. At the entrance, Roadkill met them; he wrestled to draw the massive sword, a Claymore that had belonged to Elizabeth’s father and had been passed to Ale upon his death. Etched into the blade was the word Bráithreachas. It looked like the sword that was on Heck’s tattoo and on every Blue Jock’s colors.
“When you walk in darkness, you do not walk alone,” Roadkill said, handing the massive blade to Heck, who cradled his stepfather’s cask in one arm and held the Claymore in the other. He rested the seven-foot blade on his shoulder. The piper began the urlar of “Mackay’s March” as Heck and Elizabeth entered into the blackness.
The first few yards in were muted by the fading light behind them. The walls of the tunnel were covered in a bizarre mosaic of graffiti art, name and date tags, slogans and symbols, all of it sliding and melting one into another, like a gigantic, winding, looping snake made of color and words. Heck remembered walking the tunnel years ago when he was initiated into the MC. He had heard all the stories about the tunnel and the markings on the walls since he was a kid.
“They move,” Roadkill had said. “The stuff on the wall … it’s alive … I’ve heard stories about all the ghosts from those old family cemeteries; they’re all in the tunnel. One guy walked in and never came out.…”
The strange part was that when Heck walked through the Tunnel to Nowhere six years ago, as a prospect, he had the strangest feeling he’d been here before, moved through these shadow-painted mazes, felt the images on either side of him shift and grow into almost blurry three-dimensional images of other places, lands governed by other laws, held back by a spray-painted fence of art and symbols.
The world fell into the void. Darkness swallowed Heck and Elizabeth as they continued to walk down the tunnel. The light behind them was a memory now, and the light ahead was a distant feeble splinter. The pipes had faded away, diluted by the heavy mantle of the tunnel, and, perhaps, by the darkness itself. The only sounds were their footsteps on the pavement and their breathing, echoing, muffled by the weight of the world pressing down on them.
The Brotherhood of the Wheel Page 4