Was it the same motorcycle? He looked at it again, unsure now. It seemed to be black, like the other one, but that might be a trick of the light. It had the same extended front end, and he could see the Harley insignia on the gas tank, so that much was the same. But he couldn’t be sure.
Turn around. Get back on the road, then onto the highway. Find another diner or truck stop, another bathroom. Drive away.
Inside the diner, a door swung open, gave a glimpse of a white-tiled hallway, where the restrooms and trucker showers would be. The biker stepped out, went to the counter. He looked older in the bright interior lights, gray in his hair and beard. He spoke to the waitress there, his back to the window.
When he came out the front door, he was carrying a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He spit on the ground, looked around the lot.
Kirwan slid lower in his seat. The biker glanced in his direction, then away. He set the cup atop a metal trash can, put both hands on the small of his back and stretched, then reached inside the jacket. He’s going for the gun.
The hand came out with a pack of cigarettes. Kirwan wondered again if the gun had been his imagination, his fatigue, his fear.
The biker lit the cigarette with a plastic lighter, put the pack away, blew out smoke. He was standing in the direct light fall from the windows now, and Kirwan could see the glint of a diamond stud in his right ear. He hadn’t noticed that before. Was it even the same man?
The biker went over to the Harley, opened the right saddlebag. He crouched, looked inside, moved something around, fastened the flap again. He retrieved his coffee, walked around the bike as if checking for damage, the cup in his left hand.
He looked out at the road for a while, smoking and drinking coffee, then flicked the cigarette away. It landed sparking on the blacktop. Straddling the bike, he took a last pull at the cup, pitched it toward the trash can. It fell short, splashed on the sidewalk, sprayed coffee on the door of an SUV parked there. Then he rose in the seat, came down hard, kick-started the engine. It roared into life. The people inside the diner looked out. He sat back, revved the engine, still in neutral, as if enjoying the attention. The heavy throb of the exhaust seemed to fill the night.
He wheeled the Harley around toward the road. Would he go left, back to the lights of I-95? Or right and farther west into unbroken darkness? In that direction, I-10 would eventually take him to Tallahassee, Kirwan knew, but there was a lot of nothing between here and there, mostly sugarcane and swamp.
Kirwan started his engine. Drive away, he thought once more. You’ll never see him again. Your business, your life, is down the road. Places you need to be, people to see. Commitments and responsibilities.
Still, a sourness burned in his stomach. The biker had laughed about what he’d done, and now he was riding off as if nothing had happened. He’d laugh again when he told the story later of how he’d put the fear of death into a middle-aged man in a station wagon.
The Harley pulled out of the lot, back tire spraying gravel. He turned right, as Kirwan had somehow known he would.
Headlights off, Kirwan followed.
No lights on this stretch of road, no moon above, but the Harley was easy to follow. Twice, cars coming in the opposite direction flashed their high beams at Kirwan, letting him know his lights were off. But the biker didn’t seem to notice. The Harley kept at a steady speed, didn’t try to race ahead, lose him. He doesn’t know I’m here.
He powered down the window, could hear the deep growl of the Harley’s engine. The swamp smell was strong, and a low mist hung over the roadway, was swept under the front tires as he drove. The urge to urinate was gone.
Houses started to pop up, most of them dark. Concrete and stucco, bare yards. The road began to run parallel to a canal, the Harley’s headlamp reflected in the water.
Past the houses and into tall sugarcane now. In the Harley’s headlamp, Kirwan caught glimpses of dirt roads that ran off the highway. The Harley slowed, as if the rider was watching for an upcoming turn. Kirwan slowed with it. He’s almost there, wherever he’s going. You’ll lose him. And maybe that’s a good thing.
An intersection ahead, with a blinking yellow light in all four directions. The Harley blew through it without slowing. Kirwan did the same. The road began to curve gradually to the right. Ahead, lit by a single pole light, a concrete bridge spanned the canal.
Pull over. Let him go. Put your headlights on, turn around. You’re in the middle of nowhere, and you’re losing time. Don’t be stupid.
The Harley slowed, rider and machine leaning to the right as they followed the curve of the road. Kirwan floored the gas pedal.
The Volvo leaped forward, faster than he’d expected, closed on the Harley in an instant. The bike had almost reached the bridge when the rider shifted in his seat, looked back, saw him for the first time. Kirwan hit the headlights, gave him the brights, barely thirty feet between them.
The biker was still turned in his seat when the Harley reached the bridge. Kirwan saw it as if in slow motion—the biker looking forward at the last moment, the bike coming in too sharp, the angle wrong. Then the front tire hit the abutment and the rider was catapulted into the darkness, the bike somersaulting after him, end over end, off the bridge and onto the ground below.
Kirwan’s foot moved from gas pedal to brake, stomped down hard. The Volvo shimmied as it had before, slewed to the right, the samples thumping into the seat back. The tires squealed, dug in, and the Volvo came to a shuddering stop just short of the bridge.
He reversed onto the shoulder, shifted into park, and listened. All he could hear over his engine noise were crickets. He switched on the hazards. Didn’t want another car to come speeding along, rear-end him in the darkness.
He got out, left the door ajar. There were bits of metal and broken glass on the bridge, a single skid mark. He walked up the shoulder, hazards clicking behind him, the headlights throwing his shadow long on the pavement.
At the bridge, he looked down. The ground sloped steeply to the edge of the canal. The bike was about fifteen feet away, had ripped a hole through the foliage. The rear tire was spinning slowly. From somewhere in the darkness came a moan.
He went back to the car, opened the glove box, took out the plastic flashlight, looked at the phone on the console.
Back at the bridge, he switched on the flashlight. The bright narrow beam leaped out, starkly lit the grass below. Torn-up earth down there. The bike had tumbled at least once before coming to rest in the trees.
He aimed the light toward it. It lay on its right side, the forks bent back and twisted, the front tire gone. The left saddlebag had been thrown open and its contents—clothes mostly—littered the grass. The air smelled of gasoline.
The moaning again. He picked his way carefully down the slope, shoes sinking in the damp earth. Playing the light along the edge of the canal, he followed the noise.
The biker lay on a wide flat stone below the bridge. He was on his left side, and there was blood on his face. Kirwan walked toward him, watching where he put his feet, not wanting to slip and fall.
The biker’s right boot was scraping uselessly against the stone. His left boot was missing, and the leg there was bent at a right angle away from his body. He’d dragged himself onto the rock, left a smear of dark blood and mud on the stone to mark his passage.
Kirwan shone the light in his face. The biker raised his right hand, let it fall. His left arm was trapped beneath him.
The gun. Watch for the gun.
He came closer. The biker was hyperventilating like a wounded animal, chest rising and falling. His left eye was swollen shut. He raised his arm again, weakly.
He doesn’t recognize me. Doesn’t know what happened.
Kirwan came closer, shone the light up and down the biker’s body, then around it. No gun.
“Help...help me.” The voice was a hoarse whisper. In the darkness, something splashed in the canal, swam away.
Kirwan squatted. “You don’t know who I am, do
you?”
The biker tried to shift onto his back, gasped.
“Remember me?” Kirwan said.
He turned the flashlight toward himself, holding it low so the biker could see his face. The good eye narrowed into a squint. He shook his head.
A big leather wallet was on the ground a few feet away, had come free from its chain. Kirwan tucked the flashlight in his armpit, picked up the wallet, unsnapped and opened it. In one pocket were three hundred-dollar bills and six twenties. In another was a laminated Georgia driver’s license with the biker’s picture. His name was Miles Hanson, and he was sixty-one years old.
Hanson coughed, and Kirwan looked back at him. The biker raised his head, spit a blot of blood onto the stone. “Keep it, man...it’s all yours. Just help me.” The voice still weak.
Kirwan closed the wallet, set it on a rock.
“Hurry up, man. I think I got something broken inside.”
“My cell phone’s in the car. I’ll call 911.”
He started up the slope, then stopped, looked back down. Hanson was watching him. He saw the glimmer of the diamond stud, remembered the grin, the middle finger, the chip in the windshield.
He went back down the slope, set the flashlight in the grass.
“What are you doing?” Hanson said.
Kirwan crouched, gripped the back of the man’s leather jacket with both hands. Hanson swatted at him with his good arm, but there was nothing behind it. Kirwan took a breath, straightened up so as not to pull a muscle, then jerked the jacket up, pushed, and tumbled Hanson face-first into the canal.
Kirwan couldn’t tell how deep the water was. Hanson splashed once, went under. He floundered there, got his head above the surface for a moment, gulped air, then went under again.
Kirwan found a stone the size of a basketball beside the canal, lifted it high, then dropped it into the water where he’d last seen Hanson’s head. Water spattered his pants.
He dusted off his hands, picked up the flashlight, and shone it down into the water. Hanson was a shadow just below the surface, not moving. A dark red cloud bloomed in the stagnant water, then dissipated.
He stood there for a while, watching to make sure there were no bubbles. Then he went back to where he’d dropped the wallet, took out the bills, and folded them into his shirt pocket. He kicked the wallet into the canal, then stepped out onto the flat rock, unzipped, and urinated into the water, a long stream that caught the light from the bridge, the pressure in his bladder finally easing.
When he was done, he zipped up, walked back to where the bike lay. It ticked as it cooled in the night air. Strewn on the grass were a pair of jeans, dark T-shirts, a sleeveless denim jacket. An insignia on the back read WHISKEY JOKERS DAYTONA BEACH above an embroidered patch of a diving eagle, claws out.
He reached into the open saddlebag, rooted deeper through more clothes. And there, at the bottom of the bag in a flat pancake holster, was the gun.
He drew it out, looked at it. At some point, maybe at the diner, Hanson must have holstered it in the saddlebag. But this gun was a revolver, and the one he’d seen had been an automatic. Or had it? Was this a second gun?
He went around to the other side of the bike, stepping over torn foliage. Using a pair of T-shirts to protect his hands, he took hold of the frame. It was still warm. He grunted, lifted, vines pulling at the ruined front end. The bike rose and then fell on its other side. The gasoline smell grew stronger.
He got the flashlight, opened the other saddlebag. More clothes, a full carton of cigarettes—Marlboro Reds—and a lidded cardboard box about half the size of a hardback book. No gun.
He opened the box, saw tissue paper. He peeled it back and in the middle was a cheap cloth doll—a cartoonish Mexican with a sombrero and poncho playing guitar, his floppy hands sewn to the cloth instrument.
Was this what he’d been checking in the saddlebag? A gift for a child? Then Kirwan squeezed the doll, felt the unyielding lump inside.
He turned it over, lifted the cloth flap of the poncho. Stitches ran up the back of the doll, thick ones, a darker color than the material. He tucked the flashlight under his arm again, pulled at the stitches until they were loose. The back of the doll came apart at the seam, revealing more tissue paper packed around a metal cigar tube. He unscrewed the top of the tube and pulled out a tightly rolled plastic bag. He poked a finger in, teased out part of the clear bag. Inside was a thick off-white powder, caked and compressed.
He pushed it back into the tube, screwed on the top. He put the tube in his pants pocket and tossed the doll out into the water.
He picked up the holstered gun, walked back up the slope to the Volvo, the road still empty in both directions. The yellow light blinked in the distance. The Volvo’s hazards clicked, insects flittering in the headlights. A breeze came through, moved the sugarcane on the other side of the road.
He opened the Volvo’s tailgate, pushed aside the sample boxes to get at the spare-tire compartment. He lifted the panel, pried up the spare, and put the tube and gun under it, then let the tire drop back into place. He closed the panel, shut the tailgate.
Back behind the wheel, he put away the flashlight, shut the glove box, gave a last look at the cell phone.
He reversed onto the road, swung a U-turn, headed back the way he’d come. He was calm inside, centered, for the first time that night. At the intersection, he turned the radio back on.
After a while, he began to feel sleepy again, a pleasant drifting. He looked at his watch. If he kept going, he could push through to New Smyrna by three thirty or so, find a motel, get five or six hours’ sleep before the meeting. It would be enough. Maybe he’d ask Lois out to dinner that night, divorce or no.
He had two free days after that. He could stay down there, figure out what exactly was in that tube, what it might be worth. There didn’t seem to be much of it, whatever it was. Maybe it was just a sample for some larger deal to be made later.
Rain began to spot the windshield, thick heavy drops. He turned on the wipers. They thumped slowly, and on their second arc, he saw that the chip in the windshield was gone. He touched a thumb to where it had been. Nothing there now, the glass unblemished. One less thing to take care of, at least.
He was humming along to the music by the time he reached the on-ramp for 95. What had happened had happened. There was no going back. Not now, not ever. The road and the night were his.
WHAT YOU WERE FIGHTING FOR
by James Sallis
I WAS TEN the year he showed up in Waycross. It was uncommonly dry that year, I remember, even for us, no rain for weeks, grass gone brown and crisp as bacon, birds gathering at shallow pools of water out back of the garage where Mister Lonnie, a trustee from the jail, washed cars. And where he let me help, all the while talking about growing up in the shacks down in Niggertown, bringing up four kids on what he made doing whatever piecemeal work he could find, rabbit stew and fried squirrel back when he was a kid himself.
I’d gone round front to fetch some rags we’d left drying on the waste bin out there and saw him pull in. Cars like that—provided you knew what to look for, and I knew, even then—didn’t show up in those parts. Some rare soul had taken Mr. Whitebread’s sweet-tempered tabby and turned it to mountain lion. The driver got out. He left the door open, engine not so much idling as taking deep, slow breaths, and stood in the shadow of the water tower looking around.
I grew up in the shade of that tower myself. There wasn’t any water in it anymore, not for a long time, it was as baked and broiled as the desert that stretched all around us. A few painted-on letters, an A, part of a Y, an R, remained of the town’s name.
I could see Daddy inside, in the window over the workbench. Didn’t take long before the door screeched in its frame and he came out. “Help you?” Daddy said. The two of them shook hands.
The man glanced my way and smiled.
“You get on back to your business, boy,” Daddy told me. I walked around the side of the garage to
where I wouldn’t be seen.
“She’s not handling or sounding dead on. And the timing’s a hair off. Think you could have a look?”
“Glad to. Strictly cash and carry, though. That a problem?”
“Never.”
“I’ll open the bay, you pull ’er in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Garrulous as ever, I see.”
I went on around back, wondering about that last remark. Not too long after, Mister Lonnie finished up and headed home to his cell. They never locked it, and he had it all comfy in there, a bedspread from Woolworth’s, pictures torn from magazines on the wall. You live in a box, he said, it might as well be a nice box. I went inside to the office, which was really just a corner with cinder blocks stacked up to make a wall along one side. Daddy’s desk looked like it had been used for artillery practice. The chair did its best to throw you every time you shifted in it.
I was supposed to be studying but what I was doing was reading a book called The Killer Inside Me for the third or fourth time. I’d snitched it out of a car Daddy worked on, where it had slipped down between the seats.
Everyone assumed I’d follow in my father’s footsteps, work at the tire factory, maybe, or with luck and a long stubborn climb uphill become, like he had, a mechanic. No one called kids special back in those days. We got called lots of things, but special wasn’t among them. This was before I found out why normal things were so hard for me, why I always had to push when others didn’t.
They got to it, both their heads under the hood, wrenches and sockets going in, coming out. Every few pages I’d look through the holes in the cinder blocks. Half an hour later Daddy said the man didn’t need him and he had other cars to see to. So the visitor went on working as Daddy moved along to a ’62 Caddy.
After a while the visitor climbed in the car, started it, revved the engine hard, let it spin down, revved it again. Got back under the hood and not long after that said he could use some help. Said would it be okay to ask me and Daddy grunted okay. “Boy’s name is Leonard.”
“You mind coming down here to give me a hand with this engine, Leonard?” the man said.
The Highway Kind Page 9