Not today! He had waited for just these conditions for most of his adult life. Nuts to the classrooms and the gym with its weights and punching bags—more nuts to his pal Shooter Galloway who was even now probably working at something secret that Tim would bet Shooter didn’t even want to do. Today, and for the next few weeks, Tim Carlisle ruled!
In the middle of a series of swooping turns, a tired looking pickup charged up behind him and rode the motorcycle’s rear end too close for comfort. Locals harassing the out of state guy—nothing serious, Tim judged, but damned annoying.
A long straightaway appeared. Tim pulled well to the right and waved the crowding pickup ahead. He kept his eyes on the road because there was no comfortably wide berm or shoulder on which to manage an escape. As with many country roads, where the black top ended a forested, swampy wilderness began.
The pickup’s exhaust roared, and the truck’s battered fender and cab appeared beside him. Tim glanced over and caught a long face missing most front teeth staring slack-jawed back at him.
The mouth sneered a twisty hillbilly-ignorant smirk, and the truck surged ahead. Too many generations of inbreeding, Tim suspected. He returned his attention to remaining safely on the paved surface.
Nearly past, the pickup driver swung his wheels—and that quickly—the truck’s already mangled front fender and the door window with the now openly laughing clown face crossed into Tim’s disbelieving eyes.
Without hint of warning, Tim Carlisle’s peaceful sightseeing was transformed into a biker’s nightmare. He was deliberately being crowded off the road. He and his motorcycle were about to slam into the pickup’s side, and before or after the impact, Tim would have only one way to go—into the ditch.
Instinctively, Tim snatched his front brake and his foot stabbed the rear brake pedal. He leaned violently away in a desperate effort to avoid the intruding pickup.
Hopeless!
The bike slid, and when his rear brake took hold, the entire machine slewed wildly out of control.
His outthrust right leg slammed the motorcycle more upright, but maneuverability was gone, and with his speed still high he headed off the road and hard into forested lower ground.
Tim Carlisle was not a trained and experienced motorcycle racer. He could only hold on as he and the Old Dog’s bike tore down a brambly slope and crashed into woods that seemed all low-hanging, thickly-leafed branches.
By sheer luck the Harley missed a number of tree trunks that would have stopped him cold and destroyed the motorcycle, but whippy limbs that bit like barbed wire lashed his face and shoulders.
His helmet was slapped back on his head, and stunningly hard, a heavier limb slammed him above his left eye.
The motorcycle plowed into a wallow that brought machine and rider to a violent but almost upright halt within its own length. Helpless to even hang on, Tim was vaulted over the handlebars and struck the ground face first.
His landing was an uncontrolled sprawl, and pain shot through his neck and shoulders, as he skidded through the pine-needled bog that had stopped his cycle.
For long moments, Tim lay on his face, stunned and strained but thankful to have survived.
As his senses cleared, he managed to roll onto his back, staring up through the leaf and needled canopy, discovering that nothing seemed broken or bent too far, and absorbing what had happened.
Shouting voices came through his still uncertain awareness, and he saw blurry figures beating their ways down the wooded slope toward the bogged motorcycle. For an instant he feared the crazy men in the pickup were coming for him, but then he recognized the shouting as the voices of concerned rescuers trying to locate him and to determine if he was all right.
All right? Tim managed to sit up, and as the figures came closer, he struggled to his feet.
He sure as hell was not all right! He was completely mud soaked, and as mad as the famed wet hornet. He had a knot rising on his forehead, and he felt as if every joint had been stretched loose and thoroughly shaken.
The pain in his neck lessened, and he shrugged his shoulders eliminating more, but Tim Carlisle dared not dwell on what he would feel like tomorrow.
— — —
The rescuers reached him almost together. Three of them, young and vigorous men clad in military fatigue uniforms—angry young men who had seen it all as their own vehicle had come up on the deliberate off-roading of the motorcycle rider.
Too late to get license plate numbers, they had rushed to help the biker who they expected was seriously injured or perhaps dead.
They were mildly astonished and greatly relieved to find him thoroughly soaked and muck-fouled but on his feet. They were equally awed to see his cycle, although seriously bogged, looking little damaged and also erect,
Introductions and vivid explanations were exchanged, but Tim disguised his smoking anger. His rage was not directed at these good men.
Tim’s enlarging lump was examined and there was agreement among the rescuers that his eye would soon be swollen shut. Not the best news, but Tim, too, believed it might be so.
Curses fell upon the persons of the long-departed pickup people who had driven Tim not only off the road but well out into a briar-thick swamp.
Accepting Tim’s vows that he was not badly hurt, the immediate problem was to hoist the Harley from its shallow grave and ram it uphill and back onto the road.
Until they were on blacktop and the engine had been cleaned of muck, attempting to start would be next to hopeless.
Tim believed that the befouled chain presented the most dangerous condition. When, they got back onto the road, he would clean the chain as thoroughly as possible before starting the engine.
The Harley was buried so deeply that the lower chain and engine cases were beneath the skim of water that topped the swampy bog. How to hoist it free so that it could be rolled appeared challenging.
The soldiers, and they announced themselves as trainees at a nearby US Army Provost Marshal’s school, saw the solution. The four of them would simply pick the seven hundred plus pounds of Harley-Davidson from the suction of the clinging mud, turn it around, and push it up the hill.
One of the men suggested that with his powerful looking muscles, Tim might want to do it alone, a wise crack that earned him Tim’s rueful grin, the others’ hearty laughter and displays of their own less seriously developed biceps. Tim did not offer to pose.
They all got grips. Tim mastered his still imperfect balance, and on “three,” they heaved mightily. The motorcycle stirred, but nothing gave way. They rested and gained better footing and stronger grips. This time they really put their backs into the lift, and amid sucking sounds the big cycle slowly and reluctantly began to rise. Aided by groans and gasps they encouraged each other to keep heaving, and the Harley came free in a sudden rush that sent them all staggering.
They rested, and Tim clawed a few pounds of mud from the bike. A handlebar was seriously bent. Probably he had hung onto the grip too long, but he saw nothing broken or loose on the motorcycle, and his hopes built.
Regaining the road was not that easy. They edged the machine ahead, but stalled as pushers sought new purchase on the pine-needled slope. A soldier remembered his seventy-five feet of parachute cord, and brought it from their truck.
The cord was tied to the bike’s fork and looped around a tree almost at the road edge. The owner hauled on the rope, the other three heaved, and when their limits were reached, the rope hauler held the bike in place until reorganization allowed further gains.
Perched on the blacktop and protected from being rammed by the soldiers’ parked truck, the volunteers rested. Tim clawed and wiped away mud and needles. The chain needed water and chain oil. Tim used what motor oil he had, but he needed more of the right stuff.
If the bike started, Tim would ride it to the nearest stream or hopefully a house with a garden hose, and wash what he could.
There was something wrong with the bike that they could all see but that was hard t
o define. Something was out of line. The frame or the fork? How bad could it be? Tim would determine by mounting and riding.
Tim adjusted his helmet strap to allow for his freshly knobbed forehead, straddled the saddle, added full choke, twisted the ignition switch and pressed the starter button. The Harley choked, coughed, gasped loudly, and managed a number of pathetically weak revolutions, before finally slogging into a half-throttled life.
For moments Tim feared to add power lest he overload the struggling engine. Then the motor cleared itself, blew slop and muck from its twin exhausts, and again sounded like a working V-twin. Tim carefully revved the engine, adding RPMs until the aged power plant surged with its customary vigor.
The soldier volunteers high-fived each other and slapped Tim’s shoulders. He shifted from neutral into first gear, and with appreciative nods to each man he eased his clutch hand on the bent handlebar and let the motorcycle ease forward.
The bike ran, but it headed off at an angle, and Tim hastily adjusted his lean on the saddle to compensate for a terrific pull to the left. An out of line frame, as sure as hell was hot.
Or maybe the fork was bent. Tim relaxed his iron grip on the handlebars, and the bike dipped left so sharply Tim nearly lost it.
He recovered, still running at about twenty miles per hour. He tried riding faster, but in so doing he had to lean even further to the side. He doubted he would be able to move more than a gentle thirty miles per hour. His next stop would have to be a bike shop. He tried to remember what lay ahead, but he did not recall towns of any size where motorcycle repair facilities might be expected.
Then Route 27 appeared. His brakes worked, and he pulled to a stop as the soldiers came alongside. They were obviously aware of his difficulty.
The military policemen announced their agreement that there was a Harley agency about twenty or so miles ahead on 27. Not daring to remove his hands from the grips, Tim nodded his appreciation and shouted his intent to go there.
The truck zoomed away amid their promises to check on him when they came into town. Tim wondered if he could hold his machine on the road for that distance, but he would give it a try. He supposed he could quit and call in a wrecker, but … well, he would hang on for a while.
Riding with utmost concentration, Tim got up to his hoped for thirty miles per hour, but a new wobble developed at that speed. He judged he also had a bent front wheel. Twenty miles? Maybe.
If he could do one mile, why not twenty? It was an infantryman’s way of handling long marches and tough situations, he supposed. You just gutted it out. The kind of stuff Gabriel Galloway talked about.
Mostly he thought about what he would like to do to the dullards that had run him off the road. Locals, as sure as hell, but how and when could he ever find them?
Tim Carlisle limped along, allowing cars to pass while leaning dramatically far to the right just to keep going more or less straight ahead.
Two miles further, Tim saw exactly what he might have prayed for. It was not a towing service, or a Driver’s style bike shop, or even a handy flowing stream.
It was a diner-like eating joint, and a single vehicle was parked in the unpaved lot.
Tim instantly recognized the junker pickup. He had seen the right side of the battered truck up close and personal.
Tim felt his heart rate pick up. He felt his jaw muscles flex, and he forced himself even further over the side of his cycle to make a long and slanting approach onto the joint’s rough-dirt parking lot.
If he turned his bike off, would it ever start again? If he went in and tackled the pair of morons that had ridden him into the swamp, and if he succeeded in punching their lights out, would he have any kind of a getaway vehicle waiting?
Tim didn’t care. This would be payback time, and he figured to administer a message that would resonate throughout the local area.
Here he was, presented with a rarest of opportunities, a chance to deliver justice in full—if he were man enough.
Tim expected that he was. He swiped at his partially closed left eye and decided that he would break a few facial bones in demonstrating that ability.
Based on one of his favorite Old Dog stories, he knew how. During Dog’s first meeting with Hunch Bromley at a camp along the Pacific coast, Old Dog had … well, Tim Carlisle planned on matching his uncle’s efforts, plus more than a little extra.
6
Gripping his helmet in his right hand, Tim strode across the parking lot and stepped onto the diner’s splintery, planked porch.
He chose a course that avoided easy viewing from the open front door. No screen protection for this establishment. The flies must appreciate the easy entrance.
From within, voices rose, and there was laughter. Tim settled himself. His friend Shooter, who had seen serious combat, emphasized staying cool and thinking clearly.
Tim Carlisle was about to burst into a strange eating and drinking joint to meet head on (he hoped) two strangers who had run him off the road.
As there was only the single pickup in the parking lot, Tim expected to encounter only the pair he wanted and whomever was running the diner. If there were more, he would deal with them in turn.
The two could be highly trained, tough-man fighters, or they might be devotees of some brutal martial arts technique. Tim did not care. He intended to bust them wide open in a no-rules battle until they were finished and each had admitted it or were unable to comment. He was hoping for the latter. Timothy Carlisle was pissed, and the, so far, very few who had encountered him in that condition had never returned for a second try.
Two strides took Tim inside. Another pair placed him against the bar—and beside the long-faced hick with the clown smirk he had last seen as his cycle went out of control.
The number two man, the truck’s driver, was just beyond Long Face, and the driver saw him first. The man’s eyes focused and, as recognition soaked in, his overly-pleased smirk fell away, probably in astonishment, but certainly in trepidation. With his lumped head, dirt smeared features, and filth soaked clothing, Tim Carlisle’s powerfully muscled appearance could not have been reassuring.
Long Face’s head turned to see what had startled his companion, but he was far behind. Tim was already at work. He drove his tightly gripped helmet in a full-armed swing into the middle of Long Face’s gap-mouthed surprise, and followed through with all of his weight.
The blow was crushing, and human flesh and bone could not withstand it.
Tim’s follow through blotted his ability to see Long Face’s destruction, but he felt it even through the thickness of the fiberglass helmet. The center of impact was just to the left of the victim’s nose. The helmet crushed the left cheek’s malar bone into fragments, the upper jaw shattered, and the nose was completely flattened. Long Face’s unconscious body disappeared below the bar top, and Tim thought no more about him.
The driver scrambled from his bar stool, got his hands up as if he were some kind of John L. Sullivan, and Tim was on him.
Timmy Carlisle had trained for this kind of fight for nearly all of his life. Uncle Old Dog had kept him at the punching bags, the rope skipping, and the shadow boxing for as long as he had lived.
At least as important, Old Dog had taught him basic street-fighting principles. One of the first had been that head bones were harder than his fists. There were better targets than a man’s jaw.
A second rule had been not to attack an opponent’s strong points. If an enemy was built like a brick, do not wrestle him. If the adversary thought he was a boxer, first knock his legs from under him.
Tim chose the second method. He swung a boot behind the driver’s ankle and watched him collapse in a heap.
Then, Tim followed Old Dog’s Hunch Bromley technique.
He whaled his helmet alongside the driver’s head with a soul-satisfying, resounding clunk—hard enough to stun but not with an ultimate power that might crush a skull. As with old Hunch, the driver hung in there, down on both knees, but not out cold. Ti
m let him have a second shot with the helmet.
That one did the trick, and the driver dropped alongside his KO’d partner.
The experienced-looking bar Miss said, “Good God!” But she showed no interest in interfering.
Tim examined his unconscious foes. Done, but that was not good enough. It had been too quick and too easy. He felt no satisfaction. He could have been killed, and his motorcycle was probably ruined. Tim Carlisle’s soul demanded a stronger message.
He shot a warning glance at the woman behind the bar, and she understood. She leaned away with her hands held high in surrender. There would be no interference—Tim expected. A woman operating a trashy joint like this one had probably been to this well before.
What to do? Tim decided quickly, and he acted on it. He stomped as heavily as he could with his solid H-D riding boots on a lax hand of each of his tormenters. The easiest to reach happened to be right hands, and that also felt about right.
The female barkeeper watched as if she was interested, and as he turned away, she said, “Damn, mister, you don’t mess around. What in hell did these boys do to you?”
Tim was short. “When they wake up, ask ‘em.” He headed for the open door.
The woman called after him.
“Take some advice with you, tough guy. Ride as far and as fast as you can. These boys have a lot of kin around here, and they will be looking for you.”
Tim paused. “Good, tell them I shoot better than I fight, and I’ll be watching my back from here to the west coast.”
Tim stepped into the bright sunlight. He paused for a long moment to examine his badly damaged cycle. West coast? Hell, he would be lucky to make the next town. He felt like going back inside and laying a few more hard ones on the pickup guys.
He straddled the battered and befouled Harley. He primed and tried his electric starter. Perfect. The old engine kicked over like the champion it was.
But where to now? Balancing well over to the side, Tim eased his clutch and crept from the dirt parking onto the hard road.
The Making of Blackwater Jack Page 4