by Peter Craig
It was a little past midnight when Link heard some of the Angels harassing her in the bathroom. Grabbing, joking, laughing—it was basic Neanderthal shit, but Link didn’t imagine she would be able to handle it very well. Every now and then there was a woman who just abandoned herself to the collective will of the brothers, like throwing herself into rough seas, and he hated to think of Ursula in this position. So Link pushed his way into the room, where two men had stolen one of her shoes and were playing keep-away with it. Link said, “I’m taking her home.”
“Fucking A, Link—who made you Gary Cooper?”
“Give the kid her shoe back now, Lenny, or I’m going to kill everybody here with that toilet seat.”
Still working her foot into the mule, Ursula raced alongside Link as he promised to take her home. She was giddy and shaking, and, all the way down the steps of the apartment and across the street, she was telling Link that he should get away from these people, that he was better than they were.
“Why? Because I drew your picture?”
Hardy was giving rides around the block to Ursula’s two friends, and he looked crestfallen as she climbed onto the back of Link’s Harley.
Link began racing along dark and empty streets while she wrapped her arms around his waist. It was frustrating riding with her, because she didn’t lean into the turns, and when she did, she leaned too hard and he needed to compensate. Only to show her how fast he could go, he turned up onto the winding highway and began swerving through the hills, and soon they were descending foggy mountains on slick roads into the Anzo-Borrego Desert. He became so thrilled at the moonlit stretch past tumbleweed and the shadowy tentacles of ocotillo that he forgot about her, as if she were just a sweatshirt tied around his waist, and he rode all the way to Salton City, pulling finally into the last open gas station under a flickering light. There he saw that Ursula had been terrified for the past hour.
He said, “Fun. Right?”
She started crying under the fluorescent lights.
At first, Link responded as if he’d just dropped something fragile, saying, “Oh shit, no. No, no—don’t do that.” But soon, through her sobbing, she was confessing personal things: She was failing trigonometry and history; she wasn’t going to graduate from high school; she couldn’t stand her mother and they lived together on tiny disability checks in a shit apartment, three months behind on utilities. Ursula said that she would kill herself if she had to spend another day like this. “I mean, I’m just waiting for all the lights to go out!”
The pump clicked, the tank was filled, and Link screwed back the cap. He got back onto his bike and waited. She just stood there, refusing to climb on behind him, until finally she paced back and started kissing him. Never in his life had Link felt kisses like these, like decisive points in an argument: sharp, urgent, and aggressive. A rhythm of long questions and short demands. Link was half aroused, half scared. When he pulled away from the girl, her eyes were dry and hard, and he wondered if he had misinterpreted everything about her in his sketch. She was not timid: She was too hungry for her washed-up little town. They stared at each other, and she must have felt his hesitation, because finally she asked, “Do you hate me?”
“No, I don’t hate you, kid. Is that what you were shooting for?”
They were together every day and night after that, in a strange, accidental love affair that covered the better part of ten months and twenty-three states. During their first hopeful trips through the desert, or along the shore and mountains, he would start each morning happier than ever in his life. By nightfall she had always talked him out of it. He’d had a lot of old ladies, but never anybody like Ursula. She was serious. Defensive about failing out of high school, she wanted to “educate herself,” and she read books and magazines about psychology, astrology, and the movies. She’d quote authors to Link, explaining his particular form of social maladjustment, along with whatever steps he needed to improve himself, always believing that there was some hidden talent in him that she could eventually unleash. Between the sissy bars of his Harley, Ursula rode across the country with an unhappy face. She endured his lifestyle as if he would owe her something deep and everlasting for each uncomfortable moment she spent in a campground or a cheap motel. At times, she seemed more like a missionary than his girlfriend. She needed to talk about her expectations, the relationship, and the future at practically every stop on the road.
Link didn’t see how he’d ever be able to live up to the dream this chick had in the distance. And she looked on Link’s brothers as the varying symptoms of his disease, tolerating the bike runs as sudden, virulent outbreaks. She never much enjoyed the scenery, the emptiness of the Mojave, the Black Hills, or the canyons through Arizona. She brooded, mile after mile, carrying on a flinching internal monologue. Everything was “important to experience and learn from,” yet she never liked her experiences. She hated going on runs to Bass Lake or Big Bear; she couldn’t stomach all the drunks. Coast to coast, she could never eat anything on any menu. Link doggedly tried to please her with presents from roadside stands, moonlit rides, and clichés that always mortified him as soon as he uttered them—You’re my queen; you’re the best girl in the world; but the harder he tried, the more she treated him like a child offering a homemade, misspelled valentine.
To most of the brothers, Ursula seemed only like a pretty young woman who never smiled. But conflicts had been brewing over the months among the other mamas, who disliked the way she fluctuated between lectures and pouting. She found it appalling what these women did, and she disliked the communal, public aspect of sex within the club. Link never earned his red or brown wings with Ursula. And the other women probably felt her disapproval, as if she were that familiar voice from the straight world. Link knew there were several mamas who downright hated her, particularly a chick from Lake Elsinore, Sheila Carter, who had threatened to kill her one night with a broken bottle. Apparently Ursula had called her a “black hole,” which Link at first thought was a crude insult, but later learned was some kind of astronomy or psychobabble.
Late during a Memorial Day party on a beach in Northern California, Link left Ursula to sit by himself on the dunes after an argument. Much of the story he later heard secondhand, from Hardy and the others: Ursula never could handle drugs or booze particularly well, and she had gotten drunk too quickly. She had turned on Sheila, who was just out on bond for a battery charge. Apparently Sheila had been facetiously hitting on her, whistling and claiming that she wanted “a little taste of vanilla.” Ursula had snapped, throwing sand into her face, breaking into tears, and calling her a “fat, jealous prison skank.” Clearing the grit from her eyes, Sheila rose up and popped Ursula in the head. Ursula wasn’t hurt, just scratched and humiliated, but she came to Link demanding that he murder the woman and all of her friends. Link told her to calm down—nobody was murdering anybody tonight. He returned to the bonfire to discover that all of the women were fed up with Ursula, who had apparently been lecturing them for weeks about their wasted lives and her destiny of fame and fortune. Link joined the other guys trying to defuse the shouting, not thinking that anything out of the ordinary had happened.
He didn’t notice for an hour or so that Ursula had disappeared.
He looked around the shore, but when he couldn’t find her in the dunes, on the rocks, or along the cliffs of stranded driftwood, he formed a search party. Hardy wanted to come along, as well as two others—Dagget, a redheaded bike designer covered with tattoos of chain mail and battle-axes, and a wild young guy known as the Count, with long black hair, two missing teeth, and the florid tattoo of a dragon devouring its tail. Count was tripping on a half sheet of blotter acid and seemed ready to volunteer for any adventure.
The search wound up lasting three days, with the police trolling the waters, assembling clues from trucker sightings, and later interviewing gas station attendants, who had reportedly seen her running southbound on the PCH. On the third day, Link called her mother in Lakeside to lear
n that Ursula had stopped at home, packed her things, and moved to Los Angeles with a girlfriend. Link was in a seaside diner when he made the call, and he joined the other three men as they sat around a picnic table overlooking the crashing tide. She was alive, he told them. They nodded at the sea. He said it was for the best. He wasn’t one for “big crying bullshit good-byes,” and at least she wasn’t drowned or raped by a homeless guy. They each agreed that this was the right attitude.
Then Link said, “Fuck her,” and they patted and struck his shoulders from around the table. He asked who was up for a cross-country run—and everyone liked the idea. Count just needed to make a few deliveries, but he could have some cash by that evening. So they packed up what little they had, and at sundown they gathered in the parking lot of a beach motel, agreeing that no one would turn back until they hit the Atlantic. Dagget, Count, Hardy, and Link—a splinter group, they said, the one percent of the one-percenters, the worst of the worst, the really bad apples. They followed the coast northward at ninety miles an hour on the straightaways, grabbing the suicide shifts around hairpin turns; then they bled onto I-80 in San Francisco and roared over the Sierras in the rain. Dagget had an old pair of tennis shoes flapping from the back rail, and, somewhere in the Great Basin, they came off and smacked Hardy in the face. His cheek was swollen and purple, and Count gave him a handful of unknown pills with a swig of whisky.
They stopped overnight in Elko, where they took speed in order to stay up and keep drinking; then, somewhere in the middle of a glaring afternoon, they rolled into a small casino town, where Count picked up another load of crystal. They stepped on it with baby laxative and talcum powder, skimming off a pound for themselves, and they rode off through Utah, drinking out of a Jack Daniel’s bottle in the roaring wind, passing it between bikes along the highway. They went so long without sleep that life seemed composed of just one endless day, light and darkness like an intermittent blinking in the sky. Link was amazed at how sunsets seemed to follow right after the dawn, and he started to think that the road itself controlled time. They lounged on their bikes, soaring along at ninety-plus. Their legs went numb and they could hardly straighten them again in gas stations, where they pissed, ate candy, drank beer and snorted more speed. I-80 grew more boring by the hour, so they all cut south along a smaller highway, and got lost along mountain roads and mining towns, before coming out somehow in New Mexico, days later.
In the panhandle of Texas, they went looking for more booze in an Amarillo Kmart, and got into a fight in the parking lot with a truckload of cowboys. Link was so high on some PCP-laced roach he’d bought back in Las Cruces that an hour later he couldn’t remember who’d won the fight. Dagget didn’t seem to be with them any longer.
At dusk, they pulled over at a rest stop and tried to piece together what had happened. Count seemed to think that Dagget had been killed or arrested. They all tried to remember the last time they had actually seen Dagget, agreeing that it hadn’t been for days. Finally Hardy deduced that they had lost him a week or so earlier when they made the turn off I-80. Count and Link started laughing, pounding their legs and howling.
“He’s probably still up there looking for us,” said Hardy.
“Ah, he’ll be fine,” said Link. “He’s a big boy.”
The three remaining bikers carried on for another twelve hours to a town outside of Mobile, where—sometime during the hot new daylight—Hardy collapsed onto the beach. Link and Count sat on opposite sides of him to make sure he was breathing. In the distance, seagulls were swarming around something dead on the sand. Count began rolling a joint. They lit up and savored the moment, not noticing the cops standing right behind them. When Link looked back, closing one eye to view the glaring eclipse around the officer’s head, he offered the cop a drag, and felt a steel cuff go over his wrist. Then, for a long time Link and Count sat shackled in the sand, watching as the officers tried to wake up Hardy. They asked if he was dead, and Link said, “Nah, he’s just all tuckered out.”
Count started laughing hard at this, and soon Link was laughing at his laughing, and the two couldn’t stop. In the back of the squad car, they were like kids with the giggles in church, snorting, holding their breath, and bursting out with loud guffaws. At the station, they laughed as they were all fingerprinted together. Link told Hardy he had something on his face, then pretended to get it off while smudging ink across his cheeks. They went into a holding tank, where they terrorized some local drunk, until finally they all faded out and slept for the better part of two days on the floor. Tired of waiting for paperwork, the sheriff eventually decided to escort them to the state line.
Outside on the street, while two patrol cars idled, Link, Hardy, and Count broke into an argument about which direction to go. Hardy wanted to turn back, and Count had sobered up enough to realize he had business, while Link called them both pussies for stopping so close to the end. Hardy had a gigantic waterlogged welt on his head, and Link couldn’t remember where he’d gotten it. Count calmed Link down and said, “It’s just business, brother. Got myself a good cash source, and I can’t let it go dry.”
He asked a cop for a pen and paper, and then he started writing on the hood of the car. When the cop honked his horn, Count yelled, “Fuck you—arrest me then, pig.”
He gave Link the paper: On it was the name and address of a man named “Preacher” Harris, who lived off a golf course in Palm Springs. Count said, “There’s a job in this for you too, brother. Old guy—Berdoo chapter, founding fathers. I’m going to tell him to expect you when you get back. Motherfucker’s living like a goddamn senior citizen out there now, but he’s making shitloads of money. I’ll put in a word.”
They shook on it, punched each other’s chest, and Link split off in his own direction, crossing the Florida state line.
Some time later, Link met a woman in a bar in Pensacola, and a week or so beyond that, possibly during a blackout, he seemed to have moved in with her. She was an older lady, maybe in her forties, and she had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cocaine and booze. He would lie on his back in her messy bedcovers and laundry, and she would fuck him with squirms and grimaces, as if getting comfortable in a movie seat. And then he would wander the apartment naked, searching through a mysterious refrigerator, smoking, drinking, pissing off the porch. He would put on his same clothes from the night before, as stiff as a discarded shell, and he would wander back to the bar, where he’d start drinking again with ghostly dedication.
One day, when the woman’s old father came to visit, Link worried that he might have actually married her in a blackout. The man came into the room and found Link with his shirt off on the couch, surrounded by bottles and dusty mirrors. Suntanned and wearing a fruity shirt, the old guy began giving Link a speech about how his daughter was a good woman—all he wanted was the best for her.
Link had only blurry recollections of fights, progressively more routine sex, and bouts of illness, as if those memories were all stored in a different, preverbal part of his brain. The woman was crying, and Link realized that the old man was politely asking him to leave. Link shook his hand. His old lady seemed to be involved in a separate drama, running off to her bedroom. Link got onto his bike and saw her waving from her window. For some reason, he suddenly felt lonely for Ursula. Riding away past the spits of shoreline and the seafood shacks, the air thick with brine, he imagined her holding on behind him. He couldn’t understand why he suddenly ached so badly for her, like his bones had been hollowed out, but he needed to pull off the road and sit in the gravel and feel the waves of sadness roll over him.
He expected this feeling to go away, but instead, as he turned north to avoid the state of Alabama completely, an eleven-hour looping segue that made him curse himself for failing geography, every passing mile seemed to intensify the empty feeling. He was somewhere in a cicada-filled stretch of Spanish moss and kudzu when he pulled up to a little gas station surrounded by black kids laughing and pointing at him. Inside he found the pho
ne. Somehow, out of all the soggy chaos in his brain, he remembered his old number in Lakeside. Hardy answered the phone.
“I need to find her,” said Link.
Hardy was quiet for a long time. Pissed off. Finally he said, “She’s been looking for you, man. She’s up in L.A. She just had a baby, Link. A girl. Says it’s yours, you fucking deadbeat: She was pregnant when she left.”
Link shook his head and tried to clear his eyes. He asked how the hell it was even possible that she could have a baby already.
“Link—you been gone four and a half months, man.”
The room was churning, and there were purple spots floating in his eyes, and Link was quite certain now that these were the side effects of time travel. He couldn’t speak, and Hardy started explaining that the baby was born too early, and probably wasn’t going to survive.
Link got the name of the hospital, and learned that the baby hadn’t been named yet, except with Ursula’s last name: Infant Carson. “Infant,” he repeated, as if it were his daughter’s name.
“She’s too scared to name the kid.”
“Hardy, you little shit, you do me a favor. You tell Ursula I’m coming. I’m going to make the ride straight through, even if my legs fall off.”
“She ain’t too happy with you.”
“Tell her I’m going to make it up. Everything. No more bullshit.”
By the time Link was on I-40 speeding back toward the West Coast, all he repeated to himself was Infant Carson, over and over, keeping him awake without drugs, even when all he could see was a black horizon and streams of dotted lines piercing the cone of his headlight. Had Ursula been expecting him to chase her all this time? He couldn’t figure it out, and the situation seemed hopeless to him out on the dark roads. He was racing to see his daughter before she died. This was the first real test of his life, and he found himself talking to a God he’d never believed in, begging forgiveness, pleading with him to extend the life of an unnamed girl.