The Dust and the Roar Page 4

  We watched “The Six Million Dollar Man” on TV. We were so high that watching Steve Austin run at sixty miles per hour with his bionic legs made us laugh when I guess it should have made us really fucking uncomfortable.

  “You need anything before I go?” I asked him, throwing away the paper plates that I’d filled with sandwiches I’d made from whatever I’d found in the fridge. “Need to pee or …”

  “I’m good. Thanks.” He rubbed a hand across his belly. “You make a mean bologna, ham, and cheese, man. Gonna put my radio on here, smoke some more, and zone out.”

  “All right then.”

  “You’re a good friend, Richie. The best.”

  “And don’t you forget it, fucker.”

  He winked at me and laughed. We slapped our hands together, our fingers squeezing.

  I got onto the bike and took off. Halfway down the road, I realized that Noah was getting high, and he was going to need food for the munchies that would be hitting him soon. I knew their cupboards were empty of tasty junk food. Nothing worse than having the munchies and not having anything available. How many times had we gotten ourselves into that situation? Too many.

  I stopped at the convenience store at the next intersection and got him potato chips, popcorn, chocolate chip cookies, and his favorite brand of pretzels, a six-pack of cola, and headed back to his house.

  I opened the screen door and stepped through. “Noah, it’s me. I got you—”

  No Noah on the recliner where I’d left him.

  Only that sheet he’d covered himself with lay crumpled and hanging off the chair.

  “Noah?” My mouth dried as I stepped farther into the room. The acrid smell of gunpowder filled the small house, burning through my nostrils. Another smell engulfed my senses, making my knees buckle, pushing me forward.

  My pulse pounded. “Noah!”

  At the other end of the living room, Noah lay on the floor in front of his dad’s gun cabinet. A rifle lay on his blood-covered upper body, a hand twisted over the barrel. His bound leg stubs lay exposed under his too large boxers. Blue boxers with red stripes on them.

  I didn’t think I’d ever forget those boxers.

  Or his head. Pieces of it on the blood-soaked floor.

  My body buckled. Sliding my arms underneath him, I held Noah. The stench of his blood surrounded me like a fog, filling me. The smell I knew so well, the smell that always shot me into action, now slammed me to the floor.

  My hold on my best friend tightened as I rocked him. “Noah, oh Noah … I’m sorry, man, so sorry. I wanted you to know that you done good, bro. You done good over there, I wanted you to know that. I don’t know if anyone ever told you that. I wanted to, though. You done good. Noah. You hear me? Noah!”

  He couldn’t hear me. I struggled for air, but there was none to have.

  Chapter Seven

  Noah’s funeral came and went. His sister, Josie, clung to her dad, the two of them crying. Could I have said something different to Noah that day? Should I have insisted on taking him out, to get him out that damned house? Every night I stared at my ceiling in the trailer wrestling with those fucking question, the heat stifling.

  I had to press on.

  I had to find a job.

  After I’d returned from Vietnam, I’d served at an army medical center in Aurora, Colorado but I definitely didn’t want to work at a hospital facility again. I couldn’t face another bedpan, or fetch for doctors and nurses anymore. Being a medic had been an accomplishment. Blood and gore hadn’t bothered me. I’d saved lives, stitched body parts, stopped blood flow, kept souls together on their way to the MASH unit.

  I wanted to put that to rest now. I had to. That was the past.

  The gravel factory Dad worked at had openings for vets. In my dad’s day, that gravel and rock went to building the air bases, and now it was going to build the new interstates and the highways cutting through our state. Pay was good, and I’d be physically active. I could do it for a while, save up some cash while I figured out what else I wanted to do. Made sense. I wanted to land somewhere already. There’d be bills to pay soon.

  “Here you go. Fill that out and sign.” The office manager at the factory handed me the form and a pen from a desk set up outside in the courtyard.

  I filled out the form. Men passed me walking out of work, their uniforms covered in dust, like my dad’s. That dust covered my father’s hair, his eyebrows, his clothes, his boots. He’d scrub in the shower to get rid of it every night. That dust dried my lips now like it had his then.

  I could hack this for a little while at least couldn’t I? But what if I let that “little while” last too long and before I knew it, I’d be like the men now filing out of the courtyard—defeated, weary, silently discontent. Like Dad.

  When I first got to Vietnam, the heavy silence of the jungle had lulled me, seduced me into thinking not so bad. I got this. I can hack this.

  Then boom.

  The firing of heavy mortar, rocket grenades, machine guns would rain down on us out of nowhere. Soon enough that became a daily occurrence, and any notion of “I got this” had been burned like a wash of acid from my thinking.

  No thinking.

  Don’t think. Don’t.

  My stomach cramped, my fingers cramped around the pen. Had I survived Nam to come back to this?

  “This ain’t alive.” Noah’s adamant voice filled my head.

  I didn’t have to take this job. I didn’t have a family to provide for. I didn’t want to be stifled by the dirt and the dust of that gravel and rock, of this factory.

  “This ain’t alive,” Noah pleaded with me. “This ain’t alive.”

  I dropped the pen. A dull roar rumbled in my gut, rose up my chest. I crumpled the paper.

  “Young man?” rose the manager’s voice. I dumped the pen and paper on his desk.

  I stalked off, away from that dust and rock.

  I got in my truck and swerved out of that lot, and got on the road, breathing in the crisp wind pummeling my face from my open window. My thudding heartbeat eased as my foot pressed heavier on the gas pedal. I didn’t know where I was headed right then, but I didn’t fucking care.

  I stopped for gas, and as I waited to pay, a group of bikers showed up with a black painted van behind them. Now that was custom detailing—a big eagle bleeding, its drops of blood transforming into red flames painted around the sides. I sat up. It was the Bleeding Eagles from Dead Ringers.

  Willy came to a stop alongside me. “Hey, good lookin’, what you got cooking?” He cracked a grin at his use of the classic Hank Williams tune.

  I let out a laugh. “Good to see you, man.”

  He peeled off his helmet. “What are you up to?”

  And it was there, in Willy’s blazing grin, and in my own, that I knew my life would never be the same again.

  Chapter Eight

  Willy invited me out to their farmhouse in Meager. Mick seemed to be the leader of their club. There was Cheezer, Terry, and Bobby, who was a Meager native, and there was Jump, who was the newest member. They were all glad to see me again. We drank beers, laughed at their crazy stories from the road, smoked weed, and ate a crapload of potato chips and Oreos. Cheezer sprayed a whole can of Cheez Whiz into his mouth, which accounted for his nickname. At some point in the night, we crashed, me on a blanket on the floor.

  I’d slept really good, and I woke up early the next morning. I went out front of the barn where we’d all parked last night. An army of chrome in a field of tall, wild grasses stood at attention before me, and a grin overtook my mouth and my soul. Each bike was distinctive in personality and character, and it was obvious from the mud and dirt and dings, that they rode and rode hard all the time.

  “Why don’t you all bring your bikes over to my place today and we’ll see what’s what with my dad’s stash,” I told them over coffee. “I’m sure we can find what we need and get your bikes in shape.”

  “Sounds good.” Willy tossed me his pack of smokes.<
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  “You got any food over there?” asked Mick, a burly, short guy with a long beard.

  “Yeah, I got food. You got weed?”

  “What do you think?”

  We got to my place, and pulled everything out of the old shed and laid it on the grass in piles and rows. In between, there was plenty of beer and weed to keep things flowing. Laughs, dirty stories, dumb stories, and plain ol’ good company, and I liked it.

  Instead of shuddering, bleeding bodies, I worked on Harleys. Gasoline, grease, metal, not blood and bone. The two guys who knew their bikes well, Willy and Mick, organized all the tools and the parts and set up a kind of triage for the six bikes.

  “This yours?” Willy asked me, pointing to Dad’s bike in the side of the shed.

  “It’s my dad’s.”

  “He ain’t here, man. It’s yours.” He rolled the old Harley out of the shed, leading her into the field where we worked. I swallowed hard at the sight of her as the afternoon sunlight washed over the colored metal. She was rusty in patches, dirty, seat cracked.

  She was mine.

  Among the hundreds of parts and pieces we took out of Dad’s shed, I found two complete panhead motors, and a vintage Indian Chief tank with the emblem still in good condition. Fenders, seats, a few Harley oil tanks, and headlight assemblies. There was a hell of a lot of good stuff.

  A set of handlebars hung on a wall of the shed like a moose head looking over us. The triumphant emblem of Dad’s chaos and his passion. One night on the way home from work he’d witnessed a collision with a semi, a station wagon, and a bike. “What a wreck! I’ll never forget it!” Dad had said when he came home, describing the accident to my mother and me in gory detail. We’d hung on his every word like it was some fairy tale full of magic and monsters.

  He’d found the handlebars on the side of the road, and took them along with other small pieces that had survived the accident. “It’s just gonna get tossed in a junkyard. That bike was an Indian for God’s sake.”

  Dad always had a soft spot for Indians. Indians had won those early bike races with big-name riders, running neck and neck with Harley-Davidson. The company had fallen on hard times and stopped production around the time I was born. There were a few rebuilt Indians riding around, and Dad would always point them out to me and talk to the owners if he could. He’d managed to collect a good number of Indian parts over the years too, and they were still here.

  We all stared at the parts littering the lawn. “This is fucking amazing.” Willy laughed. A hearty, rich laugh.

  Out of the six bikes, only Willy’s Shovelhead didn’t need some sort of major repair. We spent the days at my trailer, doing what we could, and we didn’t do too badly. Even Jump laid down on his back by his bike in my yard as I showed him what needed adjusting and replacing while he entertained me with stories about his latest female conquests. Mostly, he entertained himself.

  “You paying attention?” I interrupted him.

  “I am, man. I am,” he said, rubbing a hand down his middle.

  Everyone ended up crashing at my place off and on for a few weeks. Thanks to a couple of boxes of Hamburger Helper and some chopped meat there’d be dinner, but that got old real quick. A couple of the guys brought girls over, and there were groans and laughter coming from inside the trailer while the rest of us were outside by a fire.

  “I’m Shirley, what’s your name?” one of the girls asked me. She was a thin blonde with short curly hair, and wore a tube top and short shorts that were really tight. I’d noticed her flirting with Jump earlier, straddling his lap while his hand slid under her top.

  “Um, Richie. My name’s Richie.”

  She slid into my lap, and taking the joint from my fingers, took a long drag. Smiling down at me, she exhaled and kissed me. A simple planting of her lips on mine. I stared at her, my body suddenly hard under hers. The last time I’d had sex was a rushed, crazy thing with a nurse at the hospital. Barely any kissing, like with the other nurses in Vietnam—quick, drug-fueled, desperate.

  “You got nice blue eyes, Richie,” Shirley murmured as she wriggled and rubbing up against me in all the right places. Her lips dragged across the edge of my tense jaw. She smelled sweet and fruity like Hawaiian Punch. Would Jump get mad and then this would lead to a stupid fight? Would the rest of the men get ticked that one of their girls was showing an interest in me, the outsider? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to take that chance. Things were going good, and I didn’t want to screw anything up over a piece of ass. Shirley palmed my dick—she sure as hell didn’t care.

  My hard-on was full-on, my skin flared with heat. One of the girls was going down on Mick, and the sound of her wet mouth as she worked him, and his loud, irrepressible grunts, sent me over the fucking edge, and I grit my teeth against the swell of pure lust.

  Willy appeared before me through my haze, raising a beer can, his head slanted. “Go for it, man. Have some fun.” Jump came up behind him, grinning, and winked at me.

  I scooped Shirley up in my arms, her squeaky laughter ringing in my ear as I tracked over to the trailer.

  Hell yes. Life was good.

  Fucking Shirley even better.

  Chapter Nine

  I moved to Meager and got a job.

  Willy recommended me to Steve, who owned an auto repair shop in Meager, a small town about an hour and half southeast of Rapid. Steve’s brother owned the farm where the guys crashed outside of town.

  Steve owed Willy and the guys because, just the month before, another club, the Demon Seeds, had come through, breaking windows and stealing money and parts. Willy and the boys had stepped in, which was how Jump had gotten cut. They’d hung out there night and day, making sure it was known that Steve was protected and making sure Steve felt safe.

  Steve was getting on in years. He liked explaining, and I liked learning and doing. He was patient and appreciative of my commitment, and I was never late and kept everything clean and organized.

  I’d sold the trailer and the property to a development company that literally came knocking on my door, and socked the money away in the bank. I found a big room to rent at a house in Meager off Clay Street, the main drag. I was on my own in a new place, and it felt damn good.

  I’d fixed my dad’s bike, and I was so fucking proud of her. We went on a run up to Bismarck for a Bicentennial veterans’ charity event and met up with other small clubs and riding federations. Everyone was welcoming as we partied together, camped out, exchanged promises to visit with other clubs. I was high on all of it without the booze and drugs.

  We’d left North Dakota and were heading down Route 212 through the Grasslands toward home. I’d been on this road many times with my dad in his truck going to the State Fair in Minot. Heading home after the Fair on that five hour plus ride, Dad and I would talk about how great this young bull rider was, how we’d both enjoyed the Appaloosa show, or how I could never get enough of that shaved ice. We’d sing along to his favorite Johnny Cash 8-track tape as loud as we wanted.

  But today, being on the road on my own bike with a crew of friends was a different experience. As we rode side by side, Willy caught my gaze, and we both grinned. Now the battering wind and my rumbling engine were my music, the vibration of the metal between my legs, the live wire feeding my pulse. I could hear my father’s voice singing “I’m Moving On” as my bike cut through the sweep of open land into a gentle roll of hills, zooming through fields of green-yellow grasses dancing in the dusty wind.

  Joy was a word reserved for church and psalm singing, wasn’t it? But this was my church, this was my singing the psalms out loud, and my soul flew.

  Up ahead of us, Cheezer weaved on the road, his bike wobbling. He’d refused my request to inspect his brake fluid and oil, saying “Later, man.” Later, because he and Terry had gone to go score some blow and Angel Dust before we’d left. They’d cut it with a baby laxative and try to sell it at parties and bars to make a buck and attract women.

  I liked getting
high and drunk as much as anybody, but I wasn’t making it my be all and end all, day in and day out. It interfered with riding. For them, it was their favorite kick, and it showed: slurred speech, sleeping most if not all of the day, never helping out with keeping shit organized around our digs. When that shit started interfering with real life, it was a motherfucking pain in everyone’s ass.

  Suddenly Cheezer’s neck went rubbery, his whole body wavered. He slid off his bike, the chrome beast skidding in one direction, his body tumbling in another. A blur of choppy movement, burning rubber, shouts.

  We pulled over, running to him, getting him off the road. “What the fuck, you idiot!” His arms were skinned, his face already swelling, lip cut, breath wheezing. I snapped off his helmet.

  “It’s a good thing he’s so fucking high. His body was relaxed when he rolled,” muttered Willy at my side.

  “Fuck that! This is the second time,” I spit out. “Just last week he couldn’t even get up the hill to the farm, pitching himself in the mud. All he cares about is his next high.”

  “Cut him a break, man—”

  “A break? Yeah, he about near broke his bike and his skull. I’m not here to babysit y’all.” I got up and kicked at the bike, at the crooked front wheel, the mangled handlebars. I kicked it again. “Goddam wreck all for nothing. Nothing but wrecks!”

  “Except for you, that is,” Cheezer slurred, pointing a bloody finger at me.

  My eyes darted to him, staking him further in the asphalt. “What’s that supposed to mean, motherfucker?”

  “Wrecks. You fix ‘em, but you never make ‘em.” His head rolled back on the ground on a garbled laugh, bloody spit oozing from his lips.

  “He’s right,” said Mick, slapping me in the chest. “You haven’t crashed out once. You ain’t no hazard to nobody.”

  “Wreck.” Willy clapped a hand on my shoulder, laughing. “I like it. Fits, you righteous son of a bitch.”

  “Fuck off, and help me get this bike up,” I muttered.