If Rock and Roll Were a Machine (7 page)

Why did I say that? Bert thought. I could come in the evenings, I could come on weekends. I haven't been by because I'm an ungrateful little bastard. He lowered his head, and that's when he saw the contents of the pan Myrtrice Clovis held at her hip.

“It don't seem like he knows one way or the other,” she said. But Bert didn't hear this.

Three blood-black things the size of peas lay in a thin, shallow sauce of bright blood. The blood sloshed up the side of the shiny pan and the black turds rolled as she stepped out the door.

Bert shut his eyes and clenched his teeth. He clamped down with such force that his head and shoulders shook. He was trying to squash the life out of the image in his mind. He thought of the huge metal-press that finally kills the Terminator in the movie. It just keeps pressing down until the red light in his eyes goes out. Bert wanted to smash out the red light of the blood and the little black turds that shone in it like pupils in a big, three-pupiled blood-eye.

He walked over to the bed and took his grandfather's hand. It wasn't like leather. It was more like the snake skins he'd found in the woods with Gramp years ago. It was almost that translucent, almost that weightless. And it felt that dead.

Bert watched his grandfather's lips sing their silent,
palsied song. He would never hear his grandfather's voice ring out in the world again. Bert would, however, hear Gramp's voice in memory. It would ring out clearly forever from that place where human beings are both haunted and sustained.

*  *  *

It was after five when Bert rolled the Sportster into the carport at his grandmother's house. The sun was low in the west, but the light was strong and poured through the blue corrugated plastic roof, creating a blue mist where the dust motes floated silver and gold like grains of sand in a stream. Bert had helped Gramp build the carport onto the single garage. He had been the one to climb the ladder and nail down the four-by-eight plastic panels.

Bert hit the kill button, and for a second all he could hear was the exhaust note ringing in his ears. The screen door opened and Bert's grandmother leaned her head out. She was in the sunlight there, and her tightly permed, smoky-blue hair shone as distinctly as if it radiated a light of its own. Bert saw her mouth move, but he didn't hear a thing. He dismounted and walked out of the blue mist and into the sunlight.

“Has that motorcycle made you deaf already, Berty?” Edith Bowden yelled into her grandson's face. She mistook the old half-helmet Shepard had lent him for a Nazi helmet she'd seen on a TV biker. “You look like a German,” she said.

Bert stood on the sidewalk and his grandmother stood on the porch step, which put them face-to-face. Bert smiled at the
irked
expression she wore. It was her word and it always made Bert smile. Almost everything about Gram made him smile. He took off the helmet and set it on one of the thin white trellis staves where the moss-rose vines hadn't woven themselves. He'd helped Gramp make the trellis, too.

“What's that, Gram?” Bert said. “Can't hear very well. Think the bike's made me deaf. Really irks me.”

“Such a noise could make a person deaf,” she replied. “I don't know why that thing isn't against the law.”

In terms of noise level it probably is, Bert thought. “I just stopped by to remind you I love you,” he said. “And to create an irksome racket with my motorcycle.”

“You've been to visit your grandfather,” she said. “You always stop by to remind me you love me when you've been to visit your grandfather.”

“I don't think he hears me when I tell him,” Bert said. He was surprised to hear himself say this. It wasn't something he would have said if he'd thought about it first.

Edith Bowden put a hand on her grandson's shoulder and stepped down onto the sidewalk. “Berty,” she said, “you told him often enough when he could hear you.”

And then Bert was crying, which surprised him as much as what he'd just said. He broke out into big, gaspy sobs. Tears filled his eyes, brimmed over, ran down his
cheeks and dropped off his chin. Snot collected on his upper lip in a gray moustache, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand.

Edith held Bert's arm and walked him a few steps across the grass to an addition built perpendicular to the garage. It looked like a tiny house with its chimney, wide windows, curtains, and window box still blooming geraniums, but it was a workshop. She nudged Bert into a seat on the red wooden bench under the window box. In her mind she could see her Bert and little Berty hanging the window box, painting the bench. She pulled a tissue from her apron pocket and held it out.

It embarrassed Bert to be bawling with such gusto. Weeping of this or any sort didn't fit with the biker image he would like to cultivate. It didn't integrate into the music of power, which was the sound a Harley made. But, God, did it feel good just to sit there and wail. His whole body gave in to it. It was like falling asleep when he couldn't stay awake another second. He took the tissue from Gram and wiped his nose. She sat down beside him and patted his leg.

Bert looked over at the little pink house where his grandparents had lived for ten years, where his grandmother now lived alone. The living room couch folded out, and he had slept many nights there after whirling the last old maid through the buttery grit at the bottom of the popcorn bowl and crunching it, after wrestling or
bowling or a wildlife show had ended at ten. He breathed deep and slow, blew his nose, looked down at the ragged tissue. He'd told himself he was riding over here to be a comfort to his grandmother, but he guessed he was really here for the comfort she and Gramp had always given him.

Bert gave a hand signal
as he turned north on Division. He checked both mirrors and signaled again before he slipped into the right lane.
You can count on drivers of cars to be predictable in one sense only,
Shepard had told him.
They'll always be dangerous. They'll look right at you, their faces will even seem to acknowledge you, then they'll pull out, anyway.
Bert was being particularly careful because he was breaking the law riding without the company of a licensed rider. Riding a motorcycle on Division during rush hour was unwise, and it was grossly stupid when you didn't even have your operator's license. Bert knew this, but he was riding, anyway.

Traffic moved about forty-five miles an hour, and it was bumper-to-bumper. Bumper-to-bumper, that is, unless you were on a motorcycle, in which case you had no bumper. You had tires, fenders, a helmet, your skull—but you had no bumper.

Bert watched the Blazer in front, the cars moving on both sides, and he checked his mirrors for encroachment from the rear. They might get him, but they wouldn't take him by surprise.

He insinuated himself into the right lane a long ways
before the turn to Shepard's, and he rode close to the curb to keep plenty of distance between him and the cars nosing over into any little space that opened up. From the middle lane a guy about Bert's dad's age in a brown jacked-up Ford 4x4 looked at him. The guy seemed to see Bert. He even stretched his neck to look back as he cut over into Bert's lane. The cab of the pickup fit fine into the space between Bert and the red Miata in front, but there was no place for the rest of it.

This happened too fast for Bert to yell at the guy or to have hit the horn button. Neither of these efforts would have helped, anyway, because the guy's truck was louder than Bert's bike. The whir of his oversized, all-terrain tires alone was enough to drown out the Sportster. What Bert did was exactly what he should have done: He gassed it and shot up over the curb.

It was lucky for Bert and the people in the world who loved him that he hit the curb at just the right angle to go over it rather than skitter along the edge where the pickup would have caught him and where some part of him would have ended up under its right rear tire.

Lucky Bert Bowden straddled the idling Sportster in the nursery parking lot and screamed after the Ford-man with all his might, “You cocksucker!” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and then he heard a familiar voice.

“You've had that bike what—twenty-four hours? And already you're talkin' like a biker. Who says the American teenager ain't a fast learner?”

There stood Scott Shepard holding a coffee can full of straw flowers. “How come you're not at football practice?” he said. “Camille told me you're a QB.”

“I got cut,” Bert said. “I'm not a QB anymore.” Bert was amazed that Camille knew his name.

“That's too bad,” Shepard said. “Shut that thing down and we'll walk back to the shop. You might need a place to change your shorts.”

Shepard bounced the can of flowers against his leg as they walked to the alley. He actually limped on both legs. Bert had never seen anyone limp on both legs before.

“Easy to get hurt on a motorcycle,” Shepard said. “Easiest thing in the world. Especially for an inexperienced—and I might add an unlicensed—young shitball such as yourself.”

“I know,” Bert said. “I know.” He was smiling at the way Shepard had called him a shitball.

Shepard pointed at Bert's Reeboks. “You know?” he said. “You don't know much or you wouldn't be riding in basketball shoes. Guy needs a decent pair of boots if he's gonna ride a motorcycle.

“There'll come a time when one of those laces catches around your shifter or your brake pedal,” Shepard said. “If you need to stop fast, you'll be in trouble because the only brake you'll be able to get to is the front, and on these old bastards the front brake ain't enough. Say you do get stopped and you go to put your foot down to steady the bike. Your foot's not gonna reach the ground
because your shoelace is caught. You're already leaning the bike and you've got no leverage to stop it, so you and the bike go over. Besides looking a fool, which nobody ever died from, you break a bunch of shit on the bike and maybe on yourself, or maybe somebody just drives over you.”

Bert looked down as he pushed the bike. The loops of his shoelaces were four inches long. Maybe longer.

“And let's say this,” Shepard went on. “Let's say you're whipping along through traffic on Division here, and those laces are flapping around and one of 'em gets caught in the chain. Ever see a section of highway where a deer or a big dog got hit? How there's that one big splatter and then smaller and smaller spots down the road?”

Bert saw bright blood shining. He nodded his head.

“They'd collect your pieces in a plastic bag,” Shepard said. “Your folks would get a call, they'd go, and that's the last they'd see of their boy.”

Shepard stopped. He bent and set the flowers on the asphalt, then pulled up one leg of his jeans. Bert looked at the boot. It had a strap where laces would be. He saw Shepard's pale, hairy leg. Then he saw his grandfather's leg. Then he saw the blood again.

“People call these motorcycle boots,” Shepard said. “But they're engineer boots. Their function is not to stomp heads, but to protect feet. As you can see, they have no laces to catch on something and end your days.” He snugged the leg of his jeans over the boot, picked up
his flowers, and headed down the alley again.

“Is that what happened to your legs?” Bert asked.

“No,” Shepard replied. “One knee went in football, and the other in an accident in my job.”

Up ahead Bert saw Shepard's partner spraying off an old bike. He was wearing sunglasses and looked so much like Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top that Bert wouldn't have been surprised to see him pull a V-shaped guitar from behind the trash barrel and whip into “Legs” or “Sleeping Bag.”

Shepard held the dried flowers above his head as he walked through the mist thrown up by the pressure sprayer.

Bert slowed to have a look at the old bike. Dave didn't look up from the rear wheel where he was directing the nozzle.

The sprocket, hub, and wheel rim were so thick with grease that no metal showed through. Dirty white feathers clung to the grease, and Bert wondered if a chicken had tried to cross the road at the wrong moment back when this poor old wreck had been a running motorcycle.

The hiss died and Dave turned and extended his big, wet hand. “I see both you and the old Sportster are still in one piece,” he said.

“Barely,” Bert replied.

“Stay off your head, youngster,” Dave said, and he turned back to his work.

Bert pushed the Sportster out of the mist and parked it to one side of the open overhead door Shepard had
entered. He took off his mist-covered glasses and wiped them on his T-shirt.

A wooden shed ran the length of the cinder-block building. The door of the shed was open. Bert peeked in and his eyes went big. Old motorcycles leaned one against the other, packed tight as anchovies in a can, from the sunlit doorway into the darkness at the end of the shed. The chrome and rust cast a dull sheen and made Bert imagine gold shining through the dust of years. The air was thick with the smell of old grease and rubber gone to rot, and he caught a whiff of leather.

The next thing Bert caught was a hot, hard jab above his right kidney. He gasped and threw up his arms.

“You've seen our stash,” the voice said. “Now we'll have t' waste ya.”

It wasn't Shepard and it wasn't his partner.

“Turn around,” the voice said.

Bert turned. It was the biker who had come to football practice with Shepard, the guy who wanted to beat up Coach Christman, the guy with the big arms, the guy who didn't need big arms because he carried a gun, the guy Bert had called the police on. He held the sprayer level with Bert's chin.

“You the kid bought the Sportster?”

Bert nodded.

“World's best buy on a motorcycle,” the guy said. “We'll have to let you live. Thanks to your acuity and decisiveness, there'll be a hot tub on the Shepard estate.
I myself plan to be the first Shepard soothed in its balmy effervescence. I may have to fight my brother and my nephew for the honor,” he said. “But I'm up to it.” He extended his hand. “Steve Shepard.”