If Rock and Roll Were a Machine (9 page)

I was on my way to take my exam, so this was not good news.

Scotty reached out with the breaker bar he was holding and touched me on the forearm where I wish I had a tattoo but lack the courage. Not the courage to be tattooed, but the courage to face my mom and dad after it's done.

Scotty, Steve, and Scotty's son, Camille, each has a tattoo on his forearm that says RIDE FAST, LIVE FOREVER. My intellect tells me this is a stupid sentiment, but I confess that sometimes when I'm riding and I say it to myself my heart wants to fly out of my chest.

“Let me amend that, Bert,” Scotty said. “There's one person a Harley guy can run into who transcends a Washington State Trooper in terms of pure malevolence. That is a female trooper on any duty whatsoever. They are the meanest things under the brim of a hat. They're tough as badgers and their numbers are proliferating.” He pointed the bar at Steve. “That correct, Brother?”

“I'd hate to tangle with one,” Steve replied. He turned to me, blipped his throttle once, then let it idle down again before he spoke.
“They pride themselves on their knowledge of primitive circumcision techniques, Bootsie,” he said. “We're talking blunt rock and mussel shell.” He gassed it again and was off.

Scotty raised the breaker bar to the bill of his cap. “Good luck,” he said. “If you pass, take yourself a nice long ride. Don't came back till after lunch.”

Steve and I rode south on Division through the Saturday morning traffic. As we neared the examining station he slowed. I rolled into the driveway and stopped to wait for him, but he sat on his bike in the middle of the street, smiling.

I heard a scuffing on the asphalt and turned. It was a trooper. A woman. She was striding toward me like a power lifter approaching the bar. She looked like the woman Marine in
Aliens
. She was smiling. I guess I was the only one of us not having a good time.

I looked back at Steve. He'd raised and lowered his hand, and now he was wheeling back toward Division. I'd turned a little too late to catch his gesture. He might have been giving me a good-bye wave, but I was afraid he'd been flipping the trooper the bird. She touched my shoulder.

“Ready to take this old sled through the cones?” she said. Her name tag read TROOPER HARRISON. “Scotty called and told us Steve was bringing you down,” she said. She looked at her clipboard. “Bert Bowden?”

I nodded.

The test was short and simple. I rode straight along a line of cones, swerved through another line of cones, banked around one final cone, accelerated through the gears, then clamped on the binders for an emergency stop.

Trooper Harrison extended her hand and I took the sheet. At the top she'd written 92%.

*  *  *

I felt weightless as I blazed north on Division. It was tough to hold it at forty. It's always tough to stay close to the speed limit, but it was tougher that morning. The power gets inside you. It's the only sensation I know like listening to good rock and roll. If rock and roll were a machine, it would be a motorcycle.

I watched my reflection flash past in the store windows. I admired the look. Brown leather jacket open over a white T-shirt, old faded jeans, sensible boots. It was a look of confidence. This young dude was evolved. Too bad he wasn't me.

Any other time I would have been brought down by this realization, but on this day I wasn't.

Soon the stores thinned out, the pines began, and Division Street became Highway 395. When I saw the 55 sign I cut loose. It was literally like taking flight. I couldn't hold back. The speedo needle was bouncing off seventy. The wind was pushing my helmet back so hard, my chin strap had begun to strangle me. This was not how a guy stays off his head.

I was up to eighty when I passed the old gravel pit where the highway slopes down to the Little Spokane River. I had to back off then because cars were stopped waiting for a hay truck turning onto the river road. When I reached the intersection I had slowed enough for my good sense to catch me. I gave my hand signal and turned into the cool shadows of the cliffs.

It was sweet riding along the river. There was traffic, but no one was in a hurry. Just cruising. Families. Boyfriends and girlfriends.
Every bike I met carried a couple. The girls were clasped onto the guys like enraptured mollusks onto rocks. This made me aware that I was alone, but it didn't spoil the good time I was having.

I had taken my eyes off the road directly in front of me, but I don't think I would have seen it, anyway. It came too fast. What I did see was a dark blur, and then I felt the impact.

It was like being punched in the sternum by a sharp little fist. It took my breath away for an instant, but it didn't knock the wind out of me. I looked down and saw a bird stuck in my chest.

A big bird. The thing went a good twelve inches from its head to the end of its tail feathers. I couldn't tell about the beak because it was buried to the hilt in my chest. It was long enough to anchor the bird's body flopping against my T-shirt where my jacket hung open. The bird's neck was broken. It was all black except for the white iris of the eyes. Both the black pupil and white iris were opaque. They looked like porcelain.

I maintained an excellent view of the bird even while I was still riding because the thing was four inches from my chin. To oncoming motorists the bird must have looked like a pendant I was wearing. If I'd seen me coming down the road, I'd have said, “Now there's a dude with some arcane jewelry!”

I pulled off at a litter barrel, took hold of the bird's warm body, and yanked. It slipped right out. It felt funny, but I wouldn't say it hurt. I watched the white cotton cloth of my T-shirt absorb the blood. The spot didn't grow bigger than a quarter. The bird's beak was about an inch and a half long and shaped like a little chisel. It was some kind of woodpecker.

I lifted a ketchup-stained Arby's bag out of the barrel, deposited
the bird, then replaced the bag. I zipped up my coat and headed back to town with tetanus on my mind.

Back at the shop I told Scotty about being drilled by a woodpecker. He enjoyed it. He said the troopers let me slide, but I'd wound up getting peckered, anyway.

Gene Tanneran reads the concluding
line of “Peckered,” Bert Bowden's personal narrative, and smiles. He nods his head, drops the stapled pages onto his kitchen table, and gets to his feet.

It's a quarter past midnight and time for high school English teachers to put away their pens.
Slow Train Comin'
floats in from the living room, and Tanneran smiles again as he pours the last of the coffee and shuts off the pot. A piece of student writing made him forget Dylan was on the stereo. Such a powerful diversion doesn't take place every night. He will write Bert a note and hit the hay.

Tanneran knows that the most important thing to do with Bert Bowden is just to like him. Bert doesn't send many signals out into the world, but the ones he does send are going to reflect back to him off Gene Tanneran with the message “Bert Bowden, you are a neat guy.” Which is nothing more than the truth.

Tanneran feels an almost personal shame that a member of his profession spent two years creating a world where Bert's reflection showed him he was shit.

Tanneran will give Bert specific criticism of his work,
of course. He will recommend books to read, he will encourage, he will suggest to Darby Granger, the paper's editor, that she assign Bert a feature story so his writing skills are challenged. Tanneran will help all he can. But the most important thing he can do with Bert is like him. Massive doses of affection. Once the kid begins to feel like he deserves success, he'll start creating some.

Bert is easy to like. Most of the kids are. But Tanneran can't like them all. He wishes he knew some exercise to create a more loving heart. He has begun to feel his store of affection grow leaner with each passing year. In his twenties he couldn't imagine a bottom to the well from which his energy, tolerance, and affection flowed. In his thirties he felt that power diminish. Now, in his forties, he's often forced to dip deep. He doesn't see a way in the world he can keep teaching high school until he's old enough to retire. He even prays for Christian love to transform him. He remains, however, untransformed. So he does the best he can: He pretends.

Tanneran treats all the kids as though he likes them. Even the most contemptible little assholes. His hope is that this exercise will get his heart back into shape.

The thing that Tanneran believes to be his greatest success as a teacher isn't mentioned in his personnel file. No one knows about it. Every time Tanneran calls Rick Curtis's name and Curtis only nods, every time he asks him a question and Curtis doesn't respond, every time he looks at the kid's face with its permanent sneer and does not unleash
a spray of sarcasm over the self-deluded little prick like a burst of toxic chemicals, does not grab his guitar and bash him in the head with it, every time Tanneran does not give in to the lure of such pleasure, it is a victory.

Tanneran knows that Curtis has a shitty home life, knows the kid's superiority is just a pose, is pretty sure he refuses to answer questions not because he has a disdain for school, as he and his little coterie would like people to believe, but because he has an undiagnosed learning disability. Tanneran knows, in fact, that Rick Curtis needs affection and encouragement as bad as Bert Bowden. But he hates the kid so fiercely, he doesn't give a fuck.

Tanneran will not, however, add his message to all the other messages in Curtis's life that tell him he's no good. Tanneran will continue to practice affection on Rick Curtis and others in spite of how he feels about them. When he can't be decent to the kids he doesn't like, that's when he'll quit teaching.

When Bert considers Darby Granger
objectively, as he is doing now from across the journalism room, he is forced to admit that she doesn't have the perfect body. Her breasts are a little small, her butt a little big. Bert wonders if it is to deemphasize the breadth of her hips that she so often wears loose, wide-waisted jeans. You can look at her butt in those jeans and not even notice that the Darb is a minor pudge.

She is not wearing jeans today, however. Today it's baggy boxers, a baggy white T-shirt, and a baggy blue blazer.

Darby doesn't have big hair that retains a wet look throughout the day and makes her appear to be exceeding the speed limit in a vintage convertible when she is in fact not moving at all. That is to say, she hasn't modeled her coiffure on women in beer commercials and cigarette ads. Her hair is short, dark brown, curly. She wears round gold wire-rim glasses, no earrings, and no makeup that Bert has been able to detect, unless she uses a blush formula that mimics the mild glow of windburn.

There's a softness in Darby's appearance and a contrasting strength in her manner. And she's real smart. Bert has heard her do surgery on the staff with her sarcasm, such
scorching commentaries having earned her the nickname Darb Vader. She doesn't seem to need people to think she's smart, though. She doesn't seem to need people to think she's anything, except editor of
The David Thompson Explorer
, and this strength is more alluring to Bert than muscle tone. Bert has suffered thoughts of Darby since the morning he first saw her in the journalism room and didn't know her name.

Bert would like Darby to know that Tanneran thinks he's a good writer. He's considering walking around the table and letting his essay slip out of his back pocket next to Darby's grapes and cheese. When she returns from talking to the photographers, she might notice Tanneran's handwriting and get curious. But this is too weasely a thing for even the weasely Bert Bowden.

And it's also too late, because Darby is crossing the floor right now. Bert lowers his eyes to the last half of his sandwich. His peripheral vision just includes Darby's green grapes across the table. He keeps his eyes at this angle as he takes a bite of sandwich, the totality of his manner meant to illustrate the hypnotic appeal of peanut butter, honey, and his grandmother's homemade bread. Bert chews and watches Darby's grapes. Darby does not appear behind them. Bert feels a presence at his side.

“Bowden?” the voice says.

Bert turns to face Darby's boxer shorts. As he raises his eyes a viscous brown string descends from his sandwich to the chest of his white T-shirt where the word
TRIUMPH
is written in blue over a picture of an old Triumph twin. He tilts the sandwich and puts it back down on the table. He looks at the brown doodle on his shirt. He looks up at Darby, who is looking down at him.

“Nasty sandwich,” she says. She squinches her face. “That looks like something my baby sister . . . Never mind,” she says.

With his finger Bert scrapes off what he can of the sticky stuff. Then he licks the finger.

Darby squinches her face again. “Bowden,” she says, “Tanneran thinks you're a good writer, and he'd like to see you do a feature for us. I had an idea that might interest you.”

She steps around the table, grabs her chair with one hand and the paper towel her lunch is sitting on with the other, and slides both nearer Bert. She sits down and pops a grape into her mouth.

“There's a French kid in my English class,” Darby says. “Among other things, he's into motorcycles. He's also on the football team. To be perfectly honest,” she says, “he's a stud muffin.” She points a cheese stick at Bert's shirt. “You're into motorcycles, and I thought you might like to profile him for us.”