He did not want to make that walk today. He wanted, with a fierceness that surprised him, to find something, anything, that would let him walk through that door with his head up. A dollar would do it. A dollar would buy a sandwich at the diner, and a sandwich could be cut in half, and half could be carried home in his pocket, wrapped in a napkin, for his mother. He had worked out the arithmetic many times. A dollar was not a fortune. A dollar was a sandwich, and a sandwich was a start. He said the words to himself as he searched, like a small prayer that was not quite a prayer: just a dollar, just a dollar, just one dollar.
The rusted dumpster stood at the back of the lot, and Leo checked around it twice, because the ground near a dumpster was where people sometimes dropped things when they were carrying too much. The smell there was sour in the heat, and flies moved in lazy circles over the lid. Leo held his breath and peered into the shadows at its base. There was nothing but gravel and a crushed cup and a stain darkening the stones. He stepped back and wiped his hands on his shorts, even though his hands were not really dirty. He just wanted to feel as if he had done something clean.
By the second hour, his legs ached and his stomach's twisting had settled into a dull, constant pressure that made it hard to think about anything else. He sat down for a moment on a low concrete kerb at the edge of the lot, out of the way of cars, and he put his head in his hands. He was not crying. He told himself firmly that he was not crying. He was resting his eyes from the sun. The sun was very bright. That was all. But his throat felt tight, and his hands were shaking a little, and he had to breathe slowly, in through his nose and out through his mouth, the way his mother had taught him when he was small and frightened by thunderstorms.
Okay, he whispered to himself, because saying a word aloud sometimes made it more true. "Okay. One more row. Then home."
He stood up, brushed the gravel dust from his shorts, and started his last row, the one nearest the road, where the cars came in and turned. He walked slowly, eyes on the ground, kicking at stones, hoping and not hoping at the same time, because hoping too hard hurt when it failed. The road beyond the lot shimmered in the heat. A truck went past, and the wind of it lifted dust into his face. He coughed and blinked and kept walking.
He was almost at the end of the row, almost ready to turn his feet toward home, when he felt it first, not heard it, but felt it. A low, thunderous rumble vibrated through the soles of his shoes, up through the thin worn rubber, up through his ankles and into his bones. It was not the rumble of a truck. It was deeper and steadier, like a great animal breathing, like thunder that had decided to stay close to the ground. Leo stopped. He lifted his head. He forgot, for a second, about coins and sandwiches and the walk home, because the sound filled the whole lot and pushed everything else aside.
Then he saw it. A massive custom black Harley-Davidson Panhead rolled into the parking lot, slow and heavy and certain, the way only a very large machine can be slow. The chrome on the exhaust pipes glinted blindingly in the harsh sunlight, throwing off sparks of light that made Leo squint and shield his eyes with his hand. The bike's black paint was deep and glossy where it was not dusty, and its engine throbbed with a sound that seemed to come from the ground itself. It turned in a wide arc across the gravel, gravel crunching under its tyres, and it came to rest in a space near the diner door, as if it owned the lot and the lot knew it.
Leo stood very still. He had seen motorcycles before, of course, on the road, in passing, in the trailer park where a neighbour sometimes worked on an old bike in his yard. But he had never seen one this close, this big, this polished and dusty at the same time. It was beautiful in a way that made his chest ache, not because he wanted to own it, but because it looked like something that had travelled a long way and had stories in it. He watched, hardly breathing, as the rider killed the engine, and the great sound died, and the lot fell back into heat and silence.
He did not know, standing there with dust on his shoes and nothing in his pockets, that the next ten minutes would change the shape of his summer. He knew only that the rumble had stopped, that the bike stood shining and dusty in the sun, and that his hands, almost without his permission, were already thinking about a rag and a shine and a dollar.