every April he brought it to the ride washed and fueled and checked over
twice, because a bike that sits is a bike that dies, and Hollis Tate's bike was
not going to die in anybody's garage. "Your chariot," Micah said, and handed
Owen the spare helmet, the one with the scratch on the visor from the year
Owen had dropped it on the gravel and been so stricken about it that Micah
had told him scratches were just a helmet's way of keeping notes. "You call
the stops. Same as always."
"Same as always," Owen said, and climbed on behind him, and put his arms
around Micah's jacket the way he had been taught, and the lot filled up
around them with the sound of engines settling into their idle, forty-some
bikes this year, Riders and not-Riders, men and women from three counties,
a deputy from the sheriff's office on his own time, two of Paula's patients'
grown sons, and Mrs. Delaney's husband on a machine so clean it looked
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apologetic. Doyle Ketchum walked the rows with a clipboard out of pure
habit, though there was nothing left to check that forty years of Aprils had
not already checked for him. Ruth Ketchum ran the coffee urn at the
fellowship hall door and refused all payment with the air of a woman
defusing a bomb. Paula came down the church steps with Owen's jacket
zipped up in her arms in case the wind on the ridge was cold, and she did not
fuss, which was her gift and her discipline both, and she touched the top of
his helmet once, briefly, the way you touch a doorframe you have touched
ten thousand times, for luck that no longer needed asking for.
The town turned out for the leaving the way it turned out for everything,
which was to say incompletely and without being asked. Old men were
already installed in the folding chairs outside the hardware store with their
coffee, in the seats they occupied for every parade and funeral procession
and ride, and they raised their cups as the bikes rolled past in the order of a
thing as settled as weather: Doyle first, because Doyle had always been first,
then the officers of the club, then the long body of the line in twos, and
Micah and Owen somewhere in the honorable middle of it, where the newest
riders and the oldest passengers rode. Owen had a job in the line, which
Doyle had given him the first year and renewed every year since, and the job
was to wave back. The kids on the porches waved with both arms, as if
signaling aircraft. The women outside the beauty shop waved with the tips of
their fingers. A man on a ladder, halfway through a gutter, stopped with a
handful of wet leaves and waved with the leaves. Owen waved at all of them
with the solemnity of a person discharging an office, and then, somewhere
past the feed store, the solemnity cracked and he was just a boy on the back
of his father's motorcycle on a spring morning, grinning inside a helmet
where nobody could see it and it didn't matter that nobody could. Micah felt
it through the jacket, the way you feel a passenger settle, and reached back
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with one gloved hand and knocked twice on Owen's knee, which in the
language of that motorcycle meant all was well and keep holding on, in that
order.
The route was the loop it had always been: out of Alden on the Farm Road,
up through the cedar breaks where the spring had put a green on everything
that looked poured rather than grown, down past the old cotton gin and the
water tower with TATE not on it, whatever the freshmen at the high school
liked to claim, and then south to County Road 12 and the long straight that
unwound toward the Elbow. Owen had ridden it three times now as a
passenger and walked it and biked it more times than he could count, and he
knew its every seam and patched place the way he knew the lines of his own
palm, and still the road managed to be just a road for most of its length, cattle
and mailboxes and a hawk working the fenceline, and that was the mercy of
it that nobody put on the plaque. Most of the road was just the road. It was
only the one curve that carried anything, and the curve itself, more and more
each year, carried it the way a shelf carries a book — present, accounted for,
and not the whole library.
They came down to the Elbow in the late morning with the sun high enough
to take the chill off the wind, and the new guardrail shone. It ran the whole
outside of the curve now, galvanized and bright, set on good posts at the right
height, the way the county engineer and the settlement and two years of
Doyle Ketchum's courteous, unkillable attendance at commissioners' court
had arranged for it to be, and it caught the light the whole way around so that
from the straight you saw the curve announced in a ribbon of silver before
you saw the curve itself. Owen had watched them build it the summer he was
ten, had ridden down with Paula in the truck with a thermos and a folding
chair and had logged the crew's progress in the notebook out of a habit he
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was not ready to examine, post holes and rail lengths and the foreman's