“Dammit!”

The boy, his fingers stiff and numb with morning cold, had dropped the heavy pliers into the crusted snow beneath the wire fence. As he stooped to retrieve them, his father’s two big, rough hands came from nowhere and shoved him hard against the fence post and wire.

“Gawdammit, boy! You ain’t even gonna earn your pancakes, this mornin’, are you?”

Cursing, the man clawed through the dirty snow with long, powerful fingers, searching for the tool.. “Dam’ worthless, dam’ worthless you are…. just like your mother!”

The boy shivering, stood aside, and put his numb hands under his armpits. He stamped his cold feet in the snow..

“She wasn’t worthless! You say that, you say that all the time, but she wasn’t worthless.”

His father stood up – stood straight, tall and thin in a dirty plaid wool jacket and sour-smelling overalls. He looked at the boy curiously, and the blow, when it happened, came swinging up from his hip almost lazily, gracefully, but with great power and strength – and directly into the boy’s nose.

“Gahhh…….”

The boy staggered back, and then bent double at the waist, spitting, the pain coming in a dark wave, the blood draining down almost instantly — splashing against the snow, bright red and steaming. The boy could taste it in the back of his throat. He was familiar with the taste.

“Your ma was whatever I say she was, and you’ll listen, by Gawd…… She was worthless when I met her, she was worthless all the while, and she was worthless when she died! Say it now….!”

The boy swallowed. “Worthless…..,” he whispered.

“Yeah… you betcha…. now get out some hay out for these damned cows……..”

The boy went into the barn, where he tipped his head back and pinched his nostrils until the bleeding stopped. He washed blood from his face and hands with cold water from a bucket. He took a pitchfork down from pegs on a wall, and carried forkfuls of the sweet-smelling dry hay to the fence, and dumped it over to the waiting lifestock. His father had disappeared.

While the cows nosed and chewed at the hay, the boy leaned against the pitchfork and looked up at the Wallowa Mountains circling his father’s ranch. The peaks were pearl white against a blue sky, a gleaming pearl white with the last snowfall of the season. Spring was close, and every morning when the boy crawled from his blankets he could hear more and more sweet birdsong outside his window.

He slapped a cow on it’s warm, trembling shoulder and spoke to it.

“He wouldn’t have dared say that about her when the old ones lived…. Joseph and Looking Glass and Ollokot and White Bird…. those old ones still wearing the Blanket….they would have come riding down from them white hills up there, riding down on them tough Appaloosas of theirs… come down here, and killed him!. The non-Christian people would have stripped his clothes off, sliced him…. gutted him like a fish… burnt him on a fire…..and then taken her away with them, and me, too…… up and away on them tough Appaloosas.” He smiled at the cow, and then went to put the pitchfork away.

His father came into the barn before he could leave.

I’m taking the Ford truck over to Enterprise this mornin,’ because the old man at Johnson’s thinks he can fix the transmission……somethin’ I doubt…. While I’m gone, try and not be as worthless as usual. Finish wirin’ up that fence, and then spade the muck outa the west ditch…. get some water goin’ down it…… I wanta see somethin’ done when I get back!”

The boy stood against the wall, silent…..

“You hear me, boy?”

“Yeah….”

“Then say something!”

“I’m to wire the fence. Clean out the ditch…..”

“Yessir.” His father opened a tool drawer, and brought out a bottle of clear liquid. He tilted it up and swallowed twice. He smacked his lips as he replaced the cap, and then he looked at the boy.

“Don’t even think about it! I know how much is in it…..couldn’t never keep it away from your ma, though……worthless drunk that she was. Go to work now! Oh, yeah…. tomorrow we butcher your steer.”

The boy stood silent and tense

“But I wanna sell it……”

His father laughed, the sound harsh in the musty, sweet-smelling barn.

“Sell it! Yeah, in a pig’s eye! You raised it here, and we’ll eat it here….. you got nothin’ but what this place gives you, and you should never forget that..”

He stared at the boy a minute, and then walked out of the barn. The boy followed, and walked to the fence. He picked the pliers and hog rings from the top of the post, and began threading and crimping the rings through the fence wire wrapped around the post. After a moment, his father drove a rusty Ford truck around the corner of the barn and then down the dirt road that led to the farm and ranch town of Enterprise, Oregon. As he drove, his father stared straight ahead. He didn’t look at the boy.

The boy stood silent for a moment after the truck had disappeared from his sight.

“Son of a bitch.”

He gripped the pliers and with a running start threw them high and hard out into a field of snow and mud…….

“Find the damn things now, will ya?”

He broke into a dead run toward the house, and then bounded up on the porch, slamming open the front door, and going up the stairway in long bounds. He tore some shirts and underwear from a drawer and threw them on his bed. Rummaging deep in a closet, he found a canvas Boy Scout rucksack, and stuffed his clothes into it. From under his pillow he carefully pulled his most cherished possession, a long hunting knife he had made from an old file in a school shop project. The handle was of antler horn from the first deer he had killed with his father’s old 30-40 Krag rifle. The sheath casing for the knife he had sewn of buckskin from the same deer He looked around once, removed a picture of his mother from a dresser, and placed it carefully with the knife deep in the rucksack, and then left his bedroom….forever.

He headed due west, in a loping, easy run, toward a series of timbered ridges. After a half hour, he stood panting on the last of the ridges, looking down at a clearing — looking down at a neatly built cabin of pale peeled logs with smoke rising steadily from a river rock chimney. The boy loped toward the cabin, and pulled up just at the porch.

“Homer,” he called. “You in there?”

 

He waited a half minute, his breath slowing, the pulse in his temple quieting.

“Homer?”

The door opened and a tall elderly man wearing wire frame spectacles came out on the porch. He smiled at the boy. He limped when he walked.

“You again…..What, you just wanna go look at it again? You gonna wear it out with your eyeballs before it’s yours?”

“No,” replied the boy. “I’ll never own it…..I’ll never work enough here to earn it. He hit me again. And when he does it again, I’ll kill him. I’ll cut his throat with my knife.”

The old man’s shoulders seemed to collapse against his chest.

“Aw, hell…… just…..aw, hell….. C’mon in here and have some coffee.”

Later, sitting at a pine table, the elderly man rubbed his head with a nervous hand and then picked up an enameled cup of steaming coffee. The boy cradled his cup with shaking hands.

“Was it bad? Whada’ he hit you for this time?”

“Bad enough,” said the boy. “He hit me because I dropped some pliers into the snow….”

“He hit you because you dropped some pliers? Jesus…..!”

“He also called my mom, “worthless,” and I told him she wasn’t…… He’s always saying that… and I’m not gonna hear it no more….!”

“Aww, damn,” said Homer.

“Why’d she ever marry him, Homer…..and why does he hate me, his own blood?”

Homer stood and moved to a window, where he stood sipping his coffee. After a moment, he turned and faced the boy.

“I gotta tell you somethin,’ sport….. should’ve done it a long time ago, should a’ done it last summer, maybe… and maybe now’s the time. My fault it ain’t be done yet.”

The boy sat still, his hands moving gently on the smooth cup.

Homer limped to the table and set his cup down. “He don’t hate his own blood….. ‘cause you ain’t his blood. He ain’t your real father….”

The boy leaped to his feet, his cup spilling and clattering across the pine board floor.

“What the hell! What…….?”

“Easy, son, easy…. your real father was named Harold Gough…. but everybody called him, ‘Mike.’ He was a real good man, real good….. but he was a U.S. Marine that went and got himself killed off in Korea.”

The boy sank down cross-legged on the floor. He rocked back and forth on his buttocks, and in the darkness of his mind he saw somehow a splash of dancing campfire sparks, and smelled wet elkskin, and heard the shrill piping of eagle bone whistles and the throb of drums.

“Your mom went over to Idaho once, for a tribal gathering, and she met your dad in Spokane, he worked at an ice-skating rink there. At Natatorium park.”

Homer was rubbing his head again.

“Nobody could keep ‘em apart after that…. and what a picture they were! Your mom was about nineteen, your dad quite a few years older….. both wild and free and beautiful…. Damn, but they loved each other!”

Homer looked at him. The boy again saw the flash of sparks, and heard an ancient song, a hunting song, a song he had never heard before.

“You okay, son?”

The boy didn’t answer.

“She talked him into comin’ here, the Old Homeland of her people, and they moved into a house near Wallowa Lake, and he went to work in the sawmill. But he had been in the Pacific War, and they called him up again for that Korean thing, where he proceeded to get himself killed.”

The boy stood, and began removing things from his rucksack.

“Your mom just fell apart then, no Mike and you being just a little baby… she started drinking way too much. Had no way of raisin’ you, no way of makin’ enough to raise a boy… so she met Morrison and then married him. Felt it was the best way for you, I guess…..”

“And he never told me!”

“No, I guess he did not. I think he blamed you after she died, kind of resented you, I guess….. what are you doing?”

The boy had unsheathed his knife, and was stropping the hard steel blade against the smooth leather of his boot.

“I’m gonna go back there and cut his throat to the bone.”

“Aw, hell…..,” said Homer. He took a deep breath. “Son, you cain’t go and do that now, not now and not ever. They’ll catch you sure, and you’ll hang for it, even as young as you are.”

The boy tested his knife on the ball of his thumb, staring at the thin line of crimson that materialized there.

Homer stared at him. “Ya just cain’t do it…. you ain’t big enough, or smart enough…. Morrison will kill you in a heartbeat. He’s been tryin’ to have an excuse for sometime now. You ain’t strong enough yet, you’re too young.”

The boy stared up at Homer. “I can’t look at him one more time…. if I do, I’ll sink this knife in his chest!”

Homer sighed again. “Yeah. I do see that…. come with me, son.” He set his coffee cup down and – limping – led the way out the door. After a moment, the boy followed him outside and across the yard to a old log shed. In the half gloom inside, Homer stopped near a shape covered with canvas.

“Well,” said Homer. “Here she is… time for you to have her now.”

“But I ain’t got it paid off yet,” said the boy. “And I’ll never earn it now… and he’ll never let me have it…ever.”

“Ain’t for him to say,” grunted Homer. “It’s my cycle, mine to keep, sell, or give away. I half- sold it to you already…for your labor … and now I’m half-giving it to you.” He rubbed his aching hip. “I cain’t ride it ever again, anyway….damn fool horse….”

“But Morrison won’t let me keep it! He’ll sell it off, sure….”

Homer stripped the canvas away, revealing the dull green Harley-Davidson WR 45, an army surplus bike, the outline of the white star still visible on the dull tank.

“No. He ain’t agonna sell it…. because he ain’t agonna see it. You’re gonna ride it away. Tonight.”

Again, the boy heard drumbeats and eagle bone whistles.

“Where?” He whispered. “Where am I to go?”

Homer knelt in front of him. “Your dad has a brother, a fellow named Hal, he works on the tugboats outa Umatilla. You’re gonna get on that motorcycle now and ride to Umatilla, today, and look him up, get in touch with your uncle… he knows about you and he ain’t gonna turn you away. Probably get you a job on the boats.”

Homer reached over and cradled the boy’s chin with a rough, reddened hand. “After you leave, I’ll go to town and use the phone at Stockman’s Café and try and call him… tell him what’s up. But you get on that motorcycle now and leave, and don’t you ever come back…… not on your life.”

The boy sat, staring at his boot tops.

Homer shook his chin gently…… “You follow the river road to Lostine, Wallowa, and then Elgin. Keep on goin’ to La Grande, and then catch the road to Pendleton, Hermiston, and then Umatilla. If you get lost, just ask…. but keep goin’, don’t stop.” He stood up, favoring his leg.

“You got any money,” he asked.

The boy stared at him. “None, ” he said.

“Well, I’ll give you enough for gas and a sandwich. If you don’t get there tonight, pull off into the woods and make a cold camp. Keep off the highway. He ain’t agonna start looking for you until tomorrow morning, I don’t think.. By then you’ll be gone….”

He got up and moved toward the Harley-Davidson. “I’ll start this up. You go and get your pack, drink some of that coffee on the stove, and then take the blankets off the bed…. you might need them tonight. Remember how to start it? Don’t forget to retard the spark before kickin’ it any…

 

Homer grinned at the boy. “Forget to retard that spark and you gonna be pulling your ankle outa your ass! Go on now…..”

The boy ran to the cabin. He drank some coffee straight from the cooling pot, and then took one blanket off the bed. He rolled it tightly and strapped it under the flap of his pack. He looked around a final time, looked at the only room on earth in which he had always felt welcome… and then ran back to the shed.

Halfway there, he heard the Harley start, a bark, and then a deep rhythmic rumble alive in the gloom. Inside he found Homer standing there with a old sheepskin jacket and a flyer’s leather helmet with goggles.

“These will do you… wearing them, nobody’s gonna recognize you and they will keep you warm. Put them on.”

The boy shrugged into the jacket, spread the leather flaps of the helmet, and pulled it down over his head. Mixed up in the rumble of the Harley, the boy heard again somehow the old songs of his mother’s people, and – for the first time in his life – joy flooded his soul.

Homer held up a folded square of paper and several folded bills. “This is my handwritten permission for you to have this bike. And some cash. I don’t know but I don’t think you’re actually old enough to own it, but with that paper it don’t matter….. the state license is good until fall. We’ll worry about what to do about it then….You go now, ride it good and careful, like I showed you…. and remember, your uncle’s name is Hal Gough, in Umatilla. He’s a good man, trust me…”

Homer went to put the boy’s pack into one of the Harley’s saddlebags. “Wait, Homer,” said the boy. He dug for a moment in the pack and pulled out his sheath knife, and tucked it into the calf of his right boot. The folded paper and money he put deep in the other. He then stood and looked at the old man…….

“Homer…..,” and he started to weep.

“It’s okay, boy, ” mumbled Homer, and he awkwardly patted the boy on the shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay now… all you have to do is get to Umatilla….. it was all building up to this… as natural as rain. Just get to Umatilla…. I’ll see you again.”

The boy wiped tears from his eyes and then pulled down the goggles. Homer stood nodding his head and shouting above the rumbling engine. “Remember, you only got three gears, and 55-60’s all you’re gonna get, but that you’ll get for sure…. she’s got aluminum heads and iron barrels, and she’s as good as I could make her. ”

The boy through his leg over the leather saddle, and duckwalked the bike backwards out the door. Homer followed wiping his nose with a blue bandana.

The boy yelled, “goodbye Homer, goodbye uncle!” Homer waved one hand but said nothing.

The boy then engaged the clutch, shifted the hand lever to 1^st, and the bike began to move away from Homer’s shed… from Homer’s cabin…down the muddy, broken lane to the Enterprise Highway, and, suddenly, the boy was alone.

He had ridden the bike in secret many times during the fall, and in minutes he was comfortable, standing high on the pegs to ride over the bumps, and sitting down in the saddle on the smooth stretches. The bike’s engine was reassuringly smooth and the wind tore at his face. When he came to the Enterprise Highway, he stopped the bike and sat, staring up at the gleaming Wallowa Mountains.

After a moment, he looked down the highway to his left, where he could barely see the barn of his stepfather’s ranch through a fringe of timber, and smoke rising straight up from a hidden chimney. “So the bastard’s home already,” muttered the boy. “Bet he’s wondering why the fence ain’t fixed and the ditch ain’t dug!” He smiled under the goggles. He then bent to the side and pulled out his long knife, which he held at arm’s length toward the Wallowa Mountains. He then turned and pointed the knife at his father’s farm.

“You’ll see me again, old man. When I am stronger and smarter… when no one will be good enough to catch me, I’ll come one night through the timber like the old ones did, the blanket wearers, like Ollokot and White Bird, on them big Appaloosas stepping so carefully. And you’ll wake up in the black morning and my knife will be against your throat…..and then you will know sure that my mother, who you ruined, was never worthless, never….”

After a moment the boy put his knife carefully away in his boot, gunned his Harley-Davidson, and turned out on the Enterprise Highway, headed west, to Umatilla and the Columbia River.

The Old Man and Highway 14 

 

 

When I was a much, much younger man, and trying to break into social work, the county prosecutor came to my work-release office at the county jail one morning.

“Come with me. I have a challenge for you, ” he said.

We walked together to a large common holding cell called the “Drunk Tank,” where sat a thin, solitary old man with untied shoes. He glared at us with blood-red eyes, his thin straight hair springing up from his pink scalp like cheat grass.

“Lemme outa here, you two. No cause for keeping me…..”

The Prosecutor grinned at him. “They found him late last night sleeping in Pioneer Park, wrapped in an old piece of canvas. Got him a rusty old bicycle, a can of pumpkin pie filling and 38 cents…..no identification…..won’t tell us his name.”

I looked at the old man, who plucked at the sleeve of an old wool coat slick with grime, his fingers shaking and skeletal. I tried a social work smile: “Can you tell us your name, sir? The quicker you do, the quicker we can maybe get you out of here.”

The old man glared. “Tom. Dick. Harry,” he snarled. “You pick one. I ain’t drunk…I ain’t no drunk. Turn me loose!”

I turned and looked at the prosecutor. “Can’t we just cut him loose?”

He grimaced, and replied, “no… they’ll just pick him up sleeping in the park again. If he gets jailed again for vagrancy, he might do thirty days in the county…. and would that do anyone any good? Hear that?”

I nodded, hearing the mute hubbub of the awakening county cell block on the other side of the Drunk Tank wall. Young inmates shouted and screamed, steel doors clanged.

The prosecutor leaned against the bars. “Judge Rabideau thinks this would be a good challenge for you and your new department. Find the man a job, any old job, find him a place to stay, any old place, and we’ll cut him loose…. since he won’t give us a name, a family, a place of residence, I can hold him in here for some while.”

“Don’t need a job, ” the old man muttered. “Had one of them. I ain’t done nuthin,’ I ain’t no drug fiend… take me n’ my bike to Highway 14. Cut me loose.”

“Highway 14,” muttered the prosecutor. “He keeps goin’ on about Highway 14. What’s with Highway 14?”

“Highway 14,” I said, looking again at the wild hair on the old man’s scalp. “Scenic drive… Washington side of the Columbia River gorge… .ride it all the time on my Honda motorcycle.  Helluva road… he’s got good taste in roads!”

I leaned forward, social work smile pasted on. “Do you live along the river, sir? Lyle, Bingen, White Salmon, Hood River….any of those towns? Have you got family on the river?”

“I ain’t done nuthin’ to nobody….no call to hold me…. Highway 14…. turn me loose!”

We turned to go.

“Was he drunk when arrested,” I asked the prosecutor.

“No… he wasn’t.”

“Well,” I muttered. “See what I can do……”

On the way back to my office I stopped to talk to Old Tuffy, our booking deputy.

“Anything turn up on the old man in the tank, ” I asked.

“Nope.   Nothing.   We damned near had to break his fingers last night when we printed him….. wouldn’t straighten them out… Took three of us! He went to bite me, goddamn old nut case, and I told him if he bit me I’d break his head open…… didn’t bite me none, then, nossir.”

I stifled a grin, entertained by a picture of the skeletal old man sinking his few yellow fangs into the fat deputy, and Tuffy moving fast enough to break open anyone’s head. “Well, no criminal record, then, at least?”   “No,” Tuffy sighed regretfully. “Nothing yet… prints might not be any good, though…. had to mash his fingers down on the print card.”

Three days later we still had no information on our strange old fellow, but I thought I had the problem solved. I had finally begged a job for him from an old high school friend who ran a potato storage shed, a job sweeping it down for minimal wage, and a shared room at a recovering alcoholic facility. When I explained my solution to the prosecutor, he readily assented. “Yeah, get the old bastard out of there… he’s even driving the drunks nuts!”

I had Tuffy unlock the drunk tank door and waved the old fellow to his feet. “Let’s go, sir! I got you a job and a place to stay and we are outa here!”

“Don’t need a job, ” muttered the hard old man. “Give me my bike back…..”

“Well, you have to have the job…. where’s his bike, Tuffy?”

“Maintenance shed….. old  rust bucket bike…….”

We booked him out, and tried to get  him to sign for his possessions, a piece of dirty canvas, a can of pumpkin pie filling, and 38 cents, but he wouldn’t sign…. I shrugged and gave him the stuff, anyway. I opened the maintenance shed and wheeled out his machine, an old Raleigh 3 speed red with rust……. “Nice wheels, ” I said in my social work voice.

“You never had no cause to hold me….,” the old man said, spitting on the county sidewalk. “No cause a’tall.”

I signed out a van, put the old man and his bike into it and drove him to the alcohol home. I introduced him as best I could to the staff, who, when he wasn’t looking, rolled their eyes at each other. I gave the old man written instructions to the potato shed, and held out my hand. He didn’t take it, of course, much to the great delight of the alcohol people.

“Well,” I said to him. “I got one favor to ask of you…. will you tell me your name, now?”

“Tom. Dick. Harry.” Snarled the old man. “Pick one!” The staff of the alcohol center dissolved in laughter.

The next morning my phone rang; it was my friend at the potato shed. “Big surprise, but your ol’ No Name didn’t show for work.”

“Yeah, that’s a big surprise!”

“Just for laughs, I called the alcohol place….. he missed bed check and breakfast this morning, too.”

After thanking him and hanging up, I sat there for a moment, a wide grin splitting my face. I got up and went to my supervisor, the undersheriff. “Gotta have some time, okay?” He looked up, uninterested, ” yeah… just sign out, make it up when you can.”

Taking down my helmet from the coat rack, I went out and started up my Honda 305 Scrambler. I left the town and crossed the Columbia River over the old Kennewick bridge, the dark waters swift and cold far below. Across the river, the road over the Horse Heaven Hills curved away to the Oregon border thirty miles south. I ran the old familiar curves easily and smoothly, the bike purring beneath me like the well-tuned thoroughbred it was. As the sun broke through high, thin clouds, my joy rose and I soundlessly sang a Credence Clearwater Song behind my helmet shield. “Proud Mary keep on turning…..!”

At the crest of the Horse Heavens, the Columbia River Gorge opened up below me, the river now a silver thread far below, Highway 14 another, slighter, silver thread running alongside, the purple and gold fields of eastern Oregon spreading like a huge blanket beyond the far bank of the river, and to the west, the soaring volcanoes – Mt Adams, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Hood, the great peaks that had mesmerized Lewis and Clark and so many of the early pioneers – sat in timeless and regal glory in the morning sunshine.

I pulled the bike over to a turnout, and pulled from my coat some field glasses I had signed out from the sheriff’s office. It took a few minutes careful sweeping, but then … there he was, an almost unrecognizable dot, an old man on a bicycle, slowly pedaling west, slowly making his way along one of the most beautiful highways in the world. I was suffused with joy. “Goddamn, You old bastard! You must have ridden all night to get down there!” I slapped the tank of the Honda with both hands. “He’s loose! The Old Man is Loose! Damn .. I wonder what his name was! I’m gonna wonder that forever!”

I laughed some more, and then sat savoring the beautiful scene before me. And then I put away the glasses and turned the bike around. It was time to do some more social work.

 

 

I knew instantly what it was when the clutch cable snapped coming out of the campground at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming.

“Goddamn it!”

“What’s the matter,” Red asked, tightening her hold on me as the bike bucked and stalled.

“Clutch cable…broken,” I yelled, as I stabbed at the pavement with both feet, trying to keep the bike upright and nearly breaking an ankle in the process.

“Goddamn it all to hell!” I was instantly furious, mainly at myself.

I managed to get the big bike far enough off the road, and put down the kickstand. We got off and removed our helmets. All around us, the crystal morning air of the Belle Fourche valley was still and silent, a sweet morning breeze barely stirring. The Tower, bathed in morning light, stood sentinel tall and regal. No cars moved on the smooth two-laned highway, none.

“Is it bad?” Red asked softly.

“It’s not good…. I left the spare cable at home. In the bike stuff closet. Stupid idiot that I am! We can’t make the Wing go without it…. at least, I don’t think we can……”

“Can’t we buy one?” She asked.

“Look around you, Babe,” I was dangerously close to getting angry at her, too. I swept my hand in a wide arc. “There probably isn’t another clutch cable for a 1981 Honda Goldwing Interstate within 1500 miles! None! In any direction you’d care to look! Let alone the fact that it’s 0630 on a Sunday morning…….!”

She said nothing.

After an uncomfortable silence, I said, “look… the road’s slightly downhill here. I’ll put it in neutral if I can, get it started, and then roll down this hill and jam it in first. Maybe I can shift it without the clutch.”

Sweating profusely, we got the heavy bike rolling fast enough to not stall when I jammed it into first, but I couldn’t seem to up shift using the lever and revs only. The transmission screamed in protest. Finally, the bike bucked and stalled again. After a moment, Red walked up to me as I leaned glumly against the bike.

“No go, huh,” she asked.

“Nope.”

She looked around. “What now?” She asked.

“Now nothing! We’re done! Finito!” I was in a rage. “Get your stuff off and we’ll start walking.”

But she didn’t, and we stood there for some time.

Then she looked at me, and said very carefully, “is there something we could do with the old cable?”

“No! Damn it!”

But then I took another look. The old cable lay coiled and jammed in the frame. I straightened it out. And then I had the first glimmer of hope….

“You know what…..? Maybe I could make a loop out of it and pull it up with my hand!”

I made a hand loop, but the thin cable bit into my palm I searched through our tools, pulled out our tubular sparkplug socket, and retied the loop through it.

“A handle, huh?” Red said.

“Yup”

But I didn’t have the strength to pull in the clutch while seated on the bike.

 

“It won’t work,” I said. “Takes too much oomph!”

“Maybe I could do it from the back,” she said, smiling at me.

I looked at the clutch arm linkage coming out of the engine case. She would have a direct upward pull. “Holey Moley, ” I said. “Do you think you could?”

She grinned at me.

We started the bike. I yelled to her.. “Pull it in!”

“Got it, ” she yelled, and I tapped it easily into first, “Let her out slowly!” She did, and the heavy bike moved almost smoothly out onto the highway. “Now the real test,” I said. “In, again!”

“Got it,” she relayed, and, with my heart in my throat, I shifted into second. “Okay,” I breathed, “Let her out!” The bike went into second gear just like always. Within miles, we were riding as smoothly as if the clutch cable had never snapped.

“It’s gonna work!”

“Yippee,” Red yelled.

And that’s how we came home, 1700 miles — over the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, Beartooth Pass in the Montana Rockies, the Bitterroots of Idaho — with my slender wife hanging on to her improvised block and tackle on the pillion, never complaining, always smiling. Once in awhile, on a rest break, I’d catch her massaging her aching hand. We stopped at three Honda shops, but none had our cable, and it would always take at least three days to get one in. We knew we could be home in under three days….where the spare cable awaited us in our Bike Stuff Closet!

Once, at Lolo Hot Springs in Idaho, I watched her sleep in the morning light filtering through the tent fabric, the gentle sun warming her delicate, freckled cheek, and I marvelled again how such a strong, small, indestructible, joyful being came into my life. After awhile, her long lashes parted and her eyes opened.

“I never deserve you,” I said.

“Oh, there you go,” she said, smiling. “You’re being silly again…. coffee ready?”

We always stop at McDonald’s in prairie states — they are invariably air-conditioned, and the food is gosh-awful cheap. Recently, we had stopped at one and after eating I went back out to the bike to retrieve my map off the tankbag…….I heard a yell and turned to see a young Native American boy, three or four, tugging against the hands of his beautiful, laughing mother, both of them with eyes of coal and jet black hair.

“Momma, momma, momma,” screamed the little boy. “Bike, momma, bike, bike, bike!” His excitement was authentic,  real – and contagious. I wanted to set him up on the saddle of the Big Wing, but his mother seemed slightly embarrassed and in a hurry, and so I didn’t suggest it.

Later, as we prepared to leave, an elderly man asked us. “Would you mind if I stood here and watched you leave?”

“Not at all,” I replied, slightly bemused. “And did you own one, sir? Are you an enthusiast,  a rider?”

“No,” he sighed. “I never did. Always liked motorcycles, admired those who rode em…. but I never owned one. I farmed all my life and never seemed to be able to fit it in.  I’m 84 now, and just had colon cancer surgery last spring. Too late!” 

Red was gazing at the gentlemen with that special look she gets just before she weeps, and so I thumbed  the Wing to life and began to ease it out.

I grinned at the old fellow as Red clambered up behind. ”Never too late,” I yelled.. He smiled and waved, but we both knew I was lying….it was way too late for him. Sad……….As we headed west, I thought about both the little boy and the old man, and wondered why some dreams happen, and some don’t.

 

A half dozen years ago, Red and I ran up the Mormon Trail alongside the Platte River on our Goldwing, and then across the Nebraska Sandhills to Fort Robinson, a frontier military post frozen in time, and the place where the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death by the U.S. Army a hundred twenty years ago.

We camped 50 meters from a memorial marking the exact spot. The officer’s quarters of the old fort, the sutler’s store, and the guardhouse were still standing, just east of the silent, ghost-filled parade ground surrounded by the great cottonwood trees that had been planted when Crazy Horse yet lived.

We ate supper heated on a campstove while towering thunderclouds warned of rain, and the cottonwood leaves shivered violently in an uneasy evening wind. Later, the sky cleared and the night was shot through with stars and meteors. I lay in the hot silence and thought of the conflict of civilizations unevenly powerful, and the pathos and tragedy of those men caught between them.

In the morning, we packed up and rolled out of the fort, back on smooth, two-laned macadam to the small town of Chadron, Nebraska, where many of the descendants of Crazy Horse’s people yet live. We filled our tank at a convenience store/ service station, and, while Red used the facilities, I checked the pressure in the tires and polished the windscreen with aerosol furniture wax..

Hearing footsteps I turned and smiled, but instead of Red before me stood a tall young American Indian in a straw cowboy hat and faded jeans with a half case of beer under his arm. He stared at me, his eyes red and on fire, spittle on his lips, his breath reeking of alcohol.

“Howya doin,” I said.

“F**k,” he replied.

He stared at me a moment more, worked his lower jaw, bent his head, and spat exactly between my boots. Again, he stared into my eyes.

I said nothing.

After a moment, he turned and walked to a battered pickup. He opened the door, tossed  in his beer, got in… and drove away without another glance.

Red came up, concerned. “Are you okay,” she asked. “Is anything wrong?”

“Nothing that I can do anything about,” I replied.

We mounted the Wing, and swung away from the store heading West again.