Throttle, Page 3

  It had to be him. Race was still riding okay, but he was on autopilot, face frozen, fixed forward as if he had a sprained neck and was wearing a brace. A thought struck Vince then—terrible but curiously certain—that this was how Race had looked the day in Fallujah that he drove away from the men in his squad, while the mortar rounds dropped around them.

  Peaches put on a burst of speed and gained a little on the truck. It blasted its air horn, as if in frustration. Or laughter. Either way, the old Georgia Peach had only gained a stay of execution. Vince could hear the trucker—maybe named Laughlin, maybe a devil from Hell—changing gears. Christ, how many forward did he have? A hundred? He started to close the distance. Vince didn’t think Peaches would be able to squirt ahead again. That old flathead Beezer of his had given all it had to give. Either the truck would take him or the Beez would blow a head gasket and then the truck would take him.

  BRONK! BRONK! BRONK-BRONK-BRONK!

  Shattering a day that was already shattered beyond repair… but it gave Vince an idea. It depended on where they were. He knew this road. He knew them all, out here, but he had not been this way in years, and could not be sure now, on the fly, if they were where he thought they were.

  Roy threw something back over his shoulder, something that twinkled in the sun. It struck LAUGHLIN’s dirty windshield and flew off. The fucking machete. The truck bellowed on, blowing double streams of black smoke, the driver laying on that horn again—

  BRONK-BRONK! BRONK! BRONK-BRONK-BRONK!

  —in blasts that sounded weirdly like Morse.

  If only… Lord, if only…

  And yes. Up ahead was a sign so filthy it was only barely possible to read it: CUMBA 2.

  Cumba. Goddam Cumba. A played-out little mining town on the side of a hill, a place where there were maybe five slots and one old geezer selling Navajo blankets made in Laos.

  Two miles wasn’t much time when you were already doing eighty. This would have to be quick, and there would only be one chance.

  The others made fun of Vince’s sled, but only Race’s ridicule had a keen edge to it. The bike was a rebuilt Kawasaki Vulcan 800 with Cobra pipes and a custom seat. Leather as red as a fire alarm. “The old man’s La-Z-Boy,” Dean Carew had once called the seat.

  “Fuck that,” Vince had replied indignantly, and when Peaches, solemn as a preacher, had said, “I’m sure you have,” they all broke up.

  The Tribe called the Vulcan a rice-burner, of course. Also Vince’s Tojo Mojo El Rojo. Doc—Doc who was now spread all over the road behind them—liked to call it Miss Fujiyama. Vince only smiled as though he knew something they didn’t. Maybe he even did. He’d had the Vulcan up to one-twenty and had stopped there. Pussied out. Race wouldn’t have, but Race was a young man and young men had to know where things ended. One-twenty had been enough for Vince, but he’d known there was more. Now he would find out how much.

  He grasped the throttle and twisted it all the way to the stop.

  The Vulcan responded not with a snarl but a cry and almost tore out from under him. He had a blurred glimpse of his son’s white face and then he was past, in the lead, riding the rocket, desert smells packing his nose. Up ahead was a dirty string of asphalt angling off to the left, the road to Cumba. Route 6 went past in a long, lazy curve to the right. Toward Show Low.

  Vince looked in his right-hand rearview and saw the others had bunched, and that Peaches still had the shiny side up. Vince thought the truck could have taken Peaches—maybe all the others—but he was laying back a little, knowing as well as Vince did that for the next twenty miles there were no upgrades. Beyond the turn-off to Cumba, the highway was elevated, and a guardrail ran along either side of it; Vince thought miserably of cattle in the chute. For the next twenty miles, the road belonged to LAUGHLIN.

  Please let this work.

  He let off the throttle and began squeezing the hand brake rhythmically. What the four behind him saw (if they were looking) was a long flash… a short flash… another long flash. Then a pause. Then a repeat. Long… short… long. It was the truck’s air horn that had given him the idea. It only sounded like Morse, but what Vince was flashing with his brake light was Morse.

  It was the letter R.

  Roy and Peaches might pick it up, Lemmy for sure. And Race? Did they still teach Morse? Had the kid learned it in his war, where squad leaders carried GPS units and bombs were guided around the curve of the world by satellite?

  The left turn to Cumba was coming up. Vince had just time enough to flash R one more time. Now he was almost back with the others. He shot his hand left in a gesture The Tribe knew well: follow me off the highway. Laughlin saw it—as Vince had expected—and surged forward. At the same time he did, Vince twisted his throttle again. The Vulcan screamed and leaped forward. He banked right, along the main road. The others followed. But not the truck. LAUGHLIN had already started its turn onto the Cumba spur. If the driver had tried to correct for the main road, he would have rolled his rig.

  Vince felt a white throb of elation and reflexively closed his left hand into a triumphant fist. We did it! We fucking did it! By the time he gets that fat-ass truck turned around, we’ll be nine miles from h—

  The thought broke off like a branch as he looked again into his rearview. There were three bikes behind him, not four: Lemmy, Peaches, and Roy.

  Vince swiveled to the left, hearing the old bones crackle in his back, knowing what he would see. He saw it. The truck, dragging a huge rooster tail of red dust, its tanker too dirty to shine. But there was shine fifty or so yards in front of it; the gleam of the chromed pipes and engine belonging to a Softail Deuce. Race either did not understand Morse, didn’t believe what he was seeing, or hadn’t seen at all. Vince remembered the waxy, fixed expression on his son’s face, and thought this last possibility was most likely. Race had stopped paying attention to the rest of them—had stopped seeing them—the moment he understood LAUGHLIN was not just a truck out of control but one bent on tribal slaughter. He had been just aware enough to spot Vince’s hand gesture, but had lost all the rest to a kind of tunnel vision.

  What was that? Panic? Or a kind of animal selfishness? Or were they the same, when you came down to it?

  Race’s Harley slipped behind a low swell of hill. The truck disappeared after it and then there was only blowing dust. Vince tried to catch his flying thoughts and put them in some coherent order. If his memory was right again—he knew it was asking a lot of it; he hadn’t been this way in a couple of years—then the spur road ran through Cumba before veering back to rejoin Highway 6 about nine miles ahead. If Race could stay in front—

  Except.

  Except, unless things had changed, the road went to hard-pan dirt beyond Cumba, and was apt to drift across sandy at this time of year. The truck would do okay, but a motorcycle…

  The chances of Race surviving the last four miles of that nine-mile run weren’t good. The chances of him dumping the Deuce and being run over were, on the other hand, excellent.

  Images of Race tried to crowd his mind. Race on his Big Wheels: the kindergarten road warrior. Race staring at him from the backseat of the GTO, the Popsicle melting, his eyes bright with hate, the lower lip quivering. Race at eighteen, wearing a uniform and a fuck-you smile, both present and accounted for and all squared away.

  Last of all came the image of Race dead on the hardpan, a smashed doll with only his leathers holding him together.

  Vince swept the pictures away. They were no help. The cops wouldn’t be, either. There were no cops, not in Cumba. If someone saw the semi chasing the bike, he might call the state police, but the closest one was apt to be in Show Low, drinking java and eating pie and flirting with the waitress while Travis Tritt played on the Rock-Ola.

  There was only them. But that was nothing new.

  He thrust his hand to the right, then made a fist and patted the air with it. The other three swung over to the side behind him, engines clobbering, the air over their straight pipes shimmeri
ng.

  Lemmy pulled up beside him, his face haggard and cheesy-yellow. “He didn’t see the taillight signal!” he shouted.

  “Didn’t see or didn’t understand!” Vince yelled back. He was trembling. Maybe it was just the bike throbbing under him. “Comes to the same! Time for Little Boy!”

  For a moment Lemmy didn’t understand. Then he twisted around and yanked the straps on his right-hand saddlebag. No fancy plastic hardcase for Lemmy. Lemmy was old school all the way.

  While he was rooting, there was a sudden, gunning roar. That was Roy. Roy had had enough. He wheeled around and shot back east, his shadow now running before him, a scrawny black gantry-man. On the back of his leather vest was a hideous joke: NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER.

  “Come back, Klowes, you dickwad!” Peaches bellowed. His hand slipped from his clutch. The Beezer, still in gear, lurched forward almost over Vince’s foot, passed high-octane gas, and stalled. Peaches was almost hurled off but didn’t seem to notice. He was still looking back. He shook his fist; his scant gray hair whirled around his long, narrow skull. “Come back, you chicken-shit DICKWAAAAD!”

  Roy didn’t come back. Roy didn’t even look back.

  Peaches turned to Vince. Tears streamed down cheeks sunflayed by a million rides and ten million beers. In that moment he looked older than the desert he stood on.

  “You’re stronger’n me, Vince, but I got me a bigger asshole. You rip his head off; I’ll be in charge of shittin’ down his neck.”

  “Hurry up!” Vince shouted at Lemmy. “Hurry up, goddamn you!”

  Just when he thought Lemmy was going to come up empty, his old running buddy straightened with Little Boy in his gloved hand.

  The Tribe did not ride with guns. Outlaw motorheads like them never did. They all had records, and any cop in Nevada would be delighted to put one of them away for thirty years on a gun charge. One, or all of them. They carried knives, but knives were no good in this situation; witness what had happened to Roy’s machete, which had turned out as useless as the man himself. Except when it came to killing stoned little girls in high school sweaters, that was.

  Little Boy, however, while not strictly legal, was not a gun. And the one cop who’d looked at it (“while searching for drugs”—the pigs were always doing that, it was what they lived for) had given Lemmy a skate when Lemmy explained it was more reliable than a road flare if you broke down at night. Maybe the cop knew what he was looking at, maybe not, but he knew that Lemmy was a veteran. Not just from Lemmy’s veteran’s license plate, which could have been stolen, but because the cop had been a vet himself. “Au Shau Valley, where the shit smells sweeter,” he’d said, and they had both laughed and even ended up bumping fists.

  Little Boy was an M84 stun grenade, more popularly known as a flash-bang. Lemmy had been carrying it in his saddlebag for maybe five years, always saying it would come in handy someday when the other guys—Vince included—ribbed him about it.

  Someday had turned out to be today.

  “Will this old sonofabitch still work?” Vince shouted as he hung Little Boy over his handlebars by the strap. It didn’t look like a grenade. It looked like a combination thermos bottle and aerosol can. The only grenade-y thing about it was the pull ring duct-taped to the side.

  “I don’t know! I don’t even know how you can—”

  Vince had no time to discuss logistics. He only had a vague idea of what the logistics might be, anyway. “I have to ride! That fuck’s gonna come out on the other end of the Cumba road! I mean to be there when he does!”

  “And if Race ain’t in front of him?” Lemmy asked. They had been shouting until now, all jacked up on adrenaline. It was almost a surprise to hear a nearly normal tone of voice.

  “One way or the other,” Vince said. “You don’t have to come. Either of you. I’ll understand if you want to turn back. He’s my boy.”

  “Maybe so,” Peaches said, “but it’s our Tribe. Was, anyway.” He jumped down on the Beezer’s kick, and the hot engine rumbled to life. “I’ll ride witcha, Cap.”

  Lemmy just nodded and pointed at the road.

  Vince took off.

  It wasn’t as far as he’d thought: seven miles instead of nine. They met no cars or trucks. The road was deserted, traffic maybe avoiding it because of the construction back the way they had come. Vince snapped constant glances to his left. For a while he saw red dust rising, the truck dragging half the desert along in its slipstream. Then he lost sight even of its dust, the Cumba spur dropping well out of sight behind hills with eroded, chalky sides.

  Little Boy swung back and forth on its strap. Army surplus. Will this old sonofabitch still work? he’d asked Lemmy, and now realized he could have asked the same question of himself. How long since he had been tested this way, running dead out, throttle to the max? How long since the whole world came down to only two choices, live pretty or die laughing? And how had his own son, who looked so cool in his new leathers and his mirrored sunglasses, missed such an elementary equation?

  Live pretty or die laughing, but don’t you run. Don’t you fucking run.

  Maybe Little Boy would work, maybe it wouldn’t, but Vince knew he was going to take his shot, and it made him giddy. If the guy was buttoned up in his cab, it was a lost cause in any case. But he hadn’t been buttoned up back at the diner. Back there, his hand had been lolling out against the side of the truck. And later, hadn’t he waved them ahead from that same open window? Sure. Sure he had.

  Seven miles. Five minutes, give or take. Long enough for a lot of memories of his son, whose father had taught him to change the oil but never to bait a hook; to gap plugs but never how you told a coin from the Denver mint from one that had been struck in San Francisco. Time to think how Race had pushed for this stupid meth deal, and how Vince had gone along even though he knew it was stupid, because it seemed he had something to make up for. Only the time for make-up calls was past. As Vince tore along at eighty-five, bending as low as he could get to cut the wind resistance, a terrible thought crossed his mind, one he inwardly recoiled from but could not blot out—that maybe it would be better for all concerned if LAUGHLIN did succeed in running his son down. It wasn’t the image of Race lifting a shovel into the air and then bringing it down on a helpless man’s head, in a spoiled rage over lost money, although that was bad enough. It was something more. It was the fixed, empty look on the kid’s face right before he steered his bike the wrong way, onto the Cumba road. For himself, Vince had not been able to stop looking back at The Tribe, the whole way down the canyon, as some were run down and the others struggled to stay ahead of the big machine. Whereas Race had seemed incapable of turning that stiff neck of his. There was nothing behind him that he needed to see. Maybe never had been.

  There came a loud ka-pow at Vince’s back, and a yell he heard even over the wind and the steady blat of the Vulcan’s engine: “Mutha-FUCK!” He looked in the rearview mirror and saw Peaches falling back. Smoke was boiling from between his pipe-stem legs and oil slicked the road behind him in a fan shape that widened as his ride slowed. The Beez had finally blown its head gasket. A wonder it hadn’t happened sooner.

  Peaches waved them on… not that Vince would have stopped. Because in a way, the question of whether Race was redeemable was moot. Vince himself was not redeemable; none of them were. He remembered an Arizona cop who’d once pulled them over and said, “Well, look what the road puked up.” And that was what they were: road puke. But those bodies back there had, until this afternoon, been his running buddies, the only thing he had of any value in the world. They had been Vince’s brothers in a way, and Race was his son, and you couldn’t drive a man’s family to earth and expect to live. You couldn’t leave them butchered and expect to ride away. If LAUGHLIN didn’t know that, he would.

  Soon.

  Lemmy couldn’t keep up with the Tojo Mojo El Rojo. He fell farther and farther behind. That was all right. Vince was just glad Lemmy still had his six.

  Up ahead, a sign: WAT
CH FOR LEFT-ENTERING TRAFFIC. The road coming out of Cumba. It was hardpan dirt, as he had feared. Vince slowed, then stopped, turned off the Vulcan’s engine.

  Lemmy pulled up beside. There was no guardrail here. Here in this one place, where 6 rejoined the Cumba road, the highway was level with the desert, although not far ahead it began to climb away from the floodplain once more, turning into the cattle chute again.

  “Now we wait,” Lemmy said, switching his engine off as well.

  Vince nodded. He wished he still smoked. He told himself that either Race was still shiny-side-up and in front of the truck or he wasn’t. It was beyond his control. It was true, but it didn’t help.

  “Maybe he’ll find a place to turn off in Cumba,” Lemmy said. “An alley or somethin’ where the truck can’t go.”

  “I don’t think so. Cumba is nothing. A gas station and I think a couple houses, all stuck right on the side of a fucking hill. That’s bad road. At least for Race. No easy way off it.” He didn’t even try to tell Lemmy about Race’s blank, locked-down expression, a look that said he wasn’t seeing anything except the road right in front of his bike. Cumba would be a blur and a flash that he only registered after it was well behind him.

  “Maybe—” Lemmy began, but Vince held up his hand, silencing him. They cocked their heads to the left.

  They heard the truck first, and Vince felt his heart sink. Then, buried in its roar, the bellow of another motor. There was no mistaking the distinctive blast of a Harley running full out.

  “He made it!” Lemmy yelled, and raised his hand for a high-five. Vince wouldn’t give it. Bad luck. And besides, the kid still had to make the turn back onto 6. If he was going to dump, it would be there.

  A minute ticked by. The sound of the engines grew louder. A second minute, and now they could see dust rising over the nearest hills. Then, in a notch between the two closest hills, they saw a flash of sun on chrome. There was just time to glimpse Race, bent almost flat over his handlebars, long hair streaming out behind, and then he was gone again. A second after he disappeared—surely no more—the truck flashed through the notch, stacks shooting smoke. LAUGHLIN on the side was no longer visible; it had been buried beneath a layer of dust.