Homecoming

The Panhead didn’t want to make it.

Jason felt it in his thighs before he heard it, a stutter in the left cylinder, a hitch like a man limping on a bad knee. He’d pulled the engine apart the week before the arrest and never got it back together right. Three years sitting in a desert storage unit hadn’t helped. The thing ran on spite now, and so did he.

“Come on,” he said. “Four more miles. You owe me four miles.”

The engine missed again.

“Don’t do that. Don’t you do that to me today.”

Heat came off the asphalt in sheets. Sage and hot oil, the two smells of his whole life before Ely. He rolled the throttle and the engine caught, ragged, and the exhaust popped twice behind him like something small being shot.

“There. See? Was that so hard.”

In the mirror the bike was still there.

Two blocks back on the frontage road. Two blocks back on the highway. Two blocks back when he slowed for the cattle grate. Same black fairing, same patch, too far to read, but he didn’t need to read it; the Serpents didn’t run colors you mistook for anything else. The rider never closed and never dropped off. He held that distance like somebody had measured it out for him and told him not to vary it.

Jason didn’t speed up. He filed it where he filed everything now, in the cold drawer at the back of his head, and kept both hands easy on the bars.

“Nobody tails a man they’re planning to protect,” he said. “You know that. I know that.”

The compound came up out of the flat the way it always had, a long low spread of corrugated steel and chain link with the mountains stacked blue behind it. A quarter mile out the Panhead coughed hard and lost the beat entirely.

“Hey. Hey. Not here.”

He feathered the clutch, dropped a gear, let momentum carry him. The engine caught one last sullen time. Enough.

He wasn’t going to push it the last hundred yards. Not in front of them.

The gates swung inward before he reached them. Nobody waved him down, nobody asked his name. That was its own piece of information. He rolled through, checked his mirror as the heavy chain link swung shut behind him, and saw the frontage road empty all the way to the wash. The Serpents bike had peeled off blocks ago. It was never coming through the gates. Not an escort, just bird-dogging him to make sure he ran straight into the pen and nowhere else. He started counting.

The fence was new. Marcus had run six-foot chain link with a sag in it by the wash; now it was eight feet with outriggers and a second line set back twelve feet inside the first, so anybody over the outer one landed in a box. Cameras on the gate posts, which was ordinary. Cameras on the shop roof pointed inward at the yard, which wasn’t. One on the water tank covering the wash where the sag used to be. One under the clubhouse eave angled at the door, so you couldn’t come or go without somebody watching you do it.

Marcus had never watched his own men. Marcus counted bikes at church and called it a headcount.

Jason kept his face flat, rolled into the middle of the yard, into the dust and the long shadows, and killed the engine.

His ears rang in the quiet.

Forty faces turned toward him. Victor came out of the clubhouse door with his arms already open.Victor came across the dust fast with his arms wide, and the yard opened for him without anybody being told. “Three years. Three years, and the boy rides in on that same damn Panhead. You never did know how to let a thing go, did you?”

Jason swung his leg over the seat and barely got both boots down before Victor had him. The hug was real the way a vise is real. Victor clapped his back twice, hard, high between the shoulders, the kind of sound forty men could hear from the fence line.

“Welcome home,” Victor said into his ear.

“Thanks.”

“No. Not like that. Say it like you mean it, son, because every man here is listening.”

“Welcome home,” Jason said.

Victor laughed and didn’t let go. “There he is. There’s my boy.”

Over Victor’s shoulder Jason kept counting. The picnic tables were gone from the east wall where the old man used to hold church in good weather. Somebody had dragged them into a half circle facing the clubhouse steps, every one of them aimed at the same spot. The bikes sat in two clean rows with a gap down the middle wide enough for a truck, or for one man to walk. Nobody stood in that gap.

“You know what we did with your letters?” Victor said. Jason kept his hand flat on Victor’s back. “Figured they went in a drawer somewhere. Or a burn barrel.” “We kept them. Every single one, son.” Victor pulled back far enough to look at him, still gripping both his arms. “That’s what family does. Family keeps its letters. You can check the box yourself if you want.”

“That’s a lot of letters.”

“Eighteen months of them, then nothing. You just quit on me. You think I didn’t notice the month they stopped coming?”

“I figured nobody was reading.”

“Somebody was always reading,” Victor said, and he smiled saying it, and two men behind him laughed because it came out sounding like a joke.

Jason smiled back. “Good to know. I’d have spelled better.”

The camera bolted above the clubhouse door had a little red eye, and it wasn’t blinking. The one over the shop bay had swung maybe ten degrees since he rolled in; he’d caught it moving while Victor was telling him about the box.

Then he found Anna.

She stood off at the edge of everything by the rain barrel, in that thin strip of shade where the shop wall met the fence. Her arms were folded in tight and her shoulders rolled forward, so she took up about half the room a person takes up. She’d put herself where a parked truck cut her off from the clubhouse steps.

She looked at him. Half a second, maybe less. Her eyes came up and found his and there was something in them he didn’t get time to read, then they dropped to the dirt and she turned a few degrees away, and the shade took the rest of her. Nobody learns that in a week. Three years ago she would have crossed the yard, taken his face in both hands, yelled at him for being stupid, and pulled him in until his ribs hurt. Now she folded in on herself like paper in a fire. Jason felt the muscles along his jaw go rigid, teeth grinding behind closed lips until the bone ache spread up into his temples. He locked his spine, smoothed his forehead out, and let the air out through his nose in a slow, even stream. He gave Victor nothing.

“Come on.” Victor let go of the embrace at last, but his hand stayed clamped on Jason’s shoulder, steering him toward the clubhouse door. “There’s people in there been waiting on you.”

The crowd opened up in front of them.Inside, the clubhouse smelled like beer and fresh paint, and that was the first wrong thing, because Marcus had never painted anything in his life.

“Look at this,” Victor said, steering him past the pool table with that hand still on his shoulder. “You remember the bar? Plywood and a sheet of linoleum, and your old man thought that was fine. I put in oak. Men drink better off oak; they stay longer, they talk.”

“It’s nice.”

“Nice is one word.” Victor rapped his knuckles on it twice. “Office is wired now, phones that work. We’ve got a man in Reno moving product your father wouldn’t touch because he didn’t understand it. Forty-one patches, Jason. Your old man died with twenty-six.”

“Twenty-eight.”

Victor laughed. “Twenty-eight, then. You always did count.”

Jason let his eyes go around the room. New carpet in the back hall, and a steel door where there used to be a curtain, a keypad beside it. Somebody had rehung the club photos, and the big one of Marcus on the Pahrump run had moved from the center all the way down to the far end, by the bathroom door.

“You kept the pictures,” Jason said.

“Of course I kept them. That’s the whole point, son. I didn’t tear anything down, I built on what he left. Everything in this room has his fingerprints under the paint.” Victor turned him by the shoulder, gentle, the way you’d turn a kid to face a camera. “That’s what nobody understood when he passed. They thought it was over. I told them it wasn’t over; it was just getting handed across.”

“Handed across.”

“That’s right.” Victor reached into his vest pocket.

Jason knew what it was before it cleared the leather. He’d known since he was nine, since he’d tried it on at the kitchen table and watched it swing off his thumb and roll under the stove. Heavy silver. Marcus’s ring.

Victor held it up between two fingers, and the bar light caught it.

“I’ve had this since the funeral,” he said. “Kept it in my desk. Took it out maybe twice a year and thought about you sitting up in Ely.”

Jason didn’t move.

“He would have wanted you to have this.” Victor pressed it into Jason’s palm and closed his fingers over it with both hands, like a prayer. “Don’t argue with me. You know how long I’ve waited to do that? Three years.”

The men along the bar had gone quiet, and somebody set a bottle down soft.

Jason opened his hand. The band was warm from Victor’s pocket, and that was the worst part of it. He turned it once so the worn flat faced up, and there was the nick on the inside edge where Marcus had caught it on a lift arm in ’eighty-nine.

He slid it on. It fit.

“Thank you,” Jason said.

“Say it to the room.”

Jason lifted his hand so the silver showed, and the room gave back a low sound, approval, not quite a cheer.

Then he looked at Victor and held it. He smiled, and he kept the smile exactly where it was, a long second, while he thought about what he was going to do to this man. “I’ll take good care of it.”