The Welcome-Home Burn

“Three kegs,” Victor said, walking him in with a hand flat between his shoulder blades. “I told them two. They bought three.” Victor steered him straight into the noise. The compound yard had been cleared for it, music booming out too loud from speakers wired into a truck bed by the fuel shed, exactly the way Victor liked it. A pig turned slow on an iron spit over the grease pit, dripping into the coals. All around the roaring center fire, a hundred bikes sat nose-in in a tight ring, their polished chrome throwing back jagged orange light against the dark, and past their rear tires the desert cold set in hard beyond the fence line.

“Generous.”

“They’re happy, Jason. Look at them. Three years of guys asking when, and here you are. You know what that’s worth to me?”

Jason looked. He counted exits first, then bodies. Forty-one patches, Victor had said at the bar. Twenty-eight when Jason went inside. Thirteen new, thirteen men he’d never shaken hands with in his life.

They came at him in a line anyway. The Ghost Riders handshake hadn’t changed since Marcus: grip, pull in, two slaps on the back, break. Jason got passed down the chain hand to hand like freight coming off a truck.

Perez first. Old guard, gray coming into the beard, and he said nothing at all, just squeezed hard and held it a beat longer than the ritual called for.

“Perez.”

“Jason.” That was the whole speech.

Eddie came next and hugged him with both arms, beer and bar soap. “You got skinny in there, brother. They not feeding you?”

“They fed me.”

“Yeah? Then sit down and eat anyway.”

Then a kid with a fresh bottom rocker and a face Jason almost knew.

“Diego,” the kid said. “You probably don’t - ”

“Robbie’s little brother.”

“Yeah.” Diego grinned like he’d won something. “Yeah, man. I didn’t think you’d - I mean, it’s been a minute. You remember the shop lot?”

“Dirt bike. Helmet strap hanging loose.”

“Robbie said you’d tell me about the strap.”

“I did tell you about the strap.”

Twelve. He’d been twelve when Jason went away, and now he had a patch on his back and a knife on his belt and he called Victor sir.

Jason kept the warm face on and read the grips. Some of them met his eyes. More of them didn’t, and the ones who didn’t were young, new, all of them glancing past his shoulder to find Victor before they decided how long to hold on.

The fire told him the rest. Victor sat in a canvas chair at twelve o’clock with the heat on his face and the dark at his back, which meant he hadn’t worried once in three years about what stood behind him. Two chairs flanked him; then the long log, then the crates, then the prospects standing because nobody had told them they could sit. The old guard had taken the far arc. Perez kept his back to the dark and his hands open on his knees.

Somebody put a cup in Jason’s hand. A hang-around leaned in laughing, saying something he didn’t catch, her hair brushing his jaw, and her perfume went through him hard enough that he had to set his feet.

“You know what your old man did to that door?” Perez was loud now, three deep past careful. “The clubhouse door. The first one, the wood one.”

“Tell it.”

“He rode a Panhead through it.” Perez swung his arm and beer went over his wrist. “Through it, Jason. Not around. Rossi locked him out over some stupid thing, some vote, and Marcus comes up the lot doing maybe fifteen and he don’t even slow down. Splinters everywhere. He’s sitting in the middle of the bar on this bike with the door frame hanging off the handlebar and he looks at Rossi and says, ‘Open.’”

The men around the fire were laughing before the end of it. Jason laughed too, and it came out of him real, which was the problem.

“He paid for the door,” Perez said, wiping his beard. “Next day. Cash. Then he made Rossi hang the busted one up in the hall.”

“It was still there when I went in.”

“Course it was.” Perez went quiet all at once and squeezed his shoulder. “God, I loved that man.”

Jason put that away where he kept things. Perez loved him; Perez would have to pick a side before this was over.

Eddie shouldered in with his phone already out. “You gotta see this. Hold it sideways, the screen’s cracked.”

A school photo. Blue background, a girl in a yellow shirt, two front teeth missing and grinning like there was nothing in that to be ashamed of.

“Mia,” Eddie said. “Eight. Well. Eight in eleven days.”

“She’s got your ears.”

“She’s got her mother’s everything else, thank Christ.” Eddie took the phone back, looked at it a second, then passed it to the man beside him so it kept going around the fire. “Third grade. She’s doing a party at the park off Tropicana. Bouncy castle, the whole deal.”

“Sounds loud.” “You’re coming.” Eddie’s hand landed flat on his chest. “I told her about you. For years. Say you’re coming.” “I’ll be there,” Jason said, and he meant it, and that was worse.

Eddie grinned and went off to chase his phone around the circle.

Across the fire Victor sat in the canvas chair with his boots stretched out, and Diego stood at his elbow. Not near him. At him. Two feet, maybe less, close enough that when Victor shifted the kid shifted with him. Victor held his cup up without looking and Diego took it, filled it, put it back in his hand, and nobody said thank you and nobody expected it. The kid never sat. Never drank. His eyes went around the fire the whole time like somebody was grading him on it.

Nineteen years old.

Jason finished his beer and walked out past the bikes and the last of the light, until the heat came off his back and the cold took it, and he stood in the dark where nobody could see his face.Past the last row of bikes the cold had teeth. Jason stood in it and let his eyes come right, and that was when he found the two people who weren’t at the fire.

Anna first. She stood at the far fence with her arms crossed over her stomach and her back nearly touching the chain link, eyes down, shoulders in, making herself small. Somebody had handed her a cup and she hadn’t touched it. A patch came by and she shifted half a step, and the man went past her without a glance.

Then Cutter, out at the lip of the yard on his bike, engine dead, both boots down, facing the gate instead of the flames. No drink. Nobody near him. He’d parked nose-out while a hundred others sat nose-in, and nobody had told him to turn it around.

Jason counted that. Two people in the whole yard who wouldn’t come warm their hands.

An arm hooked his neck from behind and hauled him sideways.

“There he is.” Perez had gone past loud into soft, which was further down the road than loud. “There he is. Where you been hiding? I been looking.”

“You found me.”

“I been looking three years, kid. Three.” Perez got him in both arms and held on, beard scratching Jason’s jaw, beer sloshing somewhere behind his shoulder. “Listen. You listening to me? Listen a second.”

“I’m listening.”

“Your old man.” Perez pulled back far enough to aim a finger at his chest, missed, tried again. “Marcus. He’d have cried tonight. You hear me? I’m telling you straight; he’d have stood right here and bawled like a woman and then looked me dead in the face in the morning and said it never happened. That’s your father. That’s exactly what he’d have done.”

“Perez…”

“No. Don’t do that, don’t do the face.” His hand came down heavy on Jason’s neck. “He waited. Every week, every single week, he waited. You know what that’s like? He’d have seen you come through that gate and he’d have cried, and I’d have let him. I’d have poured him one and let him.”

Jason put his arms around the old man and held him.

He held him too long. Longer than the handshake, longer than the ritual allowed, long enough that Perez went quiet and let himself be held, swaying a little, smelling of beer and smoke and the same bar soap he’d used since Jason was a kid. Perez would be here when it happened. Perez would be standing in this yard when the thing Jason came to do got done, and he’d have to pick, and whichever way he picked would break something in him that didn’t grow back.

“Okay,” Perez said into his shoulder. “Okay. Okay.”

Over the old man’s back, through the heat shimmer, Victor had him in his sights.

Victor had watched all of it. He sat sunk in his canvas chair with the flames between them and the dark at his spine, and he raised his bottle, slow, and tipped it toward Jason. Warm. Proud. Perfect. Jason didn’t flinch. He let his arm ease back from Perez, squared his shoulders against the glare of the pit, and met Victor’s eyes through the heat. Then he lifted his own cup straight back at him, steady, and took the drink.