If Rock and Roll Were a Machine (2 page)

Coach Heslin told Bert to run across the street to any house and call 911.

A patrol car came howling through the parking lot as Bert
was running back across the street. There was no fight, and Bert wouldn't have wanted to see one. But he was disappointed to have missed the heated conversation.

Camille tried to go with them when the cops walked his dad and the outlaw to their car, but his dad wouldn't let him.

Nobody could believe it when they saw the cops search the outlaw biker and find a gun in a shoulder holster. They put him and Shepard into the back of the car, then one of them read their IDs into the radio.

Coach Christman yelled for everybody to get back to work, but no one, including the other coaches, was in a hurry to do it.

When the one cop put the mike down, both he and his partner climbed out of the car and opened the back doors for Shepard and the outlaw. They returned the gun, then the four men shook hands all around.

Bert caught the expression of disgust on Christman's face before he blew his whistle and turned away. Even wearing his helmet and with all the noises of practice Bert heard the rumble of the outlaw's Harley a long way into the distance.

Bert wonders what it was like for Camille Shepard to grow up thousands of miles from his father. He also wonders if life had given him the choice, whether he would have traded growing up with his parents in a normal home—if you can call growing up without any brothers and sisters normal—for the body and athletic ability of a guy like Camille.
If life would have thrown in the Harley, Bert would have traded.

Thinking about a guy of another nationality makes Bert think about the subject of race, and Bert is wondering if Christman resents being second-team to a black kid more than he would to a white kid, when he becomes aware of silence. Bert's vision registers movement and the color brown right before he takes a whack in his face mask. The ball bounces at his feet, and he moves as fast as he can to pick it up.

Heslin's voice is the first sound Bert realizes he has heard for a while. He looks at the big gray-haired man, the oldest of the coaches. “Feel all right, Bowden?” Heslin asks. “Looked like you lost consciousness there.”

“I'm okay,” Bert says.

Heslin waves his hand toward the imaginary line of scrimmage. “Then let's get back to work,” he says.

Bert's mind is full of white noise—like a stereo speaker turned up full blast when the station has gone off the air—as he bends his knees and holds his hands out as though to receive the snap. He doesn't hear what pattern Heslin has called, but he begins the count, anyway. “Hut! Hut! Hut!”

Kelly McDougall, last year's starting wide receiver, digs hard across the middle as Bert drops back. McDougall is about ten yards out when he holds up his hands. Bert lets it go. But just as the ball spirals off the tips of Bert's fingers, McDougall plants his foot and cuts for the corner of the end zone.

Bert watches the ball bounce a yard or two beyond where McDougall made his cut. McDougall is also watching the ball. Everybody is watching the ball bounce across the empty grass. Bert feels the weight of every eye shifting to him as he hustles out to get it.

Bert stands outside himself through the rest of the drill. He watches himself drop back, throw, move off to the side, throw again when his turn comes around. He sees with absolute clarity the difference between him and the other guys. They are at ease and he isn't. The ease—and the confidence—is in their voices, the way they take the three quick steps and plant their back foot as though there weren't a chance in the world they could stumble over their own feet, the way they throw the ball rather than aiming it as Bert does, even in the way they walk off to the side and talk with one another as though all this were fun.

*  *  *

Bert watches the scrimmage from the sidelines with the other guys who aren't among the first eleven on offense or defense. Before long the coaches begin substituting. To Bert's surprise, Kevin Robideaux, the fourth quarterback, goes in. They put him in before Christman, Bert thinks. They know how good Christman is, so they don't need to see him. They want to see Robideaux and me so they know who to cut. But Robideaux is a sophomore. If they've kept him on varsity through two cuts, they won't cut him now. They'll want to keep a sophomore so they'll have a guy with two years' experience by the time he's a senior. They'll cut me.

Bert has told himself he knows he won't make the team, but a part of him hasn't accepted it. A big portion of his memory and something in his body too remembers how he'd not only made every team when he was younger but been among the best players. These parts of Bert have whispered that he really is good and that the coaches will see it. But now all the various components of Bert Bowden have given in to the knowledge that he and football are parting ways for good.

A quarter-mile east of the
Y where Highway 2 forks off Division Street is Shepard's Classic and Custom Cycles. The old blue Sportster is still sitting in the window. A horn blares behind him as Bert spins the steering wheel and bounces his VW Bug over the curb.

Bert has only looked through the windows before, but this evening he pushes through the door and walks among the bikes.

The first three are Harleys. They look new, but as Bert reads the tags hanging from the handlebars he sees that one is a '55, one a '57, and one a '62.

Behind the Harleys sit two Nortons and two Triumphs, and in the row behind sit three BSAs. Bert has never heard of a Norton before, but he remembers seeing a BSA on a John Cougar Mellencamp CD cover. These bikes have such a simple look that they don't even seem like the same kind of vehicle as the racer-style Japanese bikes a lot of guys at school have.

The Harleys look tough in a squatty, old-timey way, and the Nortons, Triumphs, and BSAs are sleek and bright like exotic fish. All the bikes are so clean, they look like they were just made. But they were made a long time ago.
The newest is the '79 Triumph, and the oldest is the '55 Harley.

Bert doesn't know much about motorcycles, and he knows even less about music, but he believes that if rock and roll were a machine, it would be a motorcycle. These old bikes, especially the Harleys, make songs by Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen roar in his head.

The back of the showroom opens into the shop, and this is where Bert sees Shepard. The man stands beside a rusty old wreck of a motorcycle strapped to a workstand, scrutinizing the nasty thing and making notes on his clipboard. Now he turns to Bert.

“Wheat farmer from down around Reardon brought an old Triumph in last winter,” Shepard says. He gestures at the bike with his clipboard. “It was in worse shape than this. Guy said it'd been leaning against his windmill since 1959.

“I got it up on the stand and was looking it over,” he says. “I stuck my face down where the dynamo should have been and shined my penlight in the mounting hole. Two little black eyes shined right back at me, and I thought I saw a forked tongue whipping.”

Shepard turns and sets the clipboard on the bench. “I let out a scream and went up in the air,” he says. “I came down about halfway across the room.” He pulls a long metal bar from a set of bars in graduated sizes hanging on the pegboard above the bench and holds it up. “I grabbed this breaker bar, and I went back and tapped on
the dynamo housing. No response from the snake. So I poked around in there and fished him out.” He returns the bar to its peg and walks toward Bert.

“You're thinking that snake was dead, right?” Shepard says.

Bert isn't terribly comfortable here in a place he's never been before with this big man walking toward him. He smiles a nervous smile and shrugs.

“He looked dead,” Shepard says. “He felt dead. He didn't smell dead, though, which should have told me something. I tossed him in the trash barrel back by the wood stove.” He points his thumb toward the back of the shop.

“About a half hour later I'm dumping a worthless fairing in the trash and that snake goes off like a school bell. He'd been hibernating in that dynamo housing,” Shepard says. “Thing had nine rattles.” He smiles now, and there's a quality in his face that puts Bert at ease.

“So, son,” Shepard says—and he's right in front of Bert now, so tall, Bert has to lift his head to look him in the face—“don't ever let anyone tell you restoring motorcycles is for sissies.”

“Nobody could convince me of it” is Bert's reply.

Shepard laughs. “Well, that's good,” he says.

Shepard walks along the line of classic bikes and Bert walks beside him. He tells Bert he remembers him, that Bert is the cause of the shop going over their yearly budget for Glass Plus because Bert drooled so heavily on the
window where the Sportster sits. Bert smiles and says he stopped to look at it once or twice. In front of the old Sportster is where they stop now.

The bike looks bigger today. It's more sharply defined against the air and the objects around it. Everything evaporates from Bert's thoughts but the image of this machine and his related imaginings. Nothing hurts now. He wonders if he could be a different guy on this motorcycle.

“I've dropped the price to eleven hundred,” Shepard says. “My boy's come to stay with me, and we want to put a hot tub in. We've got everything ready except the tub itself, and I can't find anybody who'll trade for one or let me work for it. So I need eleven hundred dollars cash money.”

God, Bert thinks, eleven hundred bucks! I can buy it! He looks past the motorcycle to the window where it and he and Shepard are reflected. He would pay every cent of his savings to feel the way he looks in this reflection.

“I don't know much about motorcycles,” Bert says. “I just think it's a beautiful thing.” God, Bert asks himself, why did I say that?

“I do too,” Shepard says. He sweeps his hand from the Sportster to the other bikes. “I think they're all beautiful things.

“What a guy's got to consider,” Shepard goes on, “is that these older Harleys—all the classic bikes, for that matter—aren't like Japanese bikes. They require
maintenance. If a guy just wants to ride, he should have a Japanese bike. Get a good used Honda for five hundred bucks, change the oil once a year, adjust the valves every decade, and you'll be riding it the rest of your life.”

He steps up to the Sportster. “The old bikes don't go as fast or stop as fast,” he says. He points to the front wheel. “No disk brakes.” He points to the forks. “Inferior suspension.” He raps the gas tank. “Worse fuel economy.” He moves his fingers over the leather seat. “Not as comfortable.” He points with his left hand to the little headlight and to the taillight with his right. “Inferior lighting. These weren't made to run the lights all the time, which is the law now. And you can't just push a button to start 'em.”

The glow begins to fade from Bert's face.

Shepard walks past the bike to the corner of the room, grabs an aluminum loading ramp and returns. “You do, however, get the pleasure and the challenge of kick-starting these.”

He places one end of the ramp on the edge of the platform where the bike sits and the other end on the floor, then he steps up onto the platform. “And there's no sound I know of in the world of machines that's as sweet as the exhaust note of a Harley-Davidson V-twin,” he says.

Shepard rolls the Sportster forward, then lifts the back wheel and sets it square with the ramp. “What's your name?” he asks.

“Bert Bowden,” Bert says.

“Well, Bert, I'll let this thing down as easy as I can,
and you keep it from rolling across the floor and busting up the place,” Shepard says. “I'm Scotty.”

Bert holds the rear fender brace and steps backward, pushing against the rolling weight. In a second the bike is flat on the floor. He holds the door as Shepard pushes the Sportster out onto the asphalt. The big man has a limp, and Bert wonders if he got it falling off a motorcycle. Bert watches him more closely and sees that both his legs are bad. Shepard lets the bike settle onto its sidestand. “Throw a leg over,” he says.

Bert climbs on, tips the bike off the stand, and keeps it steady with his legs. It's heavy, and it sits high. But it's really neat. It's like a chunk of condensed power there beneath him.

“Can you still get parts for these?” Bert asks. He knows his dad would ask that. He wishes he hadn't thought of his dad. His dad hates motorcycles even more than his mom does. Bert's father is an insurance man.

“No problem on spares,” Shepard replies. “What you can't get as original equipment is being remanufactured.” He takes a step closer. “Now you're going to light this thing up,” he says.

Light it up? Bert thinks.

They turn on the fuel tap and retard the spark by adjusting the magneto. Bert looks around for the key, but Shepard tells him there is no key. “Not many people know how to start one of these,” he says. “But you're gonna know.”

Shepard reaches down and pivots the kick pedal outward on the lever. He tells Bert to kick it through easy a couple times to prime the carb. Bert feels the big pistons move. They gulp air through the carburetor with a thirsty sound.

“Okay,” Shepard says, “we got the gas on, spark set, carb primed, biker expression on face. Time to give 'er
a manly kick
, as the British say.”

Bert rests his weight on his left leg. Then he rears up, shifts his weight to his right, and comes down hard on the pedal.

The sound of the engine is deep and mellow. Bert feels the pulse rise through him slow and measured like a heartbeat. “Okay,” Shepard says, “blip the throttle.”

Bert turns the throttle and the Sportster roars. The sound rises like a fist punching a hole in the world. And when Bert backs off, the exhaust makes a hard, barking sound like nasty laughter.