Rose Madder (45 page)

This was a question she didn't yet know how to answer, so she just met him where he was and took his hand and let him lead her down and out into the sunlight washing over the first Saturday of June. He stood her on the curb beside the leaning bike, looked her critically up and down, then shook his head. “Nope, nope, the sweater doesn't make it,” he said. “Luckily, my Boy Scout training has never deserted me.”

There were saddlebags on either side of the Harley's carrier-rack. He unbuckled one of them and pulled out a leather jacket similar to his own: zipper pockets high and low on either side, but otherwise black and plain. No studs, epaulets, lightning bolts, or geegaws. It was smaller than the one Bill wore. She looked at it hanging flat in his hands like a pelt, troubled by the obvious question.

He saw the look, understood it at once, and shook his head. “It's my dad's jacket. He taught me to ride on an old Indian hammerhead he took in trade for a dining-room table and a bedroom set. The year he turned twenty-one, he rode that bike all over America, he says. It was the kind you had to kick-start, and if you forgot to put the gearshift in neutral, it was apt to go tearing right out from under you.”

“What happened? Did he crash it?” She smiled a little. “Did
you
crash it?”

“Neither one. It died of old age. Since then they've all been Harleys in the Steiner family. This is a Heritage softail, thirteen-forty-five cc.” He touched the nacelle gently. “Dad hasn't ridden for five years or so now.”

“Did he get tired of it?”

Bill shook his head. “No, he got glaucoma.”

She slipped into the jacket. She guessed that Bill's father must be at least three inches shorter and maybe forty pounds
lighter than his son, but the jacket still hung comically on her, almost to her knees. It was warm, though, and she zipped it up to her chin with a kind of sensuous pleasure.

“You look good,” he said. “Kind of funny, like a kid playing dress-up, but good. Really.”

She thought she could now say what she hadn't been able to when she and Bill had been sitting on the bench and eating hotdogs, and it suddenly seemed very important that she should say it.

“Bill?”

He looked at her with that little smile, but his eyes were serious. “Yeah?”

“Don't hurt me.”

He considered this, the little smile staying on, his eyes still grave, and then he shook his head. “No. I won't.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yeah. I promise. Come on, climb aboard. Have you ever ridden an iron pony before?”

She shook her head.

“Well, those little pegs are for your feet.” He bent over the back of the bike, rummaged, and came up with a helmet. She observed its red-purple color with absolutely no surprise. “Have a brain-bucket.”

She slipped it on over her head, bent forward, looked solemnly at herself in one of the Harley's side-mirrors, then burst out laughing. “I look like a football player!”

“Prettiest one on the team, too.” He took her by the shoulders and turned her around. “It buckles under your chin. Here, let me.” For a moment his face was kissing distance from hers, and she felt light-headed knowing that if he wanted to kiss her, right here on the sunny sidewalk with people going about their leisurely Saturday-morning errands, she would let him.

Then he stepped back.

“That strap too tight?”

She shook her head.

“Sure?”

She nodded.

“Say something, then.”

“Iss sap's ot ooo ite,” she said, and burst out laughing at his expression. Then he was laughing with her.

“Are you ready?” he asked her again. He was still smiling, but his eyes had returned to their former look of serious
consideration, as if he knew that they had embarked on some grave enterprise, where any word or movement might have far-reaching consequences.

She made a fist, rapped the top of her helmet, and grinned nervously. “I guess I am. Who gets on first, you or me?”

“Me.” He swung his leg over the saddle of the Harley. “Now you.”

She swung her leg over carefully, and put her hands on his shoulders. Her heart was beating very fast.

“No,” he said. “Around my waist, okay? I have to keep my arms and hands free to run the controls.”

She slipped her hands in between his arms and sides and clasped them in front of his flat stomach. All at once she felt as if she were dreaming again. Had all of this come out of one small drop of blood on a sheet? An impulse decision to walk out of her front door and just keep going? Was that even possible?

Dear God, please let this not be a dream,
she thought.

“Feet up on the pegs, check?”

She put them there, and was fearfully enchanted when Bill rocked the bike upright and booted back the kickstand. Now, with only his feet holding them steady, it felt to her like the moment when a small boat's last mooring is slipped and it floats beside the dock, nodding more freely on the waves than previously. She leaned a little closer to his back, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. The smell of sunwarmed leather was pretty much as she had imagined it would be, and that was good. It was all good. Scary and good.

“I hope you like this,” Bill said. “I really do.”

He pushed a button on the right handlebar and the Harley went off like a gun beneath them. Rosie jumped and slipped closer to him, her grip tightening and becoming a little less self-conscious.

“Everything okay?” he called.

She nodded, realized he couldn't see that, and shouted back that yes, everything was fine.

A moment later the curb to their left was rolling backward. He snatched a quick glance over her shoulder for traffic, then swung across Trenton Street to the right side. It wasn't like a turn in a car; the motorcycle
banked,
like a small airplane lining itself up with the runway. Bill twisted the throttle and the Harley scooted forward, blowing a rattle of wind into her helmet and making her laugh.

“I thought you'd like it!” Bill called back over his shoulder as they stopped at the traffic light on the corner. When he put his foot down it was as if they were tethered to solid land once more, but by the thinnest of lines. When the light turned green the engine roared under her again, with more authority this time, and they swung onto Deering Avenue, running beside Bryant Park, rolling through the shadows of old oaks that were printed on the pavement like inkblots. She looked up over his right shoulder and saw the sun leading them through the trees, flashing in her eyes like a heliograph, and when he leaned the bike onto Calumet Avenue, she leaned with him.

I thought you'd like it,
he'd said as they started off, but she only liked it while they were crossing the north side of the city, hopscotching through increasingly suburban neighborhoods where the hip-to-hip frame houses made her think of
All in the Family
and there seemed to be a Wee Nip on every corner. By the time they were on the Skyway out of the city she was not just liking it but loving it, and when he left the Skyway for Route 27, two-lane blacktop which traced the edge of the lake all the way up into the next state, she felt she would have been happy to go on forever. If he'd asked her what she thought about going all the way to Canada, maybe catch a Blue Jays game in Toronto, she would simply have laid her helmeted head against the leather between his shoulderblades so he could feel her nod.

Highway 27 was the best. Later in the summer it would be heavy with traffic even at this hour of the morning, but today it was almost empty, a black ribbon with a yellow stitch running down the middle. On their right, the lake winked a fabulous blue through the running trees; on their left they passed dairy farms, tourist cabins, and souvenir shops just opening for the summer.

She felt no need to talk, was not sure she
could
have talked, even if called upon to do so. He gradually twisted the Harley's throttle until the red speedometer needle stood straight up from its pin like a clock hand indicating noon, and the wind rattled harder in her helmet. To Rosie it was like the dreams of flying she'd had as a young girl, dreams in which she had gone racing with fearless exuberance over fields and rock walls and rooftops and chimneys with her hair rippling like a flag behind her. She had awakened from those dreams shaking, sweat-drenched, both terrified and delighted,
and she felt that way now. When she looked to her left, she saw her shadow flowing along beside her as it had in those dreams, but now there was another shadow with it, and that made it better. If she had ever in her whole life felt as happy as she did at that moment, she didn't know when it had been. The whole world seemed perfect around her, and she perfect within it.

There were delicate fluctuations of temperature, cold as they flew through wide swales of shadow or descended into dips, warm when they passed into the sun again. At sixty miles an hour the smells came in capsules, so concentrated it was as if they were being fired out of ramjets: cows, manure, hay, earth, cut grass, fresh tar as they blipped by a driveway repaving project, oily blue exhaust as they came up behind a laboring farm truck. A mongrel dog lay in the back of the truck with its muzzle on its paws, looking at them without interest. When Bill swung out to pass on a straight stretch, the farmer behind the wheel raised a hand to Rosie. She could see the crow's feet around his eyes, the reddened, chapped skin on the side of his nose, the glint of his wedding ring in the sunshine. Carefully, like a tightrope walker doing a stunt without a net, she slid one hand out from under Bill's arm and waved back. The farmer smiled at her, then slipped behind them.

Ten or fifteen miles out of the city, Bill pointed ahead at a gleaming metal shape in the sky. A moment later she could hear the steady beat of the helicopter's rotors, and a moment after that she could see two men seated in the Perspex bubble. As the chopper flashed over them in a clattery rush, she could see the passenger leaning over to shout something in the pilot's ear.

I can see everything,
she thought, and then wondered why that should seem so amazing. She really wasn't seeing anything she couldn't see from a car, after all.
Except I am,
she thought. I
am because I'm not looking at it through a window, and that makes it stop being just scenery. It's the
world,
not scenery, and I'm in it. I'm flying across the world, just like in the dreams I used to have, but now I'm not doing it alone.

The motor throbbed steadily between her legs. It wasn't a sexy feeling, exactly, but it made her very aware of what was down there and what it was for. When she wasn't looking at the passing countryside, she found herself looking
with fascination at the small hairs on the nape of Bill's neck, and wondering how it would feel to touch them with her fingers, to smooth them down like feathers.

An hour after leaving the Skyway they were in deep country. Bill walked the Harley deliberately down through the gears to second, and when they came to a sign reading
SHORELAND PICNIC AREA CAMPING BY PERMIT ONLY
, he dropped to first and turned onto a gravel lane.

“Hang on,” he said. She could hear him clearly now that the wind was no longer blowing a hurricane through her helmet. “Bumps.”

There
were
bumps, but the Harley rode them easily, turning them into mere swells. Five minutes later they pulled into a small dirt parking area. Beyond it were picnic tables and stone barbecue pits spotted on a wide, shady expanse of green grass which dropped gradually down to a rocky shingle which could not quite be termed a beach. Small waves came in, running up the shingle in polite, orderly procession. Beyond them, the lake opened out all the way to the horizon, where any line marking the point where the sky and the water met was lost in a blue haze. Shoreland was entirely deserted except for them, and when Bill switched the Harley off, the silence took her breath away. Over the water, gulls turned and turned, crying toward the shore in their high-pitched, frantic voices. Somewhere far to the west there was the sound of a motor, so dim it was impossible to tell if it was a truck or a tractor. That was all.

He scraped a flat rock toward the side of the bike with the toe of his boot, then dropped the kickstand so the foot would rest on the rock. He got off and turned toward her, smiling. When he saw her face, the smile turned to an expression of concern.

“Rosie? Are you all right?”

She looked at him, surprised. “Yes, why?”

“You've got the funniest look—”

I'll bet,
she thought. I'll
just bet.

“I'm fine,” she said. “I feel a little bit like all of this is a dream, that's all. I keep wondering how I got here.” She laughed nervously.

“But you're not going to faint, or anything?”

Rosie laughed more naturally this time. “No, I'm fine, really.”

“And you liked it?”

“Loved it.” She was fumbling at the place where the strap wove through the helmet's locking rings, but without much success.

“Those're hard the first time. Let me help you.”

He leaned close to slip the strap free, kissing distance again, only this time he didn't draw away. He used the palms of his hands to lift the helmet off her head and then kissed her mouth, letting the helmet dangle by its straps from the first two fingers of his left hand while he put his right against the small of her back, and for Rosie the kiss made everything all right, the feel of his mouth and the pressure of his palm was like coming home. She felt herself starting to cry a little, but that was all right. These tears didn't hurt.

He pulled back from her a little, his hand still on the small of her back, the helmet still bumping softly against her knee in little pendulum strokes, and looked into her face. “All right?”

Yes,
she tried to say, but her voice had deserted her. She nodded instead.