Copyright© Bill Blondeau, 2014, 2015; all rights reserved
Mrs. E felt that she had come to understand death pretty well.
Sometimes it went shockingly fast, like when her cousin Barry (one of the few people in her family she could stand) just died at 27 of a heart defect nobody had ever suspected. He was sitting at the bar in his house, having morning coffee; probably dead before he hit the floor, that’s what they said. Leaving everyone who cared in shock, leaving them to work it out themselves. Mrs. E hadn’t been there for the funeral: it had been summer, and she hadn’t had any summer school sections, so she’d just ridden up to the Superior North Shore with more mescaline than was good for her. She wrote madly in a journal the whole time, and never showed it to anyone, and burned it after she came back, because it was for Barry and nobody fucking else.
Then again... sometimes death was slow and meticulous and hurt a lot, raking the dying person and the people who loved them over the coals, again and again, five stages of grieving, ten, fifteen. Stan Prater taught History. He wasn't just a coworker: Stan had been the best of friends. The two of them could hang out for hours, listening to music nobody else seemed to give a damn about, smoking and drinking and having the kind of conversations that don’t come around too often in a lifetime. For Stan it was pancreatic cancer, and that’s anything but fast.
Mrs. E had participated in Stan’s death the whole way. His rather magnificent end of life game plan was to experience the ecstatic shamanistic dream of the Central Asian people he’d been fascinated with. The few who knew what he was up to thought the whole project was ridiculous and weird—who wants to experience a vision of being torn apart by demons and reassembled into a spirit body that can walk in dreams? But Mrs. E got it, and she helped him as best she could. She drummed for him for hours on end, although she never thought she was any damn good at it. (She also obtained mescaline and peyote and amanita muscaria for him, and she was quite a bit better at that side of things, thanks largely to Jeremy McFadden in her Honors section.)
And then one day Stan, visibly failing, was admitted to the hospital and that was that. No more drumming, no more dancing, no more trips. As far as she could tell, he never had the kind of dream he was looking for. Failure? Well, life itself is a failure, if you look at it that way… but Stan went out his own way, and she had helped him do that. That had to count for something. Had to count for a lot.
So yes, there were shocking deaths that were over before you heard about it, and there were drawn-out deaths where the only thing you can do is run away, or step up: step up and be a good final companion. But now she was learning about a third kind of death, the helpless kind. And it didn’t matter that Esmeralda was a machine and not a human—well, no, it mattered, Mrs. E realized. Somehow it made it worse.
If you’re listening with the right kind of ears, there’s a sound that power tools make when they’re being used for ugly purposes.
Pneumatics clatter and whirr and hiss, same as always, but it’s a particularly wicked hiss. Electric motors whine and snarl, and the snarl is just a little pronounced. The rasp and shriek of grinders trouble the ear with a kind of pity, as if the metal being abraded away in fiery gouts of sparks is really feeling pain.
And when it’s your own beloved bike being cut up...
I always hated fucking chop shops, Mrs. E thought. But this is so personal.
From her position in the shadows, up in the parts loft, the mechanics couldn’t see her, but she could see them, and hear their mostly indistinguishable shouts. Parts and pieces were ripped out and dropped or thrown on the oily concrete floor.
Clang. The exhaust pipe clattered to the floor. I had that rechromed just last year, she snarled silently. When they pulled the fenders, and later the tank, they set them down carefully on a couple of pallets. Not completely fucking stupid, then: those were factory original Black Cherry paint, painstakingly restored by a master craftsman. Mrs. E felt a brief wash of approval and gratitude that they weren’t trashing the precious work, and then caught herself. What was this, Stockholm Syndrome? She owed these fucking creeps no admiration whatsoever.
“Zed. Valves look good.” The kid with the Beatles haircut, 1964 straight up, had gotten one of them out and was turning it over in his greasy hands. “Real good.”
“Right. Bring ‘em back to Lon—” the banging of a hammer axially driving a bolt to loosen it drowned the rest. Kid walked out to the back, leaving the fat biker dude reefing on the frame.
It was when the engine was lifted out with a clattering chainfall that Mrs. E felt the change. The bike, that she had painstakingly learned to maintain and service, that had given her smooth rumbling rides in the hills and along the highways, that had been the object of adoration at her students’ keggers, was dead. Esmeralda was dead. These miserable thieving fucks had killed her. Even if they suddenly had the brains to put her carefully back together and sell her—she was worth so much more without chopping up—the bike’s soul was dead. It was a strange thing to think, but she knew beyond all doubt that she was understanding something real, and that this wasn’t a mere emotional delusion.
Mrs. E had a sudden uncharacteristic longing for a gun. One with a big goddamn magazine.
She’d killed before, a couple of would-be rapists back when she was young, and cute, camping alone with her new bike, and looked like maybe she wasn’t armed and dangerous. She’d left them lying, one with his pants already down, in the hope that the cops would correctly interpret the situation and be tempted to be maybe just a little less than diligent in their crime-scene work, then cleaned up the cigarette butts and tire tracks, the traces of her own presence, as best she could, motoring away quietly. That had been rough, soul-searing, she’d started crying after a few miles and it seemed like she’d never stop. She’d had to stop to puke several times, but never let it delay her for long, the faithful Harley putting distance behind her, distance from the scene, distance from what she had done. She was haunted for a couple of years by the (actually rather stupid, and she knew it) conviction that rapists or not, those assholes had maybe deserved to live. She was also haunted by the thought that someone might dredge the gun out of the river, or follow some other chain of clues, and she imagined the knock of a cop on her door someday…
She’d feared, too, that the faint whisper of comfort that she imagined as the voice of her motorcycle was the sign of mental breakdown. She dealt with that by christening the bike Esmeralda, because names have power.
After a while she’d grown some philosophical scar tissue over those parts of her mind, and gotten a different gun, and never used that one on anything but targets. She still defiantly took long cross-country camping trips, and trusted Esmeralda more than she trusted any of her infrequent lovers or road companions.
But now she had no gun, no voice, hidden in the shadows, an old woman, forced to watch the dismemberment of her best friend, and had never in her long life felt so helpless. It came to her that all she could do was bear witness in the shrunken spaces of her heart, witness to the final end.
Maybe I should have named her after a less tragic character.
After a while Esmeralda was mercifully taken apart, in piles and on pallets and some parts taken away for special handling, as far as she could guess. The mechanics took a long, vulgar smoke break. Mrs. E hoped that the bike’s parts would carry some scraps of that good personality to their eventual destinations.
She thought vaguely that she ought to be crying, but inside her were no tears, just a dull dry ache. She wondered whether she should leave, but something told her that she wasn’t done watching yet.
Presently she realized that the chop shop staff had stopped talking about pussy and weed (about both of which I know more than all of you useless shitbirds put together will ever learn as long as you live, she thought with a brief stir of vicious scorn) and were starting to plan out some more work.
“Why do I gotta do the fucking bead blasting,” whined the guy they all just called Fat Fuck. “It ain’t my fuckin turn.”
“Yeah, well, it wouldn’t be your turn,” admitted Zed, the tall skinny blond guy with glasses and big knuckly hands who seemed to be in charge, “except you fucked up the door on the Mercedes, didn’t you. So yeah I think it’s your motherfucking turn.”
The rest of the mechanics snickered, and a few started chanting “Mer-ce-des Mer-ce-des”.
“Everybody shut the fuck up and listen. Roto, I want that engine rebuilt like you’ve never rebuilt an engine before. Jimmy, you run parts. Remember, you guys, we want altitude along with everything else.” An older leathery man in dirty denim, with a comb-over and a dangling cigarette, mumbled something and laughed.
“Lonny, get your mom's dick out of your mouth and try again,” said the fat biker dude. Lonny took his cigarette out and waved it at the biker with an odd kind of spiraling gesture.
“I said, I got Allison valve, P-thir-eight Lightning mufuckr.” Lonny laughed again, and grabbed his crotch. “Got your altitude righ’ here.” The rest chuckled.
“Yeah, P-38, shit, that went way high in its time,” the kid with the Beatles hair said. Mrs. E snorted silently. Nothing worse in class than a know-it-all geek. “Roto, we can sure’s shit use that, right?”
The only woman in the crew, fading red hair and freckles, spoke up. “Yeah Jimmy, it’ll do. Some extra work,” looking sidelong at Lonny, “But fuck yeah, I ain’t passing that up.” She took a swig from her beer. “How long you been holding that, Lonny?”
And so it went. To Mrs. E’s bafflement, they started sorting through dismembered Esmeralda’s dead parts, and now they were discarding and discussing and fetching different pieces. There was a clattering and a stomping. Roto and Jimmy swung the engine over to a heavy workbench. Fat Fuck rinsed the last of the gas out of the tank, pulled off all of the fittings, rinsed again, and took it to the bead-blasting booth. There goes a classic paint job, Mrs. E mourned. Zed stood smoking, pondering the naked frame, walking around it, conferring with the others.
Then Mrs. E understood. They’re not parting it out. Fucking assholes are customizing my bike. It was a brief sick feeling, like realizing… like realizing a beloved relative had been harvested to build a Frankenstein’s monster. She started to shake, and hoped none of them would come up into the loft.
It was kind of weird, when the criminal mechanics started to work on the rebuild. The shouting and swearing and banter fell off, and they moved with focus. Even Fat Fuck got that look: the look that Amy Lucero, who taught Art, got when she was sculpting with no kids around.
And somebody put music on. It wasn’t even the dumb dinosaur rock that Mrs. E would have expected out of this crew: it was a mix of swing, surf guitar, and biker rock, all of it drum-heavy, almost ritualistic in its propulsive rhythms. The mechanics moved with it, a little like dancers.
This strange shift from crude rough competence to intense purpose disturbed Mrs. E. Who are these people anyway? What are they doing? She was more afraid than ever that they might discover her. She might be able to talk a gang of ordinary crooks down—English teachers know a thing or two—but she suddenly had no confidence that she could think of any way to deal with this discipline and purpose.
Her still smoldering grief and rage aside, she found herself becoming fascinated. They worked so swiftly, but without any haste. The rebuilt bike came together before her eyes. She seemed to drift, in a strange sort of suspense, time passing without touching her.
Then at last the rework was done, and the crew had slowly stopped work and were standing around the new bike at a respectful distance, mostly smoking, not talking much. Admiration time. The music had gone silent, and there were only slight scuffs of boots and the snick of lighter, the hiss of a beer bottle being popped.
It was black and low-slung and unadorned. Black paint, sometimes shiny and hard, sometimes matte (And how did they get it to dry so fast?); no chrome except for parts of the engine. Stripped to the frame but not chopped, a bobber, she remembered, they call it a bobber when they do that, going to be fast, fast as anything, fenders that were hardly more than a gesture. The saddle was smaller and trimmer, although there was a pillion saddle mounted directly on the rear fender. As though I'd want somebody riding bitch, at my age, she thought in numb confusion. Then, Why did I even think that? Not my bike anymore. Not Esmeralda.
Then Zed looked up into the shadowed loft, directly at her, and the lenses of his glasses were suddenly glowing discs of flat orange. The others turned too, and looked at Mrs. E. Their eyes glowed in the same way. She felt sudden terror. Oh fuck, what’s happening, is this a flashback? Am I going crazy?
“Don’t worry, Mrs. E,” said Zed. “You think we didn’t know what you had here? You think we’re stupid?”
And then, the voice came in her head, whispering, like a kid with laryngitis. A voice she recognized, a voice she had first started to hear shortly after she’d killed the rapists. “He’s right, Mrs. E. It’s Esmeralda. I’m still me.”
Mrs. E’s heart was already racing with fear, but now it began to pound. She needed a smoke, where were her goddamn cigarettes?
The mechanics with the glowing eyes were starting to smile, in a way that was not very nice, but not entirely hostile either. Roto and the fat biker dude saluted her with their beers. “You got a long road ahead,” said Jimmy, “So we—”
“Shut up, Jimmy,” said Zed.
“It’s really all right,” said Esmeralda’s weak scratchy voice.
Mrs. E felt that she was really losing it, psychotic break, bad bad...
And then she woke up, sitting bolt upright in her own damn bed, feeling like she was about ready to stroke out. Thin predawn light came in through the window. There were the cigarettes at least, right on the bedside table. And a glass of water, which her parched mouth really needed.
She’d been having increasingly bad, vivid dreams, but this one had been a whole new level of weird. She had something wrong with her.
Well, she knew what she had to do. Dressed, caffeinated, hydrated, travel rucksack slung over her shoulder, she went out the back door, and across the damp grass to to the shed Esmeralda stayed in. After that nightmare, she needed to get the reassurance of reality. She needed to touch the bike, start the engine, listen to the slow loping kick of it. She needed to ride Esmeralda. A long damn ride, and it was a good day for it. The morning was so clear. The dark sky was flushing with pale light, the stars still faint and the few hard feathers of cloud starting to kindle, to burn red along the edges.
She went out to the shed. The lock clicked and dropped and swung, and she lifted it out. The hasp rasped like an old guy gasping. She tugged the doors open, and the weak morning light seeped past her, and shone into the shed.
Somehow, at some level, she’d known what she’d find.
Where she had always opened the shed onto a beautifully maintained stock bike, with the original Black Cherry paint and the grand skirted fenders and studded saddlebags, the creature in the shed this morning was an alien. The exact bike she had dreamed, low and black, like a crouching tarantula. But she wasn’t dreaming now.
“Morning, Honey. Want to go for a ride?” It was the same weak, raspy feminine voice that she’d heard in the dream.
Mrs. E stood there, unmoving, as the weak glimmer of dawnlight increased, glowing on the beautiful, terrible transfiguration of her beloved Esmeralda. “What’s happening to me?,” she finally asked. “Am I dying?”
“No, dear. I died.”
“...In a dream. It was only a dream.”
The raspy voice was exasperated. “Look. At. Me. Do I look like the same bike? They killed me and put me back together different.”
“Differently,” corrected Mrs. E numbly.
Brief ghost of a laugh. “Fucking English teacher.”
“So it wasn't a dream?”
“Of course it was a dream. Just not an ordinary dream... Have you forgotten Stan?”
Well, that was a kick in the gut. “Stan?” she whispered. Then it all came together in a flash, as things often did for her. “When the... people in the chop shop... cut you up and rebuilt you. That was your shamanistic initiarory dream.”
“Well, not exactly. It wasn't my dream, it was yours. But it was about me. I was initiated all right. And now I am as you see... and I can speak to you much more clearly then ever I could.”
“Did it... hurt?”
“Oh my fucking goodness gracious YES it hurt. Being chopped apart? Being put back together? And then being goosed back into life? Did it hurt. I was terrified. And your initiation is not done yet. You have to have your own dream, just as you had one for me... Your time is not yet, but maybe soon. I hope soon.”
“Why?” cried Mrs. E. “Why do you want me to die?”
“Because when they put me back together, they did it so that I can travel all kinds of places that you can’t go yet.” A weird dry little cough. “Not until you get a new body too… listen, my voice hurts. I really can’t talk too much more right now. Can we go for a ride please?”
Mrs. E walked into the shed, and touched Esmeralda’s rakish handlebars lightly. She drew her hand back suddenly and then placed it firmly on the bike. Yes, this was Esmeralda. Not just the voice but the touch. Something tight and aching lifted out of her chest. She swung a leg over, walked the bike backwards out of the shed. It was easy: the new Esmeralda was lighter.
She set the key and kicked down on the starter with practiced ease. Esmeralda had never been hard to start, but now the big panhead engine rolled over easily and settled into a sweet, slow thumping.
People say that Harley-Davidsons make a “potato, potato” sound when running, but Mrs. E had never thought that was true. Esmeralda had always sounded slightly different than other Harleys, but now the engine was odder still. The sound was sort of complex, a slightly staggered rhythm. As it warmed up, she suddenly realized what it was. The engine was subtly drumming, the same beats that she had drummed for Stan when he was dying, seeking his shamanistic initiatory dream.
“Now you’re getting it,” said Esmeralda approvingly. “Let's go!”
Mrs. E smiled, and shifted with her left hand. They motored away smoothly. They got out to the road and headed eastward, running into the oncoming blaze of dawn, handling the curves and hills with supple balance and power. Mrs. E’s long do-rag flowed in the wind, and tears streamed from the corners of her eyes, tears that were not entirely from the wind. She wound the throttle out, the engine’s staccato settling into a deeper song of power.
“You are going to be bad ass.”
“I am?”
“Take it from me, Honey. I'm a Panhead.”