Joe Hill: Throttle

Just past the next bend in the road, Race leaned his Softail Deuce into the lane for oncoming traffic, lowered his head, and accelerated from thirty to seventy. The bike squatted, then leaped . He cut in front of the truck as soon as he was ahead of it—slipping back into the right-hand lane just as a pale yellow Lexus blew past, going the other way. The driver of the Lexus pounded her horn, but the meep-meep sound of it was almost immediately lost in the overpowering wail of the truck’s air horn.

Vince had spotted the Lexus coming and for a moment had been sure he was about to see his son go head-on into it, Race one second, roadmeat the next. It took a few moments for his heart to come back down out of his throat.

“ Fucking psycho ,” Vince yelled at Lemmy.

“ You mean the guy in the truck? ” Lemmy hollered back, as the blast of the air horn finally died away. “ Or Race? ”

“ Both! ”

By the time the truck swung through the next curve, though, Laughlin seemed to have come to his senses, or had finally looked in the mirror and noticed the rest of The Tribe roaring along behind him. He put his hand out the window—that sundarkened and veiny hand, big-knuckled and blunt-fingered—and waved them by.

Immediately, Roy and two others swung out and thundered past. The rest went in twos. It was nothing to pass once the go-to was clear, the truck laboring along at barely thirty. Vince and Lemmy swept out last, passing just before the next switchback. Vince cast a look up toward the driver on their way by but could see nothing except that dark hand hanging out against the door. Five minutes later they had left the truck so far behind them they couldn’t hear it anymore.

There followed a stretch of high, open desert, sage and saguaro, cliffs off to the right, striped in chalky shades of yellow and red. They were riding into the sun now, pursued by their own lengthening shadows. Houses and a few trailers whipped by as they blew through a sorry excuse for a township. The bikes were strung out across almost half a mile, with Vince and Lemmy riding close to the back. But not far beyond the town, Vince saw the rest of The Tribe bunched up at the side of the road, just before a four-way intersection—the crossing for Route 6.

Beyond the intersection, to the west, the highway they had been following was torn down to dirt. A diamond-shaped orange sign read CONSTRUCTION NEXT 20 MILES BE PREPARED TO STOP. In the distance, Vince could see dump trucks and a grader. Men worked in clouds of red smoke, the clay stirred up and drifting across the tableland.

He hadn’t known there would be roadwork here, because they hadn’t come this way. It had been Race’s suggestion to return by the back roads, which had suited Vince fine. Driving away from a double homicide, it seemed like a good idea to keep a low profile. Of course that wasn’t why Race had suggested it.

“What?” Vince said, slowing and putting his foot down. As if he didn’t already know.

Race pointed away from the construction, down Route 6. “We go south on 6, we can pick up I-40.”

“In Show Low,” Vince said. “Why does this not surprise me?”

It was Roy Klowes spoke next. He jerked a thumb toward the dump trucks. “Bitch of a lot better than doing five an hour through that shit for twenty miles. No thank you. I’d rather ride easy and maybe pick up sixty grand along the way. That’s my think on it.”

“Did it hurt?” Lemmy asked Roy. “Having a thought? I hear it hurts the first time. Like when a chick gets her cherry popped.”

“Fuck you, Lemmy,” Roy said.

“When I want your think,” Vince said, “I’ll be sure to ask for it, Roy. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

Race spoke, his voice calm, reasonable. “We get to Show Low, you don’t have to stick around. Neither of you. No one’s going to hold it against you if you just want to ride on.”

So there it was.

Vince looked from face to face. The young men met his gaze. The older ones, the ones who had been riding with him for decades, did not.

“I’m glad to hear no one will hold it against me,” Vince said. “I was worried.”

A memory struck him then: riding with his son in a car at night, in the GTO, back in the days he was trying to go straight, be a family man for Mary. The details of the journey were lost now; he couldn’t recall where they were coming from or where they had been going. What he remembered was looking into the rearview mirror at his ten-year-old’s dusty, sullen face. They had stopped at a hamburger stand, but the kid didn’t want dinner, said he wasn’t hungry. The kid would only settle for a Popsicle, then bitched when Vince came back with lime instead of grape. He wouldn’t eat it, let the Popsicle melt on the leather. Finally, when they were twenty miles away from the hamburger stand, Race announced that his belly was growling.

Vince had looked into the rearview mirror and said, “You know, just because I’m your father doesn’t mean I got to like you.” And the boy had stared back, his chin dimpling, struggling not to cry, but unwilling to look away. Returning Vince’s look with bright, hating eyes. Why had Vince said that? The notion crossed his mind that if he had known some other way to talk to Race, there would’ve been no Fallujah and no dishonorable discharge for ditching his squad, taking off in a Humvee while mortars fell; there would’ve been no Dean Clarke and no meth lab and the boy would not feel the need to be out front all the time, blasting along at seventy on his hot-shit jackpuppy when the rest of them were doing sixty. It was him the kid was trying to leave behind. He had been trying all his life.

Vince squinted back the way they had come… and there was that goddamn truck again. Vince could see it through the trembling waves of heat on the road, so it seemed half-mirage, with its towering stacks and silver grille: LAUGHLIN. Or SLAUGHTERIN, if you were feeling Freudian. Vince frowned, distracted for a moment, wondering again how they had been able to catch up and pass a guy who’d had almost an hour lead on them.

When Doc spoke, his voice was almost shy with apology. “Might be the thing to do, boss. Sure would beat twenty miles of dirt bath.”

“Well. I wouldn’t want any of you to get dirty,” Vince said.

And he pushed away from the side of the road, throttled up, and turned left onto 6, leading them away toward Show Low.

Behind him, in the distance, he could hear the truck changing gears, the roar of the engine climbing in volume and force, whining faintly as it thundered across the plain.

The country was red and yellow stone, and they saw no one on the narrow, two-lane road. There was no breakdown lane. They crested a rise, then began to descend into a canyon’s slot, following the road as it wound steadily down. To the left was a battered guardrail, and to the right was an almost sheer face of rock.

For a while Vince rode out front beside Lemmy, but then Lemmy fell back and it was Race partnered beside him, the father and the son riding side by side, the wind rippling Race’s movie-star black hair back from his brow. The sun, now on the western side of the sky, burned in the lenses of the kid’s shades.

Vince watched him from the corners of his eyes for a moment. Race was sinewy and lean, and even the way he sat on his bike seemed an act of aggression, the way he slung it around the curves, tilting to a forty-five-degree angle over the blacktop. Vince envied him his natural athletic grace, and yet at the same time, somehow Race managed to make riding a motorcycle look like work. Whereas Vince himself had taken to it because it was the furthest thing from work. He wondered idly if Race was ever really at ease with himself and what he was doing.