Chapter 1
Elodie
The thing about a fuel starvation issue is that it announces itself like a man with a limp trying to walk normally past a woman he wants to impress.
I was under a Dodge with a busted exhaust hanger when I heard it come off the highway, and I said, out loud, to the underside of a truck, "Oh, that's sad."
Four bikes. I could hear that much before they were in the lot — four distinct notes, and three of them were healthy, and the fourth was doing this cough-catch-recover thing at low RPM that meant somebody had been chasing the wrong problem for at least two hundred miles.
I rolled out from under the truck into a wall of April light and eight tons of chrome idling in front of my bay doors.
Big men. Cuts. GRIMM RIDERS MC top rocker, and under the patch a grinning skull in a laurel of thorns, and the bottom rocker said HOLLOW ASH PA, which was a very long way from a highway town in Arizona.
The one on the coughing bike swung off. Sixty, maybe. Silver beard, forearms like bridge cable, a face that had clearly lost several arguments with weather.
"Afternoon," he said. "Looking for the owner."
"You found the mechanic. That's better."
"Is it?"
"For you, today, enormously." I nodded at his bike. "How long's it been doing that?"
He blinked. "Doing what?"
"Sir."
"It's got a little hesitation—"
"It's got a lot of hesitation, it's just polite about it in fifth gear." I wiped my hands. "Where'd you last have it looked at?"
"Tucumcari."
"And what'd Tucumcari tell you?"
"Coil."
"And did you buy a coil?"
A pause. The kind of pause with a receipt in it. "I bought a coil."
"How much was the coil?"
"Ninety-four dollars."
"Congratulations. You own a spare coil." I crouched by the bike, which is a thing I do without asking, which is a thing I have been told to stop doing, which I will not be stopping.
"Petcock. Or the vent. It's leaning out under load and then catching up when you close the throttle, which means it's not getting fuel, which means either it can't get out of the tank or the tank can't get air in.
Both are eleven-dollar problems. Ninety-four-dollar problems make a completely different noise. They make a rich man's noise."
Behind him, one of the others made a sound like a kettle.
"Dutch," said a woman's voice from the third bike, "she got you in forty seconds. That's a record. Kasimir took four minutes."
"Kasimir's nice," said Dutch.
"Kasimir's from a village. There's a difference." She pulled her helmet off. Dark braid, scar through one eyebrow, and the way she stepped off the bike told me she'd been riding since she was small enough to need a box. "Cricket."
"Elodie."
"Cricket like the insect?"
"Cricket like the sound my old bike made for two years that nobody could find."
"Did they ever find it?"
"Exhaust bracket," she said. "Eleven dollars."
I looked at her for a second. She looked back.
"Okay," I said. "You're all right."
"Elodie, do you want to hear a very stupid proposal?"
"I'd love to. I haven't had one since Tuesday."
The stupid proposal was this.
Four bikes. Two of them needed top ends.
One needed a transmission gone through. One — Dutch's — needed eleven dollars of respect.
There was a run they had to make in nine days, out to somewhere in California, and if the bikes weren't sound they weren't going, and if they weren't going something bad happened that nobody was going to explain to a stranger in a lot.
And they had, and I am quoting Cricket exactly, "an amount of money that is best described as an insult."
"How much of an insult?"
"Like — if I said the number out loud, you'd be within your rights to spit."
"Try me. I'm having a slow week emotionally."
She said the number.
I did spit. Not at her. Just, generally, into the gravel, out of respect for the number.
"Yeah," she said.
"That's parts money. That's some of parts money."
"I'm aware."
"That's not even a down payment on the top ends, and I'd have to source—" I stopped.
Because I'd already started, in the back of my head, sourcing.
That's the disease. That's the whole disease right there.
Somebody shows you a broken thing and your brain starts building the road to the fixed version before your mouth has agreed to anything. "Nine days."
"Nine days."
"Who's your machinist?"
"We don't have one, we're eighteen hundred miles from home."
"Then you have a machinist, his name is Ruben, he's in Kingman, he's seventy-one years old, he hates everybody, and if you go yourself he'll quote you double. If I call him he'll do it Thursday."
Cricket looked at Dutch. Dutch looked at Cricket.
"Why would he do it Thursday for you," Dutch said.
"Because I don't talk to him."
"You just said you'd call him."
"I'll call him, I won't talk to him. He hates talking. You call Ruben and you say the part, the metal, the tolerance, and the day, and then you hang up while he's still deciding whether to be rude." I shrugged. "It took me two years to learn that. It's the single most valuable thing I know."
"And what do you want," said Dutch.
And that was where it got difficult, in the way it always gets difficult, in the way I have gotten very good at making look like a shrug.
"Talk to Thorne," I said. "In the office. He does the money. I do the metal."
"You're the mechanic."
"I'm the mechanic."
"But you don't—"
"Office," I said. "Green door. Knock, because he likes it."
I went back under the Dodge, which was cowardly, and I could hear them go in, and I could hear the tone through the wall, which is a skill you develop when you live above a room where your life gets decided by other people.
Thorne's voice does a thing. It goes up at the ends. Every sentence a small kindness. Well now — I'd love to — the difficulty is — you understand.
Eleven minutes. Then boots on gravel and the green door shutting soft, because Thorne never lets a door slam, because a slammed door is a thing you could describe to somebody later.
Cricket's boots stopped by the Dodge's front tire.
"He says no," she said.
"He said no beautifully, though."
"He said no like he was doing us a favor and I've been standing here trying to figure out why my feelings are hurt."
"That's the trick." I set the hanger, torqued it, rolled out. "What number did he give you?"
She told me the number. It was four times the work.
"Right."
"And then he said, and I want you to know I'm quoting, that he'd 'have to think about whether Elodie's schedule permits.'"
I laughed. I couldn't help it. It came out short and ugly and I hated the sound of it. "My schedule."
"Do you have a schedule?"
"I have a wood stove and a list."
Cricket looked at me for a second too long, and I saw her clock the coveralls, which are my father's, taken in twice.
The soot on the cuffs, which does not come out, because it comes from the stove, because the stove is the only heat in the building and I bank it at eleven and it goes out at three and I wake up at three every night of my life.
My hands, which are the hands of a woman who does not own gloves, because gloves are eighteen dollars.
I watched her arrive at a conclusion. I have watched a lot of people arrive at that conclusion and it is never useful and it always makes them want to say something.
"Don't," I said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You did the face."
"I have this face permanently."
"You do not, I saw your other face forty minutes ago, it was much less annoying."
Cricket grinned. "Okay. Different question then. Off the record, between two people standing near a truck." She leaned on the fender. "If you had the parts. Just the parts, no labor money, no promises, nothing that touches the green door. Could you do four bikes in nine days?"
I should have said no.
Here is my whole life in one sentence: I should have said no, and instead I looked at the bikes.
"Six," I said.
"Six?"
"I could do it in six if Ruben doesn't get sentimental about a deck height.
Nine's insulting. Nine's how long it'd take a man.
" I stood up and stretched something in my back that has been going for two years.
"But it doesn't matter, because the parts are money, and the money's behind the green door, and the green door said no. "
"What if the parts came from somewhere else."
"Then they'd come into this lot, onto that lift, and become his." I said it flatly, because there's no other way to say it and stay standing. "Everything that touches that floor is his. That's the arrangement."
"That's a hell of an arrangement."
"It's arithmetic," I said. "You get used to it."
They didn't leave.
That's the part I didn't expect. Anybody normal leaves. You get a stupid number from a man in an office and you ride forty miles to the next town and you find somebody with a lift and a phone number. That's what people do.
Instead they made camp. Not literally — they got rooms at the Sundowner across the highway, which has a sign that says COLOR TV like that's still a flex — but by five o'clock two of them were sitting on the low wall at the edge of my lot with a bag of gas station tamales, and by six one of them had bought a bag for me, and by six-fifteen I had explained to a very large man named Bear why his tamale situation was a tragedy.
"It's food."
"It's a sponge with regret inside it, Bear."
"I like it."
"You like it because you rode nine hours and your body has stopped asking questions. There's a place four miles east, past the scales, it's a woman's kitchen with a window cut in it—"
"Is it good?"
"It's so good I plan my week around it."
"When'd you last go?"
And I said, without thinking, "March," and then had to watch that land on a man who eats four meals a day, and it was April, and I turned and went and got the torque wrench I did not need.
That's what it's like. It's fine, and then a tamale mugs you.
Bear followed me over anyway, because Bear is a large man with the social instincts of a golden retriever and no capacity whatsoever for reading a room.
"Can I ask a question."
"You can ask."