Page 45 of Shadow Ticket
Out on open stretches of road with her Guzzi up to speed, Terike feels it now and then, some inward ignition, a willingness to risk more, for all she knows everything, drawn mysteriously by something beyond her own perimeter…
Run-ins are frequent, with armed and jittery young men in uniforms newly designed or assembled from pieces of earlier ones, appearing at ridgelines and river crossings, out to intercept anything they can, being extra-attentive to motorcycle traffic, the most common excuse being tobacco smuggling, regarded as a capital sin out here, where everybody smokes all the time.
Brought for a moment out of the snooze of routine, they’ll often just let Terike go rolling on through.
But not always. One nightfall some semi-uniformed mountain patrol start throwing their weight around.
Nobody can find the right papers, safeties on sidearms are being nervously toggled off and on again, pretty soon there’s a queue of machinery backed up out into the twilight, riders now and then allowing their engines to rip into silences felt to’ve gone on too long.
At some unexpected point in the middle of which, into the overspills of light electric and acetylene comes rolling Ace Lomax, all throb and opacity, aboard his Harley-Davidson Flathead, waving genially, poised to launch his widely recognized insane laugh.
A stirring in the small unit, nothing observed actually changing hands because everybody out here has picked up a repertoire of drops and passes and other low-visibility transfer skills.
Business soon taken care of, the patrol smile and salute, jaunty as operetta tenors.
“Nice runnin into you, Terike, guess you’re clear to roll.”
“Anything else you noticed out there that you might want to tell me about? Oh and did I forget to say thanks?”
“Don’t imagine you’d be interested in riding point for a little.”
Her gaze narrows.
“Who’s after you now, Ace?”
Ace realizes he probably could have hesitated longer before coming out with, “You mean besides Bruno.”
“You’re supposed to be working for Bruno. Did I miss something, hear something wrong?”
“Dunno, but sure is looking like I must’ve.”
In this backcountry saturated with suspicion, where strange bikers are less than welcome, drawing an evil eye from the locals into whose midst they go speeding so carelessly, women on motorcycles are apt to be located safely beneath disbelief, composite critters like sphinxes or mermaids, sightings reported, few confirmed.
“What’s with these people, they act like they’ve never seen a motorcycle before.”
“Some have never seen anything with wheels on it.”
Ace by now is drifting into middle age. Beginning to find himself approached by practiced fingers reaching from the other world, to bring him away, one stitch at a time, into a crazy quilt he might never know more of than a few of the patches adjoining, crazy and lost as himself.
The appeal of pure adventure may have begun to fade for him as early as 1919—decisions once automatic, based on maintaining a blind forward momentum, have more and more come to include how much discomfort is likely to result.
After the War he found he couldn’t return to the U.S., something there had gone screwy, it was badlands now, to be avoided. “But…there’s no money over here, all the money’s back in the States, how can you afford to even put ‘gas’ in that rig?”
“Turns out it’s oil I’m spending more on, but there’s money here all right, if you look long and close enough.
” Some old and well protected, some newly created.
It was only a matter of time before Ace, inconspicuous citizen of the pavement, creeping about smelling of Motalko exhaust, found himself drifting into the motorcycle adventurer racket, taking on jobs as they came along, at first carrying confidential messages, presently small cargoes of undefined legality…
trading up from an Army FUS dispatch bike to higher displacements, up to the Flathead he’s currently on.
Stretches of the deep highway opening up to him, geography once only a set of names becoming real, flowing from either side into view, rushing by, next thing anybody knows he’s interurban, moving in unexpected circles, finding early celebrity, after a while international.
How much of a surprise could it really have been that one day he would drift into range of Bruno Airmont, and presently find himself, hat in clenched fist, joining the long, unchronicled queue of hired stooges making their way up the back stairway to the boss’s office door?
—
Thrown together in the Trans-Trianon 2000 ride an assortment of exiles and misfits, some disappointed in romance who hopped on their bikes and joined the tour thinking it’d be like the French Foreign Legion, a lonely pilgrimage where they could brood their way out of the blues, even manage to avoid women for a while, and bonne chance with that, fellas.
They are of course mobbed out on the road by village girls, farm and city girls, female bikers, to be found these days in numbers greater than expected, even grown women, locked into the same everyday routines, when suddenly here comes trouble, fly-boy goggles, resolute jawlines, a way of bending the light.
Christian and virtuous is fine as far as it goes, but narrow and sleepless are the beds of those whose lives shining apparitions like these have gone throbbing in and out of, young men too often regrettably unaware that local girls belong to families apt to own firearms ranging from single-shot to full automatic, resulting sooner or later in one more sad tale of romantic misjudgment.
For some, magical events are reported. Creditors are outrun, bets pay off at long odds, death, injury, and wreckage from terrain or weather built into the deep structure of this route in some way nobody wants to go into detail about are narrowly avoided.
For the most part, an unexceptional mud-spattered mobility, obstacles looming at every curve not always easy to read as to size or placement especially at sundown, cargo spaces stuffed with hooch, drugs, ammo, all manner of taxable goods, especially tobacco.
“Not exactly a vegetable truck, but as you find out sooner or later, small loads can often fetch high prices.”