Ride Away Home Read online

  I arranged with Brenda to have my motorcycle delivered, after the service department had prepped it. “You’ll need some leathers and a helmet,” she said as she led me to the apparel section. Before we were done, all of those items, plus a pair of boots and riding gloves, were piled on the checkout counter, bar code tags being scanned by a young woman wearing an Aerosmith tee shirt revealing a pierced navel and jeans so tight they looked as if they’d been spray-painted on.

  “You can get a cycle license learner’s permit at any DMV office,” Brenda told me when my gear was bagged up. “Then you practice driving until you’re ready for your road test, which consists of driving around cones in the DMV office parking lot, piece of cake, and they’ll add an endorsement on your driver’s license.”

  I hadn’t thought about that, and had no time for the road test, because if I delayed my planned departure, I might not depart. I’d have to make it to Florida on the learner’s permit. When—if—I made it there, I’d certainly be ready for the DMV’s parking lot cones.

  On the way home from the dealership, I wondered if I should name my new motorcycle. It would be my companion on the long journey. Maybe Pegasus, the winged steed of Greek mythology. Or Rocinante, the name of Don Quixote’s horse. In the end, I decided not to name it. Too cutesy, too precious, like those stupid boat names I’ve always hated: Dad’s Dream, E-Z-Livin’, She Got The House, Babes on Waves, all of which I’d seen on Minnesota lakes.

  The next morning, I went to the DMV to get a booklet describing the requirements for a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license, and that afternoon, I passed the test for the learner’s permit. For this, I had to learn such rules as: passengers may not ride on a motorcycle unless they can reach the footrests on each side of the motorcycle with both feet while seated. No bar exam, but I did have to read the booklet.

  CRUISING ALONG the interstate, feeling free as that hawk I saw, I remember the time I arrived home after work and found Jenna in the kitchen, washing lettuce in the sink. Her shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair swirled sexily as she turned to greet me. She was wearing a white cotton turtleneck and black jeans. The turtleneck stretched over her breasts, her nipples visible through the thin fabric. No bra. She had something more than dinner in mind.

  She crossed to the pantry on some invented errand so I could see her fine little bottom move under the denim like a sack full of cats on the way to the river. Jenna the tease. I walked up behind her, and kissed her neck. She said, “Hey sailor, whatta ya got in mind?” And then it was shore leave time, right there on the granite center island.

  The summer before my third year of law school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I also did my undergraduate work, I decided to backpack around Europe with Peter Linden, another law student. We wanted to see something of the world before beginning the grind of being junior associates at a law firm.

  Peter and I bought Eurail passes and traveled from Luxembourg, which is where the budget-priced turboprop planes of Icelandic Air landed, to Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. We had a good time drinking beer, eating the local cuisines that we could afford on our meager budget, and seeing the sights. I had my Nikon, and Peter, who worked as a folksinger to earn spending money in school, had his Martin steel-string guitar.

  One morning, over espresso and muffins in Amsterdam, I told Peter, “We’ve got three weeks left before beginning our indentured servitude back in the States, and there is one thing this tour is lacking.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Women.”

  We’d attempted to strike up conversations with a number of local females, even joined some for lunches and museum tours, very nice girls, but in the end, the language barrier prevented the relationships from progressing. At least in my view. Or maybe it was that we didn’t launder our clothes very often, which we didn’t.

  “No problem,” Peter said. “I have the answer.”

  “And that is?”

  “Paris, city of light, city of love.”

  “But we don’t speak French,” I said. “Sure, lots of French girls speak English, but that narrows the field.”

  “Trust me,” he responded.

  The following day, we disembarked at the Gare du Nord station in Paris, checked our guidebook, and walked to the Left Bank, where cheap rooms were to be had. The first small hotels and rooming houses we tried were full. We found a little pension on the Île de la Cité that had a room, a sixth-floor walk-up. We discovered, at the stroke of the hour, and every hour thereafter, why the room was available. It was right near the bell tower of Notre-Dame Cathedral.

  “Okay, time to implement the plan,” Peter said when the ringing stopped.

  I followed him down the stairs and across the Pont-Neuf, which, the guidebook told us, was the oldest standing bridge across the Seine, connecting the island to the Left Bank. On the mainland side, Peter took his guitar out of the case and began singing American folk songs, the point being, I imagined, that the songs might attract women who could speak at least some English. Perhaps faulty logic, but the only plan we had.

  For the first hour, some passersby tossed franc notes into the open guitar case, and moved on, or ignored us entirely. Then, as Peter was into the Kingston Trio song “Tom Dooley,” two very attractive young ladies stopped. One of them asked, “Are you Americans?” By her accent, I knew she was, too.

  That’s how we met Laurie and Anne, who were on a European tour following their graduation from a Catholic women’s college in Milwaukee. We shut down the concert, had lunch together at a Left Bank café, walked and talked, and toured the Louvre.

  “So how about dinner tonight?” Peter asked them, happy to have found girls who could actually understand the invitation.

  “Not tonight,“ Laurie said. “We have other plans.”

  I must have looked disappointed, which I was, but Anne added, “We’re traveling with another friend. She’s not feeling well, stomach problem, so we’re eating at our hotel tonight. Why don’t you meet us for lunch tomorrow at Café de Flore. Do you know it? It’s on Boulevard Saint-Germaine. You could meet us there, and if our friend is feeling better, she’ll join us.”

  And that’s how I met Jenna Lockhart of Birmingham, Michigan.

  Until then, I’d always thought that the concept of love at first sight was a myth. Now I don’t.

  Jenna. My poor, wounded wife.

  I wonder if I should remind her of moments like that time in the kitchen when I stop to see her at The Sanctuary, the private psychiatric hospital in McLean, Virginia, where she has been living for nearly nine months. Would she want to remember them? I’m never certain, on my way to these visits, whether she wants to remember anything at all about our past life. Maybe that would only add to her pain.

  It was my duty as a husband and father to protect both of the women in my life. Jenna and Hope. But I found out that I could protect neither one of them, or myself, from the sudden, random evil in this world.

  3

  I hear a loud whoop-whoop-whoop sound behind me. In the rearview mirror I see the flashing lights of a Wisconsin State Patrol cruiser, coming up fast. I check the speedometer. Daydreaming and doing seventy-six.

  I slow down and pull onto the gravel shoulder, kicking up stones, and stop. I push down the kickstand with my left boot and ease the weight of the big cycle onto it. It’s a heavy mother. If it tips over, I don’t know if I could pick it up without the trooper’s help, which would be embarrassing.

  I turn in the saddle and see that the trooper has parked behind me. After a moment, the trooper gets out, slips on his Smokey Bear hat—they love to get all duded up in those hats and boots and jodhpurs, like Canadian Mounties—and takes a few steps toward me, then stops. I stoically await my fate: a speeding ticket, my first in years. Now my insurance rate will go up.

  He calls out in a loud, clipped, no-nonsense voice, right on the edge of courtesy, but clearly not to be disregarded: “Please sir, step off the motorcyc
le.”

  I hesitate, wondering if they are always this cautious in Wisconsin on a routine traffic stop. Then I remember I don’t look like my usual, respectable, solid-citizen self. I’m a motorcycle guy in leathers, with the helmet bubble hiding my face. Potentially dangerous. Maybe fitting the description of another cycle rider who just robbed a bank or escaped from prison.

  I don’t want my journey to end here on the gravel shoulder of I-94 somewhere in Wisconsin with a bullet hole in my new leather jacket, which cost four hundred forty dollars. Or spread-eagled on the ground with my face in the gravel, arms cuffed behind my back. So I dismount, and stand facing the trooper. Even though I haven’t been told to, I keep my hands in sight, which, I know from cop shows, they want you to do.

  “Thank you, sir,” the trooper says, and walks toward me. I notice that his right hand is resting on his pistol. “Take off your helmet, then lean forward against the seat with your feet spread wide.”

  Again, I hesitate. This entire situation is so utterly unfamiliar. The trooper says, more sternly, with no “sir” attached this time, “Do. It. Now.”

  I comply, resting my hands on the saddle, my legs a yard apart, the limit of my range of motion these days. Just like in the movies. The difference being that in the movies the trooper’s gun is loaded with blanks. He comes up behind me and pats me down. This is all very surreal.

  “That’s fine, sir,” he says when he’s finished, a degree of professional cop courtesy returning to his voice. “Now stand up, please.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” I blurt out as I stand and turn to face him. I instantly regret saying such a stupid thing. To a law enforcement officer, it’s probably better to be an outlaw biker than one of those scum-sucking, bottom-feeding attorneys who subvert justice with their courtroom tricks.

  “I’ll need to see your driver’s license please,” the trooper says. His gold nameplate reads, “Cpl. Jensen.”

  “Sure, officer, no problem,” I answer, as cooperatively and unthreateningly as I can.

  “Trooper, not officer,” he corrects me.

  A slip. I know he’s a state trooper but I’m under some pressure here. Trooper must be higher on the law-enforcement hierarchy. Cpl. Jensen looks to me like a teenager, barely old enough to drive, let alone enforce the traffic laws, the same way the Minnesota Twins starting lineup and summer interns at the law firm now appear to a man my age. One of the milestones in the aging process.

  My helmet slides off the saddle, where I balanced it, and onto the ground: one hundred eight dollars worth of shiny black polycarbonate shell with anti-fog face shield and removable, washable, antibacterial lining, now dinged up by gravel. I unbuckle one side of my black leather saddlebags and fish out my wallet. I notice that as my hand went into the saddlebags, Cpl. Jensen’s hand returned to his pistol. I also know from cop shows that I should take the license out and not hand over the wallet, lest it appear a bribe is being offered. I do this now.

  He takes my Minnesota driver’s license, looks at it and says, “There’s no motorcycle endorsement.”

  I take the folded paper learner’s permit out of the wallet and hand it to him. He looks at it, then says, “Please remain here for a moment, sir.”

  He returns to the cruiser, gets in, running my name on his onboard computer, I’m certain, looking for any outstanding warrants. Then he gets out, walks back to me, and begins the usual dialogue of the routine traffic stop, the kind that does not involve a shoot-out, which is a relief. I’m a speeder, not a felon.

  “Do you know what the speed limit is here, Mr. Tanner?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t notice any signs.”

  I know that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but why not give it a shot.

  “It’s seventy,” he informs me. “Do you know how fast you were traveling?”

  “No,” I fib.

  I know that lying to a law enforcement officer is a felony, but how can he prove that I know the speed limit, or how fast I was going? My lawyer’s mind at work, inappropriately for what is now a routine situation.

  “I clocked you at just under eighty at the top of that rise back there,” he says.

  “I guess I wasn’t paying attention,” I say truthfully. I know better than to speed on highways in Wisconsin, where traffic fines are notoriously a big revenue source for the state. But I guess that I’ve been on an adrenaline high ever since starting this trip. I need to dial it down a notch and keep my head in the game.

  Instead of writing a citation, Cpl. Jensen touches the saddle of my motorcycle, as if petting a horse.

  “A Road King,” he says. “Nice bike. Had it long?”

  “Not very long.”

  “Okay, Mr. Tanner, this is a warning. Slow down. I’ve had to clean up after more than a few accidents involving motorcycles coming up against cars and trucks, and the cycle always loses.”

  Road kill.

  He nods and strides back to his cruiser, opens the door, then turns back and says, “Slow down and drive safely. By the way, Mr. Tanner, where are you headed?”

  “I’m just out for a joy ride,” I tell him.

  Which could not be further from the truth.

  DOWN THE highway another twenty minutes, a sign announces the Eau Claire exit, with the promise of Food/Gas/Lodging. I swing onto the exit ramp feeding onto a two-lane road lined with gas stations, fast food restaurants and chain motels: the kind of ubiquitous neon strip that has replaced small town Main Streets. No sense of place anymore when everywhere looks alike. However, this particular stretch of road holds a special memory for me.

  One long-ago Christmas Eve morning, when our world was newer and anything seemed possible, even lifelong joy, Jenna, Hope, and I stayed at the Holiday Inn I’m rolling past. We were heading for Milwaukee, to spend the holiday with Jenna’s parents, and her two sisters and their families.

  I thought we shouldn’t risk the drive because an early morning snowstorm was building in intensity; it was very cold and the highway was getting slippery, even with snow tires. We made it as far as Eau Claire after creeping along over black ice, past cars that had slid into ditches and fields. When a state trooper directed us around a second jackknifed semi, Jenna said that we should stop and wait out the storm.

  It was clearly not going to let up anytime soon, so I got a room for us at the Holiday Inn because it advertised a swimming pool under a geodesic dome, which I knew Hope would love.

  The storm raged all night. Christmas Eve dinner was cheeseburgers, milkshakes, and fries in our room from a McDonald’s beside the hotel, which I walked to. I got a plain burger for our dog Cookie, a Bichon, the desk clerk having waived the hotel’s no-pet rule for us orphans of the storm.

  We watched an Andy Williams Christmas special on TV and were as cozy and happy as we’d ever been on a Christmas Eve. By morning, the weather was clear, the landscape covered with a white frosting right out of a Currier and Ives holiday print. We arrived in Milwaukee late Christmas morning. Hope mentioned that trip every Christmas Eve for years: remember when we drove to grandpa and grandma’s in the snowstorm and stayed at the hotel with the pool and had hamburgers? Can we do that again this year?

  Now I’m certain I shouldn’t mention these kinds of memories to Jenna, because they are so very painful for me. For her, in the condition she’s in, they would be torture.

  CRUISING THE Eau Claire strip, I notice a large number of trucks and cars parked at a Happy Chef Restaurant. I didn’t have breakfast other than coffee and OJ this morning. I’m hungry. According to the mythology of the open road, the presence of the trucks is a good sign, so I pull into the parking lot. I hadn’t yet discovered, but would before my ride was done, that the truck count outside a highway restaurant says more about the adequacy of the parking lot, and availability of showers for the drivers, than about the quality of the food.

  Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” is playing on the sound system as I enter the restaurant, the perfect theme song for this time and place. King of
the Road on a Road King. That’s me. But I won’t say that out loud, not in here, where the real road kings dine.

  I find a stool at the counter and scan the menu, not noticing until I’m seated that I’m in a section of the dining room, which, according to a sign on a stand, is reserved for “professional drivers.” But I go unchallenged and decide to stay where I am. I am a professional, and I am a driver, just not the kind they mean.

  A waitress behind the counter comes over, fills my coffee cup, and asks, “What’s your pleasure, sweetie?” She looks as if she’s logged a lot of miles behind diner counters. Her nametag says she’s Sally.

  I order the Open Roader: eggs, pancakes, bacon, and hash browns, which is the kind of breakfast I’d imagined being served in that farmhouse fifty miles back, and the kind of food I’ve avoided, for health reasons, ever since I turned fifty, my usual breakfast being oatmeal with banana and wheat germ. But clogged arteries are the least of my concerns at the moment, and I am, after all, sitting among professional drivers. Go big or go home is my new motto.

  A man seated on the stool beside mine says, without looking up from his food, “So, you’re on a cycle.” It’s my leathers. “What kind?”

  His denim jacket has Peterbilt and American flag patches. He looks to be in his late fifties or early sixties, wiry like a rodeo cowboy. He’s having pork chops and mashed potatoes for breakfast.

  “I’m Ray,” he says, looking over at me now. “Ray Price.” No handshake, his hands are occupied with utensils.

  “A Harley,” I answer, proud I can tell this guy wearing the flag I’d bought American. I swivel on my stool and offer my hand. “Jack Tanner.” He puts down his fork and returns the handshake.

  “Had an Electra Glide once,” he tells me. “Which I dumped on the way home from Sturgis when some jackass in a car heading the other way swerved to avoid a deer and ran me into a ditch. Now I have a stainless steel plate in my hip and I stick to the eighteen-wheelers.”