Chief

After they’d left and the house was too quiet, I stuck the radio on and it was Bruce singing one of those torch songs about Glory, or Fire or just plain being Born. And I was taken off into that world again. His world. To the music, like a motorcycle rider, I curved through streets like a smooth fireball, just zinging this way and that, where my mood and my heart took me. Except it wasn’t me driving the bike, it was Jake.

He’d turn up at my house after school and he was a dream. All the girls loved him, and wanted to get on the back of his motorbike, but it was me he’d take out after school, or at the weekend. We’d go riding through town, past the department store my Mom worked in. Jake’d ride real slow past there. I showed him a picture. He said he liked how she looked, but she never came out to see us.

One time we drove past my Daddy’s garage where he was sitting outside with the guys, taking a break, and he drove us past, pretty slow, but not so that when my Dad came out running after Jake we couldn’t outgun him. I was looking the other way when we rode past, hoping Daddy wouldn’t recognise me, but I knew he did.

And when he got home… well all I’ll say is, he near stripped the skin off my behind, with his work belt. “You on a damn’ motorcycle!”

I wasn’t allowed to see Jake for a month. And after that, Daddy never asked me if I was back seeing him, because he knew he’d have to kill me if I was.

Jake’ d call me Chief. I’ve no idea why. He’d say “Chief, put the radio on will ya?” “Chief, let’s go to the pictures, huh?” “Chief, I… “Oh I don’t know, I can’t remember. It was so long ago. No, hell, it was 1973! And I’d been going out with a boy my Mom and Dad loved. Eric was loaded. At least his folks were. We went out for a couple of months.

In fact, the first time I saw Jake on his motorcycle, I was with Eric and we were coming out of the Church he went to with his Mum and Dad, and this gold Ducati came past. The rider was leaning low down on the left side. You could see he was just loving life, a big pot black helmet and shades on, white t-shirt cut off at the shoulders and looked like he hadn’t shaved all week. He was way older ‘n me and Eric. Well a couple of years at least, in the last year at school.

As the bike came down the avenue, the boy’s knee almost touching the tarmac, the motor wasn’t too slow to tip over, nor too fast to take him past us, before he’d turned his gaze to take us all in, in a widescreen kind of steadicam way I guess you might say these days. He’d slowed down like a Spanish galleon in full sail, just noisier. When he’d stopped, he said over the motor “Shirley, what you doing in Church girl?” like it was the worst thing in the world!

“Why, I’ve been to the service with Eric and his Mom and Dad.”

“You aren’t dying’ are ya?”

“No Jake. I’m not dyin’” I laughed.

“Well how do you fancy grabbing hold of Mr D’s coat tails now” That was Jake’s bike ‘Mr D’. D for Ducati, I guess. “…and coming with me to see an old friend of mine. Thought you might want to come with me on my bike. It’s such a beautiful day.”

  I looked at Eric and I looked at his Mom and Dad who were all looking at each other, their mouths opening and closing like goldfish. I saw myself like I was already dead and I looked like Eric’s Mom, with thick glasses and a stick. And I looked at Eric and then I looked at Jake, and the trees moving in the avenue, and the heat haze wavering like a ghost behind his bike, and the tarmac almost melting with the noon day heat, and I put the strap of my bag over my shoulder, took off my shoes, one in each hand and I said slowly, “Sure Jake. Sure, I’ll come with you. “

“Helmet’s in that box on the back, Chief.” That was the first time he called me Chief.

I put it on and climbed on and I didn’t look back, even though Eric’s Mom and Dad almost sucked me back off the bike when they drew in their breath at my goddamn cheek and just my, well I don’t know what they said ‘cos we were gone.

And I didn’t give any thought to what Mom and Dad would say when Eric told them – because I knew he would. We drove 40 miles down the road – to some two- bit town I’d never been to in my life before. And Jake’s friend Jerry gave us cheese on toast, and he’d chopped up some garlic his Mom had for some I-talian dish she was going to cook that night. And he spread the garlic over the cheese and grilled it and you know it smelt like heaven?

We ate while he played us BB King. I’d never heard music like that before, from a black guy who’d given his guitar a name! ‘Lucille’ he called it, Jerry said. We ate on the porch steps and he’d brought the record player out and put it just behind us turned up, and we listened to the blues while every colour drained out of the sky just leaving blue, blue, dark blue, then black. So then Jerry put on Curtis Mayfield singing “We the people who are darker than blue” which was kind of fitting, wasn’t it?

As we were leaving, Jake switched on the bike and the front light came on and lit up a fox across the road looking at us real steady with red eyes.

“Like a fox in the car headlights.” Well you never ever hear that do you? Well I saw it that night with Jake. He turned the wheel and I could hear the fox’s claws clipping away down the road, and then the sound of something breaking through a hedge.

We drove back home, and I started wondering how things would be when I got there.

“Sure you don’t want me to come in with you, Chief?” I declined as I wanted to see Jake again one day, but not in a box when my Dad had finished with him.

It was quiet when I got in. There was a note on the table in Mom’s hand. “Down the hospital with your Dad. Grandpa’s ill.”

When I got to the hospital I found out from the woman on the desk where Grandpa was. A porter showed me onto the ward. It was dark, except for pools of light over some beds, and a corridor down the middle was lit for the nurses to walk down the line, comforting some, and carrying bedpans, and wheeling trolleys with medicines on and such.

I saw Mom facing me by a bed near a window near the end of the room. She was holding Daddy’s hand. He was nearest to Grandpa, looking at him, touching him and saying nothing. Grandpa was lying down with his glasses on and his hair looking whiter than snow, though his skin was yellow.

I ran over between Daddy and Mom. My Dad put his arm around me like I was worth keeping after all, and I told him I was alive. I wasn’t dyin’ like Jake had asked, but Daddy wasn’t listening. Grandpa looked like he was on his last legs. I moved around Dad to the bedhead and leaned over and asked him  “How’s it goin’ Grandpa?”

He looked at me, screwing his eyes up, like I was at the end of a long tunnel, and said “Oh I’m just hanging on ” he swallowed hard “I’m just hanging on Shirl.”

His breath was bad, smelt like a dog he and me found in a ditch out on the farm one time, swelled up to 3 times its size and stinkin’ badly. That dog didn’t last long when the jackals got wind. No noses those jackals. I’m sure they just don’t care what they eat.

Grandpa tried to focus on me, then retreated back down that tunnel, and closed his eyes.

I remember going late one afternoon with him to the pictures in town, when Grandma was still alive. We saw such a sad film, but Granpa made me laugh sayin’ “It wasn’t the cough that carried him off. It was the coffin they carried him off in.”

Next time I was in Church it was with Grandpa in his coffin. He’d lived 94 years.

Daddy never said anything about me leaving Eric and his Mom and Dad on the steps. I thought he would, but he was so upset he hardly said a word.

Then one day Jake asked me to leave town with him and move to the city. He had friends there. He had friends everywhere.

“I’m seventeen” I told him. “It would kill my Mom and Dad. My Dad wants to see me wed in the Church one day.”

“Jesus, Chief. They’re way past anything anyway. I’ve got dreams of us in the city, me getting a job and keeping you in style. If I stay here, God knows what’s going to happen to me. I’m going to come to nothing, and you’ll shrivel right up and die. You gotta come with me.”

“I can’t come with you darlin’. I just can’t. Don’t you go either, you’re too young.”

He got up to leave, and as he walked away, he turned and said “Me? Too young? Not me Chief. I’m ready for the city now, and if you’re not comin’ I’ll find someone else who will.”

“Yeah? Can’t go it alone, can you Jake?” He laughed at me, but didn’t deny it.

I was working in a local café some time later when one of the waitresses came in carrying a paper. She had her head over it, studying it closely. And when I’d finished the dishes, I walked over and said “My that paper’s awful interesting ain’t it Lucy?”

“It’s Charlotte Newham” she said.

“What? She’s in the paper? What’s she gone and done now?”

“She’s dead Shirley. Charlotte’s dead. Killed on the turnpike, just past the airport.”

“No!” It couldn’t be. She was an All-American, a Miss America type. They didn’t get killed in cars on a turnpike.

“Where was she going? In whose car?”

“No. She was on a bike… With a guy. Going to Philly with him they say here” she pointed to a picture of a wrecked motorcycle. A gold one, looked like to me, but you can’t always tell in papers.

“And Jake? What about Jake?” I knew in that moment it was Jake’s Ducati.

“Jake?”

“The guy?”

“He’s dead too. They were overtaking a truck when an idiot in a semi pulled out in front of them. The truck they were overtaking swerved and they were right in the path of a bus. They had no chance. Poor Charlotte…” Lucy’s eyes brimmed over, and she left the kitchen.

——————————————

“Shirley? Guy Pines asked if we’d like to go to stay in their place up at Cape May next weekend. You up for that too, Ellie?”

“Is Robert going as well Dad?”

“Sure thing. He heard you were going, so he’s right up for it.” He winked at me.

“Eric. Don’t lead Ellie on so, will you?” I said smiling at him all the same.

“Ellie, every word I say to you is true. Trust me.” His eyes were creased up at the edges, like they do, when he smiles.

And I knew he was telling the truth, when he folded Ellie up in his arms like a butterfly.

I’d made the right choice.

©2012