“I’m sorry, buddy,” he whispered. “I’m gonna be better. I swear it.”
Then he looked at me. “You don’t have to forgive me.”
“I know I don’t,” I said.
That was all I had in me. He nodded like he understood, and he climbed into the passenger seat of a stranger’s pickup, and I watched it bump slowly out of the gravel lot toward the highway.
Walt rolled down his window before he pulled away.
“Your boy ever been on a motorcycle?” he asked.
“He’s four,” I said. “And he’s sick.”
“I know he is.” Walt nodded. “Engine don’t have to be running.”
I thought that was just something people say. I was wrong.
Four days later an old black Harley rumbled up my gravel driveway and stopped next to the mailbox. Walt cut the engine, walked up to my porch with a helmet under his arm, and knocked like he’d been invited. I guess in a way he had.
The helmet was tiny. Bright red, with a cartoon flame painted on the side. He’d bought it that morning at a shop in Ankeny.
Leo was having a good afternoon, one of the last really good ones. I carried him outside, and Walt lifted him onto the seat of that bike like he weighed nothing at all, because by then he barely did. Walt kept one big tattooed hand flat on his back the whole time. Leo gripped the handlebars and made engine noises so loud the dog started barking.
“Vroom,” Leo said. “Vroooom. Mama, I’m going so fast.”
“You sure are, baby.”
“Faster than the cow.”
Walt laughed, a real laugh that came all the way up from his belly. I hadn’t heard a grown man laugh in my yard in months.
He came back the next Saturday. And the one after that. Sometimes he brought another rider or two from his club, guys with names like Moose and Preacher who sat on my porch steps drinking iced tea and telling Leo absolutely untrue stories about racing a tornado across Nebraska. Leo believed every word.
Walt never brought up Danny unless I asked. When I did ask, he told me the truth. Danny was in. Danny was sick as a dog the first week. Danny was still there. Danny had started going to meetings in the building twice a day.
“He asks about the boy every time I see him,” Walt said.
“What do you tell him?”
“I tell him the boy’s riding motorcycles.” He shrugged. “I figure that’s the right answer for now.”
Leo died on a Tuesday morning in late September, eleven weeks after the fair. He was in his own bed with the window open, and I was holding his hand, and the last thing he looked at was the little red helmet hanging on his bedpost.
I won’t write much about that morning. Some things belong only to the people who were in the room.
But I’ll tell you about the funeral.
I’d mentioned to Walt, almost in passing, that Leo had loved the sound of his bike more than anything. I didn’t ask for anything. I wouldn’t have known how.
When we pulled out of the church parking lot behind the hearse, there were forty-one motorcycles lined up along the road. Forty-one. Most of them I’d never seen before. Some of the riders had driven in from three states away for a four-year-old they’d never met. They rode in two straight lines behind us, engines low and steady, all the way to the cemetery on the hill.
Walt rode in front. And on the back of his bike, wearing a borrowed leather jacket two sizes too big, was my brother.
Danny was forty-three days clean that morning. He’d gotten a weekend pass from the program to come. He’d called me the night before to ask if he was allowed to be there, and I’d been quiet so long he thought the call had dropped.
At the graveside, Danny stood at the back and didn’t try to come closer. When it was over and people began drifting toward their cars, I walked back to him. I didn’t plan it. My feet just went.
He was holding a small plastic cow. Brown. The kind they sell for two dollars at the fair gift shop.
“I bought it that day,” he said. “Before. I was going to give it to him.” His voice broke. “I had it in my pocket the whole time I was in the truck with that screwdriver.”
I took it from him. I walked back to the grave and set it down right next to the red helmet Walt had left there.
Then I came back and I hugged my brother. Not because he deserved it yet. Because Leo would have.
Danny is fourteen months clean now. He works for a roofing outfit again, on the ground this time, running materials. He calls me every Sunday night. Some weeks we talk for an hour. Some weeks neither of us has much to say, and we just stay on the line anyway.
Walt still comes by. Not every Saturday anymore, but often enough that my neighbors have stopped staring at the Harley in my driveway. He fixed my porch steps last spring without being asked. He sponsors two other men besides Danny, and he says I’m not allowed to thank him for any of it, so I’ve stopped trying.
I went back to the state fair this August. I don’t totally know why. I bought a lemonade and stood in the exact spot near the livestock barn where I’d knelt down beside my son’s stroller.
The hay bale was still there. Somebody else was sitting on it this year, a young mom feeding a baby a bottle.
I think about that afternoon all the time. About how I moved my son away from the one man at that fair who was watching out for him. About how I never once moved him away from the man who was hunting for that blue bag.
I judged the beard and the leather and the faded ink. I trusted the face I’d known since it was five years old and holding on to the back of my backpack at the crosswalk.
I was wrong about both of them, in opposite directions.
Leo wasn’t. Leo looked at that big scary biker the first time he lifted him onto that Harley, and he just grinned and said, “Vroom.”
Kids don’t see the leather. They just see who shows up.
