Nobody in that kitchen breathed.
Danny looked down at his daughter. Then he looked at his father kneeling on the floor in front of him, and his whole face folded in on itself.
Earl reached up slowly and wrapped his hand around the barrel. He pushed it toward the ceiling, and Danny let go.
Earl held the shotgun out behind him without turning around. “Hank,” he said. “Unload this.”
I took it. My hands were shaking so bad I dropped the first shell on the floor. Two shells, and both of them live.
Danny slid down the front of the refrigerator until he was sitting on the floor, and he started sobbing like a little kid. Earl dragged himself over on that bad hip, pulled his son’s head against his chest, and held on.
The older girl grabbed her little sister’s hand and ran past us out the screen door. I heard their mother scream their names from the yard, and then she just screamed, with no words in it at all.
That’s when we heard the sirens.
Two state troopers and a county deputy came flying up that dirt road with their lights going. What they saw was a yard full of old men in leather, a woman on her knees in the grass screaming, and me standing in the kitchen doorway holding a shotgun.
I’ve thought about it a lot since. I’d have drawn on me too.
“Drop it! Drop the weapon! On the ground, now!”
I laid the shotgun on the porch boards with the two shells beside it and got down on my belly. So did everybody else. Eleven bikers lay face down in the dirt with our hands behind our heads while a young trooper went down the line with zip ties.
Jenna, the girls’ mother, kept screaming that we’d saved her babies. The trooper kept saying, “Ma’am, we’ll sort it out, step back, ma’am.” He wasn’t being cruel. He had driven up on a mess he didn’t understand, and in his line of work you cuff first and ask later.
They put Danny in the back of one cruiser and me in another. Earl they sat on the porch steps with his hands tied behind him, because they’d run out of room in the cars.
So that’s how I ended up in the back of a trooper’s car with my wrists zip-tied, watching my president through the window.
Which is how I saw Earl’s face go gray.
Sweat was running down his forehead even though the air had turned cool. His chin dropped to his chest. Then he tipped sideways off the step and hit the gravel, and he couldn’t put his hands out to catch himself because they were tied behind his back.
I started kicking the door and hollering. The young trooper ran over, saw Earl, and sliced his zip tie with a knife off his belt. Earl wasn’t breathing.
“I know CPR!” I yelled. “Thirty-one years at the power company! Let me out!”
He looked at me for one second. Then he yanked my door open and cut me loose.
I got down in the gravel and started pushing on Earl’s chest. I counted out loud the way they drilled us every year at the co-op, and I felt something in his ribs give under my hands and kept going anyway.
From the other cruiser, I heard Danny. He was throwing his shoulder into the door so hard the whole car rocked on its springs.
“That’s my dad!” he screamed. “That’s my dad! Let me out! Dad! DAD!”
Thirty years, and that was the first time he’d called him that.
I did compressions for eleven minutes until the ambulance got there. The paramedics shocked Earl twice right there in the gravel. On the second one, his heart caught.
They put the zip ties back on me after the ambulance pulled away. I didn’t argue.
The other ten of us spent that night in the Pike County jail. Sheriff Boyd came down to the holding cell himself the next morning and told us we were lucky nobody got killed, and that he was looking at charges for obstruction and interfering with an emergency call.
Dale asked him real polite if he’d listened to the 911 recording yet. The one where Dale told dispatch a man was threatening two little girls with a shotgun, and dispatch told him to wait thirty-eight minutes.
The sheriff didn’t answer that.
The prosecutor dropped every charge eight days later. Jenna gave a statement. So did her nine-year-old, Maddie, to a child counselor, and from what I heard she told it plainer than any of us could have. We each paid $185 to get our bikes out of the impound lot where they’d been towed off the shoulder of Route 9.
Best money I ever spent.
Earl came through a triple bypass. When they finally let me in to see him, he looked twenty years older and about half his size in that hospital bed.
“Hank,” he said. “You ever wonder why we always take Route 9?”
I had, and so had everybody else. Route 9 is forty miles of potholes and cornfields with no diner anywhere on it. Every year somebody would complain, and every year Earl would say the charity ride goes down Route 9 and that’s the end of it.
Nine years ago, Danny’s mother passed away. Earl read her obituary in the paper. It said she was survived by a son, Daniel Whitlock of Pike County.
Earl found the farmhouse that same week. He never knocked on the door. He just planned our September ride down Route 9 and rode past it slow, once a year, for nine years.
I remembered then how Earl always eased off the throttle around one particular curve out there. We all figured it was his hip.
“Every year I told myself next year,” Earl said. “Next year I’ll stop. Next year I’ll be brave enough.”
He turned his face toward the window.
“I didn’t even know about the girls, Hank,” he said, and his chin started to shake. “I’ve got granddaughters.”
Danny pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and child endangerment. The judge gave him four years, with a chance at parole after two if he finished the prison’s treatment program.
