Not Once

by Victoria Lynn Smith

It’s the most discombobulated thing I’ve ever seen my father bring home.
There’s a frame and bushel baskets of pieces: headlight, taillight, handlebars, engine, brakes, spokes, cables, and whatever else works to make a motorcycle whole. I don’t take inventory because I wouldn’t know if anything was missing. If needed my father will scavenge boneyards and parts stores.
The seventeen-year-old neighbor boy and I are playing basketball at my house this evening. My dribbling calls to him, and he comes to steal kisses while we play horse.
The boy stops bouncing the ball and uses the crook of his elbow to hold it against his side. He stands, using a practiced casualness he’s perfected as a starter on the high school basketball team. He watches my father unload the dissected bike from his pickup truck. I want to keep playing basketball. I’ve seen this kind of thing before—cars get towed into our driveway, and after a brief stay in my father’s garage, leave under the power of their own four wheels. Last year a rusty 1940s pickup truck arrived wearing a powdery, decomposing black finish. My father overhauled its engine then painted it candy-apple red. When he finished, the truck looked like it rolled off an assembly line, and he asked if I wanted to drive downtown with him and look the city bus drivers in the eye. After that we went for pizza, and he ordered a pitcher of beer with two glasses. He didn’t need to tell me the beer was our secret.
The boy asks, “What’s your dad going to do with that?” He’s watching my father haul the motorcycle frame and bushel baskets out of the truck bed.
“He’s going to put it back together.”
“No way.” He bounces the ball on the asphalt and moves it to the crook of his other elbow. “It’s a bunch of pieces.”
The boy pisses me off sometimes. His arrogance. His ignorance. “Yes, he can. He does that kind of stuff all the time.” We’ve been neighbors for a decade. Does he not pay attention?
I’m sure the boy thinks I’m boasting. I am and I’m not. Fixing vehicles is my father’s specialty. He’ll rig it, jig it, rebuild it, make it do what it’s supposed to do, and if needed, he’ll paint it. But there are a lot of other sides to my father. He broke the toilet seat by dancing on it while singing “The Old Gray Mare” just to taunt my mother. He blew the ends of the rain gutter open with a cherry bomb trying to unblock the downspout. He scorched the porch roof after putting too much gasoline on the charcoal and tossing a match on it. He doesn’t believe in lighter fluid, too slow for him. But he can fix stuff. He’s a mechanic at a dealership. And while he isn’t an auto body guy, he could be. He’s done enough of it in his garage.
I’m not arguing with the boy, so I make a motion to continue our game of horse. It’ll be a few weeks before the motorcycle emerges whole. My father hasn’t told me this. I know it by looking at the number of pieces coming off the truck. I know it because when I was born my father was an experimental mechanic who built racing motorcycles. It says so on my birth certificate.
A young woman died on that motorcycle. I overheard my father tell my mother the night before. The woman climbed on the back of the seat and slipped her arms around her boyfriend’s waist or maybe she rested her hands on his bony hips or maybe she placed her hands on her thighs. It wouldn’t have mattered where she put them because nothing would’ve changed. She was never going home again. Afterward, the motorcycle was disemboweled during an inspection, looking for what went wrong. Something mechanical perhaps, because no other vehicle was involved and the boyfriend doesn’t remember the accident. Mechanical failures happen. When I was eight, my father took a motorcycle he’d just bought for a test drive and asked me if I wanted to go with him. I climbed on the bike and sat in front of him. He was easing it up and down our road, and it bucked. He laid it down, clutching me with one arm and dropping the frame with his other arm. We’d been going slow, very slow. But we got bruises and road rash, and he got a gash on his head. He had two concerns: keeping me off the ground the best he could and laying the bike down before it threw us.
I tell the boy again, “You bet my father can put that motorcycle back together,” but I don’t tell him my father’s putting a bike together that a woman died on, then turning around and selling it. I don’t want the boy to know my father’s going to make money off someone’s death. It seems like bad karma. If that bike were a dog and it bit someone, it would be put down. Like the dog that bit up the Bouchard boy, sending him to the hospital for 48 stitches.
But this is what my father does to hustle side money. He buys stuff, fixes it up, and sells it. He sold the red truck, and he’ll sell the motorcycle.
My father will make the bike look the same or better than the day it chucked a young woman off its back. Maybe it broke her neck.
As the summer’s hot sticky sunsets give way to cool summer evenings, my father reaches the days of fine tuning the bike and test driving it. The boy and I have been shooting buckets either in his yard or my yard almost every night. Between the pounding of the basketball on the asphalt, we hear the high-pitched whine of the motorcycle sprinting up and down the narrow road as dusk is nudged away by black, starry nights. My father is listening to the bike, feeling its rhythms through his body, cranking its gears with his foot, and he’s taking note. He comes back and tinkers. And heads out again to listen. Experimental motorcycle mechanic, says so on my birth certificate right after the words Father’s occupation.
One evening, I’m playing horse with the boy and between the thumping of the basketball, I hear my father call my name. I walk across the boy’s front yard and my side yard. The boy is trailing me, two years older and always several feet behind me.
“You want to go for a spin?” my father asks. He knows I like motorcycle rides.
“Yes.”
“You want a helmet?” he asks.
“No.”
I never want a helmet. He doesn’t wear one either. My father doesn’t like the helmet law and only wears one if he thinks there’s a chance a cop will see him. And on our dark country road, with no street lamps and a town constable who never drives past our house, he’s taking his chances. I’m a minor. I’m not worried about a ticket. I want the rush of wind in my hair and the g-force to push my face.
Behind me the boy stands. He doesn’t have motorcycles come home in pieces and get reassembled at his house. His father comes home in a suit and loosens his tie as he gets out of a sedan. My father comes home in dark blue work pants and a white work shirt with his name stitched in blood red over the pocket. He’s covered in the day’s grease and oil when he gets out of his battered pickup. The boy’s father will never ask him if he wants to go for a motorcycle ride. The boy’s disbelief about the bike being reassembled is gone. But I know his brown eyes are wide because my father’s going to let me ride without a helmet.
I climb on the seat behind my father and wrap my arms around his waist. The bike putters down our long curving driveway. It purrs like a contented cat. He does a Chicago stop before rolling out on the road turning east, giving him the longest stretch of pavement before a stop sign impedes him. As he climbs through each gear, the motorcycle catches for a moment then zooms forward at higher speeds. It’s screaming by the time we pass the creek dividing those of us who go to Whitmore schools from those who go to Glenmore schools.
I look at the speedometer, and the needle is twitching at 110 mph. In seconds we’re at the highway. My father pulls the reins in and turns the bike about. He winds it back up but keeps it around 80. The speed limit’s 35. When we reach the boy’s driveway, we’re at a Sunday pace. A hundred feet later, my father turns up our drive and parks in front of the garage.
“Thanks for the ride,” I say and head back to play horse.
“Holy shit,” the boy says. His face has gone ashen, and he looks at me like he’s lost a playoff game.
I take the ball from his hands.
“How fast was your dad going?”
This boy will never take me for a ride on the back of a motorcycle.
“110.” I dribble the ball at the free throw line, grip it, then lift and release it through the air. The ball arcs over his head and catches the rim. It hangs for a moment then falls into the net. It thuds on the asphalt and rolls past his feet, back to me.
The boy wants to know if I was afraid.
I pick up the ball and use the crook of my elbow to hold it against my side. “Not once,” I tell him.
And I didn’t think of the young dead woman. Not once.

Victoria Lynn Smith (she/her) writes fiction and creative nonfiction. She lives by Lake Superior, a source of inspiration, happiness, and mystery. Her work has been published by Wisconsin Public Radio, Twin Cities Public Television, Brevity Blog, Better Than Starbucks, Hive Avenue Literary Journal, Persimmon Tree, Jenny, and several regional journals. Her fiction has also won and placed in regional writing contests. She is working on a collection of short stories. To read her blog: https://writingnearthelake.org/.