Jesus Out to Sea

“Go back to the house, Buddy,” Albert says.

The wind makes a sound like water when it sharks through the grass.

Albert had seen the bikers for the first time only last week. Three of them had ridden up the dirt road that splits his ranch in half, ignoring the PRIVATE ROAD sign nailed to the railed fence that encloses his lower pasture. They turned around when they hit the dead end two hundred yards north of Albert’s barn, then cruised back through Albert’s property toward the paved highway.

They were big men, the sleeves of their denim jackets scissored off at the armpits, their skin wrapped with tattoos. They sat their motorcycles as though they absorbed the throttled-down power of the engine through their thighs and forearms. The man in the lead had red hair and a wild beard and sweat rings under his arms. He seemed to nod when Albert lifted his hand in greeting.

Albert caught the tag number of the red-haired man’s motorcycle and wrote it down on a scrap of paper that he put away in his wallet.

A half hour later he saw them again, this time in front of the grocery store in Lolo, the little service town two miles down the creek from his ranch. They had loaded up with canned goods and picnic supplies and sweating six-packs of beer and were stuffing them into the saddlebags on their motorcycles. He passed within three feet of them, close enough to smell the odor of leather, unwashed hair, engine grease, and woodsmoke in their clothes. One of them gargled with his beer before he swallowed it, then grinned broadly at Albert. He wore black glasses, as a welder might. Three blue teardrops were tattooed at the corner of his left eye.

“What’s happening, old-timer?” he said.

“Not much outside of general societal decay, I’d say,” Albert replied.

The biker gave him a look.

Five days later, Albert drove his truck to the Express Lube and took a walk down toward the intersection while he waited for his truck to be serviced. It was sunset and the sky was a chemical green, backdropped by the purple shapes of the Bitterroot Mountains. The day was cooling rapidly and Albert could smell the cold odor of the creek that wound under the highway. It was a fine evening, one augmented by families enjoying themselves at the Dairy Queen, blue-collar people eating in the Mexican restaurant, an eighteen-wheeler shifting down for the long pull over Lolo Pass. But the voices he heard on the periphery of his vision were like a dirty smudge on a perfect moment in time. The three bikers who had trespassed on his private road had blundered onto a young woman who had just gotten out of her car next to the town’s only saloon.

Her car was a rust-eaten piece of junk, a piece of cardboard taped across the passenger window, the tires bald, a child’s stuffed animal inside the back window. The woman had white-gold hair that was cut short like a boy’s, tapered on the sides and shaved on the neck. Her hips looked narrow and hard inside her pressed jeans, her breasts firm against her tight-fitting T-shirt. She was trapped between her car and the three bikers, who behaved as though they had just run into an old friend and only wanted to offer her a beer. But it was obvious they were not moving, at least not without a token to take with them. A pinch on the butt or the inside of her thigh would probably do.

She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at an upward angle, not responding, waiting for their energies to run down.

“How about a steak when you get off?” the man with the red beard asked.

“Sorry, I got to go home and wash out my old man’s underwear,” she said.

“Your old man, huh? Wonder why he didn’t buy you a ring,” the man with the beard replied. When he got no response, he tried again. “You a gymnast? ’Cause that’s what you look like. Except for that beautiful pair of ta-tas, you’re built like a man. That’s meant as a compliment.”

Don’t mix in it. It’s not your grief, Albert told himself.

“Hey, fellows,” he said.

The bikers turned and looked at him, like men upon whom a flashbulb had just popped.

“I think she’s late for work,” Albert said.

“She sent you a kite on that?” the red-bearded man said, smiling.

Albert looked into space. “Y’all on your way to Sturgis?”

The third biker, who so far had not spoken, stuck an unfiltered cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a Zippo that flared on his face. His skin looked like dirty tallow in the evening light, his dark hair hanging in long strands on his cheeks. “She your daughter? Or your wife? Or your squeeze on the side?” he said. He studied Albert. “No, I can see that’s probably not the case. Well, that means you should butt out. Maybe go buy yourself a tamale up at the café. A big, fat one, lot of juice running down it.”

The bikers grinned into space simultaneously, as though the image conjured up shared meaning that only they understood.

Walk away, the voice inside Albert said.

“What’s wrong with you fellows?” he asked.

“What?” the bearded man said.

“You have to bully a young woman to know who you are? What the hell is the matter with you?” Albert said.

The three bikers looked at one another, then laughed. “I remember where I saw you. On that ranch, up the creek a couple of miles. You walk up and down the road a lot, telling other people what to do?” the bearded man said.

The young woman dropped her cigarette to the ground and used the distraction to walk between the bikers, onto the wood porch of the saloon.

“Hey, come on back, sweet thing. You got a sore place, I’ll kiss it and make it well,” the biker with black glasses said.