A Thousand Engines

The thing nobody told Carol about learning to ride a motorcycle at forty-three was that it was exactly as undignified as it sounded.

"You're doing great," Walt lied, as Carol stalled the old Sportster for the eleventh time in Harlan's back lot. It was February, the ground was half-frozen mud, and Carol was wearing so many layers she could barely bend her elbows.

"I am not doing great," Carol said through chattering teeth. "I am doing terribly. This machine hates me."

"She doesn't hate you. She's testing you." Walt patted the Sportster's tank with genuine affection. "Bikes know. They can smell fear."

"Then she can smell a lot of it."

Walt laughed — the pie-case-shaking laugh — and showed her the clutch again, slowly, the way he'd shown his daughter twenty years ago. "Easy. Feel for it. There — that's the friction zone. Now give her a little gas. A little. Not — CAROL, A LITTLE — "

The Sportster lurched forward, Carol yelped, and they puttered across the lot at four miles an hour, Carol rigid with concentration, Walt jogging alongside shouting encouragement.

"It counts!" he yelled. "You're riding!"

Emily, watching from the diner's back door with a mug of hot chocolate, was laughing so hard she had to sit down on the step.

By March, Carol could ride in a straight line. By April, she could turn without planning it three blocks in advance. By May, she rode the Sportster to work for the first time — eight miles down Route 89 in the spring morning, the pines green and the air clean, and she understood, suddenly and completely, why people did this. Why Eddie and his club lived for it. There was a freedom in it, a cleanness — just you and the road and the wind, no past, no future, only the next mile.

She parked in the diner's lot, pulled off the borrowed helmet, and found Harlan waiting at the door with tears in his eyes.

"What?" Carol demanded.

"Nothing," Harlan said gruffly. "You just — you look like somebody's mother in a movie. It's ridiculous."

"Walt says I look like a biker."

"Walt's an idiot. Come on, coffee's on."

The regulars had opinions. Earl said she'd lost her mind. Priya said she was a badass and asked for riding lessons. Sam said "vroom vroom" and made engine noises for a week. Jess and Marco — the college kids, home for the summer — took photos and put them on the internet, where they got four thousand likes and a comment from Elena that said MY HERO RIDES A SPORTSTER with seventeen exclamation points.

Elena. Carol thought about her every time she rode — the girl who'd been moved like cargo, who'd had every freedom stolen, and here was Carol, forty-three, choosing the wind in her face because she could. Freedom meant more when you'd seen it taken away.

In June, Eddie rode down from Prescott with a vest for Carol. It was plain black leather, broken in, with a single patch on the back: not a club patch — Carol wasn't a member, and the clubs took that seriously — but a patch Eddie had had made special. It showed a diner coffee cup with wings, and underneath, in script: THOUSAND ENGINES.

Carol put it on over her uniform, and the diner applauded, and Walt cried — actual tears, which he blamed on the onions — and Emily took seventeen photos.

"You're one of us now," Eddie said gruffly. "Honorary. The club voted. Unanimous, which never happens. Preacher abstained on principle, but he doesn't count."

Carol wore the vest to work. Harlan said it violated the dress code. Carol said she'd quit. Harlan said the vest was fine.

The first annual Thousand Engines Ride was scheduled for the second Saturday in October — eleven months after that rainy Friday night. The route would start at the Hollow Creek Diner, run down Route 89 through the pines, and end at a park in Flagstaff with a barbecue and a fundraiser for the Northern Arizona Survivor Services fund. Eddie expected two hundred bikes. Walt said five hundred. Harlan — who had agreed to cater the barbecue, and was quietly terrified — said he was making pie for three hundred and if more people came they'd have to share.

Carol practiced all summer. She rode to work, rode home, rode the long way on Sundays with Walt and sometimes Eddie, learning the rhythms of the road — the lean, the throttle, the way a bike talked to you through your hands and your spine. She learned what the bikers knew: that a thousand engines wasn't just noise. It was a language. It said we're here. We're together. Nobody rides alone.

In August, she got a letter from Jesse Miller. He was in a minimum-security facility in Arizona, working in the kitchen, taking GED classes. I think about that night every day, he wrote. Not the arrest. The rain. You, in the rain, telling me I had a choice. Nobody ever told me I had a choice before. I'm trying to be somebody who deserves one.

Carol wrote back: You already are. Keep going.

She put the letter in the drawer, with the others. The drawer was getting full — Jesse's mother's letter, the U.S. Attorney's letter, Elena's postcards from Tucson, Emily's list from the algebra notebook. Carol called it the drawer of true things.

In September, Elena called with news: she was coming to the ride. Her parents were driving her up. She'd finished her second semester — straight A's again. She was working at the clinic. She was — and here her voice got shy — she was learning to ride, too. A friend from the survivor group had a little Honda. "You're my inspiration," Elena said. "If Carol can learn at forty-three, I can learn at twenty-one."

Carol hung up and went out to the garage and sat on the Sportster for a long time, not riding, just sitting, thinking about cages and roads and the thousand small kindnesses that tore cages down.

October was coming. The ride was coming. A thousand engines, again — but this time, not in the rain, not in anger.

This time, in celebration.

The night before the ride, Carol couldn't sleep. She stood at the kitchen window, looking out at the dark, and Emily — seventeen now, a senior, college applications spread across the living room — came and stood beside her.

"Nervous?" Emily asked.

"Terrified," Carol admitted. "Five hundred bikes, Em. I'm going to lead five hundred bikes, and I learned to ride eight months ago."

Emily grinned. "Mom. You faced down a trafficker with a coffee pot. You can handle a parade."

"It was a coffee pot and a pie," Carol corrected. "Don't undersell the pie."

They laughed, and Emily hugged her — hard, the way she had in the parking lot that day — and said, "I'm riding with you tomorrow. Walt's got a sidecar."

"A sidecar," Carol repeated.

"Daughter law," Emily said. "It's very strict."

Carol went to bed smiling, and dreamed of engines — a thousand of them, warm as a lullaby, carrying her somewhere good.