Bellhaven, sixteen years and more ago.
Daniel Carter was seventeen the summer the sketch happened, and he had been haunting Murphy's Garage since he was nine years old — which was to say, since the first afternoon his father, Thomas Carter, had brought both boys by after school because their mother was working late and Thomas did not believe in letting children be bored indoors.
"Idle hands," Thomas liked to say, "'s how the devil gets his overtime."
Thomas Carter was a big laughing man who could talk to an engine like it was a nervous horse, and his best friend in the world was Ray Dawson, four years younger, already called Hammer by everybody for the way he swung one and for the way, people said, he could drive a point home. Ray had no kids of his own and never would. He had Thomas's boys instead, and he taught them both the way his own grandfather had taught him: hands on, mouth shut, watch first.
Eli was two years older than Daniel and built out of sunlight. That was how Daniel thought of him, without resentment, because it was simply true. Eli was taller, faster, funnier, better-looking, better at math he never studied for, and on a motorcycle he was something else entirely — he was fluent. Where other boys wrestled a bike, Eli conversed with it. At sixteen he was running county fair exhibition races, and somebody's uncle who sponsored dirt-track riders gave him a jacket with a number on it, *17*, and after that the whole town called the number when they saw him coming, the way you'd call a player's name.
Daniel was the other kind of gifted. Daniel could see machines. Not fix them the way his father fixed them, by ear and by feel — Daniel saw them the way he saw drawings, all at once, whole, the way the forces moved through them like weather. He kept a sketchbook that lived on the garage counter, and the men who drank coffee at Murphy's learned to check the new pages the way other men checked the sports section.
The Harley started as a joke, almost. A slow Tuesday. Daniel bored, raining too hard to ride, flipping a parts order over to its blank back because his sketchbook was full. He drew for twenty minutes without talking, and when Ray leaned over the counter, the pencil stopped.
It wasn't a kid's doodle of a motorcycle. It was a design: a long, low Road King with the weight carried differently than Harley carried it, the lines resolving into each other like sentences. On the page it looked inevitable, the way true things look.
Old man Murphy came out of the office, read his glasses, and said, "Somebody ought to build that."
"I will," Ray said, just like that, the way a man signs his name.
Daniel laughed — and then stopped, because Ray wasn't laughing. "You're serious."
"I'm serious."
"You can't just—" Daniel looked at the drawing, caught between pride and embarrassment the way only seventeen can hold both. "It'd take years. The parts alone—"
"Then it takes years." Ray rolled the parts order up careful as a diploma. "One thing, though. Tank's blank in your drawing."
Daniel shrugged, suddenly shy. "I don't know what goes there yet."
"Well," Ray said, "we'll leave it blank till you do."
Nobody in that garage — not Thomas, grinning in the doorway with a wrench in his hand; not Eli, whooping and slapping his little brother's cap backward; not Ray; not Daniel himself — had any way of knowing that the blank space on that fuel tank was a door the future would walk through, or what it would cost all of them to leave it open.
That summer had other relics, if anyone had thought to keep them. There was the dragon Daniel painted later that August on the back wall of the bays — a full day on a ladder with a bucket of green paint, his father bringing him lemonade and pretending not to supervise, Eli holding the ladder and providing, unasked, a running commentary on the dragon's anatomy that Daniel bore with the patience of a saint because the ladder, after all, was being held by the commentary. There was the church picnic where Eli won the three-legged race tied to a girl he intended to marry for a full two weeks. There was Thomas at the head of the table on Sundays saying grace with his eyes open, looking at his family over the words, a man memorizing them in case of need. If Daniel, in the bad years, ever let himself inventory that summer, it was to wonder how a season so ordinary had managed to be the whole of the good — how a pencil, a sketchbook, a blank tank, and a brother alive in the doorway could constitute, between them, the entire estate he would spend the rest of his life both guarding and fleeing.