They began arriving before the diner opened, while the dark was still deciding. Headlights in the gravel, one pair, then four, then a river of them, engines turned down low out of respect for the hour and the neighborhood. By six o'clock the Blue Plate lot held two hundred motorcycles in rows as neat as Sal's knife rolls, and more were coming down Route 40 in loose, rumbling files.
Walt Briggs stood at the lot entrance with a clipboard that Dale Kershner had pressed on him and absolutely no intention of using. He knew most of them β Iron Mile Riders from three chapters, independents, a veterans' club out of Indianapolis, two dozen riders from a church group in Brazil, Indiana, who had sewn a banner for their saddlebags. A man he'd fixed a chain for, months back on the shoulder of I-70, had brought eleven friends.
"Didn't know you knew this many people," Sal said, handing him coffee through the pass window.
"I don't," Walt said. "They know the diner."
Dale Mercer had sent a check with a courier at seven, which Ruth received without comment and entered in the ledger without warmth: the developer keeping his name polished while his deadline did its work. She put the check in the register and went back to filling coffee urns.
At eight-forty, Deputy Sellers rolled his cruiser to the head of the line, lights off, window down. A second deputy took the rear. Dale Kershner, sixty-one and president of the Iron Mile Riders since before Megan was born, stood on the bed of Sal's pickup with a bullhorn he'd borrowed from the high school and gave the safety talk in nine sentences, eight of which were "watch the man in front of you."
Then Kershner looked down the double row of machines, three hundred and twelve by the gate count, and nodded once at Walt.
Walt swung onto his old Harley at the head of the column, and the sound that went up when the engines started was not noise so much as weather β it came through the soles of the shoes of everyone watching. Megan stood in the diner doorway with the other staff, holding a dish towel she had forgotten she was holding, and felt the whole building hum in sympathy. The town had lined Route 40 without being asked: lawn chairs, thermals of coffee, flags, a hand-painted sign on the hardware store that said RIDE SAFE COME BACK HUNGRY.
The run took them forty miles β out past the covered bridge, through the river bottoms where the mist still stood in the fields, around by the old quarry road and home again β and at every crossroads a deputy or a volunteer in an orange vest held the traffic, and at nearly every farmhouse somebody waved.
At the quarry road turnout, twenty miles in, a young rider from the Brazil group β a kid on a borrowed Sportster β coasted out of line with his chain dragging sparks. The column idled. Walt was off his bike before the kid had finished apologizing, tools out of his saddlebag, working flat and fast in the gravel dust while three hundred engines ticked and waited and nobody honked. Four minutes. He wiped his hands on his jeans, refused the boy's wallet with a look, and said, "Stay in line. That's the whole trick to everything." They rolled on.
They came back in at noon to a lot transformed. Sal and Megan had run the kitchen line like a pit crew all morning, and the food went out in waves: pulled pork, beans, slaw, pie. The donation buckets by the door filled and were emptied and filled again. A bluegrass trio from the VFW played on a flatbed. Riders who had never met sorted themselves into the easy fraternity of men and women who had shared a road and a meal, and more than one of them pressed a bill into Ruth's hand, because the buckets felt too anonymous for what they meant.
By two o'clock the pie case stood empty for the first time in anyone's memory, and Sal, unbothered, sent out the sheet cake he had baked at midnight just in case, because Sal Moretti planned for appetites the way generals plan for weather.
At three o'clock, Kershner climbed back onto the pickup bed. He thanked the town, the deputies, the kitchen. Then he said, "Forty years this place fed anybody who came down that road. Today the road fed it back. That's the whole sermon. Eat your pie."
It was, by every measure anyone could name, the biggest day in the Blue Plate's forty years. When the last bike rolled out at dusk and the lot stood empty but for ribbons of crepe paper and Sal asleep in a folding chair, Ruth locked the door and stood a moment in the quiet kitchen, listening to the building tick as it cooled, like a horse after a long run.
Chapter 18: The Count