Chapter 23: The Run
Spring came to Coldwater Creek the way it always does, arguing with winter right into May, and the club opened the season with the run they'd been planning since Hammer's discharge — the first charity run of the year, dedicated to my dad.
I need to be careful here, because a thing can get sentimental just from size. Seven hundred bikes. That's the number the highway patrol estimated afterward, and for once the patrol wasn't exaggerating. Seven hundred motorcycles, from three states, rolling for a tow-truck driver from Coldwater Creek who stopped one night for a stranded motorist and never came home. The entry fees went to the scholarship fund the club had set up for kids of roadside workers. Dad would have called all of it "a lot of fuss over a man with a hook." He'd have said it with his face doing the thing it did when he was pleased and embarrassed at the same time. I know because I have the same face. Micah has it too.
Mile marker 114 is where it happened. You've driven past places like it your whole life and never seen them. A guardrail, a shoulder, a stretch of grass the county mows. The club had gone through channels — actual channels, permits and paperwork, because putting a marker on a state highway is not a whim — and set a small granite stone back from the shoulder where the wildflowers start. Dutch told me later the county hearing took eleven minutes, because the commissioner in charge of that stretch had once waited two hours in a January ditch before a Halloway truck came around the bend. The county maintains the pull-off now. There's a sign with an arrow, the small brown kind, same as for fishing access. My father's name sits in a state database of permitted roadside markers, spelled right. Kate says it's the only file with his name in it that ever came out the way it should. It's not tall. It doesn't have a photograph or a poem. It has a tow hook carved into the granite, deep enough to cast a shadow, and under it Tom Halloway's name and his dates, and under that, two words the club argued about for a month and then voted unanimous.
He stopped.
The route was planned so the whole run passes it slow, single file, at rolling speed — no stopping on the highway, that was the patrol's one condition. Seven hundred bikes going past a granite stone at twenty miles an hour takes a long time. I rode pillion behind Dutch, in the middle of the pack, where they'd put me like something carried. Dutch Ferreira at parade speed is a man suppressing his entire personality, and I could feel him doing it, and I loved him for it. Behind us, in the chase truck, Rita drove with one hand at ten and two like a woman defusing something, and Micah leaned at the passenger window, waving at the riders going past like a small mayor.
I had decided beforehand, very firmly, that I was not going to cry on the back of Dutch's bike. I had my reasons. It was windy. Crying at speed is a logistical problem.
Then the front of the pack reached the marker, and bike after bike rolled past it with the riders' left hands coming down — not a salute, nothing that formal. Just a hand, lowered, toward the stone, the way you touch a table when you pass through a room where someone you loved used to sit. Seven hundred hands. I watched it go down the line ahead of us and come back up the line behind, and Dutch's shoulders were shaking a little under his cut, and mine were too, and the wind took care of the rest.
At the fairgrounds afterward there were raffles and a silent auction and a band whose drummer was somebody's nephew, and the scholarship fund took in more in one afternoon than the treasurer had projected for the year. People kept coming up to say they'd known Dad, or hadn't known him, or had been towed by him in a snowstorm in 2009, or had heard. Micah collected these stories the way he collects everything, gravely, like a boy building something he intends to keep. By evening he could tell you the one about Dad winching a school bus out of the ditch on Christmas Eve with a straight face and both hands.
We rode home at dusk in a pack thinned to the local bikes, Micah asleep against the chase truck's window, and the stone sat back there in the grass at mile marker 114 with the light going off it. He stopped. That's the whole of the law, as far as my family is concerned. Everything since — the courtrooms, the cameras, the ninety days — has just been the rest of us learning how to say it.