Read Online If Rock and Roll Were a Machine by Terry Davis - Free Book Online

grandmother now lived alone. The living room couch folded out, and he had slept many nights there after whirling the last old maid through the buttery grit at the bottom of the popcorn bowl and crunching it, after wrestling orbowling or a wildlife show had ended at ten. He breathed deep and slow, blew his nose, looked down at the ragged tissue. He’d told himself he was riding over here to be a comfort to his grandmother, but he guessed he was really here for the comfort she and Gramp had always given him.

Chapter 13
Lucky Bert Bowden
    Bert gave a hand signal as he turned north on Division. He checked both mirrors and signaled again before he slipped into the right lane. You can count on drivers of cars to be predictable in one sense only, Shepard had told him. They’ll always be dangerous. They’ll look right at you, their faces will even seem to acknowledge you, then they’ll pull out, anyway. Bert was being particularly careful because he was breaking the law riding without the company of a licensed rider. Riding a motorcycle on Division during rush hour was unwise, and it was grossly stupid when you didn’t even have your operator’s license. Bert knew this, but he was riding, anyway.
    Traffic moved about forty-five miles an hour, and it was bumper-to-bumper. Bumper-to-bumper, that is, unless you were on a motorcycle, in which case you had no bumper. You had tires, fenders, a helmet, your skull—but you had no bumper.
    Bert watched the Blazer in front, the cars moving on both sides, and he checked his mirrors for encroachment from the rear. They might get him, but they wouldn’t take him by surprise.
    He insinuated himself into the right lane a long waysbefore the turn to Shepard’s, and he rode close to the curb to keep plenty of distance between him and the cars nosing over into any little space that opened up. From the middle lane a guy about Bert’s dad’s age in a brown jacked-up Ford 4x4 looked at him. The guy seemed to see Bert. He even stretched his neck to look back as he cut over into Bert’s lane. The cab of the pickup fit fine into the space between Bert and the red Miata in front, but there was no place for the rest of it.
    This happened too fast for Bert to yell at the guy or to have hit the horn button. Neither of these efforts would have helped, anyway, because the guy’s truck was louder than Bert’s bike. The whir of his oversized, all-terrain tires alone was enough to drown out the Sportster. What Bert did was exactly what he should have done: He gassed it and shot up over the curb.
    It was lucky for Bert and the people in the world who loved him that he hit the curb at just the right angle to go over it rather than skitter along the edge where the pickup would have caught him and where some part of him would have ended up under its right rear tire.
    Lucky Bert Bowden straddled the idling Sportster in the nursery parking lot and screamed after the Ford-man with all his might, “You cocksucker!” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and then he heard a familiar voice.
    â€œYou’ve had that bike what—twenty-four hours? And already you’re talkin’ like a biker. Who says the American teenager ain’t a fast learner?”
    There stood Scott Shepard holding a coffee can full of straw flowers. “How come you’re not at football practice?” he said. “Camille told me you’re a QB.”
    â€œI got cut,” Bert said. “I’m not a QB anymore.” Bert was amazed that Camille knew his name.
    â€œThat’s too bad,” Shepard said. “Shut that thing down and we’ll walk back to the shop. You might need a place to change your shorts.”
    Shepard bounced the can of flowers against his leg as they walked to the alley. He actually limped on both legs. Bert had never seen anyone limp on both legs before.
    â€œEasy to get hurt on a motorcycle,” Shepard said.