Storm Prey

soul, and then he fell drunk off a roof one spring morning and broke both of his legs.
    With no medical insurance, he took what he could get, the legs fixed at a charity hospital, sweating out the summer in a concrete-block apartment with both legs in casts, no air-conditioning. The guy next door was a biker, took pity on him, brought him beer, crackers, cheddar cheese, and summer sausage. Back on the job, and still under the influence of the biker, Cap saved his money and bought a used Harley Softail and a window air conditioner.
    Did the biker thing.
    Let his hair grow down to his shoulders. Bought a high-end leather jacket and chaps at a Harley rally. Pierced an ear for a silver-skull earring, pierced a lip for a steel ring, bought himself a rich selection of do-rags. Got a tattoo on his back, ten inches across, a motorcycle wheel with the words Razzle-Dazzle.
    Took some shit because of his youth. Had one guy who kept talking about taking Caprice into the desert and gang-fucking him, to break him in, the guy said. The guy laughed about it, but Caprice thought there might be something underlying it, so he killed him.
    Went to his house with a street gun, and when the guy answered the doorbell, shot him in the heart and ran away in the night, the guy’s girlfriend screaming from the kitchen.
    Nobody figured that one out. But he was riding as an indie, and anybody might try to ride over an indie. He did the reasonable thing and got himself the Judge.
    People who pissed him off tended to disappear, and bikers got careful when they were around him. Nobody knew, but they knew. He encountered Shooter Chapman, a fellow Minnesotan, in a friendship ride for cancer or heart health or kidneys or some shit like that, where the old guys all had flags on the backs of their trikes.
     
     
    BY THE TIME he was old enough to be invited into a gang, he no longer wanted it: the brotherhood, the drinking, the ranking, the rules. He likedbeing alone. He could trust being alone. He dumped the Harley after he’d killed the man for his BMW, and the new long-distance ride, with the German name, set him further apart from the gangs.
    Then one day he glanced at himself in a Burger King mirror, saw a piece of yellow cheese stuck to his lip ring.
    He was a fuckin’ joke, he thought, staring into the mirror. He needed to hone his act, he needed to get down to what he was.
    He traded the high-end leathers for a fifties jacket that he found in Hollywood, black leather so old and sand-worn and sweat-soaked that it had turned brown. Got rid of the earring and the lip ring. Shaved his head. Threw away his do-rags. Bought a pair of Vietnam-era military goggles with round lenses and olive-drab canvas straps that made him look like a frog. Liked the look.
    He got it so stripped down, so plain, so wicked, so weathered that when he walked into a biker place, everybody stopped talking to look at him. They knew he was out there, the place they talked about going, but never really did. He liked that, too.
    Like the day a bunch of Angels rode into LA from San Bernardino, then hooked north up the PCH toward Santa Barbara, riding like a bunch of old women on their Harleys, graybeards with old fat chicks, Arrive Alive, Drive 55, and he’d blown their doors off, riding one-handed through the pack like a fuckin’ guided missile at 110. He’d replayed that scene in his mind any number of hundreds of times ...
    When the roofing business went in the tank with the rest of the economy, and some bones turned up in the Mojave and got written about in the newspapers, Cappy moved back to Minnesota, looked up Shooter.
    Shooter introduced him to the gang at Cherries, and got him a job throwing boxes at UPS. The good thing about UPS was, you worked all night, had a full twelve hours to drink and ride, catch four hours of sleep, and then, with a little help from your friend methamphetamine, the next shift.
    With all that, Cappy ...
    Had never been laid.

    HE KNEW how it was done; he’d even seen it done, live and in color, on a table in the Dome Bar in Bakersfield, among the bottles of Heinz catsup and 57 sauce and the clatter of silverware. It hadn’t been pretty, but it held his attention.
     
     
    BARAKAT TOOK HIM to a bar called Trouble on the west side of Minneapolis, out on Highway 55, Cappy filled with cocaine and trepidation. Barakat drifted through a crowd unnaturally large for the crappy kind of bar it was, black light and brass poles, and hooked them up