The Biker Who Walked Her Home

That should have told me something. It didn’t. Not then.

Shane went down our steps and across the grass. I followed him, because I always followed him.

“I’m going to say this one time,” he said, “and I’m going to say it in front of the deputy so there’s no confusion about it later.”

Gus waited. Up close he was even bigger. There was a skull on the back of one hand and a rose on the other, and letters across his knuckles gone blue and soft with age.

“You don’t walk with my daughter,” Shane said. “You don’t talk to my daughter. You don’t wave at my daughter.”

“She asked me to, sir,” Gus said. His voice was low and rough, like a truck idling.

“She’s seven. She’d ask a stray dog in the house.”

Behind us our screen door creaked. I turned. Lily was standing inside it with her nose against the mesh and her wet hands held out from her sides.

Shane didn’t turn around. I’m not sure it would have changed anything if he had.

“I don’t know what you did, or where you did it, to end up looking the way you look,” he said. “I don’t need to know. But a man like you doesn’t get to move onto a street like this and borrow somebody’s little girl.”

It went very quiet. A leaf came down between them. The deputy shifted his weight and studied his boots.

Gus looked at my husband for a long time. I braced for it. A man that size, talked to that way in his own yard. I thought, here it comes.

“Yes, sir,” Gus said. “You’re her daddy. I’ll keep off.”

Then he looked past Shane’s shoulder to our screen door. He didn’t wave. He had just been told not to. He put the bandana back on his head, tied it, and went inside and shut the door without a sound.

Dale walked Shane back to our porch.

“For what it’s worth,” the deputy said, low, “I ran him the first time you called. There’s nothing there. Not so much as a parking ticket.”

“There’s always nothing there,” Shane said, “until there is.”

I would like to tell you that I argued with my husband that night. I would like to tell you I said one word in that yard.

I didn’t. I was afraid of Gus too.

He had come in August, in the worst of the heat, in a pickup with a motorcycle strapped down in the bed and not much else. No wife. No furniture truck. Two lawn chairs and a coffee can for the porch. The bike started every morning at ten till six, and it rattled the glasses in my kitchen cabinet.

Shane had him figured by the second day. “I know what a vest like that means,” he said. He didn’t. Neither did I. There was a patch sewn on the back of it, and neither one of us ever got close enough to read the words.

We live in Hadley Creek, eleven miles outside Joplin. It is a one-stoplight town with a grain elevator, a Baptist church, a Methodist church and a Dollar General. People here wave from their trucks with two fingers off the steering wheel. They do not, as a rule, have skulls on their hands.

Shane works at the concrete plant. He clocks in at five in the morning and he is home in his chair by two. I work the front desk at a dentist’s office in Joplin and I don’t get off until five. So that fall, for the first time, Lily walked herself to school and back. Two blocks. Down Walnut, across Fourth, and there’s the gate.