The Biker Who Walked Her Home

“Yes, ma’am, it’s the same man,” my husband said into the phone. “No, I’m not exaggerating. I’m watching him do it right now.”

Shane stood at our front window with the curtain hooked back on two fingers. His voice was perfectly level. That was the thing about Shane. He never raised it. The surer he was, the quieter he got.

I stood behind him with a dish towel in my hands and looked where he was looking.

Down Walnut Street, under the sweetgum trees that were just starting to drop, our seven-year-old was walking home from school. Purple backpack. One pigtail coming loose. And beside her, taking one step to every three of hers, was the man who had moved in next door in August.

Gus.

He was six foot four if he was an inch. Gray beard down to his breastbone. Black bandana, black leather vest, and tattoos that ran from his knuckles up both arms and came out the top of his collar. Lily had hold of two of his fingers. That was all her hand could get around.

“He’s a grown man with no relation to her,” Shane told the dispatcher. “Tattoos up his neck. Motorcycle. I called about this two weeks ago and a deputy told me there was nothing he could do. I’d like somebody to come tell me that again while I’m looking at it.”

He listened.

“Thank you. We’re the white house with the green door.”

He hung up and let the curtain fall.

“Shane,” I said.

“Don’t.”

“She’s two houses away. She’s fine. Look at her.”

“I am looking at her.” He set the phone on the windowsill, face down, very neatly. “That’s the problem, Amy. I’m the only one who is.”

Lily came up the porch steps at 3:16, the same as every day. I heard her say, “Bye, Mr. Gus,” and I heard a low voice say something back that I couldn’t make out. Then the screen door banged.

She stopped when she saw both of us standing there.

“Hi,” she said, careful.

“Go wash your hands,” Shane said.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Nobody said you did. Go wash your hands.”

She went. She looked back once from the hallway, at me, not at him.

The cruiser pulled up eleven minutes later. It was the same deputy as the first time, a tired man of about fifty named Dale, with a mustache and a pair of reading glasses in his shirt pocket. He got out slow, the way a man gets out when he already knows how the conversation is going to go.

Shane met him on the porch. I stayed in the doorway.

“Mr. Decker,” the deputy said. “We talked about this.”

“We did.”

“Walking down a public sidewalk isn’t a crime. I told you that. Holding a child’s hand with the child’s say-so, in broad daylight, on the way to her own front door, isn’t a crime either.”

“I’m not asking you to arrest him,” Shane said. “I’m asking you to go over there and tell him how it looks.”

Dale looked at him a moment. Then he looked at me. I looked at the porch boards.

“All right,” he said.

He walked across our yard to the little house with the blue shutters and knocked. Gus came out. I watched him listen to the deputy with his head bent, nodding, nodding again. Then he reached up and pulled the bandana off his head and held it in both hands in front of him, the way my granddad used to hold his hat when he talked to the preacher.