On a Saturday morning, 67-year-old Ray Mercer walked out of the machine shop expecting to find eight old friends and a cup of bad coffee. Instead, he found motorcycles, hundreds of them. They stretched down the road and disappeared around the band. Then, he realized there were nearly 2,000 riders waiting for him. Most had never met Ry.
Almost none had ever met the 19-year-old who had brought them there. And bolted to the back of the motorcycle Rey hadn't touched in 29 years was something that hadn't been there the night before. A brand new passenger seat, still stiff, still empty, who was supposed to be sitting there. And why had a dying 19-year-old gone to such extraordinary lengths to put someone on that seat? To understand that, we have to go back 7 months to a hospital parking garage where an old biker met a young man who was running out of time.
It was the second week of November, cold enough that the concrete held it. Ethan Cobb was standing near the stairwell with his hood up, waiting on his mother to bring the car around because the walk to the far row was longer than his left leg wanted that afternoon. About 50 ft away, an older man in a faded leather vest was trying to start a motorcycle that would not start. It turned over. That was the maddening part.
It cranked strong and clean and did absolutely nothing else. The man let off, waited, tried again. Same sound. He shifted his weight, adjusted something, and tried a third time, and the garage handed the noise back off the walls. Ethan watched for a full minute without moving.
He knew what it was inside of 15 seconds. He watched for the rest of that minute because there is a particular pleasure when you have spent 2 years being the person other people fix in watching somebody else be wrong. You're flooding it. The man didn't turn around. I know what I'm doing.
Then why isn't it running? That got him a look and not a friendly one. Gray in the beard, forearms like a man who had worked with his hands for 40 years and never found a reason to stop. There was a patch on the front of that vest with a date stitched under the lettering and nobody read it that day, including Ethan. He came over, taking his time about it, and got down on his good side, which is not a graceful thing to do with a cane.
He put two fingers on the bottom of the float bowl and ran them along the seam. Got a screwdriver. The man reached into his saddle bag and handed one over. Handle first without a word. Ethan tapped the bowl twice.
Not hard. A tap and a half. The way you knock on a door you're not sure anybody's behind. Hold it wide open all the way, then crank it. The engine caught on the second revolution.
Came up rough and settled. The man let it idle. He looked at the cane leaning against the front tire. He looked at the paper wristband sticking out from under a sweatshirt sleeve. Then he looked back up at Ethan's face, which is a small thing, and it mattered a great deal later.
Where'd you learn that? My uncle's shop. Mowers, mostly. Bikes are just loud mowers. The man made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
H. He put his hand out for the screwdriver, and a horn went off down at the end of the row, short and apologetic, and Ethan said something like, "That's me. " And got himself turned around. And by the time he reached the car, the screwdriver was in his jacket pocket. And neither man had noticed. Who was that?
His mother asked. Guy with a bike. Was he bothering you? No, mom. That was the whole meeting.
No names. Nothing either one of them would have thought to write down. Here's what you need to know about Ethan Cobb, and it isn't the part you're expecting. He grew up in his uncle's shop. Cobb Small Engine, a metal building on the east end of Delaney Falls with a handlettered sign Wade Cobb painted himself in 1998 and never once repainted.
Ethan's father moved to Texas when Ethan was 8. And after that, the boy spent his afternoons on a stool at the back bench with a coffee can of parts in front of him because that's where his mother knew he'd be safe and where his uncle knew he'd be useful. Wade Cobb is not a talker. In all the time you're going to spend with him, he says almost nothing. What he does is hand people things.
By 15, Ethan could diagnose a dead two-stroke by the smell of it. There was a plan, and everybody in that family knew it without anybody having said it in a room. Ethan takes the shop at 25. Wade retires. The sign stays.
The pain in his leg started when he was 17, and everybody assumed it was ball or growth or the way he'd been sleeping. It was a tumor in the femur. They took the tumor and gave him back a leg that worked mostly. Then 14 months went by clean and ordinary and everyone let their shoulders down. It came back in September in his lungs.
He was 19. Now here's the part that actually got to him and it took his family a long while to see it. The church on Holl Street held a fundraiser. There was a flyer and it went up on the courtboard at the diner and in the window of the feed store and it had his senior picture blown up too large so the grain showed. There was a page online where strangers left comments with hearts in them.
A woman he knew from the grocery store. A good woman who meant every word of it, pushed her cart aside in the produce aisle and cried at him for a solid minute while he stood there holding a bag of apples, saying, "It's okay. Thank you. Thank you. " He said, "Thank you about 400 times that fall. " He was in the back of Wade's shop in October, sitting with his leg out straight, and he said it flat, the way you'd read a number off a gauge. "Everybody keeps doing stuff for me.