I'm running out of ways to say thank you. " Wade didn't answer. He reached over, picked a carburetor off a dead pressure washer, and set it down in front of him with a rag. Ethan cleaned it. That was the closest thing to comfort anybody offered him for months, and it was the only kind that worked. His mother, Denise, dispatched school buses.
Up at 4:40, out the door by 5:15, home to a kitchen table and a folder of insurance paperwork that got thicker every week. Most nights she fell asleep in the recliner with the lamp on because getting up and going to bed was a decision and she had already made all of hers for that day. She and her son loved each other very much and lied to each other constantly gently in small denominations. How you feeling? Fine.
You sleep? Yeah. Neither of them was fooling anybody and neither of them called it. The screwdriver stayed in that jacket for three weeks, which is how on a cold Friday in early December, Ethan came to be riding up Copperhead Ridge Road looking for the man it belonged to. The road runs out of town past the water tower and turns to gravel about a mile and a half in.
At the end of it, set back behind a stand of poppplers, there's a house with a fabrication shop bolted onto the side of it like an afterthought that outgrew the original idea. Inside that shop, there is nothing that isn't square, level, and where it belongs. There's a wall of jigs Ray Mercer built himself one at a time over 30 years. By the door of the house on a hook, there's a woman's canvas coat that has hung there since Carol Mercer died 6 years ago. And there are two motorcycles.
The first is a 1999 Road King. And Ry uses it like a wheelbarrow. Hardware store, feed store, home. He rides it the way another man walks to the mailbox. The second one is under a tarp in the back bay.
Once a year in the spring, Ray pulls that tarp back and changes the oil in a motorcycle that has not moved. He warms it, drains it, refills it, checks the plugs, wipes it down, and covers it again. The battery stays on a tinder year round, so there's a small green light in the corner of that garage that has been burning in the dark for a very long time. The tires still hold air. They have not touched a road since 1997.
You should know something about who Ry was because none of it ever came from him. Between about 1980 and 1997, if you rode anything in that county and you bend it, cracked it, or wanted something on it that didn't come from a factory, you went up Copperhead Ridge. He built frames. He fixed frames other men had built badly. He fabricated brackets and mounts and one-off pieces that people are still riding on today without knowing whose hands made them.
Old riders around there don't say his name like a person. They say Mercer like it's a place. Take it up to Mercer. And nobody had seen him at a run in 29 years. Not a poker run, not a memorial ride, not a swamp meet.
The phone rang for a while, then it rang less. Then it stopped and Ray let it. He was not a broken down man. That's what people get wrong when they hear it. He got up at 5:00.
He kept his shop clean. He paid cash. At 67, he could still pick up the front end of a bagger and set it over 8 in without asking anybody for help. He was a disciplined man doing something on purpose every morning. And it looked a great deal like a man standing guard.
Because then somebody knocked on the door of a shop. Nobody knocked on anymore. Wade's truck sat idling at the end of the gravel. Ethan came across the yard on the cane through 2 in of old snow with a screwdriver in his free hand and it was a transparently thin excuse and both of them knew it. Ray opened the door and looked at him a second longer than was comfortable placing him.
Then he took the screwdriver. You drove out here for this. I had a free afternoon, Ethan said. I have a lot of free afternoons. There was a pause where a normal person asks about the leg.
Ray didn't. What he said was, "You want to be useful or you want to stand in the way? " And he put a work light in his hand. That is the foundation of everything that came after. And it took about 4 seconds. And neither of them registered it at the time.
Ray Mercer needed a light held on a joint at an awkward angle, and the only person in the building was a 19-year-old with a cane, so he handed him the light. Ethan held it. Then Ry asked him what he thought of the weld he just pulled out of the vice and Ethan told him and Ry disagreed at length and with citations. 45 minutes went by. Nobody mentioned cancer, not once.
Somewhere in there, Ethan got the first story out of him and it wasn't a good one. It was 1981 outside of Bristol, a clutch cable that let go on a Sunday with nothing open and Ray riding 300 m home on a boot lace and a piece of brake line using a technique he described in detail and which Ethan did not believe for one second. Four, Ethan said, "For what out of 10 plausibility? " Ray looked up. It's true. That's what makes it a four instead of a two.
He was smiling when he said it. Ray went back to the vice and something in the shape of that room had changed and neither man could have told you what. It was on his way out that Ethan saw the tarp. He'd been working the near side of the shop all afternoon. Now walking toward the door with his hands finally free, he caught the angle on the back bay, the outline of a tank, the lift of handlebars, the low sit of something old.
What's that one? Ray had a wrench in his hand. He didn't look over. That's not mine. Ethan waited.
He'd already learned that Ry filled silences if you gave him room. Ray didn't fill it. Whose is it? Ray opened the drawer of the bench, laid the wrench inside, closed it, and said, "Wade's waiting on you. " It would be 5 weeks before Ethan got an answer, and when it came, it wasn't the one anybody would have guessed. Ray turned up at the hospital 11 days later.
Nobody invited him. He'd asked which days Ethan was there, and Ethan had said Tuesdays mostly, and Ry had said, "Hm. " which by then Ethan understood to be a complete sentence with several possible meanings. He came up the hall of the infusion suite on a Tuesday morning with a coffee can in his hand, not flowers, not a card, a one-bound Maxwell house came with the lid pressed on and inside it a chainsaw carburetor in about 14 pieces with the gaskets in a sandwich bag. He set it on the tray table beside the chair and said, "Diaphragm shot or it's the inlet needle. I can't tell which and I'm not going to sit there squinting at it.