By sixteen he could shift gears with his eyes closed and could identify his father's bike by sound from the other end of their street. He and Walter argued constantly. Garrett wanted speed and recognition; Walter preferred steady work and a machine that returned its rider home. Garrett wanted a bigger club, louder pipes, a patch that made strangers move aside. Walter wanted him to learn that being feared was expensive, and that eventually somebody always presented the bill.
The two men did not reconcile before Walter died. A heart attack took him in his late sixties, after a morning spent replacing a brake line for a neighbor who had no money to spare. Garrett inherited a house full of unpaid invoices and the motorcycle his father had treated like a second child. He kept the bike, sold the house, and spent years riding through places his father had never seen, as if covering more miles might somehow complete their interrupted conversation.
Black Fury crossed state lines in every season. It survived rainstorms in Pennsylvania, desert heat in New Mexico, potholes outside Chicago, and a radiator hose blown apart on a borrowed truck while Garrett was helping another rider get home. The motorcycle accumulated changes along the way. A later carburetor replaced its original one. The wiring had been repaired more than once. Walter's unusual custom timing arrangement remained, carefully maintained and poorly understood by nearly everyone else.
Garrett knew the basic things that kept it alive. He could change its oil, replace its plugs, adjust the clutch, and find trouble he had seen before. But he had built a reputation that left him unwilling to admit when he needed help. The president of a feared motorcycle chapter did not, in Garrett's imagination, ask questions that might make him appear uncertain. He gave orders instead, and many people found it easier to obey than to question why the orders existed.
At fifty, he was a man whose physical presence arrived before his voice. He led the Detroit chapter with a mixture of hard loyalty, suspicion, and anger that had been rewarded often enough to feel like wisdom. Fifteen members gathered around him at the Iron Rail on most summer weekends, and others came and went with the seasons. Some admired his refusal to leave a brother stranded. Others endured his temper because a long history together could make even a harmful arrangement feel permanent.
The Iron Rail itself had once been a freight warehouse near a disused spur of track off Michigan Avenue. Its walls were bare concrete, its windows narrow, and its steel door bore old scars from weather and years of rough use. Inside were a bar, a pool table, a meeting room, and a garage bay built for the motorcycles that brought everyone together. Outside, a parking lot opened toward the street, enclosed on two sides by chain-link fencing and on the third by the blank wall of an old industrial building.