Leo smiled.
“Why?”
“He never knew how to accept credit either.”
She pointed at him.
“Don’t become that.”
Leo thought about it.
“I’ll try.”
Marianne handed him something.
Dutch’s dog tags.
Leo immediately shook his head.
“No.”
“I want you to have them.”
“No.”
“The ring stays with me.”
“That makes sense.”
“The tags.”
She closed his hand around them.
“Arthur carried these inside the bike.”
Leo stared.
“They belong with you.”
“Why?”
“Because you understood the bike before you understood the man.”
Leo looked at the metal tags.
“I never met him.”
Marianne smiled.
“You met what he left behind.”
After she died several years later, Big Jim called.
They spoke for less than five minutes.
Both men hated long emotional telephone conversations.
At the end, Big Jim said, “She was grateful.”
Leo looked toward the tags hanging inside a glass cabinet.
“So was I.”
Big Jim remained quiet.
Then said, “You know, when we came to Barstow that day, some guys were mad.”
“I noticed.”
“We didn’t know if you’d stripped the bike.”
“I didn’t.”
“We know.”
“You scared the hell out of me.”
“That was partially intentional.”
Leo laughed.
“You brought three hundred people.”
“Three hundred and five.”
“You counted?”
“Of course.”
Leo shook his head.
“Completely insane.”
Big Jim said nothing for a moment.
Then his voice softened.
“Dutch always said machines tell you who worked on them.”
Leo leaned against the counter.
“What does that mean?”
“Means when we looked at the bike, we knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That whoever had it didn’t treat it like stolen property.”
Leo remembered that day.
The tarp.
The wrench.
The dust.
“You could tell?”
“The bolts were labeled.”
Leo smiled.
“I didn’t want to lose anything.”
“Fuel line routed properly.”
“I fixed it twice.”
“Wiring wasn’t butchered.”
“Frank would’ve killed me.”
“And that ugly primer?”
Leo laughed.
“Budget.”
Big Jim chuckled.
“You respected it before you knew you were supposed to.”
Leo became quiet.
“I loved it.”
“I know.”
That was the truth at the center of everything.
Leo had loved a machine nobody else seemed to remember.
Not because it was valuable.
Not because it belonged to a famous outlaw biker.
Not because hundreds of men would eventually arrive to reclaim it.
He loved it because it was broken and he knew what broken things looked like when everyone had given up on them.
Maybe that was why the Harley found him.
Maybe that was why he recognized life inside an engine covered by twelve years of dust.
At thirty, Leo still lived near Barstow.
Sarah’s asthma remained difficult but controlled.
She worked fewer hours now.
Leo bought her a small house away from the worst highway dust.
Frank eventually sold the rest of O’Malley’s yard to a recycling company and retired somewhere near Lake Havasu, where he complained the fishing was terrible while going fishing every morning.
Rossi Restoration expanded.
Four bays.
Then six.
Leo hired apprentices.
Young people who arrived with bad grades, complicated homes, juvenile records, anxiety, anger, no money, or no direction.
He did not save everyone.
That was another lesson growing older taught him.
You could offer tools.
You could offer work.
You could offer patience.
People still had to choose what they built.
One sixteen-year-old apprentice named Mateo reminded Leo painfully of himself.
Too thin.