For a few hours each afternoon he worked on that bicycle. The handlebars were crooked and one rim was bent, but it had two tires that might hold air after being patched. He imagined riding into Kingman before sunrise, washing dishes or carrying parts for a garage, and never telling anyone where he had been. The plan depended on finding food, fresh water, and a tire pump he had not yet discovered. Leo was young enough to believe that solving one mechanical problem might somehow solve the others.
At night the station grew enormous around him. Wind passed through the roof openings and made the hanging sign knock softly against its frame. Coyotes called from the hills. Sometimes distant headlights slid across the broken windows and filled the garage with moving bars of white light, and Leo would fold himself behind the workbench until the sound passed. He had escaped a house where every footstep announced danger, only to find a place where anything approaching might mean the same thing.
On the twenty-first evening he sat beside the old workbench and opened the dented tin in which he kept his father's last possessions. There was a black-and-white photograph of Patrick standing beside a motorcycle, a short socket that had somehow remained in Leo's pocket through every placement, and a folded scrap of paper on which his father had once sketched a carburetor for him. The drawing was uneven because Patrick had made it with a mechanic's pencil while explaining how a machine breathed.
Leo touched the paper, then pressed it flat beneath a rusted washer. 'I could use a little help, Dad,' he whispered. There was no answer beyond the slow rattle of the station sign.
Outside, the western horizon turned violet. Heat rose from the highway in faint, wavering sheets. Leo was gathering his few belongings before darkness when a sound came from far down the road: the deep, uneven note of a large motorcycle engine running wrong.
He knew it was wrong before he saw the bike. The exhaust report broke into sharp, ugly cracks. The motor surged, stumbled, recovered, and then gave a strained mechanical sound that made Leo stand upright. It reminded him of a person trying to breathe with something heavy on his chest.
A motorcycle emerged through the red light, its front wheel wandering toward the gravel shoulder. It was a big Harley-Davidson Road King, old enough to have seen a hundred thousand miles and cared for well enough that the chrome still caught the sun. The rider was broad through the shoulders, a dark figure bent forward over the bars. Behind him, a thin trail of smoke drifted into the desert air.
Leo went to the shattered window. The rider fought to keep the machine upright as it rolled toward the abandoned station. The rear wheel gave a violent shudder, and an instant later the engine stopped with a metallic shriek. The motorcycle coasted the last yards in silence and came to rest near the dead pumps.