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eBooks
Banjo Lane: Chapter One, Meet the Bros
Banjo Lane: Chapters Two and Three, Complications
Banjo Lane: Chapter Four, An Honest Meth Cook
Banjo Lane: Chapter Five, A Dark Day for Busy Farmers
Banjo Lane: Chapter Six, Happy Plans and Complications Multiply
Banjo Lane, Chapter Seven
"Oh look," said Keith, Here comes trouble in Daddy’s car. Hand me the log, Dear."
Bruce handed him the spiral notebook and pencil as he full screened the view of the little blue house next door. The Buick idled past its usual place in the parking area and disappeared off camera, pursued by the new little boy on his bicycle. "That’s odd. The red car hasn’t been around for a week or two."
Keith shrugged. "Maybe it broke down somewhere. Who knows? Who cares? It’s back now." He made a neat entry on the blue lined paper and shifted the main screen back to OZ. "Let Oscar in while you’re up? There’s a hon. I heard him bang the screen just now. Could be Gertrude, I suppose."
Hayes drove the Buick into the barn and parked it next to the bus. He shooed Billy out of the barn and rolled shut the sliding door. The less said about the Buick the better. He put the keys in his pocket and walked back to the house. Billy pushed his bicycle back to firm ground and continued riding laps around the end of the paved road.
"Hiya Honeychile," he greeted Brandy who was smoking and shuffling boxes of her worldly goods around the small house.
"Where have you been, Love?" She set down a box of canned goods on the kitchen table. Jacob was actually sleeping and the young mother had a chance to collect her thoughts as her two older kids were fascinated by the sudden freedom at the end of Banjo Lane and spent every minute out of doors expanding their range in the fresh bright sunshine.
"Me and Larry took a ride over to hang with Loomis and pick up Dad’s car. I let him use it a while cause his car wouldn’t run and he had some business to deal with. I guess I’ll change its oil--it’s about that time." Hayes casually studied Brandy so see how she was absorbing the information he had fed her.
She must have seen the car drive up. She might wonder why he didn’t park it in its usual place. The bit on changing the oil would hopefully deflect any developing thought she might have on why he parked in the barn. Hayes exhaled slowly through his nose.
"When can we do some crank?" Brandy whined. "I need to get wired so I can put all this stuff away."
Hayes smiled. He was certain Brandy wouldn’t notice the swapping of the cars. The acid test would be when she went for a ride in the stand in.
"Soon, Honeychile. Larry ain’t back yet. I’m sure he’ll get us back between the lines when he shows. Got a tiny bit of powder and a little bud right here in this pipe."
Brandy’s eye’s lit up. Hayes pulled a brass dope pipe with a screw on lid from a shirt pocket. Scary Larry arrived in his old white car and Jacob began to fuss at the same instant.
Larry parked his Ford by the barn. He pushed open the sliding door and regarded the maroon Buick Special parked alongside his bus. Well, hell. It was time to make the switch.
He found a phillips screwdriver on the dim workbench along the back wall and started in on the rear license plate. Off came the Huling Buick license plate frame. The plates from Cletus' burned car hung from a nail on the wall. Larry chose the one without squashed bugs for the back.
He was snugging it down when Hayes darkened the door. "Hey Dawg."
"Jesus, Hayes. What did you do back there? I saw cop cars and an ambulance coming as I was leaving the area."
Hayes frowned and looked away. "I had it going really well back there, Dawg, I really did. The old woman was telling me all about how Fred had died and she wasn’t driving any more and how Fred bought the car new when Hector was a pup and I was nodding and letting her talk.
Then I finally told her I was looking for a good car and had her going in the right direction. I got her talked into me taking it for a test drive. She went and fetched the keys and I almost had them in my hand when all of a sudden she decides she had better wait until her son came by so he could go with me.
I kept talking just as smooth as silk but she wouldn’t go back to the beginning and let me take it for a spin by myself. Finally I had to take the keys out of her hand and she sort of fell."
"You push her a little, maybe?" Larry raised his eyebrows as he turned and stood.
Hayes shrugged. "Yeah, maybe a little bit. Stupid old bag."
"Oh God," Larry rolled his eyes as he read between the lines. He took a suck off of Evelyn Joneser's Finnish vodka and grimaced. He considered another slug but capped the bottle and replaced it by his old chair by the door of his bus.
"Cops'll be looking for this car, bro. You're right in that it's a dead ringer for your dad's, but that won't cut much ice if they check the VIN on the dash. However...I think we could burn these plates in the wood stove and then dump them with your dad's heap up on the hill. If that BLM joker runs them when he hauls it away, then the cops and everybody else will assume they have found what's left of this car and that should be the end of the problem.
Hayes was impressed. Scary Larry thought things through rapidly and came up with irrefutably logical solutions whereas it never would have occurred to Hayes to do other than trust to dumb luck. "You right, Dawg! That's a hell of a good idea. Let's swap the tires with the ones from Dad's car. We can just dump these. They are pretty worn out anyway."
Larry went through the "new" Buick looking for anything that might alert Cletus to the swap. He emptied out the glove box of all the receipts for tires and maintenance dating back twenty years. The pockets in the front doors yielded papers with names and addresses. He picked up the plastic FOR SALE sign out of the back seat and looked at it. A phone number and $2,000 had been written in with a sharpie in the blank space at the bottom along with One Owner & Low Miles.
Hayes industriously changed out the tires with the factory jack as Larry looked under the seats and on top of the sun visors. The pile of paper grew on top of the FOR SALE sign. There was a Mason's emblem on the back bumper and he pried it off. The car was very straight and was truly an exact duplicate of Cletus' Buick Special. The interior colors were identical. Very likely their Vehicle Identification Numbers were only a few digits apart. The car had never been smoked in. It was entirely possible that Cletus might not notice the swap when he arrived home after a year away.
"You know, bro, this just might fly. It would have been cool if we had saved all the paper out of your dad's car but I guess you can't think of everything. We could even put the hide a key box under the front bumper with keys in it.
The only problem I'm seeing right now is that your dad will show up with his original car keys and they ain't gunna work in this car."
Hayes jacked up the passenger front tire and considered. Larry certainly saw that clearly. "I think I will get some new keys made up and I will tell Dad that I installed a new ignition switch in the car when I couldn't find the key anywhere. I think the thing to do is really clean up the car and then just stick with the story that I cleaned it up to surprise him and I threw away all the old papers and junk in the process."
Larry sat in his old chair and sipped on the vodka. He was interspersing his tokay with Evelyn's liquor. He had tried pouring an inch and a half of gin in a half bottle of warm tokay. It had gone down like warm tokay always did with him and he had awoken in a puddle of puke. Fortunately there were sizable gaps between planks in the barn floor so most of it had drained between the cracks. From now on he would refrain from experimentation like that.
"I think you got it, bro. You can't do any better than that. Seems like this car has been waxed on a regular basis. Maybe you ought to wash it and buff it up real good and act like you did all that."
Hayes replaced the scuffed Korean tire with a whitewall Goodyear and spun the wheel so the tire iron firmed the lugs just by holding it. He downclicked the car onto the deck and snugged down the nuts with the fourway. Then he banged on the hubcap with the edge of his hand. He leaned his butt comfortably angainst the front passenger door and held out his hand for the vodka.
Larry passed the jug neck first and looked in his packet of storeboughts. Empty. He shrugged and picked up the Santa can and started rolling a pair of perfect smokes.
"This vodka is some stiff shit." Hayes puckered and swallowed.
"Yup. Shore is." Larry examined his roll and handed it to Hayes and took another paper in his fingers. We are gunna need some wheels if your dad repos the Buick. I don't know what to do about the white car but its plates expire at the end of the month. Needs brakes too. Bad."
Hayes lit up with a Bic and inhaled deeply on the fresh Top. When Larry rolled one, it was just about as good as a store bought. The afternoon sun was going down and life was good. "Not to worry, Dawg. We'll just peel the stickers off these here plate--oh looks like they expire next month. Well no problem. We'll boost a set of plates with a lot of time the next time we steal gas. Oh Yeah. We need to rip off a set of tail lights for the truck too. The nice policeman pointed this out the other night."
Larry lit his own cigarette and nodded. It looked like they had walked completely away from the death of the man in black. He had some misgivings about the new car swapping scheme but they were in it now. At least Hayes was. He really didn't have anything to do with it. He could hear Billy whooping out on the pavement as he rode his bicycle down the slope to the old blue house.
Tobacco smoke swirled in the sun rays slatting through the gaps in the barn's west wall. Larry flicked a switch on an extension cord by his chair and the inside of his bus lit up, dispelling the gathering darkness. He stood and fetched a paper grocery sack from the stairwell of his home. After dumping the empty green bottles out of the bag, he filled it with all the papers he had collected from the car. He slipped the two license plates in with the rest of it and handed the bag to Hayes.
The car thief took the bag and slapped Larry on the shoulder as he walked away. "Brandy said she was gunna make spaghetti with some of the ground beef we got in the freezer. Come and get some. I'll unplug the lights to your bus twice when it's ready." Hayes opened the sliding barn door and closed it behind him.
Scary Larry turned off the lights in his bus and sat in his chair in the deepening shadows. He rolled a cigarette and nipped the vodka and spun the cylinder of his loaded .38.
The days were suddenly long and hot. The mud turned to concrete and dust materialized everywhere. It was a Willamette Valley summer. Californians passing through bought real estate under the assumption that the weather was like this year round. The Seautons started a magnificent garden behind their secure deer fence.
Billy swiftly integrated with the two Hillman boys who lived in the trailer up the road. He learned to shoot arrows with the best of them. Pamela was a little too old and a little too young to associate with boys and there didn't seem to be any girls her own age on Banjo Lane.
She whined and carried the velveteen rabbit around with her. She made Brandy chase her out of the little house into the beautiful days. She explored up the old BLM road a little bit but didn't enjoy hiking around in the woods by herself. Scary Larry moved away from her whenever she came near him and Ronnie never came out of the camp trailer except to bicycle to the beer store every day.
Wednesday morning Pamela sulked in the spring chair on the front porch, rocking just enough to bang the back of her head on the shiplap wall behind her. This didn't hurt much but apparently it wasn't making enough noise to wake Mom up and make her come out to yell at her to stop. She was bored.
Donna Delores McCally came running gracefully down Banjo Lane. Her cap of the day read St. Thomas. Pamela stopped banging and watched Dee Dee run around the BLM road sign and then stoop to tie a shoe. She frowned as she thought about the big house Dee Dee lived in with new cars and all the trimmings. She was old enough to know that she wanted to live like that
Pamela routinely rode her bicycle to the beginning of Banjo Lane and back at least once a day. Yesterday she stopped and watched the movers empty out the Brand house into a big moving van in a matter of hours. Mrs Brand's oldest son pounded a SOLD sign in the yard, put the hammer in the trunk of his Thunderbird, helped his mother into the car and drove her away from the house that George built for the last time.
She would stand astride her bicycle and watch the traffic fly by on the CG- Lorane Highway at the end of Banjo Lane. It seemed like everybody drove big new SUVs out this way. She would stare at the huge McCally house and pretend that she lived there. There would be no waiting for the magic foodstamp card to recharge itself. She would NOT drive some junk car like her mother. She would be beautiful and desirable like Mrs McCally and always have new clothes and expensive automobiles with gold tipped exhauast pipes. She would wear Italian sandals and paint her toenails. Just like the beautiful people on the TV shows Mom loved so much.
Dee Dee finished tying her shoe and stood, put her hands on her hips and leaned backwards slightly a few times and then noticed Pamela as she looked down her nose at the "Tobacco Road" house with the garbage filled front yard. She waved at the girl on the porch and took off at a run up the incline. Pamela watched her go.
Pamela had taken to hanging out in the old pumphouse. It was surprisingly roomy and was well built with insulated walls and a concrete floor and even had electric lights. It sported a towering four sided pyramid roof covered with green mineral paper.
She had brought a small table and old rocking chair out to her lair. The pressure tank and plumbing stood in one corner of the little building and there were hand prints in the threshold where the concrete pourers had left their mark along with 1962.
The pumphouse was on the verge of being overrun by blackberries. It was close enough that you could smell the powerful sewage fermenting in the ditch by Ronnie’s fifth wheel. The salvaged window looked out on the back yard of the little blue house. Bright green grass exploded up amongst the junk and garbage that had come to rest there. Sad travel trailers sagged into the ground on flat tires.
This, then, was Pamela’s hideout. She could have tea with the velveteen rabbit at the little table. She could come here to rock and pout when Brandy yelled at her to quit moping around the house. She helped herself to a disused broom from the back porch and swept decades of dust off her floor. Every once in a while
the pump would trip and the little building would fill with a whirring noise as the needle on the pressure tank gauge slowly moved back to 60 pounds per square inch.
Pamela planned to put a little bed out here. It wouldn’t leave a lot of room but it would fit and she could be away from her bratty brother and all the grown ups in the little blue house. It would be pleasant to sleep outside the next few months.
Larry rubbed the sand from his eyes in his bus. He had been awake for a while but had found no reason to actually open his eyes. Bright sun filtered through the cracks in the east barn wall. It gave him an uneasy feeling that he needed to be up doing something constructive. He thought about the hot sun beating down on the thriving pot plants in the blackberries behind the barn. He would need to low crawl through the gook tunnels and give each plant a gallon of water today. He smiled thinking about the vigorous green hemp exploding up through the berry vines. This was gunna be a kick ass dope season. He would buy a big black Road King and be styling. Maybe he would even get a driver's license again.
The old white car crossed his mind. He was going to have to make some kind of a move as far as basic transportation went. The Ford hadn't received any maintenance since Larry started driving it. He added oil when it was low but never actually changed it. He had been forced to rip off some tires for it a couple of times. But it almost always ran. Hayes' idea of just stealing current tags for the car made a lot of sense. If the police pulled him over in the car for any reason, it was hard times anyway. As it was, you could just leave the Fairmont and walk away and the police would be unable to trace it to you as long as you didn’t leave paper with your name on it in the car.
There was about four hundred dollars in his big wallet with the chain. He kept hoping to develop the nest egg of Evelyn Joneser's rent money but it kept trickling between his fingers. He would brew up a little meth but most of it got smoked or increasingly, Brandy would stick it in her arm. Hayes was spiking the stuff too now, and cooking meth at the Loveless place was now a complete negative gain. It still beat working a job. He was going to have to find out how to acquire ephedrine by the fifty pound bag from Mexico. That was all there was to it.
Larry sighed and stretched on his moldy mattress. The old Beautyrest had been rescued from beside a dumpster 20 years ago. If it wasn’t worn out when it had been tossed, it certainly was by now. He was hurting a lot in the morning these days. Perhaps he needed to steal a new mattress to sleep on. Take a number, get in line. There were many day to day things that he needed to acquire but they all fell to the wayside in the endless quest for essential drugs and alcohol.
It was time to rise and shine. Larry could easily lie in bed for another hour or two but his back hurt, he had to piss and he felt the stirrings of a huge shit coming on. He thought about walking to the house to take a crap in the flush toilet but undoubtedly children would immediately start banging into the door the instant he closed it. Oh well. He got more or less vertical and shuffled at a stoop to the door of the Bluebird, grabbing the music roll as he passed a set of shelves behind the driver’s seat. He would crap out behind the barn. It discouraged kids from playing where they might discover the tunnel entrance to the operation in the feral pasture.
Hayes couldn’t sleep any more. Brandy was up with Jacob as he crashed around getting into everything. Cletus would be home soon. This would be inconvenient but he would weather it out. What choice did he have? It was either put up with Dad underfoot or get a job and become self sufficient. No contest there. Dad would go away eventually. He always did. That still left the problem of wheels when Dad was driving the "new" Buick. Brandy’s heap was on its last legs.
Money was non existent again. There was plenty of food thanks to Brandy’s experience at utilizing the system but food wouldn’t buy drugs or booze. He was going to have to steal something. He didn’t want to do the random house breaking again but what else was there? He was pretty good at stealing cars but he doubted if he could defeat the latest anti-theft systems. Even if he stole modern autos, he didn’t have anybody lined up to sell them to. All this thinking made him tired. He was drifting off for another hour or two when Jacob toddled shrieking into the room. It was time to get up.
The front end of the old white car was off the ground supported by concrete blocks. Larry swilled Tokay in the shade of the barn as he studied the worn out brake shoes on the driver’s side. It looked like the replacement shoes would fit. The old ones were worn to bare metal in places and the brake drums had grooves and ridges from letting it go. Oh well. The brake systems were covered with black gunk but there were no real brake fluid leaks yet.
Hayes wandered over from the house clutching a mug of instant coffee. "Whaddup, Dawg?"
"Hey,bro. I’m gunna change the front brake shoes on the clunk so I can stop. I guess I’m stuck with La Bomba, here. Maybe we can go steal some good tags tonight along with some gas."
"Yeah, it’s time to steal gas and a pair of tail lights for the truck. I need a car for when Dad comes home."
"Sounds like we got a whole list of needs, bro. I’m completely out of cold caps and we ain’t got much more crank. I don’t feel like showing ID to buy pills so I’m gunna have to score ephedrine from Mexico. I think Loomis might know how. I’m afraid to guess what it’s gunna cost."
Hayes shook his head and lit up a generic. "You wanna a list of needs–you oughta hear Brandy sing the blues. We need to make a score with some real dough involved. Not like that Mickey Mouse job we did with a piggy bank and credit cards."
Larry put down the new brake shoe he was holding and accepted a generic from Hayes. He nodded and lit the cigarette with a blue Bic. "I’m afraid you’re right, bro. I’m not really into ripping people off but I don’t see a lot of choice. It’s not like we just go out and get a job or something."
Hayes loved to fantasize about armed robbery but Larry wouldn’t entertain the concept. The bikeless biker was right in that stickups netted very little cash as a rule, and the police would immediately get involved instead of telling a ripped off home owner to file a report with their insurance company.
Late that night, Larry and Hayes lurked in the shadows on an upscale street in Eugene’s South Hills. The plan was to wander around and hope to luck out with an unlocked window and nobody home.
The thieves wore black sweatshirts and gloves with worn felony shoes that would be tossed after tonight. Hayes had found a nearly bald pair of Ponys, splattered with blue house paint, on the back porch. They were from the last time Cletus painted the house, many years ago. Dark baseball caps covered their heads and flashlights rode in their pockets.
They walked along trying to look inconspicuous in the shadows without actually hiding. Their eyes roved the shadows looking for an easy score.
The key was to discover an unlocked house with nobody home. And no dog. Larry had already rattled the fence of a likely candidate earlier and it had set off the frenzied barking of a sizable dog to be taken seriously.
"That one!" whispered Hayes as he pointed to a slightly smaller house than the rest of the block. It was darker than the surrounding homes and an old Acura sat alone on one side of the three car driveway.
Larry shrugged and nodded. He grabbed Hayes by the arm looked him in the eye. "Do exactly like we planned. No fuckups, bro."
Hayes nodded. He reviewed the precepts Larry had repeated over and over before agreeing to pull this job.
They would find a house that wasn’t locked. It was almost a certainty that any house in the South Hills would have a high tech security system. If they found a window unlocked, it was a good bet that the system wasn’t on.
They would take only compact items of value. Money, of course. And credit cards. Any handgun, but no long arms. No gallon jugs of pennies this time. No boxes of frozen meat and liquor bottles. No alarm clocks either.
Hayes remembered what Larry said about entering a house when they found an unlocked window. They would crawl through the window and move on all fours into the interior of the home. There might be electronic beams like in the movies. They would spend no more than 15 minutes in the house and then flee. They would take no more than two pillow cases apiece.
The housebreakers crouched in the dark shadow by the heat pump. Larry crawled along the wall to the backyard’s cedar fence and shook it. He shook it again and whistled. No savage barking. So far so good. He motioned Hayes to stand up and check windows. They both started pushing up on window casings. Hayes produced a small screwdriver from a back pocket and pried. Nope.
Larry shrugged in the gloom and climbed the fence. He made some noise but was pretty quiet about it. Soon Hayes was over and they both sat between the fence and a rhododendron bush and surveyed the back yard.
Larry pointed. What looked like a bathroom window had been left open just for them. Dim light shown through the screen. Larry moved to the window and stood up. He listened. He couldn’t hear a TV or anybody moving around. He was fairly certain nobody was at home.
Hayes moved up and jimmied the flimsy screen with his screw driver. He took it in a gloved hand and leaned it against the side of the house.
Larry made a stirrup with his hands and boosted Hayes through the window. Some small bricabrac clattered to the floor as he entered the home. No human noises. Hayes disappeared from Larry’s sight, crawling on the floor. A minute later a more generous bedroom window slid quietly up and Larry slipped through it.
"Nobody home, Dawg." reported Hayes in a low voice.
"Let’s do it." Larry moved to the king sized bed and flipped the covers off the pillows. He grabbed the ends of the satin cases and shook the pillows out onto the floor, keeping one and handing Hayes the other. "Fifteen minutes and we’re out of here, bro. You start here."
Hayes nodded in the dim light and headed for a chest of drawers. Larry crawled out of the bedroom and looked around the big family area. This was more like it. This household had money and they were going to find valuable goods to rip off. He crawled rapidly into another bedroom and looked around.
There was a desk against the wall and Larry rapidly rifled through the drawers. His flashlight beam revealed a big ashtray full of quarters. He emptied it into the pillow case. An expensive lap top computer sat on the desk. He unplugged it, folded it, and put it in the case too. He eased through the kitchen and saw a door that must lead into the garage.
He opened it. His flashlight revealed the usual jumble of junk that winds up in well to do garages. Two of the three bays had no cars in them. It was obvious that they were normally parked in as the junk did not encroach too far into the space. The third bay was occupied by a covered motorcycle.
Larry’s heart leapt. He focused his light at the covered machine. A bent wing logo and HONDA were printed in big letters on the white cover. Damn. He looked around the garage and saw tools and things of value but nothing that could be readily packed in a pillow case.
He moved at a crouch across the concrete to look behind the big motorcycle. Nothing of value that could easily be carried away. Damn. The clock was ticking. For no real reason, Larry lifted the bike cover and looked at a big V-twin motor. Must be one of those metric Harley clones. No wait a minute. There was the unmistakable HD logo on the spilt gas tanks! He groped for the ignition. Someone had left the key. A big pile of chain lay by the rear wheel. A heavy duty German padlock sat on the floor beside it. Somebody had neglected to lock the bike down and left the key in the ignition.
The Harley was big and black and Larry was riding it out of here! Nothing else mattered now. He looked at the garage doors. They had overhead pull ropes that would undoubtedly activate electric motors that rolled the doors up. But there was a big walk through door that the bike would fit through. That would be much quieter.
He rolled up the bike cover and stuffed it in a saddle bag. A pair of leather jackets and helmets hung on nails behind the bike. He tried on the larger jacket. Not bad. If anything, it was a little big.
Larry reentered the kitchen and found Hayes with two bulging pillow cases looking for more loot.
"We’re riding out of here bro!" announced Larry in a low voice.
"Come look at this, Dawg!"
Larry had found his big score and wasn’t really interested in any other small time crap.
"Yeah, what did you find?" he asked impatiently.
Hayes beckoned and Larry crawled after him into what must be the master bedroom.
"Check it out!" whispered Hayes.
"My God!" exclaimed Larry. There behind the door was a five gallon plastic water bottle almost completely full of change! Not pennies, but nickels, dimes and mostly quarters.
He grabbed the neck of the bottle and pulled. It was very heavy. Too much to carry. There was no way it would ride on the back of his new Harley. There had to be hundreds of dollars in coins. They would just have to roll it outside and come back for it with the car.
There had to be an easier way. Larry thought. Oh yeah! He had seen a little furniture dolly in the garage junk. Number one! In a few minutes, the thieves were ready to leave the "job site." Hayes tilted the bottle of coins on the little dolly’s pneumatic tires.
Larry had tied the ends shut on the lumpy pillow cases and had strapped them on the back of the Harley along with the smaller leather jacket. There was a generous supply of bungee cords hanging on the wall. As he pushed the Harley through the walk through door, Larry looked like an Easyrider rendition of Santa Claus.
Hayes trotted down the sidewalk with the jug of coins secured on the dolly with a pair of motorcycle tie down straps. He knew that lots of people ran at all hours in Eugene and hoped to be mistaken for one of them. Women, and even a few men, ran with high speed baby strollers. Maybe he would be mistaken for one of them in the night. Or if anybody saw him, they would hopefully think he was on the cutting edge of a new exercise fad.
The car was parked three or four blocks downhill and he had the key. Larry fastened on the larger helmet and gave him a couple minutes before pushing the Harley out onto the driveway. They had overstayed the planned 15 minutes by almost double. He didn’t like it but their luck seemed to be holding. The driveway was dimly lit and Larry decided the correct thing to do was to shut the door behind him.
He swung out the long side stand with his left foot and made sure the bike was stable. It was difficult to dismount with the lumpy pillow cases bungeed on behind him. He turned the door lock and shut the steel covered door.
Larry looked with pride at "his" new ride in the darkness. He was pretty sure it was an older 80 cubic inch Evo. It was obviously well taken care of and probably had low miles. The time had come to flee the scene.
He slid his leg sideways over the saddle and pushed his back against a lumpy pillow case. He swung in the side stand and turned on the right side fuel petcock. The neighborhood was dead in the wee hours and he decided to coast the bike to the stop sign at the end of the block before starting up.
The driveway was steep and the big bike gathered speed. Its springer front end bounced gently in the rain gutter on the edge of the street. Larry braked at the stop sign and thumbed the starter button.
The V-twin started immediately with a fine blub-blub sound. It had probably been ridden by the former owner that fine summer day. Larry smiled. He was "up" again and that was all that really mattered. Minor details such as legal ownership of the machine didn’t cloud his thinking right now.
He let out the clutch as he rolled on the throttle and the Harley moved west to Chambers Street with a pleasant roar. Life was beautiful! He rumbled to a stop at Chambers and balanced the bike between his worn sneakers.
Traffic was light and the no longer bikeless biker turned south on Chambers and moved up the steep hill at full throttle. The V-twin had been fitted with custom exhausts that thundered through the neighborhood. Those gay homosexuals next door had nothing on him now! He was styling.
He crested the hill and bumbled to a stop at the intersection of Chambers with Lorane Highway. The disc brakes on the Evo stopped smoothly with authority. Larry grinned from ear to ear. He was glad Hayes had nagged him into this ripoff.
Larry knew that many deer haunted Lorane Highway at night. He refrained from shifting into fifth gear. Hitting one of the flowerbed bandits with a car would be a bummer, but to go hand to hand with one on a bike would truly suck.
The Evo muttered along at 45 miles per hour. Larry passed the old gas station that had housed Jerry’s Brit bike/HD shop until recently when the owner died from Mad Cow Disease. He had heard about the place but had never gotten around to checking it out. The word was Jerry rode a Vincent Black Shadow-sort of an English Harley.
The stolen Harley had excellent lights and Larry’s fifty something eyes could see well enough through the goggles that had hung on the handlebars when the bike changed hands.
Lorane Highway meandered along Spencer Creek until it straightened out at the Spencer Creek Grange. Larry toed the transmission into high and rolled it up to sixty. He could feel his huge beard fanning out in the wind. He slowed for the big corner and cranked it up for the straight stretch to the Bailey Hill intersection.
The road was empty. It was a little on the cool side out but the excitement of riding a hot bike kept him warm. He signaled at the stop sign and made a left, rapping through the gears as he fantasized about impressing the hot blonde at the beginning of Banjo Lane. The smaller leather jacket should fit her and he would take her on a long ride out to the slide at Triangle Lake where they would get naked and...
The V-twin faltered and gasped. Oh shit! He hadn’t even considered how much gasoline might be in the twin tanks. He fumbled for the petcock on the left side and after a few heart stopping seconds, fuel air mixture again filled the big jugs.
He was pretty sure each tank had a reserve position but he didn’t want to have to stop and figure it out with his flashlight. A lonely sheriff might pull over to help and it would be all down hill from there.
Scary Larry reduced the throttle setting and putted along at 55 in overdrive. He needed to cover at least 20 miles to get to the haven at the end of Banjo Lane.
Headlights shown in the vibrating mirrors of the purloined FXDL. Larry groaned. It could be one of Lane County’s finest. If he got close enough to make out the lumpy satin pillowcases fastened to the sissybar, it would be an automatic stop for a look see. If Larry blasted away at high speed, a cop would automatically chase him down and it would be a heavy bust and free ride to jail. He had no clue as to how many miles his new ride had left before it flamed out and rolled to a stop.
He opened the throttle. The headlights fell back. He opened it some more. He was doing 75 now. He hoped some deer didn’t come stumbling into the road.
Lorane Highway crested a hill and turned gently to the right just before the Fox Hollow Road intersection . Larry cranked the Harley up to ninety and hit the high beam. He hoped to put a lot of distance between himself and the pursuing car while masked by terrain. He slowed to sixty as soon as the headlights rounded the bend behind him.
The lights didn’t come flying up behind him so either it wasn’t a cop or if it was, he had escaped interest so far. He rounded another broad bend and grabbed the brakes instead of the throttle. A small band of deer froze in his headlight. They had been happily munching the summer grass in the ditch. Their heads jerked up and their eyes shown green. Does with yearling fawns, it looked like.
Larry eased by the deer and rolled on the gas again. Hopefully they would run out in the road behind him and slow whoever was following.
He stopped at Territorial Highway and made a left. He wasn’t far from where they had burgled Evelyn Joneser’s little house. He smiled briefly at the thought of scarfing up the envelop of rent money without Hayes being the wiser.
The sign said six miles to Lorane. He just might make it. The bike was running good as he wound through the curves. Hopefully the headlights would turn right at the stop light and head for Veneta. The bike shuddered and sputtered as he accelerated into a straight stretch. The left tank had run dry. The stupid asshole hadn’t filled the bike before parking it! Larry was mad at the former owner for his current uncertainty.
He groped for the left side petcock and twisted it the other way. The bike grumbled along, losing speed for second after second. Larry downshifted and the engine exploded to life again. Whew! How long would a reserve last? Presumably the right side had some reserve gas too but this was getting closer than he cared for. He had at least ten miles to go.
Headlights shown through the trees behind him. He was still being followed. Maybe he would take the old road into Lorane and park for a bit while he looked in the gas tanks with his flashlight and determined just how much further he could go. He ought to be able to make it but it would be bad if he ran out of gas along the road with his stolen bike. Perhaps he could steal a little gas in Lorane if he needed to.
The lowrider Harley snaked through the turns at Stony Point and roared down the hill into the straight stretch in front of the lit up mega winery on the hill.
He downshifted and idled into the dark, deserted town of Lorane, making a left at the CG Lorane Highway sign. He was almost home. If he could make it to the top of the hill he could roll for a free two miles. He was almost positive he had enough gas to make it.
At 3:30 in the morning, Scary Larry slowed to make the turn into Banjo Lane from the west. He cranked the throttle just as hard as he could as he accelerated past the McCally house. Hopefully Dee Dee would be awake to appreciate the awesome thunder of his new machine. Gasoline was no longer an issue. He could roll and push the bike home if he had to-–even with the lumpy-assed pillow cases flopping on the back of the seat.
It was late afternoon and Hayes stepped through the barn door. Larry was sitting in his Lazyboy, smoking and drinking.
Copyright @ 2006 by Norm Maxwell
Norm Maxwell is a regular columnist at WxNW.org writing about local country life and land use in Lane County, Oregon and fire fighting throughout the West. He writes in his "spare time" when he isn't setting fences or fighting local corruption, or fires for Uncle Sam. Norm Maxwell is famous for his "dead car" program for the BLM, hauling in abandoned vehicles on public lands. See his work at WxNW.org.
© Copyright 2000-2006 by West By Northwest.org
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