In one of his most weatherworn pictures, John Link sits on a stripped-down Harley 74 with his tiny daughter in his lap, sometime during the last unraveling hours of her sixth birthday. They don’t look happy. Obscured by ribbons coming undone in her hair, Lydia is turning away from the camera like it’s a spoonful of medicine, while, decked out in his black riding goggles and threadbare vest, arms scrawled with tattoos, Link appears ready to attack the pink balloon that’s just been tied onto the clutch cable. In the background the other parents have gathered to watch, as if the chopper were a drugged swayback pony hired for the amusement of their shrieking children.
The photo session had been the fitting end to an awful afternoon. Link had gate-crashed the party, pulling up onto the lawn at Ursula’s new home, the remodeled Valley ranch house of a new husband. Because of a Saint Patty’s Day party a week earlier, Link’s beard was streaked with green, and from a brawl he didn’t remember, his knuckles were still scuffed. But rather than causing the unsettled reaction he had expected among the suburban parents—this degenerate biological father, a relic of Ursula’s “checkered past”—he was instead treated like some fascinating countercultural entertainment, as harmless as a sidewalk Santa, as anachronistic as a Viking.
Lydia’s mother, Ursula, was at first horrified by his arrival, the bike tearing up sod, then grumbling as he walked it between cars up the packed driveway. But after a few hours and a glass of wine, she began to enjoy parading around this skeleton from her past. She clearly noticed how the other women grew competitive, hauling out their own stories of depravity: One woman had been a groupie with an obscure rock band, and another had overdosed twice on Quaaludes. Every now and then a parent would shout across the yard at a boy throwing rocks, or rescue a bawling child from an overturned garbage can, but for the most part the kids were left alone—little boys flying like hot popcorn kernels off a distant trampoline, paramilitary gangs of muddy children in the trees, and tea-party clusters of girls around mewling, incontinent dolls—so that the parents could sit back on foldout chairs and reminisce about the crazy days, exchanging stories of bad acid trips and teargassed protests. Even Ursula’s new husband, a man on the cusp of a well-tanned and simpering old age, whose shirt seemed to come more unbuttoned with each hour, was newly titillated by the implication that his trophy wife had once been a filthy biker moll. “Was she as bad as she makes out?” he asked under his breath. Link wanted to beat him to death with the piñata stick.
“There’s kids around,” he told the smirking man, then added in a whisper, “you limp-dick motherfucker.”
He watched the smile fade.
Ursula had certainly come a long way since her youth, ascending social classes with each opportunistic marriage, always as determined to milk her good looks as any athlete would be to cash in on a vertical leap. She was just a kid when Link knew her, and he could hardly reconcile his memory with this lipsticked mother in white pants, who opened her mouth too wide when she spoke, made lavish hand gestures, and threw her head back laughing at her own jokes. When he knew her, she could hardly take two steps without encouragement. He’d hovered over her, telling her again and again that she was a diamond, until she got tired of him and needed a more convincing appraisal.
The summer they first met, Link was a thirty-two-year-old Hell’s Angel, on probation for a fight in a bowling alley, wearing a cast on his wrist that was filling up with signatures as fast as an angry petition. He held a state-required framing job that he was planning to quit; everything he owned in the world was either on his bike or in his pockets. He was handsome in those days, except for his habitually broken nose, and he was known among his brothers for being tough, loyal, and quiet. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a few scattered tattoos, Link was still surprisingly boyish, with a round, cheerful face under the stubble and sideburns.
Almost a generation younger, Ursula had grown up in the same shabby cluster of stucco apartments—The Pink Ghettoes of Lakeside, California, which with each passing year looked more like the lush aftermath of a monsoon. Doors were never fixed after police raids; tattered waitress and machinist uniforms hung forgotten off laundry lines among the sycamore trees. Nestled between horse ranches and an Indian reservation, the neighborhood was a stretch of broken bottles, faded pastel paint, and barred windows down amid the date palms and overgrown weeds. Abandoned houses filled up with sparrows’ nests and white power graffiti. Once the mills shut down, there was little work beyond the gravel mines; and whenever Link slept late with a hangover, he’d wake to the distant drone of those tractors chewing up the streambed. The gravel companies had to put back every pound they took out, so they filled up the arroyos with scrap metal and burnt-out cars, until the town was ringed by a moat of rust and steel, and the creek where Link had swum as a boy became a junkyard where kids fought, got high, or got pregnant.
Ursula was not one of those kids, though probably every teenager in the town had tried to lure her down there at one point or another.
The summer of 1982, Link was riding with the San Diego chapter of the Angels and sponsoring a young prospect named Hardy Stillman, whom he’d met in county jail. Both were there on possession charges; both made their living mostly selling weed and hustling. Hardy was a rangy kid, all Adam’s apple and stuffed-up nose. Because he liked to wear Luftwaffe helmets and play with nunchucks, he gave Link the impression of an underweight, underage soldier, allergic to the battlefield. Twitchy as a rabbit, he flinched whenever Link made a fist, until a joke developed in which Link would stand up quickly and Hardy would flee the room. But the kid was a shoo-in for the club, mostly because he was a promising mechanic and his ride was a thing to behold—a completely restored 1946 Indian Chief.
Link and Hardy would stay up late, night after night, and Hardy was awestruck by how well Link could draw. His eyes greasy with smoke, Link would sketch motorcycles, mermaids, and bosomy witches in loose-fitting clothes, hovering over the paper for hours in a trance of fidgeting pencils. One night, Hardy showed up at a party with three girls from his old high school, Ursula Carson among them, looking mortified by the scene. Hardy asked Link to draw her portrait—“the best-looking chick in this fucking shithole town!” Hardy soon lost patience with the time it took, rejoining the party. But Ursula sat primly for almost an hour, hands in her lap, on a wooden chair across from Link.
Link could not help but draw how uncomfortable she was, how her eyes had shrunk with fear and her mouth was curving down faintly at the edges. They were the only motionless people in a rowdy place, sitting at opposing ends of a table littered with bottles and smoldering ashtrays. Finally, Link held up the picture for her, and she gave him a strained and self-conscious smile. Then Link raised his voice over the din and said, “You don’t look too fucking happy, do you?”
She shrugged.
Link thought there was something odd about his attraction to the girl: She was so damned beautiful that he didn’t want to touch her. She seemed breakable. She was pretty to the point of being sexless. She smelled like those stores that only sold soap. Her skin was so fair and clean, touching her might leave a thumbprint. Her neck was thin and white, her wrists were small under the cuffs of her blouse, her hair was pulled back crisply into a ponytail—something about her was like a bed made up so preciously that he’d feel bad messing it up. Raising her chin to project her voice, she said, “You draw so well. You could probably get a job doing storyboards.”
“What’s that?”
She explained that every shot in a movie had to be drawn before it was filmed. She knew this because she had met a director once and talked to him all night. Chattering idly seemed to make her forget her surroundings, and for a long time she told Link about how she intended to move up to Los Angeles and get into “the industry,” as soon as she passed summer school. Then she began telling Link everything that he should do with his life, some elaborate scheme for sending his drawings to various people she knew; and she talked about how lots of bikers made money working as extras in films. Link wasn’t in the mood to get career counseling from a high school girl, so he tore off the portrait and gave it to her, then walked away.
It was a little past midnight when Link heard some of the Angels harassing her in the bathroom. Grabbing, joking, laughing—it was basic Neanderthal shit, but Link didn’t imagine she would be able to handle it very well. Every now and then there was a woman who just abandoned herself to the collective will of the brothers, like throwing herself into rough seas, and he hated to think of Ursula in this position. So Link pushed his way into the room, where two men had stolen one of her shoes and were playing keep-away with it. Link said, “I’m taking her home.”
“Fucking A, Link—who made you Gary Cooper?”
“Give the kid her shoe back now, Lenny, or I’m going to kill everybody here with that toilet seat.”
Still working her foot into the mule, Ursula raced alongside Link as he promised to take her home. She was giddy and shaking, and, all the way down the steps of the apartment and across the street, she was telling Link that he should get away from these people, that he was better than they were.
“Why? Because I drew your picture?”
Hardy was giving rides around the block to Ursula’s two friends, and he looked crestfallen as she climbed onto the back of Link’s Harley.
Link began racing along dark and empty streets while she wrapped her arms around his waist. It was frustrating riding with her, because she didn’t lean into the turns, and when she did, she leaned too hard and he needed to compensate. Only to show her how fast he could go, he turned up onto the winding highway and began swerving through the hills, and soon they were descending foggy mountains on slick roads into the Anzo-Borrego Desert. He became so thrilled at the moonlit stretch past tumbleweed and the shadowy tentacles of ocotillo that he forgot about her, as if she were just a sweatshirt tied around his waist, and he rode all the way to Salton City, pulling finally into the last open gas station under a flickering light. There he saw that Ursula had been terrified for the past hour.
He said, “Fun. Right?”
She started crying under the fluorescent lights.
At first, Link responded as if he’d just dropped something fragile, saying, “Oh shit, no. No, no—don’t do that.” But soon, through her sobbing, she was confessing personal things: She was failing trigonometry and history; she wasn’t going to graduate from high school; she couldn’t stand her mother and they lived together on tiny disability checks in a shit apartment, three months behind on utilities. Ursula said that she would kill herself if she had to spend another day like this. “I mean, I’m just waiting for all the lights to go out!”
The pump clicked, the tank was filled, and Link screwed back the cap. He got back onto his bike and waited. She just stood there, refusing to climb on behind him, until finally she paced back and started kissing him. Never in his life had Link felt kisses like these, like decisive points in an argument: sharp, urgent, and aggressive. A rhythm of long questions and short demands. Link was half aroused, half scared. When he pulled away from the girl, her eyes were dry and hard, and he wondered if he had misinterpreted everything about her in his sketch. She was not timid: She was too hungry for her washed-up little town. They stared at each other, and she must have felt his hesitation, because finally she asked, “Do you hate me?”
“No, I don’t hate you, kid. Is that what you were shooting for?”
They were together every day and night after that, in a strange, accidental love affair that covered the better part of ten months and twenty-three states. During their first hopeful trips through the desert, or along the shore and mountains, he would start each morning happier than ever in his life. By nightfall she had always talked him out of it. He’d had a lot of old ladies, but never anybody like Ursula. She was serious. Defensive about failing out of high school, she wanted to “educate herself,” and she read books and magazines about psychology, astrology, and the movies. She’d quote authors to Link, explaining his particular form of social maladjustment, along with whatever steps he needed to improve himself, always believing that there was some hidden talent in him that she could eventually unleash. Between the sissy bars of his Harley, Ursula rode across the country with an unhappy face. She endured his lifestyle as if he would owe her something deep and everlasting for each uncomfortable moment she spent in a campground or a cheap motel. At times, she seemed more like a missionary than his girlfriend. She needed to talk about her expectations, the relationship, and the future at practically every stop on the road.
Link didn’t see how he’d ever be able to live up to the dream this chick had in the distance. And she looked on Link’s brothers as the varying symptoms of his disease, tolerating the bike runs as sudden, virulent outbreaks. She never much enjoyed the scenery, the emptiness of the Mojave, the Black Hills, or the canyons through Arizona. She brooded, mile after mile, carrying on a flinching internal monologue. Everything was “important to experience and learn from,” yet she never liked her experiences. She hated going on runs to Bass Lake or Big Bear; she couldn’t stomach all the drunks. Coast to coast, she could never eat anything on any menu. Link doggedly tried to please her with presents from roadside stands, moonlit rides, and clichés that always mortified him as soon as he uttered them—You’re my queen; you’re the best girl in the world; but the harder he tried, the more she treated him like a child offering a homemade, misspelled valentine.
To most of the brothers, Ursula seemed only like a pretty young woman who never smiled. But conflicts had been brewing over the months among the other mamas, who disliked the way she fluctuated between lectures and pouting. She found it appalling what these women did, and she disliked the communal, public aspect of sex within the club. Link never earned his red or brown wings with Ursula. And the other women probably felt her disapproval, as if she were that familiar voice from the straight world. Link knew there were several mamas who downright hated her, particularly a chick from Lake Elsinore, Sheila Carter, who had threatened to kill her one night with a broken bottle. Apparently Ursula had called her a “black hole,” which Link at first thought was a crude insult, but later learned was some kind of astronomy or psychobabble.
Late during a Memorial Day party on a beach in Northern California, Link left Ursula to sit by himself on the dunes after an argument. Much of the story he later heard secondhand, from Hardy and the others: Ursula never could handle drugs or booze particularly well, and she had gotten drunk too quickly. She had turned on Sheila, who was just out on bond for a battery charge. Apparently Sheila had been facetiously hitting on her, whistling and claiming that she wanted “a little taste of vanilla.” Ursula had snapped, throwing sand into her face, breaking into tears, and calling her a “fat, jealous prison skank.” Clearing the grit from her eyes, Sheila rose up and popped Ursula in the head. Ursula wasn’t hurt, just scratched and humiliated, but she came to Link demanding that he murder the woman and all of her friends. Link told her to calm down—nobody was murdering anybody tonight. He returned to the bonfire to discover that all of the women were fed up with Ursula, who had apparently been lecturing them for weeks about their wasted lives and her destiny of fame and fortune. Link joined the other guys trying to defuse the shouting, not thinking that anything out of the ordinary had happened.
He didn’t notice for an hour or so that Ursula had disappeared.
He looked around the shore, but when he couldn’t find her in the dunes, on the rocks, or along the cliffs of stranded driftwood, he formed a search party. Hardy wanted to come along, as well as two others—Dagget, a redheaded bike designer covered with tattoos of chain mail and battle-axes, and a wild young guy known as the Count, with long black hair, two missing teeth, and the florid tattoo of a dragon devouring its tail. Count was tripping on a half sheet of blotter acid and seemed ready to volunteer for any adventure.
The search wound up lasting three days, with the police trolling the waters, assembling clues from trucker sightings, and later interviewing gas station attendants, who had reportedly seen her running southbound on the PCH. On the third day, Link called her mother in Lakeside to learn that Ursula had stopped at home, packed her things, and moved to Los Angeles with a girlfriend. Link was in a seaside diner when he made the call, and he joined the other three men as they sat around a picnic table overlooking the crashing tide. She was alive, he told them. They nodded at the sea. He said it was for the best. He wasn’t one for “big crying bullshit good-byes,” and at least she wasn’t drowned or raped by a homeless guy. They each agreed that this was the right attitude.
Then Link said, “Fuck her,” and they patted and struck his shoulders from around the table. He asked who was up for a cross-country run—and everyone liked the idea. Count just needed to make a few deliveries, but he could have some cash by that evening. So they packed up what little they had, and at sundown they gathered in the parking lot of a beach motel, agreeing that no one would turn back until they hit the Atlantic. Dagget, Count, Hardy, and Link—a splinter group, they said, the one percent of the one-percenters, the worst of the worst, the really bad apples. They followed the coast northward at ninety miles an hour on the straightaways, grabbing the suicide shifts around hairpin turns; then they bled onto I-80 in San Francisco and roared over the Sierras in the rain. Dagget had an old pair of tennis shoes flapping from the back rail, and, somewhere in the Great Basin, they came off and smacked Hardy in the face. His cheek was swollen and purple, and Count gave him a handful of unknown pills with a swig of whisky.
They stopped overnight in Elko, where they took speed in order to stay up and keep drinking; then, somewhere in the middle of a glaring afternoon, they rolled into a small casino town, where Count picked up another load of crystal. They stepped on it with baby laxative and talcum powder, skimming off a pound for themselves, and they rode off through Utah, drinking out of a Jack Daniel’s bottle in the roaring wind, passing it between bikes along the highway. They went so long without sleep that life seemed composed of just one endless day, light and darkness like an intermittent blinking in the sky. Link was amazed at how sunsets seemed to follow right after the dawn, and he started to think that the road itself controlled time. They lounged on their bikes, soaring along at ninety-plus. Their legs went numb and they could hardly straighten them again in gas stations, where they pissed, ate candy, drank beer and snorted more speed. I-80 grew more boring by the hour, so they all cut south along a smaller highway, and got lost along mountain roads and mining towns, before coming out somehow in New Mexico, days later.
In the panhandle of Texas, they went looking for more booze in an Amarillo Kmart, and got into a fight in the parking lot with a truckload of cowboys. Link was so high on some PCP-laced roach he’d bought back in Las Cruces that an hour later he couldn’t remember who’d won the fight. Dagget didn’t seem to be with them any longer.
At dusk, they pulled over at a rest stop and tried to piece together what had happened. Count seemed to think that Dagget had been killed or arrested. They all tried to remember the last time they had actually seen Dagget, agreeing that it hadn’t been for days. Finally Hardy deduced that they had lost him a week or so earlier when they made the turn off I-80. Count and Link started laughing, pounding their legs and howling.
“He’s probably still up there looking for us,” said Hardy.
“Ah, he’ll be fine,” said Link. “He’s a big boy.”
The three remaining bikers carried on for another twelve hours to a town outside of Mobile, where—sometime during the hot new daylight—Hardy collapsed onto the beach. Link and Count sat on opposite sides of him to make sure he was breathing. In the distance, seagulls were swarming around something dead on the sand. Count began rolling a joint. They lit up and savored the moment, not noticing the cops standing right behind them. When Link looked back, closing one eye to view the glaring eclipse around the officer’s head, he offered the cop a drag, and felt a steel cuff go over his wrist. Then, for a long time Link and Count sat shackled in the sand, watching as the officers tried to wake up Hardy. They asked if he was dead, and Link said, “Nah, he’s just all tuckered out.”
Count started laughing hard at this, and soon Link was laughing at his laughing, and the two couldn’t stop. In the back of the squad car, they were like kids with the giggles in church, snorting, holding their breath, and bursting out with loud guffaws. At the station, they laughed as they were all fingerprinted together. Link told Hardy he had something on his face, then pretended to get it off while smudging ink across his cheeks. They went into a holding tank, where they terrorized some local drunk, until finally they all faded out and slept for the better part of two days on the floor. Tired of waiting for paperwork, the sheriff eventually decided to escort them to the state line.
Outside on the street, while two patrol cars idled, Link, Hardy, and Count broke into an argument about which direction to go. Hardy wanted to turn back, and Count had sobered up enough to realize he had business, while Link called them both pussies for stopping so close to the end. Hardy had a gigantic waterlogged welt on his head, and Link couldn’t remember where he’d gotten it. Count calmed Link down and said, “It’s just business, brother. Got myself a good cash source, and I can’t let it go dry.”
He asked a cop for a pen and paper, and then he started writing on the hood of the car. When the cop honked his horn, Count yelled, “Fuck you—arrest me then, pig.”
He gave Link the paper: On it was the name and address of a man named “Preacher” Harris, who lived off a golf course in Palm Springs. Count said, “There’s a job in this for you too, brother. Old guy—Berdoo chapter, founding fathers. I’m going to tell him to expect you when you get back. Motherfucker’s living like a goddamn senior citizen out there now, but he’s making shitloads of money. I’ll put in a word.”
They shook on it, punched each other’s chest, and Link split off in his own direction, crossing the Florida state line.
Some time later, Link met a woman in a bar in Pensacola, and a week or so beyond that, possibly during a blackout, he seemed to have moved in with her. She was an older lady, maybe in her forties, and she had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cocaine and booze. He would lie on his back in her messy bedcovers and laundry, and she would fuck him with squirms and grimaces, as if getting comfortable in a movie seat. And then he would wander the apartment naked, searching through a mysterious refrigerator, smoking, drinking, pissing off the porch. He would put on his same clothes from the night before, as stiff as a discarded shell, and he would wander back to the bar, where he’d start drinking again with ghostly dedication.
One day, when the woman’s old father came to visit, Link worried that he might have actually married her in a blackout. The man came into the room and found Link with his shirt off on the couch, surrounded by bottles and dusty mirrors. Suntanned and wearing a fruity shirt, the old guy began giving Link a speech about how his daughter was a good woman—all he wanted was the best for her.
Link had only blurry recollections of fights, progressively more routine sex, and bouts of illness, as if those memories were all stored in a different, preverbal part of his brain. The woman was crying, and Link realized that the old man was politely asking him to leave. Link shook his hand. His old lady seemed to be involved in a separate drama, running off to her bedroom. Link got onto his bike and saw her waving from her window. For some reason, he suddenly felt lonely for Ursula. Riding away past the spits of shoreline and the seafood shacks, the air thick with brine, he imagined her holding on behind him. He couldn’t understand why he suddenly ached so badly for her, like his bones had been hollowed out, but he needed to pull off the road and sit in the gravel and feel the waves of sadness roll over him.
He expected this feeling to go away, but instead, as he turned north to avoid the state of Alabama completely, an eleven-hour looping segue that made him curse himself for failing geography, every passing mile seemed to intensify the empty feeling. He was somewhere in a cicada-filled stretch of Spanish moss and kudzu when he pulled up to a little gas station surrounded by black kids laughing and pointing at him. Inside he found the phone. Somehow, out of all the soggy chaos in his brain, he remembered his old number in Lakeside. Hardy answered the phone.
“I need to find her,” said Link.
Hardy was quiet for a long time. Pissed off. Finally he said, “She’s been looking for you, man. She’s up in L.A. She just had a baby, Link. A girl. Says it’s yours, you fucking deadbeat: She was pregnant when she left.”
Link shook his head and tried to clear his eyes. He asked how the hell it was even possible that she could have a baby already.
“Link—you been gone four and a half months, man.”
The room was churning, and there were purple spots floating in his eyes, and Link was quite certain now that these were the side effects of time travel. He couldn’t speak, and Hardy started explaining that the baby was born too early, and probably wasn’t going to survive.
Link got the name of the hospital, and learned that the baby hadn’t been named yet, except with Ursula’s last name: Infant Carson. “Infant,” he repeated, as if it were his daughter’s name.
“She’s too scared to name the kid.”
“Hardy, you little shit, you do me a favor. You tell Ursula I’m coming. I’m going to make the ride straight through, even if my legs fall off.”
“She ain’t too happy with you.”
“Tell her I’m going to make it up. Everything. No more bullshit.”
By the time Link was on I-40 speeding back toward the West Coast, all he repeated to himself was Infant Carson, over and over, keeping him awake without drugs, even when all he could see was a black horizon and streams of dotted lines piercing the cone of his headlight. Had Ursula been expecting him to chase her all this time? He couldn’t figure it out, and the situation seemed hopeless to him out on the dark roads. He was racing to see his daughter before she died. This was the first real test of his life, and he found himself talking to a God he’d never believed in, begging forgiveness, pleading with him to extend the life of an unnamed girl.
...
When his daughter was seven days old, Link made it to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and bought a newspaper for a souvenir.
The paper seemed a bad omen—a suicide bomber had killed over two hundred troops in Beirut and, for some reason, the United States had just invaded an island he’d never heard of. Link rolled up the paper, as if hunting mosquitoes, and entered the hospital, first washing his hands in the bathroom. In front of the broad mirror, he noticed that his face was scuffed and bleeding from debris and horseflies along the road; and he was sunburned and filthy except for two raccoon circles where his goggles had been. He scrubbed his face and watched the water turn black and sooty as it went down the drain.
When he reached the semicircular desk, there was a nurse who seemed to know who he was already. “Let me guess,” she said. “Miss Carson’s baby.” She was a tiny, wrinkly Southeast Asian woman—maybe Cambodian or Laotian—with square glasses that took up most of her face. She was stern and abrupt. She studied his license, handed him scrubs, attached an ID bracelet around his wrist, and led him down a long labyrinth of corridors to the NICU, updating him as they walked: Ursula had been sent home to rest; the baby’s chances were better than they were a week ago, but still not good.
His baby was the only one in a special room at the far back of newborn intensive care, where she lay under a network of tubes and wires in an incubator that looked like a terrarium. He was afraid to go closer. The nurse moved ahead and waved for him impatiently. When he hung over the plastic bassinet, he couldn’t believe that the little girl was alive—she was raw and purple and brittle-boned; her lungs heaved; a respirator nozzle wedged into a tiny mouth. There were strange twitches on her chicken legs, and her eyes were closed and crusted over, like a bird recovered from a fallen shell. Link wanted to smash everything in the room behind him, every piece of dormant equipment.
Instead he only said, “She’s cold.”
The nurse explained that the incubator was kept at an ideal temperature. She shivered because of her underdeveloped nervous system. The doctors had been careful with the amount of oxygen they gave her, in an effort to avoid blindness. But all Link could see was that the little thing was suffering, and he was sick with the idea that all she’d know of this world would be wires, lights, plastic, and pain.
The nurse said, “Now, you see her. Okay? Clean up next time you come here. Wash up. You smell bad, and it’s not right. This is your daughter.”
A tiny woman, not five feet tall, she scolded him with furious eyes, pointing up as he lowered his head. He nodded at her name tag—Vu Thi Tuyet—while she told him to stand up straight and look her in the face. She said, “Promise. You don’t come in here again like this. Promise me, right now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said quietly. “I promise.”
An hour later he called Ursula’s studio apartment, then arrived with tulips from the hospital gift shop, which had come apart in the wind during his ride. He hardly recognized her at the door. Her hair had thickened and turned dark, her skin had a glazed quality, her eyes were bloodshot, and she was so expressionless that he thought she must be tranquilized. She thanked him for the flowers and led him inside, filling a pitcher with water while he sat on a box in her kitchenette. He couldn’t tell if she was in the midst of packing or unpacking. In the bathroom, a wet hostess uniform hung over the shower. He asked her if she wanted to go out for something to eat. She said she wasn’t ever going to eat again, suddenly puffing her cheeks like a blowfish.
She wouldn’t answer any of his questions. He asked what money she was living on, and when she was silent, he said that he could get a job and pay for his end of things. He had the name of a guy in Palm Springs. Ursula asked, “Did you see her?”
Link nodded.
“Bad news?”
“No,” he said. “She’s tough.”
Ursula started pacing and talking about how she hadn’t been back for a few days: She had simply panicked at the sight of the little girl. She couldn’t face it right now; she felt so guilty, so overwhelmed, she couldn’t imagine going back to the hospital. Her mother and her aunt had planned to drive up next weekend to take care of her, but she had told them not to bother. She couldn’t think all the way to next weekend. It was another lifetime.
Link said, “Ursula, it’s not over. I promise you that. This is my daughter, and she’s not going to go down without a fight.”
Ursula nodded in a distracted way, moving to the window, and said, “Right, right. Because you’re such a fighter.”
Link gave her his plan: He was going to ride straight out to Palm Springs tonight, meet up with some contacts, and by tomorrow afternoon he’d have a job. He said he was ready to take care of everything—the bills, the diapers, whatever the fuck babies needed. Ursula stared at him like he was speaking another language.
The next twenty-four hours were the most frantic of his life.
By nine o’clock he found the house beside the golf course, introducing himself to a sun-baked, balding old man known as Preacher, who lived just off a sand trap on the back nine. Preacher was in the midst of a screaming rampage because someone had taken their chopper out and torn up the tenth fairway. He immediately began yelling at Link, the newest suspect. But even with his teeth bared and his eyes clouded with rage, the crazy old man seemed like a worthwhile boss. Link had never seen such energy, especially in a brother who had survived into his late fifties. From talking to Count, Link knew that Preacher had been in an engineers’ battalion during the Korean War, and he apparently still had an itch to blow things to smithereens. Every few weekends, he took packs of enthusiastic Angels up into the mountains with claymores and grenades, and they would pass the afternoons blowing up tree stumps and firing at cans floating downstream.
That night, Preacher’s house was packed with other Hell’s Angels from around the state, all gathered for a funeral the next day: a Berdoo brother had been shot in the head when he got off his bike to fight seven street kids in the City of Industry. The group was drunk and somber now, worn out from Preacher’s tirade. One man eulogized in the low-ceilinged living room, saying that the brother had gone out with dignity. Another claimed that he would have expected a good party. To talk about business, Preacher led Link into the garage, where a claymore rested against a tire, with the inscription on the side:
Face toward enemy
Preacher didn’t seem to want Link to speak. He said, “So Count called me about an hour ago and explained. You come highly recommended, and I don’t think I have to tell you about the sensitive nature of our operation. The less said, the better. Count tells me you’re the strong, silent type—and that’s what I need. I need somebody who can take orders and keep his trap shut. Understand?”
Link nodded.
“Your little pal Hardy Stillman is running for me down in San Diego. Make sure he keeps quiet, too. He’s a leaky faucet, that one. We got trials going on all over the country, and we don’t need some motor mouth. Now, go back inside and have a beer. You’re too fucking tense.”
A little while later, Preacher came into his crowded living room clutching the neck of a beer and started musing aloud about the nature of life and death.
“We are not going to mourn old Wes!” he shouted as if to a congregation. “Not here. If you came here to feel bad, you’re in the wrong place, brother. That was his death. His very own.” Stomping back and forth across the room, he continued, “Not a day went by when he didn’t know it was coming. Like all of you and like me. But he lived every day like a free man, because he didn’t know what fear was. That’s a life. He refused to back down, not one inch. And thirty-eight years of real living beats a hundred years as a slave.”
Link had heard this speech; every Hell’s Angel made some version of the slave reference at one point or another. But Preacher was such a weathered and tough-looking old buzzard that it seemed to take on new significance.
“Do not cry for this man. We’re going to celebrate his life. He died like every brother should: with his boots on.”
In the midst of his speech, Link met Preacher’s old lady—Cherise—a platinum blonde with a sarcastic shape to her mouth, as if she had heard this sermon every night of her life. She had a suntan darker than her amber beer, and Link couldn’t help noticing how her tits stood up high and straight under the halter top. She said, “So are you joining the cult of personality?” She was drunk and wavering slightly on her high-heeled boots.
“Guess so,” said Link.
“Tell me something—how noble is it to get beaten to death by teenagers?”
“Probably how I’m going to go,” said Link.
“Yeah,” she said, toasting her beer in a plastic cup. “Purple Heart. Everybody dies with their boots on.”
Link pointed down at her boots, two long red leather ones with zippers up the fronts. She laughed and modeled them, standing on one foot, then grabbing him as she lost her balance.
The next morning, Link was up early making deliveries across the San Bernardino Valley, carting red phosphorus, ephedrine, and other precursors to warehouse laboratories and aluminum sheds out in the desert. He listened to a few jittery cookers complain about their profit margins, and one explained some of the chemistry in layman’s terms: “Ephedrine and red phosphorus. Think of it as a match head and a diet pill—one way or another, it’s going to blow you sky-high.”
By two o’clock in the afternoon, Link had finished his errands, and he rode in the funeral procession to the cemetery in Covina, hundreds of Angels from all over the West Coast rumbling through the streets and attracting startled onlookers from stores and apartment buildings. They rode so tightly packed together that a single swerve might have brought down the crowd. They swarmed through the towns, past people fleeing out of crosswalks, cars pulling over, and cops barricading the side streets to guard against trouble. When they lowered the brother into the ground, Link was sober, and he felt hounded by clarity. Too many details vied for his attention—the freeway beneath them and its streaming sound, his daughter hooked up like a time bomb under a twenty-four-hour lamp, Ursula in her dirty apartment, and this departed biker who had lost his life in a back alley over an insult.
Preacher noticed Link and came over, patting him roughly on the back. He whispered to Link in a rush of hot breath, “We’ve got a hundred police around this graveyard—like anybody’s going to do anything here.” He raised one shaggy gray eyebrow, then led Link around the tombstones, saying, “Someday, son, we’re going to get out from under this persecution. I’m going to build myself a free state—out in the middle of nowhere, like the first pioneers. Get away from all this bullshit stuffed down our throats. FBI, CIA, the fucking RICO statute. I want you to know that every day out there, you’re a part of that goal.”
Immediately following the pep talk, Link returned to the warehouses to pick up the product. Next he made the second half of his deliveries in a trail from Fontana to Costa Mesa. Just past eight, so tired and tense that he could barely grip his handlebars, he pulled up at Ursula’s to give her all of his thousand-dollar cut. She let him sleep on the floor that night, and, as soon as the sun was up, he showered, scrubbed, and tied back his hair. He returned to the hospital looking like a puffy, blow-dried bear.
He stood for an hour by the incubator, watching the baby’s lungs quiver. He didn’t know what the numbers meant on the monitors, but he noticed that they were higher than before, and—as if all the apparatus were just a variation on a speedometer—he assumed this was a promising development. His daughter’s chest looked stronger and she seemed able to move her legs in more than a startled twitch. Exuberant as he left the NICU this time, he ran around the halls and called for the nurse to tell her about his daughter’s thickening legs.
For the next ten days, he alternated between deliveries for Preacher, showers at Ursula’s, and nights on her floor or a bench outside the hospital. One day, when Nurse Vu Thi had just come on her shift, she told him the good news. The baby was breathing on her own. The pediatrician thought that her vision would likely be unaffected, and there was a chance that she’d have few long-term complications. She needed to put on more weight under close observation. The doctor told Link that, at twenty-nine weeks, she had been the second most premature child to survive in his time there. Link couldn’t hold all the information about the nervous system and possible deafness; he only heard that his daughter had beaten all the odds.
When he reached Ursula’s apartment, he was riotous with the good news. Ursula had been up all night cleaning. She said that she was going back to work, and she wouldn’t need his help with the rent anymore.
“Ursula—she’s going to do it. She’s a tough little thing, that kid.”
Ursula didn’t seem to hear him. She went over to the closet to organize her clothes, then she stood in front of a mirror trying on earrings. Link hovered in the center of the dim room while she walked back and forth around him, saying something about the interview just being a “technicality,” that the boss knew her well and had promised her the job.
Link said, “Ursula! I want to name her!”
Clasping an earring, she tilted her head, as if there were water in her ear. She smiled at him, sadly, like the butt of a cruel joke, and he realized that she had not even considered the possibility of her baby surviving.
“After my mother,” Link said.
“What are you doing anyway?” she asked. “Where is this money even coming from?”
“Lydia Jane. You never met my mother. She died when I was about twenty-three. My father died when I was twelve. Just worked to death. Mean as hell, and he died young, and they just worked and worked until they broke in half. Never had a second of fun. Never had a nice day in their lives. My old man was the sourest, bitterest man you ever met. Beat the shit out of my mom, day and night. Tore into me, too. And all the kids hated his guts and used to plot to poison him at night. But I was his favorite, I think. And I was the only one who got upset at the funeral. Cried like a pussy. And you know what? All my brothers kicked my ass for that. Never let me live it down. Don’t know where they are now, bunch of assholes. You never knew a thing about my family, I don’t think. Shit, she’s going to live, Ursula. The little girl, Lydia—Lydia’s her name, and they said she was the second toughest baby they ever saw.”
Ursula was rubbing her temples.
He had never thought two people could be so far away in the same small room. She looked up at him finally, her face abstracted as if she were listening to another voice in her ears, and she said, “Well, what do you know? I guess it’s a miracle.”