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Matt Walker sighed and rolled over on to his front. He then crawled like a caterpillar, still swathed in his sleeping bag, towards a pool of shade at the foot of a sprawling pinyon pine. He flopped out of the glare of the sun and into the cool shadow of the tree like a floundering fish. Walker stretched out against the sun-bleached grass and yawned. Smelling the bitter aroma of coffee in the air, the Englishman sat up again and rubbed at his tired features. Not a great night’s sleep by anyone’s standards.
Though he was only thirty-six, Walker’s unkempt features looked ten years older today. Several nights of sleeping out under the desert stars had taken its toll on him. Dark circles hung around his bleary eyes and three days worth of black stubble perforated his face, making him look like a tired hobo. He moved slowly and awkwardly, clearly aching from another night resting in the dirt. He groaned and finally stood, wriggling free of his dusty sleeping bag. He dragged himself over to the campfire, where his friend Johnny Clark already had a fresh pot of coffee on the go.
“So much for an early start.”
Walker looked up to see Johnny rummaging through the panniers of his Electra Glide. Johnny retrieved two sachets of powdered milk and returned to the smouldering campfire. He looked fresh and rested; there wasn’t as much as a hair out of place. Though Walker and he were the same age, Johnny was a very different animal altogether. Johnny was a true alpha male through and through; close-cropped dark hair, pumped arms, model tan, with a purposeful stride and the killer instinct of a natural predator. Johnny had always been successful and seemingly without any sense of self-doubt. He made his shit look easy.
Lucky bastard, thought Walker.
Johnny flashed Walker that smug grin, the one that had clinched success in the bedroom and boardroom a thousand times over.
“You look like shit,” said Johnny.
“It’s early,” replied Walker. “I haven’t exfoliated yet.”
Johnny smirked and poured two steaming coffees out into tin mugs and stirred in the whitener. Walker slumped down next to him and fished his tobacco rolling kit out of his denim jacket, then opened up a small tin of weed. He began to roll a joint on autopilot, acting out his now usual morning rousing ritual.
“I couldn’t get off to sleep last night,” said Walker. “It was freezing, and I kept hearing weird noises everywhere. I must have dozed off just before dawn.”
“Well smoking that shit won’t help,” said Johnny.
“It’s for my back. I must have rolled on to a rock or something, it’s killing me.”
“I slept like a log.”
“I’m very happy for you.”
“It’s the great outdoors,” said Johnny, slapping him on the back. “That’s why we’re here. We’re going to take you apart and rebuild you. Make you bitch-proof. Make a real man of you.”
“The six-million-dollar bitch-proof man...”
Walker stood again and winced as he straightened up. He popped the joint into his mouth and lit it with a cheap disposable lighter. He slowly exhaled a satisfying trail of smoke and trudged back over to the pinyon tree to piss on it.
“No thanks,” he said. “I’m a committed wimp.”
Johnny wandered over to their two motorbikes resting in the shade. He sipped at the strong coffee and pressed his free hand against the black tank of Walker’s Harley Fat Boy. The metal beneath his fingers was already hot, even in the morning shade. He looked out at a desolate strip of asphalt cutting through the desert plain ahead; stretching up to meet the faded outline of faraway mountains nestled against the skyline. Walker joined him, still struggling to do his fly up with one hand, whilst holding his coffee mug in the other.
“Here,” said Johnny, taking the mug off him.
“Thanks.”
Johnny handed the mug back and the two men took a moment to just stare through the vast, empty space that lay before them.
“That really is something, eh Walker?” said Johnny.
“Yes,” replied Walker. “Yes it is.”
Walker took another drag on his joint. As he stared out into the endless desert landscape, he began to feel its pull; to feel truly lost.
Mission accomplished, he thought.
This back roads bike tour may have been Johnny’s idea, but it was definitely for Walker’s benefit. Twelve years of slogging away in the lower ranks of broadcasting had come to a crashing halt in redundancy that spring. Six years with the woman he once thought to be the love of his life had gone up in smoke a few months later. Walker was still surprised she hadn’t stuck it out a little longer, just to help him spend the redundancy money. But she didn’t hang around, choosing instead to smoothly cross-fade into her next relationship whilst phasing him out. Only now did he realize how badly he’d let his life slip away from his grasp. So now was the time for reinvention, to break down his old self and see what new version might emerge. He’d accepted that he was obsolete in his old world, both as a lover and a worker, but hopefully if he moved around enough he’d hit a new world, one that would be his oyster. With thirty grand in his pocket and no mortgage to pay, no wife or family to support, no trade to ply, what else was left to do, other than simply get lost?
So here he was, with his oldest, if not quite best friend, out on a month-long tour of a forgotten America. A tour with the specific, yet meandering goal of losing himself, so that he may go back to the start; so that he may find a life again.
Walker looked up from his thoughts to see Johnny urinating against the same tree he had just christened.
Not urinating, he thought, marking his territory.
Johnny had always been a good friend, but he was also fiercely competitive and could be very antagonistic. Walker often wondered if their friendship would still be intact if he had experienced half the success that Johnny had achieved. Johnny zipped up and turned to face him.
“Drink up,” he said. “We better get going.”
Walker finished his coffee and slipped out of his jacket. It was only midmorning, but the sun was already roasting him alive in his jeans and T-shirt. Walker stuffed the jacket into his pannier and began to daub sun cream over his face and arms.
“Want some?” he asked.
Johnny just smiled and shook his head, as if to say, who, me?
Walker watched him kick over the burning embers of the campfire and don his Ray-Bans. The two men then loaded their belongings on to their rental bikes and straddled them, ready to leave. Walker pulled out a large plastic bottle of warm water and began to guzzle it down. He offered it to Johnny.
“You’ve got to keep hydrated,” said Walker.
Johnny shook his head in mild amusement, his eyes smiling behind his sunglasses.
“Walker,” he said. “I love you old friend, but you’re such a pussy.”
The Electra Glide’s engine rumbled into life and Johnny played with the revs, making the machine roar angrily. He spun the back wheel around to cut a perfect circle in the sand, and then pulled up on to the road. Walker gunned the Fat Boy and let it creep forwards until they were level.
“So, where the fuck are we going today?” said Walker.
Johnny craned his neck around to look back at the stretch of road they had travelled yesterday, and then followed it up to their present position. He then stared out along the same road ahead; it pointed north through a sweeping flat range of desert scrub and very little else.
“Well, I think we’ll go...” said Johnny, pointing north. “That-a-way.”
“Fine,” said Walker. “Hey, you’ve left you saddlebag open.”
“What?” said Johnny, looking behind him with a confused expression.
Walker smirked and opened up the Fat Boy, roaring away along the empty road. Johnny’s face instantly creased into a scowl. He shot forwards in pursuit, the Electra Glide chewing up the asphalt as he tore after his friend.
*
The two would-be-bikers blasted through the Nevada Desert on their Harleys, racing hard, until Johnny inevitably caught and outstripped his friend with a reckless turn of speed that Walker was unwilling to match. Walker watched Johnny roar ahead in a cloud of dust, feeling his brief moment of elation fade. He knew he wouldn’t win. Whatever the contest between them, Johnny always eclipsed him. It was just the way things were. Johnny was an over-achiever, it came naturally. He had his own business, excelled at sports, charmed women and won friends without ever really trying. Walker, on the other hand, managed to find an inherent awkwardness in every nook and cranny of his life. He often believed he was just being dragged along in his friend’s wake. He sometimes suspected that his past jobs, friends and even relationships might just be the flotsam of Johnny’s own adventures; titbits thrown up by his successful friend’s endless stream of encounters. The more Walker thought about it, the more he supposed that it was just a matter of destiny. Some people were destined for greatness, others for normalcy, or even failure; it was pre-programmed. Perhaps your own drive and effort played some part, but what could they do in the face of a universal dose of lifelong bad luck? Walker knew he was beginning to feel sorry for himself again; he had been a lot since he lost his girl and his job. He couldn’t help sliding into bouts of hopelessness and despondency anymore than his friend could buck his never-ending trend for success. It was hard to be around someone like Johnny, especially at times like this, when your own luck had deserted you.
A surprising thought crossed Walker’s mind, and despite the dust and grit, he smiled to himself as he rode through Johnny’s wake.
I‘m going to beat him, he thought.
Just this once.
Just once, I’m going to take him.
Walker accelerated.
He recognised that this wasn’t just a competitive urge to beat another stirring inside him. This was something far stronger. It was a real need to know if he could be something more than destiny had dictated him to be. To find out if he really was damned to just scrape by in this life, or if he, in fact, had it within him to rise to the occasion and succeed against the Johnnies of this world, should he want something badly enough to fight for it.
To see if he could force his luck to change for the better.
Walker roared ahead, recklessly pushing the Fat Boy. He was almost on Johnny’s tail, both machines tickling a hundred miles an hour with comparative ease, when the Johnny noticed he was being challenged. Johnny didn’t even question what was happening. To him the situation was a clear equation; his superiority was being tested, so he’d have to respond with greater force, greater speed.
And he did.
Johnny instantly opened up with the Electra Glide and pulled further ahead. Walker watched the gap grow between them and felt a sudden paralysis grip him. Doubt clouded his brain and invaded every muscle, freezing his arms and legs. This was the end-stop. This was the point at which a frightened man pushed no further. Walker had felt this sensation many times before and always folded against its effects.
But not today.
Walker twisted back the throttle and hung on to his Harley as it flew ahead. He caught Johnny’s surprised double-take, as he sailed forwards and drew level with his startled friend. Though shocked, Johnny still managed to flash a wide grin of obvious pleasure at the prospect of a real contest between them.
Both bikes roared along the asphalt, until suddenly Johnny broke left and veered on to a dirt road that forked away from the main route, rising up into fiery sandstone foothills near the tail of a much higher mountain ridge. Walker just managed to make the turn too, and followed him up the incline, cursing his friend’s tactics. Walker then glimpsed a warning sign up ahead. He thought the passing blur read: “Restricted access. No trespassing”, but he couldn’t be sure, as Johnny’s Electra Glide flashed by the sign and clouded it with dust almost immediately. He heard the spring of light metal compress beneath his tyres and felt the Fat Boy’s suspension bounce and soak up a bump from something on the road’s surface. He suspected it was a downed chain-link fence that once went with the sign, and wondered where the hell they were heading. Johnny showed no signs of slowing or stopping, so he sure as hell wouldn’t either. The two men raced on, tempering their speed only slightly to the new terrain, as the winding road climbed higher and higher along a rocky ridge. Then the way ahead flattened and straightened out again, and Johnny took full advantage, accelerating towards a sole narrow passage that looked to have been blasted through the surrounding foothills to allow access.
Due to the speed they were travelling, Walker couldn’t be sure of what exactly happened next, he only knew what he saw. One moment, they were racing through the jagged gap between the hills, flanked on both sides by sloping piles of loose rock and rubble. Then, in an instant, they were bearing down on the figure of a man wandering down the centre of the road. It seemed to Walker that the man must’ve been the victim of a traffic accident. He appeared to have lacerations on his body and moved towards them as if in a daze, making no effort to dodge the speeding bikes. The man was facing them, and Walker was sure that he could see and hear them coming.
There was something else odd about this particular pedestrian.
He was completely naked.
Walker knew all of this happened in a brief moment of time, compressed by the stress and adrenalin of their race and the ensuing accident. He also knew that his later recollection was clouded by concussion, yet he was sure of the man’s nudity, and couldn’t for the life of him imagine why anyone should be out in the middle of the desert without a stitch of clothing on. Regardless of what went through Walker’s mind at that moment, the fact was, a split second later, Johnny’s bike struck the man and flipped into a series of spectacular aerial tumbles, as Johnny was tossed skyward like a rag doll. The dust whipped up by the Electra Glide quickly obscured Walker’s vision before he could see the outcome of this collision. From then on, his mind was focused solely on trying to blindly wrestle his own Harley over to the opposite side of the road and avoid hitting man or machine.
Walker managed to steer around his fallen friend, and cleared the dust cloud to find nothing but open road awaiting him. Unfortunately, he’d already leaned too far over, too quickly, to wrench his bike upright again. Now he felt his balance slipping away, his own weight combining with the weight of the Fat Boy, both conspiring against him, gradually tipping him over on to his side.
Then he was free of his bike and skidding sideways across the road, bouncing between its hard surface and the rushing air like a skimming stone. Walker was vaguely aware of the flattened motorcycle scraping and sparking against the asphalt, its greater weight and momentum carrying it far ahead of him. Walker just had time to glance up and see a rubble-strewn sandstone road siding rushing towards him. Then he felt a crunch and the rattle of bone against rock.
Blackness was instantaneous and all consuming.