They were men and women, boys and girls, some small ones not big enough to drive one yet since they were still in Pampers strapped on their mothers’ backs like papooses in knapsacks with holes cut for their chubby legs. The grown people wore caps and T-shirts and blue jeans and dungarees and pants suits and overalls and some of the women who were older had their hair in pink curlers. They were on ATVs, Kawasakis, Yamahas, Suzukis, Polarises, Hondas, Arctic Cats, green and red and blue and black and tan, all slowly churning dust, all headed somewhere in a solid line, like covered wagons crossing a prairie, up the gravel into that slanting evening sun on the road that climbed the hill past Jimmy’s daddy’s trailer’s yard that had no grass.
He stood there transfixed and watched them with a new exhaust manifold gasket for the ’55 in his hand. They came from somewhere out of the river bottom, he supposed, and they were always strung out in a line that proceeded with dignity and purpose, their hands firmly locked on the handlebars, their cold beers between their legs, riding in foam-rubber Koozies, riding along with them. Sometimes they lifted one hand and took a drink. Whenever they came by they all waved, even the children. Even the little children. Some of them were holding their own bottles and waved with them. Their coolers were in racks behind them, strapped snugly down with black rubber cargo cords like NAPA sells. A few outriders had nylon-stocked .22 rifles slung across the handlebars as if looking for trouble. Or free meat. What with twenty-pound logger-heads crossing the roads in dry spells looking for water sometimes. The chance feral suckling piglet, trapped squealing in rusted roadside hog wire. The succulent vealish steaks of the apparently orphaned spotted fawn. Jake turkeys too stupid to run from a gun. Sometimes they displayed their captured roadkill, dead bunnies or stiffened squirrels strapped to coolers like coup feathers that danced on a war lance.
They were strung out behind each other in a long line and they raised a thin stream of dust like horses on a trail and they swept uphill in a caravan of four-wheelers, the fat black rubber tires churning, the little papooses asleep or bawling, the old darkly tanned guys in their retirement years with their John Deere caps sipping beer as they rode, the children bringing up the trail end. Into the wooded hills. Into the sunset. Drinking cold beer. In a caravan. Where did they go? What did they see? The sight of them always put a longing in Jimmy’s daddy’s heart to go with them, down the road, into the woods, wherever they were going, wherever that was. Maybe one day he would. Maybe one day he could.