I was sitting at the bar in the Woody Creek Tavern last week, sipping my normal huge flagon of whiskey and getting cranked up to the right level of alcoholic frenzy for an afternoon of fast driving on the local highways, back roads and maybe even a few residential districts, when a man from Miami came in and said he had a fast motorcycle to sell, for $5,000 cash.
It was a cafe racer, he said—a fancy little hot rod with a silver engine the size of a football and hand-tooled Italian leather seats. . . . And he had it just outside in the parking lot, strapped down with pink bungee cords on the back of what looked like a flatbed Peterbilt truck.
Nobody paid any attention to him. There was a film on TV about a team of French scientists trying to load a polar bear onto the fantail of what looked like a Caribbean tourist yacht. The beast was howling and thrashing, but they had it wrapped up in a steel mesh-net—and then a woman wearing a topless bikini came out and shot it in the back with a tranquilizer gun.
It was the middle of a slow afternoon on a cold day in the Rockies, and there were only a few paying customers at the bar, all of them deeply engrossed in their own business. . . . They were locals, cowboys and gamblers, and the last thing any one of them needed was a high-speed Italian motorcycle.
The stranger took a long look at the place, then he slumped on a bench near the window and ordered a sloe gin sling. “Who gives a damn about polar bears?” he muttered. “They’re dumber than dogs and they’ll turn on you for no reason at all.”
I saw Cromwell shudder on his stool at the far end of the bar, where he had been nursing a Moosehead all morning and brooding helplessly on the 9-point spread for the Celtics-Rockets game that was coming up on TV around sundown. ... He had bet heavily on the Rockets and given 16-1 against four straight, and now he was feeling deep in the hole.
The day was already queasy. The morning had bloomed warm and bright, but by noon it was raining fitfully and the sky was turning black. By 2:30 we were getting thunder and lightning, the first spring storm of the season.
The polar bear film was still rolling. The brutes were being taken off to some zoo on the outskirts of Paris, where they would be loaded with electrical implants in the softer parts of their bodies and then turned loose on the slopes of Mount Ararat.
The reasons would never be explained. It was one of those top-secret international security gigs that only the French can do properly. . . . And meanwhile, on the other side of the world in a pure behavioral sink 8,000 feet up in the Rockies in a roadhouse on a two-lane blacktop on the low-rent side of the river, some nervous little fruitbag from Miami was trying to peddle a slick Italian motorcycle.
Cromwell eyed him balefully for a moment, then he stood up and pulled a pair of ribbed leather gloves out of his hip pocket. “OK,” he said. “You’ve come to the right place. Let’s have a look at the bugger.”
“What?” said the stranger. “You want to buy it?”
“Not yet,” said Cromwell. “But I will, if it’s fast. I just got back from Vegas and I have a lot of money.”
There was a hoot of dumb laughter from somewhere back in the kitchen, but I kept a straight face.
The price was $10,000, said the stranger, but he was new in the neighborhood, so he would let it go for five. . . . The only other one of these things ever built, he said, was sold to Steve McQueen for something like $40,000.
“Which one of us should ride it?” Cromwell said. “I want to run it against my Jeep for about a mile down the road—to the gravel pit.”
We went outside in the rain and unloaded the slick little speedster down off the flatbed truck.
Cromwell pulled on his motocross gloves. “If it’s faster than my Jeep,” he said, “I’ll give you ten grand—but if it’s not, you give it to me for nothing”.
The stranger stared at him, and nobody else said a word. “Are you nuts?” he said finally. “You want me to race my Ducati against a goddamn Jeep? For $10,000?”
“Why not?” said Cromwell. “Let’s go do it before the storm hits.”
We all agreed. It was winner-take-all. Cromwell backed his rotten-looking, mud-covered Jeep out of a corner of the parking lot and aimed it down the road, while the man from Miami got his bike tuned up. ... I drifted around behind Cromwell’s machine and pulled a Parnelli Jones-Baja bumper sticker off the rear end; the thing was a monster, so fast and strong that he was afraid to even drive it on the roads in Colorado. The engine was a 600-hp, turbo-powered Ford-Cosworth.
Money changed hands. There was serious talk about “honest dollars” and escrow. A man called Tex stepped forward and agreed to hold the cash without prejudice.
We were all involved in this thing, more or less, but nobody really cared . . . and it was just about then that the whole world exploded with a boom and a flash that blew us all sideways. Cromwell’s Jeep turned blue like a gas bomb, and then fell on top of the motorcycle, sending up a cloud of nasty electrical smoke.
We were all knocked stupid. The next sound I remember hearing was a woman screeching, “Please, Tex—don’t die.” And then I felt myself being dragged across the road by people I didn’t recognize. There was a smell of burning hair all around us, and I heard voices talking about “oxygen” and “heart failure” and “burned like a human cinder.”
No money changed hands that day, and we never saw the man from Miami again. Several days later I went back to the tavern and heard more or less what happened. We were whacked by a huge blue ball of lightning that bounced once in the parking lot and then rolled down the road about 200 feet before it exploded in the creek.
Tex lived, but his heart was like a small lump of charcoal and his face shriveled up like a raisin. A doctor in Phoenix said his body was about 400 years old, and if he ever bumped up against anything solid he would probably break like cheap glass.
I never saw him again. His family put him in a rural hotel somewhere in Arizona, where he remained helpless for whatever was left of his life.
There is still a big crater in the parking lot across the road from the Woody Creek Tavern, with a crust of black ash on its edges and a pool of stagnant water at the bottom. ... I have not been back there since I quit work and moved north, for professional reasons.
June 2, 1986