“You okay?” Reuben asks.
Sam nods.
Pearl’s eyes pop open. She moves to sit up and Reuben pulls her down.
“Pretty gruesome, huh?” Sam says.
His father strokes Pearl’s temple and she makes a sound low in her throat. Indy is belly down on Reuben’s chest. Pearl rests a hand on the baby’s back, rising and falling smoothly in sleep.
“Let’s not let it ruin the rest of the evening, okay?” Reuben asks. “What’s left of it.”
Sam produces the Polaroid and holds it out questioningly.
His father grins and shrugs. Not telling. Sam looks to Pearl and her mouth curves faintly in a little Mona Lisa smile.
“It’s nasty out. I guess I can wait until tomorrow.”
Reuben raises an eyebrow. “Up to you.”
The puppy will be lonely and scared. It’s not a long trek and his truck has four-wheel drive.
He hears the soft murmur of their laughter behind him as he goes out the back door.
The old farmhouse stands on the height of the Ridge, its roofbeam a blind leviathan spine against the sky. With Reuben sick and Sam tied up with basketball, no work has been done on the house recently and the sense of abandonment is as cutting as the wind on the ridge. Leaving the truck, Sam walks past the farmhouse up the yard toward the horsebarn, which stands far enough apart to have saved it from the fire. He’s always had more of an affection for the barn than his father does, who had lived in it for a time while in high school. In fact, it is precisely the evidence that still remains of the time his father made a home of the tack room—raw shelving, nail hooks in the wall, gaps in the wood caulked to keep the wind out, the handmade wooden seat in the earth closet—that endears the place to Sam.
Despite the faint frozen odor of manure, the horses have been gone since his mother left and there’s no point in locking the doors. Sam steps through the opening into a sudden cessation of the bitter wind.
“Hey, Cujo,” he says.
He rolls the swath of his flashlight over the lightless interior. The beam splinters the bits and pieces of things salvaged from the farmhouse fire and still stinking of it—leaded glass from the front door and the parlor, a box of ceramic doorknobs, brass or copper fixtures, a claw-foot bathtub—and shocks a gleam of black sleek curves he recognizes instantly. Numb, he reaches automatically for the light switch by the door, finds it blind and flicks it. The inside of the barn leaps into detail as if he had tumbled into it from a dark hole. In the middle of the floor, a flathead Harley Electra Glide sits in splendid potency, keys in the ignition, brain-bucket glinting like a black mechanical skull on the tail.
Cujo forgotten, Sam strokes the cold silken steel of the bike’s muscular curves.
Clipped to the keys is an envelope—ownership papers, registration, the thing is already licensed. Stuck to the papers is a note: She’s eleven years old, been through three owners, and every one of them dicked with her so she’s no virgin. Jonesy found her. He fixed the immediate previous owner’s balls-up of the transmission. She still needs some work but nothing major. Ahem. Goes fast. You don’t have a bike license yet. Also you have to pay for your own insurance which is going to be outrageous so I figure you’ll have her on the road in about five years. PLEASE DO NOT KILL YOURSELF ON THIS THING.
As he reads his father’s printing, he swings a leg over and mounts it without thinking about it. Like the jacket, the bike fits. When it comes to life, he thinks he should have put on the helmet first to keep his brains from exploding out his ears with the rush. It brings to mind a Duke Tomato song that demands “More Love, More Money.” Who needs money, Sam counters, who needs love, with a machine like this between your legs? It is love and money and the proof is there in his father’s words: Goes fast.
While he hasn’t qualified for a bike license, as a matter of course he has wheeled other people’s bikes around the garage or the parking lot or shop at school. In any case he is a natural and instinctive operator, adapting smoothly to the shift from four wheels to two. He rolls out of the barn without a second thought. Testing brakes and gears automatically, he leans his weight joyously into the curve around the door. It’s a big heavy ride. The rollercoaster thrill of planing on icy mud pumps his adrenaline a little higher. He feels perfectly in control at the edge of control. The wind bites at him and he slows, idling at the bottom of the yard to zip his jacket to the throat and don the helmet and his gloves.
He knows the road conditions are moderately greasy with occasional plaques of black ice. New riders almost always dump their bikes at least once, usually within a few miles of their first ride. And he’s unlicensed. But it’s nearly eleven on Christmas night and the cops are all at home with their families—everybody’s at home with their families. Nodd’s Ridge is a map of empty roads, byways Sam has driven constantly since he was fifteen. Working with his father on the tow truck and the plow, he knows every bad patch on them. Anyway, he notes for when his father asks, he’s wearing the brain-bucket.
As the bike’s weight and his own combine to tip dangerously on one particularly sharp corner and he compensates, the twinge of protest in his right shoulder reminds Sam of the damage he might do if he goes down with the bike on that side—nevermind the season or the state basketball title, he could wind up
