The Reluctant Prophet Page 7

  “It’s a smooth operation,” Hank told me. “Kind of like wringing out a towel.”

  She got me up to speed fairly quickly because, as she put it, “Under ten miles an hour, it’s like riding a huge bicycle. As we know, balance isn’t your strong suit.”

  The first time I made it all the way across the range without falling or stalling or heading for the creek bed, I was so thrilled I took off my helmet and waved it in the air.

  “There you go, Al,” she said. “Each smooth start and smooth stop you make will build your confidence.”

  “Was that smooth?”

  “Not at all. But you’ll get there.”

  My confidence resisted, but after another two hours I started to get it, even though I continued to drift every time I looked down at the controls to make sure I was braking, not throttling. Hank still said I was the most freaked-out student she’d ever had, though not the most hopeless.

  “Thanks for that,” I said.

  “At least you know that you don’t know it.” She gave her mouth the funny twist I was coming to enjoy. “I’ll take you over an eighteen-year-old boy any day. They want to pop wheelies in the second hour.”

  “I have to learn to pop wheelies?” I said.

  “That’s not covered in this course. But …” She shrugged. “You never know what God’s got in mind, yeah?”

  I looked at her closely to make sure she wasn’t mocking me.

  She wasn’t.

  By the end of the first hour Tuesday, I could keep the thing upright, shift all the way to third gear—where everything was less jerky—and take a slight curve without dumping it. From there we moved on to steering, since, as Hank pointed out drily, I wasn’t always going to be moving in a straight line.

  “Build up speed in the straightaways, and then slow down for the turns. The faster you go, the less wobbly you are….”

  “You have to maintain momentum in order to remain upright,” I chanted. “Slowing down is not always the answer.”

  As I learned when I nearly toppled it on a turn because I put on the brakes.

  It was, however, getting easier to stay on and keep practicing until the critiques at the ends of exercises were less along the lines of, “You’re killin’ me here, Al,” and more like, “It’s slow, look, press, and roll—not slow, look, press, and maintain.”

  It occurred to me sometime Wednesday, as I finally heard her cheer when I made a clean sweep all the way around the range, that the reason it was so hard for me to speed up and stay there was that it went against my very nature. Or maybe just against my experience.

  Then I decided it was a good thing I didn’t have time to ponder that too much.

  Just when I got the hang of maintaining speed, on Day Three, it was time to work on braking.

  “Constant and steady,” Hank said. “Squeeze that hand brake like it’s a Florida orange.”

  We did so many starts and stops and had so many critique sessions that I knew very well how to squeeze the brake—by imagining myself squeezing Hank’s neck. She was a relentless teacher, exacting and whip-cracking—all Ivy League vocabulary delivered like a Boston street thug. Yet never once did I think about quitting.

  “What am I learning today?” I asked her Thursday when we met at the range for our three o’clock lesson.

  “You know it all intellectually,” Hank said. “Now you have to practice until it comes naturally to you.”

  “When’s that going to happen? Sometime this decade, I hope.”

  She ignored me. “Just practice whatever you’re struggling with, and I’ll interject.”

  “I still feel like a klutz on it about half the time. I wish I could just practice with nobody watching.”

  “Yeah,” Hank said. “Too bad life doesn’t work like that.”

  Friday morning dawned as a “spit day”—one of those we had now and then in the fall in St. A when it didn’t exactly rain. It was more like having a conversation with someone who occasionally sprays you with fine saliva, but it’s so brief and astonishing that you’re not quite sure you actually felt it. Once again the early-September tourists made tracks to the Lightner Museum, and Lonnie didn’t see any reason for me to hang out at the Bay Front waiting for fares that weren’t going to show up.

  “You’ve been cutting out early all week anyway,” he told me when he called at eight a.m. “So I don’t figure you need the money that bad.”

  “I’ve worked five hours a day, Lonnie,” I said, and then turned on my coffee bean grinder so I wouldn’t hear most of what he said next.

  “—got a wedding coming up and the bride’s parents have requested you, but I don’t know—”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “After tomorrow I’ll be back to putting in sixes and sevens, okay?”

  He sighed. I rolled my eyes and poured the grounds into the filter basket. He was waxing dramatic.

  “Just so you know,” he said, “Bernard gets restless when you don’t work him regular.”

  “You’re a lying sack of cow manure, Lonnie. He’s the laziest horse in that stable. Feed him some extra oats and I’ll see you Saturday.”

  “Morning.”

  “Afternoon.”

  “Why?”

  “Personal business. See ya.”

  I hung up before he could pry further. I wasn’t about to tell him I had to take my motorcycle test Saturday morning. Him or anybody else. Although I hadn’t been successful in keeping it from Bonner when he’d called Wednesday afternoon to see if I was coming to Watchdogs and I had to tell him no.

  “I don’t mean to be nosy,” he said after a concerned pause, “but is anything wrong? You never miss.”

  I toyed with the idea of pretending I was losing service on my cell phone, but I knew if I did that he’d book right over to the house and call 911 on the way.

  “I have a motorcycle lesson,” I said. “From four till eight.”

  Another pause. A long man-sigh.

  “What do you want me to tell everybody?” he said finally.

  “Tell them I have a motorcycle lesson.”

  He actually laughed. “You sure you want to miss the expressions on their faces when they get that news? Nah—I don’t want to deprive you.”

  “You’re chicken,” I said.

  “Bok-bok,” he said. “I’ll tell them you have some personal business to take care of.”

  Which was where I got the line for Lonnie.

  With the day free Friday, I could practice with Hank all morning and get my final instructions for the test, which I would take with a few other Chopper-challenged trainees who were coming in for a redo. We ran through the course several times until she was convinced I wouldn’t score more than twenty-five points. Every time I made a mistake, she explained, the tester would add points, depending on how bad the error was. You couldn’t make over thirty.

  “Does anybody ever get a perfect score?” I asked her as we walked to our cars, the Buell put away and probably thanking its lucky tires it was almost done with me.

  “Not even the instructors when they take a refresher,” she said.

  “How reassuring,” I said.

  “It kind of is, actually.” Hank put her hands on the hips that lined up solidly with her waist and shoulders. “If nobody’s perfect, then nobody has to drive themselves nuts because they aren’t.”

  I laughed. “Trying to be perfect has never been my MO. Anybody who knows me will tell you that.”

  “I’d like to know you,” she said. “You want to go for coffee?”

  The woman had a way of making me feel like somebody had just changed the channel when I wasn’t looking—because she knew where the good programs were.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We met at the Spanish Galleon, a struggling little
café in the Lyon Building, across the street from the Episcopal Church just south of King. It was a long, narrow hole-in-the-wall I’d never been in, but Hank was apparently a regular, because the hippie-esque woman behind the counter had a double-shot mocha with extra whipped cream ready for her before the bell stopped tinkling on the door.

  “You’re an angel from heaven, Patrice,” Hank said to her.

  “You want your waffle?”

  “You have fresh blueberries today?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then let’s do it.” Hank looked at me. “You want something? The Belgian waffles are to die for.”

  Patrice shook her impressive head of lion-mane hair. “I have her pegged for the Walk the Plank omelet.”

  Hank nodded, eyes closed. “Mushrooms, peppers, onions, spinach, tomatoes, ham, and aged cheddar. Fabulous.”

  “I’ll just have coffee,” I said. “Black.”

  When Patrice returned, visibly deflated, to the kitchen, Hank said, “Are you fasting?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just freaked out about tomorrow. I figure the less I have to eat between now and then, the less I’ll have to throw up before the test. Or during.”

  I waited—hopefully—for Hank to tell me I had nothing to worry about. Instead she placed her compact hands in a neat fold on the table and looked pretty much into my soul. It was startling enough to make me knock over the saltshaker I wasn’t even using.

  “So tell me,” she said, “why is this so important to you?”

  I pulled the hair-tie off my ponytail, checked my cell phone for messages I didn’t care about, took a frenetic survey of the room crowded with reproduction sea trunks and large Jack Sparrow figurines.

  “Wonder where they got all this funky nautical stuff,” I said.

  “You don’t want to answer the question.”

  “No.”

  “I’m okay with that.”

  “But I think I have to.”

  “I’m okay with that too.”

  I raked my hand through my hair, which I was sure now looked like I’d been through a shipwreck. “I’ve got to be able to ride that motorcycle so I’ll get another Nudge from God,” I said. Then I added, “I didn’t even know that I knew that until it just came out of my mouth. That happens all the time lately—at the most inopportune moments.”

  “I wouldn’t call this one ‘inopportune.’” Hank’s gravelly voice had smoothed to something more like marvelous, luscious mud. “I’d like to hear about it.”

  I nodded, as once again she looked into me.

  “It’s weird,” I said. “And yet when I think about it, it isn’t—at least not for me.”

  “Always been weird, have you?” she said, mouth twitching.

  “You could say that.”

  “I can relate. Go on.”

  “It’s like with my conversion—to Christianity.”

  “From?”

  “From … nothing.”

  “Everybody believes something.”

  “I believed everything my parents didn’t believe,” I said. “They drank, so I didn’t. They exploited their workers, so I picketed with the strikers. They prided themselves on their vehicles, so I went everywhere on a bicycle.”

  “A bicycle?” Her lips twitched again. “You could’ve fooled me.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “I was about fourteen. I broke with Chamberlain tradition and insisted on going to public high school—where I found out that the rules are different for the rich, of which I was one—which ticks off the poor and makes them cynical and bitter and rebellious, and, in my opinion, a whole lot more interesting. I decided I wanted to be one of them.”

  The food arrived, and I watched in amazement, tinged with nausea, as Patrice set down a platter groaning under two Belgian waffles, a pint of blueberries, a cumulus cloud of whipped cream, and a generous sprinkling of powdered sugar. The whole buffet swam in a pool of melted butter.

  “Patrice, you are an artiste,” Hank said, face reverent.

  “It’s nice to be appreciated,” Patrice said.

  She looked at me from beneath the mane.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll have a bagel.”

  “Oh for Pete’s sake, at least bring her a carrot-raisin muffin.” Hank leveled her eyes at me as Patrice went off, happier this time. “So if this is part of your vow of poverty, I’m treating.”

  “You’ve already treated me to twenty hours of free instruction. I should be treating you.”

  “You already are. This is the most stimulating conversation I’ve had in months.”

  “You don’t get out much, do you?”

  “I get out plenty.” She tapped her forehead. “I don’t get in much. So, about your conversion.” She picked up her fork. “You talk, I’ll eat.”

  I watched for a moment to check out her approach to the feast before her. She cut daintily into the corner of the waffle, scooped up the tiny morsel and swept it through the whipped cream, and placed the tidbit into her mouth with such savor I found myself drooling. She nodded at me before she uncovered a pecan, smiled at it, and tucked it between her lips.

  “I went to the ‘right’ church growing up,” I said. “The one where it was important to be seen. When I realized everybody was looking at us and not actually seeing a doggone thing that was really there, I refused to go anymore.”

  Hank was relishing each bite. “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen. My mother would’ve forced me, but Sylvia told her that would only seal my fate as a complete heathen, so I slept in on Sundays.”

  “And did you become a complete heathen?” She stopped with half a forkful midway to her mouth. “You sure you don’t want some of this?”

  I shook my head to both questions. “Like I said, I didn’t party, because that would make me too much like them. Didn’t sleep around or hang out with the ‘wrong crowd,’ although I did love to bring home friends who were sure to send my mother running for the Valium.”

  “For you or for her?” Hank said.

  “For my father, so he wouldn’t blow a gasket. That was pretty much her job description in our household. Sylvia told her that if she didn’t leave her body print on the ceiling every time I brought in a kid with a pierced ear, I would probably stop doing it.”

  “I love it.” Hank tapped my plate with her fork tines. “Eat that muffin while it’s still warm. Who’s Sylvia, by the way?”

  “My nanny, from the time I was born basically until she died when I was thirty-five. There were some years in there—eighteen to twenty-five, I guess, when I was out in California, trying to ‘find myself’—where we didn’t talk that much, but she was always in my head. I’d wonder if she was still praying for me.” I wiggled my hand. “I’d vacillate between hoping she was and wanting to call her up and tell her she was wasting her time. Anyway, any spiritual influence I got in my youth was hers.”

  “I take it that was a good thing. At least taste a couple of these blueberries. I don’t know what Patrice does with them but they’re dee-vine.”

  I relented and scooped a few onto a spoon. She was right, of course.

  “Nectar of the gods?” Hank said.

  “Pretty close,” I said. “And, yeah, now that I look back on it, it was a good thing. When I was twelve and I’d come home all ready for a fight because some little Miss Thing was putting me down at school, she’d say, ‘You let God handle it, Allison. He’s got a special place in hell for people like that.’”

  Hank’s eyes widened over her coffee cup.

  “I know,” I said. “The theology’s questionable, but I didn’t realize until I had my own relationship with God that she was telling me He loved me, in a way that, at that time, nobody but she did. Anyway
—when she got sick, about ten years ago, I was renting a room from her and working for a restoration company, so I quit that job and took care of her until she passed away in ’03.”

  Hank put her fork down. “You were her caregiver for three years?”

  “Don’t be impressed,” I said. “It was the best job I ever had. I bumped into Jesus so many times at her bedside, I finally said, ‘All right, what’s the deal?’”

  “And did he tell you?”

  “Sylvia did, because I asked her.” I smiled into the memory. “She said, ‘Now’s a fine time to ask—I’m dyin’ here.’ I just told her to hit me with the high points, which took a year. During that whole period the doctors kept telling me she had three months max, no more than a few weeks, wouldn’t last through the night. She just kept talking to me, telling me, ‘Forget all this Jesus-is-my-boyfriend nonsense. He’s not gonna give you everything you want because you swoon over him.’” I glanced at Hank, who was grinning. “Yeah, like I ever ‘swooned’ in my life. Although—that one day—I’ll never forget it … she was bedridden by then, but she wanted to go down to the living room and sit in her favorite chair. I carried her in there—she was nothing but tissue and soul at that point—and put her in this red chair-and-a-half she bought when she first inherited the house from my parents—another story. She looked so tiny in it that day, the way I must have looked to her when I was a little girl and she was carrying me around. I thought, ‘She’s going to die right now.’ But her eyes were so alive, and I watched her take in every inch of that room. ‘I made it ours,’ she said. ‘Yours and mine. We finally got a real home.’”

  I pushed the remainder of the muffin away, because my throat was closing up. I hadn’t talked about this in so long. Maybe even never—not like this. I tried to grin at Hank.

  “What are you doin’ to me here?” I said. “I was going to give you the Reader’s Digest version.”

  “I hate those. I always wonder what I’m missing.” She pushed aside her own plate, now miraculously empty. “I’m a little confused about the house.”

  “It was my parents’ house. I grew up in it, and then when they were—when they died, they left it to Sylvia, who left it to me.”