The Reluctant Prophet Read online

  She didn’t ask the obvious question. She just said, “Got it,” and I went on.

  “Sylvia sat there for the longest time that day, just looking at everything she’d done to make the place her own, and she’d done a lot. Took out the brocade draperies, ripped off the matching wallpaper. She’d said she always thought my mother’s décor was like Early Whorehouse.”

  Hank spit out a laugh.

  “The gold carpeting came up, and she had the wood floors refinished. She sold all my mother’s ‘antiques,’ most of which were reproductions anyway because my mother could never get the idea out of her head that a real antique was still ‘secondhand.’ Sylvia replaced it all with bright colors and curtains that let in the sunshine and cushiony furniture you could actually sit on without being afraid you were going to leave an imprint in the velveteen. It was like she let the house breathe again, and she just curled up there in her comfort-chair that day and let it breathe for her until she fell asleep.”

  “Did she pass then?” Hank said.

  “No. She just slept like I hadn’t seen her do since she got the diagnosis. It was like she’d done everything she was put here by God to do and now she could rest some. And y’know, as I tried to look at the room and see it like she did, it hit me that it wasn’t just the furniture and the pictures on the walls that she’d changed. Her spirit had driven out their shallowness. She’d knocked down the façade I’d lived with all my life. Nobody could ever be false in that house again. Including me.” I looked up from my muffin plate at Hank, who was giving me her steady gaze. “I think that’s why I finally saw Christ there, at that moment, and I just said, ‘Why fight it? You’re real and I believe in you.’”

  “Did you tell Sylvia?”

  “Yeah, the next morning.”

  “How did she respond?”

  “She died. With a big ol’ sigh of relief.”

  “Dear God, I love that,” Hank said.

  She obviously really did. Her eyes were as bright as a child’s.

  “So are you a nun or something?” I said. “I mean, you’re really into this.”

  “I’m a far cry from a nun! If you’re talking about my ‘professional’ Christianity, I was an Army chaplain until four years ago. I was up at Bethesda; counseled soldiers just back from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

  “Of course you did. You could probably get anybody to spill their guts.”

  She glanced at the check Patrice slipped on the table and turned it over. The hands folded on top of it. “I get the sense that you don’t ‘spill your guts’ until you’re ready, no matter who’s asking the questions.”

  “True.”

  “So you’ve spent the last seven years learning how to be a good Christian….”

  “I think mostly what I’ve learned is what not to do anymore because I’m a Christian. I guess I was fine with that until recently, and then I started getting this restless feeling, like there’s got to be more to it than just being good. I’m not the most ambitious person in society, so the urge to be more than I am seems significant somehow.”

  “I don’t think you can ignore it,” Hank said.

  “So you don’t think this Nudgy, kind of almost-a-voice thing is my imagination? I mean, is that how people know God’s talking to them?”

  “In my experience, it doesn’t matter how you know. It only matters that you know. And I’ve gotta tell you, Al, people buy motorcycles they can’t handle all the time, and most of them wind up selling them within three months of purchase. I’ve never seen any of them work as hard as you have to get control of the thing. If you’re as devoid of ambition as you claim you are, then this sure seems like God to me.” She shrugged. “What have you got to lose by giving it a go?”

  “Do you seriously think I’ll pass tomorrow?” I said. “I want you to be honest.”

  She did the little mouth twist. “If you can keep your cool, you’ll more than pass. Pray, of course, and remember what I’ve told you.”

  “Which thing?”

  “They can tell what your head is doing by what your motorcycle is doing.” She gave the table a sound pat and picked up the check. “I’m going to go take care of this.”

  I nodded and watched her stride her stocky self up to the counter and realized she was talking about far more than a motorcycle test.

  Hank was right. I did pass, with a score of twenty and a minimum of profuse sweating. There was no vomiting.

  Ulysses was there, and Darrell, and Stan, among others from the dealership who whistled and cheered when I received my certificate as if I were accepting the Stanley Cup. I’d actually expected some eye-rolling, some indication that the sport of motorcycling was now going downhill if they’d give me a license.

  Hank passed around sparkling cider—and told Stan to bag it when he complained that it wasn’t champagne. She gave me the mouth twitch when she handed me my glass.

  Ulysses pounded me on the back, which was still aching from my bout with his class. “Now you can join HOG.”

  “Can I please?” I said drily.

  “It stands for Harley Owners Group,” Stan said. “We have a meeting tomorrow at noon.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “We all want to see you on your own ride, girl.”

  “She’s going to go home and practice on that right now,” Hank said. “And no harassing her tomorrow or you’ll all be in a hurt locker, every one of you.”

  I had no idea what a hurt locker was, but it looked like nobody wanted to be in one, especially if Hank was going to put them there.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said to me later when we pulled my Classic out of the garage to admire it together. “They’ll tease you about initiating you, but it’s all talk. We’re all about safety and everybody having a good time.” She nodded at my bike. “Now get on that thing and ride it to the end of the block here. I want to take a picture.”

  I fired her up—that sleek, Hot Sunglo machine. And for the first time since I sat on her in the showroom, she seemed one with me again—her and her shine and her chrome and her eighty-one-point-three cubic inches of engine.

  I belonged with her—and I was going wherever she took me. Even if it killed me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I decided the next day that the Classic wasn’t taking me to church. After a Saturday morning of testing and celebrating, and an afternoon of particularly obnoxious groups of tourists—one of which spoke not a word of English and glared at me for the entire hour because I didn’t know Croatian—I was too worn out to face the Watchdogs and the Reverend Howard from the back of a Harley.

  Their accosting me en masse on the church steps after the service was exhausting enough.

  “We missed you Wednesday, Miss Allison,” Frank said.

  “Everything all right?” Mary Alice said.

  India was less subtle. “So—what personal business was more important than us?”

  I caught Bonner smirking behind her.

  “Bonner can fill you in,” I said. “I really have to run.”

  And then I did, literally, straight into Pastor Garry’s open wings.

  “A good Sunday morning to you, Allison!” he sang out, and then he held me at arm’s length. I wanted to squirm like a puppy. “How’s your group coming along?”

  “I’ll touch base with you this week,” I said. “I really have to get going.” I glanced over my shoulder, where Bonner was now smoldering at me. “If you need to know right this minute, Bonner’s your man.”

  I wriggled away and took the steps two at a time. I was probably home before Bonner finished the conversation.

  After I showered off the sweat, I put on my jeans and my boots and the leather jacket and chaps I’d treated myself to when I passed the test and went out to the garage. Where I sat—broiling—on my bike and had an attack of nerves.


  “I can do this,” I said to her. “We can do this. Milestone by milestone, just like MOM says.”

  “MOM” was the Motorcycle Owner’s Manual. “If you want to know anything just ask your MOM,” Ulysses told us that first night in class. It was an unfortunate acronym as far as I was concerned. My mother had been something less than maternally helpful.

  But I’d still read the guide cover to cover the night before, and I had the Milestones memorized.

  “Milestone Number One,” I said out loud as I brought the engine to life. “Riding your own bike for the first time alone.” Why did that sound like I was about to commit a crime?

  I eased out of the garage and realized I was going to have to make a slow left turn to get headed toward St. George Street. Neither left turns nor slow ones of any kind were my top skills, but I fixed Hank’s voice in my head and managed to get onto Palm Row. Still, I had to get up some speed or I was going to dump it, right in front of Miz Vernell’s house—where she was currently standing in her pastel paisley muumuu, pulling beetles off of her roses.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her gape, but I had to imagine the rest—the eyes popping behind the magnifying glasses that already made her look like a pug dog, the garden-gloved hand going to her little dried lips. If I’d actually looked, I would have driven right up onto her lawn (I could hear Hank saying, “The bike’s going to go where your head goes”), and the bewildered little woman would have suffered cardiac arrest. Just seeing me on a motorcycle probably had her halfway there already.

  Part of me, however, couldn’t resist sitting at the corner for a moment, rolling the throttle. I was starting to love the fact that I had the power to make that sound. And I was still trying to decide whether to head for the HOG meeting. I’d gone approximately fifty yards by myself, so that was Milestone Number One. If I hung one left onto St. George and went up to Artillery Lane, I could keep making right turns after that and take care of Milestone Number Two: “riding around your own neighborhood.”

  Once I got onto Artillery, I realized that I hadn’t counted on the engine’s rumble being so ominous on the narrow street crammed with two-story buildings. By the time I got to Aviles, I’d freaked out a Yorkie on a balcony and made a man in a bathrobe jump back from the newspaper in his driveway. Left turn or not, I decided I’d better take the next street, Charlotte, to King, which, though busier, was more wide open. People were used to Harleys roaring through there.

  I just wasn’t used to being the one doing the roaring. I had to focus hard, both feet down at the same time at the stoplight, keeping my distance from the truck spewing fumes in my face—smooth, smooth, smooth, everything smooth.

  Even at that I was aware of the stares, the heads turning to the deep growl that could only come from a Hog. I didn’t let myself wonder whether they were cursing or envying as I cruised between Flagler College and the old Alcazar Hotel building like a rolling anachronism. I just kept going—it’s okay, you can pass this guy looking for a parking place, keep your speed up, slow down in front of the police station, they love to pull bikers over—until nobody was staring anymore because the crowd had thinned.

  And then I saw why. I was crossing Ponce de Leon Boulevard. US One.

  I was on West King Street.

  I knew better than to slow down too much or I’d start to wobble, and this definitely wasn’t a place where you wanted to look like you didn’t have control. Although it was as vacant-looking as it had been two weeks before when Bernard and I had found ourselves here, this time I felt like eyes were watching me from the cracks in the boards on the windows and the doors half hung on their hinges and the dank alleys I’d never noticed before. I was even more vulnerable on a motorcycle than I’d been in a carriage—and a whole lot louder. West King was wide, but my engine’s roar reverberated off of the concrete-everything like the woofers on a gang kid’s car stereo.

  Yeah, this met the requirements of Milestone Number Three: “riding outside my neighborhood.”

  I was almost to I-95 by then, with the hidden eyes of West King closing again behind me and the Harley dealership beckoning ahead. I forgot what Milestone Number Four was, but I knew Number Five, and I headed straight for it.

  “Becoming a HOG member.” Every woman’s dream. I’d refused to even sit on a bike that was called a Fat Boy, and now I was going to sign up to be something that inspired even more visions of obesity.

  I had the urge to snort—until I pulled into the parking lot and found myself in an ocean of chrome and handlebars and studded leather saddlebags. There must have been two hundred bikes, and half again as many people in a rainbow of do-rags. It felt like Day One on the training range all over again.

  I managed to nose my own bike between a Road King and a Street Glide without knocking either of them down, and then saw that every one of the motorcycles there had been backed into their spaces. Headlights taunted me as I walked away from them while my Classic remained with her backside facing the world. She and I were becoming more alike by the minute.

  The eyes of the other Harleys weren’t the only ones on me as I strode across the parking lot and tried to look like I should be there. Despite the leather jacket and chaps, I knew I still looked about as much like a biker chick as Jacqueline Kennedy.

  “Hey,” a male voice said. “Nice chassis.”

  I turned around, tongue already in half-lash, but the voice’s owner was pointing to my bike.

  “Brand new?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t think I needed to add that this was my first time riding it.

  “Good-lookin’ ride,” he said.

  I started to ask him where I had to go to sign up, but someone else said, “Dude, that thing is slammed to the ground!”

  I twisted the other way, expecting to catch somebody’s Harley under a truck. All I saw was a small masculine crowd around a bike that looked like everything on it had been lowered and stretched. Except for the handlebars, which would have extended over my head if I’d been sitting on the thing.

  “I’ll never understand ape hangers,” a woman near me muttered.

  She was even taller than I and a little older and, in spite of the past-its-prime show of cleavage that was spilling out of her tank top, she looked pretty safe.

  “What are ape hangers?” I said.

  “Those handlebars,” she said. “They make you look like an ape when you’re riding.” She demonstrated, arms chimpanzee-like in the air.

  “So slammed to the ground means …”

  “A bike that’s been modified so your butt’s practically on the street.” She looked at me a little more closely. “First time with us?”

  “Could you tell?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Everybody’s great. Let me get you a packet.”

  She disappeared into the crowd. I looked around and quickly came to the conclusion that to be a HOG of the male variety, you either had to have a shaved head or hair down to your rear. I couldn’t tell about the women because they were all wearing bandanas that equalized everyone. I was wondering if they called female members SOWs when a short, soft-looking man came up to me, put his hand out, and said, “I’m Rex. I’m the chapter president.”

  I almost said, “Are you serious?” Although his graying temples and mushy paunch put him at middle age, he had the face of an oversized toddler. He didn’t look like officer material, but I was beginning to figure out that, when they donned helmet and leather, nobody looked like who they probably really were.

  “Allison,” I said, returning his chubby handshake. “This is—wow—a big turnout.”

  He looked around as if he’d just noticed the crowd. “Not as big as most,” he said with a whisper of a French accent. “Usually we have three, four hundred bike for a group ride.”

  I was trying to determine whether “bike” was the plural form when
you were talking about a herd of motorcycles when the woman returned with the HOG packet and introduced herself as Leighanne.

  “She’s our secretary,” Rex said to me.

  Before I could ask what they needed a secretary for, someone else whistled through his fingers, and the attention shifted to instructions for The Ride—with a capital R, obviously, because people immediately began donning helmets and putting on fingerless gloves—what was the point in those?—and revving up engines until the concrete under us vibrated. When I was pretty much the only one still standing there, it came to me that a chapter meeting meant everybody got on their bikes and rode someplace. All at once. In a herd.

  I went cold all over.

  “You like your bike so far?”

  Despite the thunder of departing Harleys, the low voice beside me made me practically jump out of my chaps. I looked up—and up a little more—at a man with a gray ponytail down to his broad shoulders. Snappish brown eyes looked back at me from either side of a striking nose. It was like meeting an eagle at close range.

  He pointed at my Classic.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “You weren’t planning to take it on this ride, were you?”

  My urge to pay him Harley-homage faded, and I lowered my sunglasses. “The way you asked that, I guess my answer is supposed to be no?”

  He hitched his big shoulders slightly, as if a full shrug was too much effort. “You could do it, but you’d probably kill yourself.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Because I saw you ride in.”

  The sweat-matted hair on the back of my neck tried to bristle. “I passed my test.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then the answer is supposed to be no.”

  I looked for a smile somewhere on the raptor face, but I couldn’t tell if there was one. He seemed like the kind of guy who only had one expression: slightly ticked off.

  “How do you propose I get experience if I don’t ride?” I said.