“Hell,” he said. “You don’t have to do nothin’, Diane. I guess I just feel it’s time to shine a light on this.”

“Why me?”

“’Cause you were the one who was there,” he said. “But I ain’t telling you to do nothing. Maybe I just wanted some company. Or maybe I just wanted folks to remember her.”

Diane reached up to the edge of her hair, feeling for that long streak of gray in all that black. She played with the end and glanced down at the gray, thinking maybe this would be the week to finally start dyeing it, making it all even. She tipped the Coors bottle at Stillwell and said, “I’ve never forgotten.”

“I think about the last time I seen her,” he said. “She came to me to borrow ten dollars at the body shop and I wouldn’t give it to her. I’d got all over her about the way she’d been dressing. Embarrassed her. You believe that? She’d gotten all made-up for the carnival with a lot of lipstick and stuff on her eyes and such. You know what I did? I told her to go wash that shit off her face, said that she looked like a streetwalker. How you think that sounds from her daddy? No wonder she didn’t call me when y’all needed a ride. When I had to go see her body with Sheriff Beckett, it was raining and all that goddamn paint was washing off her, making her look something foolish. Why did I talk like that? Like I was some kind of goddamn preacher. What kind of right did I have to be such a goddamn asshole? I deserve every bit of what’s come to me.”

Diane had heard this story perhaps a thousand times, the father playing it over and over again in his mind, trying to figure a way he might have found a new outcome. Sometime later, he became such a crazy-ass drunk that he’d been kicked out of the Born Losers Motorcycle Club as a liability. That fact would become Hank Stillwell’s epitaph, Too Fucked-up to Ride with a bunch of hellraisers. The man still sporting the skull-and-crossbones tattoos on his nothing biceps and sagging skin. Pig Pen written in jagged ink.

“God damn, it keeps on hurting, Diane,” Stillwell said, finishing the beer. “You think that’ll ever stop?”

“No, sir,” she said. “Not till you quit loving your daughter.”

She stood and walked with him to the door and watched as he made his way down her stone path and back to a vintage Plymouth with shiny chrome wheels. He had to crank the car three times, but once it started it growled like a big cat before he rode away.

Diane took a deep breath. Tomorrow she’d lay it all out. Even if it didn’t make her feel better, maybe it would keep both Stillwell and Caddy Colson off her ass.

The bugs had started to gather on her front porch. She clicked off the night-light and went on to bed.

Jason’s younger brother Van had warned him: “Don’t go and fuck with Big Doug and all his bullshit. I don’t care how long y’all been friends. Something done broke in his head in Vietnam.”

“We’re just going to go drink some beer,” Jason said. “What can be wrong with that?”

“You know who he rides with?” Van said. “You know about him and the Born Losers? They seen you jump the other day and wanted you to come out to the clubhouse. It ain’t no beer joint, it’s their private club where they shoot drugs, shoot guns, and raise hell. Do what you want, but I wouldn’t go out to Choctaw Lake for nothing.”

“Appreciate the advice, Van,” Jason said, sliding into his leather jacket and snatching up the keys to his Harley. This was the Fat Boy, not the trick bike he’d used at the show. The landing had been a little off and, damn, if he hadn’t bent the frame. He’d get her straightened out and smooth out the gas tank where it got all nicked to hell when he laid her down. He hadn’t wanted to ditch the bike, but he came off the ramp hot as hell and headed right into the cop cars that had been parked in the end zone.

He rode out along Dogtown Road on a fine early-summer night, feeling the warm wind, smelling that honeysuckle and damp earth, and being glad he was back down South for a while. The Fat Boy was baby blue, with a hand-tooled leather seat made by the same man who’d made saddles for Elvis. It was comfortable to be on the bike, comfortable to be back home among friends. The evening light was faded, a purple light shining off the green hills headed out to the lake, nothing but winding ribbon and yellow lines.

The clubhouse had once been an old fishing cabin, a cobbled-together collection of boards and rusted tin. Outside, fifteen, twenty Harleys parked at all angles in the dirt, all of them custom, with tall ape hand bars, and sissy bars on the backseats for the women who rode with them. When Jason killed the engine he could hear an old Janis Joplin song blaring from inside the shack. A man with red hair and beard, wearing leather pants but no shirt, eyed Jason as he walked past. The man was turning over steaks on an open grill and smoking a cigarette. The man looked to Jason, cigarette hanging from his mouth, and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Jason-Fucking-Colson.”

The dude stopped, held up the end of a long fork to Jason’s chest, and said, “You the dude who jumped the bike over all them Pintos?”

“Yep.”

“I saw that,” the man said. “That was some crazy shit. A bit wobbly on that landing, but some crazy shit, brother.

“My name’s Stillwell, but they call me Pig Pen.” He removed the fork from Jason’s chest and offered him a big pat on the back, his hands filthy with grease. “Big Doug is inside with his old lady. Go on in, there’s cold beer in some trash buckets, help yourself. Damn.”

The windows had been busted out a long time ago and covered in plastic sheeting that bucked up and rippled in the wind off Choctaw Lake. There was a doorway but no door, and once Jason got inside it took some adjusting to get used to the darkness. The walls were decorated in those velvety glow posters of women with big tits, panthers, and Hendrix and Zeppelin. There were some black lights spaced around the room, keeping everything in a soft purple light. as men in leather vests and women in tight T-shirts stared up at him, everyone getting real quiet, just like folks in old John Wayne movies, and all he could hear was Janis daring a man to take another piece of her heart.

Someone messed with the music, turning down what he saw was an old jukebox on a dirty concrete floor, and Jason looked at the group, man-to-man, and over at the women, with long stringy hair down to their butts. He nodded and walked toward the beer, the reason he’d come to the party, since it was harder to find a cold beer in Jericho than a decent job.

And there was Big Doug, arms outstretched, big hairy belly exposed through a wide-open leather vest. He had long black hair and a long black beard and looked like he should be riding the high seas with men with wooden legs and eye patches. He walked over to Jason, wrapped him in a bear hug, and lifted him off the ground. Big Doug got the name honest: he was six foot six and about three hundred pounds. A woman, wearing a headband over her long blond hair parted in the middle, walked over and gave Jason a cold can of Coors.

“I knew you’d come,” Big Doug said. “That pussy brother of yours try and scare you?”

“Which one?”

“Van,” Big Doug said. “I tried to talk to him at the Dixie gas station a few days ago and he about pissed down his leg.”