Page 27 - Leather Blues

Leather Blues 15

“Good morning, Dennis,” Mrs. Hanratty called at him.
Her washline flapped in her azaleas.
Dennis ignored her. Mrs. Hanratty and her daughter,
Madonna, were constantly trying to save him, make him
back into the nice boy-next-door he had been to them before,
they said, he had bought that motorcycle. Before, they said,
he had cycled to Chicago and come back with a tattooed
eagle screaming down his left bicep. Whenever his Old Lady
and Mrs. Hanratty got together they plotted how to drop
Madonna into Denny’s way. “She’s a nice girl,” Denny’s
mother always said. “Maybe she’ll settle him down. She
cooks. She cleans. She can get used to the tattoo.”
Mrs. Hanratty couldn’t have cared less about Dennis.
She favored the match only because she was one of the two
persons who knew that deep down Madonna Hanratty was
stupid.
The other person was Dennis.
Mrs. Hanratty wanted the girl off her hands. “I said
Good Morning, Dennis.”
Dennis ignored her and entered the garage. His bike
stood clean and spotless in the morning sun. Chrome and
leather and power. He pulled a soft chamois from a nail and
dusted the traces of night dust from his machine. He had
to laugh. The Hanrattys and his own parents all hated his
cycle. And they were the ones who caused him to get it two
summers before. He had been sixteen and working lateshift
at a paperbox mill. They, and a biker he met at the mill, had
both convinced him, in different ways, that a motorcycle was
his ticket out. Out of everything he didn’t want.
He had ridden buddyback a couple of crazy, beery
times on high-school friends’ factory Hondas and unmodi-
fied Triumphs. But that summer when he was sixteen, a
lone outlaw cyclist appeared in his neighborhood. The rider
had come to crash for a few nights and cadge a few meals
off an embarrassed aunt and uncle. None other than the

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK