Page 70 - Leather Blues

58 Jack Fritscher

began crying as the older man yelled at his son. She tried
to stuff back into Den’s bureau drawers the clothes the Old
Man was throwing to the floor.
Den stood cool and apart.
His father turned his wrath on the crying woman. Den,
standing in denim and leather in the room where he had
slept as a boy, felt the mansweat rolling down the inside of
his thick arms. He felt apart from them. For the first time.
He saw it was their fight. They enjoyed it. They had put
him in the middle like some military objective. But now he
was no longer under them. He pulled a pack of cigarettes
from his leather jacket; he lit the smoke. Again the leather
touched his essence. The heat of the summer night made
his belly slick under the heavy leather. His body knew he
was his own man. He turned and gave his boot heels to
the man and woman pulling from the closet the clothes he
had worn last year as a high-school boy. They didn’t even
notice as he went to bed down in the old carriage barn next
to his cycle.
Had Den not fallen asleep, healthy and drained by sex,
he might have heard cutting far away through the silence of
the town’s outskirts the sound of Chuck’s cycle. The rider
had decided to make a phone call. Even the late-night cop
from the town’s bonded protection agency skirted the dark
corner where the lone leatherman in full regalia, cap, shades,
jacket, gauntlets, filthy jeans, and boots, slouched in the
lighted phone booth. Outside in the 3 AM dark, his bike
was kicked up on its stand, waiting, menacing, as the night-
cop’s headlights flashed quickly across it and then quietly,
knowing better, disappeared.
The next morning, Den avoided the house. He beat off
in the garage and came on his bike. He had held the front
wheel gripped tight between his kneeling thighs and beat his
meat until he shot white juice over the black tire. He made
a loud point of gunning his bike down the drive and off to

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