He looked down at his clothes and his bike and smiled grimly to himself. Yeah. And I’ll be the hoody teenager who loses in the end.
The fact that Flagg was a teenager was something he tried hard to hide. You had to look past that quiet, adult, dark intensity; you needed to peer through the shades that always hid his eyes. Only then might you guess that he was actually a hair short of eighteen.
His outfit surely offered no clues to his age. Certainly not the two-tone forties thrift jacket over the white T-shirt, and not the worn blue jeans, the crepe-soled rockabilly shoes, and the tiny metal stud in one ear. No, these things made Brian Flagg look as if he’d been through a lot more living than one can experience in eighteen years, which, of course, was just the effect he wanted.
He wondered idly now if all that cheering back at his alma mater meant that the Hawks had scored a touchdown. Not that he cared much. That was behind him. No, mostly what he was concerned about now was what lay before him.
This riverbed.
He was going to try and jump the mother.
It was dry now, more like a ravine than a riverbed. When it actually had been a river, there also had been a bridge. But all that remained of the bridge now was a short section of rotted timbers extending out into midair.
Flagg started the motorcycle and maneuvered to the edge of the gully, one hand still holding the beer. He drove in a lazy loop for a moment or two, contemplating the bridge. Then he drove halfway up the thing, stopped, and kicked the wooden supports with his foot.
Yeah, he thought. This should do. The timbers should make an okay ramp. A quick dart up the ramp, then over that thirty feet to the other side. Sure, no sweat.
Decided finally, he drove the motorbike back the fifty yards or so he needed for a good takeoff. As he listened to the revving sounds of the engine and steeled himself for the jump, he noticed peripherally a figure emerge from the woods nearby, followed closely by another, smaller figure.
He turned to check them out, then laughed to himself. Shit. Just the “Can Man” and his mangy mutt.
The scruffy old dude, the Can Man, was a codger who looked as if he’d fallen off the rails in the thirties and decided to stick around. He lived in an old shack up aways, and made his living collecting bottles and cans and whatnot, which he turned in for nickels and dimes. The Can Man was a figure of popular local mythology, wearing all sorts of identities to the minds of youngsters growing up in Morgan City. Brian’s own mother had warned him to stay away from the guy, but when he was only nine, Flagg had actually ventured to the shack one day, where he’d quickly ascertained that the Can Man was just a harmless fellow who didn’t have much to say. Certainly he wasn’t any kind of bogeyman. In fact, Flagg rather identified with him. He was an outcast too. Their bond ended there, however. The Can Man had little to do with anyone or anything except the business of being a hermit and collecting stuff to sell. Brian understood. In fact, he respected that. But his dog—now, there was another matter. That scruffy mutt had already tried to bite him a couple times, so Brian gave the creature a wide berth.
Now they were his audience. So, fine, he’d show the Can Man and his dog how to jump a gully.
Flagg took another swallow of beer, then crumpled the half-empty can and threw it toward the Can Man.
“There ya go, guy!” he snarled. “For your collection.”
The dog barked and Brian Flagg chuckled. He could still hear the cheering from Morgan City High, and he pretended that they were yelling for him.
Yeah. Here’s Brian Flagg, Colorado’s answer to Evel Knievel, about to show his stuff to the world. What? A twenty-five-foot jump? With a machine like this one under his butt, why, it would be child’s play!
“Yo!” he called. “Here goes!”
He gunned the throttle of the Indian, jammed the bike into gear, and spun out, spraying dirt behind him. The engine roared loud and hard, and the thrill of acceleration added excitement to Flagg’s determination. The wind whipped through his hair, whistling louder and louder as he went faster and faster. He bent his head forward to decrease the drag and yanked the throttle down all the way.
The field flashed by; the bridge approached. Man, oh, man, this was going to be a rush… He was really going to do it…
But then the Indian coughed! It sputtered and it coughed again, just yards from the bridge ramp! Flag gunned it again. What the hell was this… ?
Damn, he wasn’t going to have the speed to make the jump.
Instantly he jammed on the brakes, but it was too late. The bike skidded, kicking up dust as it veered to one side. Desperately he dug his heel into the ground, fighting his momentum as he reached the lip of the gully.
For an endless moment he hung, teetering at the very edge of the busted bridge. Brian desperately shifted his weight, lurching back away from the precipice. His muscles strained as the machine tottered beneath him. And then the bike dropped, dragging him along with it.
It really wasn’t too deep a fall till he hit the side of the gully, maybe five or six feet, and Flagg managed to land without the bike falling on his head. But the jolt was too strong and the pull of gravity too great. Both he and the Indian tumbled and slid ass over elbows, handlebars over axles, to the bottom of the gulch, collecting a goodly amount of dirt and dents along the way.
For Flagg the world twirled around, away, and then, with an abrupt lurch and a splash, he found himself at the bottom, lying in a thin trickle of water, the motorbike on top, pinning him to the muddy clay. Wetness spread through his trousers, sopping them, and he struggled to get up.
“You not only let me down,” he said to the Indian, “you rub my nose in it. What kind of faithful companion are you?”
The cheers from the high school football game seemed to mock him.
Then closer applause came from above. Flagg looked up. The Can Man was peering over the edge above, a big grin on his stubbly face. He started to wheeze with laughter.
Flagg shot him a glare, then began to wiggle out from beneath the bike.
The Can Man chuckled a little more as he polished Flagg’s discarded Coors can and chucked it with a clank into his plastic sack. The mutt whimpered away.
Flagg sighed and finally pulled himself free.
The Can Man turned and followed his dog.
Flagg shook his head morosely. God, the humiliation! He couldn’t have suffered this failure alone, he had to have Jimmy Nick the Can Man witness it. Like that saying, If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it really make a sound? If Brian Flagg gets chucked into the mud by his bike, does he feel embarrassed unless someone sees it?
Well, he felt damned embarrassed. Maybe that meant he had just proved something, though hell if he knew what. It wasn’t as if the old Can Man was going to go and blab his story all over town. The Can Man didn’t say diddly to most people, and he didn’t exactly hang out with the boys on the general-store porch. So why did it bother him?
Flagg knew why.
The Can Man didn’t use his mouth much, but sure as hell he used his ears. He knew Brian Flagg, and sure as shit he knew the boy’s troubled history. Trouble, trouble, trouble, was the theme here, with no happy endings, just a couple of stretches in juvie hall, getting “reformed.”
The old Can Man was probably thinking: Typical. Typical Flagg move. Trouble. He thinks he’s so cool, and he ends up wallowing in a ditch.
Brian stood and brushed his pants off. He pulled the bike up and pushed it toward a dry area so it wouldn’t get messed up worse. He loved his bike. It was cheap transportation, cheap freedom, and Brian Flagg cherished freedom deeply. Now more than ever, since he’d been deprived of it a few times. He just had to work out the kinks, that was all. He’d get it running right again; he was a pretty good mechanic, used to his machine.