Authors: Jade Allen
****
After everyone else had filed out of the place,
Mona was startled to discover that Ryan was still there. He’d stayed near her
through the entire wake, almost as though he knew that she wanted him there.
They hadn’t spoken to each other much in their lives, beyond the passing
motorcycle- or Benny-related conversation. Ryan was gregarious, but Mona was
rather shy, particularly while her father was around. She was his baby girl and
he worked hard to keep her tender heart protected from the bad biker boys he’d
rounded up.
Benny’s Running Hill Riders always felt like a
close-knit group of people on the fringes and margins of society, a veritable
mixing pot in a place where differences often went ignored, uncelebrated, or
even condemned. Benny Myers’s wife Leila was a Native American woman who died
of cancer not long after Mona first befriended Ryan at the tender age of 15. Benny
always said he would never forget the stories of injustice and prejudice he
heard from Leila and her family when they’d gotten married back in the late
1960s. Benny was forever changed, always bent on being as caring and compassionate
as possible, and that included sharing his passion for bikes. Because of that,
the Running Hill Riders worked hard to find bikers who were shunned or expelled
from other groups, and it worked out splendidly; now, however, that sense of
kinship and camaraderie was gone…
Mona didn’t know why, though she supposed it had
something to do with the fact that they’d been under her kind but misguided
leadership while Ryan dealt with his wounds.
There was no respect towards her. She was young
and she’d only ever been on the back of her daddy’s bikes. She didn’t know what
she was doing. Now that Ryan was back, she was prepared to fully step aside and
not be part of it so much anymore.
“You did a great job putting all of this together
today, Mona,” Ryan said to her once they were alone. His black helmet was off
and still on the bar. He didn’t look like he was planning to leave any time
soon.
Mona blushed. “Thanks. I highly doubt that anyone
else agrees with you, though. I get so nervous when everyone’s together, all
eyes on me. That’s one of the many reasons I’m not cut out to be the de-facto
owner of the club now. I’ve got a voice like a chipmunk when I’m nervous and a
raspy voice otherwise.”
“Your voice is my favorite sound. Why wouldn’t I
want to hear that?”
Mona opened her mouth a little, not quite knowing
what to say to that. She hadn’t expected him to stay there with her after the
wake, and she had expected him to pronounce his affection for her voice even
less. “Come on, I sound like a smoker who swallowed a bag of rocks,” she
quipped, trying to lighten things. She couldn’t take him seriously, right?
They’d known each other for years and he’d never made a move. So why now?
“And it’s
hot,”
Ryan insisted, prompting Mona
to dissolve into awkward giggles.
She stopped laughing abruptly as a thought entered
her mind. “I suppose that it would be better to talk to you about this while
I’ve got you here alone,” she said.
His eyes widened before he waggled his eyebrows.
She was starting to realize that he’d just been kidding around about her
before. He often wasn’t serious about much of anything, except for motorcycles
and charity work.
“I think that, now that you’re fully recovered,
you should take over as the leader of the club. I’ll go back to being the
barkeep.” With that, she opened up the bar and stepped out from behind it,
though she stayed leaning against it because it was her turf and she aimed to
look after the register until closing time.
This really did seem to surprise Ryan. “Me?
leader? I don’t know… You’ve seen the way the others respect me.”
“That’s only because they’re jealous,” Mona
pointed out. He couldn’t deny that. He was a top-notch rider, and he’d always
been one of Benny’s favorites. “Who else should be leader? Lance? Give me a
break.”
“Why not you?” Ryan asked.
She laughed, but then she realized that he was
serious. “I’m not one of you, Rye. I love you all as my family, but I’m no
biker. I can’t lead the team to glory from behind a bar. I can’t schedule
races. I don’t know the first thing about it. I’m just an accessory.”
This seemed to displease Ryan. He shook his head a
little. “I don’t know if the boys will feel right with me assuming the
leadership position.”
Mona shrugged. “I’ll tell them it was Daddy’s
idea. No one will argue with Daddy’s ideas…” She suddenly thought of something
else, too. “Speaking of Daddy’s ideas and ways of getting the old band back
together, when’s the last time you ran a charity race? Are the boys all still
doing monthly food drives? This is something you’d know more about than I
would.”
Benny had set up monthly donation drives for
low-income families nearly twenty years before, and the members took turns
making grocery drop offs. “I actually haven’t heard about one in a few months,”
Ryan admitted.
“
Months?”
Mona repeated with a note of
alarm. “How many months, Ryan?”
He searched his memory as anxiety knotted in his
stomach. “About…eight? Nine?”
He knew then that he’d made a mistake, but it
still wasn’t clear what had happened within the group to cause this change. “But
you have to remember,” he said defensively, “I’ve been out of the game for a
while now. Broken legs don’t heal within only a few months, you know.”
Mona let out a noise of exasperation and threw her
hands into the air. She knew that she shouldn’t be too hard on Ryan. He had an
excuse. The fault was largely her own. Ever since her father’s death, she’d
been preoccupied with funeral arrangements and her own grief process. She
hadn’t exactly been paying attention to the schedules of the club. “What the
hell is going on with my father’s riders, Ryan? I thought everyone had their
shit together.”
“Everyone had their shit together before I got
hurt,” Ryan said sadly, “but I can’t orchestrate food drives while laid up in a
hospital bed. I got too depressed to imagine all of my friends out on their
bikes. And you know Lance. He’s…wily. And sharp. Like a needle. He would always
speak over people and start assuming control of small groups whenever we did a
charity drive without them even realizing it.”
Mona nodded.
“He hardly even came to meetings before Benny
died, though, so I didn’t really consider it.” Ryan was regretting it now. “I
think we’ve splintered off into factions. I hate to say it, but that’s what
it’s beginning to feel like. And I don’t like it any more than your dad would.”
The Running Hill Riders that she had inherited and
she was asking Ryan to help run were no longer her father’s dream team. “What
do you think we should do?” she asked, feeling beaten before she’d even begun.
“I think we should start fresh,” Ryan answered.
“Assemble the team and find out if people are actually
for
continuing or
if they want to follow Lance’s more illegal approaches to racing.”
Mona thought about that. “Only one problem,” she
said. “What if everyone is for leaving?”
Ryan slowly shook his head at her and smiled.
“Trust me; the majority of us want to be with you.”
She blushed again, wondering if there was a double
meaning in that. “Okay, then, you organize a meeting and have people sign up.
Let me know when it’s planned. I’ll be there, at least to make sure you don’t
screw everything up.”
He grabbed his helmet from off the top of the bar
and put it on, grinning at her. “And I’ll be there, hoping that maybe you’ll
consider signing up.”
****
Going to her father’s house was not easy for Mona.
She needed to tidy it up now that he was gone. She’d been on the fence about
whether she was going to sell it or not, but it was her childhood home, so she
couldn’t. It would be much nicer to move out of her small apartment and into
the modest, two bedroom house. She didn’t exactly need the space, but it would
be nice to have it.
Loving father that he was, Benny had willed the
home to her, as well as the ownership of the motorcycle club and a pretty
decent amount of money. He trusted her. That was why, even though she was out
of the loop on a lot of the stuff going on with the club, she couldn’t just
abandon it.
When she went into the house’s garage, her eyes
fell on Benny’s radiant, teal and pearl, 1994 Softail Harley. He’d owned that
bike for ten years, remodeling it and fixing it up until it practically sang as
it raced past. Benny called it The Duke because he’d purchased it from a
now-out of business bike shop known as Duke & Wessox Motorcycle Emporium.
Benny had other bikes, but none of them meant as much to him as this one.
Mona carefully got atop it, lying against it a
little. She missed her father. Ryan expected her to ride with the club, and if
ever she was to do so she’d want to ride The Duke. The trouble was, she didn’t
trust herself not to crash and ruin it.
Ryan was going to be hosting a sign up for the
Running Hill Riders at a barbeque joint in town. Mona knew that he, and several
of the others from the team, were hoping to see her there. She closed her eyes
as she straddled the old bike, wishing that it could connect her to her father.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said softly, sadly. “I need your strength…”
Deciding that showing up at Ryan’s meet, even if
she was undecided, was better than not showing up at all, Mona put on some
tight blue jeans and a black t-shirt, then slipped into her father’s worn,
brown leather jacket. It wasn’t fashionable to wear brown with black, but who
would really care about that?
She elected to drive herself in her red and white
Mini to the place, knowing full well that she’d be the only one to not arrive
on the back of a hog. Mona Myers was responsible. She was no show-off. She
didn’t plan to appear on the back of The Duke til she knew how to properly
handle it. And she knew who she wanted as her teacher.
All eyes were on Ryan as he stood at the front of
the room; he looked up and smiled when he saw Mona come into the restaurant.
“—we just wanted to make it official that we will be continuing on in the
traditions that Benny started. We have no plans to start taking on some of the
more risky and illegal types of cycling. We are first and foremost about helping
the less fortunate, not about showing off.”
He eyed Lance, who was sitting in the front row.
Mona walked past the troublemaker, lifting her nose in the air a bit as she sat
beside him. She wanted to be close to Ryan, close to the front in case her input
was wanted. But what she ended up getting was ogles and leers from the Running
Hill Riders’ red headed problem child.
“And now that she’s here,” Ryan said. “I’d like to
welcome Mona to the front. She is, after all, the owner of our little club. Any
of the decisions I make will be made with her full backing.”
Everyone clapped as Mona stood and went up beside
Ryan. When she looked out into the small crowd that had gathered for this
sign-up, she recognized several of the club’s trusty members. Weasel, Ryan and
Arthur were there. They spanned the generations since Benny had started the
club. Weasel was a few years older than Mona, Ryan was in his early forties and
Arthur had to be close to her father’s age. She appreciated all of them for
showing up. “Hi, I’m Mona Myers. For those of you who don’t know, my father
Benny started the Running Hill Riders back in the mid-seventies. I have been
entrusted with continuing his legacy. Ryan here has been put in charge of
leading our group, but that doesn’t mean he’s the one who’s responsible for
everything. What I’d really like is for all of us to have input. All of us to
work together to keep this club successful and to keep my dad’s dream alive. I
know that I can count on each of you here to carry on the club’s good name. We
are like family. Any of you newcomers here today, I urge you to consider
signing up. You won’t be disappointed.”
She went back to her seat to a round of applause.
“So, with all of that being said—”
“Wait just a minute,” Lance said, standing up from
his chair. He looked around at the assembled group, smirking, full of contempt
for the people he chose to spend his time with. “As Mona said, we are all
allowed to speak our minds here. Isn’t that right?” He looked at her.
She was loathe to listen to him, but she couldn’t
deny that she’d just claimed that everyone who signed up would be allowed their
say in things. She gave a curt nod of the head. She hadn’t been thinking of
him
when she made that statement…
“Good,” he said. “Now, I say that there’s no reason
to stick to the plans of an old hippie. We’ve got bikes with power, built to
race and built to impress. Why do we always have to perform stunts at charity
shows? Why must we continue to be seen as nothing but circus acts? I think that
Benny’s dreams should be buried with Benny.”
Ryan cleared his throat. “We are a motorcycle
club, Lance, not a motorcycle
gang
.”
Lance shrugged, appealing to the startled and
confused expressions in the crowd. “There doesn’t seem to be much of a
difference to me. People come to see these races and pay good money. Why not
give the paying people want they want and have some real races? I for one am
tired of these peaceful, exhibition shows.”
“The people who come see the shows are largely
veterans with PTSD, you prick,” Mona argued.
There was suddenly a hush.
She saw it as an urge to continue. “My dad started
this club as a group of vets trying to raise money for more vets. He and his
friends rode in Roaring Thunder, in tours across America, racing each other and
raising awareness about the consequences of war. Well, the wars have continued
and so the Riders must continue to do their good service to this country.”
“Here here!” Arthur called over the clapping.
“If a club that promotes violence and crashes is
what you’re hoping for, then Lance I think you’re in the wrong club.”
Grabbing his chair, Lance overdramatically knocked
it over to the floor with a clang. He stormed down the aisle and out of the
restaurant. He’d always been the most hot-headed asshole that Mona and her dad
had to deal with. She couldn’t help rejoicing inwardly that he appeared to
finally be gone.
“So… With all that being said, unless anyone else
has a…
complaint
,” Ryan said, pausing to look around and make sure no one
else stood up before concluding. “Please come to the table to my right and sign
the sheet confirming that you’d like to be a member. Thank you.”
Everyone clapped. He came towards Mona in her
chair, gesturing for her to accompany him at the sign-up table. She got up
without question and joined him, sitting beside him as everyone wrote down
their names and email addresses.
“We’re going to need to have a race soon,” he told
her once everyone who wanted to sign, did. About thirty of Benny’s original
forty or so members re-signed. The rest, Mona supposed, had joined the dark
side with Lance.
She nodded. “What did you have in mind?”
“The Flag Day festival,” he said readily. It was
clear that he’d been thinking it over for some time. “It’s not as big of a deal
as Independence Day or anything like that, but it’s enough of a reason for
people to be interested in showing their patriotism and support, you know?”
Mona smiled. “You’re pretty good at this.”
He smiled back. “Thanks.”
She stood up from her seat and was just about to
start heading out when he placed his hand on top of hers on the back of her
chair. “You know, I couldn’t help noticing that you didn’t write your name
down…”
She looked at him quizzically. “I thought it went
without saying.”
He chuckled a little. “Not about being a part of
the club, but about
riding with us
.”
Blushing, Mona flashed him another smile. “I’ve
been on the fence these past few days. I was kind of hoping you might make up
my mind about that.”
“Oh really?” Ryan asked. “And how would you like
me to do that?”
“Come home with me and I’ll show you.”
He waggled his eyebrows a little at that. As if he
would turn down that invitation.