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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
April 18, 2010
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2010 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Harley Sprint, 1971
© 1971 by Bud Grossmann
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DIFFERENT KINDS OF HARLEY GUYS
I
n the early spring of 1976, five years into their marriage, when David C. Fischer and Vivian Q.F. Lum were living in L.A., attending school there, and getting around by bicycle or city bus or the kindness of wealthier friends, Vivian owned a black-and-white television she’d found for five dollars at a yard sale. “Star Trek” reruns were broadcast nightly by a local station, and she watched religiously. Tuesday nights, when their schoolwork permitted, Vivian, with David, watched “M*A*S*H.” They also watched “Saturday Night Live” if they weren’t pursuing something else lively on a Saturday night. They seldom turned the TV on for any programs but those.
Somehow, however, Vivian happened to get a Suzuki Motorcycle jingle stuck in her head, and so she asked one day, “Dave, do you ever think about getting another motorcycle?” He had owned a Harley Sprint during the months of their brief courtship.
Only a day or two before Vivian asked that question, Fischer had seen a classified ad, in their neighborhood shopper, for an almost current model of the motorcycle he had coveted in high school. He called, and it was still available. Fischer and Lum took a look, took a ride, and purchased the low-mileage ’72 Honda CB450. It was a beautiful bike for city driving, and good for the hundred-mile journey to visit Big Bear Lake. When school was out, Lum and Fischer had about two weeks before they were to begin summer internships. Lum rode the Greyhound to San Francisco while Fischer departed alone on the Honda, making his first serious road trip, to visit relatives in Wisconsin.
On the outbound journey, Fischer followed blue highways, but the bike jostled him to jelly—it wasn’t big enough, smooth enough, for long days on the road. Somewhere in Iowa, on Day Four, when the sun was going down and the air was turning chilly, he stopped for gasoline at a truck stop at the entrance to an Interstate. He was exhausted but he intended to get to Fjord, Wisconsin, before morning.
There were a lot of pumps, not many of them in use just then. Fischer filled the Honda’s tank and went inside and paid, used the restroom, and bought a candy bar and a quart of Pepsi. He came back out and brought a pullover sweater out of the backpack that occupied his passenger seat, lashed to an angle-iron sissy bar. He put on the sweater and his Levi’s jacket and buttoned the jacket all the way to the neck. He took a last swig of Pepsi, tightened the top on the bottle, put it in the pack, and was just about to put his helmet on when a rumbling Harley-Davidson, bearing an inferably local citizen, glided to a stop on the opposite side of the pump Fischer had used. The local man swept his kickstand down with the heel of a two-tone light-colored cowboy boot. He gracefully dismounted.
The man looked to be close to Fischer’s age, which is to say, in his mid- or late-twenties. He wore light-colored pressed denim trousers and a starched pale-striped dress shirt, long-sleeved. The cuffs of the shirt were turned back two turns on tanned muscular forearms. The Harley had no saddlebags; the man wore no helmet or eyewear. His blond hair, brushed back, barely touched his shirt collar. His sideburns extended low on his cheeks but were sharply shaped by a razor.
The man nodded at Fischer, and Fischer nodded at the man. To Fischer’s eye, the Harley was low and sleek, a hog in no way hoggish. Without a speck of road dirt or so much as a mashed mosquito, every inch of paint and chrome gleamed. Though Fischer did not know it then, the fenders and tank were factory-painted, Birch White. The local man tugged a doeskin glove off his left hand, finger-by-finger, and laid the glove palm up on the forward part of the Harley’s gas tank. He unscrewed the gas cap, and gently placed it upside down upon the glove. Then he removed his right glove, laid it below the gas cap, and carefully eased the gas nozzle into the opening on the tank.
When the man had finished, and capped his tank again, David Fischer said, “Nice machine!”
“Thaynk you,” said the man, with what seemed almost a Southern drawl.
“That a Sportster?” Fischer asked.
“Nooo, sir,”—definitely Southern, to Fischer’s ear—“it’s a Seventy-Fo-ur. Ah myself don’t much keer for Sportsters.”
“Hmm,” said Fischer in reply. And then, after a pause, he said, “I wish you a good evening.”
The man nodded and said, “Ah wish you a good trip.”
Fischer put his helmet on and snugged the strap. He might have been a little curious to find out a little more. But what he precisely thought, and did not say aloud, was Me, I don’t have to know a whole hell of a lot about Harley-Davidson motorcycles. I’ve got a — - — —! ♦
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This page was updated Sun, Apr 18, 2010, 1:43AM CDT
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© 2010 by Bud Grossmann
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