The Brotherhood of the Wheel (6 page)

Elizabeth pushed the few stray strands of white hair that had flowed free during the long ride out of her face and removed her sunglasses. She was an imposing woman. Age had given her features more character but had taken away none of her striking beauty. She shared the same color and intensity of eyes that Heck possessed—burning emeralds. A few inches shy of six feet, Elizabeth was taller than her son, and she knew how to use her height to add to her overall, regal presence. She turned to address the procession—an endless sea of chrome pipes and bars, black leather cuts and tartan kilts, beards and tattoos. The unruly crowd grew silent when Elizabeth raised an arm for attention.

“It would have meant a lot to Ale that you all came out for him,” Elizabeth began. “He would have cussed you all like a sailor with a sore tooth, and then he would have teared up when he thought no one was looking. That was the kind of man Ailbert Mckee was. Strong, fierce, uncompromising. But with a good, kind, heart.” Her voice faltered; the tears were close, but Elizabeth refused to let them take this moment from Ale. “He was a loving father to our son, Hector. He treated me as an equal, a wife, a friend, a counsel, and always, always like a lady.” She laughed a little, using it to fight back the sadness. “Even a few times when I didn't deserve that.” Laughter murmured through the crowd.

“Ale was always a gentleman. He was a wise president to the MC. He was unstoppable in battle, forgiving in peace. He lived by the code of the knight, of the samurai, of the outlaw. Ale always believed that if you lived outside the law,
especially
if you lived outside the law, you had to have honor.” Elizabeth glanced briefly at Heck, who lowered his eyes.

“A very, very long time ago,” Elizabeth said, “Ale and my father, Gordon, and the other founders—the originals of the Blue Jocks—came to this place, this Road to Nowhere. They dreamed their dreams here. For all the Blue Jocks, for all outlaw knights, this road is the beginning and the end. They swore the first initiation oaths of the MC here. Every prospect is made a member on the other side of that tunnel, every man who wears our cut passes through the underworld, endures the darkness, and comes out into the light.”

Night was beginning to fall, and the sun was filtering through the dense foliage above and beyond the great dark tunnel, golden bursts of radiance through the green. At a slight nod from Elizabeth and a gesture from Roadkill, the two surviving original members of the Blue Jocks stepped forward. One of them was Glen Hume, Roadkill's father, and the other was Reggie Haney. The men were old, their faces carved thoroughly by life and experience, but they both looked as if they were made of fire-hardened hickory, worn but never worn out. Both still proudly wore their cuts and their clan kilts. The MC's piper, Jim Gilraine, a burly bear of a man with a beard that made him look like a dangerous Santa, also stepped forward and prepared his pipes to play. As sergeant at arms for the club, Roadkill moved to stand beside, and slightly behind, Heck. Roadkill could see the pain hiding behind Heck's lidded eyes. He nodded to his old friend, and Heck nodded back. Elizabeth continued, clutching the small wooden box to her breast.

“At the end of their time, each of our men comes here to rest,” she said, her voice growing stronger, carried on the wind of the approaching night. “Today, we honor our fallen, we honor the best of us, what every man who calls himself a man should seek to emulate. Ale McKee was a standard, not just for the MC but for how we should conduct ourselves in this life. His like will never come this way again, and he will be missed—but never forgotten.”

The tears were hot on Elizabeth's cheeks. She could hold them no longer. “Goodbye, my love,” she whispered, clutching the cask tighter, her tears darkening the wood. “Goodbye, my heart.”

Reggie and Glen stepped forward. Elizabeth kissed the cask and then handed it to the two men. As solemn as soldiers folding a flag, Glen and Reggie draped the box with the blue-and-black tartan of Ale's clan and then folded and placed his cut on top of that. Glen walked with the draped cask to Heck and offered it to him. Heck noticed that Glen's eyes were filled with tears, as he presented the box with his stepdad's ashes to him. Heck nodded and accepted the burden with open arms. Why did he feel nothing? No tears, no sadness … nothing. He had loved Ale, even if the past few years had tested that love. He should at least feel guilt … anything. There was nothing except a vague anxiety.

Heck turned to his mother, and they both walked solemnly toward the dark mouth of the tunnel. At the entrance, Roadkill met them; he wrestled to draw the massive sword, a Claymore that had belonged to Elizabeth's father and had been passed to Ale upon his death. Etched into the blade was the word
Bráithreachas.
It looked like the sword that was on Heck's tattoo and on every Blue Jock's colors.

“When you walk in darkness, you do not walk alone,” Roadkill said, handing the massive blade to Heck, who cradled his stepfather's cask in one arm and held the Claymore in the other. He rested the seven-foot blade on his shoulder. The piper began the
urlar
of “Mackay's March” as Heck and Elizabeth entered into the blackness.

The first few yards in were muted by the fading light behind them. The walls of the tunnel were covered in a bizarre mosaic of graffiti art, name and date tags, slogans and symbols, all of it sliding and melting one into another, like a gigantic, winding, looping snake made of color and words. Heck remembered walking the tunnel years ago when he was initiated into the MC. He had heard all the stories about the tunnel and the markings on the walls since he was a kid.

“
They move
,” Roadkill had said. “
The stuff on the wall … it's alive
 …
I've heard stories about all the ghosts from those old family cemeteries; they're all in the tunnel. One guy walked in and never came out.…
”

The strange part was that when Heck walked through the Tunnel to Nowhere six years ago, as a prospect, he had the strangest feeling he'd been here before, moved through these shadow-painted mazes, felt the images on either side of him shift and grow into almost blurry three-dimensional images of other places, lands governed by other laws, held back by a spray-painted fence of art and symbols.

The world fell into the void. Darkness swallowed Heck and Elizabeth as they continued to walk down the tunnel. The light behind them was a memory now, and the light ahead was a distant feeble splinter. The pipes had faded away, diluted by the heavy mantle of the tunnel, and, perhaps, by the darkness itself. The only sounds were their footsteps on the pavement and their breathing, echoing, muffled by the weight of the world pressing down on them.

“You're not scared, are you?” Elizabeth asked Heck, breaking the silence and making Heck jump just a bit. He couldn't see her face, but he knew she was smiling.

“No,” he said, a little quicker and a bit more emphatically than he should have.

“Good,” she said. “I guess there are advantages to being hungover, then.”

“I'm not hungover,” Heck said. “I'm still a little drunk.”

“And driving a motorcycle in your condition?” Elizabeth said. “With your sainted mother on board? Hector Conall Sinclair!”

Heck laughed. “Didn't you use to tell me I was conceived while you were in the same condition on a bike going about a hundred miles an hour, ‘sainted mother'?”

It was Elizabeth's turn to laugh. “And I stayed that way as much of your childhood as possible,” she said. “Made for a better environment for all of us, don't you—”

A cold wind howled down the tunnel, swirling dead leaves, condom wrappers, and crushed red Solo cups. The wind carried voices on it—whispering, hissing, laughing, voices as dry as the dead leaves.

“
Sinnnnnnnnnclaaaaaaiiiiirrrrrr
,” they rasped.

Heck felt his mother's hand on his arm in the darkness; fumbling, he handed her the wooden cask with Ale's ashes. Both hands free, he hefted his grandfather and stepfather's blade from his shoulders. It occurred to him, suddenly, that it was his now. Ahead, two figures became visible, wreathed in a dirty, washed-out light. They were robed, like monks, their faces hidden in the darkness of their hoods. They came from either side of the dark tunnel and blocked Elizabeth and Heck's way.

“You see them?” Heck asked his mother, stepping between her and the figures.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I've seen them before. A long time ago, when you were a baby. They are not ghosts.”

Heck dropped to stance, right foot behind his left foot, resting on the balls of his feet, as Ale and Granddad had taught him when he was only a boy. Heck had been a terror to teach swordplay to, because he was left-handed, and because he never quite got the gist of swinging at half speed.

“The boy's a blur of energy and destruction,” Granddad had said, laughing as he nursed a nasty bruise on his arm from one of Heck's blows. “Once he gets some discipline in that skull of his, he'll be a damned terror with a blade.”

He didn't have the room, with Elizabeth behind him, to safely build momentum with the monstrous sword by swinging it in an ever-faster figure-eight pattern, so he grabbed the dull, lower part of the blade between the smaller set of flaring quillons—a sort of secondary hilt—and rocked back to use the blade almost like a spear. He thrust at the figure on the left and shifted his stance to use his target as partial cover for the hooded form on the right. The blade passed through the chest of the hooded figure, as if Heck were stabbing smoke. As a child, he had heard the stories of Granddad using this same ancient blade to lay low a slavering, man-eating Windigo that had shrugged off gunfire and knives of mere steel. Fear tickled his stomach, and he was suddenly back in the desert with the laughing fire.

The figures advanced. The whispering voices seemed to be at Heck's ear, or maybe in his mind.

“Come back with us, Hector … come back … you belong…”
they hissed and advanced with clawed hands the color of dead fish. It felt as if someone were vomiting in Heck's skull. Scalding, putrid thoughts were filling up behind his eyes, trying to eat the light out of them.

A slender hand flashed out over Heck's shoulder, past his head. It was Elizabeth's. She brandished a palm-size stone; it looked like a river rock, smooth from wear. It was glowing with a clean, brilliant white light from within, which seemed to repel the filthy, wavering glow of the hooded apparitions. Heck's blade suddenly touched something solid as it thudded against the specter's chest.

“Piss off,” she said. “You are not going to muck up the final ride of the finest man I ever knew, a man who kicked your sorry tails on more than one occasion, I might add. Now get.”

The hooded figures withdrew from the now dangerous sword and the light of the rock. They stepped into the deepening shadows, their aura fading, extinguishing, as the daylight at the end of the tunnel became the color of pale ash.

“Bastards,” Elizabeth said, and spat. The rock had stopped glowing, and she slipped it back into her jeans pocket. “Thank you for saving me, son,” she said to Heck, and kissed him on the cheek. “Come along, we need to get through before the light's gone.”

Elizabeth picked up her pace, striding, her man's ashes under her arm. Heck slung the Claymore back over his shoulder and hurried to catch up.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Cairn stone,” she said. “Was your grandfather's. It's
Conair Cloch,
one of the Path Stones.”

“Con-air, what?” Heck said.

“Never mind,” Elizabeth said. “I'll explain when you're older.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Heck said. “I've heard that before. That's what you said about sex.”

“Oh, you figured that one out,” Elizabeth said. “Quit your bitchin'.”

They stepped out of the far end of the tunnel into the final brilliant rays of day, shimmering across the dark waters of Fontana Lake. The choppy water split and refracted the sun's parting kiss to the earth, scattering the light.

“Beautiful,” Elizabeth said. “Let's take him into the woods.” Heck nodded. He leaned the Claymore against a low stone wall and followed his mother.

They moved deeper into the old forest. Ancient maples and birches, survivors of the TVA culling so long ago, surrounded them in the dimming light. The lake was ahead of them. Elizabeth lowered the cask to the damp, cool forest floor. She snapped the brass fasteners on the box and opened it. Within was a simple silver urn, held in place by a black velvet compartment. She lifted Ale's urn free of the cask and held it in her hands, held it close to her face. “You want to do it?” she asked, looking away from the urn and to her son. Heck stared at her for a moment too long.

“He'd want you to do it,” Heck said. “Ale and me … not so much, not for a while.”

“He loved you,” Elizabeth said. “He'd do anything for you. You
were
his son, Hector, blood or no.”

“Let's not do this,” Heck said. “We're losing the light.”

“That,” Elizabeth said. “That right there … I swear, the two of you had so much in common. You're both the most stubborn, bullheaded men I've ever known. You and Ale put off saying ‘I'm sorry' and saying ‘I'm proud of you' for too damn long, and you both ended up regretting it.”

“What do you want here?” Heck asked. “I know … I know … I missed him by twelve fucking hours, and I know nothing will ever give me those hours back. You want some big damn cathartic scene? Well, that ain't how either of you raised me. Ale would have told you and me both to cowboy the hell up and get on getting on. I'll make my peace with this, with him, in my own damn good time, Mom. Now drop it. Please.”

Elizabeth opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it and nodded. “Then walk with me while I send him along,” she said. “We used to joke that we'd mix him up with some good pot and smoke him.”