The Hero's Body (25 page)

But how could my father say that, or anything else, with a crushed throat, with his windpipe ruined? With all three of those life-ending injuries? How could he lift his arm when I knew—
I knew
—he was already dead? That is one of our many unkillable wishes in the world: to keep the dead in conversation, in motion. Keep them talking, keep them moving, and you can keep them
here
.

Two days after the funeral, I phoned Christian, one of the men who'd been with my father that day, and asked him for everything he remembered, scratching these words onto a legal pad as he spoke:

“He was too good. He refused to lay it down, never doubted for a second he could take that turn. When we found him, he had one leg up over the bike, his head propped up against the bottom of the guardrail. The tires were pointed toward him. He hit the guardrail the same time as the bike. His legs lay in the direction he came from. I saw him lift his arm up and put it on his chest.”

But another rider would tell me that my father moved his arm onto his chest once he was laid on the stretcher, not when he was still on the road. Which is right? Is either right? Because only a conscious man moves his arm. Because if there was consciousness in those last minutes, then he might have been aware of what he'd done and where it would lead. And if he had been aware? That somehow changed things for me—I'd have to reimagine, reconfigure his terminal seconds—even if it changed nothing for him.

“I didn't hear him speak,” Christian told me. “Carlos did. I didn't hear him say ‘Oh God.' ”

“Tell me about the bike,” I said.

“Every Sunday that bike looked brand new. The brakes must have failed; there's no other reason. He never would've taken that bike out of the garage that day if the brake pads were worn down like everyone's saying. I think something failed as he went into that turn.”

I have these puzzling words from Christian looking at me now from a yellow page, words from sixteen years ago:
Possible pump malfunction, there was too much blood, it needed to be pumped out
. What can that mean? The heart, of course, is a pump, but that can't be what he meant. He must have meant the engine's fuel pump. But why, then, “too much blood”? A bike doesn't run on blood, and a fuel pump would have had nothing to do with a crash. And “pumped out” from where, with what, by whom? I've reordered those words in a number of ways, thinking I might have scratched them down wrong—bereavement is a garbled tongue, has no fixed syntax, is rife with tautology and non sequitur—but no matter what I do, no matter their arrangement, I cannot make them click.

Christian said something else to me on the phone that day. He said that when they'd found my father under the guardrail, his head looked as if it had been wrenched around 180 degrees. And I did something terrible that night. In my grandparents' kitchen, just the three of us there, I told them of that detail, of my father's
head wrenched around 180 degrees on his shoulders. The sound that came from Pop was part moan, part gasp, the name “Jesus Christ” beneath it. And then I heard myself apologizing—twice, three times—in a voice lifted by a chest-swell becoming sobs. Why would I tell them such a thing? Why didn't I understand that what Christian must have seen was not my father's
head
wrenched 180 degrees, but his
helmet
that had turned on impact and given that grisly impression?

Through a wet tissue, Parma said, “It's okay. I want to know. I want to know everything.”

New Jersey's
population is the densest in the nation: it's a claustrophobic, comma-shaped state. Population density means more cars, and more cars mean clogged roads when they don't mean murder on motorcycles. And so, each Sunday, my father and his cohort retreated across the state line to the backroads of bucolic Pensy, roads that were curvier and better maintained than most of Jersey's. They weren't worried about Pensy's guardrails, lampposts, or ample oak trees because they maintained an intransigent belief in their own abilities. No—they worried about the distracted jackass in the convertible, the homicidal ditz dashing to the mall while applying eyeliner in her rearview, the silver-haired slaughterer driving east on the westbound side of the highway.

I'd grown up listening to my father carp about the average person, the average driver especially. Although he mellowed in his forties, as men are known to do—as sperm count dwindles, patience improves—he was ever sarcastic when he wasn't cynical, frequently complaining about humanity's lack of competence. “It's amazing mankind has come this far with so many stupid people” was one of his favorite sentences. He had a proletariat's definition of intelligence, indistinguishable from efficiency and what used to be called
common sense. You wouldn't have wanted to be in the car with him stuck behind some hapless sightseer doing half the speed limit. “All it takes is one idiot,” he'd say—to make him late, he meant, but more generally, to
inconvenience
him. In my family's mindset, it's something of a capital crime for one man to inconvenience another. It's simply not done.

From start to finish, a typical Sunday's ride looked like this:

Some guys would meet at Pop's house at eight thirty, look over their bikes, bullshit about throttles, tailpipes, handlebars. By nine o'clock they'd meet another band of riders in the next town, near the highway. They'd meet at the base of a water tower standing at the center of a honeycombed industrial complex owned by one of Pop's pals. A ramp led down to the tower, and as each new guy showed up, he'd pull a wheelie on the ramp to the cheers of those who were already there. More bullshitting and inspection of bikes until everyone arrived. By ten o'clock they'd have to meet the Pennsylvania batch of riders at a diner on Route 202, near the state border. They had a rule that turned into a joke because every man broke it: no racing before breakfast. Some guys never made it to breakfast.

They'd time the red lights on 202, deliberately slow to catch the red, so they could drag race, gun it to the next traffic signal, or they'd try to pass one another through the sweeping jughandles on and off the highway. There was no plan for contingencies: if you crashed and were not killed, the best you could hope for was somebody dashing to a phone to dial a tow truck or an ambulance. Once, a helicopter was summoned when a rider ended up shattered in a ditch, bleeding everywhere on the inside.

Breakfast lasted half an hour, forty minutes at most. When my uncle Nicky first began riding with this group at thirty years old, none of the younger guys would sit with him at the diner—he sat beside Pop or his brothers, ignored by the rest—until he proved himself by passing one of the fastest guys in a jughandle. After that, the
rider he passed was full of reverence and affection for him. While eating: no family talk allowed, and no work talk either, nothing personal, domestic, nine-to-five. Motorcycle talk only: the MotoGP races, recent magazine articles in
Sport Rider
, new bikes, new parts for bikes, gossip about guys who'd recently crashed. Some couldn't eat much, toast maybe, their guts tied up in anticipation of the coming speed, of the concentration they'd need. But Pop's appetite was always unwavering; each week he'd speak the same line to the waitress: “Pancakes golden brown, with sausage.”

After breakfast, the fifteen bikes lined up at a single pump at the adjacent gas station. Each topped off his tank and passed the nozzle to the next guy. Each began the ride on full. Those back roads had no gas stations, and if you found one, it was a mom-and-pop general store not open on Sunday. The price to top off fifteen tanks was normally twenty bucks, and Pop normally paid it. He and another alpha planned the route through the Pensy countryside. In the lead, Pop always knew the roads, every pothole, crack, and sudden curve, how to take a turn, where the dips were, the rises, where the elm root buckled the asphalt at the edge. And so the riders who crashed were usually those following him too fast into a turn: guys broke legs and backs trying to catch Pop.

The day had its clan lingo.
Don't go in the marbles
meant “Don't run wide off the clean part of the road, into the stones, dust, and dirt on the shoulder.”
Stay off the paint
meant “Keep your tires off the white and yellow lines,” because they were slick when wet.
I see your chicken strips
meant the tread on your tires wasn't worn on the outside, which meant you weren't riding aggressively enough.
The bike's on rails
meant the bike was stable, steady, smooth.
Keep the shiny side up
perhaps went without saying: it meant “Don't crash.” And the day had its code for cops, too:
When the pigs light up their cherries and start to chase, split up: they can't chase us all
. And if you got caught, you never gave up the names of those who didn't. When troopers
once snagged Nicky near a cornfield, they forced him facedown into the road, handcuffed him at the back, and hollered at him to name the others. He never did.

The day's racing in Pensy lasted a little more than three hours, an uninterrupted swath of time, unless a guy was lagging too far behind the pack—then you waited for him at an intersection. When the three hours were up, just before two o'clock, you needed to make it back to the highway or else you'd run out of fuel. By the time that refueling break came at two, the original clan of fifteen guys had been shaved down to twelve or thirteen: some crashed, some had mechanical issues, some couldn't hack it and went home. At the gas station, you hydrated, checked the bike, chattered about the ride's many glories and dangers. Pop always ate an ice cream cone. The Pensy guys then sped west, the Jersey guys east. And all week long, all they thought about was doing it again.

Several summers
before his fatal accident, my father caused Pop to crash at the Flemington Circle, half an hour from Manville, only a handful of miles from where Robert Chittenden died in 1981.

Pop was behind him, pushing him hard into the turn, intense and tight on his back tire. My father must have felt him there, seen him there, because instead of keeping his speed and his line in the turn, he let off the throttle. Pop had nowhere to go; he had to lock up both the front and back wheels, and the bike went down right away, slid across the circle before colliding with the curb in a burst of fifty shards. Sitting there in the road, Pop saw his leg pointing north, the bottom of his foot facing east, his ankle cracked clean through, tibial and fibular fractures both.

The bike was unsalvageable, a purple Kawasaki Ninja ZX11, and the ankle would take six weeks, at least, at his age; he was in his
early sixties then. He spent those weeks in a costly outdoor reclining chair my father had bought for him as a small recompense. When I visited Pop one morning as he recovered, I found him in that chair, in a strip of fluttering shade near the garage, his foot propped up on a spackle bucket, a Kawasaki logo beaming boldly from his T-shirt, beneath it this tip for living:
LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL
.

“You know,” he said, “Evel Knievel broke every bone in his body at one time or another.”

“Sounds like a lot of useless time in hospitals,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “That's what happens.”

Pop wouldn't blame my father, and he certainly wouldn't blame himself, or even hint at the causality of the crash. That was a core element of the masculine charter I'd seen again and again since I was young: cowardice, hubris, culpability remained unspoken, as if it was shameful even to speak of such sins. Machismo demands a certain lack of reflection upon its own tenets, a lack of acknowledgment that such tenets swayed their behavior, their conduct on a construction site, on a motorcycle, in a family.

But I've been struggling to capture the nuance, the complication, of this crash between my father and Pop. There is no definitive version of what happened that day. My father never talked to me about it. What I have are the barest details from Pop. What I have is my speculation and my doubt, my imagined version, a ricocheting of loyalties. I have the aegis of the family's masculine code—my father went yellow in that turn; he had no business being on that ride if he wasn't going to gun it with the others—and then I have my heart-pained inclination to defend him, to speak for him because he is not here to speak for himself.