The Old Motorcycle (Part 4)
Half the shed roof was in the neighbor’s garden. The big mango tree behind the church had come down across the road, and the road wasn’t going to be clear for two days. Nobody was hurt. The village had been lucky, and people said so in the flat voice they use when they mean it.
Their grandfather’s kitchen was dry. The motorcycle stood in the middle of it with a towel under it, exactly where Rafael and Julie had left it.
For a week everybody cleaned up. Then the committee moved the village rally to the second Sunday in August, because after a storm a village needs something to look at.
Eleven machines came to the square. Most of them were newer. One was a 1961 Vespa with an umbrella tied to the back.
The Honda wouldn’t start.
Rafael kicked it six times and got nothing but noise, and by the seventh he had gone a color Julie had never seen on him. Then an old man came out of the crowd, one of Papi’s friends, in a shirt he clearly kept for funerals and rallies, and he put one hand flat on the tank.
“Fuel tap first,” he said. “Then turn the grip twice. Not three times. Twice. Then leave it alone.”
It started on the next kick. The old man didn’t smile. He stood there listening to it with his hand still on the tank, and then he walked away without another word.
They finished fourth out of eleven and won a paper certificate and a bottle of something nobody wanted to drink.
Afterwards a businessman who owned the hotel out on the point came over and talked for a while about how beautiful the machine was, and how it would look in the hotel entrance, and then he said four thousand euros.
Julie looked at Rafael. Rafael looked at the bike.
“It’s not for sale,” he said.
“Everything’s for sale.”
“Five hundred thousand,” Julie said, “and my grandfather comes with it.”
The businessman laughed, because he thought it was a joke, and left his card on the seat.
That evening they pushed the motorcycle back up the path. Julie took the notebook out of the toolbox and found a pencil, and under her grandfather’s last line she wrote, in short letters, the way he wrote everything:
Rally. Fourth place. Next year.