The Old Motorcycle (Part 3)

The mechanic called Rafael on Thursday. He had remembered something, which at his age took two days.

There was a Honda in a field behind Grand-Anse, a dead one, lying in the tall grass since the nineties. Wrong year, wrong color, no wheels. But the engine was from the same family, and so was the carburetor.

The man who owned the field wanted thirty euros and a hand moving his freezer. Rafael moved the freezer. The part came off the dead machine black with dirt and perfect inside, and on the last Sunday in July, in their grandfather’s shed, the motorcycle started.

It was extremely loud. Julie laughed until she had to sit down on the floor.

Somebody told somebody, and on Wednesday a reporter from the island newspaper arrived with a camera and asked them questions for an hour. She was particularly interested in Papi, and in the notebook, and she wrote down everything they told her about him, which was more than they had ever said about him to anyone.

The headline on Thursday morning was PAPI’S HONDA RIDES AGAIN.

“It doesn’t ride,” Rafael said, reading it at the kitchen table. “It started. Once. In a shed.”

“Sixty people have said hello to me already this morning,” Julie said. “Let them have it.”

On Friday the weather changed.

They had all seen hurricane warnings before, and most of them came to nothing. This one was two days before the rally. The radio said Saturday night, and by Saturday afternoon the whole village was tying things down: shutters closed, boats out of the water, the tables from the square locked in somebody’s garage. The rally committee met for ten minutes and canceled everything.

Rafael and Julie pushed the motorcycle out of the shed, down the path, and in through the kitchen door of their grandfather’s empty house, which felt strange and completely correct at the same time.

Then the wind came.

At four in the morning it stopped, all at once, the way it does. Rafael found a flashlight and opened the door.