I kept coming back to the same thought.
We had fixed the motorcycle.
We had not fixed whatever was happening around it.
Those were two different things, and I had spent too much of the morning pretending they were connected.
The Shovelhead had been a straightforward problem in one important sense.
It was a machine.
We could examine it, work on it, and see whether our efforts made a difference.
The questions Brix had raised were nothing like that.
We couldn't open them up and inspect the parts.
We couldn't replace something and listen for a change in the engine.
We couldn't even be sure we understood the problem.
All we had was what Brix remembered.
The diner man had questioned him about the shop.
He had asked about Reed.
He had wanted to know what Brix had seen on the motorcycle.
And before the man struck him, Brix had overheard an argument about something being found before Saturday.
That was the information we had.
Nothing more.
I tried to remind myself of that whenever my imagination started filling in the gaps.
Odom seemed to be doing the same thing.
He had stopped moving around the shop and settled near the workbench.
His phone remained beside him.
He looked at it once, then turned his attention back to Reed.
"How much time do we have?" he asked.
Reed understood what he meant.
"Forty-nine hours from when we counted it."
Odom nodded.
The memorial ride was still approaching.
That part of the situation hadn't changed.
We still had a motorcycle that needed to be ready, and we still had a reason to get the work finished.
But we couldn't ignore Brix's warning simply because we had other responsibilities.
Reed looked toward the front door.
"I don't want to make assumptions."
Neither did I.
The problem was that avoiding assumptions didn't make the situation feel safer.
It only kept us honest.
I had to respect that.
A person could turn uncertainty into a weapon against himself.
He could decide that every passing vehicle was suspicious.
He could interpret every ordinary question as proof of something terrible.
I didn't want us to start doing that.
But I also didn't want us to dismiss a warning just because it was inconvenient.
There had to be a way to take Brix seriously without pretending we knew more than we did.
I looked at him.
He was standing quietly, still holding the canvas bag.
He seemed tired.
Not just physically tired, but tired of having to explain himself.
I wondered how the conversation would have gone if the diner man had never asked those questions.
Brix might never have mentioned the shop.
We might have finished the motorcycle without giving the incident another thought.
Saturday would have remained Saturday.
The memorial ride would have remained the reason we were working so hard.
Instead, a few questions had changed the way we looked at everything.
I felt uneasy about that.
Not because Brix had done anything wrong.
Because we were now involved in a situation whose beginning we hadn't witnessed.
We didn't know what had happened before the diner man confronted him.
We didn't know what the other man behind the kitchen had said.
We didn't know what anyone expected to find.
We were trying to understand a conversation through the memory of someone who had only overheard part of it.
That wasn't much to build on.
But it was enough to make us pay attention.
Reed stepped closer to Brix.
"Did the man ever say why he wanted to know what you'd seen?"
Brix shook his head.
"No."
"Did he explain why he was asking about me?"
"No."
Reed waited.
Brix looked at the floor.
"He just kept asking."
That was all.
No hidden explanation.
No name that suddenly made everything clear.
No additional detail that settled our concerns.
I watched Reed absorb the answer.
He looked frustrated, but he didn't direct that frustration at Brix.
I was glad.
Brix had told us what he knew.
Demanding more would not make his memory more complete.
Odom picked up his phone again.
He glanced at the screen, then set it down without saying anything.
I wondered whether he was checking the time.
Perhaps he was thinking about the same forty-nine hours.
The number had become a quiet presence in the room.
It reminded us that the memorial ride wasn't far away.
It reminded us that whatever had been discussed behind the diner was supposed to happen before then.
And it reminded us that we might not have much time to understand the connection.
I looked at the motorcycle.
The engine had stopped by then, leaving the shop quieter than before.
Without the sound, I could hear small things I had ignored earlier.
A tool shifting on the workbench.
Someone moving a foot across the floor.
The faint noise from outside.
I had always liked the silence that followed a successful repair.
It meant the work was done.
This time, the silence felt unfinished.
Reed ran his eyes over the Shovelhead.
He had put too much effort into getting it running to abandon the job over a suspicion.
I knew that.
But he wasn't acting as if the motorcycle was all that mattered anymore.
He had heard Brix.
He understood that the questions might be connected to something beyond our work.
And he wasn't willing to ignore that possibility.
I respected him for it.
I also wished the situation had stayed simple.
There was no point pretending otherwise.
We had wanted to finish the repair, prepare for the ride, and move on.
Instead, we were standing in a shop trying to make sense of a stranger's interest in a motorcycle.
I looked at Brix's canvas bag again.
It seemed like such an ordinary thing.
Just a bag he carried with him.
Yet he held it with the same care he had shown while telling us what happened.
I wondered whether the man at the diner had treated him like somebody whose words didn't matter.
If he had, then Brix might have been accustomed to keeping quiet.
I couldn't know that for certain.
I only knew that he had come forward when he could have said nothing.
That deserved more than suspicion from us.
Odom seemed to reach the same conclusion.
"We'll keep what you've told us in mind."
Brix nodded.
He didn't smile.
Neither did I.
There was no reason to pretend that those words had solved anything.
But they meant we weren't going to brush his account aside.
Reed turned toward the motorcycle one last time.
For a moment, he looked almost disappointed.
Not in the machine.
In the situation.
We had done the work.
We had gotten the engine running.
We had reached the point where we could finally begin thinking about Saturday as an event we were prepared for.
Then Brix had told us what he heard, and the whole thing had changed.
I understood why Reed looked at the motorcycle differently now.
He wasn't only thinking about whether it would be ready for the ride.
He was thinking about why a man at a diner had been so interested in it.
I wanted an answer as badly as he did.
But wanting an answer didn't mean we had one.
The only honest thing we could do was keep the facts separate from our fears.
A man had asked questions.
A second man had argued with him.
Something was supposed to be found before Saturday.
And the motorcycle was somehow part of the conversation.
Somehow.
That was the word I couldn't get past.
We didn't know how the pieces fit together.
We only knew they belonged to the same troubling account.
I took one last look around the shop.
The tools were still in place.
The workbench hadn't changed.
The Shovelhead stood where we had left it.
Everything looked ordinary.
That was almost the worst part.
Nothing in the room explained why the diner man had cared so much about what Brix had seen.
Nothing told us what was supposed to be found.
Nothing gave us a clear reason to believe the trouble would end when the motorcycle was ready.
For the first time that day, I stopped thinking about the repair as the main problem.
It was still important.
But it was no longer the only thing we had to consider.
Saturday was getting closer.
And we had to face the possibility that getting the motorcycle running had brought us to the beginning of a problem we hadn't even known existed.
Click here to continue reading: PART 5: I Wanted to Believe the Stranger Had Asked Ordinary Questions, but the Words Brix Heard Kept Changing How I Saw the Shop
I Thought Getting One Old Motorcycle Running Would Solve Everything, Until a Hurt Boy Told Us What He Heard
Part 4 of 20
