The following hours passed slowly.
We had things to do, and we did them.
That was how we kept the day moving.
Reed stayed focused on the Shovelhead.
Odom checked the time more often than usual.
I tried to keep my attention on the work instead of the questions that had followed us into the shop.
None of us was very successful.
The motorcycle had become an object we couldn't look at without remembering Brix's account.
Every time I glanced at it, I heard the diner man's questions in my head.
Had Brix been inside?
Had Reed talked to him?
What had he seen?
I wanted to know what answer the man had expected.
I also wanted to know what would have happened if Brix had told him something different.
Those were questions we couldn't usefully answer.
They belonged to a conversation that had already taken place.
We weren't there.
We couldn't go back and listen to it ourselves.
All we could do was work with the information Brix had given us.
Reed seemed to understand that better than I did.
He didn't keep asking Brix for details.
He didn't announce that he had figured out the man's intentions.
He simply continued working while keeping the warning in mind.
That restraint made me respect him more.
I had been tempted to build an entire explanation around a few sentences.
Reed was willing to let the explanation remain unfinished.
At one point, Odom walked over to the motorcycle.
He looked at it from the side, then glanced toward Reed.
"Anything unusual that you've noticed?"
Reed shook his head.
"Nothing I can point to."
Odom studied the machine for another moment.
"All right."
He didn't push the question.
I wondered what he had hoped to find.
Perhaps he thought there might be an obvious mark or detail we had overlooked.
Perhaps he simply wanted to feel that we were doing something about the situation.
I understood the impulse.
When a problem is unclear, even an ordinary action can feel better than standing still.
But the fact that we wanted an answer didn't mean the motorcycle would provide one.
I had to remind myself of that again.
A little later, I found myself thinking about Brix.
He had been the one person who could connect the diner man to the shop, yet his knowledge was limited.
He had heard questions.
He had overheard an argument.
He had been hurt.
Beyond that, he hadn't claimed to know anything.
I kept thinking about the way he had said he didn't know whether the diner man had expected him to come here.
He hadn't tried to make his story sound bigger than it was.
That counted for something.
I had seen people exaggerate when they wanted attention.
Brix hadn't done that.
If anything, he seemed reluctant to tell us what he knew.
I wondered how long he had considered keeping quiet before deciding to speak.
The thought made me uncomfortable.
He had been hurt by the diner man, and now he had to stand in front of us and explain why he thought the incident might matter.
He shouldn't have had to prove that every detail was important before we listened.
We could be cautious without making him feel responsible for solving the whole problem.
I mentioned that to Odom.
He nodded.
"I know."
Then he looked toward Reed.
"We can't put this all on Brix."
Reed stopped what he was doing.
"No one's doing that."
His voice was firm, but not angry.
I believed him.
We weren't blaming Brix.
We were trying to understand what his information meant.
The distinction seemed small, but it mattered.
He had brought us a warning.
It wasn't his job to tell us what to do with it.
I looked at the canvas bag resting near where Brix had stood earlier.
He wasn't there at that moment, but I remembered how tightly he had held it.
I had wondered whether he was protecting something inside.
I still didn't know.
And I had no reason to turn that uncertainty into another theory.
The bag might have meant nothing beyond the fact that it belonged to him.
That was the kind of ordinary explanation I needed to keep in mind.
Not every detail was a clue.
Not every silence concealed a secret.
Sometimes an object was only an object.
Sometimes a man asked a question because he wanted an answer.
The difficulty was knowing when those ordinary explanations stopped making sense.
The repeated questions about the Shovelhead had made me uneasy.
The argument about Saturday had made that uneasiness harder to ignore.
But neither fact told us what was actually happening.
Reed finished another check and stepped back.
He looked tired.
Not exhausted, exactly.
More like a man who had expected to be finished with a problem and discovered that finishing it had exposed another one.
I knew the feeling.
You can spend hours fixing something, believing that each step brings you closer to a clean ending.
Then, just when you think you have reached it, you discover that the original problem was only part of what you needed to understand.
I watched Reed wipe his hands.
"How's it looking?" I asked.
"The motorcycle?"
I nodded.
"Good enough for where we are."
He paused.
"The rest is a different question."
I didn't ask him to explain.
I knew what he meant.
The machine could be ready.
The situation might not be.
Odom glanced toward the front windows again.
I noticed him doing it and wondered whether I had started doing the same thing without realizing it.
We were becoming aware of the outside world in a way we hadn't been before.
A passing vehicle was still just a passing vehicle.
A person walking by was still just a person walking by.
But now we noticed them.
We looked a little longer.
We wondered whether they had any connection to what Brix had described.
That was uncomfortable.
It was also something I needed to watch in myself.
I didn't want ordinary life to become a collection of imagined warnings.
There was enough uncertainty already.
The afternoon moved on.
We returned to the work when there was work to do.
We talked about practical things when we needed to.
Nobody claimed to have discovered the meaning of the diner man's questions.
That was probably the most sensible choice we made.
Still, the conversation never entirely left the room.
It remained in the pauses.
In the way Reed looked at the motorcycle before moving to another task.
In the way Odom checked his phone and then seemed to forget why he had picked it up.
In the way I kept thinking about the same word.
Saturday.
The memorial ride was close.
We needed to be ready.
But I was beginning to understand that readiness wasn't only about an engine starting when we wanted it to.
It was also about admitting when we didn't know enough.
We couldn't solve the mystery by pretending we understood it.
We couldn't make Brix remember something he hadn't heard.
And we couldn't decide what the diner man wanted simply because we disliked the possibilities.
So we kept working.
We kept listening.
And we waited for something that might help us understand what we were dealing with.
Click here to continue reading: PART 7: Every Time We Returned to the Workbench, the Same Three Questions Followed Us, and None of Us Could Make Them Disappear
I Thought Getting One Old Motorcycle Running Would Solve Everything, Until a Hurt Boy Told Us What He Heard
Part 6 of 20
