I used to think the worst problems were the ones you could see.<\/p>\n
A broken engine.<\/p>\n
A damaged part.<\/p>\n
A man standing in front of you with anger written all over his face.<\/p>\n
Those were things you could deal with.<\/p>\n
At least, that was what I believed before Brix walked into the shop carrying a canvas bag and looking like he had spent the night fighting something he couldn't explain.<\/p>\n
He didn't say much at first.<\/p>\n
He stood near the workbench, keeping one hand wrapped around the bag as if someone might try to take it away.<\/p>\n
Odom noticed.<\/p>\n
So did Reed.<\/p>\n
Neither of them asked about it immediately.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle was still running.<\/p>\n
That sound had filled the shop only minutes earlier, and I remember thinking how good it felt to hear it.<\/p>\n
The old Shovelhead had given us enough trouble to make a patient man question his choices.<\/p>\n
We had worked on it, argued over it, checked things twice, and tried again.<\/p>\n
Now the engine was alive.<\/p>\n
For a little while, that was enough.<\/p>\n
Then Brix spoke.<\/p>\n
"There was something else about that man."<\/p>\n
Odom lowered the phone he had been holding.<\/p>\n
Reed stopped moving.<\/p>\n
I looked at Brix.<\/p>\n
He wasn't talking about the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
He was talking about the man from the diner.<\/p>\n
The same man who had become angry with him for sleeping there.<\/p>\n
The same man who had hit him.<\/p>\n
Brix looked toward the front windows before continuing.<\/p>\n
It was a small movement, but I caught it.<\/p>\n
He wanted to know whether anyone was outside.<\/p>\n
That bothered me more than his words.<\/p>\n
"What else happened?" Odom asked.<\/p>\n
Brix shifted the canvas bag against his side.<\/p>\n
For a moment, I thought he might decide not to tell us.<\/p>\n
He looked at the motorcycle again.<\/p>\n
Then he took a breath.<\/p>\n
"He kept asking me questions about this place."<\/p>\n
Reed's face changed.<\/p>\n
"What kind of questions?"<\/p>\n
Brix hesitated.<\/p>\n
"About the shop. About you. About the bike."<\/p>\n
Nobody answered.<\/p>\n
The engine continued to make its steady sound, filling the silence without making it feel any less uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
I watched Reed.<\/p>\n
He had been focused on getting the Shovelhead running.<\/p>\n
Now he looked as if he had forgotten the machine was even there.<\/p>\n
"What did he want to know about me?" Reed asked.<\/p>\n
Brix rubbed one thumb along the edge of his bag.<\/p>\n
"He asked if I'd been inside before."<\/p>\n
Reed waited.<\/p>\n
"He wanted to know if you'd spoken to me."<\/p>\n
"And the motorcycle?" Odom asked.<\/p>\n
Brix nodded.<\/p>\n
"He asked what I'd seen on it."<\/p>\n
That was when the mood in the shop changed.<\/p>\n
Not dramatically.<\/p>\n
Nobody shouted.<\/p>\n
Nobody reached for anything.<\/p>\n
Odom simply placed his phone on the workbench and left it there.<\/p>\n
Reed glanced toward the front door.<\/p>\n
I followed his eyes.<\/p>\n
There was nothing unusual outside.<\/p>\n
A quiet stretch of road.<\/p>\n
The ordinary view we had seen a hundred times.<\/p>\n
But suddenly, I found myself wondering who else had been looking at our shop.<\/p>\n
And why.<\/p>\n
Odom broke the silence.<\/p>\n
"Why would a man who works at a diner care about our motorcycle?"<\/p>\n
Brix shook his head.<\/p>\n
"I can't tell you that."<\/p>\n
He sounded embarrassed by the answer.<\/p>\n
I knew that feeling.<\/p>\n
There is a particular kind of shame that comes from knowing something important but not knowing enough to explain it.<\/p>\n
People look at you as if you are holding back the truth.<\/p>\n
Sometimes you are only holding a piece of it.<\/p>\n
Brix looked down at the floor.<\/p>\n
"There's more."<\/p>\n
Nobody interrupted him.<\/p>\n
He glanced toward the windows again.<\/p>\n
This time, he kept looking for a few seconds.<\/p>\n
Then he told us about the night before the diner man had struck him.<\/p>\n
He had been near the back of the building.<\/p>\n
The kitchen was behind him, and he had heard voices coming from outside.<\/p>\n
The man from the diner had been talking to somebody else.<\/p>\n
They weren't having a friendly conversation.<\/p>\n
"They were arguing," Brix said.<\/p>\n
"About what?" Reed asked.<\/p>\n
Brix swallowed.<\/p>\n
"Something being found before Saturday."<\/p>\n
Saturday.<\/p>\n
The word landed harder than it should have.<\/p>\n
I looked at the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
The memorial ride was coming up.<\/p>\n
Forty-nine hours away.<\/p>\n
We had been thinking about time in terms of repairs, preparation, and whether the motorcycle would be ready when it mattered.<\/p>\n
Now Saturday meant something else.<\/p>\n
Someone had been talking about something being discovered.<\/p>\n
Someone had been worried enough to argue about it.<\/p>\n
And the man who had hurt Brix had apparently wanted to know what Brix had seen on our motorcycle.<\/p>\n
I tried to put those facts together.<\/p>\n
They wouldn't fit.<\/p>\n
Not yet.<\/p>\n
Odom folded his arms.<\/p>\n
"Did they say anything else?"<\/p>\n
Brix shook his head.<\/p>\n
"Not that I could make out."<\/p>\n
"You didn't hear a name?"<\/p>\n
"No."<\/p>\n
"Did you see the other man?"<\/p>\n
Brix looked uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
"I heard him. I didn't get a good look at him."<\/p>\n
Reed stepped away from the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
"Why didn't you tell us this earlier?"<\/p>\n
The question came out sharper than he probably intended.<\/p>\n
Brix lowered his eyes.<\/p>\n
I wanted to tell Reed to ease up.<\/p>\n
Then I stopped myself.<\/p>\n
We were all trying to understand what was happening, and none of us knew how much Brix had been carrying around since that night.<\/p>\n
He had already been hurt.<\/p>\n
He had already had reason to distrust the man.<\/p>\n
And now he was standing in a shop full of strangers, explaining why he thought the trouble might not have ended.<\/p>\n
Brix answered quietly.<\/p>\n
"I didn't know it mattered."<\/p>\n
Reed looked away.<\/p>\n
For a second, I thought he was going to argue.<\/p>\n
Instead, he looked at the motorcycle again.<\/p>\n
That old machine had been the center of our attention for so long that we had stopped seeing it as anything beyond a difficult repair.<\/p>\n
We had looked at its parts.<\/p>\n
We had listened to its engine.<\/p>\n
We had checked the work and tried to make sure everything was right.<\/p>\n
But Brix had been asked what he had seen on it.<\/p>\n
That was different.<\/p>\n
It meant somebody might have been interested in something other than whether it ran.<\/p>\n
I felt a knot forming in my stomach.<\/p>\n
I didn't know what that meant, and I didn't want to pretend I did.<\/p>\n
The trouble with fear is that it can make an ordinary question sound like a threat.<\/p>\n
But sometimes a question is a threat.<\/p>\n
We had no way of knowing which kind we were dealing with.<\/p>\n
Odom moved closer to the workbench.<\/p>\n
"Let's take this one thing at a time."<\/p>\n
He sounded calm.<\/p>\n
I was grateful for that.<\/p>\n
"Did the diner man know you were coming here?" he asked Brix.<\/p>\n
Brix shook his head.<\/p>\n
"I don't think so."<\/p>\n
"Did you tell him anything about Reed?"<\/p>\n
"No."<\/p>\n
"About the bike?"<\/p>\n
"No."<\/p>\n
Odom nodded slowly.<\/p>\n
Then he looked at Reed.<\/p>\n
Neither man said what they were thinking.<\/p>\n
They didn't need to.<\/p>\n
The questions had come from somewhere.<\/p>\n
The argument behind the diner had happened for a reason.<\/p>\n
And the timing was too close to ignore.<\/p>\n
I looked at Brix's canvas bag.<\/p>\n
He had been holding it tightly since he arrived.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether he was afraid of losing the few things he owned or whether the bag had something to do with what he was telling us.<\/p>\n
I didn't ask.<\/p>\n
There were already enough questions in the room.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle continued running.<\/p>\n
Nobody seemed interested in celebrating anymore.<\/p>\n
I remembered how relieved I had felt when the engine first came alive.<\/p>\n
That relief now seemed foolish.<\/p>\n
We had treated the running motorcycle as the end of a problem.<\/p>\n
We had been wrong.<\/p>\n
The machine might have been ready for Saturday, but we had no idea what else Saturday meant to the people who had been asking questions about it.<\/p>\n
Reed finally spoke.<\/p>\n
"Nobody touches anything until we understand what's going on."<\/p>\n
It wasn't a dramatic announcement.<\/p>\n
He didn't raise his voice.<\/p>\n
He simply looked at the motorcycle with a different kind of attention.<\/p>\n
Odom nodded.<\/p>\n
Brix tightened his grip on the bag.<\/p>\n
And I stood there listening to the engine, wondering how something we had spent so much time trying to fix could suddenly make the whole shop feel unsafe.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle was running.<\/p>\n
That should have been good news.<\/p>\n
Instead, it was the first thing that made me afraid.<\/p>\n
I used to think the worst problems were the ones you could see. A broken engine. A damaged part. A man standing in front of you with anger written all … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40062,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40042\/revisions\/40062"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}