El Paso, Day 4

“You ready man?”

I was still pulling on my boots at 7:58 when Danny told me that he was circling the block nearby, ready pick me up for breakfast. I made a point of calling him before the hour, certain that I would hear about it if I was even a minute late.

“Yeah man, I’m ready.”

“Where are you?” His voice sounded distant and tinny.

I gave him the cross streets for my hotel, which I had looked up before calling as another hedge against his mocking impatience. It was too early in the day to cede ground in whatever game we were playing.

But Danny didn't take the bait. “I don’t know where that is. You know Texas Ave, that runs east-west through downtown?”

“No, but…”

“Just start walking east on the right side of the street and I’ll find you.”

"I USED TO BE A COUNTRY SINGER," the wiry man who had introduced himself as Kenny yelled, unnecessarily. He kept grabbing my shoulder to emphasize his point. A single ear plug jutted from the right side of his head like a fleshy antenna.

The bartender, a close-shaven man in a grey Winnie-the-Pooh pullover, ambled past and cut his eyes at us. Kenny's voice dropped obligingly and he leaned closer.

"There's just no money in it anymore! But I had hits! I mean I didn't tour, but I used to make some money in sales. Then I fell off the wagon."

He put a hand to his head, brushing wisps of thinning blond hair from his eyes with practiced vanity. The toe of his sneaker rapped an anxious double-time against the bar.

"I was heading for L.A. when my car broke down and this mechanic here in El Paso..."

He waved dramatically and rolled his eyes, a wordless story about the vagaries of fate.

"So I got stuck here and I was little strung-out for a while! You know how that goes!"

He turned to face me, his eyes shining with an intoxicated thrill like a gambler on a hot streak. His hands and feet ticked and danced, heedless to the calm around him. He compulsively grabbed my shoulder as the music picked up.

"I'M CLEAN NOW, THOUGH!"

The sound of Danny's diesel dually has become so familiar that as it approached from behind, I stepped to the curb of Texas Avenue without bothering to look over my shoulder.

I've started to get used to the rhythms - not just of Danny's moods, but of this city, of the shop, of getting up and working on the Shadow and immediately smelling like gasoline, the tips of my fingers cracking and peeling from solvents and the back of my neck burning in the high desert sun.

The prior evening, when the fuel had started running from the Shadow in great shimmering torrents, Danny had muttered, "Bike's a fucking nightmare." Fixing the line before shipping the bike home was a defense of her honor, and my own.

The rupture itself was easy enough to identify: pressurized gasoline sprayed in knife-like jets from the front cylinder's carburetor inlet whenever the engine was running. The fuel line that fed the carb, brittled from decades of exposure, had shredded beneath its hose clamp and was unable to seal against the pressure of the pump.

I had accepted that the trip was over and with nowhere to go I worked with a gentle patience, my fingers tracing the fuel line's route through the cradle frame and its hidden convolutions of wiring and hose. It felt like dignified, compassionate work compared to the triage of the past few days.

A few minutes later, I pulled the cracked hose free of the carburetor's inlet and held it up to Danny defiantly.

"See? Your boy Sean made the hose clamp too tight and it just destroyed this old rubber."

"What? No, that's just a bad hose."

"Well yeah it's old, but it cracked because Sean made the hose clamp so tight that the rubber split." I pointed to the shredded line.

"No, just bad hose man. I'm telling Sean you said that."

When Sean arrived that morning he had shaved both his head and his bushy white beard. His eyes, which to me had looked so sad buried in their tangle of hair, now instead read vague confusion. He looked so lost that for a moment I thought he didn't recognize me, but then he pulled off his bandana to show me his work.

"See? I stole your look." He was referring to my shaved head.

Sean must not have anyone at home: here and there long silken strands floated in the light beaming in from the shop's open door, tethered to tiny islands that his razor had missed.

"What's with all of the police? Is there a precinct down there, or something?"

Over my days in the shop I had noticed a steady stream of motorcycle police turning down a side street a hundred yards to our west. They often made up the only traffic on the otherwise quiet lanes that fronted the lot.

Danny looked up from his work. "Yeah man. Lots of cops this week. They're all here from Las Cruces because of that cop who died."

He wiped his hands on a tattered rag.

"Young guy, too. Wife and a little baby. El Paso sent some cops out to help Las Cruces and the guy was only up there for like a week before some asshole fucking stabbed him. Killed him."

Danny is covered in prison tattoos, his elbows spiderwebbed and his hands a confusion of faded glyphs. A '1%' near his neckline marks him as an outlaw biker. His reverence for the subject caught me off-guard.

"Guy had a baby, man. Now it's got no father. The wife, she's on the news hysterical." He shook his head.

"Poor fucker." I wasn't sure whether he was referring to the slain officer, his fatherless baby, or the wailing widow.

"It's sad, man. All that loss."

We had gone to get 1/4-inch fuel line in Danny's other truck, a '57 Chevy that he has to continually tickle at lights to prevent the engine stalling. As we returned to the shop I could see a sedan parked in front of the gate.

"Hey Danny, someone's waiting on you man."

"Yeah, and they're in my fucking parking space."

Danny approaches almost everyone with impatience, so when he pulled up behind the sedan and blared the Chevy's horn repeatedly it seemed possible - even likely - that the driver of the car was a close friend.

A few seconds passed before Danny turned to me. "You believe this shit?" He laid on the horn again.

The car sat unmoving.

Grumbling, Danny stepped out of the truck and approached the driver's window. Leaning down, he yelled, "You're in my parking lot! This is my business! I need to park my truck! Move your fucking car!"

The window rolled down, and the driver said something that I couldn't hear.

"Move it now, motherfucker!" Danny yelled. He spun around on his heel and stomped back to the truck, sliding onto the bench seat next to me.

He dropped into gear, the old Chevrolet shivering as the clutch engaged. I realized two things simultaneously: that Danny was actually angry, and that for all of his bluster I had not seen him angry, yet. Not really.

"What the fuck?" Danny's fingers tapped on the steering wheel, his other hand working the choke as the Chevy struggled to find idle. I could feel him considering his next move. Moments ticked by, an inexorable countdown.

The driver of the sedan rolled up his window. An empty flatbed trundled past the shop, kicking up a rust-colored cloud that washed over both vehicles. The entire street felt suspended in time and space. In my mind empires of violent possibility rose and fell to dust as the car sat, motionless.

Thirty seconds passed before Danny let the engine die and stepped back out of the Chevy, his mouth a humorless dark scrawl.

One thing that Danny and I have in common is a distaste for ceaseless chatter, but that is Kenny's game.

I had clocked Kenny immediately: his head had whipped around as soon as I opened the bar's front door, and the look on his face at seeing a stranger was unabashed interest. The two stools to either side of him were the only empty seats at the small bar.

"THIS PLACE USED TO BE FUN!"

Kenny went on to explain how many times he had taken other strung-out, aimless guys back to the nearby hostel after meeting up at the bars; other souls lost on El Paso's social ladder and unfortunate enough to find that the hand reaching out from the rung above was Kenny's. The city seems full of people like him, perpetually on their way to somewhere else but jockeying for position in the meantime, like drunks in a holding cell.

He leaned in again. "What about you: who's at home? Wife? Girlfriend?" He made a show of fishing for his next words.

"BOY-friend?" He aped innocent. "Partner?"

Kenny is a scavenger, picking for scraps at the hollowed lives that wash up here like shells discarded by life's larger, more predatory forces. Kenny is not a hunter - he is an opportunist.

"CAN I BUY YOU A BEER?" he yelled, squeezing my shoulder.

"Listen motherfucker, you need to move your car! Now!"

Danny was back at the driver's window, leaning down and gesturing wildly as he yelled at the unseen operator.

I stepped from the Chevy, torn between a feeling of solidarity with Danny and a creeping certainty that things were spiraling out of control. I hoped that the sight of another person might encourage the man in the car to concede. I walked to the shop's front door, giving wide berth as I flanked the unmoving sedan.

The silhouette in the driver's seat sat frozen as Danny raged. My eyes scanned the road hoping the sudden appearance of an abuela, groceries in hand, or more police motorcycles; any witness that might give pause to one or both men as a feeling of inevitable doom charged the air.

Danny pulled out his phone and began filming the man in the car. He circled the vehicle, noting the license plate and yelling ferociously all the while.

Then he stepped back as the sedan's door swung slowly open.

In the dark interiors of the shop's several interconnected garages fifty or so bikes languish in various states of undress, their skeletal frames mummified in thick layers of pale orange dust. In the light of a headlamp spindly handlebars cast long, grasping shadows like outstretched limbs, victims of some forgotten cataclysm frozen in eternal lamentation.

Despite their appearance a surprising amount of the bikes are in running order, and Danny moves many of them out into the lot every morning before returning them to their tomb in an ebbing tide as evening approaches. I never asked why he bothered to take the time, but the motion felt as reliable and inscrutable as the phases of the moon.

The man who stepped from the sedan was hispanic and powerfully built. Dark sunglasses concealed his eyes, and his expression was blank as he turned to face Danny, ignoring me entirely.

"What the fuck is wrong with you, man?" Danny was yelling again, his phone held out in front of him like a protective talisman.

The other man reached down to his waist. In my mind I saw his fingers closing around the textured grip of a pistol and I briefly wondered whether I would be killed as a witness to this escalation of egos on the shoulder of a dusty in-town highway in El Paso, Texas.

I thought of the murdered officer.

But when the man pulled his hand from his pocket it was holding another phone. He raised it and aimed the camera at Danny. I watched as the two men filmed one another; Danny yelling and gesturing and the other man cold and impassive, capturing the tirade in silence.

Danny stormed back to the Chevy and cranked it. For a moment I wondered whether he planned to ram it into the back of the sedan. I don't doubt that he was considering it, but then the other man lowered his phone and climbed unhurriedly back into the driver's seat, closing the door softly.

A few seconds passed before the sedan's engine suddenly roared, the rear tires spinning in place and washing a cloud of dust and smoke over the Chevy in a final retort. Then the car slowly, pointedly, crawled down the curb and into the street, and it drove away.

I told Danny about meeting Kenny, the washed-up country singer, while exploring the bars in downtown El Paso the previous night.

"That's why I don't go out to bars, man. I don't like public spaces. You always find some asshole who won't stop talking or wants something from you, so I just stay home. Fuck that. I would have punched that guy in the mouth."

I didn't bother saying so, but I doubt that Kenny would have made the mistake of approaching someone like Danny.

"That's how people get shot, Brandon Lee. People die over shit like that."

Danny had gone several minutes without mentioning the sedan and its driver, but he was clearly stewing on it. He bubbled over without warning every so often.

"I know myself, man. I have a quick temper. I could have snapped, or he could have snapped." Danny paced the shop floor. "Ten years ago I would have pulled a gun and shot that motherfucker.

"I could have ruined my whole life today Brandon Lee, and it would have been over something as stupid as that."

In the early afternoon a line of police motorcycles began to form in the center of the road, directly across from the shop's lot. Danny watched with interest.

"They're getting ready to escort the body of that cop, the young guy."

On cue, a garage door rumbled open and a hearse exited the squat building across the street, finding its place in the procession. The scene was so quiet that I could hear the classic Harley clunk from the crank case as one of the police nudged his bike into gear, the familiar sound abrupt in the tense silence.

I stopped work and stood beside Danny, watching. I fumbled for my hat and held it low, by my side.

"Sean man," Danny turned and hissed over his shoulder, "you really going to work on bikes while they take this poor motherfucker away? They're going to see you and come beat your ass, man."

But that's not why Danny wanted him to stop.

Sean set down his tools and came to stand beside us, wiping his hands on his jeans. The motorcycles coughed to life and we watched in silence as the long line retreated into the haze, accompanying the body of officer Jonah Hernandez.

Somewhere in the recesses of my imagination his faceless widow held her head and wept, dark hair spilling out between clenched fingers.