Melted Motorsickle

Yankee gunboats shell the city during the Seige of Vicksburg

                     

     Vicksburg, Mississippi, is not the prettiest town I’ve seen, but it is nice.  The way to see Vicksburg at its best is from the rooftop of the Cedar Grove Mansion at sunset.   Bar service is not available up there, but a few wrought iron tables with chairs are scattered about, and the bartender encourages guests to negotiate the steep, narrow stairway to the roof deck and watch the sun set.  Climbing that stair carrying an icy cold, straight-up Martini is daunting, but well worth the effort.

     Hugh and I timed our road trip to take advantage of this event.  We left Kerrville on our motorcycles at six am, rode diagonally across Texas on Hwy 79, picked up I-20 just outside Shreveport, and pulled up in front of the Beauregard House B&B in Vicksburg eleven hours, ten minutes and 619 miles later.  We checked in, briefly met the weird Beauregard family, hurriedly showered and dressed, and called a cab for the short ride to the Cedar Grove Mansion.  Neither of us is comfortable riding after dark and we flatly refuse to ride if we’ve been drinking.

     The sunset was spectacular.  A wet, foggy haze covered the wooded swamp that is Louisiana, and the waning sun bathed the whole scene with an iridescent golden glow.  The light glinted off girders on twin bridges which span the Mississippi River in the foreground, and the distant forest obscured the featureless plains behind a green/black veil of live oak and Spanish moss.  The warm, humid air was softly perfumed by magnolia blossoms.  Hugh and I, still high on adrenalin, discussed the first day of our ride.

     “What a great ride. Was that super, or what?  This is about as good a day as I can remember.”  Hugh said.  We clinked glasses and took our first sip, a ritual we have performed countless times before in countless other places.  

    “Damn, that Honda will run.  I had trouble keeping up.” Hugh said.  “How fast were you going when you passed those eighteen-wheelers outside Buffalo?”

     “Something over a hundred.  I didn’t mean to go that fast, but I passed the first truck and still had plenty of room, so I fogged it and passed the second, then I just cranked on down and went around the third one.  After I let off the throttle and got back in the right lane,  I glanced down at the speedometer and it was dropping down past 105.  I’d been afraid to take my eyes off the road before that.

     “You know, Hugh, this town has lots of history.  These people really suffered in the Civil War.  Grant surrounded the city and choked off all supplies—food, munitions, whatever.  Yankee gunboats shelled the city from the river and the people dug caves and lived in them for protection.  Most of the houses were destroyed.  The people starved.  Toward the end, they ate boiled shoe leather.  Pemberton finally surrendered on the fourth of July, 1863.”

     “You always learn about history, wherever we go.  Did you see those cannon balls in the dining room downstairs?”  Hugh asked.

     “One stuck in the floor and one in the wall.  They left them there so no one would forget.   The people here in Vicksburg haven’t forgotten.  They refused to celebrate the Fourth of July for almost a hundred years.  Ignored it completely.  Finally, in 1956, President Eisenhower asked them, as a personal favor, to at least recognize the national Independence Day.  They acknowledge it now, but I don’t think  they celebrate it.”

     “Enough history lessons.  What do you think about our boy, Jeffy, back at the B&B?  I’m not sure Jeffy is all here.” Jeffy was the only child of the owners of the Beauregard House, where we were staying.  He did odd jobs and cleaned the rooms, but his main occupation seemed to be timing the bread machine so the house specialty, date/nut bread, would be done in time for breakfast.

     I laughed.  “You noticed ole Jeffy too, huh? What would you expect?  The whole family is nuttier than that bread they make.  The daddy’s name is Jeb Stuart Beauregard, the mother is Miss Melanie, after a Gone with the Wind character, and they met at Ole Miss.  They named the poor kid ‘Jefferson Davis Beauregard,’ and she calls him ‘Jeffy.’  They’re all nuts.”

     “I don’t think it is all hereditary.  I believe that boy had some chemical assistance.  Did you see his eyes when he talked about the motorcycle melting?”

      Jefferson Davis Beauregard was about five-nine and shaped more like a bratwurst than a twenty-eight year old man.  His abundant dark, curly hair topped a head that seemed over-inflated.  His features were soft and rounded and his skin tone was smooth and uniformly pale, like the German sausages they sell in Fredericksburg.  He wore a plaid flannel shirt and rolled-up Penney’s Towncraft jeans, with Boy Scout moccasins.  No young man would choose to dress that way.  It was obvious his mother bought his clothing.

      Earlier that evening, as Hugh and I waited at the Beauregard House for our cab, Jeffy admired our motorcycles, parked under the porte-cochere.  “I had a motorsickle once, but it melted,” he said.  “It was a real wide motorsickle--a Harley-Davidson motorsickle.  Real wide.  Rode it all over everywhere--rode it to California on my way to Michigan once.  Didn’t tell nobody.”   Jeffy glanced warily back toward the house.  It was obvious “nobody” meant his parents.

     “Was it a Wide-Glide?”  Hugh rode a state-of-the-art Harley Convertible Soft Tail, with all the chrome bells and whistles, and could talk Harleys with anyone.  I rode a more sensible and more powerful Honda 1200 Gold Wing.  “What do you mean, it melted?” Hugh continued. “The whole motorcycle just melted?”

      “That’s it.  That’s what it was—a Wide-Ride Harley, metallic green with gold pinstripes.  It just melted and sank down through the sand in the Mojave Desert.  Disappeared, just like that.  Gone.”  Jeffy’s eyes had a far away look that replaced his usual vacant stare.  He was more animated than I’d seen him.

      “I was riding across the desert and I stopped to look up close at a Joshua tree.  Never seen any such-a thing up close.  All spiny and sharp—cool looking.  I was standing there on the sand looking up close at that Joshua tree and I hear this hissing sound behind me.”  Jeffy was becoming downright entertaining.
  
     “I turned around just in time to see my gas tank melt off.  The handlebars looked like chrome noodles and the front tire was half gone.  I just stood there and watched as the motor sank out of sight and those two big chrome shocks just dripped down between the melted spokes of the front wheel.  It was completely gone in less than five minutes.  Just a tire track coming across the sand to that little wet green spot.  Then the wet evaporated and there wasn’t nothing left but the track.”

     Hugh and I looked at each other.  This kid was serious as a heart attack.  I don’t know if his Harley melted or not, but he was convinced it did.  I tried to think of something to say.  Hugh had enough presence of mind to ask, “What did you do?  What happened?”

     “Oh, I thought about it for a long time.  Finally, I decided that I had to walk because I didn’t have a motorsicke to ride anymore.  I started following the track and these little puffs of sand poofed up behind my heels every time I took a step.  Poof.  Poof.  Poof.  Just like walking through talcum powder.  Poof.  Poof.  Only the powdery sand was light purple, with bright neon orange and green highlights on the black Joshua trees.  It was really cool.”

     Hugh and I again exchanged glances as Jeffy’s father, Jeb, came outside to join us.  Jeb was a big man who spoke with a deep southern drawl, “Jefferson, you need to go inside and set up the bread machine for in the morning.  You telling these folks about your motorcycle getting stolen by the highway patrol?”

     “You know it didn’t get stole, Papa.  It melted.  I had the keys in my pocket and they melted, too.  I showed you the empty key ring.”  Jeffy was hurt that his father didn’t believe him, and they obviously had this conversation often.  “I come out here to find out when these gentlemen want breakfast, so I can set up the bread machine for Mama’s date/nut loaf.  It’s not as good if it’s cold.”

      “We’ll be down for breakfast at eight thirty,” I said to Jeffy.  It was the fourth time I had told him and Hugh had told him twice.

     “Let’s see, then, I’ll plug in my formula.  Eight point five, minus four, plus point five.  Let me write that down—whatever the answer is, that’s when I set the bread machine to come on.  Mama’s date/nut loaf ain’t good if it’s cold.  Won’t melt the cream cheese.”  Jeffy went into the house, furiously scribbling on a note pad.

     “That is a good boy,” his father drawled as he sipped a bourbon on the rocks.  “Gets his talent for math from me.  Did I tell you I was a NASA engineer and should have been in charge of the whole Marshall Space Flight Center over in Huntsville, Alabama?  The big shots screwed me over and put an ass-kisser from MIT in ahead of me.  I promise you, I’ll get even one day.  Ass-kissers always get it in the end.  Heh, heh, heh.”  As Jeb relayed the story, he flashed a conspiratorial wink, as if we knew all about crooked people and the doings behind the scenes at NASA.

     “What happened to Jeffy’s motorcycle?” I asked.  I was almost afraid to bring up the subject.

     “Miss Melanie and I got a call from the Arizona Highway Patrol, saying they had Jefferson and we needed to come get him.  They said they found him wandering in the desert outside Yuma, stoned out of his gourd.

     “We told them that couldn’t be our son, because he was up in Michigan and he didn’t do drugs.  They put Jefferson on the phone and he was pretty disoriented, but it was him.  It took three days for us to get out there and pick him up.  I asked the captain about Jefferson’s bike, and he said there wasn’t any motorcycle.”  Jeb paused expectantly, waiting for one of us to catch the significance of his words.  Again, the wink.

     “You can see what happened, can’t you?  One of them laws found Jefferson riding across the desert on that fancy new Harley and decided he wanted it.  So they picked Jefferson up on a trumped-up charge, confiscated his Harley, drugged him, and called us.  They can’t fool me.  I’ve been around crooks like that my whole life.  NASA’s full of them.  You can’t ever take things to be what they look like.  They’s always a turd in the punchbowl, somewhere.”  He winked again.

     Thankfully, our cab pulled up.  Jeb followed us to the car, still talking.  “They haven’t heard the last of me.  I hired a private detective out in Phoenix to find that Harley and get it back.  He’s staking out that captain’s house.  We paid over $23,528.00 for that Harley.”  Jeb was getting intense.  

      “They just don’t understand who they’re dealing with.  I’m through letting people screw me over.  Just like them NASA suits, they’ll find out.   I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.   When I'm getting even, I’m mean as a snake and I don’t ever forget.”  He finished his bourbon and pitched the ice under an azalea bush. 

     “You all have a good time now, ya hear?  All of a sudden, I'm dry,  I got to get Miss Melanie to put a half-sole on this here bourbon.”