“I was just confirming.”
Jerry smiled.
“Good. Keep confirming.”
They spent the next hour rotating the engine by hand.
They moved slowly.
Painfully slowly.
The Harley seemed determined to reveal its secret one fraction of an inch at a time.
Then Pete stopped.
“Wait.”
Jerry looked over.
“What?”
Pete pointed toward the rear cylinder.
“Listen.”
They listened.
Nothing.
Pete rotated the engine again.
A faint metallic click came from inside the crankcase.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just a tiny sound.
Click.
Pete rotated it backward.
Click.
Forward.
Click.
Jerry's expression changed.
“That's new.”
“No,” Pete said.
“What?”
“I heard that yesterday.”
Jerry stared at him.
“You didn't tell me.”
“I thought it was something loose.”
Jerry crouched beside him.
“Do it again.”
Pete rotated the crank.
Click.
Jerry put his fingertips against the engine case.
Again.
Click.
He looked at Frankie.
“Did Bill ever work on this engine himself?”
Frankie hesitated.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Before he died.”
“Do you remember what he did?”
Frankie shook his head.
“Not exactly.”
“Anything unusual?”
Frankie thought.
“He was always doing something unusual.”
Jerry nodded.
“That's not helpful.”
Frankie smiled.
“No. It isn't.”
He looked at the Harley for a long moment.
Then his smile disappeared.
“But there was one winter when he wouldn't let anyone touch it.”
Jerry waited.
Frankie continued.
“Not even me.”
“What year?”
“1992.”
Pete looked at Jerry.
Ray stopped working.
Frankie stared at the motorcycle.
“That was the year before he died.”
Nobody spoke.
Outside, traffic moved along the Oakland street.
Inside, the old Harley sat beneath the fluorescent lights, silent and heavy, as if it had been waiting thirty-one years for someone to ask the right question.
The next morning, Jerry arrived before sunrise.
He unlocked Iron & Oil, switched on the lights, and found the Harley exactly where they had left it.
He stood there alone for several minutes.
He had spent his life around machines.
He knew better than to romanticize them.
Metal didn't remember.
Steel didn't mourn.
Engines didn't miss the people who had ridden them.
That was what reason said.
But Jerry had also lived long enough to understand that reason didn't explain everything.
Some objects became important because people poured their lives into them.
A wedding ring was only metal until somebody wore it for fifty years.
A photograph was only paper until the person in it was gone.
A motorcycle was only an arrangement of steel, aluminum, rubber, leather, and gasoline until it carried two young men through the best years of their lives.
Jerry walked over to the Harley.
He put one hand on the seat.
“Let's see what you're hiding.”
Pete arrived twenty minutes later.
Ray came shortly afterward carrying coffee.
Frankie arrived last.
They removed the fuel tank.
Then the rocker boxes.
Then the heads.
They inspected everything again.
No obvious failure.
No shattered component.
No catastrophic damage.
Nothing that explained the repeated stopping point.
Jerry's frustration grew.
“Let's pull the primary.”
Pete nodded.
They worked through the morning.
By noon, the floor around the lift was covered with carefully arranged components.
The engine became less recognizable with every hour.
Frankie watched quietly.
He occasionally answered questions about the motorcycle.
He remembered almost everything.
The first time Bill bought it.
The first trip they took.
The crash near Bakersfield.
The time Bill rode it through a rainstorm with a broken throttle cable.
The night they slept beside it on a desert road because neither of them had enough money for a motel.
But there were gaps.
Whenever Jerry asked about 1992, Frankie became quiet.
Finally Jerry said, “You don't have to tell us anything you don't want to.”
Frankie looked at him.
“I know.”
He walked toward the workbench.
For a while, he watched Pete clean a crankcase component.
Then he said, “Bill wasn't supposed to die.”
The mechanics stopped.
Frankie continued before anyone could respond.
“He had cancer.”
Ray lowered his eyes.
“He knew.”
Frankie nodded.
“But he never told me how bad it was.”
The garage became still.
“He kept riding. Kept working. Kept pretending nothing had changed.”
Frankie rubbed his hands together.
“One night he came to my house. It was raining. He sat in my kitchen for almost three hours.”
“What did he say?” Jerry asked.
“Nothing.”
Jerry frowned.
“Nothing?”
“He drank coffee. Smoked two cigarettes. Stared at the table.”
Frankie smiled sadly.
“That was Bill. He could sit in silence for three hours and somehow make you feel like he'd told you everything.”
He looked toward the stripped Harley.
“Then he asked me to promise something.”
“What?”
“If the bike ever stopped running, I would never let anyone replace its engine.”
Jerry looked at Pete.
“Why?”
Frankie shook his head.
“I don't know.”
“Did you ask?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Because then it won't be mine anymore.’”
Nobody spoke.
Jerry slowly turned toward the motorcycle.
“Did he know he was dying?”
Frankie looked away.
“I think he knew.”
The room felt colder.
Pete broke the silence.
“What happened after that?”
“Three weeks later, he was gone.”
Frankie swallowed.
“I kept the motorcycle.”
Jerry nodded.
“And you never opened the engine?”
“Not until now.”
That changed everything.
Jerry crouched beside the workbench.
“Pete.”
“Yeah?”
“Get the crankcase.”
They examined it again.
This time, they weren't searching only for mechanical failure.
They were searching for history.
Jerry ran a light over the inside of the case.
Pete examined casting marks.
Ray inspected the wiring channels.
Then Ray said, “Wait.”
He pointed toward a narrow recess near the rear of the case.
There was something there.
A small piece of metal.
At first it looked like debris.
Jerry reached for tweezers.
He pulled it free.
It was a thin brass plate.
Approximately two inches long.
Covered in oil.
Pete wiped it clean.
Letters appeared.
Not many.
Just four.
J.
A.
C.
K.
Ray frowned.
“Jack?”
Frankie went completely still.
Jerry looked at him.