A Glimpse of the Buffalo--a story (iii)

On Wednesday, Mount Rushmore was full of motorcycles for the big rally, one whole tier of the parking lot lit with chrome and glistening colors in a perfect arc, like a juke box. Some of them leaned forward on long forks, looking as mean as their owners. I choked back a little fear, right there at the foot of democracy's great mountain monument, because everywhere you looked there were grungy-looking bikers in sleeveless black T-shirts with blazing colors across the front.

I held the girls' hands on our way up the steps, but not Jamie's. He was walking tall out front, dressed in a pair of cut-offs I would have washed the day before if we'd been home. He wore his new sneakers, no socks.

"I see George Washington," Jerelyn said, pointing from the sidewalk, up through the trees, over the heads of people walking back and forth beneath the parade of state flags.

"Who's George Washington?" Amy said.

"He's the 'Father of our Country;" Jamie said, still close by, even though he was too proud to hold hands. I think he could feel all those bikers, just like I did.

"Who's the mother of our country, Mom?" Jerelyn said.

I didn't think we had a mother, so I told her Betsy Ross, probably because of all the flags.

The four of us stood up at the wall outside the visitor's center, and I asked a lady in a dress to snap a picture using my camera.

"Smile," I said to the kids, holding them.

The lady waited, then put down the camera. "The boy isn't looking this way," she said, trying not to scold.

I told Jamie to pay attention, and she took the picture. When it slid out, she'd missed the whole monument.

Later, Amy sat on my lap on a couch inside the Visitor's Center, and we watched a movie about the man who carved the faces. Jamie sat in a crouch on the floor, his legs crossed in front of him, looking wor­ried, even though I thought he'd love the story on the screen. Jerelyn's hand was locked in mine. It was cool inside, very cool, or I couldn't have taken the way she leaned her weight into me.

At another viewer station across the room, a bunch of bikers slumped against the wall as if they were bushed. Some of the men wore no shirts, and the women looked bored, I thought. None of them were young anymore-their faces were creased, and the sheath tanks they were wear­ing, braless, weren't exactly flattering to their sagging boobs. "My body belongs to a biker," one of those shirts said, "but my heart belongs to Harley Davidson."

They didn't scare me. You could tell that somewhere they had kids because they had real hips and their stomachs rolled where they snap­ped their tight jeans. The men were red-eyed and sunburned, grizzled by the wind, their hair knotted in clumps, and they all sat in a daze, staring at screens, no more dangerous, it seemed to me, than tourists with expensive cameras bouncing off their bellies.

But on our way out, six bikers, all men, sat around a cement bench right beneath our state flag. We walked between them as if they weren't there. One of them, a kid with a red kerchief for a sweatband, tipped his head at me, maybe because I was alone. When I didn't smile back, he flapped his tongue out like a snake, flashing his eyes.

"Those guys are assholes," Jamie snarled, when we were fifty feet away.

"Jamie!" I said, "don't use that language."

He shrugged his shoulders, then walked away from us, out in front, his hands clenched, his calves bunched up into little fists when he walked.

The next morning he was up early again, like every morning. Not so many years ago, Burt would get up early for the paper on Sunday mornings and Jamie would crawl in the moment he was gone, this little tub of warm flesh snuggled beside me. But every morning at the camp­site, I'd hear him slip out of his sleeping bag and fuss with the wood until flames would pop.

I'd sling his sleeping bag over Amy and tell myself I should warn him to be careful with those flames, but I never did. I didn't want to wake the girls, so I let him scrape around for kindling until he had something crackling. I hoped he was old enough to play with fire.

I haven't the backbone to play Mom when the sun isn't yet clearing the tips of the pines. My body is dead weight, even on a flattened mat­tress. I'd lie awake on the ground in a thick morning daze while the girls lay asleep against me, pushed up against both my sides.

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Tomorrow: The ruckus next door.