From wherever I am now, I could see everything—my mangled body on the rain-slicked asphalt, my crushed Harley Davidson Road King lying twenty feet away, oil and blood mingling in a dark pool. The paramedics didn’t even bother with CPR. One look told them everything. Nobody survives having their chest cavity crushed by an 18-wheeler.
I’d been riding for fifty-three years. Started when I was sixteen, back when helmets were for sissies and traffic was light enough that you could open up on the highway and feel like you owned the world. My last thought before the truck hit me wasn’t fear or panic—it was anger. Anger that my boy wasn’t returning my calls. Anger that I was riding alone. Again.
The funeral surprised me. I’d expected maybe a dozen old riding buddies, some beers poured on the ground, and a few stories about our wild days. Instead, nearly three hundred bikes roared into the cemetery, engines thundering like a storm rolling across the plains. So many leather vests with patches from clubs I’d ridden with over the decades. So many weathered faces streaked with tears they weren’t ashamed to shed.
But my son wasn’t among them.
