A state trooper put a palm on his gun and stopped fourteen motorcycles outside Chillicothe and walked straight up to me, the one towing my dead father behind his own bike. “You don’t close a highway for a joyride, sweetheart,” he said. “Get your little club off my road.” Then he looked past me, at the trailer.
Dad asked for one thing in hospice, to come home down this road, and the cemetery gate locked at four.
So I hitched him behind his own bike, on the trailer he welded the summer I turned seventeen.
The trooper’s name plate said Giordano. A ladybug was walking across the hood of his cruiser.
He walked past Carl and stopped at my handlebars.
“License,” he said. “And tell your friends to shut those engines off. NOW.”
Fourteen engines went QUIET, all the way down the line.
I’d checked those straps at EVERY stop for ninety miles, and I wasn’t crying over a goddamn license.
Carl climbed off slow, the way he has since his knee, and pointed back at the trailer.
The trooper turned.
The flag covered the casket end to end, tucked under the straps.
His hand came off the gun.
Carl took his sunglasses off. His eyes were raw.
“That’s Eugene Greenlee,” Carl said. “Marines, then THIRTY-ONE YEARS cutting people out of wrecks on THIS road.”
“He wanted to ride it ONE more time.”
The trooper took a step back on the gravel.
Then his fingers went up to the brim of that hat and stayed there.
He didn’t say a word.
Behind us a grain truck stopped, then a minivan, then a pickup.
Folks climbed out and stood along the shoulder with their hands flat on their chests.
Kylie was crying on the seat behind me so hard I felt it through my jacket.
Nobody broke formation.
But that’s not the part I keep telling people.
A mile on, a woman about my age stood on the overpass with a bedsheet tied to the rail.
Spray paint, BIG letters, so we’d see it coming from a long way off.
Just one word.
It was the trooper’s own name.
Mile marker 112
GIORDANO.
Red paint, gone over twice so it ran at the bottoms. The last O was squeezed small where she’d run out of sheet. Two zip ties at each corner, and on the green sign under the overpass, 112.
She wasn’t looking at us.
Carl went under first, then the rest of the line, and I took Dad under it at twenty miles an hour with Kylie’s hands locked on my ribs. The woman had both forearms on the rail. Her eyes were on the road behind us.
I checked my mirror.
The cruiser was back there. Giordano had pulled in behind the last bike after the salute and followed us the whole mile, slow, light bar dark. Nobody had asked him to. Nobody had told him not to.
His front bumper came out from under the overpass and the light bar came on.
One blip of the siren.
Carl’s left arm went up, flat, and the line started bleeding off onto the shoulder. I downshifted and felt the trailer push at the hitch the way it had every time I braked since Kansas City.
Kylie got her mouth up against the side of my helmet. “Mom. Why is it HIS name?”
I didn’t know who the woman was. I didn’t know why a stranger would paint a trooper’s name on a sheet and hang it over a highway on the afternoon we buried my father.
But Dad had made me say that number back to him three times in hospice.
And I’d thought it was the morphine.
Room 4
Room 4 at the hospice in Kansas City had one window, and it looked at a parking garage. Dad made Kylie crank the bed up so he could see it anyway.
He’d quit eating by then. He hadn’t quit giving orders.
“Not the hearse,” he said. “Not the interstate. The old road. My bike, my trailer.”
“Dad, I’ve never pulled a trailer in my life.”
“You held the light for every bead on it.”
That was 1994, the summer I turned seventeen. He built it in the barn out of channel iron and a boat-trailer axle, and I stood there with the shop light on its orange cord until my arm went dead, because he said a crooked weld would kill somebody someday. He built it to haul the squad’s hydraulic cutter. The rescue truck lived in town, twenty minutes from the bad stretch. Dad lived four miles from it.
With the cutter strapped behind his bike, he beat the truck to every wreck on that road for twenty years.
He registered the trailer that fall and renewed the plate every March after, even the years it never left the barn. He wired the lights himself. I never once saw them on.
He kept a green memo book in his shirt pocket, the kind with the spiral across the top. One a year. Mile marker, date, the car, the people, what he had to cut. When I was twelve I opened one at the kitchen table and he took it out of my hands and didn’t say anything, and I never opened another.
There were thirty-one of them in a Red Wing shoebox in his closet.
I’d put the shoebox in the steel box he welded onto the trailer tongue. They were going in the ground with him. Nobody asked me to do that. I’d decided it at the closet door.
“Gate locks at four,” he said in Room 4. “Beatrice won’t hold it. Don’t ask her.”
“I know, Dad.”
“One-twelve,” he said. “Slow down at one-twelve.”
“Why?”
He’d closed his eyes. A cooking show was on the TV with the sound off, a man flipping something in a pan over and over.
“Plug’s in the box,” Dad said. “The brown one.”
I said one-twelve back to him three times. I didn’t ask about any plug. He died nine days later, a Thursday, at ten after five in the morning.
When I hitched up in his barn this morning, there was a rubber cap on a socket under the bike’s seat and a loose cord under the trailer tongue that didn’t go anywhere. I zip-tied the cord up off the road and forgot it.
Now, on the shoulder past the overpass, Giordano’s door opened.
He had the hat on before both boots hit the gravel.
The shoulder at 3:16
He didn’t walk past Carl this time. He walked past everybody.
He had my license in his left hand. I’d handed it up at the first stop, and after the salute he’d gone back to his cruiser still holding it.
“You think that’s funny?” he said.
“I don’t know who she is.”
“Somebody called ahead. Somebody put my name on a bridge.” He pointed back up the road with my own license. “There were nine phones out on that shoulder. Nine. I counted. My sergeant reads Facebook on his lunch.”
Carl had his kickstand down. “Son, she didn’t call anybody. She’s been on that seat since Kansas City.”
“Sir, get back on your motorcycle or you’ll be riding in mine.”
Carl didn’t get back on. He didn’t come any closer either. He stood with his weight off the bad knee and his sunglasses hooked in his vest.
Giordano walked around the trailer once, slow. He crouched at the back where the end of the flag hung down. He looked at the taillight on the fender. Dark.
“No lights,” he said. “No plate I can see. That trailer is not moving on a state highway.”
“My father’s on it.”
“Then your father waits for a hearse. I’ll call it in for you.”
Kylie was already off the seat with her phone. She called the cemetery on speaker. Beatrice talks on the phone like everybody’s across a parking lot from her, so the whole front half of the line heard it.
“The gate’s on a timer, hon. And Devonte takes the backhoe home at four. I can’t keep a man on the clock to sit in a field.”
“Ten minutes,” Kylie said. “Can you give us ten minutes?”
“I’m sorry about your granddad. I am. I’m sorry. It’s four o’clock.”
Kylie hung up and looked at me. Her mascara was down to her jaw. The clock on my phone said 3:19.
Giordano had his ticket book open on the hood of the cruiser. The ladybug was gone. He wrote with his head down and his elbows out, like a kid guarding a test.
“If he’s not in by four,” he said, “you’ll bury him tomorrow.”
The 1994 book
I called the funeral home in Chillicothe. The man who answered said both their cars were at a service in Trenton and the nearest one was an hour out.
“An hour,” I said.
“Ma’am, I’m so sorry, if you want I can call you as soon as…”
I hung up on him.
Then I did the thing I knew better than to do. I walked over to the cruiser and told Giordano my father had worked this road for thirty-one years.
He didn’t look up. “Lot of people worked this road. I work it.” He tore the top sheet off the book and held it out. “Trailer lighting. Second one’s coming.”
I didn’t take it.
So he walked it back to the trailer himself and slid it under the front strap, over the flag, where Dad’s chest would be. Then he went back to his book.
Carl said, “Christ, son.”
Giordano said, “Keep talking, sir.”
Kylie said, “Mom.” She said it twice.
I went to the steel box on the trailer tongue.
The lid stuck the way it always had, and I had to hit it with the heel of my hand. The shoebox was in there, wedged in with a tire gauge and a roll of duct tape. Taped to the inside of the lid was a sandwich bag, and in the bag was a brown plastic plug on a short cord with masking tape wrapped around it. Dad’s capitals: BIKE.
I didn’t know what it was. I pushed it out of the way and pulled the shoebox lid off.
They were in order. 1994 had a coffee ring on the cover and the spiral was crushed flat from his shirt pocket. I went through it with my thumb, standing in the road with trucks going by. June. July. A deer through a windshield at 98. A kid under a four-wheeler. A woman who’d had a stroke at the wheel and never knew she’d gone in the ditch.
Then September.
He wrote small, in pencil, no capitals but the names.
sept 3 94 · mm 112 · first run for the trailer. buick century roof down in the creek. bike ran her off, didn’t stop. mother Wilma Giordano 41 out first. girl 17 Delilah pinned both legs, cut the post twice. boy 7 back seat Dov. not hurt. kept asking was his sister okay.
Delilah
A blue Malibu came down the shoulder from the overpass with its flashers going and stopped behind the last bike.
The woman got out. There was red paint on two fingers of her right hand. She walked with a hitch, the kind you stop seeing on a person once you’ve known them a while, and she walked straight down the line of bikes. Past Carl. Past Kylie. Past me. The same path her brother had walked.
“Del,” Giordano said. “Go home.”
“Did you stop them?”
“Did you put that up there?”
“It wasn’t for you.” She looked at the trailer. Then she looked at me, and at the green book in my hand, and something went out of her shoulders. “You’re his daughter. It was in the paper Tuesday. The route, the time, the bike. I’ve been on that bridge since one o’clock.”
“Half the county just watched me pull a funeral over under my own name,” Giordano said.
“It’s my name too, Dovey.”
He closed the ticket book on his pen. Nobody had called him Dovey before an audience in a long time. You could tell from his ears.
I walked over and held the book out to him, open, with my thumb under the line.
He didn’t take it. He read it in my hand. His lips moved at the mile marker, the way people’s do when they read a number they know. He got to buick and stopped.
“Mom’s,” Delilah said. “The green one. You threw up in it the week before, on the way to Grandma’s. You remember that.”
“I remember that.”
He read the rest. I watched his eyes go down the line and come back up and go down it again. He never got to the end of it. He kept stopping in the middle.
“It was a bike put us in that creek,” he said.
3:41
“Black Harley,” Giordano said. “Two-tone tank. He came around that curve on our side and Mom put us in the ditch to miss him, and he looked back. I remember his helmet turning. I remember him looking right at the car and going. I remember the water coming in the window on my side. I don’t remember any saw. I don’t remember your father. I don’t remember anybody’s father.”
“Dovey,” Delilah said.
“So don’t you hand me a notebook.” He was talking to me now, and he was loud, and the people along the shoulder had their phones up again and he didn’t care. “Fourteen of you come over that hill two wide in my lane, no escort, no permit, and I’m supposed to know which kind you are? I’ve pulled bikers out of that same ditch. Dead ones. I’ve got a stack of them. I don’t keep it in a book.”
“You remember the saw,” Delilah said. “You screamed at the vacuum cleaner till you were nine because it sounded like the saw.”
“Del. Stop.”
“He came to the hospital every day for three weeks. In the green vest.”
“I said stop.”
I didn’t say anything to either of them.
I went back to the steel box and got the sandwich bag off the lid. The brown plug had two prongs and a little latch. I cut the zip tie off the loose cord under the trailer tongue with Carl’s knife. The cord had a brown socket on the end of it, old, the rubber gone gray. They went together with a click.
The other end of the plug’s cord had a fat round connector. I got down on one knee in the gravel and pulled the rubber cap off the socket under Dad’s seat. It went in a quarter turn and locked.
Both taillights on the trailer came on red.
“Kylie,” I said. “Squeeze the brake.”
She got on the seat and squeezed the lever, and the lights went bright and stayed bright, and she let go and they dimmed back down.
Then I unhooked the back strap. I lifted the end of the flag off the tailgate, careful, the way you’re supposed to, and held it up off the iron so he could see what was under it.
The plate. Missouri. A tab in the corner with this year on it, put on straight by a man who’d had to sit down halfway through doing it.
I slid the ticket out from under the front strap and held it out to him.
He looked at the plate a long time. He looked at the lights. He didn’t take the ticket. He opened the book and tore out the second one he’d been writing, and folded it twice, and put it in his shirt pocket behind the name plate.
“Registration’s current,” he said. “Lighting’s good.”
He handed me my license.
“You’ve got nineteen minutes,” he said.
I tucked the flag back. I hooked the strap. Then I opened the 1994 book to September third and tore the page out along the spiral, slow, so it came out whole and not in pieces. I’d had all of them in a shoebox two hours before and I’d meant every one of them to go in with him.
I held it out.
He didn’t move.
“Take it,” Delilah said.
He took it. He held it down by his leg like something he’d found in the road and didn’t know whose it was.
Carl got back on his bike, the bad leg swung over with both hands under the knee. Fourteen engines came back up, all the way down the line. Delilah walked to her Malibu without a word to her brother and fell in behind the last bike with her flashers on.
Nobody broke formation. Nobody waited for him.
He was still on the shoulder when I looked back, the page in one hand, his hat in the other.
The rail at 112
We got him through the gate at 3:56. Beatrice was standing at it with the key ring on her finger, and she didn’t look at her watch once. Devonte had the backhoe idling at the edge of the hole. Thirty-one green books went in atop the casket, in order. One of them was short a page.
Delilah stood back by the cedars with paint still on her fingers. She shook my hand at the car and drove home.
Carl had his knee scoped two weeks later. Kylie drove him.
The Saturday after Thanksgiving I took Dad’s bike out by myself. No trailer. It’s back in the barn, and I never unplugged the brown cord. It’s still hanging off the tongue.
The sheet was gone from the overpass. Two zip ties were left on the rail at each end, cut short, and somebody had wiped most of the red paint off the concrete under it where it had bled through.
I pulled onto the shoulder under the green sign that says 112.
A grain truck came over the hill behind me and slowed down to go by, and the driver lifted two fingers off the wheel.
I shut the engine off.
If this one got to you, send it to the person you’d want riding up front in your line.
For more tangled family legacies, there’s the fight over a brother’s dog and a name that brings trouble to the dean’s office. And for another family mystery that surfaces after a loss, read the note dated weeks before a mother’s burial.
