Bikers don’t go looking for trouble. But when Elena missed her third straight shift at Rosie’s, trouble came looking for us with its teeth bared. Saturday morning the bell over the door chimed like it always did, but the stool at the end of the counter stayed empty. Rosie kept glancing at it while she … Read more
The fluorescent lights buzzed like trapped wasps above Aisle 7 of Miller’s Grocery on that bitter Ohio evening. I rolled my shoulders under my cut, the Steel Vultures MC patches stiff with road dust, and joined the checkout line with nothing but a quart of milk and a craving for silence. At sixty-eight, with forty-four … Read more
The October wind cut like a scalpel across the empty parking lot of the old Piggly Wiggly on the outskirts of Birmingham. It was 7:47 p.m., the kind of raw, wet cold that seeps into eighty-two-year-old joints and makes every breath feel like broken glass. I sat on the metal bench outside the automatic doors, … Read more
The low growl rolled across the fields outside Ashford Creek long before anyone saw the source. It wasn’t thunder. It was engines—many engines—growing deeper, heavier, until the front windows of Juniper’s Table began to shiver in their frames. June Merritt stood behind the counter, coffee pot frozen in her hand. Thirty years running this diner … Read more
The small funeral home in Maple Grove smelled of wilting lilies, lemon polish, and quiet heartbreak. Sunlight slanted through half-closed blinds, striping the faded carpet in gold and shadow. In the far corner, as far from the two closed caskets as a child could get, sat five-year-old Tommy Walker. He wore a black suit two … Read more
My brother Marcus and I used to be the same person in two bodies. That’s not something I say lightly or romantically. I mean it in the literal, functional sense that people who grow up poor and close in age understand — we shared clothes, we shared a bedroom for seventeen years, we shared a … Read more
My grandfather Walter Emmett Briggs was, to my understanding for the first thirty-four years of my life, three things: a veteran, a quiet man, and a biker. The order in which I understood these things was reversed from the order in which they actually mattered, which is something I think about now when I think … Read more
The Sunday my congregation left me was the second Sunday in April, which I remember because the dogwoods were flowering outside the windows of Calvary Road Community Church and I had taken that as a hopeful sign that morning, which teaches you something about the reliability of dogwoods as omens. I had been the pastor … Read more
I spent twenty-six years as a law enforcement officer in a county that had, during most of those years, a significant and complicated relationship with the Copper Saints Motorcycle Club. I made a lot of arrests in those twenty-six years. I made one arrest that I think about more than most. His name was Eddie … Read more
My son Caleb is small for his age. Always has been. At twelve, he was the height of an average nine-year-old, which was in his genes — I’m five-four, his father is five-seven — and which had been mostly fine in elementary school, where size differentials are manageable and the social cruelties are still relatively … Read more