C4 antho - Chamber Four

Black Night Ranch ~199~
“I think we ought to run.”
After that Billy found it fascinating to hear all the stories
about the big man. James Carl once took on a band of Hell’s
Angels sixty miles away in Lehigh, Oklahoma, back when
being a Hell’s Angel had nothing to do with parades or charities.
Back when all outlaw motorcycle gangs called themselves
Hell’s Angels. Outside the only bar in Lehigh, for fun
he kicked one of their bikes to the ground. After a short chase
down unfamiliar dirt roads, he wound up taking twentythree
stabs in a wheat field. Billy had heard his father tell the
story many times.
Shortly after being hired on, and in a rare moment of
courage, Billy had asked his boss about the stabbing. The
courage to raise the question resulted from James Carl having
burned the palms of both his hands when Billy had mistakenly
tried to open the hood on the feed truck he was
driving. What Billy had thought was steam rolling from
under the hood, James Carl had realized was actually smoke.
He had knocked the boy out of the way and burned himself
instead. He had talked Billy through how to bandage his
hands for him, and in the moment, though Billy had felt responsible
for getting his boss burned, he’d also felt a kind of
safety and trust in doctoring the man’s burns. In feeling that
sense of safety, Billy asked about Lehigh. James Carl said it
was the prettiest stand of wheat he ever saw. He claimed it’s
what saved him. Said the wheat sang to him and kept him
from bleeding out. Billy didn’t much buy it, but he wouldn’t
have been the one to disagree. Two of those stabs were to
James Carl’s neck, and not pocket knife stabs either. All his
scars were at least an inch wide. Those bikers had used big
knives.
Starting to doze into his daydream, the CB cracked.
“Wake up, goddamn it.”