Molly's red hair was flowing out behind her and her tears left salty trails as the wind pushed them around toward her ears.
Splitting the air at over 100 miles per hour the wind roared in her ears and it was hard to exhale, but she kept the throttle twisted and burned through the cool air of the mountains.
His leather jacket was too big on her, sagging and gathering at the shoulders and elbows. Likewise for his black leather gloves. She wore them anyway because they still smelled like him.
Of course, she still tasted the coppery smell of the blood stained sheets he lie on as he died. She saw and smelled it every time she closed her eyes, even at over 100mph on his Vincent motorcycle.
"ain't nothin' like a 52' Vincent and a red headed girl." He had said, as he lay there turning paler than the white sheets, grinning while his blood and life ran from his body. "You take good care of her. Don't let them have her."
He had been clutching the keys in his left hand, out of sight of anyone in the room who were altogether focused on his ragged chest wound. Slipping his hand across his belly slowly, he opened that hand and took Molly's.
"I can see the angels coming to get me now, I reckon." He whispered, wincing a bit and then grinning again. "Angels on Arieles in leather and chrome."
With that he'd expired with a pleasant expression on his face, despite his wounds.
She rode the Vincent home from the hospital, lurching away to speed and awkwardly lurching to stop. She parked the bike in her family barn and threw an old bedsheet over it where it sat until the following spring.
The Vincent, and her grief over James, began to pierce her heart more and more as the winter's chill thawed that year. Finally, she stood staring in the barn at the Vincent still there under the bedsheet. Drawing the old dingy white thing slowly off, she discovered the bike hadn't tarnished in the damp winter air, nor had it collected any rust.
She swung her leg over it and sat there gripping the handlebar controls, smelling his smell somehow still on the bike. When her fingers found the key in her pocket, she slid it in to the lock and gave it a turn. When her foot found the kickstart, she rolled the engine around the way that James had shown her and then jumped on the pedal while hoping all the time she didn't get tossed over the bars. To her surprise, the bike started and sat idling underneath her with that sinister low rumble for which those 52 models are so famous.
Molly didn't care that it was one of maybe 35 like it in the world, or that it was one of the 35 fastest motorcycles ever to ride on planet Earth. The sound brought memories of James back to her and rides through fields that smelled of daisies and dandelions, the oil and dew smell of summer asphalt at midnight, and laughter as they burst into quiet roadside diners to escape sudden summer showers.
She whacked the throttle with her right hand and the engine roared underneath her. The exhaust note seemed to lighten the grief that had been hanging on her like an unwelcome guest.
She whacked the throttle again and felt a ray of light was shining on her now. She wiped at eyes that leaked tears that weren't painful for the first time in months. She remembered lying on a blanket in a hayfield with James sweet talking her and running his fingertip down her chest nearly to her navel for the first time.
Molly eased the Vincent out of the old tobacco barn and across a spot of grass until she made her way into her parent's driveway where she left it rumbling on its sidestand. She went back into her family's small Tennessee home and came out a couple of minutes later with a small bag that she roped awkwardly to the passenger section of the seat. She was wearing James' gloves and black motorcycling jacket that he had always worn.
A note on the front door curtly said "I'm going for a ride. Be back soon."
A broken piggy bank in her room and an empty Prince Albert can in the kitchen hinted it might not be so soon.
Soon turned to hours. Hours to days, then weeks. Long years passed as she wandered the roads on the old black Vincent, never going back to her home in Knoxville.
She learned to cook in diners. She learned to clean hotel rooms. She learned to smile at boys to get a couple of bucks for gas.
People looked at her strangely when she tried to explain that she could feel his presence when she rode the motorcycle, that is until she began to ride with other motorcyclist who lived on the road.
They would nod knowingly and never studied her with odd glances when they thought she wasn't looking the way that people who rode in "cages" did.
Despite the miles she tripped on the odometer and the days she rode under the sun or nights rumbling under the stars, the Vincent never needed tires. It never needed tune ups, and Molly would never let anyone fiddle with it, even after she became fast friends with a blind mechanic named Sammy who would swear the valves needed to be adjusted every time he heard it running.
After 20 long years of life on the road, Molly's hair had begun to get streaks of gray in the scarlet curls. Her face began to show lines from years of laughing and smiling around campfires and friends, or scowling during rainstorms that pelted her like little bullets. James' leather jacket had weathered well, even after she'd sewn patches on it in the sixties including one on the right upper chest that read "Vincent Molly" in bright red letters arrayed in an embroidered black rimmed oval.
Even after two decades, she could still feel the excitement that pulsed in her chest when she first put her leg over the Vincent and her arms around James. She could still smell the summer daisies and dandelions even on the murkiest winter days or as she squinted through a rainstorm. She could still smell the grass on box hill as they rode across it to a hidden spot in the trees.
On her way to Daytona that year, she'd been coming South from a stop to see some friends in New Hampshire. She was riding a busy four lane highway in Charlotte when a car with two shaggy looking guys had run her off the road and into a gas station parking lot. It was nearly midnight and hardly anyone was around on a Tuesday night.
"Hey, what's your problem!" She shouted at them as they stepped out of their car.
One was a rangy tall guy with the pasty skin of a junkie and the shaggy hair of someone who had a crush on Mick Jagger. The other was a darker skinned Latino with a growing belly and broad shoulders but not as tall as his friend.
They exchanged a look and then quietly started walking toward her.
Molly pulled an old government issue .45 from her waistband. A fellow biker and Vietnam Veteran had given it to her years before and she'd never had to use it. It clattered a little when she swung it in front of her, but was quiet and steady as she showed the pasty one the gigantic barrel that the .45 caliber slug was about to come through at full steam.
"What the fuck is your problem, man!" She shouted again.
Wordlessly they kept walking toward her, their feet crunching the gravel beneath them.
The .45 barked and a small spray of blood came from the junkie's chest. He looked down and then looked back up with black eyes.
The Latino raised his right index finger and wagged it.
"That was not very nice at all." He said.
Molly stepped back from the Vincent as a look of muddled confusion and horror worked her face. The gun began to shake until it barked 6 more times. Each time one of the big slugs found a vital spot that would have dropped all but the biggest of men, except for one that found the Latino's forehead. That one would have dropped anyone.
They strode across the gravel until the pistol clicked and made her gasp involuntarily.
The junkie with the hole in his chest slapped her hard enough to drive her to the gravel and make her head swim, but she crabbed backward on the ground and was back on her feet again. This time she drew a knife from her boot and held it with the blade backward along her wrist.
"Give us the bike." The Latino said in a calm voice. "We just want the bike."
Molly let out a confused look as her brow furrowed and she glanced from one to the other.
"Give us the bike!" The junkie shouted at her. "Give us the fucking bike, bitch!"
The Mick Jagger wannabe stepped closer and she slashed across his midsection and then drove the blade into his chest.
He looked confusedly at the Latino for a second and then pulled the knife from his chest.
"Now we do it my way." He said, tossing the knife behind him.
He reached out and grabbed Molly by the hair and spun her around, wrapping his left arm under her jaw and then bracing his right arm behind her head.
The Latino stepped forward, nervously looking at the junkie with his black eyes.
"Give us the fucking motorcycle or I'm gonna break your goddamned neck and throw your body in the sewer!" He seethed into her ear.
Molly's face was turning red from his grip on her and tears streamed down her face.
Out on the road there was no traffic to flag down. There was the faint sound of something rumbling the next block over but no one around in the dim lot to help her.
She thought about James and a hay field sorrounded by a perfect day and felt her head getting light.
From the next block over a group of motorcycles burst from around the corner, the rumble of the engines turning into loud roars she could barely hear now as the streetlights blurred and the world started to seem faraway.
The headlights of the bikes were bright as they pulled in fast and skidded to a halt in the gravel.
"Get rid of 'em." The junkie shouted over the sounds of the engines.
The Latino walked into the field of headlights and disappeared.
A loud sickening thump could be heard following a crunch of bone. The Latino slid back in the gravel lifelessly at Molly's limp feet like a ragdoll.
The headlights and engines ceased simultaneously and the chirp of crickets in the nearby grass could be heard.
On the motorcycles, the silhouettes of 4 brawny men and one slightly built figure could be seen sitting placidly.
The slight one dismounted from a Honda 750 and the gravel crunched under his boots as he walked forward into the semi circle made from the front tires of the bikes.
The junkie's grip lightened a bit and the world began to return as Molly gulped air.
The slightly built man stepped forward into the moonlight and showed a finely featured face of someone who couldn't possibly be much more than 19 or 20. But, his green eyes burned with a bright anger.
He stepped forward with a startling quickness and a right jab to the junkie's forehead sent him sprawling backward to the ground grasping his head.
The patch on the small young man's denim vest read "Sonny" and Molly saw it as he shuffled her into the hands of one of the other bikers who had by now dismounted with a surprising quickness. He was a giant barrel chested man whose patch ironically named him "Mouse.".
"Oh, you didn't think you were going to just run back to hell, did you?" Sonny said, grasping the junkie by the hair and snatching him to his feet.
The junkie now had a bloody imprint on his forehead of some symbols that matched the ones on the knucks that Sonny was sliding off his right hand and slipping into his pocket.
"Please, I..." the Junkie began to mewl."I was just following my orders. I didn't know you guys was involved!"
Sonny grabbed his face with a bony left hand and pierced him with his bright green eyes for a second.
"I don't care." He said, shoving the junkie back into the arms of another of the 5 bikers.
For nearly an hour Molly listened to them brutally pass the demon back and forth, punching and kicking him, heaping insults and injury upon him. Finally, Sonny was heard saying "Ok, that's it."
One sharp bone crunching crack of his neck and the junkie fell limply to the ground.
"Can you ride?" Sonny asked Molly who was still under the watchful eyes of Mouse.
"Yeah. I think so." She said, averting her glance from Sonny's bright green eyes and bright blond hair.
"Good. Let's get rolling." He said. "You're riding with us."