The Big Dirt Nap

Ten

I was channeling Cher and mumbling the words to "Believe" under my breath. Five beefy guys on four bikes followed me to my car. Whatever it was the Michelin Man had in mind, he was no match for my new best friends, and we left him and Ravi, and whoever was in that second car, scratching their heads in the service station minimarket.

Charlie seemed to be the big dog. The biggest physically, he had the biggest bike, two-thirds as wide as the Jeep and encrusted with pipes and grilles that did who-the-hell-knew-what but made the bike look like a small spaceship. He stayed on my left, tossing me the occasional smile or thumbs-up, and the others trailed us, playing leapfrog until we got to the diner.

By the time we'd pulled into the Paradise parking lot, I'd convinced myself that Charlie and his friends had saved me from worse than death, and as they dismounted, I gave them bear hugs and back slaps as if we'd just ridden cross-country together instead of twenty minutes on a tree-lined suburban road.

"Party of two . . . three . . . six?" Babe asked, as we tumbled into the near-empty diner. Charlie's arm was still around my shoulders. "Any more coming?" She craned her neck to look into the parking lot.

Wanda "Babe" Chinnery owned the Paradise. Although she is one, I hesitate to call her a retired rocker because she still rocks, she just doesn't do it onstage anymore alongside a metal band and in front of thousands of screaming kids. She waved the guys over to the corner booth in the back and pointed to some menus stacked by the window.

"How old is that decaf?" I asked, joining her at the counter.

"Not that old," she said, pouring me a cup. "You know, I'm the last to throw stones, but when I said you should get out more," she whispered, "this wasn't exactly what I had in mind." Babe had been playing matchmaker for me for the last year, with zero results, so she was surprised to see me come to the diner with five guys in tow.

"So who are your friends, and why are you sitting over here? This isn't some weird initiation rite, is it?"

"I couldn't decide between them. I brought them all here so you could help me choose." She squinted at the unlikely assortment of suitors. For a minute I think she believed me.

"I'm joking. They got me out of a sticky situation on the Merritt," I said.

"Did they?"

I told her what had happened, or nearly happened, at the gas station.

"So you thought two guys were following you and decided it was better to have five guys following you? That makes sense."

Put that way, I wondered if I'd made a huge mistake and whether tomorrow's Bulletin headline would read "Local Business-woman and Customer Found Raped and Murdered."

I looked back at my escorts. Charlie was well over six feet tall, with one earring, no weird insignia on his leathers. I wasn't up on my bandanna symbolism but his was black and partly covered thick snowy hair. He smiled at us through his close-cropped beard and revealed a puckish gap between his front teeth. Santa, or his evil twin? The others were all permutations of the same guy . . . a little thinner, a little taller, two mustaches, one soul patch. They all wore black leather chaps, like hundreds of helmetless bikers you can find on the Merritt any day of the week, but especially on Sundays, when they all seemed to converge on Norwalk, just south of the service station where I'd met these guys.

"Safety in numbers?" I wondered aloud. The bikers called Babe over.

Watching Babe walk, when she's working it, is a thing of beauty. I can only imagine what she was like twenty years ago, shaking her tambourine and just about everything else for the Jimmy Collins Band. They'd traveled all over the United States and Europe and Babe had the stories and the scars to prove it.

She wore sleeveless tops twelve months out of the year to show off her well-defined arms and sported a collection of tats that would have impressed an NBA player. Her black apron was tied low and tight around her narrow hips, and she employed her no-fail Yeah, I'm sexy, and I know where to kick you if you mess with me walk. It had its usual intended effect. Two were in love, two were in lust, all were in awe. Including me.

She took their orders and I tried not to stare. Instead I sucked up my coffee and absentmindedly gazed out the window, looking for the two clowns we'd left at the service station and profoundly happy they were nowhere in sight.

The Paradise was across the road from a typical suburban retail strip—liquor store, karate school, nail salon, Dunkin' Donuts—and somewhat less typically a police substation. A few years back these outposts were common in suburban Connecticut and may have even helped keep the petty crime rate down, but budget cuts and benign neglect had forced many of the substations to close, and the rest, like this one, to be virtually abandoned for most of the day. A faint light shone from behind the blinds, but there were no other signs of life.

Babe came back and handed the bikers' orders to Pete, the diner's cook. There was always a chance that a cigarette ash might make its way into the food, but that aside, dining at the Paradise had gotten a whole lot better since Pete discovered the Food Network, and the captivating trio of Sara, Rachael, and Giada. Pete routinely threatened to leave this Babe to go chop vegetables for one of those babes, but smart money says he won't.

"Grilled chicken Caesar, two spinach salads, and two turkey clubs, I think we're okay," Babe whispered to me.

I'd heard of people being able to predict criminal behavior by computing a person's gender, age, youthful exposure to violence, even head shape, but never by what they ordered in a diner. I wanted to believe she was right but what did she expect them to order—Twinkies with chocolate sauce? But, Babe wasn't finished. She had more anecdotal evidence.

"And furthermore," she said, "they're riding Harleys. It's the rice-burners you have to watch out for. They ride for speed not comfort. I prefer a man who doesn't go too fast." According to Babe, men on Japanese bikes were nine times out of ten more likely to be thugs than men riding Harleys. I don't know where she got her statistics but since I had zero information on the subject, I believed her.

My biker friends considered dessert, but decided against it after a lengthy debate on how much further they'd ride that night, and whether or not the sugar overload of one of Pete's four-story desserts would cause them to crash, nutritionally speaking. Despite Babe's confidence in her culinary assessment of my escorts, I wasn't comfortable leaving her alone with them so I stuck around after finishing my coffee.

"You boys have a good ride?" Babe asked.

"Coming back from Marcus Dairy. Just went for the day," one of them said.

Marcus Dairy was actually a working dairy but better known as a hangout for bikers all over the East Coast. One of the guys had had a breakdown and had to leave his bike there for a couple of days. As Charlie and the boys left, they promised to stop in again on their return trip. From the way Charlie was looking at Babe, it was a sure thing.

"I don't think I've ever been here this late," I said, helping Babe pull the shades down. She opened the register, counted out some cash, and put it in a zippered bank bag. She put a hundred dollars back in the drawer and left it open. "So the robbers don't feel like they've wasted their time and trash the place."

"Are you ever nervous," I asked, "all by yourself?" I followed Babe out and she yanked the front door shut.

"I don't scare easy. Besides . . ." She seemed on the verge of telling me something, then pulled back. "It doesn't happen that often. I close when I feel like it, and Neil usually picks me up after work. He's just away for a few weeks. His mother's sick."

"That's a drag."

Neil MacLeod was Babe's . . . what? Hookup? Lover? Boyfriend? Can you have a boyfriend after the age of thirty? Whatever she called him, he was handsome, young, Scottish, and visiting home, where his parents owned a small pub and inn in Cardhu, on the Malt Whisky Trail.

"Is it serious?" I asked.

"Don't know. But it was time he went back. He hasn't been home for ten years. Listen, if you're planning to meet up with those guys, go for Charlie," she said, putting the receipt tape in her bag. "That gap between the teeth presents possibilities," she added, always looking on the bright side.

"Please. They served a purpose and are now, conveniently, out of the picture."

Babe climbed into her car and I climbed into mine. How long had it been since I'd been home? And where was home anyway? New York City, where all my friends were? Brooklyn, where my eighty-five-year-old aunt still lived in the house where she and my father were born? Boca Raton, where my mother inexplicably moved after my father died? Or was it finally Springfield? The small house and big garden that the bank and I owned, but only I lived in?

In A.D. 93, the Roman poet Horace wrote: This is what I prayed for! A piece of land not so very large, with a garden, and near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and up above these a bit of woodland. That's exactly what I had. And that's where I was going.