"It's fine," Caleb said, which was a second lie in under a minute. And it was the kind of lie that told Gus everything he needed to know about how long his grandson had been protecting him from something. By Wednesday morning, the story had already traveled the length of Marmion Way twice over, gaining weight the way stories do when they pass through mouths that were not present for the original event. In one version, the Iron Saints had cornered a group of children on the sidewalk. In another, Gus Dawson himself had threatened to burn down a house on Yosemite Drive.
Diane Ashkam had posted about the incident in the Highland Park Homeowners Alliance forum before the milk Caleb had bought that day was even back in the refrigerator, describing in careful and reasonable sounding language her concern for the safety of local children given the presence of a known motorcycle gang on a residential block. She did not mention that her own son's bicycle had been seen by at least one neighbor parked suspiciously close to the wreckage the previous afternoon. She did not need to. The narrative had already assembled itself around the shape everyone expected it to take. Inside the garage on Figueroa, Gus sat at the workbench with the ruined bicycle laid out across two saw horses like something in a hospital, and Warren stood across from him with his arms folded, watching his old friend's face for the decision he already suspected was coming.
Caleb's mother had dropped him off there after her shift, unwilling to leave him home alone with a bicycle-shaped hole in his weak, and Caleb sat quietly on an overturned bucket near the back wall. "Close enough to hear everything, far enough to feel like he wasn't quite part of the conversation happening about him." Kesler thinks we should find the kid," Warren said, using the club's habit of referring to opinions in the third person, even when there were only two people in the room. "Ask around. Somebody on this street knows whose bike that was."
"And then what?" Gus said. He was running his thumb along the bent rim of the front wheel, feeling for the places where the metal had given rather than bent. We show up on some family's porch in our cuts and ask their kid nicely to apologize. You know how that photograph looks before we've even taken it.
"So, we do nothing?" "We do the opposite of nothing," Gus said. We just don't do the thing they're all waiting for us to do. He set the wheel down and looked at it a long moment. The way he looked at things he was deciding how to fix rather than whether to.
That boy's been telling himself for a week that the reason nobody helps him is because of who I am. I'm not about to hand the whole street proof that he was right to be ashamed of it. It was not an easy thing to hold to. Two days later, a patrol car idled outside the garage for the better part of an hour, called out by a complaint that Diane Ashkam had filed personally, alleging that the Iron Saints had made threatening statements toward a minor. The officer who eventually came to the door, a young man named Dale Corbin, who'd been on the Highland Park beat for less than a year, stood in the roll-up entrance with his hand resting near his belt in a way that made his discomfort plain, and asked Gus a series of questions in the flat, careful tone of someone reading from a script he half believed and half didn't.
Gus answered every one of them without raising his voice, without stepping closer than the doorway, aware the entire time that any motion larger than necessary, would be the only detail anyone remembered afterward. When Corbin left, unconvinced of wrongdoing, but clearly still unconvinced of innocence either, Warren exhaled like a man who'd been holding his breath the whole visit. through the front window. Both of them watched the patrol car sit at the curb a moment longer than it needed to, engine idling before it finally pulled away. And neither man said what they were both thinking, that the visit itself, regardless of its outcome, would already be treated by half the block as confirmation of something that had never actually happened. "They're not going to let this go easy," Warren said.
Not with her stirring it. "No," Gus agreed. But that's her problem to carry, not mine to solve by giving her a better story. Caleb, who had been sitting on an overturned bucket near the back of the garage through most of this, watching his grandfather's face for some sign of the temper the whole neighborhood assumed was coming, finally spoke. "Maybe I shouldn't come around here anymore," he said.
Maybe it's making it worse for you. For mom. Gus turned to look at him properly for the first time since the officer had left. There was something old in his face just then. Something Caleb had glimpsed only once before, the day he'd caught his grandfather staring at the locked drawer beneath the workbench with an expression that had nothing to do with bicycles or engines.
You think I built this garage, this club, this whole life so that a woman with a petition could scare my own grandson off my property? I just don't want it to be my fault," Caleb said. And his voice cracked in the middle of the sentence in a way that embarrassed him. "Come here," Gus said. And when Caleb came, his grandfather did not hug him exactly, but put one heavy hand on the back of his neck, the way you'd steady something that was shaking.
"None of this is your fault. Not one piece of it. You hear me?" He glanced almost involuntarily toward the locked drawer again. There's things about me this street doesn't know.