If Rock and Roll Were a Machine Read Free

notes on his clipboard. Now he turns to Bert.
    â€œWheat farmer from down around Reardon brought an old Triumph in last winter,” Shepard says. He gestures at the bike with his clipboard. “It was in worse shape than this. Guy said it’d been leaning against his windmill since 1959.
    â€œI got it up on the stand and was looking it over,” he says. “I stuck my face down where the dynamo should have been and shined my penlight in the mounting hole. Two little black eyes shined right back at me, and I thought I saw a forked tongue whipping.”
    Shepard turns and sets the clipboard on the bench. “I let out a scream and went up in the air,” he says. “I came down about halfway across the room.” He pulls a long metal bar from a set of bars in graduated sizes hanging on the pegboard above the bench and holds it up. “I grabbed this breaker bar, and I went back and tapped onthe dynamo housing. No response from the snake. So I poked around in there and fished him out.” He returns the bar to its peg and walks toward Bert.
    â€œYou’re thinking that snake was dead, right?” Shepard says.
    Bert isn’t terribly comfortable here in a place he’s never been before with this big man walking toward him. He smiles a nervous smile and shrugs.
    â€œHe looked dead,” Shepard says. “He felt dead. He didn’t smell dead, though, which should have told me something. I tossed him in the trash barrel back by the wood stove.” He points his thumb toward the back of the shop.
    â€œAbout a half hour later I’m dumping a worthless fairing in the trash and that snake goes off like a school bell. He’d been hibernating in that dynamo housing,” Shepard says. “Thing had nine rattles.” He smiles now, and there’s a quality in his face that puts Bert at ease.
    â€œSo, son,” Shepard says—and he’s right in front of Bert now, so tall, Bert has to lift his head to look him in the face—“don’t ever let anyone tell you restoring motorcycles is for sissies.”
    â€œNobody could convince me of it” is Bert’s reply.
    Shepard laughs. “Well, that’s good,” he says.
    Shepard walks along the line of classic bikes and Bert walks beside him. He tells Bert he remembers him, that Bert is the cause of the shop going over their yearly budget for Glass Plus because Bert drooled so heavily on thewindow where the Sportster sits. Bert smiles and says he stopped to look at it once or twice. In front of the old Sportster is where they stop now.
    The bike looks bigger today. It’s more sharply defined against the air and the objects around it. Everything evaporates from Bert’s thoughts but the image of this machine and his related imaginings. Nothing hurts now. He wonders if he could be a different guy on this motorcycle.
    â€œI’ve dropped the price to eleven hundred,” Shepard says. “My boy’s come to stay with me, and we want to put a hot tub in. We’ve got everything ready except the tub itself, and I can’t find anybody who’ll trade for one or let me work for it. So I need eleven hundred dollars cash money.”
    God, Bert thinks, eleven hundred bucks! I can buy it! He looks past the motorcycle to the window where it and he and Shepard are reflected. He would pay every cent of his savings to feel the way he looks in this reflection.
    â€œI don’t know much about motorcycles,” Bert says. “I just think it’s a beautiful thing.” God, Bert asks himself, why did I say that?
    â€œI do too,” Shepard says. He sweeps his hand from the Sportster to the other bikes. “I think they’re all beautiful things.
    â€œWhat a guy’s got to consider,” Shepard goes on, “is that these older Harleys—all the classic bikes, for that matter—aren’t like Japanese bikes. They requiremaintenance. If a guy just wants to ride,