My son-in-law took the spare key off my kitchen hook at Sunday supper and said, “You two old hens are going to die in that Buick, and I’m not paying to bury either one of you.” Nine days later it died on the rails with my sister beside me, and a biker came at us wide open while the whole line held up their phones.
Rita couldn’t walk ten feet without her walker.
It was folded flat behind us, wedged between the seats, yellow tennis balls on its feet.
We were coming home from her eye doctor, out the two-lane past Hollis Road outside Smithton.
They’d put drops in both her eyes and sent her out in those dark roll-up glasses they hand you at the desk.
“Everything looks like it’s underwater,” she said.
So I was driving.
I’m seventy-seven. I drive fine.
There was a sack of Roma tomatoes from the farm stand rolling around by Rita’s feet. Two dollars. I have no idea why I remember that.
The Buick hiccupped once as we came over the first rail.
Then it just quit.
No bang, nothing. Every light on the dash came on at once, like it was thinking something over.
I cranked it. One dry click.
I cranked it again. Click.
Our back tires were sitting right on the second set of steel. I could feel it through the seat, that little tilt.
“Lynn,” Rita said. “Why aren’t we going?”
The bells came next.
You know that sound. Everybody does. You just never hear it from inside.
The red lights started swinging back and forth over our hood, and the arm behind us came down and laid itself across our trunk. It tapped the glass.
“Is that a train?” Rita said.
“It’s the bells,” I said. “Hang on.”
I got my door open. I got one foot down on the gravel.
And then I looked over at her.
Her hands were patting at a door handle she couldn’t see. The walker was folded up behind us, and on a good day it takes me a full minute to get it open. And her hip.
I sat back down.
A hundred and six pounds of me was not lifting her out of that car.
Behind the gate the cars were piling up. A woman in scrubs jumped down out of a white SUV and started yelling.
“Get out of the car. GET OUT.”
The man beside her already had his phone up and pointed at us, like he was waiting on a show to start.
All I could think about was that key coming off my hook.
Old hens.
Off to the left, where the tracks bent into the trees, a light came on in the dark between them.
Then a horn so long and low I felt it in my fillings.
That’s when the motorcycles came rumbling up at the tail of the cars.
Nine of them.
I counted them in the mirror, which is a crazy thing to do with a train coming, but I did it.
The front one was a big man with a short silver beard and old faded ink down both arms, nothing under his vest, sunglasses pushed up on his head.
He looked at the gate. He looked at us. He looked down the rails at that light.
Maybe two seconds.
Then he pulled out of line, rode the shoulder past the SUV, swung around the end of the arm and opened it up.
Straight at our back bumper.
“Oh my God,” the woman in scrubs said. “He’s going to hit them.”
“Lynn,” Rita said. “What is that noise?”
I couldn’t answer her.
That headlight was getting bigger in my mirror and the other light was getting bigger out her window, and I honestly could not tell you which one scared me worse.
A man behind the gate was screaming, “HE’S TRYING TO KILL THEM.”
I believed him.
I’ll tell you the truth, for one second I thought my son-in-law sent him. That’s where my head went.
I put both hands on the wheel and braced, the way you brace when a dog comes off a porch at you.
The biker was yelling. His mouth was wide open and I couldn’t get one word of it over that horn.
He was close enough now to see the dust on his boots.
Then it came through.
“NEUTRAL. PUT IT IN NEUTRAL.”
My hand was on the shifter before my head caught up with it.
Park. Reverse. Neutral.
“Lynn,” Rita said, and she found my wrist and held on.
His front tire hit our bumper.
The whole Buick jumped. Rita’s head went back against the rest. Tomatoes went everywhere.
And we moved.
A foot. Then two. I could feel him back there, that engine roaring like it was in the trunk with us, one man and one wheel shoving a car four times his weight off a rail.
The horn was right on top of us. Rita’s window was nothing but white light.
“Tell me what’s happening,” she said. “I can’t see it. Tell me.”
I opened my mouth to tell her.
And the Buick stopped moving.
Two feet of gravel
It stopped because the front tires had dropped off the end of the crossing boards into the gravel.
That little drop was all it was.
The tilt in my seat was gone. Our back tires were off the steel.
“We’re off,” I said. “Rita. We’re off the track.”
Then the train came through behind us.
I’d like to tell you it missed us by a mile. It missed our back bumper by about the width of a grocery sack.
The whole Buick rocked on its springs like a big man had leaned on the trunk.
The gate arm slid off the glass and swung loose. The noise came in through the open crack of my door and went on and on, steel on steel, so loud Rita put both her hands over her ears.
He wasn’t behind us anymore.
The biker’s motorcycle still was.
In the mirror I saw it lying on its side over the steel, that big black machine, and then I saw boxcars, gray and rust and gray, one after the other.
He’d let go of it at the last second and come off it sideways.
The train took his motorcycle the way you’d kick a can.
“Lynn,” Rita said. “Where’s the man? I don’t hear the man.”
I got my door the rest of the way open.
He was on his hands and knees on the gravel by my back tire.
He had gravel in his beard. His sunglasses were gone off his head.
He was breathing like he’d run up a hill.
“Are you hurt?” I said.
He didn’t answer that. He got up one knee at a time and put his hand flat on my roof and stayed there a minute.
The train kept going. It was a long one.
Then he bent down and looked in past me, at the dash, where every light was still lit up red and orange like a pinball game.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Who’s been working on this car?”
The hook by the back door
My husband put that hook up the year we bought the house.
It’s a brass one shaped like a fish, by the back door, and it’s held two keys for forty-some years.
Mine, on the ring with the house key.
And the spare, on a red plastic tag he wrote BUICK on with a marker in 2004, the week we drove it home off the lot.
Rita came to live with me two years ago, after Tolentino passed and her hip went.
She sleeps in the sewing room. She’s eighty-one and four years older than me, and she still thinks that makes her the boss.
My daughter and her husband come every Sunday at five.
Knapp does my taxes. He has since my husband died. He brings a folder with my name on the tab in his printing, and he sits at the head of the table where my husband sat, and he says grace, which my husband never did.
That Sunday he’d brought a brochure.
It was for a place out on the highway, the kind with a fountain in the front and a van with a lift on the back.
He slid it across the tablecloth to me, next to the green beans.
“They have a van, Lynn,” he said. “You’d never have to drive again. Either of you.”
“I like driving,” I said.
“You like it fine till you put Rita through somebody’s front window.”
My daughter said, “Honey.”
“I’m just saying what everybody’s thinking.” He looked at Rita. “No offense, Rita.”
“I can’t see what you’re saying,” Rita said. “My eyes are in Tuesday.”
“That house is too much for two women your age,” he said. “The taxes alone. Somebody’s going to call the state on you two one of these days, and then it won’t be up to you.”
I didn’t say anything. I passed the rolls.
After pie he got up to get his coat, and on the way past the back door he reached up and took the red tag right off my fish.
“I’m taking the Buick in tomorrow,” he said. “Oil change. You won’t do it yourself, and that car’s past due.”
“I can take my own car in,” I said.
“You two old hens are going to die in that Buick,” he said, “and I’m not paying to bury either one of you.”
He laughed when he said it. My daughter laughed a little too, so it would be a joke.
“He doesn’t mean it, Mom,” she said.
He put the spare key on his own ring, right there in my kitchen, next to his truck key.
Monday morning he came and got the Buick. Tuesday evening he brought it back with a new sticker in the corner of the windshield, the little white kind with the next mileage on it.
“Good for another three thousand,” he said. He tossed some paperwork in the glove box and shut it. He kept the spare.
That week the clock in the radio was blinking twelve every morning when I started it.
Thursday at the stop sign on our road the headlights went dim and came back.
So when that biker stood there with his hand on my roof and asked me who’d been working on my car, I didn’t think anything of it.
“My son-in-law had it in last week,” I said. “For the oil.”
He looked at the sticker in the corner of the windshield a long time.
Then a sheriff’s car came over the rise with its lights going.
The shoulder past Hollis Road
By the time the train was gone and the gates came up, there were maybe twenty people standing in the road.
The woman in scrubs got to Rita first. She opened Rita’s door and crouched down in the gravel and held both her hands.
“You’re okay,” she said. “I’m a nurse. You’re okay, I’ve got you. Can you tell me your name?”
“Rita,” Rita said. “Who are you? Everything’s purple.”
The silver-bearded one sat down on my back bumper, which he had just pushed off a railroad track with a front tire.
The deputy was young. He had a clipboard and a ballpoint pen he kept clicking.
The man with the phone got to him before anybody.
“I got the whole thing,” he said. “That guy went around the gate and rammed them. Rammed them. I’ve got it right here.”
He held the phone up so the deputy could see. The deputy watched it, the little screen, and clicked his pen.
“He pushed them off,” the nurse said from Rita’s door. “He was pushing them.”
“He hit them going thirty,” the man with the phone said.
The deputy walked over to the biker. “Sir, did you go around a lowered crossing gate?”
“I did.”
“Can I see your license.”
He took his wallet out of his vest and handed it over. The deputy read it and wrote on the clipboard.
“Mr. Kessel,” he said. “You know that’s against the law in Missouri.”
“I know it,” Kessel said.
I got out of the car. It took me a minute. My knees were not right.
“Officer,” I said. “That man saved our lives. The car quit at the crossing. He said to put it in neutral, and he pushed us off.”
The deputy looked at me the way you look at a lady in a church parking lot who’s lost her car.
“Ma’am, you’ve had a real scare,” he said. “How old are you, ma’am?”
“Seventy-seven.”
He wrote that down. I could see him write it.
“And you were the one driving?”
“I was driving. The car quit.”
He wrote that down too.
I’ve thought a lot since then about how I said it. I should’ve said the car quit first.
I said I was driving first, and he wrote down what I said in the order I said it.
He wrote Kessel a ticket for going around the gate. Kessel signed it on the clipboard against his own knee and handed the pen back.
“That’s fair,” he said.
“It isn’t,” I said.
Nobody heard me. The man with the phone was telling a second deputy now.
I called my daughter because I didn’t know who else to call.
The Buick wouldn’t start and Rita couldn’t stand up out of the car without the walker and the walker was under the tomatoes.
It was forty minutes. My daughter’s SUV pulled onto the shoulder with Knapp driving.
He got out and didn’t come to me first. He walked all the way around the Buick, slow, the way a man looks at a car somebody’s trying to sell him.
He looked at the bumper where the tire had hit. He looked at the rails.
Then he looked at Kessel, still sitting on my back bumper.
“Is this him?” he said to the deputy. “Is this the guy?”
“Sir, are you family?”
“I’m her son-in-law. I’m the one who’s been telling her for a year.” He put his hand on my shoulder. It was heavy. “You write down that she was driving. You hear me? You put that in your report.”
The letter from Jefferson City
Knapp had the Buick towed to my driveway. He said it was so it would be easy to sell.
“No sense paying to fix a twenty-two-year-old car,” he said. “I’ll put it on the internet for you. Somebody’ll want it for parts.”
At my kitchen table that night my daughter showed me the video.
Somebody had put it up that same evening. Over the top it said, in capital letters, BIKER RAMS ELDERLY WOMEN STUCK ON TRACKS.
It had been seen four hundred and eleven thousand times.
I watched our Buick sitting there on the rails like a turtle.
I watched the arm come down on our trunk. I watched the big black bike swing around the gate.
You could hear the man filming. “He’s trying to kill them.” You could hear the nurse. You could hear the horn.
You couldn’t hear Kessel. The horn ate every word he said. On that little screen it looked like a man with his mouth open, screaming, coming at two old women.
Then the tire hit the bumper and the video ended.
It ended right there. Whoever put it up had cut it off right there.
You never saw the bike lying on the steel.
“Who’d do that,” I said.
“Mom, scroll down,” my daughter said. “Look at the comments. Everybody’s praying for you.”
Halfway down there was one with Knapp’s picture by it, him in his softball cap.
It said, *That’s my mother-in-law. Thank God they’re alive. She should never have been driving and she knows it.
That biker should be in jail. Family is handling it from here.*
It had nine thousand likes.
“He was upset,” my daughter said. “He was scared for you.”
“He wrote that he’s handling it.”
“Somebody has to, Mom.”
The next week I didn’t drive anywhere because I couldn’t. Rita’s eyes came back the second day.
She’d stand at the front window with her walker and look at the Buick in the driveway with the new sticker still in the corner of the windshield.
“It looks fine,” she said. “It looks like it could go to the store.”
On Monday, the second of November, the mail came at eleven like it does.
There was a long envelope from the Missouri Department of Revenue in Jefferson City with my name typed in the window.
I opened it standing at the mailbox.
It said that the Department had received a Driver Condition Report concerning my ability to safely operate a motor vehicle.
It said I had thirty days to complete a vision test, a written test and a driving test at a license office.
It said if I didn’t, my license would be suspended.
I thought, well, there it is. The deputy’s report. Seventy-seven, and driving, in the order I said it.
Then I read the date.
There was a line near the bottom with a box. Report received: and a date stamped in blue.
October 19.
The Tuesday at the crossing was the twenty-seventh.
October nineteenth was a Monday. It was the Monday he drove off in my car.
Eight bikes and a borrowed one
Saturday morning I heard them before I saw them.
Rita said, “Lynn,” from the sewing room, the same way she’d said it at the crossing.
I went to the front window. There were nine motorcycles coming down our road single file, slow, the way you’d drive past a house where somebody had died.
They pulled up along the curb in a row in front of my mailbox and shut off one at a time.
Kessel was on the last one. It was a red bike, smaller, with somebody else’s things in the saddlebags.
He came up the walk by himself. The other eight stayed by their bikes and didn’t look at the house.
I opened the door before he knocked.
“Mrs. Arndt,” he said. “I’m sorry to come by like this. I got your name off the report.”
“I’ve been wanting to find you,” I said. “I didn’t know how.”
“I’ve got a court date on that gate ticket. November seventeenth, the courthouse downtown.” He had his hands in his vest. “My insurance won’t touch the bike, on account of the ticket. They want a statement from the driver. I wouldn’t ask, but that bike was most of what I had.”
“Come in,” I said. “Come in the kitchen.”
Rita came up behind me with her walker. She looked him up and down.
She hadn’t seen him before. She’d only heard him.
“You’re the one who yelled,” she said.
“Yes ma’am.”
“I heard every word. Neutral. Put it in neutral.” She said it in a big flat voice like his. “She did it, too. In the dark.”
He smiled at that. It was the first time.
“I’ll be there on the seventeenth,” I said.
I want you to know I thought about it before I said it.
The letter was on my kitchen counter under the sugar bowl. Anything I said in a courthouse about being the driver on those tracks, that was going right into Knapp’s folder with my name on the tab.
I said it anyway.
He nodded and turned to go. Then he stopped on the step and looked out at the Buick in the driveway.
“Can I ask you something,” he said. “Before it quit. Did your battery light come on?”
“Everything came on.”
“Before that. A few days before. The radio clock acting up. Lights going dim on you.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute.
“The clock,” I said. “Every morning that week.”
“That’s a charging system,” he said. “Alternator. A car that age doesn’t just quit on you out of nowhere when it’s been in a shop a week before. They put it on a tester when they do the oil. They all do. It’s a free thing.” He looked at the little white sticker. “Whoever brought it in, they’d have been told.”
He went down the walk and got on the red bike. Nine of them started up one after the other and went off down the road the way they came.
Rita stood in the door with me until they were gone.
That night I took the flashlight out to the driveway.
I opened the Buick’s passenger door.
The paper in the glove box
The glove box always sticks. You have to hit it with the heel of your hand.
I sat in Rita’s seat with the flashlight in my lap and hit it.
The owner’s manual fell out. Napkins from the Sonic. My husband’s old sunglasses, the clip-on kind, that I’ve never thrown away and never will.
And a pink paper, folded in thirds, with the shop’s name across the top.
I unfolded it on my knee.
It was a work order. My name was on it, and my car, the 2004 Buick, the color, the mileage.
It said Dropped off by: Knapp, and his phone number.
The date at the top was October 19.
Oil and filter, $39.95. Then the tax.
Then a section printed in boxes, where somebody had checked things with a pen.
Battery test: FAIL.
Charging system: ALTERNATOR OUTPUT LOW.
Recommend replace battery and alternator. Est. $412.00.
And under that, in big printed letters, the kind you’d use if you wanted somebody to see it later:
CUSTOMER DECLINED.
His signature was next to it. That big K he does.
Under the signature there was one more line, in different handwriting, smaller, slanted, the mechanic’s.
Advised customer vehicle may not restart. Customer states vehicle is being sold.
I sat there with the flashlight on it.
The dome light in the Buick had gone dim while I was reading, the way it’d been doing all week.
I hadn’t thought anything of that either.
I read it again. May not restart.
He had known it on the Monday. He’d known it on the Tuesday when he tossed the paper in this box and said good for another three thousand.
He knew it at supper the Sunday before, when he said we’d die in it.
He mailed the state that same Monday.
Monday morning at eight I called the number on the pink paper.
A man answered. I told him who I was and read him the number at the top.
He was quiet a minute. I could hear an air wrench going behind him.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “I remember that one. Tan Buick. I told the gentleman I wouldn’t drive it far. He said it was his mother-in-law’s car and it wasn’t going to be on the road much longer anyhow.”
“I’d like it fixed, please,” I said. “The battery and the other one. The alternator.”
“We can tow it in this afternoon.”
“I’ll pay for it,” I said. “It’s my car.”
When I hung up, Rita was standing in the kitchen doorway in her robe with her walker.
I don’t know how long she’d been there.
“Read it to me again,” she said. “The part about the customer.”
Second floor, Pettis County Courthouse
On the seventeenth I drove us downtown myself.
New battery. New alternator. Four hundred and twelve dollars and some tax, out of the coffee can over the refrigerator that I keep for the furnace.
The radio clock said the right time when I started it.
Rita sat beside me in her own glasses with her purse on her knees and the pink paper in her purse, because she said I’d lose it.
There were nine motorcycles in the courthouse lot when I pulled in.
They were in a row by the side door. Kessel’s red one was on the end.
And there was my daughter’s SUV, parked in the handicapped spot with the tag hanging off the mirror.
Knapp has never been handicapped a day in his life. It’s my tag.
He took that, too, last spring.
They were upstairs on the second floor, on the bench outside the courtroom. Knapp had his folder. He was in a tie.
He saw me come off the elevator with Rita and stood up.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “How’d you get here? Who drove you?”
“I drove,” I said.
“In what? In that? Who fixed that car? Lynn, you can’t just go and get a car fixed, there’s a letter from the state, you’ve got thirty days, I’ve got it right here.” He tapped his folder. “And you drive it down here in front of a courthouse full of cops? Are you trying to prove my point?”
My daughter stood up behind him. “Mom. You shouldn’t be here. This is about the biker.”
“I know what it’s about,” I said.
“I called the prosecutor’s office myself,” Knapp said. “I told them the family wants that man held responsible. I’m giving a statement. That video’s got half a million people saying the same thing. You put two old women on the news like that, somebody answers for it.”
Rita opened her purse and gave me the pink paper. I unfolded it and held it out to him.
He didn’t take it. He looked at it in my hand.
He looked at it long enough to see the shop’s name across the top.
“Where’d you get that,” he said.
“The glove box. Where you put it.”
My daughter took it out of my hand. I let her.
“It’s a twenty-two-year-old car,” Knapp said. “Four hundred dollars into a twenty-two-year-old car? For what? So you can drive it another year and kill somebody? I wasn’t putting money in that car. You’d have done the same thing.”
“You told me the shop said it was fine,” my daughter said. She was still reading.
“It was fine. It was fine to get to the store. I figured it’d quit on her in the Walmart lot, she’d call me, I’d come get her, and that’d be the end of it. That’s all. That’s all it was. One phone call and she’d finally see it.”
“It says may not restart,” my daughter said.
“Every car may not restart.”
“You filed this the same day.” She’d found the letter in his folder. She had them both in her hands now. “You filed this with the state the same day.”
“Because somebody had to. Because she won’t listen. Because that house is worth two hundred and forty thousand dollars and she’s going to sit in it till the taxes eat it and then the state takes the license anyway and we’re the ones driving out there every day.” His voice was getting louder in the hallway and people on the benches were looking. “I didn’t put that car on a railroad track. I didn’t know she’d take the long way home from the eye doctor. Nobody could know that. How is that my fault?”
“It’s not the long way,” Rita said. “It’s the only way.”
He looked at Rita like he’d forgotten she could talk.
“I was trying to help you people,” he said. “That’s what this whole family does to me.”
My daughter didn’t say anything for a while.
Then she took his key ring off his belt loop. He let her. I think he didn’t know what she was doing.
She worked the red tag off his ring with her thumbnail.
She held it out to me. BUICK, in my husband’s marker.
I took it.
“I’m not going to sit there and listen to you say that in front of my mother,” she said to him. “I’m going downstairs.”
He went after her.
She didn’t come back up. Neither of them did. I found out later they drove home in her SUV with my tag still hanging on the mirror.
They called Kessel’s name at ten-twenty.
He stood up in front of the judge and said yes, he went around a lowered gate, and no, he didn’t have a lawyer.
The judge asked if anybody else wanted to be heard on it.
I stood up.
“I was driving,” I said. “The car quit at the crossing. He said neutral and I did it. That’s all.”
The judge looked at me over his glasses. He asked my age. I told him. He wrote it down.
He fined Kessel a hundred and twenty-five dollars and court costs. Kessel paid it at the window downstairs out of his wallet, in cash.
Out in the lot he stood by the red bike and looked at the Buick parked two spaces down.
“You drove here,” he said.
“I drove here,” I said.
The red tag
The test was the first Tuesday in December, at the license office on Limit Avenue.
A woman with a clipboard rode with me around four blocks and had me parallel park between two cones.
I hit one cone. She wrote that down too.
I passed.
Sunday came.
I set the table at four-thirty like I always do. Rita does the beans now, sitting on her walker seat at the stove.
I made a roast. I put the rolls in at ten till five.
I set four plates. Rita watched me do it and didn’t say anything.
My daughter hasn’t been back on a Sunday since the courthouse. She calls on Wednesdays.
She asks about Rita’s eyes. She doesn’t say his name and I don’t either.
At five the road was quiet.
At five after, I took the red tag out of my apron pocket, where I’d been carrying it around for three weeks like a rabbit’s foot, and I reached up and hung it on the brass fish by the back door, next to mine.
Then I picked up the phone on the wall and dialed my daughter’s number, and it rang four times and went to the machine.
“It’s your mother,” I said. “Supper’s on. There’s a plate for you. I’m keeping it warm.”
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who still drives their own car to the eye doctor and means to keep doing it.
For more stories where bikers change everything, read The Morning of My Exam, Fourteen Motorcycles Turned Into Our Driveway and The Rider Who Wouldn’t Let Me Sell My Late Husband’s Bike. Then hear the four words that changed one waitress’s day in I Was on the Stool Close Enough to Hear the Biker’s Four Words.
