For five months I gave three dollars a day to the old rider who slept beside his motorcycle at the edge of the courthouse lot. The night I handed him my dead husband’s riding jacket, his hands started shaking, and he said, “Please don’t go home tonight. There’s something you don’t know.”
My husband, Lyndon, fought cancer for twenty-two months. The bills took everything but the house and his two motorcycles under a tarp.
I took a records clerk job at the courthouse in Duluth, where nobody knew me.
The old man camped on a flattened box by the motorcycle stalls, reading the same folded sports page like it owed him money.
The lot attendant, who ate sunflower seeds all day, called him Craig.
At first it was loose change.
Then egg sandwiches, and coffee in Lyndon’s old steel thermos.
He’d tip his head and say, “You watch yourself, hon.”
In January the wind off the lake turned mean.
So one Thursday I packed a bag with coffee, five dollars and Lyndon’s heavy black riding jacket. It was doing nobody any good on a hook.
Craig pulled the jacket halfway out and ran his thumb along the collar.
His hands started shaking.
He looked up, and what sat in his face was FEAR.
I didn’t move.
“DON’T GO HOME TONIGHT,” he said. “Get a motel. Stay with somebody. I’ll explain tomorrow.”
Before I could answer he was up and gone between the parked cars, the jacket under his arm.
I told myself he was confused. A man from a sidewalk, telling me where to sleep.
But I kept seeing his thumb on that collar.
That night I drove to my sister Missy’s and said my furnace was out.
“Just in case,” I said to myself on her pull-out couch.
I didn’t sleep.
In the morning I walked straight to the motorcycle stalls, forty minutes early.
Craig was already standing, the jacket folded over his arm.
“Thank you for trusting an old man,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything. IT’S ABOUT YOUR HUSBAND. There’s something about him you never knew.” ⬇️
Forty minutes early
“What about him?” I said.
“That old Indian under your tarp isn’t his, hon,” Craig said. “It’s mine. He kept it for me so I couldn’t drink it.”
He turned the jacket’s collar up so I could see the inside. A line of white thread ran along the seam, thick and even, whiter than the rest.
“I sewed that,” he said. “Summer of 2012. He laid his bike down on 61 and tore the collar half off, and I put it back on at the upholstery shop where I worked. I’d know those stitches with my eyes shut.”
I knew the Indian. Red, older than both of us, no front fender. Lyndon called it the project. He never worked on it once.
“When did he go?” Craig said.
“Last March.”
He sat down on the box. He didn’t say anything for a while. A city plow went by on First Street, and he waited until it had passed.
He looked down at the box behind him, at the folded sports page on top of it. “That’s the last one he brought me. Sunday paper, every week, for eight years. Then he quit coming, and I figured he’d quit on me. Everybody else had.”
The sports page was from October, three Octobers ago. The Vikings had lost to the Lions.
“That’s not why I said don’t go home,” he said. “Yesterday afternoon a man stood right there by the stalls on his phone. Golf jacket. Said he was pulling an old Indian out of his brother’s garage that night, he still had the remote. Said the widow goes to bed by ten.” Craig looked at the jacket on his arm. “Said if she comes down, she comes down.”
The attendant spat a shell into the snow and went back inside his booth.
“Hon,” Craig said. “Who else has a way into your garage?”
The trailer
Lyndon brought the Indian home at two in the morning in April of 2015, on a trailer he’d borrowed from somebody at work. I came down in my robe and he was backing it into the garage with the headlights off.
“Bought it off a guy,” he said. “For parts.”
“At two in the morning?”
“He needed it gone tonight.” He pulled the tarp over it, and that was the end of it. He was like that. He told you all of a thing or none of it.
He never took a single part off it. Every Sunday morning he rode out to get the paper and came back two hours later with coffee on his breath and no paper. I thought he sat at the Holiday station with the old guys. After twenty-some years you stop asking where a man goes on Sunday.
Once, the winter before he got sick, I found a receipt in his jacket pocket from the Holiday on Superior Street. Two large coffees, Sunday, 7:40 a.m. Lyndon never drank a large anything.
When he got sick, his brother Dominic came around more than I’d ever seen him. Dominic sells boats at a marina in Superior and has never ridden anything with two wheels. He drove Lyndon to chemo when I couldn’t get off work, and I gave him a garage remote so he could pull in out of the snow. At the funeral he gave the eulogy and cried through the part about fishing.
I never got it back. It didn’t seem like a thing you ask for.
In hospice, Dominic came twice. The second time he asked me to give them a minute, and I sat in the family room for an hour with a vending machine that only took exact change.
The last eleven days Lyndon couldn’t hold a spoon. The nurse, Vicki, wrote everything down in a blue binder, every pill and every spoonful, and I fed him the vanilla pudding myself. He died on March 30, a Sunday.
Two days before, he said, “The Indian goes back.” I thought it was the morphine.
After the funeral I found a sealed envelope in the fireproof box with the house papers. It said C.B. on the front in his capitals, and under that, NOT YOURS. DON’T OPEN. I put it back. I didn’t know anybody named C.B.
Dominic called in May and offered me twenty-five hundred for both bikes. “So you don’t have to deal with them,” he said. I told him not yet.
Now I pulled into my driveway with Craig in the passenger seat and pushed the button on my visor.
The garage door went up.
Tire tracks
The tarp was on the floor in a heap. Lyndon’s Harley sat where it always sat, under its own cover. The other side of the garage was a rectangle of dry concrete with an oil spot in the middle.
Two lines of trailer tracks ran out through the snow to the street.
Craig stood in the doorway and didn’t come in. He looked at the oil spot a long time. Then he picked up the tarp and folded it corner to corner, the way you’d fold a flag, and set it on the workbench.
“He kept it covered every winter,” he said. “I told him to.”
I called Dominic. He answered on the second ring.
“Hey,” he said. “Yeah, I grabbed the Indian last night. Didn’t want to wake you. Lyndon gave it to me before he passed. I’ve got the paper, signed and everything.”
“He never told me that.”
“He told me.” Then, softer: “You’ve got enough going on. Kristina and I’ll swing by tonight and I’ll show you. We’ll bring bars.”
I stood in the garage with the phone in my hand. Lyndon’s helmet was still on the shelf over the workbench with the visor up. Craig picked it up, looked inside it and put it back exactly where it had been.
I called the police, the non-emergency line, because I didn’t know what else this was.
An officer named Reyes came out at noon. Young, polite, snow on his boots. He looked at the oil spot and the tracks and wrote things down. He asked me what the bike was worth, and I said I didn’t know. “More than you’d think,” Craig said, and nothing else. Then Reyes called Dominic from my kitchen and talked to him for six minutes with his back to me.
Craig sat at my table the whole time with his hands around a mug and his hat in his lap. When the squad car pulled in, he started to get up. “Cops and me,” he said. “I ought to go.” I told him to sit down, and he did. Reyes looked at him once, at the vest over the parka, and didn’t ask.
“He’s got a bill of sale, ma’am,” Reyes said when he hung up. “Says your husband signed it in hospice. He’s family, and he had a remote you gave him.” He put his pen away. “That makes it civil. You’d want a lawyer, or small claims.”
“It’s not even my husband’s bike,” I said.
He looked at Craig, then at me.
“Then whose name is on the title?”
Lemon bars
Dominic came at seven with Kristina and a pan of lemon bars under foil. He hugged me at the door. He smelled like the marina, gas and cold.
He stopped when he saw Craig at the table.
“This is him?” He set the pan down on the counter. “This is the guy off the box?”
Craig didn’t get up.
“Okay,” Dominic said. He took a folded paper out of his jacket and flattened it on the table with both hands. “Here’s what I’ve got.”
It was a bill of sale off one of those pads they sell at the hardware store. One 1948 Indian Chief, red. Sold to Dominic Duffy for one dollar and love and affection. Signed Lyndon Duffy.
“He gave it to me,” Dominic said. “In hospice, when you stepped out. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to upset you.” He looked at Craig. “And now this guy turns up after five months of you handing him money, and all of a sudden the forty-thousand-dollar bike is his. Come on. You know what this is.”
“Forty thousand,” I said.
“I drove him to every one of those appointments,” Dominic said. “Every one. Where was this guy?”
“Forty-one. I’ve got a collector from Minneapolis coming Sunday to look at it.” He said it like it was good news for all of us. “Look, I’m not a monster. I’ll give you five out of it. That’s five more than this guy was going to give you.”
Kristina hadn’t taken her coat off. She stood by the door with her car keys in her hand, looking at the lemon bars. She’d done her lipstick in the car.
Craig spoke for the first time. “He kept it eleven years. He kept it while you people were losing everything. You think he’d sign it away for a dollar?”
“I think you sleep in a parking lot,” Dominic said. He took a lemon bar off the pan and ate half of it standing up. “Ask yourself something. Lyndon was alive for eight years of this. Did you ever meet this guy once? Did Lyndon ever say his name in your house?”
He hadn’t. Not once.
I picked up the bill of sale. It looked like Lyndon’s name. Every letter was there, and every letter was careful.
I looked at the date.
March 24.
C.B.
They left at eight. Dominic took the bill of sale with him. Kristina took the lemon bars out to the car, then came back up the walk alone and set them on my front step without ringing the bell.
I got the fireproof box out of the hall closet and set it on the kitchen table. Then I got the blue binder down off the shelf over the dryer.
I opened the binder first. Vicki’s writing, small and slanted, one line for every visit.
3/19. Pt unable to grasp utensils. Fed by wife.
3/22. Unable to grasp. Sleeping most of day.
3/24. Pt nonverbal. Brother visited 2:10 to 3:15. Pt did not open eyes for brother.
I turned the binder around so Craig could read it. He read it twice with his finger under the line.
I remembered March 24. It was the day the snow slid off the roof all at once and took the gutter with it. I fed him pudding at noon, and he didn’t open his mouth for the second spoon.
Then I opened the fireproof box and took out the envelope. C.B. NOT YOURS. DON’T OPEN.
“What’s your last name?” I said.
“Becker.”
I slid the envelope across the table to him, still sealed.
He sat with it a while before he opened it. Inside was a Minnesota title for a 1948 Indian Chief. Owner, Craig A. Becker. Nothing signed on the back. Folded around it was a sheet of yellow legal paper in Lyndon’s capitals, and Craig read it and handed it to me without a word.
CRAIG. ONE YEAR SOBER AND IT’S YOURS. IF I’M GONE SHE’S GOOD FOR IT. TELL HER WHERE I WENT ON SUNDAYS.
I read it at my kitchen table with my reading glasses on top of my head, where I’d forgotten them.
“How long?” I said.
“Fourteen months,” Craig said. “November before last. I was going to come find him at two years. I didn’t want to show up with one.”
“Where did he go on Sundays?”
“The Holiday on Superior Street. Two large coffees. Then he’d sit on the curb by the stalls with me for an hour and read me the box scores I could read myself.” He looked at the jacket. “He never once asked me if I’d been drinking. He just looked.”
He folded the title back into the yellow paper, put it in the inside pocket of Lyndon’s jacket and zipped it shut.
I called Missy and asked if I could borrow her truck and her trailer.
At six the next morning she backed both of them into my driveway and didn’t ask one question.
The pole barn
Dominic lives on two acres outside Superior with a pole barn behind the house. The barn door was open a foot. I could see the red fender of the trailer through the gap.
He came out in slippers before we’d got out of the truck.
“You’re kidding me,” he said. “You brought him? To my house?”
I set Vicki’s binder on the hood of his pickup, open to March 24, and put the title down next to it.
He read the name on the title upside down.
“So what,” he said. “So some guy’s name is on it from 2015. Lyndon had it eleven years. He stored it, he insured it, it sat in his garage. That’s his. That’s the estate’s. And I’m his brother.” He turned to me. “You know what that bike paid for while he was sick? Nothing. The hospital called you at work about the bills, and forty grand sat under a tarp in your garage.”
He tapped the binder. “And that’s a nurse’s notes. Nurses write whatever. He knew me that day. He squeezed my hand.”
Kristina came out on the back step in her parka with her arms folded.
“He told you about me,” Craig said.
Dominic laughed. “He told me a lot of things. He was full of morphine.”
“First time you came,” Craig said. “He told you to find me.”
Dominic looked at his wife, then at me.
“Yeah. Okay. He did. ‘Find Craig, he’s at the courthouse or the mission, give him the Indian.’ And you know what I thought? I thought, my brother is giving a forty-thousand-dollar bike to a drunk while his wife sells the dining room set. So no. I didn’t go looking under bridges. I kept it in the family.” He pointed at me. “For her. Twenty and twenty. You and me. He was going to drink it anyway. You need it more than anybody, and you know you do.”
I did need it. The furnace I’d lied to Missy about was real, and it was eighteen years old.
“You said if she comes down, she comes down,” Craig said.
“Dom,” Kristina said.
“It’s an expression. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Officer Reyes is on at nine,” I said. “His name’s on the title. It’s his to report.”
Kristina came down the steps and walked past all three of us to the barn. She put both hands on the door and pushed it the rest of the way open. The Indian sat on the trailer under a moving blanket.
“Load it, Dom,” she said.
“Kris. It’s forty-one thousand dollars.”
She didn’t turn around. Craig took the title off the hood of the pickup and put it back inside the jacket.
Dominic didn’t load it. Craig and Missy and I rolled it down his ramp and up Missy’s while he stood in the yard in his slippers.
When I got back in the truck he leaned on my window.
“You drive off with that, don’t you ever call this house again.”
The stalls
The courthouse lot was empty on a Sunday morning in May. I parked where I always parked, the third row, and walked the thermos over to the motorcycle stalls.
The flattened box was gone.
Craig had a room at the Seaway by the week by then. The upholstery shop on Superior Street had taken him back three days a week, and he paid for the room out of that. The Indian had a front fender on it from a salvage yard in Two Harbors, and it sat in the stall where the box used to be.
I sold Lyndon’s Harley in April for ninety-two hundred dollars. It bought a furnace and four months of the bills. Dominic never called. Neither did anybody else on that side of the family, and at Easter I found out I wasn’t on the card list anymore.
The attendant was in his booth with his seeds, even on a Sunday, and he lifted two fingers off the counter at me.
Craig was standing by the bike in Lyndon’s jacket, the white stitches on the collar turned down where nobody could see them.
I gave him the coffee and the Sunday paper, the whole thing, still in the plastic.
He took out the sports page, folded it in quarters and put it in his pocket. He handed me back the rest.
“You watch yourself, hon,” he said.
Then he unscrewed the thermos, poured the first cup and handed it to me.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who still brings an old friend coffee on Sundays.
For more stories where a biker knows far more than he should, read The Rider Behind My Husband’s Shop and The Biker Knew My Daughter’s Secret Middle Name. And if family, motorcycles, and buried secrets are your kind of story, there’s also The Eleven Thousand Dollars My Mother Wanted for Grandpa’s Motorcycle.
