At my best friend’s wake, his two stepsons pointed at me across the Legion hall and called me “the junk dealer who stole Dad’s bike for four grand.” Then his wife pressed the brass tag off his old dog’s collar into my palm, and they bet a hundred bucks I’d sell it before Monday. Neither one knew what was stamped on the back.
Doris was sixty-six, and Carmine’s boys had been through her garage twice before the casket was even closed.
They weren’t really his boys.
Carmine married their mother when Yosef was ten and Ryan was seven, raised them after she passed, and never once let anybody say “step” at his table.
He married Doris later. They didn’t like that either.
When the chemo took his grip in April, Carmine sold me his ’96 bagger for four thousand dollars.
I rolled it into the back of my shop and never hung a price on it.
So that was me. Junk man.
The club rode him out that morning, eleven bikes behind the hearse, and I rode his.
Ryan watched me back it into the line at the curb with his arms crossed.
Inside, the auxiliary ladies had the coffee urn going and a tray of ham sandwiches nobody touched.
Somebody’s granddaughter in a church dress was building a tower of sugar packets on the windowsill.
Yosef found Doris by the flag case.
“We need the combination,” he said.
“I told you I don’t have it.”
“Thirty years of his stuff is in that safe. Titles. Whatever cash he had.”
“Then I guess it stays in there,” Doris said.
Ryan put a hand flat on the wall beside her head. Not on her. Beside her.
“Mom would’ve known it,” he said. “You were married to him for what, fifteen minutes?”
Seventeen years.
I set my cup down.
Two tables over, Leonardo set his down too. Leonardo has been the club’s road captain since before either of those boys could drive.
Doris got out from under Ryan’s arm and walked straight to me.
She had something closed in her fist.
“Carmine wanted you to have this,” she said.
She opened my hand and put it in.
A brass tag on a split ring, the edges rubbed smooth. ZION, stamped on the front.
Carmine’s shepherd. Gone four years now. That dog rode in a milk crate bungeed behind the seat until his hips quit.
I’d have known that tag in the dark.
“Doris, I can’t take this.”
“You’re taking it.” She folded my fingers down over it and held them there.
Behind her, Ryan laughed.
“A hundred bucks says it’s in his display case by MONDAY,” he said.
“Brass is worth what, a dollar eighty?” Yosef said. “He’ll find a way.”
“Junk man always finds a way,” Ryan said.
The near tables went quiet the way people do at a funeral when they want to hear better.
I didn’t say anything.
I turned the tag over with my thumb.
Six digits on the back, small, cut in by hand with a punch set. Not a phone number. Not a birthday.
I know what a number looks like when somebody wants to remember it and doesn’t want anyone else to.
I’ve opened a lot of locked things for a living.
Doris was watching my face.
“He said you’d know,” she said.
Ryan didn’t catch the words, but he saw something pass between us, and he came across the floor fast.
“Let me see that.”
“No.”
“That was Dad’s dog. That’s FAMILY property.”
He reached for my wrist.
He got about halfway.
Every chair at the club’s two tables scraped back at once.
Eleven men in old leather stood up in a hall full of casseroles, and nobody said a word.
Ashish, the big one who drives the chase truck, came and stood behind Doris with his hands folded in front of him like an usher.
Ryan’s hand stayed in the air.
“This isn’t your business,” he said to the room.
“It’s a funeral, son,” Leonardo said. “Everybody in here is somebody’s business.”
Yosef pulled at his brother’s sleeve. Ryan shook him off.
“He got Dad’s bike for NOTHING,” Ryan said, loud enough for the kitchen. “And now she’s handing him the rest.”
That was when Doris turned around.
“He paid what Carmine asked, and he came every Sunday. WHERE WERE YOU TWO IN APRIL?”
Nobody touched a sandwich.
Ryan opened his mouth and nothing came out.
Out the front window, the eleven bikes sat in their line at the curb in the rain, and Carmine’s was the one on the end.
Then the door by the coat rack opened, and a woman in a gray suit came in shaking water off an umbrella.
Christina Yarborough. I’d seen her once at the hospice, with a folder on her knees.
She looked at the men standing. She looked at Ryan’s hand, still up.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I’m Mr. Egan’s attorney. He asked me to come today and watch for one thing.”
Yosef smiled. He thought she was there for him.
“Which one of you,” she said, “has the dog’s tag?”
Ryan looked at my fist.
Yosef stopped smiling.
I opened my hand.
The index card
Christina came across the floor with her umbrella still dripping on the tile.
She didn’t look at Ryan. She looked at my palm.
“May I?”
I held it flat. She didn’t take the tag. She turned it over with one fingernail, opened her folder against her forearm and slid out an index card. Six digits in blue ink, in Carmine’s printing from before his hands went.
She read the card. She read the tag. She put the card back.
“Mr. Dressler,” she said. “Carmine Egan named as executor of his estate the person his wife handed this tag to at his wake. He wanted it done in front of the club and in front of his sons.”
Yosef laughed once, like somebody had told a joke at the wrong table.
“That’s a dog tag,” Ryan said.
“It is,” she said. “And Mr. Dressler is the executor.”
“We’re his SONS.”
“You’re both in the will. Nobody disputes that.” She closed the folder. “The safe in the garage gets opened by the executor, with me there and two witnesses. Monday at ten.”
Ryan stared at my fist like he could see through the fingers.
“Why him?” Yosef said. “He’s not even family.”
Christina answered me instead of him.
“Carmine said you’d want to know that more than anybody,” she said. “He said it’s in the safe.”
The milk crate
I met Carmine in 1999 at a swap meet, both of us after the same carburetor. He got it. He bought me breakfast to make up for it, and that was twenty-seven years.
Every Sunday for most of them I drove out to his garage. Coffee from a dented Thermos. A radio on the workbench that only pulled in a polka station out of Toledo, so that’s what we listened to.
Zion slept in the milk crate even after the bike quit taking him anywhere. Carmine bungeed it to a sawhorse by the door so the dog still had his spot.
Carmine wrote down everything that left that garage. A spiral notebook hung off a nail by the vise on a twist of baling wire. Socket set to the neighbor, March 3. Floor jack to the kid across the road. When a thing came back, he drew a line through it.
“You’d make a decent pawnbroker,” I told him once.
“I’d make a better one than you,” he said. “I’d charge.”
The boys came around less every year. Yosef had a job in Columbus and called on holidays. Ryan lived twenty minutes away and came when he needed the trailer. He said “Dad” in every sentence, like he was paying a toll with it.
Doris made them sandwiches anyway.
In March, the Sunday after his second round, Carmine asked to borrow the punch set from my shop. Letters and numbers, quarter inch, in a wooden case my old boss left me when he retired. The four die has been chipped since 1998. Every four I stamp with it dips its tail.
“What for?” I said.
“A project.”
He brought it back two weeks later, wiped down, every die in its slot.
In April his hands quit. He couldn’t hold the Thermos lid. He called me on a Tuesday, which he never did, and said come get the bagger.
He wanted cash, in a bank envelope. When I handed it to him, he handed it right back with a pen.
“Write what it’s for,” he said. “I can’t make my letters anymore.”
So I wrote BIKE – 4,000 across the front, and he carried it into the house, and I didn’t see where it went. I didn’t ask.
I didn’t ask about a lot of things that spring.
Back in the Legion hall, with Christina’s folder shut and Ryan breathing through his nose, I tipped the tag toward the window and looked at the back again.
The second pair of digits started with a four. Its tail dipped low.
My set does that.
The curb, in the rain
The wake broke up the way they do, a few people at a time and then everybody.
The auxiliary ladies wrapped the sandwiches in foil. Leonardo boxed the flag case himself and handed it to Doris.
Out at the curb, the eleven bikes had water standing on the seats. I wiped Carmine’s with my sleeve. Ryan came down the steps with Yosef behind him and Christina behind both.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Ryan said. “Dad never said one word to us about any tag.”
“He didn’t say a word to most people about most things,” Christina said.
“So the junk man opens the safe. Then what? He takes what he wants and tells us that’s all there was?”
“He opens it, he lists it, he puts a value on it. That’s what an executor does first. I’m there for all of it.” She turned to me. “There’s one more piece, and I’d rather say it with everybody here.”
The rain picked up. Ashish held his jacket over Doris like a tent.
“The will names an alternate,” Christina said. “If Mr. Dressler doesn’t have that tag in his possession at ten o’clock Monday, for any reason, the alternate becomes executor.”
“Who’s the alternate?” I said.
“Yosef.”
Yosef stood up a little straighter in the rain.
Ryan smiled at me. I’ve seen that smile across my counter for thirty years, on men who already decided what my stuff is worth.
“Monday’s a long way off,” he said.
Ashish walked over and stood next to my bike. He didn’t say anything to Ryan. He said to me, “I’ll follow you home.”
He did. So did Ryan’s truck, two cars back, all the way to my shop.
Saturday, behind the counter
I opened at nine like always. The tag hung on a chain around my neck, under my shirt, the way I wore my dog tags in the Corps.
The bagger sat in the back where I’d rolled it in April, between a rack of power washers and a pallet of somebody’s grandmother’s dishes. No price. No sticker. A drop cloth over the tank.
Ryan came in at ten-fifteen, alone. He walked the cases the way a customer does. Looked at the guitars. Looked at the rings.
“You buy anything, right?” he said. “That’s the deal in here.”
“Most things.”
“Then sell me something.” He laid five hundred-dollar bills on the glass. “Dog tag. Brass. You said yourself it’s worth a dollar eighty.”
“Yosef said that.”
“Fine, Yosef said it.” He laid down five more. “A thousand dollars for a dollar eighty. You won’t see a margin like that all year.”
I didn’t touch the money.
He went to two thousand. He counted it slow, so I’d hear every bill hit the glass. Then he looked past me at the drop cloth.
“Nice of you not to price that,” he said. “Saves me finding out what Dad was worth to you.”
He picked up his money and left the bell on the door going.
Doris came in twenty minutes later. Ashish had driven her in the chase truck and waited out front with the engine running.
She’d been crying earlier and was done with it. She went straight to the back and pulled the drop cloth off the tank like she was checking on somebody in a bed.
“Ryan was here,” I said.
“I know. He called me from your lot. Said you’d take his money by Monday.” She put her hand flat on the seat. “Bobby, did Carmine ever tell you why he sold this?”
“His grip.”
“His grip,” she said. She almost laughed. “Sure. He was in the hospital the ninth through the twelfth, with the infection. I slept in the chair.”
I waited.
“On the eleventh the neighbor called me. There was a truck in our driveway. Ryan, and a man with a trailer and an envelope. Ryan told the neighbor his dad wanted it gone.”
“Carmine didn’t want it gone.”
“Carmine was on oxygen. He didn’t know a thing about it until I told him.” She took her hand off the seat. “He called you the morning he got home.”
That was the Tuesday.
“How’d a stranger even know there was a bike?” I said.
“Ryan put it online in March,” Doris said. “With Carmine’s VIN. While Carmine was sitting in the chemo chair.”
Ten o’clock Monday
By Monday the rain had quit, and the garage smelled like wet concrete and old oil.
Christina set her folder on the workbench beside the vise. Leonardo and Ashish stood by the side door, the two witnesses, hands folded. Doris sat on a stool with her coat on. The polka station was off for once.
Yosef and Ryan came in at five after. Yosef had a coffee. Ryan had nothing.
The spiral notebook wasn’t on its nail. Just the loop of baling wire.
The safe stood in the corner where it always had, a gray gun safe about chest high, with a dial and a three-spoke handle. Somebody had been at it. Bright fresh scratches all around the dial ring, and a dent in the door seam about the width of a pry bar.
Nobody mentioned it. Christina wrote something on her pad.
“Mr. Dressler, do you have the tag?”
I pulled the chain out of my shirt.
Ryan looked at it, then at the floor.
“Ten-oh-seven,” Christina said, and wrote that down too. “Go ahead.”
I’ve opened a lot of these. Mostly for widows. Mostly with a drill, after the kids already tried everything they could think of, birthdays, anniversaries, the last four of the social.
Carmine’s I opened with his dog. Right four turns to the first pair. Left three to the second, the crooked four. Right two to the last. I felt it seat.
The handle turned.
Ryan took a step and Leonardo moved one shoulder about an inch, and Ryan stopped.
Top shelf, a folder of titles and a coffee can. Second shelf, Zion’s collar, the leather gone dark, nothing hanging from the ring.
And the bank envelope. BIKE – 4,000, in my handwriting. The flap still glued down.
Christina lifted it out with two fingers, held it up for the witnesses, and set it on the bench.
“Four grand,” Yosef said. “He never even spent it.”
Under the envelope was the spiral notebook.
Christina opened it to the last page with writing on it, read it to herself, and turned it toward me.
Carmine’s printing, from before the grip went. Mar 9. Ryan. Snap-on chest, red, 7 drawer. Says he’ll bring it back.
No line through it.
Page fourteen
There were five entries on that page. None had a line through.
Mar 9, Ryan, the Snap-on chest. Mar 22, Yosef, Dad’s Hamilton watch, for safekeeping. Mar 30, Ryan, bike listed online with my VIN, never asked. Apr 11, Ryan, man with trailer, D’s neighbor sent him off.
Then the last one, the letters going shaky halfway through. Apr 13. Sold bagger to Bobby, 4,000. Money stays in the safe. Bike was never for sale.
Christina read the will out loud, the one paragraph. Anything recorded in his notebook as taken and not returned was to be valued by his executor and taken off the share of whoever took it.
Ryan went first, and he didn’t stop.
“That’s a sick man’s diary. He was on morphine half of March. You can’t put a dying man’s grocery list in front of a judge.”
“March ninth was before the morphine,” Doris said.
“Stay out of it, Doris. Seventeen years in this house and you think you know how it worked. I borrowed a toolbox. Dad said take it. He SAID take it. He’d have given me the shirt off his back, and you know it, and so does this guy, standing there with his little chain on like a priest.”
“Mr. Dressler,” Christina said. “You’ll need values.”
“Snap-on, seven drawer, red, used,” I said. “Eleven hundred. The Hamilton, if it’s the gold-filled one, three-fifty.”
“You’re pricing my father’s stuff,” Ryan said. “In his garage. In front of me. You know what, that’s perfect. That’s exactly what you are. Go ahead, price the collar. Price the crate.”
Yosef set his coffee on the bench and went out to his truck. He came back with a watch on a cracked leather band and put it beside the envelope.
“It’s been in my glove box since March,” he said. “Take it off the list, not off my share.”
Christina drew a line through the entry and wrote the date beside it.
Ryan watched his brother do it like Yosef had changed teams in the fourth quarter.
“Fine,” Ryan said. “The chest is gone anyway. I sold it in March to a guy in Dayton for nine hundred. Dad wasn’t using it. He couldn’t lift a wrench. So take your eleven hundred, whatever. But that bike.” He pointed at the envelope. “That bike’s worth fourteen grand, and he paid four, and Dad was on oxygen when he signed it over. Any judge in this county undoes that sale in an afternoon. Then I’m the one who puts a price on it.”
Christina didn’t argue with him. She looked at me.
“A sale to the executor under value can be challenged,” she said. “He’s not wrong about that part.”
I took the checkbook out of my jacket. The shop’s, the one with the roof money in it. I’d been saving for the roof since the hailstorm two summers ago.
“It’s not fourteen,” I said. “Ninety-two hundred, clean title, original paint.”
I wrote the estate a check for fifty-two hundred and tore it out.
Ryan looked at the check on the bench. For a while he didn’t say anything.
“So split it,” he said finally. “When do I get my cut of that?”
Nobody answered him. Doris got up off the stool and walked out of her own garage.
Leonardo cleared his throat.
“Son,” he said. “You had a hundred dollars on Monday. It’s Monday.”
Ryan pulled a bill out of his wallet and slapped it on the bench next to my check.
He left the garage door up behind him, and the cold came in.
The price sticker
Three Sundays later I rode the bagger out to Doris’s.
The milk crate was still bungeed to the sawhorse. She had coffee in Carmine’s Thermos and the polka station on, and the notebook back on its nail. Christina had made a copy for the file.
There’s a blue tarp on my shop roof now. It’ll hold till spring.
The Tuesday after, a man in a Bengals jacket came in and walked straight back to the bike. He bent down and looked at the tank like he knew what he was looking at.
“What do you want for the bagger?” he said.
“She’s not for sale.”
He went back to the guitars.
I took Zion’s tag off the chain around my neck and hung it on the key ring in the ignition, where Carmine could have read it in the dark.
If this one got to you, send it to the friend who still shows up on Sundays.
For more stories where bikers reveal the heart beneath the leather, read about the biker who brought a teddy bear to my register, the eleven bikers who let my daughter paint their nails, and the biker who waded into the canal.
