If Rock and Roll Were a Machine Read Online Free PDF Page B

photos, but he could still see them in his mind. They were always there.
    So many people on both sides of the Atlantic had been kind to his son. If this were not so, Camille would not be the happy kid he was. His mother, his stepfather, his grandparents, teachers, coaches, his day-care mom and their families, his therapist when he was six. Shepard knew someof these people well, some he’d met, some he was able to imagine from what Camille told him, and others had shown his son kindness, love, patience, had treated the boy decently, and would never pass through Shepard’s thoughts where he could thank them face to imagined face.
    There was luck in the way his boy had turned out, of course. But there were also these good people. Some of them got paid to be good to kids, but that didn’t matter. Plenty of people got paid to be good to kids and treated them like shit.
    Whatever opportunity Shepard had to be kind to Bert Bowden, he would take. Maybe Bert was Shepard’s chance to return some water to the well.

Chapter 8
Bert Keeps His Word Again
    Bert withdrew fifteen hundred bucks from savings for the bike and a jacket. His parents haven’t alerted the bank as he feared. The fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills lie in a bank envelope on the passenger seat of the Bug, which Bert pilots north on Division. He can stay on this road, cross the Little Spokane River, climb the hill on the other side of the valley, and keep going until he burrows into the mountains. But he won’t burrow into the mountains today. Today Bert will keep is word.
    *  *  *
    Shepard is sitting in the back of the shop playing cribbage on an empty shopstand with his partner, Dave Ward, who looks like Billy Gibbons, guitarist for ZZ Top. Dave’s gray beard reaches to the cribbage board and enmeshes like cobwebs the green and red plastic pegs. They didn’t hear Bert come in, and they don’t notice him standing beside the cash register. He clears his throat, and both men turn.
    â€œBert Bowden,” Shepard says. “Had lunch?” He gestures with a remnant of fishwich. “I could eat a couple more of these.”
    Bert is feeling better. He could eat something. But “Icame to pay for the Sportster” is what he replies.
    â€œLet’s pop across the road, get a bite, and talk about that,” Shepard says.
    Bert and Shepard are standing on the island waiting for a break in traffic when Bert realizes they are wearing identical T-shirts as well as jeans in the same degree of fade. The faces in the car windows all turn with looks of disapproval. Biker and biker junior, the looks say.
    Shepard can really motor for a guy with two bad legs. Bert is hustling after him, taking note of this, as the toe of his Reebok catches the curb. He is airborne. He throws his hands out and knows that for him today’s lunch will be fillet of concrete. But Shepard catches him at the shoulder.
    Bert gains altitude as he flies over the sidewalk. Shepard is lifting him. Bert feels his weight shifting in relation to the fulcrum that Shepard is making of his shoulder joint. This guy is holding me in the air with one arm, Bert thinks as he descends against the tension Shepard applies.
    Bert hears a crack simultaneous with his landing. That sounds an awful lot like bone, he thinks. But I’m not in pain. He looks down. He has landed in a low shrub. Each of his tennies rests on a branch, and at the base of each branch the wet white flesh of the shrub is open in a compound fracture.
    â€œOops,” comes Shepard’s voice from behind him.
    Shepard eats a fishwich while he tells Bert that his dadvisited the shop and he no longer needs to look for new lodgings. Bert works on a fourteen-box of McNuggets and listens. This is good news. He’s already begun to miss his room.
    Shepard gives Bert a chance to back out of the deal. He notes again the various ways classic bikes can be a pain in the ass. He reminds Bert that