PART 3
I want to tell you about the second Saturday of June.
Goldie rode her cardboard Harley around the cul-de-sac for three hours that morning. She had upgraded the cardboard between Saturdays. The gas tank now had a small painted skull on the rear-fender side that she had copied off a photograph of a real Harley fender she had pulled out of a magazine. She had added a second American flag. She had refined the vroom sound with what I can only describe as a thirty-six-hour personal practice regimen of listening to V-twin engines on YouTube and adjusting her mouth-shape to match.
She came past Gunner’s garage at eleven twenty-two.
She waved.
Gunner was standing in the open bay door with his coffee cup in his right hand.
He waved back.
Then he did something he had not done in the eight days of cardboard-Harley rides.
He walked out to the edge of his driveway.
He waited until Goldie circled back around. He held up his right hand. She braked, on the pedal-back brakes of her 2002 Schwinn, and she stopped at the curb.
She looked up at him.
He looked down at her.
I was watching from the front porch. I was watching because I am a single mother and I watch where my nine-year-old daughter is at all times when she is on the street. I had also been watching, for three years, every interaction my daughter had ever had with Gunner Wallace, because my own mother had told me to not let her wave at him, and I had been waiting in some quiet part of myself that I am only now able to name to see what kind of man Gunner Wallace actually was.
I was about to find out.
Gunner crouched down on the curb on his haunches in front of Goldie’s bike. He was eye level with her now. He set his coffee cup down on the asphalt beside him.
He pointed at the cardboard gas tank.
He said: “That’s a nice piece of work, kid.”
Goldie said: “Thanks. I made it myself.”
Gunner said: “I see that. What year is this Harley supposed to be?”
Goldie did not hesitate.
She said: “1998 Heritage Softail. Sequoia Yellow Pearl with black trim. Two-tone leather seat. The one in Cycle
World July issue 2003.”
Gunner looked at her.
He looked at the bicycle.
He looked back at her.
He said: “Kid. What’s your name?”
She said: “Marigold. People call me Goldie. I’m nine.”
He said: “Goldie. You ever sat on a real Harley?”
She shook her head.
He said: “You wanna?”
She nodded. She did not say anything. She just nodded.
He said: “Wait here.”
He stood up. He walked back into his garage. Sixty seconds later he rolled a custom 2018 Heritage Softail Sequoia Yellow Pearl, two-tone leather seat, the bike a customer had picked up the previous Friday and that Gunner was, by his own report later, just about to deliver across town that afternoon-Gunner rolled it out of the bay and parked it on the curb in front of my daughter.
He said: “Goldie. Hop on. I’m not gonna start it. Just sit”
She got off the cardboard Harley. She laid it down very carefully on the grass strip between the curb and the sidewalk. She walked over to the Heritage Softail. She put one foot on the left peg. She swung her leg over the seat the way she had been watching people do it on YouTube for five years.
She sat down on the leather seat of a sixty-thousand-dollar custom Heritage Softail in Sequoia Yellow Pearl.
She put both her small hands on the ape-hanger handlebars.
She closed her eyes.
She made the vroom sound with her mouth.
For exactly four seconds.
She opened her eyes.
She said: “Mister Gunner. Thank you. That was the best thing that ever happened in my whole life”
She got off the bike. Very carefully. She did not scratch a single inch of the paint.
She picked up her cardboard Harley off the grass.
She got back on it.
She started pedaling again.
She made the vroom sound the way you make the vroom sound when you have just heard, in your head, what a 2018 Heritage Softail actually sounds like.
Gunner watched her ride back up the cul-de-sac.
He picked up his coffee cup off the asphalt.
He went back into his garage.
He did not come out for three hours.
PART 4
I am going to tell you, because Cheryl told me, what Gunner did in his garage between Saturday afternoon, June 8th, and Saturday afternoon, June 22nd, 2024.
He did not deliver the Heritage Softail to the customer that afternoon. He texted the customer a heart surgeon in Tampa named Dr. Petrosian and told him there was a fabrication issue and the bike would be ready Monday. Dr. Petrosian, who is sixty-one years old and a very patient man, said okay.
Gunner spent the rest of Saturday afternoon at a Goodwill on Memorial Boulevard, where he bought a used twenty-four-inch BMX-style bicycle frame for eleven dollars.
He spent Sunday morning at the Lakeland Harley-Davidson dealership where he has had a working relationship since 2009. He bought, at parts cost, two used items from their backroom inventory: one fuel-tank emblem off a 1998 Heritage Softail that had been parted out for insurance reasons in 2019, and one small section of chrome exhaust pipe from the same parts bike.
He bought, full price, one quart of Sequoia Yellow Pearl factory Harley paint.
He spent Sunday afternoon back in his garage on the twenty-four-inch BMX frame.
He stripped it to bare metal. He welded a custom crossbar plate to it that would hold a hand-cut steel gas-tank cover the same shape and dimensions as a 1998 Heritage Softail tank, scaled down to roughly forty percent. He cut the tank cover out of sheet steel in his garage on the Saturday night with a plasma cutter. He hand-welded the seams. He ground them smooth on Sunday.
He primered it on Sunday night.
He laid down the Sequoia Yellow Pearl in three thin coats over the next four nights Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday letting each coat cure for twelve hours. He hand-applied the black pinstriping with a small brush at the kitchen table on Friday night under a desk lamp, with Cheryl reading a book on the couch behind him.
He laid the genuine Harley fuel-tank emblem he had bought on Sunday at the dealership into the tank cover on Saturday morning.
He cut and welded the small section of chrome Harley exhaust pipe into two short pieces that he mounted to the frame as functional “exhaust cosmetics” on the back wheel.
He hand-stitched a small leather seat from a sheet of real Harley-brand seat leather he had in his shop, with a two-tone insert that matched the colors of the 2018 Heritage Softail Goldie had sat on. He stitched it himself with a leather needle and waxed thread at his workbench. He had not, by Cheryl’s report, hand-stitched a seat for a customer in four years because the shop pays a specialist in Tampa to do it now. He did this one himself.
He built two small leather saddlebags from the same leather. Real Harley leather. Hand-stitched. Sized to fit a nine-year-old’s school backpack.
He built two small leather saddlebags from the same leather. Real Harley leather. Hand-stitched. Sized to fit a nine-year-old’s school backpack.
He cut down a set of mini ape-hanger handlebars from a parts bin in his shop – handlebars that had originally been on a Sportster to twenty-four-inch BMX scale. He chromed them himself with a small powder-coater he keeps in the back of the shop. He installed real Harley grips.
The bicycle, when he was finished on the night of Friday, June 21st, weighed thirty-one pounds.
It was a working twenty-four-inch BMX bicycle.
It looked like a forty-percent-scale 1998 Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail.
It had cost Gunner Wallace, by Cheryl’s count of the receipts in their kitchen drawer, four hundred and twelve dollars in parts.
It had cost him sixty-two hours of his time.
He did not, by Cheryl’s report, sleep more than four hours a night for the fourteen days he was building it.
On Saturday morning, June 22nd, he put it in the bed of his truck under a tarp.
He drove the four houses up the cul-de-sac.
He pulled into our driveway at six-fifteen p.m.
He knocked on our front door at six-eighteen.