ELLIS
The oak. The Shovelhead. The sundress. The lightning.
The Shovelhead started missing at seventy-two, the same hiccup she’d been throwing since I’d swapped the stock Keihin for the S&S on a Tuesday I should’ve spent doing something smarter. I’d been nursing her north on 61 since Vicksburg, the throttle response going soft in my right hand, and I knew—the way you know a thing in your wrist before your brain catches up—that the storm building out of the west was going to get to me before I got home.
The sky had gone the color of a four-day bruise. Purple-black at the crown, sickly green along the belly where it pressed against the treeline, and the air had that weight to it—thick, electric, tasting of copper and the ozone tang that means the atmosphere is about to come apart. I could feel it in the hair on my forearms, standing against the leather. Pressure drop. The kind that makes old fractures ache.
I saw the oak before I saw her.
A live oak, centuries old by the spread of it, set back forty yards from the road on a rise that had no business being there. Flat delta land in every direction and then this knoll, this tree, like something the earth had shoved up just to give the oak a stage. The canopy had to run ninety feet across. Spanish moss hung in curtains so thick the ground beneath looked dry, and in Mississippi in mid-April, dry ground is a promise worth pulling over for.
She was already there.
Sitting with her back against the trunk, knees drawn up, a canvas messenger bag pulled into her lap like she was shielding it from shrapnel. Dark hair plastered to her neck. A white cotton sundress soaked through and clinging to collarbones, ribs, the small architecture of her shoulders. She’d been caught in the first band, the same band that had been running down my collar for ten miles, and she was wet the way you get when there’s no point in running anymore. Surrender-wet. The dress had gone translucent against her skin and she either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and both possibilities told me something.
I’d killed the engine twenty feet out and walked the bike in under the canopy without seeing her—the trunk was that wide. The Shovelhead was still ticking as it cooled—that metronomic tink tink tink of hot metal contracting—and the woman looked up at me with eyes the color of creek water over limestone. Gray-green. Assessing.
I set the kickstand and swung off. “Engine’s fine. Sky’s the problem.”
Her mouth moved—not a smile, exactly. The left corner lifting a degree. “The sky’s been the problem for about twenty minutes.” She gestured at herself, at the soaked dress, the water still running from her hair down the line of her jaw. Evidence.
The first crack of thunder hit like a door slamming in a cathedral. The sound was a physical thing that rolled through my chest and rattled the moss overhead. The rain came behind it in a wall. Not drops.
A wall. The kind of rain that erases the road, that turns air into water, that hits the ground so hard it bounces back up to knee height. The sound of it was a roar that swallowed everything. The insects, the distant highway, the ticking of my engine. Gone. Just rain. Rain as violence.
Under the oak, though—under those ninety feet of canopy and moss—we were dry. A few heavy drops found their way through, fat and singular, landing on the packed earth between us with the precision of a leaking faucet. But the tree held. The oak did what live oaks do: it endured, and it covered, and it asked for nothing in return.
I pulled my jacket off. Leather, patrol-cut, the lining worn through at the left elbow where someone’s left elbow had worn it through. The jacket was heavier than a jacket needed to be. I held it out to her.
She looked at the jacket. Looked at me. The creek-water eyes moved over my face the way a caliper measures. Deliberate, calibrated, missing nothing.
“I’m already wet.”