The Mysterious Ride of Chase Menen
the crucial account of the curious jack-of-all-trades Chase,
if it were hastily written by Neil Gaiman.
by Jake Kilroy
In the old country of Mexico, there is an older country still. It twists and crawls at night, and it cannot be found in the day. Any traveler would need to focus their brightest of eyes to see the shadows within the darkness, but, even then, that would not be enough to give the land an honorable name.
Somewhere beyond the reach of locals, though close enough to hear each child sleeping, there are creatures of colors from dreams and nightmares. They growl, they gnarl and, worst of all, they laugh.
The land, as divine as it is broken, keeps an oral history that has only been recited in the jungle of shadows seen exclusively out of an eye’s corner, while the most truthful poems about terra firma are found in restless cemeteries of olde. And yet the roadside shops of La Misión open and close each day without terror or notice.
Most lock up at sunset, with the shopkeepers going home to their families, walking the dirt paths that would always lead to them to hearty supper and cold ale.
A thick scoop of black pressed itself against the hills and over the town, as night didn’t fall so much as it splashed like a cannonball across the long, anomalous valley. The lamps of the living rooms were kept aglow, this was true, but the only shops left with life in them were the liquor store and the restaurant of choice, Magañas.
The sounds of the valley were atmospheric and quaint. Dogs barking, mariachi on radios, and the symphony of crickets giving up on harmony. But a new sound slathered its greasy, beautiful noise across the only paved road that lead into the small, moonless town of La Misión.
A motorcycle.
Chase Menen rode his motorcycle through the curves of the country, massaging the asphalt’s hip bones as much as he attacked them. It was the only sound between the graves and the heavens in the vale’s stillness. White stars and yellow lights dotted the bruised landscape, and his figure, patterning coolly along the slow carving of the hillside, was the only thing that moved. The silhouette of curious men and women watched his lone light roll into their village from behind the pale curtains and iron bars of their homes.
But no one spoke or hailed his arrival.
He pulled up to Magañas, greeted the employees warmly, especially the bartender, and ordered his meal. After a few strong laughs, Chase stepped into the cool wind that tumbled through the void like a swift stab at the ocean.
The lone and lovely rider, adorned in a leather vest keeping a bare chest modest, lit a Marlboro Red, snuck a drag, and, in an instant, the world went black. Well, not exactly. He at least had the stars glittering like a nervous audience, but any light rising up had been snuffed out. Behind him, the inky details of the restaurant whispered not a word. There was not a soul, not a sound, not a thing. He withdrew the cigarette and watched the town with a thin tickle in his throat. The town was there, just as it had always been. But the air now tasted stagnant, as if he were taking deep gulps of an old house’s damp attic. The windows of every home were dark, and not even a dog barked in the emptiness of the blackout.
His eyes adjusted and the earth came back to him in purples and blues. His glare moved from one end of the road and to the other. There was no breeze in the fresh pelt of midnight. The nothing was complete.
“Huh,” was all he said.
A boom erupted in the distance and it came to echo without apology in the valley. The splattering of an engine, one that belonged to another motorcycle, coughed a death so loud that Chase instinctively touched his ears to check for a wound.
The motorcycle rolled into town like slow lightning, materializing at Chase’s right, from the bridge the he had driven across since he had been old enough to speed. The brutal racket of the motorcycle seized his nerves, as the vehicle made itself at home in the restaurant’s dirt lot.
Then the stranger upon the beastly machine stepped off and undid his helmet, hurriedly dropping it to his side. A long top hat popped out from underneath, along with shaggy hair the color of ash and soot. The rider’s skin swirled in the faint light of the stars, moving even, as if snakes of melted seaweed and pasty white soap coursed through his rangy limbs.
Chase blinked and corrected his eyes, and the skin looked ghostly but ordinary in the fresh beat of his pupils. The stranger dressed in peculiar clothes that looked formal and ill-fitting. He was a long pile of scarlets and ebonies.
“In my haste, I must confess, I am without guidance,” said the stranger excitedly. “Am I correct to assume you have been charged with the title of town mechanic?”
The phrasing rattled Chase’s head for a moment, but his wits returned with a swing.
“Oh, no, I’m just cruising through, picking up some food,” said Chase. “That’s a gorgeous bike though.”
The stranger seemed confused. His eyes idled.
“What trade has claimed you as its own?” asked the stranger.
“I’m an engineer,” said Chase.
“Ah! Splendid, splendid,” said the stranger. “And that is your conveyance over yonder?”
Chase turned to see his motorcycle still parked in the dirt.
“Yep,” said Chase, “that one’s all mine.”
“And it is a grand contrivance at that! So you have crafted your fingers as tools then,” said the stranger. “I could use that toolbox of a hand, you see, as this perilous machine has lost its livelihood.”
“What’s the matter?” asked Chase.
“The matter is that it runs on knowledge,” answered the stranger, “and I am too tired to teach it anything, lessons or otherwise.”
“Right on,” said Chase, amused by the traveler’s curious approach to language.
He took a long drag of his cigarette and put it out, stepping toward the unfamiliar motorcycle. As he neared the wheeled beast, the metal changed in each of his steps. It was a red that he had only seen the first time he accidentally cut himself. He remembered it looking like a river of jewels pouring out of him. He stepped closer to the bike and the colors came more quickly; the blue of skies above churches, the green of a field he made love in once, the brown of a girl’s eyes that he had only ever seen dance in his dreams of South America.
His eyes strained from the greedy spectrum. When he finally touched it, the motorcycle was nearly pellucid, and it burned. Like running a cold hand under hot water. The sensation was cruel.
“You built this yourself,” said Chase, distraction at his throat.
“No, truly, I wish I could bestow credit for it upon myself, but when you are in the position that I’m often found in, you have created and destroyed enough to simply leave things be. There are others who will build. There are others that enter the world in search of destinies, and they remain despaired until their heart has been given purpose. To even tinker on a machine such as this…it makes their very pores glow. I would take that away from no man or creature.”
The engine stirred, almost with a breath of its own, as Chase’s hand, strained and tense, dragged across the hide of it. It rumbled faintly.
“I’ve been working on bikes for a long time,” said Chase, “and I’ve never seen something like this.”
The stranger stepped forward, a thinly stretched smile cutting his face open.
“Go on,” whispered the stranger.
“Honestly, I’ve been from Mexico to the Maldives, and I’ve fixed up some of the wildest things not cooked up by a god, and this doesn’t come close to anything I’ve found on the road.”
“Tell me, young traveler,” said the stranger with a peculiar intensity, “what is it you most want from the road?”
Chase dwelled on this, as if nurturing new life. Then it came.
“I want to ride my motorcycle through the Middle East.”
“Ah,” said the stranger with a harsh tone of thrill. “A rather brave charge, but what do you most seek before the creeping strangle of dawn?”
Chase considered this, and his pupils swam through the murky waters of honesty.
“I could use a good surf right now,” said Chase.
“Good,” said the stranger with the coo of a hungry bird.
Like it were his solemn duty, Chase noticed a small pack of tools tied to the seat and unwrapped them. He tinkered with the engine, while the stranger posed questions and gave him conversation like supple fruit he could not stop eating. He could find nothing wrong with the motorcycle, though the stranger’s demeanor had become more confident than curious.
“Now open the gas tank,” said the stranger.
The stranger extended his arm and a tool Chase had never seen before slid out of his sleeve and into his hand in a single swift motion. Chase took the tool from the stranger and inspected it. The tool looked like a cross between a screwdriver and a wine opener, and it was heavy. But it fit into the lock of the oddly shaped tank. Chase removed the cap.
As if all the words he had spoken these last few minutes had been looming above him like vapor, Chase thought he heard his voice in tiny bits float down and into the gas tank. Stunned, he stood up quickly and looked at the stranger, who leaned forward, scooped up the cap, and tightened it against its mount.
The stranger smiled knowingly. “That may have seemed all too easy to you, but it takes the right spirit to breathe life into such a vessel.”
“I don’t even know what I did,” said Chase.
A moment of wordless echo seemed to pass between the canyon of the motorcycle riders.
“You know,” said the stranger, “you aren’t possessed with demand and desire like the others I encounter. They drag questions and requests. You carry observations and interests.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” said Chase.
“Well, no questions will get you no answers, but you have the immaculate glimmer of a wayward philosopher. So I will tell you,” said the stranger, “there is a rumor that, each year, two motorcycles race across the world.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s the name of the race?”
“It has no name.”
“Who competes?”
“There are no names for the two racers, but many are given,” explained the stranger. “Good and Evil. Life and Death. God and Devil. The battle, the race, the everything must go on, you see.”
It was only a moment that the words hung there before new sound came. Another motorcycle suddenly wailed in the darkness. The bridge illuminated with a ghostly headlight, and the new banshee rider cried out in a mad bellow, poisoned with a feverish glee, flying by the two.
“Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeooooooooooow!” was the wild cry of the unknown.
Chase laughed.
“And there goes the other,” said the stranger.
“Damn,” said Chase, a gleaming smile decorating his chin.
But a sweat drew itself out of him then. His smirk deepened into an unfamiliar bite of the lips. His bones went cold, and the world unveiled itself to him. He breathed with long strokes of his lungs, watching the lone light of the valley, besides the shower of stars above, pass as fevered and easy as it had arrived. No fear drove his mouth to ask the million questions that now devoured his tongue. Instead, he looked at the curious visitor and asked the one thing he wanted to know more than anything.
“So which one are you?”
The stranger turned his head toward Chase in a slow rumble and showed him something that resembled a smile as he buttoned his helmet. His mouth was a treasure chest of mismatched teeth. Chase had not noticed it before, but the grin had the unmistakeable quality of a hastily built fence, as if each tooth belonged to that of a different animal. How the mouth was able to close without gashes or cuts was beyond his mastery. The mechanics of it were otherworldly, a terrible gift on display in the haunted museum of La Misión.
Finally, the stranger answered.
“I am the one who is losing.”
The stranger threw himself atop the motorcycle, started the engine, and rolled it by Chase, back toward the road.
“In my many thanks, I would give you this,” said the stranger. “Consider it a token for putting me back in the race. Chew the earth and rinse your mouth with the unknown and you will get what you most need from this world.”
The stranger then thrust out his hand and dropped the object in Chase’s palm. It was a necklace of dark twine with an opal oval looped into the thin rope.
“You carry moonlight with you now,” said the stranger. “Rouse the tides and award your starved soul a feast.”
With an enormous blast of color from the tailpipe, a shot rang throughout the valley. Chase could only describe it as the sound of every war’s first gunshot fired at once.
And so the stranger’s motorcycle leapt onto the only paved road and barreled out of the valley. The asphalt seemed to slide and careen beneath the weight of the spinning tires. A howl, not of man or animal, bestowed itself upon the chilly Mexican landscape.
Chase examined the necklace. His fingers, coarse from honest work, drifted over the surface. It was perfect in his smoothness. When he shook it, he heard the modest crashes of water inside.
The world returned with a call and he looked up. The houses and streetlights were aglow once again and he turned to see the cook gesturing to show his food was on the tiled counter. He stared at the length of the road, but no cars or trucks crossed it, nor the demons or angels he suspected he may encounter now.
He rode home, his quesataco stuffed into his pants’ pocket. The house was as he left it, partially lit. His plan to turn on each remaining lamp in the house became him standing on the wall of the patio smoking a cigarette and listening to the ocean as it purred against the dim house.
Chase picked up the prepossessing stone one of his younger cousins had discovered on the beach and left in a seashell last Christmas. He rolled it in his hand and felt its tiny curves.
With his cigarette was extinguished, Chase climbed into his wetsuit and tied the necklace around him. There was a small but noticeable hole at the bottom of the oval, yet no liquid escaped. He tilted the gloomy green canister and still no water leaked from the necklace. It was curious.
He picked up his surfboard and walked to the water’s edge, the small stone in his fist and the necklace tapping his chest. The world was still, but not as silent as when the stranger had arrived. Cars passed in the distance, and the water coughed and crashed. After a long thought, the surfer entered the sea.
After a comfortable paddle and several dips beneath small waves, Chase sat upon his board. He laid the stone in his mouth and drank from the necklace. The water carried a sugary taste as he swirled it across his gums.
A wave rolled beneath him like a quiet, slow-waking beast.
The coastline’s lone mariner watched the sky sparkle above him with the bare light of the stars, and the jewels of the coastline, a confetti of porch lanterns and highways lamps, snuck upon the world with a cluster of yellow that gave the cliffs a broken-tooth grin.
Chase gargled the sweet flavor a final time and then spit the stone into the ocean. It sank, and as it did, a stormy pale blue burst from the stone like glowing tentacles. The contorted arms spread out until the surrounding water seemed sprinkled with every shade of blue oil paint.
And then — the waves came. A set of translucent hills, swimming with the pace of great aquatic creatures, dazzling and featureless, rolled their way toward Chase, who lowered himself and began paddling forward, in anticipation of the Poseidon’s playful challenge.
A magnificent lust blazed in the young man now, as his hands carved out the ocean water that warmed with each stroke. His fingers lightened, and the water’s temperature reminded him of pool parties from his youth, when summer was endless and time was motionless, and he was free.
The bountiful laughter could be heard along the shore for miles, loud and exuberant; his eyes radiant and his heart triumphant. Blue, the color of boyhood and sea and sky alike, swallowed the darkness around Chase, piercing and welcomed. For this moment and beyond now, all was hope.
