The Motorcycle Diaries [Birdie/Vasco]

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

v a s c o 


Take the parts of me you thought were pure
Tear 'em up, then tear 'em even more
Drown 'em till they all disintegrate
Do you see the point I'm tryna make?

I can’t recall when I’d put it away – maybe it’d been close to thirty years – when, like all things had been back then, a law was passed telling us that we weren’t allowed to ride on the open road, and anyone who disobeyed would be severely punished.

And I’d clung to it still, wheels on gravel and backroad adventures, no matter who many times I got caught in the mud or practically flipped over the handles.

You could get a good fifty miles an hour on a flat patch of old road if you put your mind to it.

I still remember flying, roaring with all the orange of sunset at our front and canary hills at our back. Emma with her scarf fluttering and hands wrapped around my waist. Me with my smile just a little bit brighter when her hands gripped at my belt.

Parts got hard to source after too long. I could turn up my empty pockets and make all the promises I wanted, but that wasn’t going to feed the family of the man who had what would get the engine to turn over. Not to mention the shortage of gasoline. Outside of what was meant to run on the farm there hadn’t been a drop to spare.

And I told myself, at some point, that was the way life had been meant to be. We had our fun, and that’d been enough. Got the taste of a rip-roaring wind, a race toward infinity, and like all good things, had to end.

That had been the way of things for as long as I could remember.

Preserve what you could, live how you wished. Take in the good and treasure those who you could keep close. And no matter how far someone could drift, you’d still have that – memories to fall back on when the weight came crashing over your shoulders like a wave. Whether grief or ghosts, we had to light our own darkness.

So, I could turn to the wind. The rush.

Nostalgia had a funny way of drawing us back, though.

Not because I wanted to chase what I’d had when I was young. You can’t put lightning back into a bottle, won’t see the same sunset.

Yet it’s not the sunset that gave me what I needed. It’s that I’d had a dream in that moment that carried me through – a hope in something that couldn’t be fettered by this world.

I’d spent the last six months on a restoration. It’d been the first time in ten years that I’d spent any of my salary on myself, and I couldn’t help feeling guilty every time I brought another shiny piece of chrome home instead of passing off an envelope to the college or splitting it up between the cousins. But each tiny piece that I sweat through, the way that it’d taken shape, man. It’s a masterpiece.

Yani called it El Tigre, half because it sounded a god awful racket when I kicked it alive, but also because she said it’d brought out something else she hadn’t seen before. In all the years spent in grace and quiet courage, when I sat on my motorcycle, I let go. A body in motion, unafraid of moving forward. Not stopping for danger but sailing clear through, as though the years could melt away to the kid who’d ridden a little dirt bike across the sun cracked earth.

El Tigre wasn’t some child’s plaything – powered by a 489 cc parallel-motor engine, if I got a patch of flat road, I could’ve gotten up to a hundred, easy. I’d spray painted the body black with the outline of a star across the front fork. And even if they could hear me coming from miles away, I still disappeared across the horizon. Body rattling along with the frame of El Tigre, ready to go – to move.

There’d been a bunch of old laws about vehicles that I’d stripped away from the books just last year. We were due to open a few factories to produce automobiles (something I’d negotiated last term), and it’d only made sense.

I’d shown up to the train station in style that morning: a brown leather jacket, black shades, and a new pair of cowboy boots to mark the occasion. Sofia had picked most of it out for me. It’d been a gift after I’d taken her on a few rides. She’d said something about how my old jeans and fleece didn’t compliment what I’d put together. And I hated to admit it, I felt different on that bike dressing like someone who could handle it.

Waiting for Birdie, I wondered what to expect from someone who hadn’t seen in what felt like a lifetime ago. Last we'd seen one another, I’d just started my second term, and Pierre had still been in office.

It’d taken too long for us to find one another again. Even if there’d been letters or phone calls, I don’t know whether I could say I’d done enough to keep in touch. It hadn’t been enough to think about her. I should’ve gone to eight and seen her.

When the train came through the station, I flipped up my sunglasses atop my head and sat back against El Tigre with a grin.

All I could think about was Birdie stepping off that train and how I’d get to see her again.

Not what we hadn’t done, or what I should’ve done, but that here was someone I could only call a friend.

If she’d ever chosen to change this world, I believed she might have been the only one capable of doing so, and somehow, she’d chosen me as worthy of an ounce of her time.

“Birdie Hope!” I called out and up the stairs to the double doors where passengers spilled out from the station. I motioned my arms from myself to the motorcycle at my side. “Your ride is here!”

elegant

[goat]

out of the ash
i rise with my red hair   
and i eat men like air.
- sylvia plath, lady lazarus


The fact of the matter was that age and time had not made Birdie a nicer woman. If anything, she figured she’d be just like her mother in no time, bitchy and sharp, impatient, insufferable. She locked her tongue behind pursed lips, rolled her blunt remarks into the back of her head. She was a mother again, after all, and if she didn’t behave, someone would certainly make note of it. There were always people watching her, whether it was her family, people in town who liked to peel the scabs off her psychotic stints, or her daughter, who didn’t seem to like her very much at all.

It wasn’t either of their faults. Birdie didn’t know how to make herself likable, and her daughter didn’t want to wait for her to figure that out. It was easier with Damaris, who never quite knew who she was or what she wanted, but she tried not to think about her first daughter, her dead daughter, because all it did was remind her that she was raising another lamb for slaughter.

She wondered if she was being dramatic, or if she was just annoyed she got caught smoking in the train bathroom. When she handed the Peacekeeper her lighter, she imagined cutting him open from belly to chin with one of the butter knives from the dining car. Now, that was dramatic. Hysterical, even. She’d become better at controlling her impulsive thoughts, the ones with teeth, the ones that scared her, but thoughts like that, the ones of enacting violence against those who had taken so much from her, they didn’t feel particularly wrong. They just felt like thoughts.

In the District Eleven train station, she bought another lighter, square and silver, and shoved it into her pocket as she went outside. It was brighter here than in Eight, same as it ever was. She could only imagine the laughable sunburn she’d return with. Once her eyes adjusted to the golden morning, she could see the outline of her friend at the bottom of the stairs.

Her life had become so strange in the past eleven years. Even stranger to think that over a decade had passed everything. The vague everything. The hand gesture when a friend of a friend asks how the black sheep has been. Either way. Here she was now, on the far end of it, down one child, married, on shockingly good terms with her brother, and with enough government contacts to count on two hands. Some of those were means to an end, an end she wasn’t quite sure of yet, but Vasco was her friend. He’d been kind to her.

She wondered if she’d ever reach the far end of that kindness.

“Vasco,” she said, mouth twisting in a crooked grin. “You look old.”

She barked out a laugh as she descended the short stairs, arms crossed over her chest. She didn’t know anyone else who would meet her like this, so garish and proud, complete with a skeletal vehicle that he probably expected her to get on. Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t. She hadn’t decided how she was feeling yet.

She stepped around the side of the bike and nudged the hubcap with the toe of her boot. “Is this legal?” she asked, as if she cared.

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

v a s c o 


Take the parts of me you thought were pure
Tear 'em up, then tear 'em even more
Drown 'em till they all disintegrate
Do you see the point I'm tryna make?

I let out a little laugh when she teased at me getting old. Seemed to be the first thing that anyone noticed about me nowadays. Gray hair poked out from the scruff on my cheeks to go along with the wrinkles that had settled atop my forehead.

Time had been far kinder to Birdie Hope, though part of me imagined it had to do with her determination rather than whatever the years had brought her. Birdie would simply tell time to ‘fuck off’ and the rest of the world would march on. Gravity could not conspire to weigh her down like the rest of us, after all.

So it was, I’d let time lead. My grandmother Marisol had always accepted each year better than the last, and I’d favored that approach. Somehow, hope could not live without it, whether looking back at where we had been to where we were going. Change only came if we were willing to chance it. I’d favor a few laughter lines if it meant we could get to peace.

“Birdie, it’s good to see you,” I leaned forward off my bike to grasp at her hand in mine and leaned in to kiss each of her cheeks. I turned back toward El Tigre and rubbed my palms together with a grin. “It's something isn’t it? I used to have one of these when I was a teenager, but they outlawed them. I mean, I kept riding it – back then it was just about not getting caught. But it got too hard to get gas or parts, so I stopped.”

I put a hand along the leather seat and stared down at my reflection in the chrome. We had been what? Sixteen, seventeen when they’d laid out a series of proclamations outlawing motorbikes? They blamed a stint of robberies that’d culminated in a standoff at one of the checkpoints they set up on the road leading toward the mountains, but it’d felt less a means of containing crime than retribution.

Our childhood photos had always been a mixture of barbed wire and smiles; we’d learned to drown out the sound of sirens or the sight of peacekeepers and their assault rifles.

I stared into the handlebar mirror and brushed back a flyaway hair.

“I got tired of having to ride a horse into town or take the bus.” I decided to tell the truth rather than the politicking – this had been as much of a commonsense decision as it was one that I’d wanted for myself. “So, I said that the laws were old fashioned and that we were done with them.” The capitol was either too busy to care (or too excited that Eleven had put in for set of factories to manufacture automobiles) that there hadn’t been a fuss when we’d struck the laws down.

I stepped over onto the seat and sat forward to make space for her. The sunflower pin on the lapel of my jacket caught the sun as I turned back to face her.

“I mean, if you'd like, we could walk or catch a bus back but our farm’s a few towns over.” I said with a grin. There were still too few autos on the roads that we’d have the run of the open road, too. “Besides, you should feel what it’s like when this thing starts to move.”

elegant

[goat]

Birdie chuckled as Vasco described his teenage years. She didn’t know how to drive. She didn’t think the citizens in District Eight had ever been allowed to own vehicles. The Peacekeepers could, of course, never subject to the laws they had to enforce, and they did, rolling their square trucks down the main roads with no care for the pedestrians who had to jump out of the way. When she was a teenager, she often had the urge to shove her pocketknife into one of their tires. She never did, but she never quite outgrew it either.

“So, I said that the laws were old fashioned and that we were done with them.”

“Tell me about it,” Birdie said. She’d never been one to respect authority. When Damaris was alive, she tried to mellow out and be a good girl, a good influence, but she was dead now, so it didn’t matter. She’d given up hope on being a woman someone could look at and be proud of. And who would be? Proud of her, she meant. Maybe her husband, but she didn’t have to do much to impress him. He was like a dog at her heels. That was how she liked it. “There are quite a few laws I’d like to wash my hands of. But I don’t have that kind of power. Yet.”

She punctuated her sentence with a harsh laugh and a smile. It was a joke, or it was supposed to seem like one. She’d been truthful in saying she didn’t have power. She wanted it, though, or maybe she just wanted control, but the two may as well have been the same. She didn’t know. What she did know was that no one could agree on the best way to gain power. Violence or respect, working within the government or submitting to lawlessness.

Birdie wasn’t old, but she’d been around for a while. She knew which ways worked and which made you a joke.

Vasco got onto the motorcycle and looked back at her. She blew out a sigh, throwing her hands up as a feigned surrender. “Fine, fine. You win. You’re a funny guy, Vasco.”

She swung her leg over the open part of the seat and sat as far back as possible. What was trying something new without a little risk?

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

v a s c o 


Take the parts of me you thought were pure
Tear 'em up, then tear 'em even more
Drown 'em till they all disintegrate
Do you see the point I'm tryna make?

“Birdie Hope in charge, that’s an interesting proposition,” I couldn’t help but grin thinking about it. Not because I’d ever wish for her to have to endure all the tortured decisions I had, but that maybe someone like Birdie was just what this world needed. Someone who’d think less about who would feel what, or how the littlest ripple could topple something that’d never been anticipated; she’d the soul to strike without fear, and without need to please anyone but herself.

I wouldn’t have thought about selfishness as a virtue – but that’s wrong, it’s not selfishness.

(That’s just how I’ve thought about it all these years, huh?)

Somewhere between Raquel’s death and my third term, I’d come to believe that the only way forward was if I could get through unharmed. That even when my body had been broken in Sampson’s riot, I’d been more worried about all the people who’d been in the front row. Who had he hurt? What did it mean when the fires burned and everything went to hell, again, because someone had been so cruel? And, when Snow had died, that I’d forged an alliance out of hope that the gossamer webs that connected our districts could hold strong, that we could find a way forward because it was the right thing to do.

She turned the thought of riding along the piece of junk I’ve assembled and agreed. I wouldn’t have thought her one to be afraid, though I’m not sure how much I would’ve trusted most had only ever seen in the hands of the peacekeepers before.

“Okay, now, hold on, you can grab my hips if you’d like – I promise I don’t mind,” I spoke as I leaned forward and kicked the stand back. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a pair of goggles. “You might want to wear these, helps with the bugs!”

A roar sounded from the engine, one that sputtered and coughed across the road. It echoed loud enough that a peacekeeper poked their head out from the station to get a load of the racket my bike was making.

“Here we go!” I grasped the handlebars tight and gave a twist to rev the engine as we started across the street. Each divot in the road sent us back and forth, but I held tight. We picked up speed as we started out of town.

As the speedometer climbed, the red arrow turning past forty, I let out a laugh. The old, cracked road underneath us stretched out toward the horizon, curving, and turning along fields tangled with corn and wheat. The air drew my jacket back behind me, and my hair whipped with every cross breeze.

“AND THEY WANTED TO KEEP THIS FROM US!” I shouted over the engine’s crowing, “NOT ANYMORE! HEEYAH!”

We rolled past sixty miles per hour. The yellow stalks of wheat blurred together and telephone wire spiraled overhead. My heart beat up into my ears but not from the fear. Just that even if I had lost this so many years ago, I’d come back around again – nothing had been lost forever, so long as I’d been willing to take what I’d wanted. Something that I’d wanted more than anything, small as it was. But we deserved that, didn’t we? A little happiness.

elegant

[goat]

Birdie smirked. “Maybe not in charge. I’d just like to be able to make sure no one else is in charge again.”

Or something like that. It sounded silly when she said it, like a plotting child who hadn’t quite figured out how to get what they wanted yet. She didn’t even know what she wanted. Revenge? Revenge was impossible. Revenge was for the upper class, the people who had people to crush in their fists. She tried to remind herself that she’d never have that kind of power, because that was the smart thing to do, the rational, adult thing to do, but she was always pulled back by her need for it.

What could she do with that type of power? Not the type of power her brother once had, the type that kept you on a leash, tethered to laws etched nearly a hundred years ago, but the type of power that ensured nobody else could have it again. She could do a lot of things with that.

“Okay, now, hold on, you can grab my hips if you’d like – I promise I don’t mind.”

“Vasco, I can’t keep pissing off your wife. She’s a lovely woman and I’d like it if she didn’t want me dead.” When he handed her the goggles, Birdie realized there was no getting out of it. The engine jolted to life then, bubbling like its throat had been cut, and she shoved them on as quick as she could. The straps cut into her head, but there was no time to dwell on the thin pain as they took off from the train station valley.

She wondered, childishly, if she had a big head.

One of her arms was looped around Vasco’s shoulders as they sped through the open plains of District 11. She used the other to shield her face from the sun, golden, itching for a sunburn. This place really was beautiful. How unfair, she thought, to build electric fences around it, though she supposed it would be unfair to do that anywhere, even in Eight, with its concrete buildings and its eternal smog.

Vasco yelled over the engine, triumphant. It made her laugh. Vasco was a man who could find good in almost everything thrown at him, even if he didn’t want to. She envied that. She was always looking for the worst in everything. Even now, she hated the smell of gasoline, and the way the engine shook under her, and the way the sun shone in her eyes. She was such a miserable person, and she didn’t know how to change it. Some days, she didn’t even know if she wanted to.

“My kid would love this,” she shouted into her friend’s ear. “She’s a little psycho. Like mother, like daughter, right?”

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

v a s c o 


Take the parts of me you thought were pure
Tear 'em up, then tear 'em even more
Drown 'em till they all disintegrate
Do you see the point I'm tryna make?

“She’s more than welcome to spend some time here, if you could stand it!”

I cocked my head to reply, quick to lean forward again and keep my eyes on the road. We’d set about a restoration of each of the cracks and potholes but that was slow going. For those of us who lived more than a stone’s throw from the district center, we were used to all the veins and arteries popping out along the skin of these ancient roads. Long bus rides out to the field came with muscle memory of where to lean when we rolled over a particularly vicious cavity between the asphalt and the earth.

I tried not to dwell on what had come before – not the comment about my wife, since Emma had been unfazed even with all the phone calls and letters – but the fact that she’d rather no one have been leading us at all, ever again. No one else in Panem had me think for a second they could ever make that happen, somehow. Not Pierre, her brother. Not the would-be fascists of One and Two. Maybe not even the council that had hardly stoked division and malice as much as Snow ever had.

Yet Birdie Hope had an undeniable potential that society mismeasured and an ambition that had until now, been tucked free from the light of day.

Or maybe it was just me projecting on my old friend.

I couldn’t help but see someone who’d come out the other side having always known exactly who she was, even if that may not have been who she’d ever been.

The engine dulled to a hum as I drew on the breaks. For a moment, I listened to the engine ping as we sit between a fork leading out toward the mountains, and another through a patch of overgrown fields with crumbling shells of foundations. A sign had been erected to remember the space, with bold yellow letter and a navy background. One that reflected the sun and demanded attention.

“You know, there used to be a whole town here?” I shouted back through the spray of dust and exhaust. “They burned it down after the first games. Not because of rebellion or a riot. But because they couldn’t stand how well the people had been doing there. Said they weren’t part of the district, that they weren’t enough.”

I nudged my foot back and leaned forward to get the motor running again. We chased after the farms poking out the horizon and I kept my hands tight on the handlebars. Another few minutes we’d be pulling off onto the farm, and we could finally let our words do more than drift.

elegant