Hard Ride Home (Tiger Snakes Motorcycle Club) by Tamara Knowles

 
    HARD RIDE HOME
     
    Ronald Pilua glanced at the speedometer on his Honda ST1300 and throttled it back to the 35 mph speed limit. At that rate, with the factory mufflers in place, the bike’s powerful motor was nearly silent. He grinned at the shocked expressions from some of the people on the sidewalks as he passed by. The bike looked like a cop bike, and basically it was—even down to the black and white color. But the clean look and crisp lines of the ST contrasted greatly with Ron’s ragged jeans and thick, slightly dirty, white T-shirt. Even those, however, looked new compared to the ratty black denim vest which covered the shirt.
     
    On the front of the vest were two columns of year dates, beginning with the year Ron graduated from high school. There were five in the first column and four in the second. The last year was eight years ago—the same year that Ron sped out of town on the very same highway. That day he wasn’t riding a cop bike, he wasn’t doing the speed limit, and the back of his vest wasn’t blank.
     
    Back then, he was on a fully-chopped Harley with high handlebars and no mufflers. The back of his vest had sported a coiled snake with a tiger’s head. Above it, the rocker patch read “Tiger Snakes.” Below it, another patch read Melbourne, Nevada. Now all that remained on his back were the outlines of the patches and a small white square with the letters, “MC.”
     
    Eight years ago, the front of the vest also displayed a Vice-President’s patch. That, too, was now gone. Several other areas on the front showed evidence of patches that had once proclaimed Ron’s position in, and allegiance to, the Tiger Snakes Motorcycle Club.
     
    The Tiger Snakes were an unlikely combination of young men from the wrong side of the tracks. The original club banded together while Ron was in high school because no one else in the small, rural town of Melbourne would have them… and because they shared a love of motorcycles and the MC lifestyle. Because the town’s name was Melbourne, they chose a Tiger Snake from Australia as their emblem. The original emblem was a true tiger snake, but the members soon got tired of explaining to people that it wasn’t a badly drawn rattler and put a tiger’s head on it.
     
    When you are on the wrong end of society’s stick, it’s easy to be consumed with a bitterness against those who are more affluent or more accepted or more… whatever. It was not surprising, therefore, that the Snakes were outlaw from the very beginning. One of the first patches on the front of Ron’s vest was the “1%,” which he wore over his heart. True or not, the legend was that almost 70 years ago, the American Motorcycle Association disavowed what it called “outlaw motorcycle clubs” by saying that 99% of motorcyclists were law-abiding members of society. The Snakes proudly claimed being a part of that remaining 1%.
     
    In the beginning, the 1% was the only patch that bothered Ron. His mother, Mary Johanson, was a local, born and raised in Melbourne. Her family had turned against her when she fell in love with Ramanan Pilua, a young man from India, whose family had come to town to run the local 7-Eleven. Ram and Mary gave their son the anglicized version of his name, and Ronald Pilua grew up living behind the store and working behind the counter.
     
    As soon as he graduated from high school Ron got a job as a construction worker and almost immediately moved out into his own apartment. It was shortly thereafter when the Snakes began moving further and further into that 1% of motorcycle clubs who were beyond the law.
     
    Ron was one of the few in the club who actually held an outside job. Perhaps that was because his mother’s family had helped him get in on a friend’s construction company. In a rural area, who you are related to is often more important than your overall qualifications when it comes to finding employment.
     
    Ron had a knack for building that was phenomenal,