Our Club Rode Into A Hostage Call Before Cops Did

Our club rode into a hostage call before cops did and now we’re being arrested.

Eleven of us bikers, every one of us over sixty, were on a charity ride through Pike County when it happened. Before that day was over, I was sitting in the back of a state trooper’s car with my wrists zip-tied behind me, and I want you to know how we got there.

About four in the afternoon, a woman came running barefoot out of a cornfield onto Route 9. She was waving both arms and bleeding from her lip.

We pulled over in the gravel. She grabbed the front of my vest and could barely get the words out.

“He’s got my girls,” she said. “He’s got a shotgun and he says he’ll do it this time.”

Her daughters were 6 and 9. They were still inside the farmhouse at the end of that dirt road.

Our road captain, Dale, called 911. The dispatcher told him the nearest deputy was 38 minutes out and to stay back and wait.

Thirty-eight minutes. We could hear a little girl screaming all the way from the road.

Our president, Big Earl, was 68 with a bad heart and a steel plate in his hip. He was already walking up that dirt road before any of us could stop him.

He told us to stay put. He said he knew how to talk to angry men because he used to be one.

Nobody stayed put. Ten old bikers followed him up that road on foot.

When we reached the porch, the screen door was hanging open. A man stood in the kitchen with a shotgun pointed at two little girls huddled under the table.

Earl stopped dead in the doorway. I’d ridden with him for 26 years and had never once seen his hands shake.

They were shaking now.

He took one step into that kitchen and said the man’s name like he’d said it a thousand times before.

“Danny,” he said, and his voice cracked. “Danny, put it down. It’s me. It’s your dad.”

Earl Whitlock had been our president longer than some of us had been riding. I’d followed him through a snowstorm in Wyoming and stood next to him at nine funerals, and I would have sworn on my life the man didn’t have a single living relative.

The man in the kitchen swung the shotgun away from the table and pointed it straight at Earl’s chest.

“You don’t get to be here,” he said. “You don’t get to walk in my house.”

He was close to forty, thick through the shoulders like Earl, with the same heavy brow. I could smell the whiskey on him from the doorway. An empty bottle sat on the counter next to a pink lunchbox and a layoff notice from the paper mill.

Earl didn’t back up. He raised both hands where Danny could see them, and the faded eagle tattoo on his right forearm stretched as he did it.

“You’re right,” Earl said. “I don’t. But I’m here, son, and I’m not leaving till you put that down.”

Behind me on the porch, I could hear Dale breathing hard and somebody whispering the Lord’s Prayer. The little one under the table had gone quiet, and that scared me worse than the screaming had.

“How?” Danny said, and his voice broke right in the middle of the word. “How are you even standing in my kitchen?”

“I’ll tell you after,” Earl said. “Put it down first.”

“Thirty years, and you show up today? Today?”

“I know.”

“You don’t know nothing!” Danny jabbed the barrel toward him. “You don’t know what it was like!”

Earl started lowering himself to the floor. With that steel plate in his hip, I’d watched him take two full minutes just to climb off his bike at a rest stop. He got down on one knee on that linoleum anyway, right between the shotgun and the table where those two little girls were hiding.

“I know exactly what it was like,” Earl said quietly. “You were eight. You were under a table just like that one.”

Danny’s face changed.

Then Earl told the story, right there in front of all of us. I’d never heard a word of it. I don’t think anybody alive had.

Thirty years ago, Earl came home from the bar on a Friday night and found his wife packing a suitcase. He took his deer rifle down off the rack in the kitchen and said things to her no man should ever say. He never fired it. But a little boy hid under the kitchen table with his hands over his ears, watching his daddy’s work boots go back and forth across the floor for most of an hour.

“Your mama took you to your grandma’s the next morning,” Earl said. “I never lived under a roof with you again. I got sober two years later, and by then you wouldn’t even come to the phone. I don’t blame you. I’d have hung up on me too.”

The shotgun was shaking now.

“You remember what it felt like under there,” Earl said. “Your girls are going to remember this for the rest of their lives, Danny. Every second of it. Unless you stop right now. Then maybe the part they remember is the part where their daddy stopped.”

Danny’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

“You did this to me,” he finally whispered.

“I did,” Earl said. “So if you need to point that thing at somebody, point it at me. I earned it. They didn’t.”

Danny took one step forward and pressed the end of the barrel flat against Earl’s chest, right over the patch on his vest.

I spent thirty-one years climbing power poles, a lot of them in ice storms with seven thousand volts humming a foot from my ear. I have never been as scared as I was watching that barrel touch Earl’s vest.

Then a small voice came from under the table.

“Daddy?”

The older girl had crawled halfway out. She had a scraped knee and red hair like her mother, and she was staring straight at Earl.

“Daddy, that’s the man from your truck,” she said. “The picture in the visor. He’s got the same bird on his arm.”

Nobody in that kitchen breathed.

Danny looked down at his daughter. Then he looked at his father kneeling on the floor in front of him, and his whole face folded in on itself.

Earl reached up slowly and wrapped his hand around the barrel. He pushed it toward the ceiling, and Danny let go.

Earl held the shotgun out behind him without turning around. “Hank,” he said. “Unload this.”

I took it. My hands were shaking so bad I dropped the first shell on the floor. Two shells, and both of them live.

Danny slid down the front of the refrigerator until he was sitting on the floor, and he started sobbing like a little kid. Earl dragged himself over on that bad hip, pulled his son’s head against his chest, and held on.

The older girl grabbed her little sister’s hand and ran past us out the screen door. I heard their mother scream their names from the yard, and then she just screamed, with no words in it at all.

That’s when we heard the sirens.

Two state troopers and a county deputy came flying up that dirt road with their lights going. What they saw was a yard full of old men in leather, a woman on her knees in the grass screaming, and me standing in the kitchen doorway holding a shotgun.

I’ve thought about it a lot since. I’d have drawn on me too.

“Drop it! Drop the weapon! On the ground, now!”

I laid the shotgun on the porch boards with the two shells beside it and got down on my belly. So did everybody else. Eleven bikers lay face down in the dirt with our hands behind our heads while a young trooper went down the line with zip ties.

Jenna, the girls’ mother, kept screaming that we’d saved her babies. The trooper kept saying, “Ma’am, we’ll sort it out, step back, ma’am.” He wasn’t being cruel. He had driven up on a mess he didn’t understand, and in his line of work you cuff first and ask later.

They put Danny in the back of one cruiser and me in another. Earl they sat on the porch steps with his hands tied behind him, because they’d run out of room in the cars.

So that’s how I ended up in the back of a trooper’s car with my wrists zip-tied, watching my president through the window.

Which is how I saw Earl’s face go gray.

Sweat was running down his forehead even though the air had turned cool. His chin dropped to his chest. Then he tipped sideways off the step and hit the gravel, and he couldn’t put his hands out to catch himself because they were tied behind his back.

I started kicking the door and hollering. The young trooper ran over, saw Earl, and sliced his zip tie with a knife off his belt. Earl wasn’t breathing.

“I know CPR!” I yelled. “Thirty-one years at the power company! Let me out!”

He looked at me for one second. Then he yanked my door open and cut me loose.

I got down in the gravel and started pushing on Earl’s chest. I counted out loud the way they drilled us every year at the co-op, and I felt something in his ribs give under my hands and kept going anyway.

From the other cruiser, I heard Danny. He was throwing his shoulder into the door so hard the whole car rocked on its springs.

“That’s my dad!” he screamed. “That’s my dad! Let me out! Dad! DAD!”

Thirty years, and that was the first time he’d called him that.

I did compressions for eleven minutes until the ambulance got there. The paramedics shocked Earl twice right there in the gravel. On the second one, his heart caught.

They put the zip ties back on me after the ambulance pulled away. I didn’t argue.

The other ten of us spent that night in the Pike County jail. Sheriff Boyd came down to the holding cell himself the next morning and told us we were lucky nobody got killed, and that he was looking at charges for obstruction and interfering with an emergency call.

Dale asked him real polite if he’d listened to the 911 recording yet. The one where Dale told dispatch a man was threatening two little girls with a shotgun, and dispatch told him to wait thirty-eight minutes.

The sheriff didn’t answer that.

The prosecutor dropped every charge eight days later. Jenna gave a statement. So did her nine-year-old, Maddie, to a child counselor, and from what I heard she told it plainer than any of us could have. We each paid $185 to get our bikes out of the impound lot where they’d been towed off the shoulder of Route 9.

Best money I ever spent.

Earl came through a triple bypass. When they finally let me in to see him, he looked twenty years older and about half his size in that hospital bed.

“Hank,” he said. “You ever wonder why we always take Route 9?”

I had, and so had everybody else. Route 9 is forty miles of potholes and cornfields with no diner anywhere on it. Every year somebody would complain, and every year Earl would say the charity ride goes down Route 9 and that’s the end of it.

Nine years ago, Danny’s mother passed away. Earl read her obituary in the paper. It said she was survived by a son, Daniel Whitlock of Pike County.

Earl found the farmhouse that same week. He never knocked on the door. He just planned our September ride down Route 9 and rode past it slow, once a year, for nine years.

I remembered then how Earl always eased off the throttle around one particular curve out there. We all figured it was his hip.

“Every year I told myself next year,” Earl said. “Next year I’ll stop. Next year I’ll be brave enough.”

He turned his face toward the window.

“I didn’t even know about the girls, Hank,” he said, and his chin started to shake. “I’ve got granddaughters.”

Danny pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and child endangerment. The judge gave him four years, with a chance at parole after two if he finished the prison’s treatment program.

Earl visited him every Sunday, a 140-mile round trip, and he made that drive 102 times. He only missed two Sundays, and both times he was back in the hospital himself.

I rode along with him once, about a year in. I sat two tables over in the visiting room and pretended to read a fishing magazine.

They didn’t talk much. They played gin rummy on a scratched-up plastic table, and Earl cheated the same way he always cheated at our clubhouse. Danny caught him at it and laughed out loud.

That was all. Two grown men playing cards.

On the drive home, Earl didn’t say a word for sixty miles. Then at a stop sign, he turned to me with his eyes full and said, “He laughed, Hank. Did you hear him laugh?”

I told him I heard.

Jenna wanted nothing to do with any Whitlock at first, and nobody could blame her for it. So Earl didn’t push. He drove out one Saturday, fixed the busted step on her porch without knocking, and left. A few weeks later he cleaned out her gutters. The third time he showed up, Jenna came out with two cups of coffee and sat down on the step he’d fixed.

By that Christmas, the girls had a grandpa. Lily, the six-year-old, called him Grandpa Bear because of his beard. He taught Maddie how to check tire pressure and change a spark plug, and she bragged about it to the whole fourth grade.

Earl hung a calendar on his refrigerator with Danny’s release date circled in red. Every night before bed, he crossed off another day with a black marker.

He died in his recliner on a Tuesday in March, nineteen days before that red circle.

I’m the one who found the calendar when we cleaned out his house. Every box was crossed off right up to the Monday before. Then nineteen clean white squares, and the red circle.

I sat down on his kitchen floor and cried like I hadn’t since I was a boy.

We buried him with his club vest on. Lily tucked a crayon drawing into the casket of a big brown bear riding a motorcycle, and Maddie set a spark plug in his hand.

The prison wouldn’t let Danny out for the funeral. The chaplain set up a laptop in his office so Danny could watch, and I’ve been told he sat there alone with his hand over his mouth through every minute of it.

Earl’s will was one page long. He left almost everything to the girls. He left his 1998 Road King to Danny, along with a sealed envelope.

Nineteen days later, the whole club rode up to the prison gate. I rode Earl’s bike there myself, planning to ride home on the back of Dale’s.

When Danny walked out with his paper bag of belongings, he saw that Road King and stopped walking. I put the keys in his hand, and then I gave him the envelope.

He read it twice. Then he handed it to me. I think he needed somebody else to read it so he’d know it was real.

“Danny,

If Hank is handing you this, I didn’t make it to the gate. I’m sorry. I was late for most of your life, and I guess I was late for this too.

The bike is yours. The title is in the saddlebag. Don’t ride it drunk, and don’t ride it angry.

Ride it slow past your girls every chance you get, until they get tired of waving.

I’m proud of you. I should have told you that thirty years ago.

Dad”

Danny hadn’t been on a motorcycle since he was a kid. He rode Earl’s bike home at about thirty-five miles an hour the whole way, with the whole club stacked up behind him, and not one of us minded.

That September, we rode Route 9 again. Dale gave Danny Earl’s spot at the front of the pack.

Danny lives in an apartment in town now. He works at a tire shop and goes to a meeting four nights a week. Jenna lets him see the girls on Saturdays, and she’s the one who decides how much, which is exactly how it should be.

When we came around that curve, Jenna and both girls were standing out by the mailbox. They were holding up a poster board in purple marker that said GRANDPA BEAR’S RIDE.

Earl rode past that mailbox slow for nine years and never once stopped.

Danny stopped.

He pulled over in the gravel, and the rest of us pulled over behind him. Lily ran straight to him and asked if she could sit on Grandpa Bear’s motorcycle.

Danny looked at Jenna. Jenna nodded.

He lifted that little girl up and set her on the gas tank in front of him, and she wrapped both hands around the handlebars and grinned.

Then he handed me his phone and asked me to take a picture.

I knew which picture he was thinking about. Maddie had told me about it. A faded snapshot of a young Earl Whitlock on his first Harley, that same eagle on his forearm, with a five-year-old boy sitting on the gas tank in front of him and both of them squinting into the sun.

Danny kept that picture in the visor of his truck for thirty years, through all of it. He never once called his father. But he never threw that picture away, either.

I took the new one. It’s tucked up in that same visor now, right next to the old one.

People still ask me if it was worth it. The zip ties, the gravel in my face, the night in county, the threat of charges.

We rode into a hostage call before the cops did, and they arrested us for it. I’d walk up that dirt road again tomorrow.

Earl said he knew how to talk to angry men because he used to be one. He never told us he’d spent nine years riding past one, too scared to stop.

Every September now, our whole club slows down at that mailbox on Route 9. Nobody has to tell us anymore.

And every year, two little girls are standing there waving.