EPISODE 5 — The Drifting Years
Between Miller’s Curve and Harlan’s Diner, there were twenty years of road.
Tank rode them all. Coast to coast, border to border. He’d take work where he found it — construction, wrenching, bouncing. He never stayed anywhere longer than a season. Staying meant quiet. Quiet meant Buddy.
The club found him in Arizona, or he found them — it was the same thing. Men with their own holes in their chests, their own noise. Spider had been a medic who couldn’t save his best friend. Preacher had buried a daughter. They recognized each other the way stray dogs do — by the smell of the same wound.
They never talked about it. That was the rule, unspoken but iron. You rode, you drank, you laughed loud, and you never, ever said the true thing.
Tank was good at the rule. He was the loudest. The biggest. The one the prospects feared and the brothers leaned on. When a young brother got the shakes after his first bad night, it was Tank who sat with him till dawn — never saying why he knew how.
“You ever think about getting a dog?” Spider asked once, years in, watching a stray sniff around the clubhouse.
Tank’s face closed like a steel door. “No.”
Spider never asked again.
But that night, Tank rode out alone to the desert, killed the engine, and sat in the dark until sunrise. And if anyone had been there to hear it, they’d have heard a three-hundred-pound biker whisper one word into the quiet:
“Buddy.”
