Page 68 of Diesel's Perseverance
Diesel opened the SUV’s door and helped Myla out of the cage. She glanced around, green eyes growing wide.
“I didn’t expect it to be so crowded,” she said.
“Bikers love anything to do with motorcycles. The more popular events can bring in hundreds of thousands of people.”
“Like Sturgis?”
He smiled. “You know about Sturgis?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not totally clueless when it comes to motorcycle things.” She plopped a wide-brim black straw hat on her head.
“You look cute,” he said, tweaking the tip of her nose.
“And you look badass. You’re in full biker gear.”
“I’m at a fuckin’ rally, woman.” He teased.
Myla ran her fingers over a few patches on his cut. “What do these mean?”
“Stuff.”
“I knowthat, but what kind of ‘stuff’?” She tapped a diamond-shaped patch, the number 13 embroidered in red.
“It stands for marijuana, or it could be methamphetamine.”
“Wow, I never would’ve guessed that.”
“The number is chosen from the thirteenth letter of the alphabet—M. There’s logic in that, right?”
“It makes sense when you know it’s based on letters in the alphabet. Do you do that with most of the letters?”
“Nah, just some of them. Like this one”—he pointed to a round patch with the number 9 in cobalt blue—“means Insurgents becauseIis the—”
“Ninth letter of the alphabet,” she said, finishing his sentence. “I get it. It’s kind of like a code or something.”
“Maybe to citizens but not to outlaws.”
“And this one?” Myla ran a red fingernail over a black square patch in the middle of the left side of his cut. The initialsFTWstood out in white stitching.
“‘Fuck the World.’ This one stems back to the soldiers in the Vietnam War. You know, after they put their lives on the line, they were treated like pure shit when they returned home. I mean, no support, respect, gratitude—nothing. So they createdFTWas an acronym for how they felt about the American public. The vets could only rely on each other because they all went through the same shit during the war and back home. Many Vietnam vets joined motorcycle clubs, which gave them a sense of brotherhood again.”
“I can see that. So wearing it is honoring those veterans who served in the war?”
“In a way. I mean, we remember their story and salute them and all veterans who risk their lives whether a war is popular or not. But the FTW patch has been adopted by the biker community as a whole. It shows our contempt for mainstream ‘society,’ you know, the citizens’ world. Fuck them.”
“I’m a ‘citizen,’” she said.
“You’re not mainstream. Anyway, some citizen chicks are all right.”
“Good to know that I’m ‘all right.’ Now I can finally quit worrying aboutthat.” A smile twitched on Myla’s lips.
“Smartass,” he said, loving how her eyes sparkled when she teased him. He took her hand and walked toward the event.
The areas open to motorcycle traffic were an ocean of multicolored bikes and a wave of men wearing denim and leather for the most part. A lot of the women’s attire was leather and denim, too, but just a whole lot skimpier.
“I think I’m wearing too many clothes,” Myla said as her gaze fixed on a woman in Daisy Duke denim shorts that left little to the imagination.
Diesel laughed and lightly squeezed her hand.
