The two scariest-looking men in our entire suburb of Spokane, Washington stood on the sidewalk in front of my granddaughter's house at 7:42 every weekday morning for six months, and the only person on our entire block who wasn't terrified of them was the five-year-old girl who came running out the front door at 7:43 with her glittery purple backpack bouncing against her tiny shoulders. She would shriek their names. She would run full speed across the lawn in her pink Velcro sneakers. She would slam herself into the bigger one's leg like a small purple-and-glitter missile. The bigger one's road name was Boomer. Six-foot-four, two hundred and ninety pounds, completely shaved scalp, full salt-and-pepper beard down to his sternum, both arms covered in dense black-and-grey ink, faded military tattoo on the side of his neck — USMC, three black hash-marks for tours. The smaller one was named Diesel. Six-foot-one, mid-forties, sleeves of color tattoos, a thick chain wallet, the kind of laugh you could hear from two blocks over. Both of them, every single morning, wore worn black leather cuts with patches that said BIKERS AGAINST CHILD ABUSE — SPOKANE CHAPTER. That's a real organization. Look it up. They are not actors. They are not a costume. They are men and women who have decided, with their own time and their own money and their own bikes, to stand between children and the people who hurt them. My granddaughter — I'll call her Sadie, because that is not her name and at five years old she has earned every shred of privacy I can give her — was assigned a BACA escort in February of last year. The reason for that assignment is something I will not describe in detail here. It is enough to say that her biological father had done things that put him in handcuffs, that the case was pending, that he had been released on bond pending trial, and that he had — for reasons the prosecutor's office is still trying to explain — been allowed to rent a small house exactly three blocks from Sadie's elementary school. Three blocks. Walking distance. The man who had hurt her was allowed by the State of Washington to live three blocks from where she was supposed to spend kindergarten learning her alphabet. So my daughter Megan called BACA. And Boomer and Diesel started showing up at our front sidewalk at 7:42 a.m. Two Harleys would pull up. The engines would shut off — that low rolling thunder, then sudden silence. Boomer would stand on the left side of the walkway. Diesel would stand on the right. They would not knock. They would not ring the bell. They would just be there, arms folded, boots planted, two enormous black-leather walls between Sadie's front door and the rest of the world. Sadie would come out at 7:43 with her hair in two crooked pigtails (Megan, like me, has never been good at hair) and a Pop-Tart in her hand, and her whole face would light up. She'd ride to school on the back of Boomer's Harley, gripping his cut with both hands, her purple bicycle helmet too big for her head, her tiny pink Velcro sneakers swinging six inches off the floorboards. They'd park at the school. They'd walk her to her classroom door. They'd nod at her teacher. They'd leave. Two more bikers — different ones, sometimes Tank and Razor, sometimes Smiley and Bear — would be there at 2:55 to bring her home. Six months. Every single school day. Without fail. Until last Wednesday at 7:48 a.m., when Sadie walked out the front door and there were no Harleys. What happened in the eleven minutes after that — and what came around the corner of Maple Avenue at 7:53 — is the reason I am writing this at one in the morning, and the reason I will be donating to BACA every month until the day I die. What none of us knew until Boomer sat down on our porch step that afternoon with a cup of cold coffee in his shaking enormous hand was that on the other side of our block, two streets over, a man had been watching from behind a parked car for six months. And he had been waiting for exactly the kind of morning that almost happened. 👇 I can't post the rest here — Facebook keeps cutting it off. If you want to know what came around the corner, what the president said when he picked Sadie up, and what her father did when he saw what she saw, just comment "BACA" below. I'll send the full story your way.

 

The first time I met Boomer, he was sitting on my front porch step at four in the afternoon with a cup of coffee I’d handed him, looking at the floorboards instead of at me.

It was the day Sadie was officially “patched in” — that’s the BACA term for it. The day a child becomes a sister of the chapter. The day they bring her, with her parents, to their clubhouse, give her a small leather vest of her own with the BACA patch on the back, give her a road name picked just for her, and tell her — in front of the whole chapter, all of them in their cuts, standing in a circle — that she is theirs now.

Sadie’s road name was Pixie.

She got to ride home on the back of Boomer’s Harley with her tiny arms barely reaching around his enormous tattooed waist. She held onto his cut for dear life. He drove the speed limit minus five. He took every turn like it was made of glass. She wore the little leather vest over her glittery purple t-shirt for the rest of the day. She wore it to bed that night. Megan finally pried it off her around midnight and folded it next to her pillow.

The next morning, Boomer was on our sidewalk at 7:42. So was Diesel. Two motorcycles at the curb. Two enormous men with their arms folded.