Lucky Money – PJ Nutting

Hang on, she said, I want to show you something.

She dug through a loose purple bag on the fold-out table. I tried to guess what it was. Some South American bric-a-brac? Maybe HER driver’s license? Aha, she said, there it is. She pulled out a bill fold. Then she plucked out a bill and held it out to me. 

Oh, wow, I said, even though I had seen a two-dollar bill before. But there was a story attached to this one, and as I would learn, there are a lot of stories attached to two-dollar bills.

This one had been to the other side of the world, she said, and it has always brought her luck. And you are a traveler now, she said, embarking on a big trip, so you should take it. It worked for me, why shouldn’t it work for you? Then, for the first time in my life, I was hugged by a stranger at a DMV.

 

I was somewhere outside of Hanoi, driving my new motorcycle as fast as it could go, when I heard a terrible noise. 110 kilometers per hour, the speedometer read. I was looking for the limit, and I found it.

The highway was a strip of streetlight plaid wound around the darkness. It was just myself and my new motorcycle that I had named Frank and an itinerant truck of dirt, pointing our headlights into the flat night. I knew the loud crack was bad. I felt Frank listing to the left, then started to shimmy. My left leg started to feel really hot. 

I kept it steady as the throttle came out, and my leg stopped burning so much. After I came down to about 60kph, I could feel that throttling the engine was causing it—the engine, not the bike—to torque to the left. The radiator loudly tap-danced against the front fork.

When I arrived in Hanoi, I had told everyone, no Honda Win for me, no sir, I don’t care if they’re cheap and easy to repair. No beat-up 100cc engine would do for this epic trip. I waited around in Hanoi until I had found Frank, a junkyard special—a 175cc engine bolted to a Suzuki GN 110 frame with a fake Thai license plate. It had promise, and that was what had mattered most to me. I had named it Frank, short for Frankenstein, and now the shuddering monster was trying to purge its foreign heart.

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