Francis “Ace” Beauregard Jr. loved just two things in life; fast motorcycles and Barbara Sue Waters. He encountered choppers in a dirt quarry as a child and it was love at first site. Four wheels were for losers and if you didn’t drive with the wind at your face, you weren’t a man. Maybe it was having with a bootlegger for a father that made Ace a rebel and a scoff-law, or maybe it was growing up in Urso before the highway tamed its wild back roads. But whatever the reason, the roar of an engine and the drone of a police siren were music to his ears.

It wasn’t love at first site with Barbara Sue. They circled each other for a whole summer at the Dairy Dipper, as wary as a grizzly under a buzzing bee hive. But finally one day Ace pulled up during the afternoon shift, shouted “Get on!” and waited exactly two seconds for Babs to throw down her apron and leap onto the back of his bike.

Barbara had heard all about him of course. Everyone in Urso knew about old man Beauregard’s outlaw son. During the war he was rumored to have lived up in the hills to escape the draft, hunkering down in abandoned bear dens until the law forgot him, then roaring back when the heat was off. She’d heard about the bar room brawls and the questionable ownership of the car parts he sold behind the burned-out roadhouse. She knew he was dangerous and it thrilled her. Damned if she’d be a rancher’s wife and mother to a bunch of snotty brats.

On their first date, they vowed to “live fast, die young and leave beautiful corpses.” But unlike all the big mouths who chickened out and got slow and fat, Ace and Babs kept their vow. Their unplanned-for son Jon was born between road trips, dumped with Francis and Zelda, and simply forgotten. Their love was all for each other and the open road. They came back to Urso occasionally but by the time Ace inherited the family house, their son was a stranger. They tolerated Jon but neglected him and the old homestead in equal measure, without malice or remorse. Nothing and nobody would ever slow them down.

Their mad love flamed out in 1959*, by the light of a winter moon, when Ace and Barbara Sue careened off a slick of black ice on Route 93 and were thrown 40 feet in the air, crashing straight into the back paddock fence of a startled rancher. The rancher swore that, a moment before the bike exploded in a fireball, he heard the wild wailing of two banshees, roaring with laughter in the icy wind. No one who knew Ace or Babs doubted his story.