Man on a Motorcycle with a Cougar Riding on the Back: A Short Story by Michael Fine

by Michael Fine, contributing writer

©2026 by Michael Fine

They were in a valley between two mountains.  A reductive idea, perhaps.  Valleys are always just spaces between higher places — not a body, but the absence of bodies.  This valley was more than just a depression that some river followed on the way to the sea.  There were two mountains that dominated the vista, these two masses of rock with trees on their sides, and the road followed a river which snaked between them, a puny afterthought, trivial, compared to the mass and power, the immovability and dominance of the mountains themselves.

It was at the moment late winter turns into early spring, when the light is strong again but before the air has warmed, when there was still snow in the shadows but a few green shoots pushing up along the roadside, pushing through the sand and grit that had accumulated from the trucks all winter long, before the rain had washed that sand and grit away.  There were birds, here and there, but not many now, because there isn’t the dense abundance of birdlife that had once dominated the skies and the underbrush of country places, yellow and blue-green and coal-black and red birds as well as the dun-colored, grey and brown birds that create a cacophony of calls and thrashing.  That once created that cacophony.  Some birds.  Perhaps more would come, as spring advanced and the birds returned from their migration south, when there would be Vs of honking geese flying north to their summer feeding grounds in Maine and Canada, in and around Hudson Bay.

They were in a convertible and the top was up.  It was an old blue Ford  Mustang convertible with a  light tan top and tan fabric seats.  The body was in good shape, despite the age of the car, because he always kept it garaged.  There was no rust.  That didn’t mean that the car was pristine, however.  The car’s age was apparent from the haziness at the edges and corners of the windshield and the bubbles under the chrome, and the plastic rear window that had grown white and opaque with age.

Jessica sat beside him, wearing a grey raincoat with wide lapels and an orange chiffon or silk scarf around her chestnut hair, a scarf that made her dark eyes somehow more prominent.  It was raining, a light, scattered rain.  The sky between the mountains was dark.  A cloud hung over the valley, lower than the mountains on either side.

That is what life is, the man thought. Two mountains, both too steep to climb.  A series of choices, each wrong.  A set of ideas, one more distorting and alienating than the other.  Communism and Fascism.  Freedom and justice.  Even peace and war, although there is rarely a problem with peace, other than the tendency of human beings to get lazy in peace time, and to take the peace and what they have for granted.  Scarcity and abundance.  Human beings who always want more, when more is never enough.

But it was more than that.  They were two mountains, two separate mountains, adjacent but distinct.  Jessica was distant and aloof.  She kept her own counsel, played her cards close to her chest, and always kept something in reserve.  Secretive.  Private.  Quietly manipulative.  She knew about her attractiveness, and knew it gave her leverage, that she could use to skate under accountability, that it meant she didn’t need the truth for much, that she could finesse or misremember or deny what she didn’t like about herself, or whatever anyone else didn’t like or expect of her.  That anyone included everyone and especially Andrew, who she managed to be with and not with at the same time.

Andrew, for his part, was cerebral.  He styled himself a thinker, an intellectual, facile with books and ideas, but the truth was he didn’t account for much.  He used big words but he rarely did or accomplished anything of substance.  His words and ideas were a distraction.  He’d get you, and Jessica, to pay attention to those words and ideas, and that way you’d never actually look at, see, or hear the man himself.  Who was wishy-washy.  Indistinct.  More style than substance.  Willing to go along and get along.  An enabler.  Or never could quite fish or cut bait.

“Look over there,” Jessica said, as they rounded a bend and the road dropped into a low place.  The Mustang swung on its frame.  It was big and bold but it wasn’t tight.  A highway car, not a mountain car at the end of the day.  It slipped and swung around curves rather than took them.  Sloppy, not tight.  An American car of a certain era, whether you wanted to admit that or not.  Big-boned and vacuous. Promised more than it delivered, if you were a driver.  A half-Thoroughbred gelding, made for jumping.  Not an Arabian stallion, built to be quick, nimble, and fast.

“Where?  I don’t see anything,” Andrew said.

“There, under the trees, near the picnic tables,” Jessica said, and she pointed to the left.

Andrew came off the gas.  The car slowed a little, though rain still spattered on the windshield.

There was a turnoff into a little picnic spot to the left, a flat grassy area set over the river, which raged beside it.  Beneath the two mountains, which towered over the place. Tall pines surrounded the place – ancient eastern white pine, mostly, but a hundred feet tall and two feet in diameter on the stump, with an occasional spindly undergrowth red oak thrown in. Picnic tables and little barbecue stations – iron boxes with grates that stood on metal pipe posts, each anchored in concrete in the ground.  A little State Department of Parks roadside picnic spot.

And indeed, under the trees, next to the  picnic table closest to the river, was a man astride a red motorcycle, a heavy old bike — an Indian, Andrew thought at first, and then he was sure, a red Chief V twin with those amazing swept back red fenders and fringed, hand-tooled leather saddlebags, that sat low to the ground, as if it owned the space on which it sat. Owned the road and the picnic area and the whole space between the mountains.  The man who sat astride the bike also looked like he owned the road – hefty and tattooed, with shoulders as big as those mountains, long, flowing gray hair and a handlebar moustache.  He was wearing a brown leather-fringed jacket, and brown leather- fringed chaps.

Behind the man, one muscled leg on each of the saddlebags, sat a cougar, a mountain lion, one tawny front paw on each of the man’s shoulders, its head up and alert, its ears erect as it looked about.  Each tan ear was edged with black hair, and the tip of the cougar’s tail, which was also black, twitched from side to side.

“That can’t be,” Andrew said.  “No sane human would ride around like that.  And no cougar would just sit there, docile as a housecat.  Like a woman riding on the back of a bike.”

“Watch it,” Jessica said. “Who said women are docile?  Not this woman.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Andrew said. “No cougar is going to just sit there like that.  Must be a stuffed thing.  Or be drugged.”

“The tail is moving.  And the head.”  Indeed, as the car slowed and came abreast of the picnic spot, the cougar turned its head to look at them.  The man on the motorcycle looked straight ahead. He glanced at them for an instant.  But then he turned his attention back to the road.

He leaned over, lifted one leather-fringed leg, found the kick start, threw the weight of one side of his body into the kickstart with a sudden thrust, and the motorcycle roared to life.

The bike rolled forward a few feet, closer to the road.

The man on the bike looked left and right.  He saw no cars coming to his left, where the road climbed, and he could tell the blue mustang had slowed almost to a stop, so he hit the gas and the red motorcycle with the cougar riding behind roared off onto the road, accelerating as it climbed, one mountain to its right, the river splashing and gurgling to its left, and then the other mountain rising fast beside the river.

Self and soul, Andrew thought.  They are not the same.  Two mountains, with death, history and endless sadness in between.  And always distracted by light and hope, the twin illusions that sustain us.  Woven together by our endless, sacred discontent.

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Many thanks to Carol Levitt for proofreading, and to Lauren Hall for all-around help and support.

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Michael Fine, MD is currently Health Policy Advisor in Central Falls, Rhode Island and Senior Population Health and Clinical Services Officer at Blackstone Valley Health Care, Inc. He is facilitating a partnership between the City and Blackstone to create the Central Falls Neighborhood Health Station, the US first attempt to build a population based primary care and public health collaboration that serves the entire population of a place.He has also recently been named Health Liaison to the City of Pawtucket. Dr. Fine served in the Cabinet of Governor Lincoln Chafee as Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health from February of 2011 until March of 2015, overseeing a broad range of public health programs and services, overseeing 450 public health professionals and managing a budget of $110 million a year.

Dr. Fine’s career as both a family physician and manager in the field of healthcare has been devoted to healthcare reform and the care of under-served populations. Before his confirmation as Director of Health, Dr. Fine was the Medical Program Director at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, overseeing a healthcare unit servicing nearly 20,000 people a year, with a staff of over 85 physicians, psychiatrists, mental health workers, nurses, and other health professionals.He was a founder and Managing Director of HealthAccessRI, the nation’s first statewide organization making prepaid, reduced fee-for-service primary care available to people without employer-provided health insurance. Dr. Fine practiced for 16 years in urban Pawtucket, Rhode Island and rural Scituate, Rhode Island. He is the former Physician Operating Officer of Hillside Avenue Family and Community Medicine, the largest family practice in Rhode Island, and the former Physician-in-Chief of the Rhode Island and Miriam Hospitals’ Departments of Family and Community Medicine. He was co-chair of the Allied Advocacy Group for Integrated Primary Care.

He convened and facilitated the Primary Care Leadership Council, a statewide organization that represented 75 percent of Rhode Island’s primary care physicians and practices. He currently serves on the Boards of Crossroads Rhode Island, the state’s largest service organization for the homeless, the Lown Institute, the George Wiley Center, and RICARES. Dr. Fine founded the Scituate Health Alliance, a community-based, population-focused non-profit organization, which made Scituate the first community in the United States to provide primary medical and dental care to all town residents.Dr. Fine is a past President of the Rhode Island Academy of Family Physicians and was an Open Society Institute/George Soros Fellow in Medicine as a Profession from 2000 to2002. He has served on a number of legislative committees for the Rhode Island General Assembly, has chaired the Primary Care Advisory Committee for the Rhode Island Department of Health, and sat on both the Urban Family Medicine Task Force of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the National Advisory Council to the National Health Services Corps.

 All of Michael Fine’s stories and books are available on MichaelFineMD.com or by clicking here