STetc ch 29 - anyway, that's how come Ace got started with Bruno

[Michael Bailey]

He sort of worked his way up from [it seems implicit] motorcycle soldier in WWI, "found himself drifting into the motorcycle adventurer racket....How much of a surprise could it really have been that one day he would drift into range of Bruno Airmont, and presently find himself, hat in clenched fist, joining the long, unchronicled queue of hired stooges making their way up the back stairway to the boss's office door?" - and now he's "drifting into middle age" -

A lot of drifting going on, almost like a snowstorm in Wisconsin, or in the Badlands which in his view now cover the United States, removing any desire in him for a return there.

https://youtu.be/WRrEP_lpN_U?si=Mow6wcSYeKTLXan2

We know from Ace's later exchange with Hop some of the details of Bruno's ire - the proximate cause of Ace's presence on the XT2K - but at this juncture Terike is surprised that Bruno might be after him; it seems like she sort of approves, or at least had at some point learned of, and accepted, that employment for Ace. While we don't get an explicit verbal acceptance from her it seems like they take off together from the crooked checkpoint.

The XT2K is posited as 2 things:

  1.
An expanse of space and time where the romantic loner myth on a motorcycle finds a venue; the narrator mentions some of the drawbacks & casualties of that in terms of disappointed short term partners & the indignant families they belong to, "families apt to own firearms ranging from single-shot to full automatic" - an outcome later explored in "Easy Rider" (1969)
  2.
And a situation where some find miracles, the list of which mainly consists of incidents of disaster avoided; to fund it, they carry cargo in motorcycle-sized increments: "Not exactly a vegetable truck, but as you find out sooner or later, small loads can often fetch high prices."