The Night Cyclist (2 page)

He must have needed the work.

The three times I came out to talk to tables—the first was someone I'd worked with years ago but wasn't thrilled to see, and the other two were first dates showing off their food IQ, but masking it as simpering complaints—I made sure to linger long enough to see whether the groups huddled on the wrong side of the hostess podium were glittering with raindrops or not.

I'd left my bike at the restaurant overnight a few times before, either hitched a ride home with a server or manager or just cabbed it, but I wanted to get out and stretch tonight, if possible. Judging by my second two trips out to the dining room—dry shoulders from the hostess podium crowd—it just might be possible. Granted, there would be puddles, a slick spot or two, and my bike would need another thorough rubdown once I got home. But the wind in my face would make it worth it. It always did.

And, after a rain, the paths and bike lanes are usually devoid of traffic, completely lifeless. All mine.

Coach used to always tell us to choose our line, to stay focused on that, to not look anywhere else but the direction you're going.

It was advice that worked in the kitchen as well.

The line I could see ahead of me, it led past cleanup, out the back door, down the bike lane for half a mile before swooping and banking onto the path for nearly three glorious, empty miles.

*   *   *

In the alley at two in the morning, my clothes steamed at first. It always made me feel like I was just touching down in this strange atmosphere, my alien fabric off-gassing, adjusting. It was just temperature differential, of course. It had been happening since I first started washing dishes, would clock out soaked from head to toe.

I usually wasn't this wet by the end of the night, had already paid those dues, but, because I was ready to be shut of the kitchen, and because the captain has to go down with the ship, I'd stepped in beside Manny, our dishwasher of nine months. You can't help getting sprayed, especially when you're dealing with a ladle. But we got it done in half the time, racked the wine glasses so they wouldn't spot, and then I saluted him off into the night, hung my apron on its hook, and rolled up my knives.

I should have been using them to cut up the day-old bread for croutons—a ten-minute job, with nobody tugging on my sleeve—but screw it. Sometimes you just have to walk away. Feed yourself first, right?

The bike lane away from the restaurant was as empty as I'd imagined.

I leaned back from the bars, planed my arms out to the side like I was twelve years old again.

What do people who lose that part of themselves do, I wonder?

When Doreen had accused me of not growing up, I'd felt parentheses kind of form around my eyes, the question right there in my mouth:
And?

It's not some big social or emotional impediment to still be able to close your eyes, pretend to be an airplane.

Some people hold on to that with video games, some with books about space, some with basketball or tennis, if their knees hold together.

For me it was a bike. For me it was this.

Soon enough the path opened up just across the creek, inviting me to slalom down it one more time, but I stopped mid-bridge, still clipped in, my arms crossed on the rail on the uphill side.

The melt
was
coming fast, and hard. The surface of the water breathed like a great animal, the sides of the creek surging up just over the bank, washing the concrete of the path and then retreating.

I was definitely going to be up until dawn, drying my bike out.

Somebody old and sensible, they probably would have gone the long way, the dry way.

My only concession was turning my headlight on, and hitching the strap of my knife-roll higher across my chest, like the bandolier it most definitely was.

*   *   *

The first mile, the water never even crested up over my valve stem. And, down here by the creek, the sound was massive. It felt like the mountains were bleeding out.

But I didn't forget the promise I'd made earlier: A mile into it, right at the bend where the creek turned west, I stepped my right foot over the top bar, rode sidesaddle on my left foot, and looked behind me, at the rooster tail of mist I was leaving.

It was stupid. It was wonderful.

Before the bike rolled all the way to a stop, I stepped down into the grabby muck, hitched the bike up onto my arm like I was racing cyclo-cross.

What I was really doing was playing detective.

The mud in the tall grass and brush and tangle of vines and trash turned out to be sloppier than I'd hoped, but I trudged and clumped through it, picked those clear glasses off the naked sapling like the fruit they were.

I'd been right, that afternoon. These were seriously antique, from another decade of cycling gear.

Usually, something like this hung in a tree or set up on a rock with another rock there to keep it from blowing away, it was just what you did when you stumbled onto something somebody else had dropped. It was only kind. Surely they'd be back, looking for it, right?

This was too far out for that, though. There were closer places to the path to hang a piece of equipment.

I stood there by the sapling, raised the wet glasses to my face and looked through them. At the shiny path. At the silhouette of trees waving back and forth. At the creek where the two college kids had been floating.

For maybe twenty seconds, I couldn't look away from that bend. It was like I was seeing them again. Like a puzzle piece in my head was nudging itself into some bigger picture. Before it could resolve, I looked over, to the right.

There was someone there. On a matte-black aluminum bike. You can tell aluminum from carbon by the turns in the frame.

Aluminum bikes, they're ten years ago as well.

And the rider—where I was in kitchen rags, like usual for the ride home, he was in tights. Not shorts or a bib, but some kind of wet suit a surfer might wear: slick black like a second skin, ankle to neck to wrist.

It would have been terrible in the sun, and at night it had to be terrible as well, since there was no way your skin could breathe.

To match the black seal suit, this cyclist also had black shoes and black gloves, a flash of pale skin at wrist and ankle. No helmet. And—looking down to what I was holding—no glasses.

I held them out across the muck, through the misting rain, and in response, this night cyclist, he
snarled
.

I'd never seen anybody actually do that before. Like a dog you were happy was on a chain.

“What?” I said, only loud enough for myself, really. He was already whipping his bike away, standing to granny gear it through the silt just under the water.

When he looked back, his dank black hair was plastered to his white face.

And his eyes—they were all pupil.

Like smoke, like a whisper, he faded once he made the dry concrete.

For maybe ten seconds, I considered what had just happened.

And then I saw it for what it was: An invitation. A challenge. A dare.

I smiled, splashed through the tall grass, ran past the deep water, and hit the concrete running alongside my bike, catapulted up into the saddle already shifting hard, my nostrils wide because my lungs were about to need air.

It had been too long since I'd really gotten the opportunity—the
need
—to open up. Coach had diagnosed me early as a sprinter, and he'd kind of sneered when he said it, like there was no hope, really. He'd work with me, sure, but I was what I was.

For four years it made me faster, better, harder.

He was right, though: I'm a born sprinter. I'll burn through my quads those first two miles, leave the whole pack in the dust.

It was
one
mile until the trail nosed up into the canyon for twenty vertical miles.

It was one mile, and this night cyclist, he only had about a half-minute head start.

If only Doreen could see me now.

*   *   *

Where I finally saw him again, it was at the pond the low part of the trail had become, downtown.

He was standing there, one foot down in the water.

There's no way I was making any more noise than the flooded creek, but still, as soon as I rounded the corner, he whipped his head back settled his black eyes on me.

I gave him a cocky two-fingered wave from my grips. He didn't wave back. He was watching the water again.

My big plan was to walk my bike up beside him, so as to keep from whipping water into his face. Not like we weren't both already soaked, but manners are manners, even at two in the morning, in the dark and the rain.

He never gave me the chance.

I was fifty feet away when he hauled his bike around, rode the lapping edge of the water through the wet grass, all the way up to the road, stepped down for just long enough to lift his bike up onto the cracked sidewalk that runs up there. He didn't lift his bike because he didn't have momentum—the climb he'd just made would have even taxed my sprinter's legs in their prime—he lifted it because road bike rims, especially old aluminum ones like he was running, they'll crimp in from that kind of action.

I bared my teeth just like he'd done, and I gave chase, having to run my bike up the last ten or fifteen yards, when my narrow road tires started to gouge into the mud.

By the time I clipped in on the sidewalk, he was a receding black dot in the car lane.

I ramped down off the curb at a handicapped place, and I gave my bike every last bit of myself I had.

We took the turn—on the road, not the path—up into the canyon maybe ten seconds apart, him running the beginning of the red light, me catching the end of it, leaned over too far for wet asphalt but I didn't care anymore. My left pedal snagged on the blacktop, hitching the ass-end of the bike over a hiccup, but the tire caught somehow, and I rode it out. Watching my line. I was watching my line.

It led straight to him.

He looked back just like Coach was forever telling us not to, but it didn't slow him or tilt him even a little.

A half mile after the turn, the road started its wicked uphill slope.

Twice I'd gone up it, but that was fifteen years ago, and the road had been barricaded off for the event, and I'd still been pretty sure I was going to have to sag wagon it. Not because I was a sprinter. Because I was
human
.

I'd promised myself never again.

But this was now. This was tonight.

I geared down, stood on the cranks.

He was there in my headlight. Not riding away. Just crosswise in the road, like a barricade himself.

I rear-braked, my rooster tail slinging past without me, like my intentions were going where I couldn't.

The night cyclist wasn't smiling. He wasn't anything. He was just looking at me.

“I've got your—!” I said, pulling the clear glasses away from my neck, against the elastic.

He turned in a huff, uphill, and, because I had the jump, I figured I'd be alongside him in two shakes.

Wrong.

He was faster on the climb than I was. It wasn't even close. Even with me screaming for my lungs to be deeper, for my legs to be younger, for the grade to flatten out.

It was like the mountain was sucking him uphill. And when he looked back on the first turn, his mouth wasn't haggard and gasping like mine. He was calm, even. Not winded in the least.

Two miles into it, blood in my throat, I had to stop.

I threw up over the guardrail, then collapsed across it, not caring how it was chiseling into my midsection.

No headlights came along to hitch me down the hill, into town.

“What are you?” I said to the night cyclist, wherever he was.

Miles away by now, I thought. Or—watching me from the trees?

I tried to bore into the darkness, to catch his outline there, but then I was throwing up again, from deep, deep inside, like I was dry heaving all the years between who I was and who I had been, and then I climbed back into the saddle like the rag doll I was, rode my brakes home, taking the roads this time.

*   *   *

I was bonked by the time I crawled into my living room. The adrenaline had burned through all the blood sugar I had, and left me in the hole for more. I couldn't remember the last time this had happened. I didn't miss it. It was like having sludge for blood, and having to look at the world through one narrow, long straw.

I settled my bike against the back of the couch in exactly the way I never do—it was Doreen's couch—unrolled my knives on the counter to be sure the oiled leather had kept them dry, and then I ate great heaping handfuls of corn chips and chocolate morsels from the pantry. Not because that's any kind of magic formula, but because they were the first things I saw.

It took ten or twelve minutes, but I finally woke up enough to rack my bike, dry it with a hand towel from the kitchen, even going so far as to twist off the valve stem caps, blow any lingering droplets in there back onto my face.

Only after my bike was properly stabled did I change into dry clothes myself. Just some mountain bike shorts I'd only bought because they were on clearance and I had credit at that store. They were my house shorts, had a pocket right on the front of the thigh. My phone dropped into it perfectly.

I turned on the television to see if our race had been documented, but all up and down the dial it was just cop shows sentenced to ten years, hard syndication. The first time I woke still watching, I rolled off the couch, checked to make sure the front door was secure—never trust yourself when your blood sugar's flatlined—then climbed into bed on what I was still calling
my
side. The way I turned the lamp off in the living room was by shutting my eyes.

The next time I woke, I wasn't completely sure that's what I'd just done. The way my legs were still both burning and noodled at the same time, I thought for a second that maybe I was at the end of a long ride, years ago. Something up in the peaks, in the thin, crisp air, permanent snow back in the shadows of the evergreen.