Six eternal kilometres with this burning shadow. Most alarming is the obvious boredom of this speed. From fifth to second gear just to trail the skinny primitive. Cocaine to herbal tea. Finally, Andrew turns and stares, leaving just four outstretched fingers on one handlebar, still pedalling, to look:
What?
Nothing. Engine, visor, leather. He yells it now, “What?! . . . Quoi?!” Still they hang back.
He's thirsty from the increased pace. He wants to swat the dusty nub of his water hose into his mouth but is afraid to show any weakness. No, it's foolish to go without water, to weaken himself for their sake. He drinks. He even spits a little, onto their side of his bike, not into the ditch.
What can he throw or swing? Tucked into his fist, the compact cylindrical pump may strengthen his punch a little, but then again it's designed to be featherlight and could crumple or splinter at the first crack. The engine snorts, and the motored fatty lurches up another two feet to hang just inches past Andrew's rear tire. Recalled here is the boyhood nudge of front tire to rear, the cyclist's trip. Breathing, cranking and sweating, Andrew finally gets one image. His helmet. He'll throw his helmet, pull his goalie. One quick hand under his chin, then a flick back to send the hard dome under their front tire. Feed them to the road.
When the motorbike pulls up alongside him, passing his rear tire but then holding again before running completely flush with his front, he thinks of the metre advance as a wolf's snarling leap. Brushing off the flash of panic that would have had him roll into the ditch, damn the consequences, he sees, not beside him but in the mirror, the passenger's right arm extending a tiny bundle of tinfoil. (Woman or slim man?) The driver levels off this offering with Andrew's own arm. This is how they could finish him: wait for his hand foolishly outstretched, grab it, then kick the bike (or his ribs) out from under him. Still, a biker's tinfoil ball. The speed. The offer between moving parallel lines. His exposed fingertips brush the passenger's hand as she presses the tinfoil into his gloved palm.
Focused on the bridge of their arms, on proximate threat, he has been slow to notice the passenger's other arm stretched around the driver's far hip, its quickening stroke on the winded red pole of his exposed erection. A small white moth splatters onto his leather chaps before they roar off.
When the valley is his again, when his pace is down and his mouth rinsed, his hands crowd together on his profile bar to open the foil while he pedals on. If this is the weed he's hoping for, the proper leaf of this country's flag, this unpeeling of the foil could spill crumbs or drop a valuable nugget. Or maybe they've wrapped up a dead bird for you. Your bird, crushed beneath your tire. The one mercy kill you did make. On a journey, memory tries to become action.
Ten more metres of poor steering and a sideswiped pace as he unfurls aluminum leaf after leaf. To nothing. This is just metal foil, an effective lure of shine alone.
By the time Andrew was seventeen, the medical trips to Toronto were done by car, not bus. Strap Stan in, negotiate CBC Radio versus CDs, advance and retreat with the volume dial, slip into the fast weave of traffic.
“Oh, for Christ's sake, give him some horn,” Stan barked.
They were in the left lane, the
passing
lane, of North America's busiest highway, yet held back by a car in front of them content to travel at exactly the same speed as the one beside it.
“That's right, buddy, the skinny pedal,” Stan was saying. “You can do it. Go any slower and
I'd
be able to give you the finger. Oh, sorry, glasses please.”
Andrew waited until he returned to the centre lane to reach over and nudge Stan's sunglasses back up his nose. Half an hour later, Stan announced another plan. “You're smooth between lanes. You keep your eyes open and moving, and I'm willing to bet you don't keep those fingers near the horn just to impress me. Drivers ed taught you well. When we get back home, phone around to find a decent package for renting a standard.”
“We Porsche shopping while in T.O.?”
“They taught you to drive,” Stan clarified. “I'll teach you to drive fast.”
On rented cars they progressed from frustration in empty parking lots to endless trips though town â “Stop and go traffic'll give you the chops like nothing else. One more round” â to larger and larger highways. “Throw it fat on the curve. Fat on the curve,” Stan ordered, but joyously, urging Andrew to engine-brake by dropping into fourth. “Who's dancing with a big one now?!” Stan yelled. Andrew hadn't seen him grin like this in years. “All right, we're out. Don't burn your power.”
Here, beside Andrew's legs on the drum kit of clutch and gas, Stan was almost all voice. Once again Stan was a disempowered body and a
managerial, almost imperious voice. You'll find a . . . You'll want to . . . Bend down to look . . . Hundreds of times Andrew had wanted him to shut up. A few times he said so. Then, there in the fast night, he wished he could close his eyes to get just voice, swing hand over hand on that baritone rope. And this time the voice was different, crackling with fun even when it was full of care, maybe even peppered with a little daring.
“Think of chess,” Stan half-counselled and half-commanded. “Don't just look at what's moving, but also what could move. And from where. Rank
and
file. What's beside you? Either side? What's in front
and
behind? Take the Accord and do a full right sweep.”
The surprises were as numerous as the lane changes. That Stan knew all this, had once done it. Ghost muscles, the atrophied sacks at the tops of his arms, hid days of fast youth. Imagine those bent, cabled hands dissolving into pliant fingers, an easy palm, into the flick and snap of third to fourth gear, the right hook into fifth.
“No. No. Stay here. There's space, regardless of how fast they're going. You can fit. Gain on the Prelude. More. More. C'mon, you're not even in his lane. Good. Steady. He's a fixed distance in front of you. Feel that. Know it. Don't lose or gain any speed, just slide left. The Neon's not going to hit you. Slide. Slide.”
And the waste. The rented car. The scorching fuel. Insurance. A possible fine. “You handle the speed. I'll handle the speeding,” Stan said more than once.
Andrew had got the balance down from paid lessons, got the clutch-and-gas Tai Chi, and took every prompting to use it. Stan didn't need to close his eyes to remember the yin and yang of the pedals. Every kick and release rippled through the seat backs, each chuck and pull echoed through the floor. The kid was all right, all pink meat and reflexes, earning his confidence in five-kilometres-an-hour increments.
“Always know what's happening to the space you're leaving,” said Stan.
“Yeah. Got it.”
“Why?”
“So you know what's happening and what could happen.”
“Be more specific. Your life depends on it.”
“To know where the cars are.”
“You're repeating yourself. Always know if you can move back. A leap's fundamentally different when you can't leap back.”
“That's what I meant.”
“Is it? Anything over one-twenty, you're dead in seconds. I'm a train wreck. You, we need to keep whole.”
That night, wired and splinted into bed, Stan could still feel the speed, the old narrow tunnel rush of it. Staring absently at the ceiling, he remained in the pouring lanes, was still in the fast tile game of moving cars.
You handle the speed. I'll handle the speeding
.
Mercifully, Stan's intended police charade had gone untested. For the bond with the boy, for this one rush he could arrange, Stan had thought himself ready to pretend to a police officer that the visible mutiny of his body had suddenly become worse, that the hostages of his bent shoulders or tented hands or half-paralyzed limbs were now in even greater danger. If a cop car had pulled them over, Stan told himself he would have gone horse-eyed and gestured with one of his paws at his silver tracheotomy tube. He'd swap badges across the boy's chest, mouthing
can't breathe,
work spittle all the way to the ER. He'd been slipping though the medical cracks for years, repeating syringomyelia so narcoleptic interns and pudgy GPs could make it to the nearest reference guide. Spine mechanics, trachea mechanics.
Wow, same thing happened years ago. Some kind of blockage. I'm fine now
.
This was what his parenting had become: reckless, pointless speeding protected by lies and schemes, weakness a badge. Sorry, Andrew, sorry â playing my hand.
The wetness in the highway air has changed once more. Again his cheeks wear a moist blush, but something in the wet air is different. His curious chin prowls about ceaselessly, a dog dissatisfied with every corner. Finally his flared nostrils understand. He can feel water but no longer smells it. The salt is ending.
Ferris-wheeling over the next New Brunswick hill, he sees a flash of river snaking through the trees. Mentally he leaps ahead into the shaving clean of cold moving water. This keen leap should be regarded as the fruit of a fourteen-minute climb, should be tied to his three-digit pulse, and yet he is already a series of wet crescents. His chinstrap floats among the reeds of his whiskers. His crotch is a swamp. If saturation won't change, though, temperature certainly will.
Down the hill, up an oiled gravel side road past a faded Dead End sign, he lugs the hot machine until the river curls and gurgles in front of him. He digs beneath his jaw for the helmet's warm buckle, removes and cups the bright yellow beetle in one hand. Exposed, his sweat-drenched hair begins to cool in the breeze.
As soon as he dismounts he begins scraping his pale, wrinkled feet from the tight, hot shoes. The wet jersey comes over his head like a sail in scorched wind. Glancing briefly around the gravelled shoreline of weeds and squat shrubs, he finally tosses the balled jersey ahead of him into the river.
The water's cold bite is just a nibble compared to the icy mud's ceaseless, severing gnaw. Strips of mud seal around each toe, buzzing constantly with a frigid electricity. Beneath his heels, the mud sucks playfully at first, then jealously, entrappingly, as he tries to stumble forward into the water's filleting cold. Wading in past good sense, he is disappointed to see streaks of dirt still visible on his shins beneath the thin brown gauze of diffusing river mud. How can the cold hurt his skin so much without cleaning it? A thin, frigid line inside his
skull may be a logical argument for a higher water temperature at the river's surface but may also be the thin edge of a hypothermic wedge as this long body of sun-cooked sweat, this strip of plunging mercury springs forward into brain-dissolving cold. He turns onto his back to hold his skull together with a series of lung-emptying whoops. Inside his recently molten shorts, his testicles mutiny and burrow into his pelvis. Sliding the shorts off, he either kills two dirty birds with one foul stone by using the balled Lycra as a washcloth or he simply smears bacteria all over himself. Each armpit gets chiselled with soap. As the cold deepens, chest, thighs and feet are lathered and rinsed with increasing haste. Contrary to both experience and expectation, his crotch remains warmest and invites a scratchy, prolonged soaping.
Returning to the gravelly shore he watches purple spill over his skin, cheap Chianti barfed from every vein, before he's even out of the water. Fingers jerking on a pannier zipper, he rips his way through to the car-care chamois which
250 Touring Tips
assured him would make the perfect camp towel. He shoves the faux-sheepskin chamois, a silly beige rectangle no larger than a placemat, around his body in absurd shapes â a scrotum-to-stomach codpiece, a nipple-to-nipple flag â to arrest the growing chill. Still, cold spills in. Fleece, rain pants and toque stall but don't reverse the purple tide. He needs a burn. Back left pannier for the sealed bag of dryer lint, lid-pocket for the waterproof matches. He has four sources of paper.
When he had read touring sites refer to dryer lint as “puffy gasoline,” he was skeptically stupid enough to take matches along on his next trip to his apartment laundry room. To his very abrupt surprise, the pink cloud of lint in his hand had exploded its already puffed nature, maximizing the three-dimensional sprawl of its shaggy molecules in a nearly instantaneous leap from end ignited to end burning. Although he had hoped to drop it to the ground and extinguish it with his shoe, the lint was even lighter when it was ablaze, and it floated, a tiny Hindenburg above dirty, cracked linoleum.
Now at the riverside, Andrew retrieves his already diminished sack of lint with shivering fingers. He is by now a graduated sapper and knowingly laments the charge's meagre supply. Cold continues to race out of the river and fling itself at him. Arctic cleavers take one
kneecap, then the other, as he piles twigs, sticks and snapped lengths of dead branches. The match's tiny flame wobbles then stands before briefly igniting the lint's inadequate store. Again the cyclist's razor pares mass from priority. He wants fire. Toilet paper, novel, Betty's postcards, or map? Choose now.
No single garment is less welcoming to life without toilet paper than cycling shorts. Given the snugness of the cycling shorts, their value and a crotch itch that he fears is becoming constant, he reaches instead for the map and slices off its unnecessary provinces. Newfoundland, off in its columnar time zone, is the first to go, then Thunder Bay and a panel of Ontario from the other edge. The useless southern row, New Brunswick's porch door on the States, also meets the press gang. In less than a week and with the help of his knife, Quebec will finally separate.
Warming, finally, he begins to refold the heartland remnant of the map then recognizes that he has already biked off its neat squares. The red highway line stretched between distant Maritime towns has no relation to two and a half days of sweat. The map's lime-green hash marks are too quaint for these acres of trees. Older than the nascent Trans Canada Trail, the map doesn't show him the one thing he can't find himself. This gap between paper map and daily muscle is a small epiphany, the mere actualization of theory learned with a burning thigh. More important is his acceptance of a deeper, simpler navigation. He doesn't need a map at all. Just take the highway west. Chase the setting sun.