The Bike

The man behind the counter of the pawn shop was sunburnt on exactly half of his face.

It was the left half. The line went down the middle of his nose and across his chin as straight as if it had been ruled, red on one side and brown on the other, and he stood behind the glass counter full of rings and watches and pistols with a mug of coffee in his hand at a quarter to ten on Tuesday morning and looked at the four of them in the doorway, and Frederick, who had been looking at the left half of his face, understood that he had spent the whole of Monday sitting in a boat facing the same way.

“Crappie,” said the man, by way of explanation. “Forty-one. In the cooler.” He jerked his head at a white plastic box behind the counter, beside the safe. “What can I do for you boys?”

“The blue bicycle,” said Frederick. “In the window.”

The man looked at him over the coffee.

He looked at him for about as long as Darlene had, and in much the same way, and Frederick watched the whole thing go across the half-sunburnt face: see him, and know him, and be surprised, and think about it, and decide. It took a little longer than four seconds. It was a slower face.

“Forty-five,” said the man.

“I know.”

“It’s a good bike. Steel frame, nineteen-ninety-something. New tubes. I put the tape on the bars myself.”

“I know. I saw. I wanted to ask…” Frederick stopped, and started again. “I want to buy it with my own money.”

“That’s generally how it works.”

“I haven’t got any.”

The man put the coffee down on the glass counter, on top of the watches, and looked at him properly.

“Then you can’t buy it,” he said reasonably.

“I know. I wondered if I could earn it.” Frederick felt his face going hot, and kept going anyway. “Here. Today. If there’s anything that needs doing. Anything at all. And then you could pay me, and I could pay you, and it would be my own money.” He stopped. “If that makes sense.”

“It makes sense,” said the man. He looked at Frederick for a while longer. Then he looked past him, out of the window, through the bars and the five bicycles, at the corner of the square, where the grey car with the tinted windows was parked in the shade of the courthouse trees with its engine running; and then at the bench beside it, on which Kimura was sitting with a bottle of water and a pair of binoculars, looking with deep attention at a pigeon on the head of the soldier.

“Huh,” said the man.

He came round the end of the counter. He was big, bigger than Castellanos, with forearms like hams and a belly that went in front of him, and he walked to the back of the shop between the shelves of televisions and guitars and power drills and lawnmowers, and opened a door at the back, and the heat came in through it like an animal.

“You can lift?” he said.

---

There was a trailer in the yard behind the shop.

It was a cattle trailer, a long one, made of aluminium, with slots in its sides for air, hitched to a pickup and parked on the gravel in the full sun; and it was full. It was full to the roof. Frederick stood at the open back of it with the man beside him and looked into it, and it was a whole house, in a trailer, all of it, packed in any way at all: a bed in pieces, and a sofa standing on its end, and a refrigerator lying on its back, and chairs with their legs in the air, and boxes, dozens of boxes, cardboard, sagging, with things written on them in marker. KITCHEN. GARAGE. BOOKS. JUNE’S THINGS. DON’T KNOW. There was a lamp with a fringed shade. There was a deer’s head on a board. There was a bicycle wheel. There was, at the very back, in the dark, something tall and wooden that he thought for a moment was a coffin and then saw was a grandfather clock.

“Fella out at Bluejacket,” said the man. “Died in April. Ninety-one. His daughter’s in Tulsa and she don’t want any of it, and she don’t want to look at it, and I don’t blame her. I bought the lot.” He looked at it. “It’s all got to come in. Into the back room. The furniture on the left and the boxes on the right and the things I can’t tell what they are in the middle.” He looked at Frederick. “Ten an hour. It’s about four and a half hours of work, for one, if he don’t stop.”

“That’s forty-five.”

“That’s forty-five,” agreed the man.

“Then I’ll do it.”

“You’ll do it,” said the man, “if you don’t fall down. It’s a hundred and two.” He looked at Theo and Marcus and Felix, behind Frederick in the doorway. “What about them?”

“They’re not allowed,” said Theo, at once.

The man looked at him.

“It’s the rules,” said Theo. “With my own money. It has to be him. If we help, it’s not his own. It’s ours.” He looked at the trailer, and swallowed. “We’ll sit down.”

“There’s a step,” said the man, after a moment. “In the shade.”

He went back into the shop. At the door he stopped, and turned round, and looked at Frederick in the sun beside the trailer with the whole of the dead man’s house behind him.

“Pettit,” he said. “Royce Pettit. You get dizzy, you stop. You get a headache, you stop. You stop sweating, you come and tell me, and you stop.” He went in. Then he put his head out again. “And don’t drop the clock.”

---

He did not drop the clock.

He dropped very nearly everything else, over the next four hours and a half, at least once. He dropped a box marked KITCHEN on the gravel and it rang like a church. He dropped one end of the sofa on his own foot. He dropped the deer’s head, which looked at him from the ground with an expression of the deepest reproach, and picked it up and carried it in and hung it on a nail in the back room facing the wall, because he could not bear it, and then turned it round, because that seemed worse. But he did not drop the clock. He carried it in last, at two o’clock, very slowly, in his arms, like a man carrying another man, with the pendulum inside it knocking softly against the case at every step; and he put it down in the back room against the wall, upright, and stood back from it, and it was taller than he was.

It was the hottest thing he had ever done. He had not known that heat could be like that. It came off the gravel and off the aluminium of the trailer and down out of the white sky all at once, from every side, so that there was nowhere for it not to be, and inside the trailer, in the dark, among the boxes, it was worse, much worse, a thick, close, airless heat that smelled of cardboard and of a house that had been shut up since April. He had sweated through his T-shirt in the first ten minutes. By eleven it was sticking to him like a second skin. By noon he had taken it off and hung it on the hitch of the trailer, where it dried in a quarter of an hour, stiff, with white lines on it from the salt.

And every twenty minutes, exactly, by her watch, Kimura came round the corner of the building from the square with a bottle of cold water and held it out to him, and stood there, saying nothing, until he had drunk it. All of it. If he stopped halfway she waited, with her hand out for the bottle, and did not take it until it was empty.

“That’s nine,” she said, at one o’clock.

“Nine what?”

“Bottles.” She took it. “Eleven is the number. By the end. Sergeant Castellanos has done the arithmetic.”

“Where is Sergeant Castellanos?”

Kimura looked at the corner of the building.

“Watching,” she said. “From the car.” She paused. “With the air conditioning.” Another pause. “He is not happy, sir.”

“He can come and help if he wants.”

“No, sir,” said Kimura. “He can’t.”

---

On the step, in the shade of the back door, the others gave advice.

They sat in a row, the three of them, Theo and Felix and Marcus, with their knees up and their arms round them, very upright, like people at a ball game, and watched him go in and out of the trailer, and did not help, because they were not allowed, and it was killing them. Frederick could see it was killing them. Every time he went past them with something heavy, Felix’s hands moved on his knees.

“Lift with your legs,” said Felix.

“I am lifting with my legs.”

“You’re lifting with your back. I can see you. My father does removals on Saturdays. Bend your knees.”

“Turn it,” said Marcus, as he came through the door with one end of the chest of drawers in his arms and the other end on the ground behind him. “Turn it on its side. It won’t go through like that. It’s too wide. No, the other… the other side…”

“Stop telling me.”

“I’m not helping,” said Marcus. “I’m advising. That’s different. Advising’s allowed.”

“Is it?” said Frederick, to Theo.

Theo thought about it, honestly, the way he did, with his chin on his knees.

“Advice is free,” he said. “So it doesn’t count as money. So you can have it.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Then don’t take it,” said Theo, “and turn it on its side.”

He turned it on its side. It went through.

---

At noon he sat on the tail of the trailer in the shade of the building, which had come round the yard to meet him, with his shirt off and a sandwich from the café in one hand and the eleventh bottle of water but two in the other, and looked at the box beside him, which was the next one, and which said on its side in marker PHOTOS ETC.

It was not sealed. The flaps were folded into each other. He did not open it. But one of the flaps had come up, and inside, on the top, there was a photograph in a frame, a cheap frame, gold-coloured, of a young man in an army uniform and a young woman in a hat, standing in front of a church, in the sun, squinting, and laughing at something outside the picture. It was in black and white. The young man had a great deal of hair. The young woman was holding his arm with both hands, as if he might get away.

He sat on the tail of the trailer and looked at it.

He thought about the dead man at Bluejacket, who was ninety-one, and whose name, he had seen on a box, was C. W. Mayfield, and who had lived in one house, he supposed, most of his life, and had a deer’s head and a grandfather clock and a lamp with a fringe and a wife called June, and a daughter in Tulsa who could not look at it; and all of it, the whole of his life, had gone into a cattle trailer in one afternoon and come to a pawn shop in Vinita to be sold, at three pounds a box, to whoever wanted it.

He thought about the archives at the Palace. The rooms of them, in the basement, under the west wing, where the Household kept everything. Every letter. Every photograph. Every list of everybody who had ever come to dinner. His own first shoes, he had been told, were in a box down there, catalogued, with a number, and would be there for ever, or until there was no Palace; and the drawings he had done at five, and his school reports, and his first letter, and his last, and this summer, too, probably, in the end: the Private Secretary’s file on it, the Programme and its fourteen pages, the Census Office’s letter, all of it, numbered, kept.

Nobody was ever going to sell any of it for three pounds a box.

He did not know whether that was better or worse. He sat on the tail of the trailer and thought about it, and found that he did not know, and that he would have liked to ask somebody, and that there was nobody he could think of who would know either.

He folded the flap of the box down over the photograph, carefully, and picked the box up, with his legs, and carried it in.

---

He finished at a quarter past two.

The trailer was empty. It stood on the gravel in the sun with its back open, and inside it there was nothing but a few dead leaves and a single sock, which he took in too, and put on the pile in the middle, with the things you could not tell what they were. Then he went into the shop, through the back room, past the grandfather clock and the deer, which was facing the room, and stood in front of the counter in his stiff salt T-shirt, with his arms hanging down by his sides because he could not, for the moment, lift them any higher.

Royce Pettit looked at him over the counter.

“All of it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The clock?”

“Against the wall. Standing up.”

Royce Pettit went and looked. He was gone for some time. When he came back he did not say anything about it. He opened the till, which rang, and took out three notes, two twenties and a five, and closed the till, and came round the end of the counter, and stood in front of Frederick, and counted them into his hand, one at a time, slowly, the way you count change into somebody’s hand.

“Twenty,” said Royce Pettit. “Forty. Forty-five.”

Frederick looked at the three notes in his hand.

They were damp already, from his palm. They were not new. The twenties were soft and grey with use and one of them had a corner torn off and somebody had written a telephone number on the five in biro. He stood in the pawn shop at Vinita and held forty-five pounds in his hand, the first money he had ever been given in exchange for something he had done, and he found that he did not want to let go of it, and that this surprised him very much.

Behind him nobody said anything. He could feel the three of them in the doorway of the back room, not saying anything, very loudly.

He took out the brown wallet. He unzipped it. He put the three notes into the long pocket for notes, behind the Private Secretary’s list of telephone numbers, and zipped it up.

He stood there and held the wallet with the money in it for three seconds.

Then he unzipped it again, and took the three notes out, and held them out across the counter to Royce Pettit.

“The blue bicycle,” he said. “Please.”

Royce Pettit looked at the notes. He took them. He counted them, the same way, slowly, twenty, forty, forty-five, and opened the till, and put them back into it, in the same places they had come out of, and closed it.

Then he took a pad of receipts from under the counter, and a pen, and wrote on it, slowly, in capitals, and tore it off, and held it out.

1 BICYCLE (BLUE). £45.00. PAID CASH. R. PETTIT.

Frederick took it, and folded it, and put it in the brown wallet, in the long pocket, where the money had been.

“It was in there for three seconds,” said Felix, behind him, in the doorway. “That counts.”

“Does it?”

“It counts,” said Felix firmly. “It was embarrassed and then it came. That’s all it has to do.”

---

The van had gone.

It had gone at two-forty, from the courthouse square, while Royce Pettit was pumping up the tyres of the blue bicycle in the yard behind the shop with a foot pump and putting the chain back on, which had come off when he lifted it down out of the window, and oiling it, and adjusting the saddle, and raising it, and raising it again, and saying that it was a good bike and the boy should look after it, and showing him how the gears went, which took some time; and when they came round the corner of the building into the square, pushing the bicycle, at ten to three, there was nothing at the courthouse but the grey car with its engine running, and Kimura on the bench, and a note.

It was on the bench, under her water bottle. She held it up. It was on a page from a clipboard, in pencil, in capitals.

HANOVER +3. WAITED TILL 2.50. DIDN’T LIKE IT. EARL.

“He waited,” said Marcus. “He said he would.”

“Ten minutes,” said Kimura. “Then he had Bud’s dialysis.” She folded the note and gave it to Frederick. “Sergeant Castellanos will drive you home, sir. All of you. There’s room. The bicycle will go in the boot with the seats down.”

Frederick looked at the blue bicycle.

He looked at the road out of the square, going south, between the brick shops with their names a yard high, towards the edge of the town, and the highway, and the flat country beyond it shining in the heat, and fourteen miles away, at the end of it, the farmhouse on the gravel road and the refrigerator with the list on it.

“No,” he said.

Kimura looked at him.

“I’ll ride it,” said Frederick.

---

Castellanos got out of the car.

He did it slowly, the way he did everything, and came across the pavement in his sports jacket, in the heat, and stood in front of him on the edge of the square, with the bicycle between them, and looked at him; and Frederick knew the look, because it was the look that came before the one-at-a-time on the stairs.

“Sir,” said Castellanos. “It’s fourteen miles.”

“I know.”

“It’s a hundred and two degrees.”

“I know.”

“You’ve just lifted a house.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “Sergeant, I know. It’s a bike. It’s my bike. I bought it. I want to ride it home.” He heard his own voice and did not care what it sounded like. “People do. People ride bikes home. Ordinary people. It’s practically the definition.”

Castellanos looked at him for a long time.

Then he looked at the bicycle, and at the road going south, and at the sky, and at his watch, and his jaw moved, once, the way it did.

“The car stays behind you,” he said. “Directly behind you. Not a quarter of a mile. Twenty yards. With the hazard lights on. On the verge where there’s a verge. You stop every three miles. You drink when Sergeant Kimura tells you to drink. If you go white, or if you stop sweating, or if I don’t like your face, you get off the bike and get into the car and the bike goes into the boot and you don’t argue with me.” He paused. “Sir.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do.”

“And one of you,” said Castellanos, without turning round, to the three of them on the pavement behind, “is coming in the car with me, with the window down, to talk to him. Because he’s going to need somebody to talk to him after mile nine, and it isn’t going to be me.”

“Me,” said Theo, before anybody else could move.

---

He went out of Vinita on the blue bicycle at five past three, south, on the highway, with the grey car behind him at twenty yards and its hazard lights going on and off and on, orange, in the white glare.

It was nine miles an hour. He found that out at the edge of the town, when Theo leaned out of the passenger window of the car behind him and shouted it, reading it off the dashboard: nine. Nine miles an hour. It felt like flying. It felt, after the trailer, after four hours and a half in the dark among the boxes, like the fastest thing that had ever happened to him; the wind came at him, hot, but wind, and went through the stiff T-shirt and dried the sweat on him as fast as it came, and the road went out ahead of him under the wheels, grey, cracked, shining, with the white line along its edge, and the blue bicycle hummed on it, and the gears clicked when he changed them, and the bell rang when he hit a bump, by itself, a small, bright, silly sound, ting, and he laughed out loud on the highway with nobody to hear him but Theo.

Then it was mile three, and he had stopped laughing.

Then it was mile five.

The country was flat, and then it was not flat; it went up, in long low rises that you could not see were rises until you were on them, and then you could feel them in your legs, which had carried the sofa, and the chest of drawers, and the clock. The pickups came past. Every one of them slowed, coming up behind the grey car with its hazard lights going, and pulled out wide, and went past slowly, and every one of them, as it came alongside him, had a face in the window looking at him. Not at the King. He knew the difference. At a boy on a bicycle in a hundred and two degrees on the highway with a car behind him at nine miles an hour with its hazards on, which was a thing that nobody in Craig County had ever seen. A man in a feed cap leaned out of the window of a pickup with a dog in the back and shouted y’all need help? and Theo, behind, shouted no thank you, he’s fine, he’s doing it on purpose, and the man looked at Theo, and at Frederick, and at the car, and drove on, shaking his head, with the dog looking back at them from the bed of the truck with its tongue out, all the way to the horizon.

At mile six Kimura’s arm came out of the back window of the car with a bottle in it, and he stopped on the verge and drank it, all of it, while she waited.

At mile seven a woman on a horse, on the far side of a fence, in a field, rode along beside him for a quarter of a mile, at a walk, watching him, and then turned the horse and rode away.

At mile eight he could not feel his hands.

At mile nine Theo started talking.

---

He talked about everything. He talked about Milwaukee, and about the lake at Milwaukee, which was bigger than this lake, much bigger, you couldn’t see across it, and about his father’s bus, the number fifteen, which went up and down the same road all day for twenty years, and how his father knew every stop on it and every person who got on at every stop and what they did and whose dog had died. He talked about Kate, who was going to the college on the river in September and was taking the good lamp. He talked about the ducks on Felix’s tie. He talked about the Census Office, and Mr Vollmer, and the deviation index, and the three decimal places, and the pie in the newspaper, and what kind of pie it had been, and whether it had been a peach pie, like Mrs Sixkiller’s, which nobody had been told not to eat for supper. He talked about nothing at all for whole minutes together, the way you talk to somebody in a hospital bed, out of the window of the car, over the noise of the engine and the tick of the hazards, and Frederick did not answer him, because he could not, and he did not need to, and Theo did not stop.

At mile eleven the road changed.

He felt it before he saw it. He had been riding on the cracked grey surface of the highway and then on the county road, which was worse, much worse, patched and potholed and broken at the edges where the tarmac had crumbled into the dirt, so that he had had to ride out into the road and the car had had to come out after him; and then, at a sign that he did not read, at a line across the road that you could see, a straight line, the road was suddenly smooth. Black. New. Graded, and rolled, and edged, with a verge that had been cut, and a white line that had been painted that year, running away ahead of him over the next rise, shining.

“Mayes County!” shouted Theo, out of the window. “Sergeant Castellanos says it’s the county line! He says the Mayes County commissioner does the roads!” A pause, while he listened to something in the car. “He says the Craig County commissioner doesn’t! He says Earl says he’ll be finished at the next election!”

Frederick rode on the smooth black road and did not say anything. He thought: Earl knew. Earl knew exactly.

He thought: I will remember to tell the Premier.

He thought that he would not. He thought that the Premier knew already.

---

At mile thirteen he could see the lake.

It came up over the last rise, through the trees, on the left, a long arm of it, shining, blue and silver in the late sun, with the boats on it like specks, and the town on its shore; and he came down the hill towards it on the blue bicycle without pedalling, because he could not, any more, and let the bicycle carry him down the road with the wind coming off the water now, cooler, a little cooler, and the bell going ting at every bump, and the car behind him with its hazards; past the sign, KETCHUM POP. 471, with the syllabary under it; past the Cove Café, where the lot was full and a man in a tractor cap came out of the door with a toothpick in his mouth and stopped and watched him go by and lifted one hand, very slightly, from his side; past the Methodist church, and the third house past it with the blue door, where nobody was in the garden; and out the other side of the town, onto the paved road, and then the gravel.

The gravel was the worst. He had not thought about the gravel. The blue bicycle went from side to side on it, and the stones flew, and he could not keep the wheel straight, and the car behind him slowed to a crawl and its tyres crunched.

At the bottom of the farmhouse drive, by the mailbox, in the dust, there were three people waiting for him.

Felix and Marcus, who had come back from Vinita before him, he could not think how. And between them, on the ground, a bucket. A galvanised bucket, full to the brim, slopping, of water, from the hose, from the well; and Felix standing over it with his arms folded.

Frederick rode the blue bicycle up to the mailbox and stopped, and could not get off.

“You filled it,” he said. “From the well.”

“Yes.”

“Mrs Sixkiller said. You don’t fill anything up for fun.”

“It’s not for fun,” said Felix. “It’s medical.”

“How did you get back?”

“Mrs Sixkiller,” said Marcus. “She was at the bank in Vinita. She came out and saw us in the square and didn’t say anything at all. She just opened the back door of her car.” He thought about it. “She drives at exactly the speed limit.”

Felix picked the bucket up, with both hands, with his legs, bending his knees the way his father did on Saturdays, and threw the whole of it over him.

---

At a quarter past six he was lying on his back on the porch boards with his wet hair on the warm wood and his legs in the air against the wall of the house, because Kimura had said so, and the blue bicycle was leaning against the porch rail at the bottom of the steps where he could see it if he turned his head, and he turned his head every few minutes, to see it.

Theo came out through the screen door, and let it bang, and stood over him with the short pencil.

“Number two,” he said.

“Tick it.”

“I’m going to.” Theo looked down at him. “I just wanted to say. Before I did.”

“What?”

Theo thought about it.

“Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to say number two.” He went back in. The screen door banged. Through the mesh, Frederick heard the pencil on the paper on the refrigerator door, a small, short sound, like a match.

He lay on the porch with his legs up the wall and closed his eyes.

In the yard, by the trailer, he heard Castellanos say something to Kimura, low, in the voice he used in cars; and he heard Kimura answer him; and he heard Castellanos, who did not laugh, at anything, ever, in any circumstances, laugh. Once. Short. Like a door.

Then the trailer door shut on the air conditioning, and there was nothing but the insects, and the frogs, and the windmill turning once, slowly, as some wind came across the yard that he could feel, now, on his wet face, and stopped.