By Jon Berger
I moved to a new town last summer where I didn’t know anyone. Drank a lot of beer and ate a lot of weed edibles and didn’t shave or get a haircut. I looked homeless and I loved it and I was losing weight because I couldn’t afford food and I’d been riding my mountain bike over 100 miles a week on endless gravel roads and single-track trails and doing pushups and ab-wheel and kettlebell workouts in my 600 square-foot studio-apartment while staying hydrated on tap water.
I accidently ripped off 4 door handles in my hipster apartment. Frank Lloyd Wright did not design my apartment. I could’ve designed my apartment, dude.
This one guy rode his bike around town and honked his horn. He rode up and down Center Street late into the night. I watched him from my big window. He rode an electric bike. He’d stop at the four-way and try to direct traffic and everyone ignored him. He had a cognitive impairment or something.
One morning I was in the parking lot of my apartment building with my mountain bike turned upside down, oiling the new chain. I broke my old chain a week ago while riding single track. 8:30 at night, one last lap, and my chain snapped on a sharp rocky incline. I had to walk my bike home and didn’t get back to my apartment until 10 pm. I had the bike shop do a tune up and give me a new chain.
I loved my bike as much as I hated my car. My bike is a single speed 4130 Chromoly frame from a small frame builder in Arizona. The bike was assembled in Colorado. I started riding when I lived in the Western UP.
I have a high engagement hub that makes a loud clicking sound. I was running the chain lube across the chain as I cranked my pedals with my other hand, letting the hub purr wide open, feeling the deep clicks of the hub echo off the walls of the surrounding buildings.
Electric Bike Guy could hear my hub clicking from across the street and rode his bike over to me. I was finally going to talk to this local legend. He sped up to me then sat there on his bike and watched me, slack jawed. He was skinny and looked to be about 50 years old. He was wearing a winter hat even though it was 85 degrees outside.
He started pointing at my bike and making a funny noise. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to imitate the noise of my hub or what. He started waving his hands around.
“Hey, bud. How ya doing?” I said with a wave over my shoulder.
He started telling me something I couldn’t understand. I think it was about a crash he was in because he kept making big explosion sound effects with his mouth and waving his arms around and then flying into another wave of explosions like the rhythm of the ocean.
Everyone who lived in my apartment building knew each other but they didn’t know me and they didn’t talk to me but this guy did and I was fine with that.
I stood up. “You wanna ride around the block with me?”
He went into another fit of sound effects and hand gestures.
“Alright, let’s go.” I threw a leg over my bike and off we went. He was following close behind honking his bike horn and squawking and making sound effects as we rode through the quiet neighborhood and people in their front yards stared at us.
My bike felt good but the pedal tension didn’t feel the same. It somehow felt weaker. I rode across the street to get a tallboy from the gas station. I sat my bike up against the side of the building. He did the same.
We entered the gas station like two barbarians on an impromptu quest to destroy the town. The gas station was nice and cool. As we walked in, the cashier yelled, “Hey, Bobby, you can’t be here!” She was talking to my new friend. His name was Bobby. In response to being yelled at, Bobby took his winter hat and pulled it over his eyes and mumbled something inaudible and extended his hands out in front of him like he was blind and then started walking around the gas station like Frankenstein.
“No, Bobby! Get out!”
Bobby ignored her and started walking down the candy aisle like Frankenstein. There were a few small children in the candy aisle and they feared Bobby. They cautiously shuffled away from him.
I walked back to the fridge to get my beer. I decided to let the situation with my new friend Bobby and the cashier and the children play out on its own. I grabbed an All-Day IPA six-pack and walked back up to the clerk. “You!” she said pointing at me. “You and Bobby can’t be in here. You bother all the customers. I’ll be reporting you two to the foster home.”
I stopped and stared at her and my brain flexed and pumped green toxic sludge through the gears of my mind and I realized she thought I lived in the adult foster care home with Bobby.
I gave her a blank look and said, “Okay.” I sat my beer on the counter. She looked at me like I was a hologram.
“I shouldn’t let you buy that.”
“Okay,” I said absently and showed her my ID and gave her cash.
She exhaled sharply, sucked her teeth and shook her head and gave me my change. I left the gas station. As I left, she yelled, “Hey, take Bobby with you. You have to stick together.”
I kept walking. I waved back at her. “Okay!” I said it like I just won a stuffed animal at the county fair.
I left Bobby in the gas station to scare the children. This is what he decided to do at this certain point in time on earth and who am I to say otherwise.
I rode my bike back home and loaded it on the bike rack hitched to my Ford Fiesta.
I was going to ride the trail by my apartment called the Jail House Trail but figured it would be a better idea to get out of town for a bit. I pictured a grumpy fat guy with a big net and a tranquilizer gun in a dog-snatcher-styled box-truck driving around town looking for me and Bobby so he could catch us and bring us back to the Adult Foster Care Home.
It was a beautiful day. I went back into my apartment and changed into my mountain bike clothes and grabbed my helmet, a cooler for the beers and ate a weed gummy.
I decided to ride a trail in the town over. A smaller, easier trail. The trailhead was somewhat busy. A river nearby with people fishing. I offloaded my bike and put on my helmet and pedaled hard down the trail. The trail is a 4-ish mile loop.
I tell myself it’s a 5-lap minimum for this trail. I tell myself I will drink one beer after each lap.
The trail has a sign at the trailhead and it says which direction to ride for each corresponding day throughout the week. I ride whatever direction I feel like.
I do the things I tell myself I am going to do.
The trail is sandy and has a lot of tight turns. My bike is long with a steeper headtube angle, so I have trouble on tight turns. It rained the night before so the soil is sticky and I can fly down the trail at top speed before slamming on my brakes at the turns. I listened to my hub click through the silent woods, my mind and body free.
A few miles in, my bike was riding different. Maybe the handlebars were at a different angle. I needed to break the bike in. That was my goal for the day. To make all the parts settle back into each other like layers of the earth beneath my feet.
I saw a guy through the woods, also riding a bike. He was not wearing a helmet. He was going slow and struggling. He was going the wrong way on the trail, or I was going the wrong way on the trail. I’m not sure.
He didn’t seem to notice me. I’m breathing hard, pedaling rotations through a 19-tooth cog.
I pedaled around a corner and he finally saw me and I veered off the trail and into brush and rode through the brush like a deer in rut. The guy stopped completely in the trail and stared at me. I kept riding.
A few more miles down the trail, on a small log section, I came around a corner and hit a patch of sand. I tumbled over the handlebars and landed on my forearm and elbow. I thudded to the ground and my bike clanged into a tree. I was super fucking pissed I crashed. My bike never had a tune up before and now my muscle memory of how to ride was gawky and misplaced.
I got up and picked my bike up out of the bushes near the tree it hit and I got back on and finished my lap.
I’m leaning against my car, drinking a beer and watching people walk around the cemetery. My shins were covered in dirt and my right side had streaks of dirt and my forearm had light little lines of scratches that bled. I drank some fucking IPA. You drink IPAs when you mountain bike because you can drink them warm. IPAs were invented by the British because they didn’t go bad when the British Empire shipped them out of India.
I got back on my bike and rode two more laps. I drank a beer after each lap. The air is getting cooler. A family of 4 was walking on the trail and I waved at them and they stared at me like zombies.
I was 3 beers deep and on my 4th lap. I built up speed. The time of dusk was floating through the forest and I breathed its thick coldness.
I was maybe a mile into the 4th lap, trying to build up speed for this one section I really enjoy riding that has some little dips in it and you go through a little stream that splashes mud.
The bike was still riding wonky but creaked less.
I crashed again. I sailed over the handlebars and felt my shin hit the top tube of my bike. I heard a vibration tear through the dusk air like a gong. I sat up. Blood trickled down my shin and flowed over the specks of dirt and hair. I picked my bike back up and kept riding.
A sharp pain, like a nail pounded into my shin bone sideways, weaved and pulsated. The start of a hematoma. I’ve had so many I know the familiar pain of them forming. A hematoma is like a little trickster goblin fucker growing out of your body who mocks you every time you bump it or move just right or breath too hard and they stick around just long enough to where you get used to it and then one day it is gone and you miss it.
I made it back to my car and got off my bike and leaned it alongside my car. I checked my leg and there it was, a pulsing hematoma forming on my shin, covered in dirt and blood. My shin throbbed as the hematoma grew and drenched my sock in blood.
I opened a beer. The sky was the brightness of a night light and I still had another lap to ride.
The other guy I saw riding his bike, going the opposite direction of me, came out of the trail, slow and crouched over, not pedaling. He coasted down the slight hill to his very own junky vehicle parked near mine.
I nodded at him as he approached.
He avoided eye contact with me.
I took a sip of my beer and watched him get off his bike with a groan. He was doughy and not used to riding a bike.
That is okay.
I took another sip from my beer.
His bike was silhouetted against the lamp shining above doors to the bathrooms behind us. I could tell there was something wrong with it.
He bent over his bike, looked down at it and didn’t seem to know what was wrong.
I approached him slowly and asked if he needed a hand.
He looked up at me with round startled eyes. His mouth moved up and down like a bad translation in a foreign film. “I just bought this bike.” He had a speech impediment and he sounded insecure.
I walked over to his bike and looked at it. I didn’t recognize the brand and the bike was falling apart. The brake caliper had come off, the seat was bent down, the handlebars were bent down. It made a grinding sound when he cranked the pedals.
“Where did you buy it from?”
“Oh… Walmart.”
“Alright.” I walked over to my car and opened the back seat and got out my set of bike tools.
I walked back over to his bike and took out a few Allen wrenches. I tested the sizes until one fit the fastener on his seat. I propped his seat up and tightened the screw.
“Um… you’re not going to break it are you?”
“No, man. Just tightening it up for you. A lot of the workers at Walmart who assemble these bikes don’t do it right,” I said, leaning over the seat and finishing up the tension so his seat would stay still.
I started working on the handlebars next. I reefed them up and adjusted them until they were snug.
I stood back and looked at his brake caliper. The world was dark now. Fully dark with the cemetery next to us, the dark woods on the other side, and I heard ghosts whispering to each other as they shambled out of the ground and the deer whispered to themselves about us as they stood motionless in the thick brush.
I was still sweating. Sweating all the beer out, I could smell the hoppy IPA beer seeping out of my pores and whispering back to the deer as it evaporated from my skin into the night sky above me.
“I’m not sure about the brakes, dude,” I said, taking out my phone.
“Oh.” He said this like he had no idea what I was talking about.
I handed him my phone with the flashlight on. I told him to shine it on the brakes. He didn’t really shine them on the brakes but I didn’t say anything.
I fumbled with his brake calipers. They were sidewall brakes. I clipped them back on so they would work but it wasn’t a permanent fix.
I picked up the rear of his bike and cranked the pedals and heard the drivetrain grind and hobble.
“I can’t fix that. Take it to the bike shop in town. Have them fix it.”
“Oh… maybe I’ll just take the bike back.”
“You can try, friendo.”
I helped him load the bike into his shitty minivan.
I picked my beer up off the cement and finished it and tossed it into a garbage can by the bathrooms.
He was climbing into his minivan as I was throwing a leg over my mountain bike.
“Where are you going?” He asked me with that blank look in his eyes. He had the same look as Bobby.
“I’ve got one more lap to do,” I said as I started to slowly pedal away.
“Oh… it’s dark out and you’re bleeding.”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you doing another lap?”
“Because I hate the world.”
“Oh… well… be careful.”
“You too.” I gave him a salute as I rode away.
I pedaled up the hill, past the cemetery and into the dark cold woods. I could hear the deer leap away from me in the dark to make room as I pedaled forward.
Jon Berger is a teacher in Rural Mid Michigan. His short story collection Goon Dog and his poetry collection Saint Lizard are available at Gob Pile Press. He has work forthcoming at Southwest Review. He tweets @bergerbomb44.