Dad pulled me up. I heard an evil hum in my left ear, and the next
instant I took a sting at the edge of my ear that caused the tears to jump
from my eyes. “Ow!” I heard myself shout, though with all the screaming and
hollering one little ow was of no consequence. Two more wasps, however, heard
me. One of them got me in my right shoulder, stinging through my suit coat and
shirt; the other darted at my face like an African lance and impaled my upper
lip. I gave a garbled shout—owgollywowwow—of the kind that speaks volumes of
pain but no syllable of sense, and I, too, fought the churning air. A voice
squealed with laughter, and when I looked at the Demon through my watering
eyes I saw her jumping up and down on the pew, her mouth split in a grin and
red whelps all over her face.
“Everyone out!” Dr. Lezander hollered. Three wasps clung, pulsing and
stinging, to his bald skull, and his gray-haired, stern-faced wife was behind
him, her blue-blossomed Easter hat knocked awry and wasps crawling on her wide
shoulders. She gripped her Bible in one hand and her purse with the other and
swung tremendous blows at the attacking swarms, her teeth gritted with
righteous anger.
People were fighting through the door, ignoring raincoats and umbrellas
in their struggle to escape from torment into deluge. Coming into church, the
Easter crowd had been the model of polite Christian civilization; going out,
they were barbarians to the core. Women and children went down in the muddy
yard, and the men tripped over them and fell facefirst into rain-beaten
puddles. Easter hats spun away and rolled like soggy wheels until the torrent
slammed them flat.
I helped Dad pry Grand Austin’s wooden leg loose from under the pew.
Wasps were jabbing at my father’s hands, and every time one would sting I
could hear his breath hiss. Mom, Nana Alice, and Grandmomma Sarah were trying
to get out into the aisle, where people were falling down and tangling up with
each other. Reverend Lovoy, his fingers swollen like link sausages, was trying
to shield his children’s faces between himself and sobbing Esther. The choir
had disintegrated, and some of them had left their empty purple robes behind.
Dad and I got Grand Austin out into the aisle. Wasps were attacking the back
of his neck, and his cheeks were wet. Dad brushed the wasps off, but more
swarmed around us in a vengeful circle like Comanches around a wagon train.
Children were crying and women were shrieking, and still the wasps darted and
stung. “Out! Out!” Dr. Lezander was shouting at the door, shoving people
through as they knotted up. His wife, Veronica, a husky Dutch bear, grabbed a
struggling soul and all but flung the man through the doorway.
We were almost out. Grand Austin staggered, but Dad held him up. My
mother was plucking the wasps out of Grandmomma Sarah’s hair like living
nettles. Two hot pins jabbed into the back of my neck, one a split second
after the other, and the pain felt like my head was going to blow off. Then
Dad took hold of my arm and pulled and the rain pounded on my skull. We all
got through the door, but Dad slipped in a puddle and went down on his knees
in the muck. I grasped the back of my neck and ran around in circles, crying
with the pain, and after a while my feet slipped out from under me and my
Easter suit met Zephyr’s mud, too.
Reverend Lovoy was the last one out. He slammed the church door shut and
stood with his back against it, as if to contain the evil within.
Thunder boomed and rolled. The rain came down like hammers and nails,
beating us all senseless. Some people sat in the mud; others wandered around,
dazed; others just stood there letting the rain pour over them to help cool
the hot suffering.
I was hurting, too. And I imagined, in my delirium of pain, that behind
the church’s closed door the wasps were rejoicing. After all, it was Easter
for them, too. They had risen from the dead of winter, the season that dries
up wasps’ nests and mummifies their sleeping infants. They had rolled away
their own stone and emerged reborn into a new spring, and they had delivered
to us a stinging sermon on the tenacity of life that would stay with us far
longer than anything Reverend Lovoy could have said. We had, all of us,
experienced the thorns and nails in a most personal way.
Someone bent down beside me. I felt cool mud being pressed against the
stings on the back of my neck. I looked into Granddaddy Jaybird’s rain-soaked
face, his hair standing up as if he’d been electric-shocked.
“You all right, boy?” he asked me.
He had turned his back on the rest of us and fled for his own skin. He
had been a coward and a Judas, and there was no satisfaction in his offering
of mud.
I didn’t answer him. I looked right through him. He said, “You’ll be all
right,” and he stood up and went to see about Grandmomma Sarah, who huddled
with Mom and Nana Alice. He looked to me like a half-drowned, scrawny rat.
I might’ve punched him if I’d been my father’s size. I couldn’t help but
be ashamed of him, a deep, stinging shame. And I couldn’t help but wonder, as
well, if some of Granddaddy Jaybird’s cowardice might be inside me, too. I
didn’t know it then, but I was going to find out real soon.
Somewhere across Zephyr the bells of another church rang, the sound
coming to us through the rain as if heard in a dream. I stood up, my lower lip
and shoulder and the back of my neck throbbing. The thing about pain is, it
teaches you humility. Even the Branlins were blubbering like babies. I never
saw anybody act cocky after they got a hide full of stingers, have you?
The Easter bells rang across the watery town.
Church was over.
Hallelujah.
5
The Death of a Bike
THE RAIN KEPT FALLING.
Gray clouds hung over Zephyr, and from their swollen bellies came the
deluge. I went to sleep with rain slamming the roof, and I awoke to the crash
of thunder. Rebel shivered and moaned in his doghouse. I knew how he felt. My
wasp stings had diminished to red welts, but for day upon day no ray of
sunshine fell upon my hometown; only the incessant rain came down, and when I
wasn’t doing homework I sat in my room rereading old Famous Monsters magazines
and my stock of comic books.
The house got that rainy smell in it, an odor of damp boards and wet dirt
wafting up from the basement. The downpour caused the cancellation of the
Saturday matinee at the Lyric, because the theater’s roof had sprung leaks.
The very air itself felt slick, like green mold growing on damp stones. At the
dinner table a week after Easter, Dad put down his knife and fork and looked
at the steamy wet windows and said, “We’re gonna have to grow gills if this
keeps up.”
It did keep up. The air was heavy with water, the clouds cutting all
light to a dim, swampy murk. Yards became ponds, and the streets turned into
streams. School started letting out early, so everyone could get home, and on
Wednesday afternoon at seventeen minutes before three o’clock my old bike gave
up the ghost.
One second I was trying to pedal through a torrent on Deerman Street. The
next second my bike’s front wheel sank into a crater where the pavement had
broken and the shock thrummed through the rust-eaten frame. Several things
happened at once: the handlebars collapsed, the front wheel’s spokes snapped,
the seat broke, the frame gave way at its tired old seams, and suddenly I was
lying on my belly in water that flooded into my yellow rain slicker. I lay
there, stunned, trying to figure out how the earth had knocked me down. Then I
sat up, wiped the water out of my eyes, and looked at my bike, and just like
that I knew it was dead.
My bike, old in the ways of a boy’s life long before it had reached my
hands by merit of a flea market, was no longer a living thing. I felt it, as I
sat there in the pouring rain. Whatever it is that gives a soul to an object
made by the tools of man, it had cracked open and flown to the watery heavens.
The frame had bent and snapped, the handlebars hanging by a single screw, the
seat turned around like a head on a broken neck. The chain was off its
sprockets, the front tire warped from its rim, and the snapped spokes sticking
up. I almost cried at the sight of such carnage, but even though my heart
hurt, I knew crying wouldn’t help. My bike had simply worn out; it had come to
the end of its days, pure and simple. I was not its first owner, and maybe
that made a difference, too. Maybe a bike, once discarded, pines away year
after year for the first hand that steered it, and as it grows old it dreams,
in its bike way, of the young roads. It was never really mine, then; it
traveled with me, but its pedals and handlebars held the memory of another
master. Maybe, on that rainy Wednesday, it killed itself because it knew I
yearned for a bike built for me and me alone. Maybe. All I knew for sure at
that moment was that I had to walk the rest of the way home, and I couldn’t
drag the carcass with me.
I pulled it up onto somebody’s yard and left it under a dripping oak
tree, and I went on with my drenched knapsack on my back and my shoes
squeaking with water.
When my father, who was home from the dairy, found out about the bike, he
packed me into the pickup truck, and off we went to fetch the carcass on
Deerman Street. “It can be fixed,” he told me as the wipers slogged back and
forth across the windshield. “We’ll get somebody to weld it together or
somethin’. That’ll be cheaper than a new bike, for sure.”
“Okay,” I answered, but I knew the bike was dead. No amount of welding
was going to revive it. “The front wheel was messed up, too,” I added, but Dad
was concentrating on his driving.
We reached the place where I’d pulled the carcass up under the oak tree.
“Where it is?” Dad asked. “Was this the place?”
It was, though the carcass was gone. Dad stopped the truck, got out, and
knocked on the front door of the house we sat before. I saw the door open, and
a white-haired woman peered out. She and Dad talked for a minute or so, and I
saw the woman point toward the street. Then my dad came back, his cap dripping
water and his shoulders hunched in his wet milkman’s jacket. He slid behind
the wheel, closed the door, and said, “Well, she walked out to get her mail,
she saw the bike lyin’ there under her tree, and she called Mr. Sculley to
come pick it up.” Mr. Emmett Sculley was Zephyr’s junkman, and he drove around
in a bright green truck with SCULLEY’S ANTIQUES and a telephone number painted
on the sides in red. My dad started the engine and looked at me. I knew that
look; it was hard and angry, and I could read a grim future in it. “Why didn’t
you go to that woman’s door and tell her you were gonna come back for your
bike? Didn’t you think of that?”
“No, sir,” I had to admit. “I didn’t.”
Well, my dad pulled the truck away from the curb and we started off
again. Not toward home, but heading west. I knew where we were going. Mr.
Sculley’s junk shop lay to the west, past the wooded edge of town. On the way,
I had to endure my father’s tale, the one that began like this: “When I was
your age, I had to walk if I wanted to get somewhere. I wish I’d had a bike
back then, even a used one. Heck, if my buddies and me had to walk two or
three miles, we didn’t think a thing about it. And we were healthier for it,
too. Sun, wind, or rain, it didn’t matter. We got where we were going on our
own two le—” And so on, you know the kind of speech I mean, the generational
paean of childhood.
We left the town limits behind us, and the glistening road wound through
the wet green forest. The rain was still coming down, pieces of fog snagged on
the treetops and drifting across the road. Dad had to drive slowly because the
road around here was dangerous even when the pavement was dry. My dad was
still going on about the dubious joys of not having a bike, which I was
beginning to realize was his way of telling me I’d better get used to walking
if my old ride was unfixable. Thunder boomed off beyond the hazy hills, the
road deserted before us as it curved beneath the tires like a wild horse
fights a saddle. I don’t know why I chose that moment to turn my head and look
back, but I did.
And I saw the car that was coming up fast behind us.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and the skin beneath it tingled
like the scurrying of ants. The car was a black, low-slung, mean-looking
panther with gleaming chrome teeth, and it rocketed around the long curve my
father had just negotiated with an uneasy alliance of brake and accelerator.
The pickup truck’s engine was sputtery, but I could hear no sound from the
black car that closed on us. I could see a shape and a pale face behind the
wheel. I could see red and orange flames painted on the slope of the ebony
hood, and then the car was on our tail and showed no sign of slowing or
swerving and I looked at my father and shouted, “Dad!”
He jumped in his seat and jerked the wheel. The truck’s tires slewed to
the left, over the faded centerline, and my father fought to keep us from
going into the woods. Then the tires got a grip again, the truck straightened
out, and Dad had fire in his eyes when he swung his face in my direction. “Are
you crazy?” he snapped. “You want to get us killed?”
I looked back.
The black car was gone.
It hadn’t passed us. It hadn’t turned off anywhere. It was just gone.
“I saw… I saw…”
“Saw what? Where?” he demanded.
“I… thought I saw… a car,” I told him. “It was… about to hit us, I
thought.”
He peered into the rearview mirror. Of course he saw only the same rain
and empty road I was seeing. He reached out, put his hand against my forehead,
and said, “You feelin’ all right?”
“Yes sir.” I didn’t have a fever. Of that, at least, I was certain. My
father, satisfied that I was not building up heat, pulled his hand away and
refastened it to the steering wheel. “Just sit still,” he said, and I obeyed
him. He fixed his attention on the tricky road again, but his jaw muscle
