two bikes

by Elijah Cansler

The noon sun beats down mean on the school bus Two Bikes calls home. He lies sleeping in it, red and peeling all over except for where his skin is covered by the cargo shorts that he hasn’t taken off for some weeks now. The baby’s crying on a bench seat near the back, but Two Bikes, still half drunk in his sleep, doesn’t stir. His old lady wakes and soothes the child without making a sound. The whole ordeal lasts only a few moments, and Two Bikes sleeps like the dead through it all.

In his dream, he wants for nothing. The wheels on both of his bikes roll without effort, and the front tires never turn in on his heels as he walks along the road. The grips on each handle are soft rubber. They do not callous his palms. The road he walks is level, and there is space enough between each house to see what does or does not lurk between them. It’ll be a few more hours before Two Bikes wakes and forgets the events of his dream. He’ll know only that he had felt comfort before, and that now he does not.

It's just after 2pm when he’s stirred by muffled noise wafting out of a shed down the way. He wakes slowly off and on at first, and then violently with a start—choking and coughing on the stuffy July air trapped inside the bus. He leans up on one elbow and spits hard upon the metal floor. Steam rises from the little pile of phlegm he’s made, and he can’t help but notice how the image reminds him of hissing eggs in a steel pan. If the bus would still turn over, he thinks, he could start cooking on its engine block. He rises to his feet. The woman and child already gone for the day, Two Bikes puts on his backpack and follows the noise.

Outside the bus, the air lightens ever so slightly. Two Bikes feels his thirst growing and reaches for the fifth he keeps in his backpack bottle pocket. He kills the shot-worth of clear liquor left in it and decides a quick pitstop is in order on his journey down the hill. He stretches and thinks. Judging by the placement of the sun and the severity of his headache, he figures Riley must be off at work by now. Riley got hurt on the job a few years back and doesn’t believe in painkillers, so he drinks like a fish. Plus, he’s a union man and makes plenty to always keep extra on hand. He probably won’t even miss it. Right bike handle in his left hand and left bike handle in his right, Two Bikes sets off.

Riley’s house is one of the easier ones on the hill to get in and out of. He has a window in the back bedroom that doesn’t sit quite right in the track, and Two Bikes’ fingers are just skinny enough to fit in between the two panes to unlatch them at their meeting point. He approaches the window and sets off, skinning himself at fingerjoints and cursing. The job takes a good while longer than usual, and the realization at his own fumbling frightens him. He’s always gotten by on being dextrous—on being quick.

After a long and paranoid minute, his panic is dismissed by the paired sounds of a latchclick and the top pane falling heavy to the base of the windowsill. The air that spills out from the opening is cool. In a single vault, he shoots up and balances flat as a plank on the window frame, half his body in and half still outside. He tucks his legs, flips headfirst, and lands hard on the carpet in an upright sitting position. Little as he’s eaten these past few years, he has no ass to cushion the fall. “Goddamn,” he says and scratches his head. More embarrassed than hurt, he shrugs it off quick and sprawls out flat on his back. He says a short prayer, grateful to be out of the heat a while.

After he rises, he hoists the fallen window back into place and latches it. He heads for the kitchen, lifting on the way a half-smoked Sonoma gold 100 from the ashtray and lighting it. Once he makes it through the squashed end-stub of ash, it’s a nice relaxing smoke. At the kitchen counter, he stands on tiptoe to open the liquor cabinet, and his drags begin to quicken in sync with his growing frustration. “Fuckin’ whiskey,” he barks to no one in particular out of the side of his mouth. Dark liquor just won’t do in this heat, he thinks. Bottles are shuffled about every which way, and somewhere in between clinks and grunts, he realizes he’s swinging at nothing and relents. He stands and huffs a moment to think. He turns to open the freezer, thinking that more cold will clear his head. Inside, he finds an unopened plastic fifth of red label Smirnoff. The day begins to look up.

Two Bikes stands in the sweet refrigerated air and lets his head fall backwards in relief. He sighs, exhaling the last of the Sonoma slowly. All of his muscles relax. He tosses the cigarette butt into the sink and turns on the faucet. His head darts beneath it, and he drinks with closed eyes, stopping only to gasp for air between every couple swallows. He returns to the open freezer, grabs the Smirnoff bottle, and unscrews the cap. He takes a healthy swig and wipes at his mouth with the back of his forearm. Little by little, the Earth around him begins to feel less hostile. He makes and eats a bologna sandwich at Riley’s counter before drinking some more water and taking another pull off the fifth. Before he leaves, he washes Riley’s piled dishes and sets them on a paper towel to dry. He throws the now soggy Sonoma butt into the trash.

Now properly liquored and fed, Two Bikes drops the quarter-drank fifth into his backpack and heads for the door. He exits into the godawful heat of the day and traces along the wall to lift his bikes from the patch of weeds he dropped them in. Steadying the bikes proves to be a difficult task, and the earlier paranoia over his slowing body settles in a few layers deeper. Down the hill, air waves above the patchwork of here-and-there blacktop. The homes cling tightly together, and Two Bikes is almost always watched from them through finger-split front blinds as he walks the road. His earlier respite from the hostile Earth slips further. A railthin dog whines at him from behind rusted chain link, and the bikes continue to wobble as he moves. He just keeps on following the noise.

The noise in question is being made by a band that moved into the least dilapidated house in the village a few months back—three downwardly mobile young men who haven’t yet shaken off their scent of general good health, though not for lack of trying on their parts. To hear the boys tell it, they chose the house for two reasons, the first of which being its location in the dead center of the village. The house set right in the middle of the main hill, equidistant from the 24-hour Marathon at its base and Two Bikes’ bus parked at its crest. They held hard and fast to a romantic ideal that they could plant themselves there at the heart of the village and pump blood little by little along its roads and alleyways to nourish the place back to health. How they intended to accomplish this task was unclear, but it seemed to have something to do with art and the honest making of it. They didn’t recognize for a second that the village had been for some time overripe with blood and threatening to burst—that its inhabitants were perfectly healthy already and did not want or need saving.

The second reason they chose the house was for the amish-built shed in its backyard, which they felt was a perfect rehearsal space. The previous tenant had used the shed to manufacture and sell handloaded ammunition out of, and the leftover scrap lead and gunpowder he failed to salvage during a short notice eviction gave the space a certain cherished edge. To power industrial lighting late into the night, the previous tenant had also buried a power line that ran from the house to the shed. Even though it was equipped with electricity, the boys chose instead to run a generator to power their amplifiers. They had told Two Bikes once that both the added noise and the smell of carelessly poured gasoline it provided played a large role in shaping their sound. Real honest punk, as they called it.

Two Bikes thinks he wants to be just like them, and they each think they want to be just like Two Bikes. He strikes up conversation with them in between songs each day they practice. In nearly every conversation, Two Bikes will motion to his backpack’s full bottle pocket and tell the boys unprompted that he just drinks—he doesn’t do anything else. He never remembers that he had told them as much the time before, or the time before that, and so on.

“Cool, man. That’s real cool,” they’ll mutter.

The boys are sincere—they do think it’s cool, but not a one of them believes that Two Bikes doesn’t do anything else. He doesn’t, in truth. Not regularly, at least.

Two Bikes approaches the shed today like he does any other, bobbing his head to the beat and bouncing manic as he nears the open end-doors. He leans a sunburnt shoulder against the frame and keeps on bobbing until the boys finish their song. The bass player acknowledges him first with an enthusiastic there he is!

Two Bikes nods and grins.

The drummer shouts “WHAT’S GOOD” and daps him up.

“Same shit different day, bro.”

The full group strikes up small talk about nothing in particular in between Two Bikes’ reassurances that the boys are really onto something. He used to play, he tells them, but he’s gotten too busy as of late. The boys nod, and one of them asks how his daughter’s been doing.

“Shit, man!” he says, “she’s about good as it gets. Gettin big! Be tall as me here fore too long.”

Two Bikes stands at 5 feet and 2 inches.

One of the punks ducks out of the shed, headed for the house. When he returns, he’s holding a tallboy outstretched in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. Two Bikes takes both reverent. He inhales the water bottle, crumples it, and tosses it aside. The beer, he intends to nurse at. He takes a seat cross-legged in the shade provided by the shedroof and looks down at the can now resting in his lap. Sweat runs along it, blurring white, red, and blue into a cold impressionist masterwork. Selected as America’s best in 1893, it reads. He cracks the top and takes a sip.

“I needed that,” he says.

The band starts up another song, and Two Bikes stretches out his hand flat against the bass amp speaker. Low midrange runs up his arm and spreads a hum throughout his body. He nods slow with the beat and lets his eyes fall closed. Down on one, up on two, down again on three, back up on four. Down and up, down and up. Two Bikes is somewhere else.

The song ends and he returns to his senses. Chatter picks back up. Two Bikes speaks in mostly short phrases that keep the boys rolling. “Damn right,” he says, and “you ain’t lyin.” Somewhere in the middle of all the mindless banter about the state of things–the heat, the local church, and The Man the local church is said to be in cahoots with–Two Bikes spaces out. He misses a question directed at him and breaks the little-too-long silence with a “yeah man. Rough out here.” None of the boys respond, so Two Bikes defaults to his tried and true you feel me? They do not. How could they? After another short silence, the bass player grabs for Two Bikes an old beater guitar from the far end of the shed.

“That’s for you, bro,” he says. “Handmade by this old dude in Tennessee. Great guitar, just needs a little love.”

It was not handmade, but it did need a little love.

The boys hang around only a short while longer, but they reassure Two Bikes as they leave that he’s welcome to stay as long as he likes. He remains in the shed until sundown, sipping at his Pabst and cracking knuckles and toes and back off and on. He waits for the day he’ll be invited into the house, but it hasn’t come yet. Alone, he stretches out on the drum rug and thinks about the guitar he’s been gifted, losing himself a moment in recollection. As a boy, his papaw taught him all the major open chords. He would stay up late practicing, and he’d perform regularly for his family before he left to work the sawmill at 16. He hasn’t played since, and his papaw is now long dead.

It's dark when Two Bikes starts his slow climb back to the bus. The gifted guitar is slung uneven overtop his backpack, and it knocks now and again against his elbows. His body is wearing down, and after a while he gives up on trying to steer the bikes. They drag erratic alongside and behind him, scraping along the road and bouncing at cracks and patches, catching in the odd pothole and needing to be yanked out forcibly at times. His struggling is illuminated in short bursts by motion sensor floodlights. The scraping sound of the bikes bleeds into the night air hum of bugsong. Dogs bark at random intervals. In the final stretch, he yanks one bike too hard and catches himself hard on the outside of his right knee. He hisses through closed teeth and keeps moving. Just a little further now.

The bus is empty when he arrives, as it often is for a few days at a time. She has never once told him where she goes, and he has never asked. He lets the bikes fall from his hands and removes first the guitar and then the backpack from his shoulders. He leans each item gently against the wall of the bus and takes a seat on the step, pulling the little plastic fifth from the bag as he does so. The vodka rushes over his tongue now warm. He coughs and replaces the cap. The hill stretches downward before him throatlike in the dark, the Marathon sign beaming up at him from below. He sits a long while and thinks as little as he can manage. The village lays down to sleep beneath a July moon. Time crawls.

Two Bikes sits out behind the bus late into the night strumming aimless at noise and slurring words overtop. Nothing clicks, and the strings bite at his fingertips. He stops, spits, and looks up. The stars overhead scowl, and he does not look away. Instead, he scowls back defiant and fights to sober up, thinking that if he could just focus, everything would be set back into place. His fingers would toughen, his voice would ring out clear and strong, and all the old songs would come right back. His sunburn would finally heal. He’d get the bus running and have a great big breakfast ready for the woman and child when they return home. He’d translate all the spotted light above into something ordered–into some topographical map of any other world he could step into, even if just for a moment.

He falls asleep enraged. He does not dream.

Photo of Elijah Cansler

BIO: Elijah Cansler is a west Kentucky writer focused on the gutter cultures of the mid-South. His writing has been published in Citywide Lunch and on personal blogs. You can find all of his work by following him on Twitter @moonrat27