by Gary Paulsen
Allow me to describe:
He had, indeed, found the best sealed-bearing hubs, “so smooth and perfect that if the bike was upside down and you spun the front wheel, you could go off and eat lunch and when you came back, it would still be spinning,” Dad said.
I don’t know why anyone would do that, but he and Pooder nodded approvingly as if that’s the whole point of wheel bearings—endless unattended spinning.
The alloy pedals—with strapless metal toe clamps—also turned without any effort. “So light they don’t seem to be on your foot at all,” Pooder said, calling them “air pedals,” because they almost floated on the end of his feet when he jumped at the chance to switch places with me to “get a feel for this beaut.”
The brushed aluminum alloy crank arms with three polished chainrings on the front and seven sprockets on the rear cassette clocked in with twenty-one possible gears.
“Anything,” Pooder said after halting his circles in our yard to shake my dad’s hand and congratulate him on his efforts, “you could possibly want or need, terrain-wise.”
The shifters for the front and rear gears were so smooth and lightning-fast it seemed the derailleurs could practically be shifted by thought alone. The wheel rims were of brushed aluminum, sturdy and only slightly corroded, with almost surgically balanced tension to the spokes, tires narrow and light enough for street racing but ample enough for gravel. And welds on the custom frame made from tubing cannibalized from a half-dozen junkyard frames had been done with such wire-feed-welder precision they seemed to not exist at all, smooth and seamless like the frame was created from one piece of liquid metal.
Have I mentioned the brakes? Not yet? Again, exactly perfectly right disc brakes, so sensitive yet powerful they needed only a featherlight touch on the levers to bring the bike back to earth from space where it seemed almost to float when you rode it.
I’m aware that this description makes it sound like the perfect bike.
And it was.
Almost.
Because my father is the absolute monarch of the Kingdom of Almost-Was.
Only a few minor details—small things, infinitesimal things—kept this marvel of mechanical ingenuity and design perfection from being the bike of my dreams.
First of all, my dad had designed and built a recumbent bicycle.
Which is all right, in a way. Recumbents are fun and fast and they move right along. Unless you try going up a steep hill. All your power comes from your legs because you are essentially lying down, with your feet on pedals that stick over the front wheel, so you can’t bring your body weight down on the pedals for added force to combat all that physics and angles and gravity stuff. That means pedaling uphill makes you sweat because you have to work harder. It’s still okay because you can shift down to a lower gear and pedal faster for a lower speed up a potentially steep grade. So slow you might wobble a bit. But, still, you can get it done.
Did I mention my school is on a hill? A steep hill? Probably not. So, my dreams of gliding effortlessly to the bike racks looking casual and chill were replaced with a nightmarish image of me flat on my back, pedaling madly but moving forward very slowly, hyperventilating, with leg cramps, semi-blinded from the sweat that, instead of rolling down my face all manly and Tour de France–like, is pooling in my eyes, stinging them and making them water so it looks like I’ve just had a good cry on my way to school.
Added to that pretty picture, a recumbent bike puts you roughly three feet lower than anybody standing near you and on a completely different plane of view from somebody who is riding a conventional bicycle.
And by “anybody” and “somebody,” I mean, of course, Peggy. Who I have seen, like everyone else ever, riding a normal bike.
So, what my dad’s hard work had ultimately provided was the opportunity for me to try to be accepted as a regular person by the best girl in middle school (not only my middle school, but quite possibly all middle schools everywhere over the entire history of middle schools), looking like an absolute dweeb on a homemade lie-down two-wheeler. “Hi, up there,” I’d gasp, struggling and failing to sit upright (did I mention my body hates me and the parts that hate me most are my abs?). She would undoubtedly look around and after first seeing no one, eventually drop her gaze down to me, a semi-prone, self-propelled freaky perv pedaling around eye level with people’s bottoms and …
No.
Not a good way to start a relationship.
And to top it off, even if I somehow survived what had been this attempt to make a good first impression—and what I should have mentioned before when I was going on about her hair and her eyes, was that Peggy’s personality is aces, and she’s supernaturally kind and may well have given me a pass for the weird style of biped—but then my father went and added the final touch, the crowning glory:
The seat.
Which, in reality and, if you ask me, quite beside the point, was extremely comfortable. He’d made it of beautifully welded pipe with exactly the right lean-back angle, and the front edge brought my legs up so my feet hit the pedals exactly right.
Perfect.
But remember now, I told you this already, my father leans well into the concept of being practical and has never been one to honor the cosmetic side of things. Looks, for him, came in a distant second place during his design process and while the seat was comfortable and fit me exactly right …
He had covered it with a plastic-laminated, crinkly upholstery of huge palm fronds and garish flamingos that he had apparently lifted off an old lounge chair from one of Oscar’s piles. It had probably been on the edge of somebody’s pool for many summers because the flamingos were no longer that vibrant, screaming, pinky-orange color, but a light dusty pink. And the fronds had faded from a jungle green to a light moss, making the whole pattern look gently floral, rather than robustly tropical.
“It looks like the weird couch thing my grandfather sits on in the all-season porch when he gets some sun at the assisted-living home,” Pooder said, “only with wheels.” He gazed happily at the bike sitting there in the sun, propped up on what must have been a Harley kickstand.
Dad had painted the frame black. Not sprayed and glossy, but flat-black paint applied with what must have been a coarse brush, so in some places the original color of the parts, and sometimes rust, showed through. Sort of spotted. Like it had some disease—call it bicycle leprosy—and the flatness of the paint seemed to absorb light. I blinked, trying to clear my vision but nope. When the light hit the paint just right, it produced an optical illusion that shimmered and looked like the portal to a new time-space continuum.
I could not even begin to imagine riding the bike to school, or the mall, or anywhere. Pedaling along, absorbing light, causing a portable, miniature black hole wherever I went, coming up next to and well below Peggy like a mysterious lurking shadow and giving a hearty greeting to her behind.
It was, simply, not acceptable.
The bike, that is.
And something, clearly, had to be done.
About my father, that is.
A POSSIBLE SOLUTION INVOLVING PUPPIES
I initially considered that I could perhaps run away from home, and I gave it serious thought for a while (and, by “a while,” I mean as I pictured myself riding this bike to school) as a way to avoid my dad and his philosophies and ways of looking at life that make everything harder than it has to be for me.
I could run somewhere, Out West, probably, and get a job on a ranch that paid actual money rather than stuff like bags of rice and dried beans that my dad thinks is the greatest payday of his life.
The ranch work would make me strong and allow me to save up a pile of money of my own and then, eventually, I’d come back all tanned and tall and bronzed and probably without needing glasses anymore and my abs would be rock-hard and I’d accidentally run into Peggy and then …
I snapped myself out of that line of thinking before I said anything out loud because Pooder would have teased me like crazy f
or how “barking mad” I was (another term from his British phase).
Plus, he loved the bike, thought the whole situation was nothing short of hilarious, and took to calling it “your nursing home Harley.”
“The best thing about it,” he said, “is that it makes you look older. More mature. About seventy-five. Ride the bike long enough and you’ll probably be covered with wrinkles, trying to pull quarters out of everyone’s ears like my grandfather, only everyone at the assisted-living home is onto him and they stay an arm’s length away now and he doesn’t get to watch his shows if he doesn’t observe and respect people’s personal space, which he says is nothing more or less than an unhealthy dislike of magic tricks.”
“Quit stooging around, Pooder. This is serious. Whatever it is that makes my dad so … dad-like seems to be getting worse all the time. Last night at dinner he told me he’s now considering reweaving old cloth and sewing our own clothes because he says they did it in prehistory, before they even understood the concept of money. Can you imagine me heading for school riding this … this … supine rolling lawn-chair Death Star thing wearing hand-stitched clothes made of woven scrap cloth?”
Pooder has this smile. I’ve talked about it before—this strange little quirky smile that makes you not sure if he’s kidding because what he says always sounds so far-fetched and unreasonable but the way he says it is always so certain. Anyway, he was smiling that smile now.
“You’re looking at this all wrong,” he told me. “What we do, see, is we get a video of you in your new clothes on your new bike. I can use my phone to film you even though it’s not that good at motion. A little fuzzy. Still, I’m thinking that we throw that sucker on the internet. I already have a channel, just lacking quality content, you know. As soon as we get that video loaded, we’ll rack up viewing numbers and then we can make some coin when the big corporations start to want to advertise on it.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do say. I see stuff like this all the time. I’ve made a study of self-made social media phenoms. You know, if I pitch it right…”
One of Pooder’s phases that, to be fair, he kept drifting in and out of, unlike the other fair-weather ideas, was his dream to form a company. He’s never very detailed about what kind of company or how he’d start one, but he did work up the design for his business card and made a list of necessary office supplies, including an adjustable standing desk with a balance ball chair and adjoining treadmill attachment “to maximize both work efficiency and physical fitness.” He plans to make a lot of money as an agent or adman (“Are they the same thing,” he asked once, “or would I be the first agent/adman hybrid?”), pitching ideas (he tries to remember to carry around a notebook for jotting down these pitchable ideas, only he keeps losing them—the notebooks and then the ideas) and stacking coin.
“Pooder—”
“I can see it now. We start with you off in the distance, so you’re just a black dot, and then lay in some music as you come closer until you stop right in front of the camera and you say—”
“Knock it off.”
“No. Not that. You’ll say something like, ‘Hi, everything I’m wearing and riding is made completely of recycled material,’ and that will lock up the green and eco-friendly market as well as the global corporations who only want to appeal to a young demographic and are always looking for convincing influencers to partner up with because today’s youth is tomorrow’s consumer or the hope for the future or whatever.”
“Are you done yet?”
“Never. But I can see that your mind is elsewhere. The dad thing. So, what are you going to do?”
“I am open to suggestions. But only good ones.”
The thing with Pooder is, kidding aside, when there is a real problem, he is a ride-or-die friend and won’t stop until he helps you out of the jam you’re in. Perhaps because of what he calls his fertile imagination, his brain works like the best kind of artificial intelligence. There’s logic, observational ability, and, oddly enough, a good portion of common sense stacked up behind that quirky mind and filterless mouth. I looked at him hopefully.
“I don’t have a thing,” he said. “Not a blessed thing.”
“I was not expecting that from you, to be honest.”
“The problem is your dad is too good. He thinks all the time and really cares about you. I would kill to have your dad. Lately, mine comes home from work, pours a glass of what he calls his nighttime wine—red, because white wine is for the day and red for the night—clicks on the television, works his way through the bottle, and then goes to bed. I don’t think he’s said four words to me or my mom this week. I’m not even sure he remembers our names. Your dad actually talks to you, seems to like you and care what you say or do. The ideal father, except…”
“Except what?”
“Well…”
“He’s crazy, right?”
Pooder shook his head. “Not at all. He’s obviously a genius. It’s just that he has a completely unique way of looking at things—”
“His way.”
Pooder nodded. “Exactly. He sees things not as they are, but as they could be in the best of situations.”
“Just not necessarily my way.”
“True.”
“So what do I do?”
“Elementary, my dear Watson.” (Pooder’s British phase included, but was not limited to, him wanting to be a detective like Sherlock Holmes for a while, and he still enjoyed the opportunity to misquote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, he informed me, never wrote such a line.)
“Enlighten me.”
“You have to reboot your father.”
There it was. Simple, clean.
“You’re stuck with a really good guy who just needs some tweaks in the father department. You’re going to have to change him to be something you can live with. Or something with which you can live.”
Pooder started paying attention to grammar rules after Ms. Johnson, our English teacher last year, had what he called a glow-up and Pooder thought if he grew up and became an English teacher they might meet at a teacher’s convention and … well, let’s just say I’m not the only one with hopes that may not be realistic.
“And how do I reboot my dad?”
“Not a clue.” Pooder shook his head, then shrugged. “It’s not like you can turn him off for ten or fifteen seconds and then turn him back on and he’ll self-adjust to what you want, like a laptop. I only know the what, I do not know the how.”
But it was there, right there, that fate kicked in and took over.
Often you can’t tell when that is in life, don’t see it until it’s in the past, but that time, at that juncture (a word again from when Pooder walked around saying things like “whereas at this juncture the plaintiff made known his aforementioned predilection for wasting his efforts on…”), fate made its move, presenting me with what I thought might become a solution.
Puppies.
Dramatic pause.
I can tell right now that you might be a little skeptical in thinking that puppies can solve this thing. It’s not like I went out and adopted a litter of puppies to distract my father from his philosophies, although there is something about a pile of puppies that can be pretty distracting. A pile of puppies is way cuter than a basket of baby ducks, which I think is measurably cuter than a pile of kittens on a table covered with balls of yarn, and I wonder if Peggy likes puppies …
Got sidetracked there. Sorry.
Pooder caught it. He’s reading this as I go and he’s worried that I’m addled and might lose my commitment and mind in a fortnight. (He’s working now at being a writer in Victorian England. Between us, he had to look up the word fortnight before he used it because he initially thought it might be something about a military installation after dark.)
So I was talking to Pooder and he had the what but not the how to handle my dad problem, and that’s when fate stepped in. Because that’s when I looked up at the wall and saw the color calendar that is sen
t free each year from the feed store where we buy hog and chicken feed and—here is the stroke of puppy genius—dog food.
Just a run-of-the-mill freebie calendar with generic pictures of baby calves and ducklings and chicks. They might switch it up from month to month and throw in a barn, a covered bridge, a mountain range with snowy peaks, and even a pretty girl wearing a plaid shirt and bib overalls chewing on a piece of straw while she looks out across a farm field. But mainly it was baby animals.
And this month featured a photograph of a distractingly cute pile of husky puppies.
Which reminded me of a recent purchase at the store.
That’s where fate was hiding. That’s where fate showed me where to look for the how.
In a forty-two-pound bag of dry dog food.
You weren’t there, so let me explain.
See, we couldn’t leave bags of dog food out in the open because Carol might have been related to a chain saw and there was probably some bloodhound in her family tree, too, and she was always up for a snack, even if she had just eaten. If you left the bag of dog food out, she’d find it and shred it and tear it apart like she did with skunks and then try to eat it. Like she did with skunks.
But forty-two pounds of dry dog food is a challenge even for a pit bull like her. She’d eat until she couldn’t hold any more, then puke it up and then eat more—puke, eat, puke, eat, puke. And, because she was feminine and oddly delicate with good manners and a strong sense of pride about her yard, she was always careful to puke where it wouldn’t mess up the yard. She’d run for the trailer, climb the three steps, and puke on the porch.
“She wants to share it,” Pooder said the first time he saw Carol’s worst trick. “She’s so cute.”
“That’s because you don’t have to clean it up,” I said, scooping up piles of dog vomit—wondering why it turned into green-yellow goober snot after it went through her mouth and stomach—with an old shovel we kept for picking up pieces of shredded skunk.
After a couple of what we call the puke-and-rally incidents, we figured out that the bag had to be opened and the contents poured into a metal garbage can with a tight lid to keep Carol out of it. Earlier that day, I’d carried a new sack into the shed, opened the top of the metal barrel, ripped the sack open, and poured the food down into the bottom.