by Nathan Poell
Now, I’ve never been the picture boy for health or what not. I didn’t really know how many miles I could do in one day, much less how many I could do stringing those one day trips together and being sore and all that. But I had given up smoking almost four years prior, when I couldn’t get it no matter how badly I wanted it. I just started riding into work every day. Didn’t take long before I realized I needed some fenders, and so I pulled those off your old Schwinn in the shed. Good chrome-plated ones, and plenty wide to cover the tires. Riding got easier after a week or two, but I knew it wasn’t even remotely preparing me for the trip.
I still hadn’t really figured out how to get enough food to cover the trip. Well, I remembered Sean had gone to Sunday school before you and I hooked up so I went to the Methodist church and asked about getting a handout. I’d always thought I was above doing such a thing, but it came really natural to me. I didn’t even have to lie about it, just told them that I needed it to go find my son... well, former stepson, but they didn’t need to know quite that much of the truth, right? (Alfie Ganz filled me in on how lenient the Methodists were with all things material, except money.) I came away with a whole shit-ton of flour and some parched corn and a half-gallon of pickled eggs and even some beef jerky. So, if I ever said anything bad about the Methodists, let me take it back right now. They’re OK folks.
So I made hard tack. Just water and flour that you let kind of bake or dry. It’s not very good, but I ate less and worse before. Made some in advance and packed it and the rest of the flour to make more as I went along.
Just had my boots re-soled last fall, but I figured the old pair of sneakers would work a lot better on the road. And I packed an old sleeping bag I got with Marlboro miles and a blue poncho that used to belong to Sean. Didn’t have a helmet. Hot enough riding without a big damn hat on, and if I fell off and really hurt myself... well, who knows? Might have been a relief.
So I let Alfie know where I was heading a couple days before – just shook his head, like he knew it all – and then left out of Wichita on April 30th, as early in the morning as I could muster. By the time I made it to Newton, I was in a bad way. Just panting and had it in the granny gear on almost all of the hills. But, I kept on and made it just past Hesston. I’d tell you I thought that wasn’t too bad for a first day, but I wasn’t really thinking anything once I got off the bike. I crawled into the sleeping bag and wrapped the poncho around me tightly as I could. It was colder than I thought it would be, but I still fell asleep in a few heartbeats. Slept like a log.
The second day was the worst of the entire trip. I woke up and tried to get up and at ‘em, but couldn’t. The sleeping bag or poncho weren’t constricting me. My back was. After a few minutes of doing my best to rub my back in the parts that felt most like hot irons, I was able to ease myself up into a sitting position. Finally, I was able to stand, and then I remembered what I really should have asked the Methodists for. Fucking aspirin.
So I packed the stuff up best I could and got back on the bike. All day I just wanted to get back off it and walk. In all actuality, it probably would have been as fast. Made it up to Elyria that day, just past it a couple miles, then had a dizzy fit and fell off the bike. I figured that was enough for one day, even thought it wasn’t even evening by that point, so I ate and kind of slept, but mainly shook all the rest of the day and into the night.
Third day I got up slowly and got underway without even eating anything. I don’t know, maybe it was the long rest I’d had, but things went a little better that day. I made it up to Lindsborg without feeling dizzy or anything. Alfie Ganz’s parents, Paul and Cindy, live there, so I begged off a little dinner from them – a whole chicken sandwich with butter and some vegetable soup! – after running a couple errands for them and taking a bath in the Smoky Hill river and changing my clothes. I hadn’t brought too much with me, just a backpack’s worth of stuff. A pair of long pants, couple pairs of shorts, a couple short sleeve shirts and a long underwear top. I spent the night in Alfie’s old bedroom, and crashed out pretty hard. They even gave me a bit of breakfast in the morning before I got on my way. They had coffee! I’d forgotten what it tasted like, but don’t think I ever really got over not having it in the morning. So, I stuck around a bit and chatted with them. They were damn nice people, not like Alfie at all really. Wanted to know what he’d been up to, how he was down in Wichita. I felt a little bit bad, feeding them some white lies about business at the shop and Alfie’s love life... oh, I’m not even going to give you any details on that nasty business. But man, such nice folks... don’t know why Alfie just doesn’t move back. Well, the talking to such decent people and two cups of coffee perked me up and I left Lindsborg feeling pretty damn right with the world.
The ride up to Salina turned out to be not too bad. I got there early afternoon, then turned west. Made it to Carneiro or thereabouts before the sun went down. I probably could have saved a bit of time heading west out of Lindsborg, but thought it would be better taking what I thought were the most traveled routes. It turned out to be a pretty good plan, for the most part.
The next week or so I made my way west along I-70 through the rest of Kansas. Despite the wind slapping me in the face the whole way, I had a few halfway decent days. I just got up every day at butt crack of dawn, hopped on the bike and rode until I felt like it was time to stop. Only rained on me twice, once near Hays and then a couple days after as I was pulling into Oakley. Took a day’s rest in Oakley and begged off some more food and even did laundry (in the Saline river, but still – did you ever think I was capable of doing it?) They’ve still got that stupid cement prairie dog museum there. No visitors to it, of course, and I think the signs on the interstate have all long since been used for firewood. But the museum is still there. Don’t know if it was open, and didn’t even try going in.
Do you remember hopping on the bike with me in Wichita and taking road trips to Denver or the Springs? Remember how free you felt back then? At least, I felt that way, like I was an arrow in flight, almost. And it didn’t matter if it was windy or a little rainy, I could just roll back on the throttle and power through it. Well, the feeling I got in Goodland was just... not the opposite. I felt like a halfway fumbled pass. You remember, a football pass? Just kind of flopping through the air, so slow and goofy, just waiting to be picked off by something. But, I knew I was past the high point of the arc, past the halfway point. And that was good in a way. Felt even better when I was actually in Colorado a day later.
It didn’t last too long. I had planned to go quite a ways that day and stop in Bethune, ‘cause there’s a creek there and I could get some water and maybe wash up a bit. But some pretty rough characters stopped me on the way through Burlington. I don’t know if you knew this, but apparently there was a high-security prison in Burlington, and there was a major breakout after all the power and everything else went out. So now the prisoners are basically in control of the town, which you think would be a pretty bad thing. And it is.
I was getting roughed up a bit (been through worse in other bars, though that’s nothing to brag about I guess) and called a faggot spy or some such and being asked who I was working for. Well, of course, I didn’t know what in the hell they were on about, so I kept saying so. I was starting to get pretty dizzy and unable to answer them what with all the punches they were raining down on me, but then I heard someone yell “Sam!” And I don’t even recall recognizing my own name at that point, but I looked up all the same and saw them boys getting pulled off me before I blacked out. When I woke up I saw a face I thought I’d never see again. Rod Vickland. Used to work at the same shop as me and Alfie before he got busted for making meth. Had no idea he got sent up to Burlington. Big time tweaker, and wasn’t a very decent guy back then. Still wasn’t. He grinned at me with one of them horrible methmouth grins and started asking me questions. Where was I going? Who was I working for? How deep did I cut the junk in my pack? Well, I didn’t know what the hell to tell him, except that I did
n’t know what he was talking about. He showed me a handful of powdery looking stuff and said that his bosses in Denver didn’t like those Pollocks in Ohio trying to move junk in their turf. And I looked at that powdery stuff and looked back and him and just asked him to take as much flour as they wanted but to please leave me enough to get to Denver to look for Sean. He looked at me and the flour back and forth a few times and asked me whether I was couriering for the eastern cartel. I told him I didn’t know anything about any cartels or couriering, but that I was trying to get to Denver to look for my son (I didn’t tell him he was really my stepson, and he’d never have thought to ask, anyways). Some of those other mean mothers started chuckling and seemed to be giving Rod some shit, so he made me eat almost half a pound of the flour, mixed with water beforehand, thank God, and then he sat me aside and had a couple young punks keep an eye on me for a few more hours. Guess he wanted to make sure I was telling him the truth.
After they were sure I wasn’t going to OD on Methodist flour, they took half the rest of it and half the eggs and put me back on my bike and told me to get the fuck out of town. I was still really dizzy and my left eye had swelled almost shut and I couldn’t see well at all out of it, and I had a headache, but I rode out all the same. Anything to get the fuck out of dodge. By the time I was a few miles to the west, I hopped off the bike and rolled out the sleeping bag and laid there. I thought I was going to die, but the next day I woke up. I stayed there for a few hours, trying to get my bearings. It was cloudy, and I wasn’t sure which way was west and which east. So, I just sat there and waited the rest of the day for the sun to go down. It was boring as hell, but finally I was able to make out the sun going down in the direction I thought west was, so that was good. And I went back to sleep.
Felt a lot better that next day, but I needed water, so I rode to Bethune first thing and drank my fill right out of the creek there. Probably not the best course of action, but it hadn’t hurt me before and it didn’t then, neither. Made it into Vona that day and the next few days just kept making progress. I ran out of eggs the day after Limon, and was precious low on parched corn and hard tack a few days later when got near to Denver.
I remember riding into Denver with you on the back of the bike. It was always after dusk before we made it even remotely close to to the city, and you could always see it from almost an hour away. Just the buzzy glow of it, of course, all that light bouncing off the front range and back to the east. It always amazed me, especially when we woke up the next day in the city and saw the sky for what it really was – a thick, brown, smoggy mess. The local bar flies always said it was dust in the air kicked up by the wind, not pollution, but what the hell ever. (Sky never stopped us from having a good time, though, remember?) Well, this time was a bit different. It was mid-day, and I had my head down and was pushing so hard against the wind just to make headway, I hardly even took a look the sky as I got into eyeshot of the city. Well, I finally saw a faded green roadsign that said I-470 exit whatever it was, five miles, and took a swig out of what was left of my water and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. And there that sky was, but it looked so different. You could see clearly all the way west, to the mountains!
In hindsight, I probably ought to have taken more time and soaked in that view, but I was a bit nervous about being still while on the road. Basically boiled down to that I didn’t want to get in trouble with or even see Rod’s bosses, whoever they were, so I took the interstate bypass road, I-470, down southwest towards Parker just hoping they weren’t situated that far out of the town center to notice. That’s where I spent my first couple nights, and I was able to scavenge a bit of food out of an abandoned house down that way. I’m not proud of it, but cold canned soup had never tasted so good. I even slept inside those nights, and it was sweet.
I felt a bit stronger after spending a couple days there – whoever had ditched that place (or maybe got stuck somewhere far away) had done so real quick and carelessly, ‘cause there was still some serious dried and canned goods stocked there – even some freeze dried instant coffee! Also some booze, but with God as my witness I didn’t touch it. (I didn’t dare open the fridge – I’d heard too many horror stories about doing that, and it had an odor even with the door closed.) The house was really on the far southeast outskirts of the city. There were some bare concrete slabs just to the south of it. Probably houses that got started but not finished before everything went dark. No wood there – figure that there probably was but people took it for fuel. (That’s what happened with all the construction under way in east Wichita.)
So after I was rested up, I started looking for Sean. I decided to use that house as a home location, of sorts. I had the address you sent me, and still had that photo of him, so after taking most the junk off the bike – wanted to look most like a local as I could – I planned to just ride into the city to find the address and then, if Sean wasn’t there, a public place where I could ask around. Not much of a plan, in hindsight... but I never tried anything like this before.
Before leaving, I took another look at the little map I’d drawn of Denver, and realized I would never be able to find the address with it, so I rummaged around the house I’d been squatting in and found an old yellow pages and ripped the map parts out of it after circling Sean’s address nearest I could find it and drawing a route from where I was pretty sure I was.
It was clear as a bell when I left the house in the morning. The whole city was so quiet as I rode up the highway through the other suburbs. I saw maybe a couple dozen people stirring outside as I rode, cooking breakfast over wood fire in grills or hanging out laundry or weeding their gardens. So few people, though. I know it was almost like Wichita and... other cities now. Well, the few folks that looked at me gave me odd little doubletakes, like it was obvious I didn’t belong, even though I really had tried to blend in. Thought maybe it was my beard.
By the time I made it through Aurora and Glendale and then into Denver proper, though, the sky had clouded over and looked real nasty. There was lightning off above the mountains. I had left my poncho with the rest of the stuff I’d taken off the bike, like a knucklehead – but then, are there any forecasts anywhere anymore? – and an hour later I was almost soaked, even though it had only rained about ten minutes. I hopped off before everything on me was completely wet and hid beneath the overhang of an old strip mall storefront. It was coming down in buckets a few minutes afterwards, and I felt lucky I stopped when I had. Not that it would have made a big difference to me, ‘cause my clothes were already pretty much soaked through, but it’s a big pain to ride in that stuff. I propped my back up against the storefront wall and sat straight down, then immediately felt a stiffness in my chest. Well, I realized in a second what was wrong, and pulled out the map pages, which were completely soaked and stuck together and ruined.
I set the pages down and just sat there for the better part of a half hour with my head in my hands, when out the corner of my eye I saw someone come out the front of one of the shop doors a ways down. It alarmed me, ‘cause I thought the whole place was abandoned, but it was a little old lady, at least sixty years old. She didn’t even pay me any mind, just walked over to the corner of the overhang to a big bucket – which had just started overflowing – at the bottom of the gutter there. She had a little trouble getting it out from under the gutter spout, so I walked over to help her out with it. Soon as I grabbed the bucket she let out a squawk that it belonged to her and I couldn’t have it. Well, I didn’t know any better. Said I was just trying to help, and she eyed me real close for almost a minute I thought – felt that long, anyway – and then nodded and pointed at the bucket. I hauled it to the door for her – had a little trouble myself, ‘cause it really was damn heavy – and made to take it inside, but she stopped me and half-grunted to me to put it down. Said OK, and had an idea, so I asked her if she had a yellow pages. She eyed me again, like I had a dick growing out of my forehead, and finally said yeah and to come in. I started walking in but she stop
ped me again and pointed at the bucket. Jesus, you know?