by John McManus
“Yes, another lovely painting this morning,” Cody said. He was masking his awe, thought Hunter. He didn’t want to admit that the world could seem too beautiful to be real.
“Think we’ll be arrested?” Hunter asked in the empty trailhead lot, pouring water into his bottles.
“Everest used to be off limits to climbers, too.”
“Is that a no?”
“It angered the gods. I say fuck that.”
He almost wished Cody would fear arrest, so he could pull out Buck’s card and say, Here’s how I know we’re safe. If he mentioned Buck out of context, it would seem like he needed to talk about him.
A solitary hawk was circling as they aired up their tires. They loaded their saddlebags. Hunter led the way into a stand of cliff-rose. The leaves of those twisty trees pricked him and made him shiver in the warm air. He wheelied over a fallen pine. Barely had he landed again before the world fell out from under him and he was soaring downhill, almost too fast to control.
To keep from flying over the bars, he hung back with his weight behind the saddle. The path narrowed to the width of his tires. Before him gaped miles of empty space. He leaned hard left. Over the wind Cody’s screams sounded like thrill-cries, changing in intensity so many times that Hunter paused at a wide place in the trail in case it meant something sinister.
Straddling his bike, he counted mesas that rose between him and the snowy North Rim. All part of the illusion, he was musing when Cody came careening around a bend. He skidded halfway to a halt before knocking Hunter over.
“What the fuck?” Cody said, as Hunter untangled himself from his bike.
“You screamed like you were in trouble.”
“You were winning again, dickface.”
“I’m only riding,” he said.
“Quarter mile ahead without trying.”
Cody was right, Hunter hadn’t been trying. “Go in front then.”
“No, Death Wish, you’d be riding my ass.”
Cody wasn’t smiling. “I don’t have a death wish,” Hunter said, startled to realize his friend’s attitude wasn’t just a shtick.
“Well, I do. I’d rather die than lose to you again.”
“I didn’t realize we were racing,” he lied.
“Last night on that butte, middle of nowhere and you still wouldn’t let me win. You flew right over my head.”
“I’m sorry,” Hunter said, honestly surprised.
“‘I didn’t realize we were racing,’” Cody repeated in an effeminate whine. “Like mother, like daughter.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You think you win races because it’s not real. It’s all your fantasy, and in your head you deserve to be champion.”
“Fine, I deserve it,” Hunter heard himself say, as his fondness for his friend dissipated into the enormous emptiness.
“Let’s find out,” said Cody, pushing his way between Hunter and the cliff edge.
After Cody had vanished around a bend, Hunter stood there in a daze, straddling his bike. Emily was sick at home, thinking kind thoughts, while healthy Cody was here living out his hateful dream.
If I’m winning because I believe I ought to, then I’ll fucking win, Hunter thought in belated reply as he pushed off downhill.
He pedaled with all his might. One inch to the right as he accelerated, and he would be dead. One inch left, and he would ricochet off the cliff wall into the open air. But he was in control. He shifted to the smallest rear cog. To lean into curves was exhilarating. His whole body hovered over the chasm. He fell into a trance, exulted, breathed, put his life at risk too many times to count, until his hands were numb from the bumps and the trail petered out by a boathouse on the shore of the Colorado River.
He laid his bike on the gravel beach and stood in awe of the colored canyon wall that rose before him. Except for the rippling water, it was quiet. His thoughts about Cody seemed small to him now. No longer caring who had won, he looked toward the boathouse. Cody must be in there, intending to scare him. Let him have his moment to gloat, Hunter thought, walking over. When he shouted Cody’s name, it echoed back. He arrived at the wooden structure, reached for the door handle. As he did, the door swung wide. “Boo,” he cried out, producing a gasp from a uniformed female ranger.
She dropped the kayak she was dragging. “Help,” Hunter heard himself say as she touched a gun in its holster. Pretend to need water. I’ve wandered for days. But she noticed his bike and moved her hand onto her radio.
“Are you dumb or insane?” was her first question of many. Had he thought about the hikers he might have killed? Imagined that the rangers would vanish at midnight? Had he ridden helmetless in a show of bravado, or had his helmet fallen into the canyon, as he so easily could have done too? Was he aware of the laws she was citing in a rush? No, he indicated with a head shake to each rhetorical question, he wasn’t, hadn’t, didn’t, and so on until she asked for his friend’s last name.
“I’m here alone,” he said, hoping Cody could see what was going on.
“I scared you more than you scared me,” the ranger said, and then she radioed to headquarters.
“Is his bike expensive?” asked a man over the radio.
“Kid, how much did that bike cost?” she said.
“I’m not hurting anyone,” Hunter protested, wishing Cody were here after all. Cody could say, “Know who we are, bitch?” and take off running, whereas Hunter felt knee-jerk guilt to think of this woman as a bitch.
She detached his front wheel and chained it up with the kayaks. “See you up top,” she said, and told her colleague to meet Hunter at the trailhead.
“I want my wheel back,” he said meekly, scared for his friend, even as he feared Cody could overhear him being a pussy.
“You can hike out with the rest of it, or I’ll keep the whole thing.”
The ranger escorted him over to where the bike lay. He dragged it out of her sight behind a stand of mahogany, where he sat down to wait for Cody.
The sun was high overhead now. He grew thirsty and uncomfortable. Half an hour passed by. He wanted his wheel back. The ranger hadn’t even asked how it felt to ride the canyon. Did she not wonder? Was it a thrill she couldn’t begin to imagine? If Cody would just show up, they could mock her incuriosity together, but it was becoming difficult to believe his friend was okay.
He looked up at the terraced cliff. If he’d been guiding events by religious conviction, Cody would signal from above with a pebble. There was only the wind in the trees, the flow of the river.
When he couldn’t sit still for the disquiet he felt, he balanced the bike on its wheel, held its handlebars at chest level, and pushed it in front of him.
It was hotter than it had been. He drank some water. By the first switchback his arms already ached from their outstretched position. He moved his right hand to the saddle. His limp finger bounced with every bump. Occasionally in dust or manure he could make out a scant set of tire treads. This didn’t mean Cody hadn’t ridden past, only that on such a skinny trail their paths had overlapped.
He inched uphill, scared to have rounded such impossible bends. The trail never remained straight for more than a few feet. At one point where the route veered acutely left, he couldn’t see how he’d made it past without dismounting, unless the canyon was an illusion after all. Nor did he recall this particular arrangement of spires whose crows cawed as if to say, Getting warmer.
He scrolled through his odometer to find that his maximum speed had been an unimaginable twenty-nine miles per hour.
He’d ridden downhill in closeted superstition and survived, but Cody had ridden an atheist and now lay dying.
To shout Cody’s name brought only his own voice echoing in ever fainter reply. He shifted positions and walked in front of his bike, pulling it like a plow. He drank the last of his water. Scenes played out in his mind of finding Cody at the trailhead, screaming at him about this dirty trick. He teared up to imagine the sheer relief. He pictured the
ranger at the morgue, saying to Cody’s desolate parents, “If only your son’s friend had admitted that he was down there.”
If she hadn’t stolen his wheel, he would ride back down and change his story, have her radio in for help. It’s that bitch’s fault, he was telling himself when he spotted a second set of treads.
Heart racing, Hunter propped his bike up against some sagebrush and followed the tracks to where they trailed away at a shale slab.
A few feet farther, two sets picked up again, but of course below here he’d retraced his path and there would need to be three sets.
It was time to pray. I’m sorry for being unkind, he chanted in mind, trudging uphill again. If his mother wished for Christian Science treatment, she could have it. His lack of empathy had killed Cody. Be generous, and the universe repaid you. He vowed to call from the first pay phone and drop his emancipation suit. He was responsible for his own acts and felt ashamed of them all. Fall in love with the world, and you quit trusting in God to guide you through it. I trust, he chanted, I don’t love the world, until he rounded the final bend to face a uniformed Buck, arms crossed, asking, “You and your friend like the ride?”
Back when Hunter was friendless, before Cody first lent him a spare bike, there’d been nothing but TV. He’d gotten to be well-versed in the tropes of drama, such as the hurt son who abhorred his deadbeat dad. On TV some teenage boy was always shouting “You ruined my life!” to a father he barely knew. “How dare you show your face here?” Hunter didn’t wish to be a kid like that. What if Emily had lied, and the tea and lingerie had come from another man? What if Buck didn’t know he had a son? Tempting as it was to bellow curses, Buck might not grasp their meaning, in which case Hunter would feel ashamed for years to come. Too thirsty to speak anyway, he walked past, to the van. He opened the cooler. Only when cold water had flooded the dry cavities in him did he consider how suggestively Buck had enunciated friend.
“My friend’s gone and I can’t find him,” said Hunter, his voice cracking enough that something changed in Buck.
“What’s his name?” Buck said, seeming to have detected at last that Hunter was only a boy who needed help.
“Cody Avery. It’s been hours.”
Buck walked out of hearing range and spoke on the radio. When he was done, he told Hunter, “Seems you’re under arrest, but hang tight.”
Hunter sat on a log and flipped through old issues of Bike. After a while a helicopter flew overhead and vanished below the canyon rim. He didn’t want to think about what that meant. Staring down at the glossy trail photos, he focused on keeping Cody’s obituary out of next month’s issue, occupying himself with that hope or prayer until Buck ambled over to ask what he’d been doing in Charlie’s Bar.
“I drove past and saw it.”
“So you’re twenty-one?”
“Thought maybe they’d serve me.”
“How old’s your friend?” said Buck, again adding a subtly lascivious innuendo to the word friend.
“We were both born in seventy-eight,” Hunter replied. His stomach growled audibly. He felt a swell of something, roiling him more than hunger.
“There’s a steakhouse past the boundary.”
“What?” he said, as if Buck had delivered a non sequitur.
“Show up with me, they’ll serve you drinks.”
“I already ate,” he said, certain now Cody was observing from the afterlife, snickering in derision.
Buck held up a key chain with a pink rabbit’s foot. “Your friend will be okay,” he said, rubbing it.
“Do you believe in that?” Hunter said. He heard the latent anger in his own words. On the verge of losing control, he counted the seconds, timing his breath.
“No, you’re just cuter when you smile.”
Hunter pulled out his training journal. Although he no longer desired emancipation—felt petty to have considered it—he handed Buck the court papers.
Buck pulled out reading glasses, read down the first page. “I see,” he murmured.
“Do you see?” said Hunter.
“I believe I do.”
“What, exactly?”
“That finger, for one.”
Hunter had to look down at his hand before he understood what Buck meant.
“You know, your church founder paid dentists to fix her teeth.”
“Medicine back then was hardly better than praying,” Hunter answered, startled to hear himself defending Emily’s ideas.
“She wrote that it was a still birth.”
“It wasn’t,” was all he could reply.
“Well, is there something to write with?”
How dare you, Hunter almost said now, just like those hackneyed boys on TV—you ruined my life—but he only shook his head.
“Your ma’s the superstitious one,” Buck said. “She wanted a baby in seventy-seven because it’s a lucky number. I skedaddled. See you in seventy-eight, I told her.”
He was stroking his rabbit’s foot again. Hunter shut his eyes. Earlier in his count he’d reached seven; now he whispered eight Mississippi, nine Mississippi, ten.
“Know what else? My dad had a stroke, and Emily took my hands and said, ‘Arthur, this life is but a stem on a rose.’”
“A thorn,” Hunter corrected. Eternity lasted forever, while life was but a thorn on a stem in a garden of flowers, all manner of them, all colors, fertilized by the divine, infinite mind.
“Thorns grow on stems, last I checked. Is there really no pen?”
In the silence, as Hunter’s glands prepared spit for a fit of rage, he could hear Emily’s soft voice describing those flowers. He got ready to drown her out. “Never show your face again!” would be his first words, and then he would lose track, screaming anything, because of course there were pens. He’d been called out in a silly lie; Buck could see them in the coin tray, the ones Cody had used to denote bike routes.
“They’re out of ink,” he whispered.
“Can’t sign without one.”
“I don’t need your signature anymore.”
“You’re not under arrest. Jenny wants me to call the state police, but I’m the one told you to come.”
“As if I care,” Hunter managed to say. He no longer wanted to stifle his screams. To do so dishonored his mother. Still, that was the effect of Buck’s lines: he breathed more slowly again, peering into the future at the end product of rage. Buck, already a sad sack, now KO’d into suicide by this kid he might have loved if given a chance. Whom he hadn’t meant to hurt—and so forth in a maelstrom of empathy run amok.
“Speaking of calls,” he said, “I should alert Cody’s folks.”
“There’s a phone at the entrance kiosk. Anyone asks, say Buck Flynn sent you.”
Hunter climbed in the van. “Be right back,” he said, disgusted by how he’d suppressed his emotions. Throttling even apt rage was what made him a pussy. He drove away. He bypassed the shut park gate without stopping. After a while he passed a Western Sizzler that stood alone on that red plain. There was a pay phone. He sped up, took off his seatbelt. “I’m an atheist,” he said aloud as a tractor-trailer rushed toward him, straddling the yellow line and shaking the van in its rough wake.
Someone braver would have to call Cody’s folks, he was thinking when he spotted a shirtless cyclist coasting toward him down the center line. A jersey, red like Cody’s and rippling in the wind, hung out of that rider’s shorts.
Hardly had Hunter stopped the van before he was rushing out onto the empty highway, catching a bewildered Cody in his arms.
“Dude, chill out,” Cody said.
“You’re alive,” Hunter choked.
“Yeah, shit was sick. I almost died so many times. Are you. . . ?” He didn’t need to say crying, now that the answer was obvious.
“I waited forever.”
“Must have made a wrong turn; I’m the one who waited.”
“There weren’t turns.”
Cody opened the hatchback door to load his bike.
“What the hell?” he said.
“They confiscated my wheel. They’re looking for us now.”
“Rangers? No way. That’s awesome.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“Yeah, you wish. Ready to go?”
“Go where?” He was weeping openly now under that endless sky. He could see forever, and there was nowhere he wanted to go besides home.
“What time did you reach the river?”
“I didn’t notice,” he lied.
“Bullshit. I was 8:21 and ten seconds.”
“You probably beat me,” Hunter said—another lie. Not that it mattered if they’d descended different routes, but he recalled touching the water at 8:18.
“Damn straight,” Cody said, launching into an account of the hairy turns and narrow ledges. Hunter winced to hear of every skid, as if the telling put him in danger again. “How about you? You crash?”
“Only when you hit me.”
“We’ll be cult heroes. We’ll name our RV Cult Hero.”
“You be the hero. I need to focus on my mom.”
“Let’s try not to be retarded, okay?”
“I think something’s really wrong with her.”
“Yeah, Death Wish, it’s called her brain?”
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Hunter blurted, suddenly needing his friend to speak sincerely too. To be reverent for a moment, like at sunrise; to ease up so Hunter could admit it all felt like a magic trick, this crimson desert whose deadly cliffs he’d navigated by force of will. He’d stopped trusting in reality. There was no helicopter. If it were out searching, wouldn’t they be hurrying up the highway, deeper into the red dream of earth? He yearned to come clean, and then for Cody to admit he believed in something too. Whatever that thing was, it had held Cody in its stead down the canyon, or Cody had perished and been resurrected by Hunter’s wishes—but Cody said only, “Guess I’ll emancipate myself from my own parents. Christ.”
They didn’t stop being friends. Hunter just spent more and more time by himself, riding Squaw’s Leap alone at night, racing downhill by moonlight and imagining himself not as a bike champion but as someone girls could enjoy being with. He was toned from riding; Buck had liked him. Thinking the acute empathy that had crippled him in Arizona might work to his advantage, he tried to cultivate a look of innocent serenity so that girls would take him for a Buddhist or an abuse victim. He even got a little turned on to think of himself this way, or at least he did until his mother grew sicker, with abdominal pain that the practitioner blamed on malicious animal magnetism.