by W.H. Harrod
~Biker Tales
Heywood couldn’t recall not mentioning the sad state of affairs regarding his daily mode of transportation to anyone who would listen. He always took any opportunity to set the record straight. “Basically, it stinks,” he would tell them.
He would tell any willing listener how he had to cover all of what he considered to be the interesting areas of his small rural community on a bike not fit for even those most unfortunate denizens of that Hades place his uncle, the preacher, was always talking about. The piece of junk his progenitors stuck him with was not fit to be in a scrap yard.
As he thought about it later he could see that his parents’ intention was to provide him with as little opportunity to get out and see the world as possible, and they almost succeeded. He suspected that his bike, for want of a better term, would not be accepted as suitable transportation by even the neediest of young lads. It had no brakes to speak of, excepting the bottoms of his shoes which during the summer were paper thin to start with. The shoes were so worn because in the country a kid never got new shoes until a few days before the new school year started. Heywood never hesitated to bring the matter to his parents’ attention on a regular basis. But it was always to no avail.
The main reason his parents gave for this abuse was related to the simple fact that the great majority of them believed it was best if their children frolicked amongst themselves during the summer without shoes.
Heywood could easily see why this custom might work out fine with other kids, but his was a special situation. Heywood was a traveling youngster, so to speak. He wasn’t one of those, “Mom, can I go down the street and play in Bobby’s yard?” kind of kids. Heywood only went down the street to Bobby’s yard to fill their chickens’ rear ends with BBs when Bobbie’s parents weren’t home or maybe to get some of those tasty grapes hanging on the vines out behind the garage.
Heywood needed better transportation because he always wanted to find out what was over there, up there, and down there. He had been told on more than one occasion by some loose lipped old-timers who had traveled the world, mostly while in the military, that the world was a very big and exciting place. Not only big, but there were mountains, oceans, islands, forests, deserts, and folks called foreigners out there.
Heywood once asked his teacher what a foreigner looked like one day during school recess period. She, by that time, knew quite well that Heywood could not be dismissed with just any old reply, so she thought about it for some time before answering. “Heywood,” she replied tentatively, “a foreigner is someone who lives in a foreign land.”
Heywood thought about this for a moment before following with another question, “What’s a foreign land?”
Heywood’s reply was met with a polite frown from the teacher indicating that she felt this whole thing could get out of hand very fast.
“Heywood, a foreign land is someplace far away,” she answered, a hint of a smile on her face indicating she believed she had stymied Heywood’s attempt to ensnare her in another one of his seemingly never-ending circular discussions.
Heywood quietly pondered her response for a time before asking his next question, “How far is far away?”
By this time his teacher was starting to show signs of stress. Heywood had seen all the signs before: twitching, frowning, rubbing her temples with eyes closed, sweating, and, the most obvious sign of all, praying.
“That depends, Heywood,” answered the mumbling educator.
“What about California? Is it far away?” asked Heywood.
“Ye-yes, it is but-” the stressed out teacher replied in a tentative voice.
“So my uncle who moved to California is a foreigner?” asked Heywood. “And California is a foreign country though it’s included in that big map you have hanging on the wall that says United States of America on it?” he continued.
Heywood quietly stood there awaiting a reply to his question while his teacher continued her impromptu mumbling session with eyes closed, rubbing her temples. Before he could ask another question, a bell rang indicating it was time for the adults in charge to round up their frolicking students for a return to a more secure learning environment inside the building.
But, getting back to the main question, how was he supposed to get around the community on a regular basis if he didn’t have reliable transportation?
His dad went to a lot of work to make sure he, as the family bread winner, had a reliable vehicle to go back and forth to work five days a week. Heywood felt he needed to keep watch on the goings-on in the community seven days a week. That was going to be hard to do with the piece of junk he had to rely on.
He regularly made his community rounds at present on a twenty-inch-high contraption that had no fenders, bald tires that had been patched more often than his favorite pair of blue jeans, a broken seat straight from where the devil lives that caused his tally-whacker to get pinched every time he hit a big bump, no chain guard which ensured every time he wore long pants he risked getting his right cuff caught in the sprocket resulting in one leg ending up with ragged holes in the bottom, no handle bar grips, and missing spokes aplenty.
Something was going to have to give. Heywood intended to press his progenitors harder for a timely resolution to this very serious matter, or else they just might find out that their second son possessed even more of what those medical folks officially referred to as issues.
There was another serious matter that also needed to be dealt with prior to Heywood persuading his parents to spring for a new ride. This had to do with his cousin stealing his disgraceful source of transportation on several prior occasions. Heywood couldn’t believe it the day he came out of the house to find the nastiest, most unreliable two wheel contraption in rural America missing.
Quite simply, he was stunned. Who would be that desperate? Or even better, that stupid? How could he be so lucky! If he had had the good sense to think about it, he would have paid someone hard cash to do it earlier. Heywood couldn’t wait to get back inside the house to give his mom the terrible news. Some horrible person had filched her son’s favorite bike. Now, they would just have to bite the bullet and buy him a new one.
Heywood went about explaining this completely untenable situation while his mom never stopped sorting all the dirty clothes piled before her for the regular weekly wash. At first Heywood thought maybe she didn’t hear him when he apprised her of the most tragic event that had transpired right in front of their home. He reckoned that he would have to repeat the same terrible story, only this time a little louder.
“Mom? Mom?” he had practically yelled at his mother before repeating the woeful tale of sorrow and great loss.
Finally about the time Heywood was about to reach over and poke his mom with a finger to get her attention, she calmly turned to him and informed her soon-to-be crestfallen second son that his cousin from down the block had come by and taken his bike earlier that morning. She had assumed that Heywood knew about it, but if he hadn’t, well now he did.
Heywood was crushed. Only moments earlier he built beautiful castles in the rare air that had surrounded his entire bike riding existence. And now, only seconds later, he was down in the pit of despair. Mentally he had already picked out the color of his new bike. After having had his dreams smashed, he began to focus on how he was going to bring mayhem into his sneaky cousin’s soon-to-be miserable life.
He would teach that sneaky little twerp a lesson for having gotten his hopes up so high only to come crashing down once the truth came out. If he had taken it and thrown it in a deep creek he would have been Heywood’s best buddy forever. But now, he was going to have to do him some real harm. He would teach him a lesson for being an incompetent thief.
Heywood devoted the greater part of the remaining morning devising an elaborate scheme to punish his cousin for having been so dumb to have been identified as the thief. If the kid had only told him first, they could have planned the whole thing out. There was a deep rock quarry a short di
stance away where his cousin could easily have ditched the menacing pile of scrap iron after he was done with it.
Heywood’s plan, after much deliberation, was to hide out behind the big coal pile out front and jump out and apprehend his cousin, the culprit, when he brought the bike back. What Heywood didn’t anticipate in his plan was not being able to stay awake as he lay in the cool grass under the limbs of a big shade tree. He had no idea how long he’d slept until a slobbering face washing by one of the neighborhood hound dogs woke him up. What made it even worse was that this particular hound was known for eating about anything he found on the ground anywhere. Dead varmints, garbage, dried rabbit turds, slimy snails were all on this hound’s daily diet plan. Opening one’s eyes to find such a mongrel’s tongue licking your face only deepened one’s depression.
Heywood was about to give the slobbering hound a quick boot in the rump when not twenty feet away from him he saw his sneaky little cousin roll up and throw his bike up against the fence before turning abruptly to make his getaway.
“Halt or I’ll shoot,” yelled Heywood before his surprised cousin could make a clean get away.
Having recognized Heywood’s voice immediately, his cousin, who knew he was a faster runner than Heywood, stopped and started to laugh.
“With what?” his smirking cousin asked as Heywood got to his feet and moved towards the slowly retreating miscreant. “You ain’t got no gun. Why your momma even took your sling shot away for shootin’ rocks at old lady Sadler’s guinea hens she put in her yard to get rid of the ticks.”
Heywood knew he was right. The little sneak could out run him. Then an idea came to Heywood. That’s one reason why Heywood was so fond of himself, he always could count on coming up with lots of really good ideas.
“Wait a minute, maybe we can make a deal,” pleaded Heywood. He was getting more desperate by the minute. Somehow he had to get rid of that piece of pig iron from Hell. His potential future as a father was in jeopardy every time he sat astride that testicle pinching contraption.
“Go on,” replied his suspicious cousin.
Heywood moved closer to his cousin so he could speak in a softer voice. No need letting the whole neighborhood in on his little scheme, he figured.
“What would it take for you to come back here some night after it gets dark and actually take that bike there out to some deep pond and toss it way out in the middle?” Heywood asked his cousin in his most conspiring tone of voice.
His cousin, knowing well that Heywood was in the process of making plans to pull off some neighborhood atrocity, stood there staring at him for the longest time.
“Well,” said Heywood, “is the question too hard for you?”
“I’m thinkin’,” responded his cousin, who actually seemed to be mulling the proposition over in his mind. A thinking person never, ever agreed to get involved with anything Heywood was into without fully vetting the deal. One educator, who was from up north, remarked that Heywood’s schemes were what he referred to as purely “Machiavellian.” As Macha-whatever, was such a big word, Heywood guessed it must be important.
“This could get a couple of kids in big trouble if anyone ever found out what really happened,” said his cousin.
“As long as we keep it between you and me, how could another person ever find out?” countered Heywood, who could sense his cousin was warming to his little scheme.
“How much do you think its worth for a fella to keep a secret like that forever?” countered the interested cousin.
Heywood smelled the greed. “Well, I reckon as we are talking about forever, it might be worth as much as, say, two dollars. Half now and the other half when I get paid for working the preacher’s tobacco crop this fall. Whataya say?”
By this time his cousin’s bug eyes were visualizing the cash. Two bucks was sure enough big money in a country boy’s cash strapped world.
Heywood suspected the deal was done. His cousin’s eyes had glazed over at the thought of real dollars bills coming his way. The whole world looked like a completely different place when a kid had two bucks in his dirty jean’s pocket.
“We never talk about this deal again to another person or even among ourselves,” said Heywood in a whispering voice.
“Deal,” said his cousin as he looked all around to make sure they were alone.
“You were never even here,” answered Heywood, likewise, scanning the surroundings.
Fresh spring days soon turned to summer, and the summer days turned to fall. All was well in Heywood’s small rural community. Heywood, who had been on his best behavior for a time, recalled hearing a, practically yelling, preacher on the radio say one day that “the righteous shall prevail.” Heywood naturally figured that since he had been so handsomely rewarded with a new bike within weeks following the tragic and painful loss of his old bike which he swore he was so fond of and would never ever forget about, he must surely be a most deserving person.
What do righteous young fellas, like Heywood, do when they have sleek new bikes with real fenders, non-penis-pinching seats, mud flaps, a handlebar bell to ring at their leisure, handlebar tassels, red reflector lights on the rear fender, and a place on the front fender for an honest to goodness shiny chrome light which Heywood’s folks permitted knowing his inclination to stay out after dark? They ride around all the live long day. That’s what they do.
Heywood altered his normal route once he moved up in class regarding modes of personal transportation. A young man with a smooth ride the likes of which Heywood had no longer frequented the same streets, highways, gravel roads, and haunts he previously did with regularity. His new bike demanded more of him. He even started wearing his prized little league hat, the one he wore when he pitched the no-hitter the summer before. A bike, like the one he toured the town on, deserved the best out of a rider. No more hanging a road kill carcass from the front handlebars in anticipation of throwing it on the front porch of an individual who may have slighted him in some way. One might go so far as to say that Heywood now sat on the front row.
Consistent with Heywood’s decision to move up in class, he naturally included in his new route around the small community the upscale streets where several of the really cute girls in his class lived. Heywood never let on that he was doing anything more than any young man of leisure owning a super cool bike would do when nonchalantly cruising the town.
The first few times he rode by the home of a particularly cute little girl from his class and spotted her playing with her girlfriends in the front yard, he simply nodded his head in response to their waves and went on about his business. Heywood could tell from the looks of amazement that they were completely enthralled with his new ride. Life was getting better and better with each passing day.
As time passed, it seemed as if his admirers were beginning to lose interest with Heywood and his super neat ride. Heywood began to fret about this most unexpected change of events. How could a bunch of cute, but dumb, girls not be impressed on a regular basis with his new bike? Were they crazy? The bike had enough chrome on it to burn a fella’s eyes out if he happened to glance at it from the wrong angle during the midday sun.
Heywood fretted about this unexpected occurrence for several days until a solution came to him while he was filling his older brother’s gym shoes with chicken feces for having reported him to his parents for taking a short cut on his new bike through the Barnett’s Mercantile Store. His brother hadn’t bothered to tell them that it saved two blocks on his ride home. They were always yelling about Heywood getting home late and then when he showed some initiative relating to their, to him, completely uncalled for concern for his wellbeing, they up and get mad because one old lady standing there squeezing a head of lettuce threw it up in the air when he started ringing his bike’s warning bell for her to get out of the way. It seemed to Heywood that a guy couldn’t win around his house anymore. So what if the head of lettuce hit the floor? Where do they think it was found in the first place – it was growing in dirt!
Heywood devised a plan to put on a little show for the young girls. The idea came to him while he was watching a rodeo. Those cowboys rode around an arena doing all kinds of tricks, lassoing things, jumping through hoops, jumping over barrels and fences, and sometimes even shooting things while riding on their horses. Heywood didn’t figure he wanted to try most of those things on his new bike, but he figured if a cowboy could stand up on a horse, he could surely standup on a bike and maybe even lasso something. How hard could it be?
Two long weeks later, Heywood had not completely perfected his act. Try as he might he had failed terribly every time he tried to perform any of the tricks he attempted, especially, the one where he tried to lasso a post. Turns out posts neither run nor move. The part where they don’t move became abundantly clear when he did successfully lasso an old tree stump while coasting down a hill in Farmer McDullard’s back pasture. It was a little bitty stump as far as Heywood could figure, not more than three inches in diameter at most. It had sat there for several years wasting away. Heywood knew that because he had stumbled over it one day coming back from a long trek to watch Farmer McDullard castrate a bull calf. Turned out they didn’t castrate the bull calf after all. What they did was even worse as far as Heywood was concerned. They did something called banding to the poor dumb animal. They wrapped cords around the testicles to cut off the blood so they would eventually rot off.
Heywood recalled how painful it was that time he tied that string around his finger and it swelled up and hurt like the devil. He could only imagine how the poor calf was going to feel standing around the barnyard all day all bug-eyed with pain because his testicles felt like they were gonna explode at any minute.
But getting back to Heywood’s new plan, surely a guy on a bike going downhill with his lasso tied to his bike could yank a little stump out of the ground without much fuss. At least that’s what Heywood thought.
Afterwards as he lay on his back with the wind knocked out of him, Heywood was just happy he hadn’t broken his neck. He revisited the thought process that caused him to come to believe a kid on a small bike with a lasso could pull a small stump out of the ground. Ultimately, he decided, between gasps for breath while on the ground, that the fault was not his. The fault lay with the stupid land owner who had left the stump in the ground in the first place. It was an attractive nuisance. A curious young man would naturally want to see if his trusty bike could pull an ill-placed stump out of the ground. Kids do that stuff all the time. It was the land owner’s fault.
What was Heywood to do now? He needed to come up with some surefire way to impress the girls with his riding prowess. Try as he might, no ideas came to him that did not run the risk of him ending up on the ground beside his new bike moaning in pain. Heywood didn’t worry as something would come to mind.
Unfortunately for Heywood, it came sooner. Heywood could see no reason why he couldn’t still pass by his would be admirers’ homes from time to time while he was in the process of coming up with a surefire bike rider trick to impress the young girls. So, there he was again casually rolling down the street, about to pass in front of the home where his soon to be admirers usually frolicked, when wham! He recalled his earlier idea of him standing up on his bike as he coasted by his soon to be admirers.
He pictured it all in a split second. Of course he could do it. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? All he had to do was get up some speed and then simply hop up on his seat and stand up as his highly polished new bike coasted down the street in front of the, sure to be gaping in awe, cute girls.
Within a second, Heywood made his move. He removed both feet from the pedals, resting his knees upon the bike’s seat. This is going to be so neat, Heywood thought as he placed his trusty right foot on the seat while he grasped the handlebars. Only one more move and he would be riding into that place where few young country boys like him had ever gone before. Bicycle dare-devildom folklore awaited him. He could do it. Heywood felt sure of it.
Sometime later when Heywood regained consciousness to find several older ladies kneeling over him in the street, the first thing he heard was giggling.
Sure enough, the girls he’d wanted so badly to impress were having a gay old time laughing at the recollection of Heywood losing his footing as he’d attempted to stand erect on his new bicycle before slipping and falling flat on his back on the hard street surface. It was probably a good thing it was summertime and the hot sun had softened the asphalt. And honestly, Heywood’s shame at having failed to impress his giggling audience was of little importance when compared to the bent front fender on his new bicycle.
This was a crushing blow. Heywood realized for the first time in his young life that a guy had to know his limitations. A fella had to find out what was really important to him. Then he had to make sure to take precautions to never risk what was of real importance. Heywood finally knew what was of real importance: his new bicycle. As far as he was concerned, from now on all those dumb girls could spend their time eating bugs.
Just what good were girls anyway? All you could really do is pull their braids to get them to chase you. Then what? Why, at his own home his dad never chased his mom around or anything. All they ever did was sit around talking about kids, money, budgets, chores, what all their stupid relatives were doing wrong, politics (whatever that was), and something they were already looking forward to way far away in the future - retirement. That would be a time when they could sit around watching all their dumb kids gripe about having to do all the things their parents did when they were raising families.
Walking away in shame from the scene of his most recent humiliation, Heywood decided he had to show those little vixens what he thought about their being so smug, and he did. Stopping his bike, he put his tarnished ride’s kickstand down and slowly began to walk around the area until he found what he was looking for. Slowly he bent down to retrieve the object. Then he did what should probably be the first action of every young man when they are so callously relegated to their customary place beneath the proverbial heel of womankind everywhere. He threw a rock at them.