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.