Crunch (3 page)

ON THE OVERPASS, I STOOD UP ON THE PEDALS
and got my first good look at the highway below.

Surreal,
Lil had said. And she was right. Lanes were forming down there. Walkers on the far right, bikers to the left of the rumble strip, and speedier bikers to the left of those. The far left lane was open on the off chance, I guessed, that something bigger might come humming through.

I merged onto the highway. Riding a tandem solo is less awkward than it looks. It’s fine once you get it rolling. Then it has a stretch-limo thing going for it on the visual. We’d be faster coming home once I had Lil on the back. Or, knowing Lil, once she had me on the back. Anyway, I didn’t get too many funny looks because it wasn’t long
before I picked up a rider. I passed a guy in a shirt and tie, briefcase swinging at his side. He jogged a few steps and called out, “Whoa! Hey! Hey, kid! Help a guy out? I’m looking at that empty seat! Could we work together?”

I squeezed the brakes and pulled right. It was the only thing to do. I stood astride the tandem and twisted back to look at him. He looked slightly familiar. But more important, he wasn’t old, and he looked pretty fit. This could pay off.

“I’m not sure how far I’m going,” I said. “Maybe just to the East Elm City line. I’m watching for my sister. She’s on foot somewhere in the northbound lane. The trains out of the city were jammed.”

“Same with the trains in,” he answered with a nod. “Really makes you wonder how long it’ll go on. But they say this is all about politics. Not geology,” he added.

Geology. I felt like I’d swallowed a spoonful of sand. We’d talked about that at home. I cleared my throat and said, “My dad says politics is just about people not being able to get along. So maybe this’ll
be over soon. As for geology, well, everybody gets it now, right? World demand will become too high.” I shrugged. “My dad thinks we can invent our way out of it if we scramble,” I added. “Bring back the electric car.”

“I think your dad is right.” The guy nodded. “In the meantime, I’ve had enough walking. Job or no job, I’m going to have to buy a bike.”

“Ever ridden a tandem before?” I asked.

“I haven’t,” he said. “But I’ve biked. And I learn fast.”

“Here, strap your briefcase to the rack.” I handed him a bungee from my handlebar bag. “And roll your pants.”

“Sorry to hold you up,” he said. “This is very nice of you.”

“If we do well together, it’ll be worth it,” I said. “It’s important that we start off exactly together. Watch me. You have to
anticipate
,” I said. It was a weird way for me to talk to an adult. But I had to make sure he wouldn’t make us crash the tandem. “And I can’t hold the bike up on my own. Not with your weight on it. So you have
to follow my lead. Settle yourself quickly. Other than that, it’s not much different from a regular bike. You just don’t get to steer. But I’m a safe rider, I promise. Oh, and the pedal cages can be rough on your shoes.”

“I remember,” he said.

The rear pedal set whacked the guy in the shin and gave him a good skinning at the start. “You’ll think of me tomorrow,” I said apologetically. A hundred yards later we started to cruise past other cyclists. We were not a bad team.

“This is great!” the guy called up to me. “The speed! Wow! Seems almost unfair!”

By Exit 57 I knew my rider’s name was Robert Deal. He’d been out of college just a few weeks and he was job hunting in Elm City.

“I’m trying to impress future employers just by showing up to interview during this shortage,” he said.

“So how’s that working for you?” I asked.

“It’s not! Nobody’s hiring. Been thinking about trying to go back to the beach. I was a lifeguard back in high school—”

“Oh!” I said. “At the town beach in Rocky Shores?”

“Yes.”

“You once treated me for a jellyfish sting!” I said.

“I did that a lot!” he said.

We biked on. The truck stop at Exit 56 was full of trucks—stuck trucks, which, of course, made me think of Mom and Dad.

“I’m going to slow us down some,” I told Robert. “I don’t want to miss my sister.” I began to wonder if she’d changed her mind about walking the highway. Then just before the frontage-road strip mall, I saw her. “There she is!” I said. “Lil! Lilly Marriss!” I strained. Ridiculous. She’d never hear me. “Look, Robert, I’ve got to take the off-ramp and get back on again to come up behind her. I can’t see us lifting the tandem over the barrier.”

“No! That’d be the very moment a truck comes barreling along,” he said.

We came to a clean stop.

“I can’t thank you enough, Dewey. You saved
me miles of walking,” Robert said.

“You helped me, too,” I said. “Listen, if you think you’re really going to buy a bike, my family has a business. Repairs, mostly. But we have a few bikes that we built from parts. They’re excellent machines for the money. We guarantee them.” I grabbed one of our business cards from the handlebar bag and thrust it at him. I wanted to go catch up to Lil.

Then I heard it. A hum in the distance. It sliced through the sounds of pedals, gears, and voices on the highway like it had a direct line to my ears. I looked to the north. All I could see was the long broken line of bikes and riders, coming down the highway.

The hum grew louder. Then there it was. A single diesel, gleaming in the sun. Every head turned to watch it, every rider braced for the draft. The truck whooshed by. Time stood still for just a beat. Then everyone started moving again.

I turned to Robert and stuck my hand out. “Pleasure biking with you,” I said. I shook his hand hard. I swung myself back onto the seat of
the tandem. He gave me a running push to start me up the ramp. As I crossed above the traffic I looked down. Tried to find him again. No luck. He must have been hoofing it onward to Elm City.

LIL COULDN’T HIDE IT. SHE WAS GLAD TO SEE
me in spite of herself. She ran at me and landed me with a bear hug. For the second time that day the tandem twisted to the ground. For the second time I fell on top of it.

I lay there looking up at the sky while the front axel hub stuck into my kidney and Lil cheered, “My taxi cometh! My taxi cometh!” We drew a few grins. Sideshow on the highway.

On the way home, I was right where I figured I’d be: looking at Lil’s back. She set us a good pace.

We talked to each other in little shouts as we pedaled. “Well, the class may be canceled, but I am
not
going to sit around,” she insisted. “I’m going
to put a mural across the back of the small barn.”

“A piece of art for Mr. Spivey?” I joked. That wall faced his yard.

“Right! Just for him!” Lil laughed. “Pay him back for the pleasure of looking at his lovely junk pile.”

Lil has always been intense about her art. Mom says she goes at it “body and soul,” and it’s true. She mixes paint, wood, metal—everything and anything she can get her hands on, from old timbers and windows to hinges to horseshoes. I like the stuff my sister makes. One of her best pieces started with something I’d given her.

I’d found a bike out by the highway. It’d been dropped from a car, and probably run over—maybe more than once. It looked like tinfoil. But Lil took all the parts and she mangled and untangled, she hammered and she painted, and she created the coolest piece of kinetic art ever. Since it was pretty much all made out of bike parts, we hung it up over the entrance of the Bike Barn door.

That’s where Mrs. Bertalli saw it when she’d brought her sons’ bikes to us for tune-ups. She’d
gone wild. She’d hired Lil to do a piece for her on the spot. “Anything you want to make,” she’d said. “It’ll be the focal point for my patio garden. A freestanding sculpture!” That was Lil’s first sale.

But the important part is that when Mrs. Bertalli’s home had been part of the town garden tour that summer, a big, full-color picture of Lil’s work had made it into an article in the
Shoreline Weekly Sun
. (I think Mrs. Bertalli made that happen.) From there, Lil’s art had caught on.

Lil and I pulled off the highway and down our driveway. We let the bike down and sat in the shade for just a minute. “So, what if we cook up some bacon and tomatoes with barley tonight?” Lil said.

“Oh my gosh, best thing! I forgot to tell you!” I said. “Pop and Mattie are coming to make chowder tonight.”

“You’re kidding? Oh yes! Yes! This day doesn’t totally stink after all!” she said. She set to unpacking her supplies from the panniers. Then she paused. “This isn’t a pity supper, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“They aren’t feeling sorry for us because Mom and Dad aren’t home, are they?”

I laughed. “It’s
clam chowder
, Lil! Do you care
why
it’s coming?” Lil could go overboard on the whole “we can take care of ourselves” thing sometimes. “They had a good dig this morning,” I said. “And besides, Pop and Mattie are our friends. They come when Mom and Dad are here too. Plus, we’re providing everything but the clams.”

“Hmm. Right.” Lil gathered up her supplies. “I’m serious, by the way. I’m starting on that mural. Today. Mark my words, there will be art!”

IN THE BIKE BARN, VINCE WAS LEANING OVER
the workbench in the shop with a pile of pink work orders in front of him. He held a few of them in one hand.

“Oh hey,” he said when he saw me. He thought for a second. “You made pretty good time.”

“I had help. I picked up a rider on the way out.”

Vince grinned. “A
hitchbiker
,” he said.

I laughed, wishing I’d thought of it. “So, did it go okay?” I asked.

“Mrs. Bertalli came in,” he told me in a slightly stick-it-to-me way.

“No!” I said. I hated that I’d missed her, and my brother knew it.

“Well, you’ll see her again,” he said. “She left
Chris’s and Carl’s bikes for work.” The boys were rough riders. We saw their bikes often.

“So what else?” I asked. I pointed to the papers in his hand. “What are those? Tough jobs? Do we need Dad for those?”

“Yes. Well, I might be able to do them,” Vince said. I thought it was really cool of him not to completely give up. “But it’s parts, too.”

“Yeah. We don’t have them. I’m going to have to take a trip out to Bocci Bike and Rec to buy parts,” I said.

Vince grunted.

“Not today,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about this. We need a new system. What’s that called when the hospital gets a whole bunch of people in at one time?”

“Bloody?”

“I mean when they have to divide them up. They decide who they can help, like who’s critical and who just needs to get patched up—”

“Oh,
triage
!” Vince said.

“That’s it. We have to
triage
these repairs.”

Vince screwed up his face. “
Organize
them?”
he said, and you’d have thought I’d asked him to roll in poison ivy.

“Look, just take the next order you can do off the top and go start it. I’ll sort the rest out. And by the way, sorry about leaving you this morning. I’ll take care of everyone who comes in from now on.”

Vince glanced at something over my shoulder. “Everyone,” he said.

I turned around.

It was our neighbor. Mr. Spivey.

Sometimes Mr. Spivey actually asked for help rather than just helping himself. But even then it was more like being
told
what you were going to do for him. It was even a little like being yelled at about it. So when he said, “I’m going to need you to come over with that push mower today,” I understood him. He expected to borrow our mower, but he also expected a boy to come with it.

I remembered to greet him. “Hello, Mr. Spivey,” I said. I thought to ask him if he’d enjoyed his sunny-side-up breakfast, but I skipped it. “I’d like to help you,” I lied. “But the mower is at a house over on Sandy Reach Road.”

He stood with his arms crossed tightly over his chest with his hands in his pits. Familiar stance. Next, he’d fling a hand forward and jab his finger at the ground like a pecking hen.

“Well, when can I expect that back here?” he asked. Sure enough. There was the fling and the peck. He retucked his hands.

“The mower?” I said. “We’d need a truck to get it. And gas. And of course if we had gas, you could run your own mower.” That last part might have sounded fresh. But I was just thinking out loud. I was also trying to think what Dad would do.

“I can bring you our sheep, Gloria Cloud,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “She’ll graze that lawn for you.”

Mr. Spivey thought about it. “Fine,” he said. “But I’ll need the big one instead. That one you’ve got in the back.”

“Sprocket?” I said. “The billy goat?”

Vince muffled a snort and ducked out toward the paddock.

Mr. Spivey went on and I watched his bobbing finger. “The big one will eat more. Faster. I need
that lawn taken down,” he said.

“Mr. Spivey,” I said, “you
really
don’t want Sprocket. Billy goats can be bad company. Besides, he’s more of a
brush cutter
. Mass destruction. You’ve seen how he’s gnawed a ring in that old pine tree,” I added.

He seemed to think it over while he gave me a hard squint. “Right then,” he finally said. “The sheep. You bring her over. I’ll need the dooryard done first.” He turned and walked out.

I looked at the bike-repair orders in my hand. Triage, I thought. I sighed. The sooner I delivered Gloria Cloud, the sooner I’d get back to work. I went out through the paddock. As I passed Vince’s work stand he jabbed one finger toward the ground and said, “Now, I’m going to need that grazed on a diagonal.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. I hoisted myself over the fence in pursuit of Gloria Cloud.

IT SEEMED LIKE TEN MINUTES PASSED FROM THE
time I tethered Gloria to a cinder block in Mr. Spivey’s yard until the time Vince left to get the twins from camp. The day was melting away. I felt a wave of panic. I hadn’t done a single repair. I had to get on top of things. Somehow.

I grabbed the next order up. Mr. Gilmartin. He had a pretty upscale bike, but it wasn’t brand-new anymore. He really needed a new derailleur, but he’d already told me that he didn’t want to spend a lot for it. So I’d promised him I’d work with what was there.

I stood staring at the bike. I was stuck.

Whenever I get hung up on a job in the shop, I check Dad’s list of the Eight Rules That Apply to
Fixing Almost Anything. (He also calls it his One-Page Bible for Bike Mechanics.) He keeps it tacked to the Bike Barn wall. It’s rumply and all covered in grease spots. And it rarely fails me.

• 1. RIGHT IS TIGHT. True for nuts, bolts, and screws, with few exceptions.
  
• 2. USE PROPER TOOLS FOR THE JOB.
  
• 3. AN OUNCE OF MAINTENANCE IS WORTH A POUND OF REPAIRS.
  
• 4. RUST NEVER SLEEPS. Ask yourself where water might accumulate.
  
• 5. STUDY THE PROBLEM. Understand how something works before you try to figure out why it isn’t operating correctly.
  
• 6. TRY THE LEAST EXPENSIVE FIX FIRST. It’s often the solution.
  
• 7. TAKE NOTES ON COMPLICATED JOBS. Consider how the thing was assembled in the first place.
  
• 8. ONE REPAIR AT A TIME. Work on one problem at a time. Disassemble as little as possible.
  

Reading the rules always reminds me that bikes are pretty simple machines—though that doesn’t mean fixing them is always a snap. Mr. Gilmartin had already directed me toward Rule Six—the least expensive fix. So, I went at it and I managed to work it out.

When Vince came back with Angus and Eva, I couldn’t help crowing. “I took care of that Gilmartin job,” I told him. “And no new derailleur. I worked with what was there. Fixed his flat and his shifter cables, too. One more out the door,” I added.

Vince gave me a nod. Not that impressed.

It was a good afternoon. Nobody came to check in a bike during the heat of the day. So Vince and I worked steadily. Angus and Eva spent a while out back with Lil. Then they came in and stomped around the loft above the bike shop.

Every so often I’d look up from the workbench and see a sweaty little face or hand appear at the Trap, as we called it. It was a basketball-size hole in the boards that we kept covered with an old
toilet-seat lid on a hinge. The twins loved flipping it open, calling down to us, and dropping things through the hole. A handful of dandelions, three cherry tomatoes, and Angus’s left sneaker all rained down on my workbench that afternoon.

Around four or five o’clock customers began to come for their bikes. This was the part I liked. A lot.

“Oh, I’m so glad this place is here,” Mr. Chandra told me. He pressed a few extra bills into my hand and I thanked him.

Old Mrs. Marrietta hiked in from the Post Road to pick up her cruiser. “One-stop shopping! I got my eggs, got my wheels. Enough walking for my old hips for today. Biking home will feel like flying! Thank you so much!”

But Dad had warned me: You can’t please everyone.

There I was proudly wheeling Mr. Gilmartin’s bike out of the shop for him. There he was changing into his biking shoes after probably a four-mile walk. He grinned when he saw his bike again.

“Ahh…I sure have missed it,” he said.

“Wish we could work faster,” I told him. “I think you’ll be set for a while longer. It’s going through its gears smoothly now. Your limit screws were off and your derailleur cage was bent. You’ve got new shifter cables, and I put a new inner tube on the front like we talked about. All in all, you still own a great bike.” I felt nervous about telling him the next part so I hesitated. “Look, I know that you declined, but I still recommend that new rear derailleur. This one is showing fatigue. The adjustments are temporary.”

“Well, I know you tried to talk me into it,” he said with a doubtful sort of smile.

“Right. Well you can always let us know if you change your mind.”

“The Bike Barn always does good work,” he said. We never got tired of that compliment. I handed Mr. Gilmartin his itemized bill. He read the slip and immediately pulled his chin in. He gave me a sharp look. “Seems pretty steep,” he said.

“Uh…well, parts have gone up,” I said. “But maybe I added wrong.” I reached for the tab to
take a second look. But Mr. Gilmartin was still busy scrutinizing it.

“Since when do shifter cables cost so much?” he wanted to know.

Oh, crud. Here goes.

“W-well, bike parts have…uh…they’ve taken a huge hit during the crunch.” The words went tripping over my lips.

“So you said.” His volume went up. The look on his face could have killed mildew. “But this is
preposterous
,” he said.

That’s when I felt my limbs drain.

Mr. Gilmartin pressed on. “I know bikes well enough to know that this is something like
triple
what it should be. Same for the lousy derailleur cage. And the tube, too. Is your father here? I want to speak to him.”

“H-he’s not,” I said.

“When will he be back?”

“Uh…it’s hard to say, Mr. Gilmartin. We’ve had some bad luck. He’s caught up north due to the outage—”

“Then
you’re
going to have to explain this to
me.” He shoved the tab at me and said,
“I’m not satisfied.”

I gulped. Stick to the facts, I thought. I took a breath. “We actually haven’t marked anything up. I’ll show you the invoices. We’re paying more too. We’ve kept our labor price at a minimum—”

“I’m not talking about the labor price!” he said. “I’m talking about simple things that don’t even have moving parts!”

“Sir,
please
let me show you our costs.” Finally, he followed me into the shop. I fumbled with the invoice. I showed him each line item, even though part of me felt like I shouldn’t have to. “You are right,” I said. “Some costs have tripled.”

“I
know
I’m right. I just don’t see how it’s possible,” he said. He whipped his wallet out of his back pocket. “But you have me over a rail, haven’t you?” he said. “You
know
I’ll pay. I need the bike.”

He
did
pay. Practically threw the bills at me.

I walked him back outside. “We appreciate your business, Mr. Gilmartin. If you have any problems…well, we guarantee our work.”

He never answered me.

I leaned on the fence, waiting for my hollow limbs to fill again. “Well, that sure stunk,” I said to myself.

“Hey, Dew.” Lil had come around from her side of the barn. She was covered in smudges—the sign of a good art day.

“Hey,” I said. I flapped Gilmartin’s bills against the fence rail.

“I’ve seen some happy people pedaling out of here,” she said. “Good job.” Then she called for Angus and Eva, who came running out of the shop as I went back inside.

“Happy…except for that last one,” I mumbled.

I didn’t want to tell Lil much about the Bike Barn. She had her thing to be in charge of while Mom and Dad were away, and I had mine. Of course it was in the back of my mind that Lil was ultimately in charge of Everything Marriss. The Bike Barn fell under that bigger umbrella and I knew she felt that way too. But as long as there were no problems, that wouldn’t come up.

Gilmartin had paid and he was gone. I popped the lid off our peppermint tin. Couldn’t help but
take a whiff. It still smelled of peppermints every time I opened it. There was a pretty good roll of bills in there, and I added Gilmartin’s to the coil. I was going to have to make another bank deposit soon. Dad had taught me how, and I liked biking up to the drive-through window. But I also liked another picture that I held in my mind: us kids handing Mom and Dad a good wad of cash—all from the Bike Barn—when they got home. Okay,
me
handing them the wad. Whatever. I just wanted them to know I’d done it; I’d kept the shop going with no major troubles.

I set the tin on the back of the workbench. I leaned around the door to the paddock. “Vince,” I called, “you coming to help me with the pit fire? It’s time.”

I was up for a huge meal. And no grouch was going to sour my chowder.