The Orphan (3 page)

The fragrant smell of damp earth. The music of running water. A tingling, almost electrical sensation pulsing throughout his limbs. In his core, a sinking despair and the broken feeling of detachment, that he had been split into parts by some terrible incident, his true self lost to another place, a better realm.

The boy perceived each of these things as he stirred and opened his eyes, and the darkness surrounding him did not alleviate the feeling he was lost. When he tried to move, the ground seemed reluctant to give him up. A moist suction along his thighs and belly, the wet seeping into his clothes. Fragments of the scenery returned and he remembered this was where he had come to rest. Near a stream, in the hills. But he couldn’t remember anything else. Where he had come from, why he was here. Questions piled up, each more frightening than the last. What happened, where am I, and then most alarmingly – who am I?

What came to him wasn’t an answer, only a label.

Adam.
 

Or so a voice prompted inside him, but it didn’t sound like his voice.

Adam who?

Adam.
 

Okay, then. Adam for now. It wasn’t a bad name, he supposed. Maybe it felt wrong because there was nothing attached to the name – no last name, no family, no friends, no colored-in life. Only the name and his cold self, face-down in the mud and pine needles and long grass. Rising, he saw that he was in a sparse forest.

He needed to find shelter.

Not
home,
because he couldn’t remember where home had been or if he’d ever had one. Even the idea of home was too vague for him to latch onto.

When Adam sat up, every muscle protested the change of position. His thighs felt knotted with rocks. His calves, arms, shoulders and back were sore. What had he done earlier today? Yesterday? A week ago?

Running. He was sore because he had been trying to get away from something. On his feet were a pair of severely worn sneakers that appeared two sizes too large because they were caked with mud, and maybe the mud was all that was holding them together. His Puma Baskets, white with the black stripe. He remembered them as new, but they looked ten years old. How could that be? Somehow the plight of his shoes conveyed everything else that was wrong. This was his life. Soiled. Lost.

He looked at his T-shirt, threadbare blue with a cartoon screen of the Creature From the Black Lagoon standing in a swamp, the thought bubble above his head reading, ‘Who peed in the pool?’ His favorite shirt. But how could he remember his shirt and shoes but not where he lived, what had happened to him? Had he been beaten up and left for dead? Drugged by some kidnapper and thrown away like trash? Neither felt true but both seemed possible.

A strap slipped down his shoulder and Adam pulled it back up before pausing to consider what it was attached to. A cloth-grained weight shifted between his shoulder blades. A backpack, not too heavy, but another thing so familiar he’d forgotten it was there, like it was a part of him. He had no idea what was in it, but he’d find out later, when he had gotten out of here and into some light.

His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he got to his feet. He was standing on a slope, not a riverbank. The stream must be on the other side. He set one leg straight to brace himself and surveyed the woods. They weren’t very deep, or at least all the trees were small, mostly young pines. He saw no houses or roads, no lights or other signs of civilization. He noticed a fallen log angling down the slope, leaves and loose ground cover that had been piled up beside it, like a burrow. He’d chosen this spot.

‘Hiding,’ he said softly. There was no other explanation. ‘You were hiding.’

From…?

His heart drummed and his thoughts raced in a fight-or-flight response, even though he had no idea who or what he had been running from.

Adam turned and saw a deer standing on the slope, not more than twenty-five feet away. The deer was small, like him, but it didn’t look frightened or even curious. It had no spots, just brown fur that looked gray in the night.

‘Hey there,’ Adam mumbled to the deer.

The deer craned its head around to its opposite flank, smoothly. It took two small steps toward the peak of the slope and held very still. It wasn’t interested in him now. Something else in the woods had become the priority.

Adam felt the change before anything happened, before he saw any movement. The air came alive with another presence. A moment ago he had felt lost but hidden, safe from the eyes of the world. Now he felt watched, him and the deer, and he knew something was in the woods with them, and that it was a bad thing.

He listened for the crunching of twigs and leaves underfoot, the snap of a branch, the growl of something large and predatory, something that might like to eat a deer or a boy. But it did not announce itself.

‘It’s all right,’ Adam whispered to the deer.

The animal’s ears rotated like radar dishes. Adam cinched the straps of his backpack tight against his chest.

Go. Run now,
the voice warned him, speaking from a place of knowledge.
Gonna have to run again, might as well get a head start.

Hunt for shelter, find help.
 

But who could he turn to? Everyone, people of all kinds, seemed far away and faceless to him. When he tried to remember even one person he knew, kids or adults, all he could see were plain blank faces, yellowed like dried candle wax. They had no voices and their eyes were black sockets. He meant nothing to them.

The deer bolted, broke into a full gallop before Adam could turn around, bounding over the slope, down and splashing through the stream, only to emerge hopping like a jack rabbit up the other side. Vanished.

Adam wished he could move so quickly, for now he could hear the thing that stalked them, coming from behind the thin screen of nearest trees. A low keening at first, then building to a strained howl. Adam’s vision magnified and jumped wildly around the woods but found nothing.

Something full of full of dead weight clomped over the ground, dragging through dry grass and brush, growing louder, coming closer.

Adam threw himself forward, scrambling up the slope and over the bank, following his deer. He slipped going down the other side and his backpack braced his fall. He dropped down a steep slide, hard root branches tripping his heels, cold water covering his shoes, soaking into his socks, halfway to his knees. He jammed one palm into the mud and shoved himself upright and leaped, hoping to clear the stream. He landed midway and slipped on the stream-bed rocks, water sloshing up to his waist as he hop-stepped across, the splashing loud, blowing his cover completely.

The thing loosed a heart-rending scream, the sound of a lamb being quartered by a pack of wolves.

The toe of one sneaker snagged on a heavy rock and Adam pitched forward, his entire front side smacking down in the water before his hands caught the edge of the other bank. He crawled out, his fingers digging in cold mud and raking at rocks as he imagined something the size of a bear and twice as angry coming down behind him.

I’m going to die here tonight. Whatever’s chasing me isn’t just an animal, frightened because I wandered into its territory. It’s smarter than that. It has another purpose, and that purpose is to kill me.
 

This was more than his fear talking. Adam knew in his guts that he and the thing chasing him shared a connection, their fates set in motion by some terrible event. He had wronged it somehow and it wanted to make him suffer for what he had done.

Adam scaled the second bank, gasping. There were no trees on this side, the stream was a border at the end of the woods. He ran downhill and quickly leveled off into a huge field, the prairie grass knee-high in all directions. He could run faster out here without fear of slamming into a tree or slipping on rocks, but he also knew the thing would be able to spot him in an instant.

Adam looked in every direction for a building or street light, some marker of civilization. But there was only the land. He ran as fast as he could.

The beast loosed another series of hateful shrieks, sounds neither human nor animal but more wretched than either. Adam imagined a monster eight feet tall, covered in dirty white fur, skeletal, with a mane of black hair and flat snout, its mouth racked with fangs. The human-like hands and gnarled fingers ended in talons as large as the big blade of his pocketknife. His pocketknife? Yes, he remembered there was one in the backpack, but it would be no use against this thing.

The scream wound down like a siren, and Adam flew across the field in the grip of a primal terror as fierce as any he had ever known. He arched his back as he ran, imagining the claws digging into his flesh, hooking into his spine, bringing him down in the field where no one would hear his dying screams.

Hu-chuff-hu-chuff-hu-chuff
…
 

The thing panted after him, gaining, snorting like a bull.

Adam pushed himself harder, the wind beating back his tears. He wanted to lie down and cry but he knew there was no one to help him. If he slowed even for a minute he would be devoured. Out here in a field that seemed endless, with the indifferent stars above and the beast tracking him from behind, Adam felt condemned, stranded in a barren realm with no exit save his own death.

Darren searched every one of the showroom’s twenty-five hundred square feet, behind the shelves, under the office desk, in the bathroom and closet, between the rows and aisles of goods. He found no trespasser.

Nothing had been stolen, either. He would have noticed immediately, the space and its contents as familiar to him as a puzzle he had been staring at for months, which in fact he had, nine of them to be precise. A single missing item would have registered to his eye as surely as a black slash of graffiti in a beautiful mural. The lights were on and the alarm had been deactivated, which could only mean he had forgotten to lock up. It seemed unlikely, but then again, he did not feel like himself these days.

The shop, the showroom, the Bike Cave – that had been Raya’s cute name for it – whatever it had become, Darren always felt calmer inside its walls. Now that he had confirmed everything was in order, he was in no hurry to return to the main house. The Bike Cave potential was not the only reason he’d acquiesced to Beth’s wish to buy this house, in this town he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to return to, but it was the clincher.

Aesthetically it had been hideous, all that metal siding, but the dedicated space was the appeal of it, and the old-fashioned black and red checkerboard tile flooring inside – aged with grease and paint stains, chipped by decades of semi-industrial use, like some hybridization of an old school barbershop and an amateur stock car racer’s garage – only helped shape his vision for the space.

He ordered the renovations before they moved, investing forty thousand to redo the exterior in eight-inch pine boards, finish the interior with new drywall blown full of insulation so that he could work year-round, add a new wood shingle roof, install new plumbing for a small bathroom, updated electrical, wireless everything for the small office. He hired a painting company to cover the exterior in dark brown with white trim and then painted the interior himself, in alternating panels of white, gold and P.K. Ripper baby blue to give it some life.

He equipped one long wall with workbenches, rolling toolboxes, a refrigerator, a CD jukebox wired into premium speakers, as well as the main stereo and turntable set-up he’d had since college, a leather couch, dartboard, and three stand-up classic arcade games –
Zaxxon, Defender
and
Tempest.

Then, when he’d exhumed his collection from the seven rented storage bays in Milwaukee and had it all boxed up, along with the bike stands and glass display cabinets, he hired a second moving truck to bring it all here. Part bike store, part museum to his youth, part lab for a mad scientist with a serious Eighties bent, the shop now housed Darren’s only remaining hobby, passion, and occupation:

The Totally Radical Sickness Collection.

One hundred and nine complete BMX bikes (even after the auction). Three road bikes. Two classic motorcycles. One motocross and one enduro motorcycle (the ’77 Bultaco Alpina), another seventy BMX bike frames, forks, dozens of wheel sets, thousands of other vintage components. Wooden display bins for his eight hundred and counting vinyl records, twice as many CDs, and the two hundred and sixty-two pairs of vintage sneakers, most of which had never been laced. Concert tees and posters. A few signed professional sports jerseys. Rare toys from the Seventies and early Eighties. A few hundred issues of now-defunct BMX magazines. Three hundred VHS tapes – mostly terrible action, horror and sex comedy flicks. Scores of pocketknives, throwing stars, nunchakus, blowguns and other martial arts weaponry. A baker’s dozen original Vision and Powell Peralta skateboard decks preserved in shrink-wrap. Baseball cards, primitive gaming cartridges and consoles, rare candy bars…

Was this a hoarding obsession of some kind? Absolutely. Did Darren care what other people thought of an adult still fascinated by ‘childish’ things? Absolutely not. He had worked seventy- and eighty-hour weeks for over twenty years to secure his family’s future. The house was paid off, the cars were paid off, the retirement accounts were on cruise control. Raya would be able to attend any college that offered her admission. Beth had been able to be the in-home, hands-on mother she always wanted to be, and now was free to dabble in non-profits without fear of financial failure. They did not spend lavishly or flaunt their good fortune. He had earned the right to follow his interests. Someday maybe he would sell it all and donate the proceeds to some cause, but for now it served another purpose.

There were no fires in the shop. No bad dreams. Money, politics, business contracts, sales pitches, proposals from new investors, health problems, their friends calling to announce a sudden illnesses or surprise divorce, Darren’s own minor moments of marital discord with Beth, the depressing reality of his own waning sex drive, some hotshot in line at the grocery store barking into his cellphone, holding everyone up, whatever headache it is, whatever problems exist in the real world, you could keep that business out there – it wasn’t allowed through this door. Here we are only interested in bikes. In cool. In the good old days.

In sanctuary.

And until tonight, that sanctuary had been untainted as a monastery in Bhutan. But now…

How had he missed
this
?

The shop’s back door was ajar. Darren hadn’t noticed it until his third pass, but he did so now. He’d been so lost in his reverie, he hadn’t noticed the gap between door and frame. He walked to it, experiencing another wave of vertigo similar to what he had felt waking from the nightmares, and opened the door slowly.

The exterior screen door was wedged open, the exit out onto the cement porch blocked by a wooden crate the size of a child’s coffin. Darren stepped over it, out into the grass. He searched the rear of the property, along the row of small pine trees, but there was no one out here.

He dragged the box inside. It wasn’t light, but couldn’t have weighed more than thirty or forty pounds. He shut the door and locked it, then rolled the crate over, checking each side, but there were no shipping labels of any kind. Darren shipped plenty of packages and took as many deliveries, through UPS, the US Postal Service and sometimes DHL for international service. He knew most of the drivers by name, and none of them would have delivered a box without the proper paperwork.

Someone with no official business had delivered this.

It was roughly the size of a bike box, but those were almost always cardboard. This was pine, nails, metal belting. More importantly, he hadn’t ordered any new bikes or parts in almost two months, since before the auction.

He took a claw hammer from the pegboard of tools above his workbench and began to pry the metal straps off. Then he went at the nails, breaking the thin cover of wood in the process. Most collectors packaged bikes and their components in plastic bubble wrap or foam pipe tubing, then filled the excess space with styrofoam peanuts or wads of newspaper. This crate was filled with balls of old yellowed newspaper, but beneath the first layer of that, Darren found himself staring at thick bolts of purple velvet, dusty and dry. It made him think of antiques, a magician’s cabinet of props.

Sensing he was dealing with something valuable, or at least very old, Darren removed the box’s contents slowly, carefully placing each piece – still wrapped in layers of the velvet – on the shop’s floor. There was no note or paperwork inside. In the office he found one of his old Mexican blankets, of the sort he kept for setting up items he could not afford to scratch. He spread the blanket on the floor and began to unwrap each purple bundle. When he had unwrapped the last piece, he knew what he was looking at, but had no more clue as to who had sent it to him, or why.

And he was too astonished to care.

Somehow, probably by accident, he had become the owner of a 1980 Cinelli CMX-1, a very rare BMX bike whose frame, fork and major components had been designed and manufactured by that Holy Trinity of Italian bicycle artisans – Cinelli, Campagnolo and Columbus. He had forgotten such a thing existed. He’d never owned one, never paid much attention to them, but he should have. The failed run of BMX equipment the famous Italian road bike manufacturers had collaborated on during the years 1980–81 was stunningly beautiful.

The oxblood-red CMX-1 frame and forks, anodized gold Cinelli stem, brown suede buffalo hide Cinelli saddle, gold Cinelli seat post, had been partnered with Campagnolo’s BMX-specific hubs, cranks, chainring and sealed bottom bracket, all in that famous Campagnolo blue. The tires, brakes, handlebars and grips were from other manufacturers, but still vintage, era-correct, and obviously chosen with an expert eye, color-matched and outfitted in a way Darren himself would have been proud of.

But he could not get over its miraculous condition.

Even with NOS (new old stock) bikes and parts that had sat gathering dust in the loft of some old geezer’s bike shop in Akron, Ohio, there was almost always evidence of what the collectors referred to as shop wear. Little nicks or scuffs or other blemishes in the finish from rubbing against other parts and boxes or shelves, decals that had begun to crackle and flake.

But this Cinelli showed zero shop wear. Darren had never seen a bike so cherry. There were no scratches, dents, dings, bends or re-welds on the frame, and all of the decals appeared to be original, mint. He couldn’t even find a fingerprint. If there were an
Antiques Road
show
for BMX geeks, hosted by a guy who knew the market for such finds and who loved bikes, he would have taken one look at this Cinelli and wet himself.

Darren was disturbed by it for reasons he could not explain. It was a work of cycling art, but it was also a puzzle, or a message, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to see what it revealed once it was complete.

There was something almost threatening about it.

He wondered if one of his fellow BMX junkies had it in for him, if he’d pissed someone off in a deal. He doubted it. He had 784 feedback comments on his profile at BMXMuseum.com (an online market and showroom mecca where he’d spent thousands of hours surfing, trading, researching) and he maintained a 100 per cent positive member rating, lacking even a single negative comment, and another perfect rating on eBay. Besides, people who had it in for you didn’t send you bikes. They stole them.

A gift? The last thing anyone who knew him would give him was yet another bike.

It was an orphan, he decided, a term in the cycling community for a spare part without its other half or ‘parent’ unit, a piece with no mate, no home. You’d see the term in the classified listings online: Orphan Shimano DX pedal, needs a good home, $85 OBO. Orphan Comp III yellow label tire, used, $40. There wasn’t much demand for orphan parts because the odds were low you would find the perfect match in terms of color, wear, fade, size, year, etc.

The entire Cinelli was an orphan, albeit an expensive one. It had no home or proper owner. It was just here, waiting for someone to take it in.

Later he would call some of his contacts, maybe set up a query on the forums, to find out if anyone had made a mistake. But in the meantime…

Outside, the rain started up again, pattering the shop’s roof with a comforting drone that made him want to stay inside and work on bikes all night with his father, until the a.m. radio oldies station gave it up for a religious sermon and Mom came out and told the boys to get their butts back to bed.

As he had on so many other nights, or lazy Sunday afternoons, Darren felt a pang of longing for a second child, a scabby-kneed, dirt-on-his-cheeks boy who could experience this with him. A father could ask for nothing more of a daughter than Raya had given him, but sometimes a man needs a boy around to understand the beauty of a wrench, the allure of a rusted chain.

He was not conscious of the decision to proceed, but there went his hands, unwrapping velvet. Working as carefully as a surgeon performing an open-heart procedure, he assembled the Cinelli. It took less than an hour because the brakes were already perfectly tuned. He inflated the tires. But when he reached the last of it, the pedals, he could not find them.

He searched the wads of newspaper spread around the shop’s floor. His workbench. Finally he went back to the box. Inside was a smaller bundle of velvet, taped into the corner of the (coffin) crate. This had to be the pedals.

He pried the bundle from the crate, but another double strand of clear packaging tape was wound around the velvet seams, sealing the contents from view.

The Oakley clock above his office window read 3:22 a.m.

Yawning, Darren went to the workbench and found his box-cutter in one of the plastic trays where he kept rolls of packing tape, felt markers, labels and other shipping supplies. With his thumb he inched the blade forth from its steel handle, held the bundle down with his left hand, and drew the razor along the tape layers.

Two-thirds of the way through, the blade caught on something hard, jumped up and sliced into his thumb. There was a delay of numbness, then the stinging set in. He stared at the fish-white gap between his severed thumbprint whorls for a moment, dazed, until fresh dark blood flowed out in a thick stream.

In the grand tradition of self-injured mechanics since time immemorial, he cursed at himself and the tools rather colorfully, dancing to his right to reach for some paper towels to staunch the flow. The cut was deep, almost to the bone. Probably should get some stitches for that tomorrow… today. Later this morning.

Not now. He had to see what was inside and make sure he hadn’t scratched them with the knife.

His blood continued to flow, droplets of it landing on his floor, the workbench, the toe of one shoe. He knew there was a first-aid kit out here somewhere, but he couldn’t find it in the bathroom or the office. He didn’t want to run back to the house. Wadding his thumb in two folded paper towels, Darren used his free hand and teeth to tear a length of duct tape from the roll hanging off the wall peg. He wrapped his thumb several times, but already more blood was seeping up through the tape seams.

Hurrying, he unrolled the last bundle on the bench. Two jagged-toothed Campagnolo BMX pedals gleamed before him, their gold cages and chrome spindles as spectacular as the rest of the bike. He studied them carefully but found no scratch.