His Illegal Self

25

Tired and burned and sandy, they coasted down onto the plain to the west of Coolum, and the tops and bottoms of paperbark trees were already drowning in the melancholy night. The sky was still dark green. The headlights were on but the mother had had trouble seeing through the smeary insect glass. Below the sky was nothing but a smudge of road, wormy white trunks showing in the scrub.

The light made the boy homesick for his grandma. In the evenings the pair of them would drive like this, side by side, into Jeffersonville to Ted’s Diner. For a while one summer they would take his bike and he could ride around and around the empty parking lot at Peck’s.

There were local kids but they were not friends to him. They had short hair and hard squinting eyes and once when he was eating in Ted’s Diner they stole his bike. He knew who did it and where they lived so on every trip to town thereafter he walked up into the little backstreets around Pete’s Auction Barn and on one of these occasions, just after dusk, he finally saw his bike lying on a little lawn. No question it was his. It had black electrical tape wound around the middle of the crossbar.

He was wheeling it away when the kid came out and asked him what he thought he was doing.

It’s my bike.

Bullshit!

Yes it is.

Liar.

The other boy was maybe eight but when he came down onto the lawn Jay dropped the bike and flew at him so hard he knocked him over and he dropped on him with his knees and smashed him with his fists and he did not stop until the kid’s father pulled him off.

Christ, what you doing?

He stole my bike.

The father was a tall wiry man with tattoos up his arms and on his neck. He had wild black sideburns and pouchy eyes.

Hey, boy, he said, it’s just a goddamned bike.

Yes sir.

The boy had never been hit. He waited for it. Instead the man put his arm around the shoulder of his weeping son and together they walked up onto their porch and the boy saw a woman rush, like a moth fluttering in the light. He cried then, a kind of ugly hiccup.

Back at Ted’s he saw his grandmother.

You found it!

He should have told her, I gave it to him good, some stuff like that, but he was ashamed and dirty and did not know what to say. He kept seeing the father, the tenderness in his dull eyes as he put his arm around his son.

Are you awake, said Dial.

I’m OK, he said.