by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Merrily, We Roll Along
Joe has to ask a half-dozen people walking the streets of Queens before he gets the answer he is looking for. That answer, a quick stop at an ATM, and a brisk half-hour walk bring him to The Razr’s Edge. Joe takes his time looking at the solar-powered scooters. His initial inclination, one guided by the fact that he is a fifteen-year old boy, is to buy the thermest scooter in the store, a silver and black SPD-Z, but, then, a newly wakened maturity, something Joe is willing to attribute to Bob Tom, takes over. He goes to the FAQ screen and begins to key in his questions.
Joe has narrowed his choice down to an E-RAZ-R, a slow, heavy, solidly built scooter with an extra power pak that is capable of going forty kilos miles on a single charge, when a door at the back of the shop explodes open and a bandy-legged gnomish man scuttles past the secu-cams toward Joe.
“Watcha bizness?”
It takes Joe a minute to decrypt the powerfully built man’s question.
Joe outlines his needs—sturdy, dependable, capable of going long distances. As Joe explains what he is looking for, the little man begins to shake his head, and, then, begins muttering, “No, no.” Finally, like a compressed spring suddenly released, the man’s short, thick arms fly up past his head and he yells, “Pizza gabbage. No, no, not this crap. No. You wait. You don’t move. You hear? Don’t move.”
After Joe nods, the little man, looking like a fire hydrant on wheels, whirs around and scoots back through the door from which he had emerged. Joe wonders what it is about him that draws loony old men. When he turns back to the E-RAZ-R, he hears a muffled voice through the door, “He moved. Goddamighty, I say ‘don’t move’ and he moves. This is my life?”
Something slams behind the wall, the door bursts open and an ancient bicycle explodes through the opening like a racehorse galloping from the starting gate. The bicycle, with the gnome atop pedaling furiously, speeds toward Joe. Just as the teener darts out of its path, the bicycle’s front wheel comes a meter off the ground. Something that Joe thinks is meant to be a battle cry rips the air, the wheel rises even higher until the rider gracefully slides off the set and dismounts.
“Fuhged that pizza crap. Heahz the horse you wanna ride. SchwinnerTakesAll-450. Fastah. Lightah. Strongah. No crappy battry, just ya legs. Ya god legs, right? Ya not some kind a teenah-weenah, ah ya?”
The gnome takes a second to look Joe over.
“Whad ah ya? Lemme guess. Hockey, right? Am I right?”
A surprised Joe nods.
“I thot so. Big legs, but no kinda stamina. Am I right, am I wrong?”
Joe puffs up his chest at the little man’s challenge.
“I can keep going.”
“Yeah, sure whadevah. If ya can keep goin like ya say, den dis tings da ting to keep goin on. Garanteed ya legs ah gonna crap out before dis ting does.”
When the bike first shot through the door, Joe thought it was a ridiculous idea, but now he is reconsidering.
“G’wan, kick da tires. Give it a spin. Whadever. Yule see. Dis is for you. Journey ya god ahead, dis is definitely for you.”
The gnome’s words freeze Joe. How can someone he’s just met know where he is going?
“Whaddya think I’m stchtupid? You’re ona island, right? Can’t go far north or south. West is the city wheahs theahs no need for somethin like dis or a scoodah. So, whad’s dat leave? Up, down, or east. Ya goin east and ya tole me ya need somthin that can go pretty far. That leaves just one ting as far as I can see, which bein such a short man mebbe you tink ain’t dat far, but yore goin past da Pale. Ya runnin away. Fine, like I shoud care. Get tickbit. Hey, it’s yore life. I go plenny of udder stuff to keep me worried. Go, but go on dis bike and you’ll ged dere and my conscience, which ain’t any bigger’n me, will be clear.”
Joe accepts the seller’s explanation, but he worries that if the gnome has figured out his destination so easily, then he may not be the only one. Joe decides that his best defense is to get moving as quickly as possible.
“How much?”
“Dis museum piece? A STA-450? Da Mona Lisa of two-wheelers? You can’t pay me whad it’s worth, and I can’t bring myself to sell it ata loss.”
“How do you know I can’t pay you?”
“Cause runaways, even ones from very well-known, very rich families, don’t carry dat kinda mool around.”
Understanding that he is alone in a shop in an area of New York that he doesn’t know, with a powerfully built man who seems to know who he is, makes Joe wish for Bob Tom to come striding through the door. However, rather than show fear, Joe feigns anger as he turns toward the door, “If you weren’t going to sell it, then why show it to me.”
The gnome darts past Joe and blocks the door, “How come da rich have evrythin—houses, boats, jewels, art, everythin, but never a sense of humor. Why’s dat?”
Joe slides to the left with the thought that he will rush the shopkeeper, knock him aside with a shoulder check, and escape through the door.
As if he can hear Joe’s thoughts, the homunculus takes a step away from the door.
“I god it. You can’t afford da buy it. I can’t afford to sell it at a loss. So, that leaves just one option as far as I can see, which bein short mebbe ain’t….”
The man stops talking. Joe waits. The little man scurries past the boy, grabs the frame of the bike and gives it a push toward Joe.
“I give id to ya. No strings. But, you godda remember a stranger gave ya a gift. Okay? You god the kinda mind dat can keep a memry like dat?”
Joe freezes for the second time since he’s been in the store. He realizes that it has been days since he has thought of Blesonus and all that she had done for him. A burst of honesty impels Joe to say, “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve been too good at it. I’m pretty self-involved. Selfish.”
“You’re what?”
“Selfish.”
“Really? How old?”
“Fifteen.”
“Nodda lodda fifteeners even know what selfish is. Gwan. Take it. And work on da memry.”
Not knowing what else to do, Joe says thank you, but in a voice as thin and fragile as a Meissen teacup.
Joe is ten minutes and six kliks away before the idea comes to him that the shopkeeper has set him up. The STA-450 is so distinctive that even in an area with thousands of inhabitants it makes him stand out, and, as he travels farther east and the population dwindles, it will make him stand out even more. If he tries to minimize his risk by traveling at night, the possibility still exists that the bike has a bug on it. Joe can continue making his way on foot, but in just the short time he has been aboard, he has become enamored of the speed and comfort of the STA.
The boy tries to think what Bob Tom might do if he were in the same situation. After another block of pedaling, he guesses the old man would enjoy the bike, minimize the risk, and have confidence in his ability to handle whatever was going to come his way. Deciding that he is going to emulate the riverman’s thinking gives Joe a burst of energy, which he transfers to the STA’s pedals.
In a little over three hours, Joe is more than seventy kliks east of the East River. He has ridden through the shopworn streets of Queens and past the overgrown trees and under-populated tract homes of the outer suburbs. As he travels east, the works of man grow smaller and less impressive while nature’s efforts begin to take on a certain ragged and unkempt majesty. A motley of ancient trees stretch cloudward with their limbs spread in wide welcome to the masses of birds that fill the air. Despite the air whistling past his ears from the bike’s speed, Joe still can hear their trillings, an octave higher than the bike’s song,
As he pedals along, Joe watches his shadow race ahead of him. As the sun falls, Joe’s shadow grows longer and leaner, but its sharp contrast with the world around it fades. Finally, the sun falters and the shadow disappears into the murk of dusk.
The 450 has lights and Joe uses them to guess his way along the road’s broken surface while he wai
ts for the moon to rise. After climbing a long hill, which leaves his calves aching and his lungs burning, Joe pauses at the crest. In the time it has taken Joe to pedal up the hill, the moon has finally shown up for work. While he catches his breath, he notices a line of silver outlining the next hill. He rides for another twenty minutes before he understands what it is he is seeing.
Behind the silvery line is an unbroken swatch of purple black. Joe realizes that somehow the silvery thread that rides along the land as far north and south as he can see is a warning the all the land beyond is an uninhabited jungle that has grown up in the fifty years since fires destroyed eastern Long Island during the Ticklish Situation.
As Joe remembers the story from grade school history, a mutant form of Lyme’s disease had been discovered near the eastern tip of Long Island near Montauk. The new spirochete proved to be much more virulent than any of the previous forms of Lyme’s. Within a year of discovering the first case, not only had that victim died, but several thousand others also had been laid waste. When the New York Public Health Services proposed a tick eradication program far more draconian than any of its earlier programs, the Noramican EPA had prevented the program from going forward because of fears of what the spraying program would do to indigenous wildlife, particularly the millennially endangered miniscule population of piping plovers. As the matter was being wrangled out in a federal court hundreds of miles away from the danger, another three thousand Long Islanders died. When Senator Stacy Clinton-Bloomberg called for hearings and summoned Bionia Adams, former Green candidate for president and EPA’s chief administrator to testify, Adams countered the senator’s charges of gross incompetence by noting that there were fewer than eight hundred plovers in existence while humans numbered in the billions.
Less than a month after that famous exchange, as the annual westerly mistrals blew strong and steady, a series of fires, obviously coordinated, were lighted across the width of Long Island on a north-south line just west of Islip.
The fires merged into a single fire which burned out of control for five days—many said purposely so—as a flotilla of boats from Rhode Island, Connecticut and the New York metropolitan area rescued more than three hundred thousand inhabitants. Nearly ten thousand died in the fire, but within a year, no one was dying of the new version of Lymes. In the fire’s aftermath, the federal government declared the area an NVNS refuge. Westegg Preserve became the only No Visitor No Stewardship refuge on the east coast north of Virginia. In order to minimize the chance that any surviving ticks would infect or infiltrate the western half of Long Island and the country beyond, a fifty meter high laser curtain had been installed along the western end of the burned territory. The goal was that any tick bearing animal trying to pass through the curtain would be incinerated by the laser.
Although Joe has known of the barrier, he hadn’t considered that he was going to have to get past the lasers in order to find his friend. That thought stymies him for a minute and makes him wish, not for the first time, that Bob Tom was still his traveling partner. The old man’s absence, the darkness on all sides of him, the obstacle ahead and a sudden sharp hunger begin washing over him like torrents of rain. Joe finds it hard to keep pointing his small beam of light into the chilly night. At the bottom of the hill he slows his pedaling so that he can better look for a place to spend the night.
It takes the teener twenty more minutes, and his search brings him within a klik of the laser fence, before he discovers a narrow path carved into the wall of kudzu which borders the road. Using the bike’s headlight to guide him, Joe follows the path’s twists and turns until he comes to an opening, perhaps ten meters in diameter that is carpeted in tall grass. Joe centers himself in the meadow before he tromps down the grasses to make a campsite. When he finishes with his rude resting place, he rustles through the food in his pak and in the small camping bag suspended from the bike’s handlebars and wonders what he had been thinking when he had dashed into a Qwikee on the eastern edge of Queens to provision himself.
After a day that started with him being towed across the Hudson River just as the sun was rising, traversing Manhattan, both above and underground, and bicycling for hours, he wants meat and potatoes or rice, or, better, mounds of both. Instead, he has high school happy food—Nougie-nuggets, Swirls&Kurls, apple chips, and warm Zzzoltkola. As he lays propped on an elbow eating what would have been fun at a bonfire before Bissell Day, Joe stares at the million stars in the sky above. Unlike the ancients, he sees chickens and rib roasts rather than bears, belts and archers.
Joe is lost in his food reveries when he suddenly realizes that in addition to the soughing boughs, the rustle of leaves, and the flutelike sound of some gregarious night bird, he is hearing a popping sound that reminds him of bacon frying on a camp stove. Occasionally, along with the unidentified noise comes the slightest whiff of a familiar but hard to identify smell.
Joe has finished his meal and has told his grousing stomach that what it holds is far better than twigs and berries in an Adirondack cave. Leaning back on a elbow, the boy vacillates between giving in to that part of him calling for sleep or obeying the part urging vigilance against whatever unseen dangers that may lurk nearby. Joe opts for the former and is nearly asleep when it comes to him that the popping sound and faint smell come from animals being incinerated by the lasers. That thought delays Joe’s sleep until the birds themselves grow quiet.
