Crunch

by Leslie Connor

  “Dewey!” Lil stared at me. She got so calm it was maddening. She leaned toward me. “I’m sorry. I should have stepped up sooner. I knew it was too many bikes—”

  “The Bike Barn is me, Lil! My job!”

  “But the crunch made it too big.” She shook her head. She gave me a look I hated—a pitying sort of face. “You can’t do it alone, Dewey. You can’t.”

  “Hah!” I shouted. “You sent my help away, and now you tell me I can’t do it alone!” I stood there, breathing at her through my nose. “You want to shut me down, Lil? Forget it! I’ll do it myself!”

  I marched around the house into the front yard and hollered, “Go!” So many pairs of eyes stared back.

  “Oh no! Hey, buddy, we’ve been waiting since—”

  “I’m closed!” I cried. “Closed, closed, closed. No more repairs.”

  The mob spoke. Their sentences blurred.

  Just look at my shifter cables—I’ve got to get to—I can’t move the seat post—it’s a simple flat—I’ll pay you double—I just have a broken chain—lost my Allen wrench—will you sell me—can I use your—there is no place else to go…

  I stood there shaking my head. “No,” I said. “None of you know. Ev—everybody wants bikes. We’ve been alone. My—my father can’t come home—”

  “Dew.” It was Lil with her hand on my shoulder. I was on auto-rant.

  “We’re just a tiny shop. W-we were never supposed to be this big.”

  “Dew,” Lil said again, “you don’t have to explain.”

  The hot morning fell quiet except for a nanny goat bleating in the distance. Then a tiny bit of birdsong. The low murmur of hens. The heat ringed my nostrils. Choked my throat.

  “Sorry, everyone. Sorry to turn you away,” Lil said. She sounded sweet. Like another bird chirping in the yard. “We need you to leave.”

  There were groans and mutters. People turned their crippled bikes and began to slowly roll them away. Lil ushered them along, keeping up her apologetic song.

  I stood by. Numb. Mute.

  I think everyone was gone when I finally turned and started up the steps into the house. I watched my bare feet—the newly swollen toe—my bare knees—the hem of my boxers.

  My boxers.

  On top of everything else, I had gone outdoors without my pants.

  40

  BREAKFAST WAS EXCRUCIATING. HARD TO SIT AT the table with Lil. Hard to face our ornery twins knowing we had nothing but bad news for them. It was the last place I wanted to be. But mad as I was at Lil, I wouldn’t leave it on her to tell them.

  We held Angus and Eva in our arms. There were lots of tears that morning. We passed them from lap to lap to try to comfort them. They were full of questions:

  Did the bad guy punch Dad? What about everybody else who has those ration cards? Could the bad guys hurt everybody? Did the truck break? Can Dad still drive it?

  Everything was so hard to answer.

  But when it came to Dad’s injuries, Angus had his own answer, even as tears streamed down his face. He said, “I don’t know about that concussion, but if Dad got banged up like my chin…” He tapped his bandage. “Well, it’s okay. It gets better.”

  “Yes, and Dad will recover,” Lil repeated. “And there is fuel and they will get home. We just have to wait. Some more.”

  It was Vince who moved us along that day. He got up from the table, picked up his milk buckets, and called for Angus and Eva to come with the egg baskets. “Chores to do,” he said. “Just like yesterday.” He sent them out the door in front of him. Then he turned back to me.

  “I thought you said the yard was full of customers again this morning. Did I dream that?” I couldn’t believe he’d missed the firestorm in the front yard—me shouting at Lil and going crazy. In my underwear.

  “No. You nightmared it,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  Lil covered. “Dewey told them that we couldn’t take any more bikes,” she said.

  Half a story, but I let it go.

  “Really?” Vince looked surprised. “So we’ll just knock off jobs when we feel like it?” His buckets clanked against the doorjamb.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Take the whole day off if you want.”

  When Vince was good and gone, Lil spoke. “Look, I know you blame me—”

  “Did someone else send Robert away?” I asked.

  “No.” Lil sat down across from me. She folded her arms across her chest. “I did that. But don’t think that I liked it. Dewey, you were like this machine taking in bikes. You wouldn’t stop! I had to shut you down, and I didn’t want to embarrass you by doing it in front of Robert.”

  “Yeah. I like it lots better when you go behind my back,” I said. We endured a beat of silence. “I wanted him here,” I said. “It’s not just that he’s a good mechanic, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, I get it. Mom and Dad cannot come home. I’m no baby. And it’s nothing against you, Lil, but I liked just having that extra adult around.” I thought for a second. “It’s not even all about Robert. I like it when Pop and Mattie touch base. Or when Runks rides up. You’re so busy telling everyone we don’t need anything. But Lil, I’m half-glad knowing that the Spive is next door! Can you believe that?”

  “Last part kind of surprises me,” she said. “But I get the rest. If you want, we’ll have another dinner in the yard. Whatever.” She paused and said, “But ask yourself, aren’t you just a little bit relieved that the yard isn’t full of strangers, that you’re not logging in more bikes today? That you don’t have to decide—”

  I shoved back my chair. “Don’t be the parents on me, Lil.”

  I went upstairs and put on my pants. When I came back down, I sailed straight out the door without looking at her. I went out to the barn and I stood around in the open doorway to the shop. Angus and Eva came out of the coop with baskets of eggs while both dogs and the Athletes followed. They looked busy.

  “You guys okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We just really, really want Dad to be all right,” said Eva. “So we’re planning a surprise for him.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Angus whispered, “We’re going to get rid of our thief.” He pointed to Mr. Spivey’s yard.

  “Once and for all,” said Eva, and she gave me a devilish grin.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “What’s the plan? You better tell me.”

  “Well…we’re going to sneak. And we’re going to put a carton of eggs by his door every week. If he already has eggs, then he won’t need to steal anymore. And he won’t be a thief.”

  “Oh…” I said. “You know what? That will work. Brilliant plan.”

  Eva nodded. “I know,” she said. She turned back to Angus and said, “How about if it’s like a birthday card? ‘To Mr. Spivey,’” she recited, “‘Eggs for you…Happy Breakfast to you.’ And that’s all.”

  So now a gift for the Spive. I shook my head. What a morning. I dragged out an old barn board. I took some of Lil’s famous blue paint (without asking) and I made a sign: BIKE BARN CLOSED. I leaned the sign up against a couple of cedars at the end of the driveway and pressed back the weeds so nobody would miss it.

  I plugged along with the jobs we had already logged in, but more by rote than by drive now. I felt like a guy who had forgotten how to do anything but fix bikes. Not so, Vince. He took his fishing pole and went for a bike ride. He showed up again early afternoon to take a tough job or two.

  “Do you know if there’s been any word from Mom today?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Dad’s less groggy. Talking. Apparently a lot.”

  “Is he? Oh, good.” Truth was, I wanted to phone him.

  “I guess they’re having trouble making him rest.”

  “That sounds like Dad. How was your ride?”

  “Good. I watched the highway from the overpass. A few more trucks around. Still pretty quiet out there. Change didn’t come overnight. Oh, and wan
na hear something funny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw Sprocket.”

  “No!” I set down a wrench. Looked at my brother.

  “He’s doing community service. Taking down the weeds by the exit sign. Making himself right at home. He saw me. Moved off into the brush, the brat.”

  “Shoot. So he’s hanging out by the highway. And now the trucks are moving. I bet he’d walk into traffic just to spite me.”

  “Naw. He won’t jump the guardrail, and if he does, he takes his life in his own hands—hooves,” said Vince.

  “It never pays to chase him,” I conceded.

  “Stubborn. But he’ll come home on his own.” Vince swirled grease off his finger onto the seat post of a BMX bike he’d been working on. It’d come in for a wheel repair. But we often covered Rule Three as a courtesy: An ounce of maintenance is worth a pound of repairs. He worked the seat post into the tube. He tightened the screw and said, “There. Another one ready to ship out.” He rolled the bike forward and stuck the order on the call spindle. “You did a lot today,” he said. It was true. The spindle had about seven finished jobs on it. “So when do we take in more?” he asked.

  “No more,” I said. I surprised myself.

  “What? You’re kidding?”

  “Nope. I want to clear the Bike Barn.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I don’t know,” I said. “But I can’t see Dad coming home to this. Especially with a busted hand. I don’t even want him to see the mess I’ve made.”

  41

  WE ALL THOUGHT IT’D BE MOM WHEN THE phone rang during supper that night. But Lil handed it to me.

  “Young Mr. Marriss?” It was Mr. Bocci again. “My team went by your exit today. They saw your sign. You closed up shop?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I took a tough swallow. “Not taking any more in.” I set my fork down in my eggs and glanced up at Vince. He gave me a shrug.

  “Is this about you needing parts?” he asked. “I can help you some.”

  “Oh, thank you. Parts are—well, parts are only part of it,” I said.

  “Yah!” He laughed. I guess he felt I was playing with my words.

  “We’ve had some more bad luck,” I said, and I went on to tell him about what had happened to Dad. “He’ll be okay,” I started to say. But Mr. Bocci got excited. He was loud and spoke fast. I held the receiver away from my ear.

  “Ah! The gas begins again and then somebody beats this man? This good father so they can have some card so they can get precious, precious gasoline! Terrible, terrible!” he said. “What has it come to?”

  “I guess it’s gotten nasty out there,” I said, though I hated to use the words. “Anyway, the Bike Barn is taking a break.” My face ached in that about-to-start-crying sort of way. I always fight that feeling and it always gets worse.

  “You sound low of spirit,” Mr. Bocci said.

  “Umm. Well. Somewhat,” I said. Now I was having trouble speaking.

  “Well, you need something, you can call me. Maybe I’ll have the team stop by? You can give them a list. You want this?”

  Sure, send Team Bocci over to see the collapsing little bike shop….

  “W-we’re okay.” I squirmed. “Thanks. Thanks so much, Mr. Bocci.”

  After I hung up I felt miserable and stupid. Of course I needed parts.

  Especially if I wanted to clear bikes.

  Just an hour or so after Mr. Bocci called, the phone rang again. Again, Lil held it out to me. “Dewey, Dad wants to talk to you.”

  My hand was thick and clumsy on the receiver—like if I held it too tightly, I’d somehow be hurting Dad. “Dad? Hi.” I spoke softly.

  “Oh heck, am I going deaf on top of everything else? Dewey? You there? I can hardly hear you.”

  I laughed. “No, Dad, sorry. I just thought I should keep it down since you’re in the hospital. Dad, how are you?”

  “Feel like I went a few rounds with something large and unintelligent,” he said. “And I’m not very pretty. They’ve got my eye stitched up like a baseball and my hand looks like a boiled lobster claw.”

  “Dad, it’s horrible,” I said. “Horrible somebody did this to you.”

  “It is what it is, Dewey. It’s the times. Listen, I’m going to be fine,” he said. “I’ve got everybody taking care of me here. What about you, Dew?” He was more serious now. “I hear the shop’s been tough.”

  I knew he must have heard that from Lil. “I—I’m trying to work it out,” I said. I cleared my throat. “It got so busy. We had to stop taking bikes in.”

  “Ran out of room, did you?”

  “You could say.” I wondered how much Lil had told him. Hardly mattered. I wasn’t about to bother Dad with a sibling fight. “I’m tired,” I finally said.

  “Well, you should be! All you’ve done! Dewey, I’m so proud. And as for right now, well, it’s easy for me to say it from here, sitting on my butt in a hospital bed, but all problems have an answer.”

  “Yeah, I keep trying to figure out which of our Eight Rules That Apply to Fixing Almost Anything applies to fixing this,” I said.

  “Have you tried turning the whole Bike Barn clockwise?”

  I laughed. “Well, ‘one problem at a time’ worked for a while. But the whole thing’s come disassembled now. Dad, you might have to just tell me what the answer is this time,” I joked, but in the most hopeful way.

  “I wish I knew,” Dad said. “I’ve never seen it like you’re seeing it. But I’ll listen to you talk it out.”

  I repeated what I had already said in the past. “There are just so many.” I told Dad that the repairs were simple. “In fact, if they were harder—way above my head—it’d be easier to turn them away. But there’s not much I can’t do. And almost nothing Vince can’t do,” I said. “So, I’ve taken in all these jobs, and I guess I have too many now. And then there’s the problem of getting parts.”

  Dad was calm and kind. “There’s nothing to be done about parts. That’s happening with everything all across the country right now—and not just in the bike business. But, Dew, I swear, some kind of answer is probably right in front of you. It’s somehow there with the bikes, or maybe even with the people.”

  “The people?” I said. “Okay, now you sound like a guy who got hit in the head,” I said.

  Dad laughed. “Hey, I’m sorry. Your mom’s here nagging me to wrap it up and get some rest.”

  “Okay, Dad. You should do that. I’ll—I’ll work on this,” I told him.

  “Or maybe don’t work on it. Maybe better to relax and let it come.”

  Let it come.

  I could not for the life of me think what that meant.

  42

  IT IS A CLICHÉ TO SIT BOLT-UPRIGHT IN BED IN the middle of the night when an idea strikes. But that’s exactly what I did.

  I’d been not sleeping while I replayed my conversation with Dad.

  Somewhere right around two o’clock in the morning I started repeating three things to myself over and over again:

  The bikes. The Eight Rules for repairing them. The people.

  Something was coming to me. I wasn’t sure what. I needed a genius.

  “Psst! Vince? Psst!”

  My brother moved in his bed. Slightly.

  “Hey, Vince. Psst! Psst! Ps-s-st!”

  “Wha-what?” Vince sat up, just halfway.

  “You awake?”

  “What?” He squinted at our clock. “No,” he decided, “I’m not.”

  “I need your help. I’m trying to think.”

  “Well, do it with your own brain,” he complained. He threw himself facedown into his pillow.

  “Feed me the Eight Rules,” I said.

  Vince groaned.

  “Come on. One at a time,” I said.

  He spoke into his pillow. “Wule Wun: Wight ish tight.”

  “Right is tight. Probably the simplest rule. Okay. Go again,” I said.

  Vince rolled faceup. He sighed. “Rule Two
: Proper tools.”

  “Yes…” Hadn’t someone even asked to borrow something? Someone in that crowd of customers that I’d turned away? “Proper tools if you have them,” I said. “And we do. But most of the people who come to the shop don’t.”

  “Profound,” said Vince. He went on to Rule Three robotically. “An ounce of maintenance is worth a pound of repairs.”

  I settled onto my back again and thought out loud. “If people knew how to do a few simple things for their bikes, we’d never even see them….”

  “Rule Four.” Vince yawned. “Rust never sleeps. And neither does my brother.”

  “Hmm. Tightly tied to Rule Three,” I said. “Okay, next one.”

  “Rule Five: Study the problem.”

  “Or…” I thought for a second. “Find someone to explain it to you.”

  “Rule Six.” (He was pretty much cutting me off now.) “Try the least expensive fix first.”

  “But if you have to hire someone, that adds to the expense.”

  “Eh…well…” Vince stopped and thought. “Not so sure about that,” he said. “Sometimes it pays to go with a pro.”

  “Right. Or consult one…Okay, give me Seven.”

  “Take notes on complicated jobs.”

  I flashed on the cheat sheets that Dad had made for us when we first started to do repairs—the ones that Robert had been looking at so recently. “How to proceed,” I said.

  “Rule Eight: My nightmare. One repair at a time; don’t disassemble more than you have to. Goes with knowing when to get help from a pro,” he added, and he yawned again, loudly.

  I knew what he meant. People brought us bikes that they’d tried to fix by themselves all the time. “Components in pieces,” I said.

  “Yes-s-s…but, of course, Dad has a soft spot for do-it-yourselfers,” Vince said, and he let out one small laugh.

  “Yeah. That’s Dad. Always willing to help them.”