Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  Once the dishes were in the sink I bounced down the stairs and made myself scarce. Pop had one daily chore he never liked me to watch. With his two bad knees and an arthritic hip, it hurt him to walk down the stairs. He gripped the handrail and lowered himself down the stairway in an even, rolling stride. At the bottom he used the hem of his T-shirt to wipe the tears of pain from his eyes. I dawdled behind as we wheeled our bicycles out onto Beach Street and coasted down the hill to Main. Then we rode past the marina and the park and under the canopy of trees that marked the town limit. This was how we did it since I was old enough to keep up.

  Overnight a north wind had blown away the heat of graduation day, and a drizzle fell just hard enough to extinguish the mist that hung over the ground. We began slowly by custom, turning our lower gears quickly until the heat of our blood restored stiff muscles. By the putting green at the country club, he stood up on his pedals and bullied his way up the shallow rise. Beyond the clay tennis courts, the road jogs to the left and begins a lazy incline of about a half mile to where it meets Claremore Road at the westernmost point on the island. Pop slowed on this grade to make me come alongside.

  At first sight he is not an imposing figure on a bicycle. In his torn T-shirt, moth-eaten cycling shorts, and cracked leather cleats, he rode hunched over the handlebars, churning fitfully like a crippled blacksmith. However, the more discerning eye would recognize the purpose and efficiency of an old sprinter in his form, his grip on the bars, and his short, powerful pedal strokes.

  The men my father rode against back in his professional days came from the nations of Europe. They’d grown up in smoke and ruins and death. They’d survived the war and were tough and mean. All of them—the Belgians and Dutch and Italians—remembered the Nazis and none of them had any love for a German.

  I closed on his right, as he had taught me to do. Pop said that all but the best riders will only glance over their left shoulder to see if anyone is catching them from behind. For as long as we’d ridden together Pop had treated these rides like a kind of on-the-job training, an apprenticeship in the profession of road racing. He never got tired of telling me what to do, as much for the pleasure of bossing me around as out of any hope that I’d amount to much. I caught him, looped my finger into his saddle stay and tugged, to let him know I was there. “Cinch your toe strap,” he said.

  We crested the next hill together, our pedal strokes matching identically. I was never sure whether he was preparing me for a life in the saddle—an occupation that had brought him little but hard times—or if it was just that he had nothing better to do with me. Agnes Reed always said that he wanted to turn me into a second version himself so that I could correct the mistakes he made, which makes sense, except Grey’s mom is biased because she hates Pop for the way he treats me and has never understood him.

  Pop’s own father died when my father was five, sunk on a U-boat in the war. Aunt Berthe told me this. Most of what I know about my own father I know from her rather than from Pop, who wasn’t likely to remember anything he didn’t want to, and even less likely to tell you how he felt about it.

  One thing he did talk about was a bike. This particular bicycle was new and yellow (a rare color in my imagining of my father’s drab German childhood), left behind by his cousin Tomas—who I’m named after—when he went to join the paratroopers. The bike became Pop’s when Tomas was killed at Rotterdam.

  My father rode the yellow bicycle until the tires wore out and because there was no rubber, he made new tires himself by binding twisted rags with twine. “Was it hard to ride like that?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “and that made me stronger,” which was the sort of thing he always said, but I didn’t believe him. It’s the kind of thing parents tell their kids to justify their own lousy childhoods. What boy would not have taken new rubber tires over a grueling lesson in calamity?

  Sometimes I figured he’d used up all the sentimentality he could muster on that bike and had none left over for my mom or me. No other object held that much importance in his mind.

  The bike he rode now he’d won in a trade show raffle. It was elegant, with a pearl finish that embarrassed him. I think he was relieved when a fall on a wet curve scuffed it up a bit. Mine, on the other hand, was a battered midnight blue of dubious pedigree that Pop cobbled together from old parts lying around the shop and then garnisheed my wages to pay for. I loved it like a dog.

  You might think being in the business like we were that I would get the pick of the inventory, but if you knew Pop you’d know that’s exactly why I didn’t get. He was not going to have everyone on St. Raphael saying that just because he ran the one bike store on the island was no reason his son should have a new bicycle every time he wanted one. I had to be happy with the strays that found their way to the back door of our shop all summer long, or the ones that people left to get fixed and then forgot about.

  We turned west at Claremore Road and rode in and out of the trees along the high bluffs. The clouds were giving way to the sun, which skipped off the water in the channel. It was the one sight along our route that could still turn my head after all the times we’d come this way. The road runs north by northeast along the leeward side of the island, descending from the bluffs and running along the beach to Sitwell Point. Beside the gravel shoulder, the scrub was suddenly alive with movement—a stir of russet and white and black feathers—and an eagle rose from the tall grass and crossed right in front of me, forcing me to brake suddenly. I shuddered, and as I did I felt Pop’s hand on my hip. He was holding me up. “It almost got you,” he laughed, shaking his head. That was Pop for you: there to keep me from falling and grateful to the eagle for making me look like a klutz.

  At the far eastern tip of the island, the road ends at the water. We turned on a road called Cranberry Glen that winds through a cluster of summer houses, bigger and newer than most of the others on St. Raphael. This is a Sitwell development: sheetrock and aluminum siding and built-in gas grills that never seem to be lit on concrete decks and jungle gyms on the lawns that never have kids hanging off them. Like electrons, the owners bounce between the beach and the country club, never stopping anywhere in between.

  Beyond the glen, traveling north, the asphalt gives way to dirt for a rugged climb and descent of a mile and a half. Here we had to busy ourselves with not going over the handlebars and going fast enough to make it to the crest. The downhill slope was just as treacherous, a ritual argument between speed and caution.

  The wood gets thick there, and the temperature cools until the dirt drive meets Basswood Road, where the airport lies in a broad clearing. Just the one runway and the service sheds, it is the only sure way off the island in January. From there it’s a two-kilometer dash into town. Nearly everything Pop taught me about strategy and tactics of road racing he taught me on the false flat from the airport to the ferry dock.

  “Shift down,” he’d yell at me, and side by side we’d tear down Basswood and back onto Main, our heads down, yanking the handlebars back and forth so hard I wondered how they didn’t snap off.

  Some nights, after a few schnapps and beer chasers, Pop would spread the clippings he’d saved about his career across the table, yellowed newsprint in a dozen languages from Flemish to Basque. This was always a solemn affair, with a lot of sorting and stacking, enough to convince me when I was much younger that he’d been an important man. I’d pick up an article from, say, a Spanish sports journal, studying the photo of a younger Pop gritting his teeth on a steep rise and ask him, “What does this one say?”

  He would study the caption through bleary eyes, then shrug, and say, “It says, ‘Ernst Zimmermann has done something remarkable.’” I don’t remember how old I was when I figured out that he couldn’t read a word of it, that he was making it up.

  “I was—rabinous,” he told me once.

  “You mean ravenous?” I said, “like hungry.”

  He glowered at me.

  This hunger was what drove him to several
strong finishes in his first season and a stunning second place the following March in the Paris-Roubaix, the first major race of his second season. This hunger was what drove him to hoist his aching legs out of bed at five in the morning to train on the still-dark streets of Aurich. And it was what drove him—on a rain-slick cobblestone boulevard in Brittany, in the final meters of a field sprint that would have paid the winner a lousy thirty francs—to kill a man.

  Under an arch of oak branches we reached the church mailbox, which had been our finish line for as long as we’ve been riding together. I had the line measured and could have beaten him easily, but I let him take it. Like I say, he taught me what I know. I let him win more in the days just before I left for school. It meant more to him than it did to me. There was a time when he would curse me for losing, back when he dreamed (if dreamed is a word you could ever associate with my father) that I would follow in his footsteps as a professional racer.

  The island was waking up, and everyone was happy to see us. Ben Friendly was shaking a rug at the door to his tavern. He waved. So did the college girls who cleaned the rooms at the Marina Hotel and a family of tourists who must have thought we were a tourist attraction, which in a way I guess we were.

  After our Sunday rides came church, where I was the only kid my age whose dad made him wear a suit. Aunt Berthe had drilled into his head the sanctity of the house of the Lord to the point where he was sure that if Jesus was to come back tomorrow you’d better be wearing a tie. I didn’t mind it so much when I was ten.

  The First Lutheran Church suffered the distinction of being the oldest landmark on the island and was mobbed every Sunday of tourist season. It was built a hundred and fifty years ago on the stone foundation of a French Catholic church that had been built by missionaries two hundred years before that, though there were no stones in the weed-ratted cemetery to mark their presence on the island. Nor were there any for the Ojibwa. Their burial ground on the inland hills had been turned over by plows and torn up by the first Norwegians, who had found out the hard way that this land wasn’t good for growing much of anything.

  Reverend Vogel was up with his family on Isle Royale on a fishing trip and Brad, the youth pastor, gave the sermon, which was about Jonah and the whale. He stood before the congregation in short sleeves and raised his arms for quiet. “I want you to think about the reverend up there on his bass boat,” he said, in a loud voice, “and then think of old Jonah and the whale—which was probably only a perch until he got home and told his buddies in Nineveh.” That pissed Pop off, I’m sure, because he didn’t like our lives being compared to the lives of the Holy Immortals. “This big,” Pastor Brad said, holding his palms a couple of feet apart and slowly spreading his hands. The laughter among the pews grew until everyone was laughing, except Pop.

  My father thought he was pandering. He had a point. Even Vogel, who took his preaching seriously, had two kinds of sermons: off-season and tourist. The summer sermons were never his best. They were the general kind, of scripture and fable, a little like sitting through the same movie more than once. On the way out, Pastor Brad shook my father’s hand and said “Ernst” in such a way as to show that he knew Pop didn’t like what he was doing up there and could not have cared less. Pastor Brad started asking me if I was going with the church softball team to Washburn when a hand locked on my shoulder. I knew by the grip that it was Sgt. Spires of the Wisconsin Highway Patrol.

  “Staying out of trouble?” he said.

  “You know I am,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. Spires had to be six and a half feet, with oversize forearms, the left of which was deeply tanned from driving the cruiser around all day. Outside of the park rangers, Spires was the only law we ever saw on the island. Since he lived out here he made a point of driving the circuit at the end of his shifts, and probably had a pretty good idea of the kind of trouble Grey and I got into. He socked me hard on the arm and said, “See you next week.” I rubbed the charley horse all the way home.

  The shirt and shorts I’d worn the night before still smelled of wood smoke from the bonfire. I pulled them on anyway, and we headed down to the shop, the footfalls of my rubber sneakers drowned out by the thunk of Pop’s work boots. On hot days he didn’t zip up his coveralls, and his collar was twisted in on itself. In one hand, he carried a can of Pabst and a pack of cigarettes and from the other, he trailed the rest of the six-pack, the plastic ring looped around his finger. When we got downstairs, there were so many bikes waiting to get fixed that we had to inch our way sideways to the benches. Pop set the beer down on the corner of the bench, lit a cigarette, glanced at the repair tag on the first bike in line, lifted it to the work stand and clamped it in place with a smack on the spring-hinged lever.

  The day’s work had begun.

  In the spring and early summer we worked like cobblers attached to a retreating infantry. The unending stream of repairs from the tourists was swollen by the arrival of bikes from the locals, who dragged them out of the garage for a first spin of the season to find that their tires were flat, or that their wheels had been crushed under the Arctic Cat all winter. No matter what condition they came in, they had to be fixed in twenty-four hours, or else—according to our shop policy—we wouldn’t charge for the work. This sometimes meant that we had to work until well after midnight, in spite of the fact that my father, while never appearing to draw any pride or pleasure from his work, was the fastest repairman I’d ever seen. On a typical day we might clear twenty repairs before noon, not counting the flats and minor repairs we did for the walk-in clientele.

  Sweeping up was always my first chore of the day, though the floors never really got clean. The wood was scarred and oil and grime had worked its way into the cracks. They still smelled of gasoline from the days when Chalmers owned the place and all this was lawn mowers. In a town where wealth is measured by how many internal combustion engines you owned my father’s first act when we bought the place had been to clear out anything with a motor on it and leave us at the mercy of the tourist trade. I don’t think Pop, who’d never as far as I knew ever sat behind the wheel of a car in his life, had any specific objection to the internal combustion engine. It was just that he was against anything that was beyond his range of knowledge—which, given the size of the world in which he lived, was a whole universe of things.

  A SNORT LIST OF THINGS MY FATHER KNEW NOTHING ABOUT

  1. Science. Uncle Karl tells a story about the headmaster at their school who got arrested by the Nazis because he refused to keep his school open during bombing raids. Consequently, the education of Ernst and Karl Zimmermann consisted of not getting blown up. Since they lived through the war, you’d have to say they passed. When it was over they knew they’d survived, but they didn’t know much else. As far as Pop understood, water was made of water, air was made of air. Which doesn’t mean he thought the world is flat. It was more like he never had to know what shape it was since he’d traveled as far as he was going to and had no plans to ever reach the end.

  2. English. My father talked a kind of ape English that he’d picked up on his own, learning only words that could be observed through action, mostly nouns and verbs. If someone said, “Hand me that wrench,” he had hand and wrench down and he got the general idea, but if one of his ladies was to ask him, “How do I look in this dress?” as they sometimes did, he could only shake his head, which they took for the kind of indifference that made them throw themselves at him.

  3. Books. Pop never read a book that I saw. He had two in his possession, both of them the Bible, one in English that Berthe gave him when we were learning English, and one in German after she gave up on teaching him. He never went to the movies. He hardly ever watched anything outside of Bowling for Dollars on television. Though once we stayed up late watching this movie called Zulu, about these English soldiers who fight off every screaming native on the continent of Africa. Amazingly, Pop remained awake through the entire film and when it was over and the British had w
on, he said, “Very good.”

  4. Children. Pop didn’t see the difference between children and adults. He’d never had a childhood in the way we would understand. Which probably explained why he treated me the way he did. When she left, my mother didn’t ask him to look after me. She may have expected that Aunt Berthe would do the job. The point was he didn’t have a choice. It’s hard for me not to wonder what choice he would have made if he had.

  A SHORTER LIST OF THINGS MY FATHER DID KNOW ABOUT

  1. Loss. His cousin Tomas died early in the war. Later came the disease and starvation and the firebombs. Pop was an orphan at six and had lost all four of his grandparents by the time he was eight. No matter how much you might love somebody I don’t imagine you let the last death get to you like the first.

  2. Betrayal. The way my father tells the story, Gilles LaSalle was a fat, fading French star. “Washed up,” Pop said.

  “A hundred meters to go, I was in front—the worst place to be,” he said, adding a lesson in tactics to the story for my benefit. “I went left. ‘If he wants to pass,’ I said to myself, ‘let him come around.’ He tried—of course, and of course, I couldn’t allow that,” he said, “and I put an elbow in his way.” Pop reenacted just how he had done this—a sharp, violent jab—and clapped his hands like cymbals. Crash.

  Hundreds of racers signed a petition demanding my father’s expulsion from the European Cycling Federation. Among the signatures on the petition were those of the three other German racers on the circuit.

  Pop said, “My brothers turned on me.”

  3. Disappointment. In the shop, above the bench, in a dusty, wood frame, behind clouded glass, stands a photograph. The frame is mounted on a steel bracket and angled toward where my father stands. The picture is of Pop’s only victory as a professional. He is standing, barely twenty, on a wooden dais, his fine fair hair, shaved on the sides and cropped short, is dirty but neatly parted. He looks like a raccoon in negative: his face blackened with road grime, except for the white circles over his eyes where his goggles had been. An inverted triangle of sweat stains his wool jersey. He is waving an enormous bouquet over his head and is flanked by two women in traditional costumes of the region. The woman on his right is broad in the hips and shoulders. Her chest strains at the bodice. Her hair is blond, braided, and curled around her ears like ram’s horns. She is smiling at Pop as though she thinks he won the race for her. The woman on his left is small, dark, and though she wears the same style of dress as the other, looks like a girl playing dress-up with her mother’s clothes. She is holding a bottle of mineral water with the label carefully turned toward the camera to please the sponsors. She has a worried look on her face, as though she is afraid she is doing something wrong.