Checker and the Derailleurs

by Lionel Shriver

  “How much you get it for?” asked Eaton.

  “Thirty dollars,” said Howard briskly, oiling his chain with a drop in each link. “It must be, oh, twenty years old.”

  “Why not get a new one?” asked Eaton. “Because the bicycles they’re making now—”

  “You say they too much,” Howard observed severely. “There’s no they. Check says.”

  “All the same,” said Eaton coldly, “bicycles are much lighter now.”

  “But when a bicycle gets old,” said a voice behind them, “it has scars. Stories. And it gets real cool, you know? You can’t mess it over anymore.” Checker leaned Zefal against the park railing. Once copper with black trim, her finish was evenly scraped, the scratches filled with grease. The black handlebar tape, washed by rain and snow, was now tattered and gray; the rubber brake hoods had lost their pigment; the once-suede seat had bits of fur only on its tip, like a stuffed animal loved bald. The whole machine, packed in with the dregs of a harsh New York winter, eaten by salt on its underside, was an even gray-brown. Nothing gleamed but a muted inner warmth. Zefal didn’t demand a lot of attention, never asked for or expected praise. She was good at waiting at parking signs without complaint. She was nine years old, as aged for a bicycle as for a dog. Her treads were worn and brake shoes nubby, her derailleur clogged, but you could tell she was a loyal vehicle all the same, and surprisingly fleet for such an enfeebled creature. Checker suspected Zefal was starting to go blind, for she didn’t spot pedestrians lately until they were practically under the front wheel, but you didn’t replace a bicycle casually. He would clean and grease her, repack her bearings, and ease her fondly through another year.

  “Better than people, anyway,” said Eaton. “They get old, they look like sun-dried tomatoes.”

  “See if you say the same thing when you’re seventy-five.” Check suddenly pulled up short, and blanched. “It’s funny, I—”

  “What?”

  Checker hesitated. “Sometimes I can see people, old. How they’ll look. I saw you, that’s all.”

  “And what did I look like?” asked Eaton tolerantly.

  “Nothing,” said Checker with an involuntary shudder. “Never mind.”

  Checker rapidly put the image away, like shuttering a bad snapshot to the bottom of the stack.

  “Howard, your bicycle is perfect!” Check exclaimed. “It’s exactly the bicycle you would have.”

  “Yeah?” Howard felt tentatively insulted. The bike had upright handlebars and only three speeds. It was red all right, but less red like a Corvette than red like a wagon.

  “Let’s go for a ride, Howard,” said Check, sweeping over Zefal. “The ramps on the Triborough are still slagged, but the snow’s melted now, and if we go to Manhattan we’ve got the wind downtown. Then I’ll show you how to get on the Queensboro—a real no-nonsense bridge, serious. Fifty-seventh still has big chunks of the street mysteriously missing, so watch your rims…” Still rabbiting away, Checker led off, with Howard pumping eagerly behind him.

  “Didn’t shake his tree one bit,” said Caldwell. “In fact, he seemed pretty jacked about it.”

  “Think he notice?” asked J.K. “About Howard?”

  “Sure. But he doesn’t care.” They shrugged. “Let’s go, old man.” They motioned to Eaton.

  Eaton started. He’d been thinking. Eaton had decided he wanted a motorcycle.

  “Have you scoped out this furnace deal Check’s got going?” asked Howard.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Well, doesn’t it seem terrif?”

  “Check likes it.”

  “Geez, I think—that furnace. Terrif. How does he do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Well, first there was that job at Tower Records—with the discount, and rock and roll all day? Then the messenger job, riding around skipping potholes, and he’d come back—”

  “Jacked out of his ever-loving mind.” Caldwell laughed.

  “Yeah. And now this, this tops it. Sweets, all I can find is that Baskin-Robbins late shift, and if I see one more scoop of Oreo ice cream, I’m going to lose my own cookies—”

  “Howard,” said Caldwell patiently, “it’s not the job, dummy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you worked for Sprint you’d come back saying how dirty it was, how wiped you got, how it was dangerous; at Tower you’d complain about the pay; the furnace would be hot. What do you think Check would be like at B-R? It’s not the job.”

  Caldwell shrugged and walked off, leaving Howard to imagine Checker Secretti scooping ice cream. Checker would wear his paper hat at a jaunty angle and never spill Rocky Road all over his apron. He’d take the apron home every night, washing and pressing it with real affection. He’d memorize all the flavors and recommend his favorites; he’d never make the mistake of eating too much ice cream for dinner and feeling sick the rest of the night. By the end of a week he’d know all the regulars’ names and the ages of their children. He’d give away a lot of tastes and a few free scoops and make jokes with fat people that for some reason they didn’t find offensive from Checker. Business would pick up during his shift, and Brockton would notice. He’d let Checker decorate cakes, and pretty soon Check would abandon the Snoopy and Big Bird patterns to do his own designs, caricatures of children in pink and yellow icing. They’d sit for him as for a photographer and giggle, and he’d give them icing mustaches if they promised not to tell. Customers would start requesting that Checker do their cakes. In the meantime, the band and a lot of other hangers-on would start congregating in the parlor, loitering on the curb, waiting for Check to get off, and when business was slow Check would drum with tiny pink plastic tasting spoons on the glass counter, ticka-ticka. He’d learn to balance five scoops at a time and develop theories that matched flavors to types of people. The rising office types in their thirties now moving into Astoria from Manhattan would listen to Check talk sometimes and linger and ask him if he planned on going to college. People were always asking Check that—Howard wouldn’t be surprised if someday this whole neighborhood took up a collection.

  Howard trudged down Ditmars to work, and tied on his messy apron. The freezer wasn’t working well, and several chocolates were soft. People would complain. Howard would feel helpless. It seemed a long way to ten o’clock.

  “You’re kidding. Howard!”

  “I wanted to see if you were right. If it was the job or not. And it’ll get me in shape.”

  “What’s this campaign of yours lately? All the exercise?”

  “A little experiment.”

  Howard had applied for Checker’s old job at Sprint, walking into it with surprising ease. Since Checker Secretti had been one, it had never struck Howard that messengers did low-prestige work. He found out in short order.

  Messengers are at the very bottom of the corporate ladder, even under secretaries’ sharp, resentful heels. In elevators, having marked the purple canvas bag, executives stared straight through him to the numbers overhead. Howard had looked forward to the exotic film studios Check had described, and he did often find himself aimlessly ambling over high-ceilinged sets scattered with cold cups of coffee; but tripping over wires and dodging cameras wheeling by, Howard might lose half an hour locating “M. Rayson.” Paid on commission, Howard found this costly entertainment.

  Furthermore, he never seemed to get much exercise. Terrified by taxis and buses cutting him off just when he got the heavy red bicycle going, Howard poked through midtown, disdainfully passed by other messengers, who weaved casually through clogged avenues as if running a maze in a video game. Policemen made him nervous, and he wouldn’t run lights. At least the job alerted Howard to the value of his life. He refused to take rush jobs. Under his breath he would lecture cyclists that whipped by him, clipped the heels of old ladies in crosswalks, and brought whole lines of cars signaling right screeching to a halt: “There are only two kinds of cyclists, careful—and dead.” Yet watching his less responsible colleagues careen
through midtown, he was forced to add a third kind: lucky.

  Howard developed a cough. By the time he dragged home at five o’clock, the hairs on his skin had collected a delicate dusting of exhaust that turned his limbs gray. He found he could actually write his name in the soot on his arm. Nostalgically Howard remembered the nights when rocky-road stains were made of ice cream.

  “What happened to that cute black guy?” secretaries would ask him. “With the blue eyes and light skin?”

  Sometimes Howard pretended not to know whom they were talking about.

  “You know,” a pretty girl once pressed, “he’s got dimples right here. And he always seems so—” She couldn’t find the word.

  “Jacked,” said Howard.

  “What?”

  “Happy?”

  “Yeah!” She seemed pleased the word was simple. For an ordinary adjective, “happy” gets curiously little use.

  “He’s helping run a glass furnace.”

  “No kidding! Well, there wasn’t much chance that kid would stay a bike messenger, I guess…”

  “Actually—he’s not very ambitious.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s my best friend,” said Howard shyly.

  “Well, you tell him Wanda says get off his butt, then. He’s got the stuff. Tell him Glenda had a girl, and that he was right about my kid. That it worked.”

  “What worked?”

  “Just tell him. He’ll understand.”

  It was like that, all the time. Where’s Check? Where’s that sweetheart who could never stand still? Even on the street when other messengers would pass and recognize his company’s bag, tall terrifying black boys would stop and ask, “How that maniac you got at Sprint doing?”

  “Who?”

  “The drummer. Lean back on that seat like he sipping a martini. An he play traffic like music, man. Tell him Race says hey.” And in no time Race would be ten blocks away.

  Howard had been working for Sprint two weeks when he called in for his last job of the day. He had to go through five pay phones—a record—to find one that worked.

  “2 West 178th—?”

  “Don’t make me say it again, we busy here.”

  The pickup was surprisingly far away for so late in the day, and Howard was exhausted. Yet dutifully he pulled the red bicycle off its parking sign. The machine seemed beleaguered, and increasingly more like a tricycle than a bike—ungainly and awkward, it didn’t fit in here. At Checker’s suggestion, Howard had named it Charlie, and lately he related to it as if it were a retarded younger brother he was compelled to baby-sit. The two of them alone got along all right, but socially Howard was ashamed. Charlie was slow. If Charlie could talk, he would stutter.

  When Howard finally got up to Washington Heights he couldn’t find the address. Men in cars kept signaling him over. “Nickels and dimes.” Howard was in the middle of the cocaine district, but Howard wasn’t the sort of person who noticed that kind of thing, though he was the sort of person who would later pretend to have known all along if you mentioned it.

  Howard called into his service to discover that the address was wrong and he’d gone a hundred blocks out of his way.

  “Don’t make me say it again,” Howard grumbled, straddling Charlie. “We’re busy here. Ten extra seconds for him, ten miles for me.”

  Back down on the West Side, Howard found the right address; it was getting dark. No one answered the buzzer.

  So: one of those days. As he cranked back to Fifty-ninth Street, Charlie’s fender began to rub on the tire; the wind picked up, and trees bent ominously on Riverside Drive. It started to rain. His brakes worked badly and taxis sprayed his left side. Pedestrians looked Howard straight in the eye and then proceeded to walk right in front of his bicycle. Pedestrians are like that.

  By the time Howard reached the bridge he was soaked, and in no mood to marvel at the view. A miracle he had noted before: he went from a head wind going south in Manhattan to a head wind going north in Queens. Little wonder, then, that plodding up Twenty-first Street, his tennis shoes sloshing squisha-squusha, it took him several blocks to notice he had a flat tire.

  “Howard!” Checker quickly necked his vase and cracked off into the annealer.

  Covered in the grim black sand distinctive to New York City pavement, Howard dripped in the doorway of the glassworks, his chest lurching. “Doesn’t anything ever go wrong for you?”

  Check pulled Howard into the studio, prying the handlebars from Howard’s clammy, white-knuckled hands. He glanced at the flapping back tire, but decided against a caution on the dangers of bare rims. “What happened?”

  “Everything!” While Howard recounted his woes, Checker peeled off the boy’s clothes and retrieved one of Syria’s oversized button-downs, pausing as he slipped Howard’s arms through the sleeves to smell the sweet rise of old sweat coming off the shirt like perfume. He rested Howard’s jeans on a yoke near the furnace; steam rose from the denim. The sneakers slowly curled as their canvas tightened. Howard himself was not so easily warmed. Even two feet from the furnace he still shivered; his lips were purple. Howard refused Check’s jeans, and wrapped the dark shirt around his body, the sleeves draping beyond his hands; for all that bicycling, the pale hairless legs dangling under the tails were still scrawny.

  “You have to make them give you the address slow and clear,” Checker sympathized. “They’re bored is the trouble, and they’re inside on the phone and don’t have the least comprehension that you’re out on the street in the cold.”

  Howard wiped his nose on a sleeve and sat in the chair Check brought him, pulling his knees to his chest. “You didn’t warn me. You’d come home and rave about carrying films from Jason Robards and how you got all the way across Fifty-ninth Street without missing one light. That’s all you’d say. How the sunset from the bridge was amazing.” Howard turned on Checker with uncharacteristic ferocity. “Didn’t you ever get a flat, or two, or three? Didn’t you ever miss every light on Fifty-ninth Street? Didn’t it ever rain?”

  “Of course, Howard. There are just ways—”

  “You mean it’s my fault I’m not all jacked now? That today could have been a peach if I only had the right attitude?”

  “No, no. I mean for me, Howard. Sometimes I just—have good shocks. And sometimes so much goes wrong that it’s funny. So I laugh.”

  “When you’re cold it’s not very amusing, Check. I don’t buy it.”

  “Well, cold. That’s a whole—thing.”

  “A thing.”

  “Like, when I can’t feel my feet anymore? And pains are shooting up my arms from my fingers? I think about Arctic explorers.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I know it sounds dorky. But when I watch movies about the Eiger, or see bums sleeping over vents in December, I think, I know that. I know what it’s like to be incredibly, incredibly cold. I’m glad I know that feeling.”

  “Later. But at the time it’s horrible.”

  “No,” Check responded evenly. “Inconvenience, discomfort—that’s not what’s horrible.”

  “Then what is?”

  Checker didn’t answer.

  Gradually both Howard’s body and demeanor thawed. It was hard to stay angry at Checker, and Howard didn’t really enjoy it, anyway. They commiserated as it got later over people who opened their doors on you, and about buses—Checker said the only way he stayed cool around buses was to imagine what it must be like to drive one and how annoying bicycles must be late in the day, swerving in front of you, so small, like flies around a cow. They compared favorite routes, delis, and dispatchers. Checker asked about Glenda and said that she’d wanted a girl. Finally Howard’s jeans were dry; though stiff and gritty, the fabric burned pleasantly from the heat. Checker fixed Charlie’s tire—claiming he enjoyed it—wiped the frame down, oiled the chain, and adjusted the brakes until Charlie didn’t seem so goofy anymore. Howard stepped out to discover it had stopped raining and there was an unusually war
m breeze coming up, for once, in the direction of Howard’s house. As Howard would later document, Checker attracted tail winds.

  Toward midnight the drummer was unusually quiet, puttering around the bicycle, and when he was finished, wiping the grease pensively from his hands, he said, “Howard?” as if he was going to say something, but then he didn’t. When Howard wheeled out and said goodbye, Checker did add, “Listen,” and put a hand on Howard’s shoulder, “I do have bad days.”

  They looked each other in the eye, and Howard said, “Really?” Checker nodded and smiled weakly.

  “Thanks, Check,” said Howard, sweeping his leg over the frame and pushing off, feeling, perhaps for the first time in his life, graceful, to ride newly paved roads on fully inflated tires, toasty now but very clear on what it felt like to be cold.

  “You quit!”

  “That’s right,” said Howard calmly. “You have to pick your spots.”

  “Check says?”

  “That’s right,” said Howard, not embarrassed. “And my spot is definitely not midtown Manhattan on a bike. Check says.”

  “So what’s next?” asked Caldwell. “Tower Records?”

  “Nope. B-R said they’ll take me back. Some kids’ve been asking for me. Stop by if you want. The new coconut fudge is top-notch.” Howard raised his eyebrows. “Free sprinkles.” And smiling, he pedaled away to work.

  Caldwell laughed. “Howard—”

  “What say?” asked J.K.

  “He’s all right.” Caldwell shook his head. “Sometimes he’s all-fuckin’-right.”

  8 / Hot Rocks, or: The Igneous Apartment

  The first time Checker stopped by the Carver Arms he was reminded of fierce dogs that girls had somehow managed to dress up in doll clothes. Rahim met him at the door with an apron and a scrub brush and something very close to a snarl.

  Each step across the living room crunched. Winking in a variety of colors, broken glass covered the floor. In one corner was a tiny clean spot and a broom.