Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  So she said, “What’s all this got to do with a bicycle race?”

  Lydia’s expression showed that she thought Maggie had come to the key question. “I suppose,” she said, “that you’d better find out.”

  When Michael, walking like an arthritic old man and much bandaged, arrived at their tent, Maggie was standing outside watching the sunset. He started to wordlessly move past her, but she took him by the arm and turned him around, guiding him back into the narrow lane between two rows of tents.

  “Where are we going?” he asked irritably.

  “Away from the village,” Maggie said. “Somewhere we won’t be overheard.”

  He didn’t reply, but when he shrugged out of her grasp, he nevertheless walked alongside her.

  Soon, they realized that the best place for privacy was the place they least wanted to go. The base of the Obelisk.

  The twins walked around the monument so that they stood in the shadows opposite the race camp. There were benches of poured concrete set on the grounds nearby, and they settled down on one of them, Michael letting out a soft gasp of pain when he did so.

  “Anything broken?” Maggie asked.

  “My pride,” he said.

  “That seems unlikely,” she answered. “But listen. I don’t blame you for the crash. I mean, you caused it, but anyone would have done what you did.”

  “They can’t know!” Michael said. “Not a word of this to anyone!”

  Maggie took her brother’s hand. “It’s too late, Michael. I told Japheth Sapp about the phone calls. And I told Lydia Treekiller about what happened at the sprint today.”

  She anticipated the anger and recrimination to come, but when he looked sharply up at her, he didn’t speak, and was in fact then looking past her, and standing and trying to shove her behind him. She turned around and saw what had he had seen.

  A half-dozen greasy-haired men in gray wool uniforms, carrying rifles and grinning broadly, were walking toward them from the trees.

  “Get to the camp,” Michael whispered urgently. “Find help.”

  But one of the men lazily brought his rifle up, pointing it in their direction, and said, “Nah, better you don’t go anywhere.”

  Maggie moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with her brother, thinking that they must look ridiculous, covered with bandages, standing up to six armed men. But she said, “We don’t want any trouble. We’re with the race and are just out for a walk.”

  Another man grinned broadly, then spat a stream of tobacco-stained juice on the ground before turning to his fellows. “Hear that, boys? They’re with the race. Hell, I guess we’d never have figured that out on our own, would we?”

  Michael tensed, and Maggie put her hand on his arm.

  The spitter must have been the leader, because it was him who walked up, separating himself from the others, strutting. “Don’t really give much of a damn about bicycle racing,” he said. “But we surely would like to know how you know Japheth Sapp.”

  Chapter Eight

  When the Reenactors made a ragged circle around them on the bench, Maggie whispered, “Don’t do anything stupid, Michael.”

  The leader spat again and said, “That’s right, Mikey. Nothing stupid.”

  Michael bristled. He hated any and all diminutives of his name. Their parents had never called him anything but Michael.

  The Reenactor who had first aimed at them laughed roughly. “He’s going to do something stupid, look at him. He ain’t going to be able to help himself.”

  “Michael!” Maggie whispered again, pleading with him.

  The leader walked within a few feet of them, close enough that they could smell his unwashed body. “Nah, Mikey ain’t stupid. Mikey don’t want his sister to get shot, now, does he?”

  “People from the race will be looking for us,” said Michael, and Maggie breathed a sigh of relief. “They’ll be here any minute.”

  The leader laughed. “Hear that, boys? Bicyclists is gonna come kick our asses, I guess.”

  “What do you want with us?” Maggie asked.

  “I done told you, little girl. You were telling Mikey here about some conversation you’d had with Japheth Sapp. That’s a name we know. That’s a name we don’t care too much for.”

  “He’s just a neighbor of ours from back home, away east,” said Maggie. “We’ve only ever even seen him once.”

  “Well, that don’t sound too neighborly now, does it?” The man ran a hand through his lank, greasy hair, then pulled out a folding pocketknife and began to ostentatiously clean his fingernails with it. “See, once upon a time, we offered your neighbor the hospitality of our camp, and that didn’t turn out too good for anybody. A man died that night. A good man.”

  A Reenactor the twins hadn’t seen before rounded the Obelisk. “There’s people moving around over there, sir,” he said, nodding back toward the race village. “Looks like something’s up.”

  “Well now,” said the leader, “Maybe Mikey was right about folks coming to look for him after all.”

  Maggie tried to hold her brother down, but he stood despite her efforts. “It’s Michael, you ignorant redneck. My name is Michael Hammersmith.”

  Anticipating a blow at best and a gunshot at worst, Maggie stood next to him. But neither came.

  Instead, the leader had backed away a step and was clumsily folding up his knife to tuck away in his pocket. The man who had pointed his gun at them had paled, and said, “They must be his kids, the one that was with Sapp, he said he had children!”

  “Look, we don’t want any trouble,” said the leader. “We’re just camping out here on the grounds like y’all are. No need for any entanglements.”

  Entanglements, thought Maggie. What does that mean? What’s going on? “Do you mean that you’ve met our father? How recently?”

  Their father had been headed deeper into the hills, not to the flatlands. Why would he have been here?

  The Reenactors were melting into the darkness, calling to one another in some kind of battle cant that saw them splitting off in many different directions. When only the leader remained in sight, he paused, nodded at the twins, and saluted. “Your father is known everywhere he travels,” the leader said.

  Then he was gone.

  Before either Maggie or Michael could speak, the bright white light of an electrically powered lantern flooded the area. Shielding their eyes against the glare, the twins could just make out the helmeted form of the race director, flanked by a pair of the red-clad referees they’d seen aback motorcycles during the day’s racing. One of these held the lantern, and the other approached.

  “Director says it’s best you get back to camp,” she said in an up-east accent. “He’s made an agreement with the Reenactors to divide the grounds for the night, and you two are right up on the edge of the border.”

  Maggie looked at the director’s helmet, blazoned with the features of an owl over its smooth faceguard. She repeated to herself, “Right up on the edge . . .” Then Michael took her hand and led her back to their tent.

  “Why did you tell her?” Michael asked softly, returning to their conversation before the Reenactors had interrupted.

  “What if Dad does need our help?” Maggie replied.

  She didn’t expect him to answer, and so she wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t.

  The second stage of the race was set to be another hard, fast run across flat country, beginning at noon. The first order of business though, was breakfast.

  The whole team gathered in an open-sided canvas shelter around portable tables groaning beneath the weight of the thousands of calories they would take onboard. Muesli and other cereals, rice, fish, lean beef, and liters of fresh water, thick coffee, and electrolyte fluid were spread out, with each rider filling their plates more than once. They would expend a tremendous amount of energy over the course of the day, so, slim as they were, they ate huge quantities of food, concentrating on carbohydrates.

  “How about passing the soy milk, C
rash?” asked Jordan, who was sporting a bandage above her right eye. Her tone was jovial.

  Maggie saw that the glass pitcher, condensation beading on its sides, was sitting directly in front of Michael. He did not respond, and Maggie didn’t think he’d even heard the jibe. For all that he was surrounded by his teammates, Michael was breakfasting alone with his misery.

  Maggie thought of an old joke of her father’s.

  “There’s no such thing,” she said to Jordan.

  A quizzical expression crossed the green-haired woman’s face and she shook her head in confusion. “No such thing as what?”

  “Soy milk,” Maggie said, and kicked her brother under the table to be sure he was listening.

  All the riders were paying attention now, and Samantha pointed at the pitcher. “That’s soy milk right there.”

  “That’s soy beverage,” said Maggie, and she was so thankful when Michael spoke up, finishing for her.

  “Beans don’t lactate,” he said, his voice deepening slightly in unconscious imitation of their father.

  Telly laughed softly, and it spread around the table, all of the riders nodding at the small witticism, with only David shaking his head in confusion. “I do not follow that,” he said. “Beans?”

  They all laughed louder, and when Michael joined in, Maggie breathed a long sigh of relief. He may not have been completely forgiven for the disaster of the previous day, but he was still part of the team.

  And he was still her brother.

  So after breakfast, when the team was warming up with their bicycles mounted on stationary trainers lined up alongside the team bus, Maggie took advantage of the fact that the two of them were at the end of the line, and that Samantha, to her right, was listening to music on headphones so loud that Maggie could almost understand the lyrics.

  “I need to know,” she said quietly, “I deserve to know if yesterday was the first time she’s reached out to you other than the phone calls.”

  Michael had the resistance on the trainer set too high for a warm-up. A bead of sweat tracked down off his forehead and dripped off the end of his nose. He waited so long to answer that Maggie thought he was ignoring her, but then he said, “It’s not her.”

  She nodded. “It, then. Was that the first time it has reached out to you?”

  David worked his way down the line of cyclists, checking their machines and sharing a few quiet words with each of them. He smiled when he reached Maggie, leaning in to read the wattage measurement on the computer mounted on her handlebars. “Good,” he said, “That’s good.”

  But when he saw Michael, he frowned. “What is this? Are you trying to exhaust yourself before the race?” He leaned down and made an adjustment where the rear wheel of Michael’s bicycle was meshed with the training unit. Michael’s pedaling rate suddenly increased as the resistance in his pedals dropped away. He’d been pushing himself hard.

  David shook his head, then snapped his fingers in front of Michael’s face. Annoyance showing, Michael looked up at the Frenchman.

  “Many years ago I rode the Strade Bianche in Tuscany. Do you know this race?”

  Michael nodded and looked over at Maggie, his expression telling her that he wanted her to do the talking. She opened her mouth, hesitated, then closed it and looked down at her front wheel.

  After a bare moment, Michael said, “Yes. Our mother placed third there once. Strade Bianche means ‘white gravel roads.’ A race for hard riders, it says in her old magazines.”

  “A race for the mad,” said David. “It is run over sections of that white gravel instead of good smooth pavement. My bike handling, it was . . . not up to the challenge.”

  Michael didn’t reply, so Maggie said, “You crashed?”

  David pulled down the collar of his knit shirt, revealing an ugly scar running across his right collarbone. “Spectaculairment,” he said. “And I took down a dozen other riders with me, including my team captain, who was riding for a repeat win in the race.”

  Michael blinked sweat out of his eyes. “But racing is racing and the whole peloton forgot about it and forgave you, right?”

  David smirked at Michael’s bristly tone, and said, “No. Well, yes, actually, but that is not the point of this story. The point of this story is that I forgave myself. My mistake, well, it was not quite so stupid as yours, but it was a mistake and it ended the race for me and for many others. You are lucky to be riding today. You all are. In this crazy place, anyone is lucky to be riding on any day. Remember that. And don’t exhaust yourself before today’s stage.” With that, he strode away.

  Michael reached back and amped up the resistance on his trainer again.

  Maggie looked over and saw that the other four riders were all looking at the pair of them quite frankly. So she said nothing more.

  The racing was aggressive from the start, but tightly controlled. Numerous escapes went away, only to be brought back in by the high speed of the peloton. Jordan, detailed to be the go-between ferrying bottles up from the follow car to her teammates, spread Michael’s new nickname of “Crash” through the whole race, and Maggie heard her father’s joke about soy milk being told in a half-dozen languages over the course of the day.

  Stage Two ran for 110 miles from the Obelisk and through the towns of Elkton and Russellville and Auburn before the race rolled through the lands of the Amish, and the peloton was all together, speeding through flat farmland, when the first sign of them came.

  Maggie was riding behind and to one side of Telly, who was pacing Nicholas. The team’s GC rider had not suffered as many hurts in the previous day’s crash as other riders, but he had yet to speak to Michael despite the general feeling of forgiveness on the race. He seemed, as he had the first day and as Maggie supposed someone riding for the overall win must, supremely concentrated. So it surprised her when he changed position on his machine, moving his hands from the drops to the top of his handlebar, and pulled off his gold-lensed riding glasses. These he threaded into the air vents in his helmet and he put a hand out to Telly’s shoulder, indicating that the older rider should look sharp because Nicholas was no longer watching the road, but the sky.

  “The camerastats are all pulling up and away,” he said, and some of the riders around him followed his gaze up and out.

  “Mind the road, now,” Telly said in a clear voice, and the racers all began playing the neat trick of splitting their attention between riding in close formation at high speed and watching the dozens of flying cameras peel away to either side of the road, gaining altitude as they went.

  “What’s going on? Is it another river crossing?” Nicholas asked, and Maggie realized he was talking to her. There had been no mention of an interruption in cable coverage at the morning meeting or at the sign-in, and Maggie supposed he was depending on her local expertise. She started to say she didn’t know when she heard Michael speaking into her right ear, his voice barely discernable above the spinning of the flywheels and the hissing of the tires on asphalt.

  “Amish,” he said. “No cable allowed.”

  And Maggie remembered, then, what their father had taught them about the Amish.

  “Only river today is the Barren, at Bowling Green,” she reminded the others. “And the machines of Tennessee are short-lived and have little power in that water.” The reasons for the die-off of the invisibly small invaders from the Voluntary State in the Barren were mysterious, but thought to be related to the general miasmic nature of the river, which supported no fish or insects. No wildlife drank from it, and even plants struggled to thrive on its banks. The federally supported university at Bowling Green, the campus of which they would be racing through soon enough, was given over to the study of the river and its effects.

  But the Barren was a test for later in the day, at the 59 mile marker according to the short-handed stage description David had taped to her top tube. The Frenchman either hadn’t known to mark the Amish holdings in his notes for the riders or hadn’t thought the scant three or four m
iles notable in any way.

  “So if not a river, what then?” asked Nicholas. His tone was businesslike, but not unfriendly.

  “We’ll be riding through farmlands held by the Amish,” said Maggie. “They don’t allow anything to do with cable television or the Viewers at Home on their lands.”

  This seemed to satisfy Nicholas, who nodded and said, “We’ve people like that in Oklahoma.”

  “They’re a . . . a membership, I guess you’d say,” said Maggie. “They’re great builders and farmers.”

  And then the road was on Amish lands for sure, as the fields became even tidier. Orchards, pastures, gardens, and croplands of every sort were spread out and the road swept left to arrow due east between two long rows of people, who waved as the racers passed, but did not cheer.

  And then there was a stranger thing, because two girls on the right-hand side of the road, gawky teenagers, had clambered atop the stone fence and unfurled a quilt that had been made into a banner. It was pieced so that flags of America and Kentucky were at the corners, and sober letters were spelled out, reading, “We support Team USA. We support the Hammersmiths.”

  “You’ve fans,” said a trade-team rider from behind Maggie.

  He must have been speaking to Michael, because her brother answered. “Not fans enough to use an exclamation point on their sign,” he said.

  Maggie was about to protest his meanspiritedness when the girls suddenly reversed the quilt, showing that a different message was spelled out on its back.