Boys Life

Nana Alice. He looked to me like a half-drowned, scrawny rat.
    I might’ve punched him if I’d been my father’s size. I couldn’t help but be ashamed of him, a deep, stinging shame. And I couldn’t help but wonder, as well, if some of Granddaddy Jaybird’s cowardice might be inside me, too. I didn’t know it then, but I was going to find out real soon.
    Somewhere across Zephyr the bells of another church rang, the sound coming to us through the rain as if heard in a dream. I stood up, my lower lip and shoulder and the back of my neck throbbing. The thing about pain is, it teaches you humility. Even the Branlins were blubbering like babies. I never saw anybody act cocky after they got a hide full of stingers, have you?
    The Easter bells rang across the watery town.
    Church was over.
    Hallelujah.

V – The Death of a Bike
    THE RAIN KEPT FALLING.
    Gray clouds hung over Zephyr, and from their swollen bellies came the deluge. I went to sleep with rain slamming the roof, and I awoke to the crash of thunder. Rebel shivered and moaned in his doghouse. I knew how he felt. My wasp stings had diminished to red welts, but for day upon day no ray of sunshine fell upon my hometown; only the incessant rain came down, and when I wasn’t doing homework I sat in my room rereading old Famous Monsters magazines and my stock of comic books.
    The house got that rainy smell in it, an odor of damp boards and wet dirt wafting up from the basement. The downpour caused the cancellation of the Saturday matinee at the Lyric, because the theater’s roof had sprung leaks. The very air itself felt slick, like green mold growing on damp stones. At the dinner table a week after Easter, Dad put down his knife and fork and looked at the steamy wet windows and said, “We’re gonna have to grow gills if this keeps up.”
    It did keep up. The air was heavy with water, the clouds cutting all light to a dim, swampy murk. Yards became ponds, and the streets turned into streams. School started letting out early, so everyone could get home, and on Wednesday afternoon at seventeen minutes before three o’clock my old bike gave up the ghost.
    One second I was trying to pedal through a torrent on Deerman Street. The next second my bike’s front wheel sank into a crater where the pavement had broken and the shock thrummed through the rust-eaten frame. Several things happened at once: the handlebars collapsed, the front wheel’s spokes snapped, the seat broke, the frame gave way at its tired old seams, and suddenly I was lying on my belly in water that flooded into my yellow rain slicker. I lay there, stunned, trying to figure out how the earth had knocked me down. Then I sat up, wiped the water out of my eyes, and looked at my bike, and just like that I knew it was dead.
    My bike, old in the ways of a boy’s life long before it had reached my hands by merit of a flea market, was no longer a living thing. I felt it, as I sat there in the pouring rain. Whatever it is that gives a soul to an object made by the tools of man, it had cracked open and flown to the watery heavens. The frame had bent and snapped, the handlebars hanging by a single screw, the seat turned around like a head on a broken neck. The chain was off its sprockets, the front tire warped from its rim, and the snapped spokes sticking up. I almost cried at the sight of such carnage, but even though my heart hurt, I knew crying wouldn’t help. My bike had simply worn out; it had come to the end of its days, pure and simple. I was not its first owner, and maybe that made a difference, too. Maybe a bike, once discarded, pines away year after year for the first hand that steered it, and as it grows old it dreams, in its bike way, of the young roads. It was never really mine, then; it traveled with me, but its pedals and handlebars held the memory of another master. Maybe, on that rainy Wednesday, it killed itself because it knew I yearned for a bike built for me and me alone. Maybe. All I knew for sure at that moment was that I had to walk the rest of the way home, and I couldn’t drag the carcass with me.
    I pulled it up onto somebody’s yard and left it under a dripping oak tree, and I went on with my drenched knapsack on my back and my shoes squeaking with water.
    When my father, who was home from the dairy, found out about the bike, he packed me into the pickup truck, and off we went to fetch the carcass on Deerman Street. “It can be fixed,” he told me as the wipers slogged back