Boys Life

He started off and I followed him, and we’d taken maybe a half-dozen steps when Mrs. Sculley said, “Hey! You trip over somethin’ and break your legs, we ain’t liable for it, hear?”
    If what lay in front of the house was a mess, what lay behind it was nightmarish. The two “sheds” were corrugated metal buildings the size of tobacco warehouses. To get to them, you had to follow a rutted trail that meandered between mountains of castaway things: record players, broken statuary, garden hose, chairs, lawn mowers, doors, fireplace mantels, pots and pans, old bricks, roof shingles, irons, radiators, and washbasins to name a few. “Have mercy,” Dad said, mostly to himself, as we walked through the valley between the looming hills. The rain spilled and spattered over all these items, in some places running down from the metallic mountaintops in gurgling little streams. And then we came to a big twisted and tangled heap of things that made me stop in my tracks because I knew I had found a truly mystical place.
    Before me were hundreds of bicycle frames, locked together with vines of rust, their tires gone, their backs broken.
    They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light spirits at the end. I believed at that moment in time that I had found the grave of the bicycles, where the carcasses flake away year after year under rain and baking sun, long after the spirits of their wandering lives have gone. In some places on that huge pile the bicycles had melted away until they resembled nothing more than red and copper leaves waiting to be burned on an autumn afternoon. In some places shattered headlights poked up, sightless but defiant, in a dead way. Warped handlebars still held rubber grips, and from some of the grips dangled strips of colored vinyl like faded flames. I had a vision of all these bikes, vibrant in their new paint, with new tires and new pedals and chains that snuggled up to their sprockets in beds of clean new grease. It made me sad, in a way I couldn’t understand, because I saw how there is an end to all things, no matter how much we want to hold on to them.
    “Howdy, there!” somebody said. “Thought I heard the alarms go off.”
    My dad and I looked at a man who pushed a large handcart before him through the muck. He wore overalls and muddy boots, and he had a big belly and a liver-spotted head with a tuft of white at its peak. Mr. Sculley had a wrinkled face and a bulbous nose with small broken veins showing purple at its tip, and he wore round-lensed glasses over gray eyes. He was grinning a square grin, his teeth dark brown, and on his grizzled chin was a mole that had sprouted three white hairs. “What can I do for you?”
    “I’m Tom Mackenson,” my dad said, and offered his hand. “Jay’s son.”
    “Oh, yeah! Sorry I didn’t recognize you right off!” Mr. Sculley wore dirty canvas gloves, and he took one of them off to shake my father’s hand. “This Jay’s grandson?”
    “Yep. Cory’s his name.”
    “Seen you around, I believe,” Mr. Sculley said to me. “I remember when your daddy was your age. Me and your grandpa go back a piece.”
    “Mr. Sculley, I believe you picked up a bike this afternoon,” Dad told him. “In front of a house on Deerman Street?”
    “Sure did. Wasn’t much to it, though. All busted up.”
    “Well, it was Cory’s bike. I think I can get it fixed, if we can have it back.”
    “Oops,” Mr. Sculley said. His square grin faltered. “Tom, I don’t think I can do that.”
    “Why not? It is here, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah, it’s here. Was here, I mean.” Mr. Sculley motioned toward one of the sheds. “I took it in there just a few minutes ago.”
    “So we can get it and take it back, can’t we?”
    Mr. Sculley sucked on his lower lip, looked at me, and then back to Dad. “I don’t believe so, Tom.” He pushed the handcart aside, next to the mound of dead bikes, and he said, “Come on and have a look.” We followed him. He walked with a limp, as if his hip worked on a hinge instead of a ball-and-socket.
    “See, here’s the story,” he said. “Been meanin’ to get rid of those old bikes for over a year. Tryin’ to clean the place up, ya see. Got to make room for more stuff comin’ in. So I said to Belle-that’s my wife-I said, ‘Belle, when I pick up one more bike I’m gonna do it. Just one more.’” He led us into