The Lesson of Her Death

and combed back. In his plastic pocket protector were three pens, a tiny calculator and a sales tax chart. Trout sold carpeting at Floors for All. He looked sadly at the bubbles. “What’ll it cost for a patch?”
    “Five seventy-five.”
    “I could do it myself, I was home,” Trout said.
    “You ain’t home.”
    “Looks to be a pretty slow leak and she got me all the way here this morning. I could just pump her up and take my chances.”
    “You could. You wouldn’t want to do that, without you had yourself a good spare. That’s my opinion.”
    Trout wouldn’t have been so concerned about the tire if after he closed up tonight he and the wife weren’t driving up to Minnesota to catch big lazy muskies and sit in lawn chairs while they drank cocktails out of the back of their beige accordion Travel-All. And it was going to be four weeks before he got back to thirteen-ninety-five acrylic pile your choice of colors pad included free if you buy today.
    “Plug her,” he said. “And do a good job. I’m about to put some road under that Buick.”
    Four blessed weeks thank you Lord though I’m sorry about the wife part.
    The tire man went to work. After a moment he held up a piece of glass like a Dodge City doctor who’d just extracted a bullet from a gunslinger’s arm. “There she be. You had steel belteds it wouldn’t even’ve dented em.”
    Trout studied the glass. “I knew I picked up something. Tuesday night I was coming back late on 302. And you know that curve by the dam? Blackfoot Pond? Where everybody fishes?”
    The mechanic slicked a plug with glue and began driving it into the puncture. “Uhn.”
    “Well, I went around the curve and this fellow comes running up right into my lane.”
    “Maybe your lights’re on the blink. I could check—”
    “They’re fine except one high beam’s out of whack.”
    “I can just—”
    “That’s okay. And so I went off the road so’s not to hit him. Wham bam just like that. He froze. I went over a beer bottle. You know it’s those fishermen, they leave all kinds of crapola around. They don’t do that in Minnesota.”
    “They don’t?”
    Trout said, “Scared the living you know what out of me, seeing that fellow. He looked scared as I was.”
    “Don’t blame him. I wouldn’t wanta be Buick feed myself.”
    “Yessir.” Trout looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. He paid for the plug. “You sell propane?”
    “You got a tank, you can fill it.”
    “No, I mean for a Coleman.”
    “Naw, gotta go to the Outdoor Store for that.”
    “Guess I better. Long lunch hour today. But, hell with it, I’m almost on vacation.”
    The sound of the gears buzzing was just audible over the wind that hissed past his ears.
    Jamie Corde upshifted as he came to the crest of the hill on Old Farm Road. Below him, a hazy mile away, the school sat in a field—tar-topped brick buildings squatting in a couple of acres of parking lots and lime-green grass.
    This was his favorite stretch of road—a sharp decline of smooth asphalt, which if you caught it at the right time of day was pretty much traffic free. Although he now rode a fifteen-speed Italian racing bike, the boy had often surged down this road on his old three-speedSchwinn, which was mounted with a speedometer. On a summer day with tires fat from the heat inflation he could hit fifty miles per hour before he had to brake for the stop light where Old Farm crossed Route 116.
    He started downhill.
    Jamie Corde loved to run and he was a ragingly fast runner, but he knew that nothing could beat the feeling of speed not of your own making—flying down a mountain of snow in Colorado or racing down a slope like this one, effortlessly, the gears ratcheting beneath your toe-clipped feet. As if the powers of nature were taking you someplace you couldn’t find by yourself.
    The bike was steady under his strong arms as the dotted centerline became a single gray blur. He leaned forward to cut the drag and concentrated on nothing but steering around patches of pebbles. He did not think of his mother or his sister, he did not think of his father. With the exception of a few images of Greg LeMond in the Tour de France, Jamie Corde thought of speed and speed only.
    Halfway down the incline, to his enormous delight, he passed a car. True, it was an old Volkswagen diesel and it was being driven by someone who resembled Mrs. Keening, his antiquated Latin teacher. But it was nonetheless a car and he had outraced it,