The Lesson of Her Death

feeling with utter ecstasy the motion of the driver’s head as she glanced at him with disapproving awe.
    A half mile ahead at the foot of the hill lay the intersection. He noticed with disappointment that he had timed his assault on the slope wrong. If he had waited three or four minutes at the top and started his descent just as the stoplight had turned red, he might have arrived when it was green and he would have swept smoothly through. But the light was now changing to yellow. Route 116 was heavily trafficked and was favored by this particular light, which kept drivers on Old Farm Road waiting impatiently for long minutes.
    He slowly squeezed the rear brake lever.
Thonk.
A sudden sensation. Something had struck his right calf.He believed he had hit a small animal—a field mouse or chipmunk—and it had been flung up against his leg by the hissing wheel. Almost simultaneously his hand on the brake lever began to cramp. He glanced at the handlebars and noticed that the lever was all the way to the metal.
    Jamie looked down at the rear wheel. What had struck his leg had not been an animal. It was the rubber pad of the rear brake shooting from its housing. The metal seemed slightly bent and he realized with horror that when he had lifted the bike onto the pegs in the garage last night, he must have hit the steel jacket that held the pad, loosening it. His father had warned him a dozen times to be careful when he placed the bike on the wall; he continually ignored the advice.
    He was two hundred yards from the intersection and still accelerating, approaching forty-five or fifty. The bike began to vibrate. He gripped the handlebars with trembling fists as he swept over stones and branches; he was going too fast to maneuver around them. Sweat of panic burst from his neck and under his arms. He felt the icy chill as the moisture evaporated in the slipstream. Jamie gently squeezed the front brake. No effect. He squeezed harder and the rear end of the bike rose suddenly, nearly sending him tumbling head-forward over the front wheel. He was now a hundred yards from the intersection. He kept as much pressure on the front brake as he dared but still the bike continued to speed up.
    A stand of tall oaks flashed into his vision and vanished. A roadside truck, some fence posts. The shoulder here was narrow. Paralleling his mad course was a barbed wire fence that would lacerate him if he were to set the bike down in the gravel beside the road.
    Jamie Corde, an A-minus science student, knows that terminal velocity in earth atmosphere is approximately one hundred and thirty miles an hour, he knows that human organs cannot withstand instant deceleration from any speed above fifty. He glances up at thecross-traffic along Route 116, trucks and cars whizzing past. Tears—from the wind, from his panic—streak from his squinting burning eyes and disappear into his hair. He sits up to increase wind resistance. He remembers a prayer from Sunday school. He drags his feet on the asphalt but shreds the running shoes’ nylon toes quickly. He lifts his feet to the pedals and the bike hurtles forward once again.

S eventy-five yards …
    The hill had bottomed out but the bicycle tore along the road at close to sixty, the noise of the wheels and gears wholly obscured by the howl of the slipstream. Several bugs died against his face with sharp stings. The lightweight frame of the bike shuddered painfully with every stone.
    Jamie eased onto the centerline of Old Farm Road where there was less debris. A fragment of bottle or a smear of grease could kill him.
    Fifty yards from the intersection
…
    He believed he heard a horn behind him, maybe the Volkswagen driver trying to warn him.
    Forty yards
…
    The man in a car waiting at the light glanced in his rearview mirror and Jamie saw astonishment in the glossy rectangle that reflected the man’s eyes.
    Thirty
…
    Two Japanese imports and a Buick dashed through the intersection on 116 going north. A tanker truck rumbled south.
    And Jamie Corde began to pedal.
    He couldn’t stop in time. That was clear. Either he was going to dart between cars or he was going to get nailed. He lowered himself into his best aerodynamic huddle, clicked into his highest gear, released the front brake lever and pedaled as he never had before. He felt a warm sense of calm envelop him. The cars were on a different plane. The wind, the barbed wire, the road too. The bike itself. The fear vanished. He was above all of