The Cycles of Our Lives
Pat Dixon
“Look at those freakin’ creeps!” I yell, swervin’ my station wagon to the left an’ mashin’ hard onto my brakes so as not to run over any of ‘em.
Roy Baker, my passenger, my companion of the day, stares silently ahead through my windshield as if he didn’t even see one the seven skinny young men in black spandex corsets, bright red or yellow or blue knit shirts, an’ streamlined little “helmets” who just raced collectively in a pack through a red light for them, right in front of us, who have us a green one.
The wagon has stalled out in the middle of the intersection because I didn’t mash down on my clutch pedal when brakin’, an’ as I try restartin’ her while I still have a green light, another pack of five more skinny cyclists, decked out in the same gear, approach us from the right an’ similarly race through on their red light.
“Roy,” I say, “I don’t care if it is a nice sunny Sunday mornin’. An’ I don’t care if these are back-country roads with only two traffic lights in twenty-five square miles. Those kinds o’ bike riders are a freakin’ menace. An’, worse still, they’re inconsiderate. No sense of whose rights they’re violatin’. Or, more likely, they do know full well what they’re doin’ an’ just do it to aggrevate decent people. Like me an’ you, Roy.”
Roy still says nothin’. I flip a glance over at him as the engine catches, an’ I put her in first. Ol’ Roy is still starin’ forward, expressionlessly, slowly movin’ his lips the way he usually does, with no sounds comin’ out.
I’ve been takin’ Roy out for Sunday drives about thirty times a year for the past six years, even since his stroke, partly so he could get out to garage sales to look for vintage radios that he collects an’ partly so he could spend half an hour or so with an ol’ gal friend that is crippled an’ lives with her niece way out in the wooded wilds of central Connecticut. On some days, Roy is fairly talkative, but he often hardly says five or six words, an’ I wonder if he is off in some corner of his head an’ not listenin’ to me while I try to chatter away. Funny thing is, sometimes he’ll suddenly make a comment about somethin’ I mentioned an hour before, as if he had to mull it over an’ look at all fifty-seven sides of the issue before deliverin’ me his views.
At the next intersection I stop an’ consult my road map again. I can hear a woodpecker off to the left, possibly up in one of the huge oaks that overhang the blacktop road.
“Sure is a pretty day, Roy, huh?” I say, lookin’ over at him. Roy still stares ahead an’ says nothin’.
I determine from the map that our next garage sale is down the left-hand road about a mile an’ get ready to roll.
“Can you hear that ol’ woodpecker up there, Roy? ‘Minds me of the hours I spent pokin’ ‘round the woods about thirty miles from here when I was a kid. Just me an’ my little beagle, all by our lonesomes, a-walkin’ through the second-growth woods an’ findin’ new things each time, even in the same ol’ places. Iron tires from ol’ farm wagons with spoked wooden wheels an’ glass bottles an’ broken dishes an’ ol’ wells. Yeah, Roy, ol’ wells that had stone sides an’ were all filled in with rotten tree limbs an’ crud for the past hundred years. Or maybe two hundred. An’ once we saw a doe with a fawn—which drove ol’ Freddy, my dog, nuts. The neatest thing I ever found was an ol’ ox yoke, which I lugged a quarter mile out o’ the woods an’ almost four miles down a country road to my home. An’ the neatest place, Roy, was an ol’ stone crypt for storin’ dead folks’ bodies over the winter till the ground thawed out.”
I glance over at Roy, but he seems to be deaf to everythin’ I’ve just told him.
As I start to mash down on the gas an’ let off the clutch, about a dozen more of those punky cyclists come whippin’ ‘round the bend an’ zip on through a stop sign.
This time I push in my clutch an’ don’t stall, but I give ‘em a good blast on my horn, an’ four of ‘em reply by signalin’ their I.Q.s with their middle fingers.
“There go another batch of ‘em, Roy. Little snots! Those aren’t even ten-speed bikes, either! Look to be those new twenty-five gear thingies I’ve heard about! I wonder if their mommies ‘at bought ‘em for ‘em know how they’re breakin’ the damn law at ev’ry crossroad, ehh, Roy? What’s your thought on this?”
Roy stares straight ahead as I make my turn an’ follow the same route as the bikes. I expect that when we get to the sale, he’ll need to pee again, so I mentally go through my patented explanation which I’ve given a couple hundred times to the people who run these things—incontinence, stroke, elderly, not a threat, nice ol’ guy, no family, etcetera, etcetera. It’s been about half an hour since we left Nadine, his ol’ gal friend, an’ I think he peed just before we left, though I never ask.
Ahead about three hundred yards, I see another bevy of cyclists runnin’ a stop sign, but this time it doesn’t get under my skin, so I say nothin’. I just glance over at Roy, who also says nothin’.
It’s a four-way stop, so I stop, an’ as I do, Roy speaks for the first time since we left Nadine’s place.
“Don’t be so judgmental, Albert,” he says.
I let out a surprised laugh. What? Me?
“‘Bout what, Roy?” I say.
“When I first met Nadine, it was when she came into my TV repair shop about forty, forty-five years ago,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m not judgin’ her—nor you either, Roy. What d’y’ mean?”
I pull off onto the shoulder of the road so we can talk, now that Roy has a mind to. For a few seconds he sucks on his lips, an’ then begins again.
“She was a real beauty when she came in with her little TV set. Sort of like some Italian paintin’ done in Florence or somewhere four, five hundred years ago. Flirted with me a bit an’ asked my name while I wrote up the ticket an’ told her it’d be ready in two days. An’ when she came back for her TV, she was wearin’ an open-neck white blouse, an’ she smiled an’ said, ‘Roy, I’m a bit short o’ cash today. Can we work it out in trade somehow?’ An’ she undid a couple more buttons on her little white blouse.”
Here Roy pauses as if to savor the memory.
“Nadine an’ I went back into my workroom, an’ she taught me a few things that I an’ Martha, my wife, had never known about, an’ I an’ Nadine agreed that four more o’ those would cover the parts an’ labor for fixin’ her TV. An’ she came back twice more, an’ I admit I was gettin’ real’ fond o’ her.”
I hadn’t even known that Roy was ever married, let alone involved with Nadine in this way, an’ I’m lookin’ at him with new eyes. Roy’d been old when I met him, about twenty-five years older’n I am, an’ then he’d had his stroke, an’ so I began drivin’ him around on Sundays, but I’d never asked an’ he’d never told me much about his earlier life.
“So, Albert,” Roy says, “it was the greatest thing I’d ever experienced, an’ then Martha walked into my workroom an’ caught us that third time. So there never was a fourth time or a fifth time, though o’ course I let her, Nadine, take her TV set home anyways.”
Again Roy pauses.
“Never was a fourth time—or a fifth. O’ course, Martha got the house an’ our car. An’ I put up a canvass cot in my workroom an’ lived there with a little two-burner hot-plate. After the divorce, what with legal expenses for the both of us an’ then her alimony payments, it took me over seven years to get to where I could buy another car, so mean time I just bought me a cheap bike an’ rode around with that for my transportation.”
A half dozen more bikes whizz past us even as he speaks. I nod once, slowly, to encourage Roy to continue.
“Nadine got married durin’ that first year to a guy who’d beat her. After two years o’ that, they got separated, though I hear he’s still alive somewheres, an’ they’re still legally married. An’ I’ve stayed in touch with her all these years,” he says.
Roy shrugs an’ looks straight ahead.
“Albert,” he says impatiently, “are we goin’ to set here all day? Some times a fella needs to heed the calls o’ nature! Can we just get a damn’ move-on here, young man?”
“Sure, Roy,” I say. “You’re the boss.”
As we pull out onto the blacktop, Roy adds one more thing.
“Albert, be less judgmental! Even though you’re a sheltered academic that’s livin’ in an ivory tower most o’ the week, you’ve at least heard o’ the real world, right? An’ you’ve heard about how more’n half the marriages in the U.S. today break up within a couple o’ years? Who amongst us can ever say what terrible stresses the other folks are sufferin’ from? I could see that all them fellas ‘at just went by on their bikes’ve just been cleaned out by their wives.”
I suspect from long past experience that there will be more, so I bite my lips to keep from grinnin’ an’ just stay focused on the road.
Roy pauses for a good half a minute before layin’ the last brick of his logical conclusion on me: “Albert, e’cept for walkin’ or thumbin’, this bikin’ is the only way any one o’ them fellas can get around anywheres now! Be less judgmental!”
I shoot Roy a quick side glance. He is still starin’ straight ahead, an’ I cannot tell if he is spoofin’ me or not. An’ I do not ask.
