The Free Bike

I'm heading back from McAllister Park and I pass the parking lot. I notice Carmen sat at one of the benches. Her bike is on its stand nearby. I usually pass her on the trail at some point each day.

'I had a flat!' she wails.

I see the back tire has a puncture and almost immediately I notice something large stuck in the tread, something woody about the size of a piece of corn. It's obviously the remains of some twig to which a huge, sharp thorn is attached. 'Do you want me to fix it?'

'It's fine. I already called Stephen. He's on his way.'

'Are you sure? It wouldn't take long, and at least it's obvious where the puncture is.'

'It's fine,' she says. 'I'll take it along to Bike World.'

'Well, okay.'

We sit and talk about cats and wait for Stephen in his truck.

'Did you see that bike in the creek just by the boardwalk?' I ask.

'I know. Stephen spoke to the guy.'

'Really? It looks like a perfectly good bike apart from the wheel.'

Stephen pulls up in his truck. He hefts Carmen's bike into the back and we shake hands.

'I saw you yesterday,' I say. 'I wasn't ignoring you. It took me a moment to register that it was you. I waved but you were already gone.'

'I didn't think you recognised me,' he chuckles.

'Did you see that bike in the creek?'

'I spoke to the guy. He had two kids with him. I noticed there was a slight buckle in his rear wheel so I tried to tell him about adjusting the spokes but he didn't seem interested. Then when I came to the boardwalk I saw it. I guess he'd had enough and just tossed it away in anger.'

'I think I'm going to have it if it's still there.'

Fifteen or so minutes later, I come to the boardwalk and the free bike is indeed still there. It's a little smaller than mine and it's a mountain bike. The front wheel is bent into the kind of drunken pretzel by which theoretical physicists attempt to describe the shape of the universe, or time, or reality. Otherwise it looks fine.

I'm puzzled because it's clearly the front wheel that's fucked. The rear seems okay. I hoist it up onto the boardwalk and try to work out how I'm going to get it home, given that I'm on a bike. The free bike is light, but probably not light enough to carry. Maybe I can remove the crippled front wheel and somehow hitch the frame to the back of my bike and tow it along. I have the spanners I need because I carry them everywhere. I can't get the front wheel free of the forks because of the brake blocks, so I have to take off the brake blocks too. I can never remember which way you unscrew a nut, and the fucker won't give. Then it gives in spectacular fashion, and I somehow cut open the tip of my thumb with the other end of the spanner. Big fat droplets of bright red blood drip onto the boardwalk, onto the warped front tire, everywhere.

After five minutes of holding things against other things then frowning, I realise that all my ideas for taking the free bike home have thus far been putrid. I guess if I can at least get it to the other end of the boardwalk - which is admittedly the better part of a mile - I can hide the bike in the undergrowth and we can pick it up later when Bess and I go out for something to eat. The bike is fairly small and if I also remove the rear wheel it should fit in the car.

First I try wheeling both bikes, one in each hand. It's too awkward, so I pick up the freebie by the cross bar whilst wheeling my own bike along. It's awkward and I have to stop for a rest every twenty or thirty feet, my thumb still dripping a trail of blood as I go. I recall accidentally slicing a groove of three or four millimeters depth in one side near the nail with a box cutter about two months ago. The hit with the spanner has simply reopened an old wound.

People pass by because my progress is slow and laborious, someone every few minutes.

'Hey, you need a hand?' asks one guy.

'I'm fine,' I tell him, 'but thanks.'

'Someone just threw that away. We saw it earlier.' His wife makes noises to confirm as much.

'I figured all it needs is a new wheel, so why not?'

'Yeah, it seems like a good bike. How far are you going?'

'Well, I'm just going to hide it in the woods up ahead, then me and the wife can swing by and pick it up later.'

'You sure you don't want us to drop you somewhere? We're parked up at Ladybird Johnson.'

'Thanks but I'm fine,' I say. 'It's good exercise.'

Of late I've been spending about half an hour each day cutting branches from trees in the garden, mainly for exercise. I'm not going to bother today because hefting the free bike along has been more physically demanding than I'd anticipated.

'You're from Australia, right?' the wife says.

I laugh. 'No, England, but that's what everyone thinks. I lived in London for twenty years and I guess the accents sound similar.'

'Wow,' she says. 'That's the one place I really want to go. I went all over when I served - Germany, China, but I never made it to England. How do you like it here?'

'It's great.'

'Don't you miss England?'

'Not really. I definitely don't miss the weather - no sunlight for six months of the year, the rain…'

'I'm from Ohio so I hear you.'

'I thought Ohio was pretty sunny.'

'It's up by Lake Erie.'

'I'm thinking of somewhere else, maybe Iowa.'

We reach the end of the boardwalk and they head for the parking lot. I spend another ten minutes further dismantling the free bike, removing both the rear wheel and the seat. I can take the seat with me, but I bind the two wheels and the frame together into a more compact assembly with a length of bungee rope. Then I wander off into the wood next to the parking lot and leave it behind a drift of twigs, leaves, and crap.

Four hours later, we swing by in the car. The bike fits in the back just fine and we drive on to Charlie Brown's given that it's out this way. It's Thursday so it's trivia night. We experienced the first three questions of a previous trivia night and they seemed so simple as to border on ridiculous. One of them asked that we identify the punctuation mark comprising an apostrophe set above a full stop - a semicolon. We heard someone at an adjacent table confidently declare that he knew the answer to this one, and that it was called a polka dot. This evening we've decide fuck it - we're going to enter the trivia quiz, because we'll clean up if the other questions are that simple. We'll be like Superman when he first came to Earth.

 

I order chicken fried chicken and have a Dos Equis in one of those enormous German beer mugs. Bess has a chicken salad and unsweet tea. The woman running the trivia quiz comes around with boards and marker pens. We have to come up with a name for our team so I choose Tex Pistols because we were talking about the Sex Pistols in the car on the way over. Specifically, Paul Cook's Professionals named their most recent live outing the Pretty Vaccinated tour in reference to the Pistol's Pretty Vacant tour, which I thought was funny enough to tell someone.

The food is great.

The questions are asked by our hostess over the PA, flashed up as text on the screen behind the small stage, and we each get the length of one song to consider our answers. We write answers on the boards we've been given, which are the kind that can be wiped clean, and our hostess tours the room taking note of who wrote what before returning to the stage to deliver the answer as each song comes to an end. Songs include the Doobie Brothers' China Grove and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama, both of which sound pretty good to me these days. I seem to be naturalising.

The trivia quiz comprises twenty questions and goes on for more than an hour. The questions turn out to be fucking hard and surprisingly reliant on a working knowledge of Latin with which neither Bess nor myself are blessed. We get a few wrong and a few right, but about half of those we got right were guesswork.

'Maybe we're more stupid than we realise,' Bess proposes ominously. We're both shocked by the results. I consider those views I now hold which I believed were traditionally held by mainly stupid people up until fairly recently.

Perhaps I'm more naturalised than I realise.

Somehow we come in third, thus winning a twenty dollar voucher towards our next visit to Charlie Brown's - which is nice, not least because I've now had two enormous German beer mugs of Dos Equis which is a lot more than I usually drink, and I'm particularly refreshed - more refreshed than I've been in a while.

Next day I take a closer look at the free bike in an attempt to assess the damage. It turns out that there is indeed a buckle in the rear wheel as Stephen reported. Presumably the rider took note of what Stephen had told him, then met with the accident which folded the front wheel into its present shape; then hurled the bike away into the creek in a fit of anger. I guess I could replace a single wheel, but wheels aren't cheap, and it seems both are fucked. I root around online and find a helpful YouTube video about fixing lesser buckles in wheels by adjusting the spokes.

I'm going to need something called a spoke key.

I go into the bike shop on Saturday and immediately find what I'm looking for. I have the front wheel with me, the one shaped like a monster munch, mainly so I can check that whatever spoke key I buy will fit the spokes of the free bike. I explain this to the assistant.

He looks at me with uncertainty, and at the massively wonky wheel I have in my hand. 'I don't think you'll be able to fix that by adjusting the spokes.'

Another customer, a young man with a beard who happens to be browsing, snorts loudly. Whatever his intention, it feels somewhat as though he's laughing at the rube. I look him directly in the eye and growl, 'Well, I'm glad you found it fucking funny,' then turn back to the assistant. 'I know. The rear wheel isn't as bad, and that's the one I'm going to try to straighten up.'

I pay up and leave.

There are a thousand stories in the big city, and this was two of them, or possibly two and a half.