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A
Truck Will Hit Me
We've got a car back
again and voices passing Car Back forward, and a Dodge pickup goes by,
faster than Christina, wilder, closer to us, but then again, the road's
narrowing and getting potholed and nasty with more pebbles and rising
dust. A vehicle moving at any speed, under these conditions, could
appear to be moving faster than it's actually moving, what with the
high-pitched waterfall noise the bikes make in the gravel and the
closeness of the trees, but it's okay, the truck's gone around the
corner and down the S-turn ahead of the group and way out of sight.
The road seems clear to me, so all right already, I'll throw down the
first attack and make it an emphatic one to boot. I get low in the
handlebar drops now and slingshot through the corner and yell clear and
lift out of the saddle and run on the pedals to the crest of the rise,
piece of cake to put out this effort, hardly elevates my heart rate to
do it. Right here, right now, I'm so aware and so grateful that my life
has transformed into this magnificent thing I can do, feels like I'm
flying on the road, as if I'll reach the top of the hill and keep
rising, like E.T. past the open guts of the moon, twenty miles an hour
at the top, accelerating over the blind crest and leaning forward on the
bike to dive hard into the descent, passing through twenty-five miles
per hour now.
A Dodge Dakota, green in the evening sun, fifty yards ahead of me,
pulled to the left shoulder, wrong side of the road, driver's-side door
next to a row of mailboxes--looks like the guy in the truck's checking
his mail and his brakelights go off and he pulls forward and I just keep
on pedaling and positioning myself to swing in behind him and draft up
the next rise, keep the speed up over twenty-five easy, get a head start
on spanking everybody over the next mile toward Spillway Road.
He's Robert, construction worker, home from framing in a set of
master-bedroom doorways at a new half-million-dollar home at the Shawnee
Hills Golf Community. He's thirty-three, a guy who's been, as he'll
probably tell you, up and down the block a few times. He doesn't have
any mail worth paying attention to, a couple of coupon circulars,
nothing, no reason to turn right off Dogwood onto Robin Lane and go
inside his house and set the mail on the kitchen table to let his old
lady Cindy know he's been there, he's come home and proved he at least
cares before cruising over to his friend Tom's trailer and hanging out
till ten, but what the hell, he'll drive down to the house first, see if
everything's okay. He pops the truck in reverse then forward and Ys into
me, I'm like whoa and he's gonna hit me and thwack into his front fender
and over the hood and spiraling through the air twenty-five feet, around
and around and end over end like a skater doing a double axel with a
three-quarter twist toward oblivion. The bike separates from my feet and
soars due east down Dogwood, and I fly the direction my life's about to
go for a while: south and into the ditch.
I land headfirst. I'll remember that forever: smashing headfirst into
the roadside gravel, then the follow-through momentum into my shoulder,
then flipping over onto my back, and okay, okay: I'm sitting upright in
the weeds, elbows propped comfortably on my inner thighs, hands clasped
together as if in prayer, as if God has lifted me off my bike and the
obsessive life I've been living on the road and slammed me into the
ground, upright, where I'll be in proper position to reflect.
God says, "Feel like praying now?"
I say, "As a matter of fact--"
My left leg is trashed. I know this because I can't seem to move it much
or I don't think I should just yet. A lump's already rising in the
shin's middle, and blood's emerging from an array of gashes on my inner
leg at the knee. A dozen or so tiny grass flies have already settled in
on the blood, they pop up off it and sink back in, and I can hear riders
unclicking from their pedals around me, the sound of bicycle cleats
walking on the road. I can see the truck, the guy in it, bearded guy
with a flannel shirt and a feed cap and a ponytail, staring blankly
forward into the gravel of Robin Lane.
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