The Bike My Neighbor Backed Over

The sound was not loud. That is the part I still think about. It was a crunch like somebody stepping on a pop can, and then a long thin squeal of metal being dragged across concrete.

I was sitting on our porch steps lacing up my boots. It was a Saturday morning near the end of August, a little after eight, and the street still had that blue early light on it. Ryan had just come back from his paper route. He had leaned his bike against the maple on our tree lawn, the way he had every morning for two years, and gone inside to wash the newsprint off his hands.

Across the street, Don Petrie was backing out his new truck.

It was a dark red Ford, the big one, three weeks old, with running boards he had to use to climb in. His old truck had been half that size. He had not figured out the new one yet, and everybody on Walnut Street knew it.

That morning he swung wide. Too wide. The back tire came up over our curb, across two feet of grass, and over the bike.

Then he stopped. Right on top of it.

I was already walking. I remember I had one boot laced and one not.

Don got down off the running board slowly, one hand on the door. He was sixty one, heavy through the middle, in a tucked golf shirt at eight in the morning. He walked back along the bed of the truck and stood with his hands on his hips and looked down.

The front wheel was folded nearly in half under his tire. The handlebars had turned all the way around backward. One blue grip was lying by itself in the grass.

He looked at it for a good while. Then he looked at his fender, and bent down to see if there was a scratch.

“Don,” I said.

He straightened up. He did not look sorry, and he did not look surprised. He looked like a man who had found something in his way.

“That your boy’s?”

“You know it is.”

He nodded slowly, as if I had confirmed something for him.

“A kid that age,” he said, “should learn to keep his junk out of the road.”

“It wasn’t in the road. It’s on my grass. You’re on my grass.”

He glanced down at his tire, sitting in my lawn with a bicycle under it, and then back at me. Nothing moved in his face.

“It’s the right of way, Mike. First six feet belongs to the city. Look it up.”

That was when I heard the screen door behind me.

Ryan had come out onto the porch. He was still in the Shelby youth league jersey he wore on his route, and he had his canvas paper bag in one hand, empty. He came down the steps and across the yard and stopped beside me, and he looked at the bike.

He did not say anything. He was ten years old and he did not make a sound.

Don looked at him for about one second. Then he climbed back up into the truck, put it in drive, and rolled forward off the bike. It made the pop can noise again. He pulled into the street, straightened out, and drove away toward Main at about fifteen miles an hour, the way he always did, with his turn signal on.

Ryan walked over and picked up the blue grip out of the grass. He held it in his hand.