The Bike My Neighbor Backed Over
You could hear it for half a block. It was not a loud sound, any more than the crunch had been. But a street of old houses at six in the morning is a quiet place, and that sound went past every bedroom window on Walnut, one after another, every single day.
It went past Don Petrie’s window too. Ryan put the paper on his porch at six fifteen, same as always, folded, inside the storm door so it would not get wet. I checked, I am ashamed to say. He delivered that man’s newspaper as carefully as he delivered everybody else’s.
I do not know who asked him first. I think it was Mrs. Hadley at the end of the block, who was eighty four and missed nothing. But I know how he answered, because I heard him say it myself that Friday.
I had taken him downtown to the bank after work. He went every Friday to put his route money in. He liked to carry the coffee can in himself and set it up on the counter, and Brenda, who had worked that window since before I had an account, always counted it out loud for him like it was a payroll.
He had ridden down and I met him there. He leaned the bike against the brick outside, and Brenda watched him do it through the glass.
“Honey,” she said when he got to the window, “what in the world happened to your bicycle?”
Ryan set the can on the counter.
“Mr. Petrie’s truck,” he said. “He said I should learn.”
He said it the way you would tell somebody it had rained. There was nothing in it. No edge, no hurt, no little pause to let it land. He was just answering the question.
Brenda’s hands stopped over the quarters.
“Don Petrie? On Walnut?”
“Yes ma’am. He backed over it.”
“And he said what?”
“That I should learn to keep my stuff out of the road.” Ryan thought about it, wanting to get it right. “It wasn’t really in the road. But that’s what he said.”
“Well,” she said, and she started counting again, slower. “And what are you doing about it?”
“Saving up. There’s a Schwinn at Earl’s.” He stood on his toes to watch the bills. “I’ve got eighty three with this.”
She gave him his slip and two suckers instead of one, and she watched him all the way out the door.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Up Main Street, past the diner windows, at four thirty on a Friday.
That was how it went. I want to be very clear that he did not go around telling people. He never brought it up once. But a ten year old on a bike that sounds like a clock is going to get asked, and in a town our size he got asked by everybody.
Earl asked him, at the hardware store, when Ryan came in to look at the Schwinn and count the weeks.
“Mr. Petrie’s truck. He said I should learn.”
The man at the gas station asked him. His baseball coach asked him. The two retired sisters on Second Street who shared a newspaper asked him, and then, I am told, got on the telephone.
And Pastor Jim asked him.
Pastor Jim had the parsonage at the top of our street, next to Grace Lutheran, and Ryan cut his grass. It was one of the four lawns. That second Saturday, Ryan walked our mower up the sidewalk the whole three blocks, pushing it with one hand and steering the bike with the other, because he would not leave either one behind.