The Demon’s Backbone
A long, early-morning bike ride sparks recollections of a long-ago friendship—with its unspoken words and unresolved tensions.
There’s been a deep shooting pain in my hip joints in the mornings. I’ve been feeling it when I go to raise my leg over the top bar of my bike before heading off on my rides. Started back in November, December maybe. Dark, cold mornings. A rifle shot of pain, befuddling. Is this fifty? Shit sneaks up on you.
I take a deep breath, raise my foot a few inches off the ground and then grab my knee with both hands and hoist my leg over. Maybe I should do all the impossible things Dr. Reeves tells me during annual checkups. “Tommy, you should change what you eat. Drink less at night. Sleep more. Reduce stress.” Right, Doc.
I’m just going to accept the pains as they come. I’m going to live with them. I’ll grimace. I’ll make a noise that nobody else hears because I do all of this, Martha, while you and our teenaged kids are still sleeping, while most of the neighborhood still sleeps, then I’ll push off and roll down the streets of our little subdivision on the edge of a lake, headed out to the county highway that leads away from town, a sunrise not far behind.
There’s a yellow-and-red-tinged ribbon of sky low over the cow pasture I’m pedaling past on my right, electric blue morning whispered above it, shading deeper and darker as the sky domes over me, suggestions of violet, then navy to midnight to the west over the woods of the creek on my other side, the creek that feeds the lake, all still nighttime under those trees. A silvered sliver of moon is above. Venus is setting to my left. But it is Woody superimposed in my vision, Woody in my thoughts.
My hips don’t bother me once I’m going. Everything is like a machine, pistons going up and down. Age disappears.
I talked to a man on the phone last night, after you had gone to bed, while I was on the sofa fighting a losing battle against sleep and getting up the energy to come join you. I never answer numbers I don’t recognize, but this number popped up three times in ten minutes, and he’d finally left a voicemail. “This message is for Tommy Mayer. I don’t know if you remember an Elwood Jones, from Alabama. Woody. If I have the right number, please call me back. My name is Philip. Philip Jones. I’m Woody’s partner. Husband. He asked me to find you, call you, tell you what’s going on.”
There’s a snatch of warmth—a mere suggestion, really—in this morning’s air. A reminder that winter is closing and spring is coming to these hills and fields that run through this part of Georgia in between the scrum of Atlanta’s suburbs and the mountains that ripple farther north. My legs are warmed up now. I don’t need to consciously will them up and down. My hips don’t bother me once I’m going. Everything is like a machine, pistons going up and down, moving me through the countryside, air into and out of my lungs. Age disappears.
I’d just turned eight years old in June 1978, when we moved to Meadowview from Tomsville. It was scorching, a wet oven, the day of our move. After Mom and Dad and my sister and I finished hauling the last boxes out of the rented panel van and into our new house on the edge of a creek on the west side of town, we drove out to the Pizza Hut on the Bypass. The air-conditioning was balm. Everyone looked like they had been out in the day and were all glad for the shelter. Tired pink and black faces, slack smiles, thinning shirts and dresses, elbows on tables. Refugees under faux-stain-glass hanging lamps over red-and-white-checked-vinyl-covered tables and booths moored around a salad bar like boats anchored around a lush tropical island. Brown-polyester-clad waitresses ferried pizzas on high-raised arms through the dining room to lucky families. Condensation dripped heavy down the windows.
As the sweat dried on our backs and our shirts unstuck from our skin, we sat and drank Cokes from those translucent red plastic glasses with the Coca-Cola script across them and munched iceberg lettuce and limp cucumber slices and little cherry tomato bombs drowned in ranch dressing. Croutons. Chuck Mangione on the jukebox, “Night Fever” by the Bee-Gees, Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty.” “Dust in the Wind.” Meat Loaf. The music was as cool as the air coming through the dust-dangling vents. After the pizza, we felt like humans again, and maybe we each fostered thoughts and hopes of being humans in this new town among these humans around us. At least I did, and I still imagined at that time that I was an inseparable product of my family, indistinct from them in thought and spirit, so I supposed we were all thinking about that, about being new people who could be welcomed in a new place.
When we got back to our house, our bikes and the lawn mower had been stolen off the side porch.
Meadowview Elementary was a mile and a half away. When that first summer in Meadowview was over, we still had no bikes, so when I started third grade, I had to walk there and back. Mornings, I would walk with Fiona, my sister, a sixth grader, but in the afternoons I was usually on my own. Fiona had choir practice or softball practice or a friend’s house to go to most days after school. I didn’t have any of that. I would try to time my exit from the building and the pace of my walk to avoid this kid named Matt and his older brother. Matt was another third grader. He and his brother lived in a little falling-down-porch house about halfway between the school and our house, so they walked the same route. If I didn’t exit school at the end of the day significantly behind or ahead of Matt, he would end up sidling up to me and would taunt me, call me “fag,” insult my hand-me-down clothes, and my bowl-cut, though it was shaped just like his bowl-cut.
While I could outrun all the bullies and smart-alecks, I would do so with cries of “Tommy’s riding a girl’s bike” ringing in my ears. I didn’t care, though, because I was fast.
Fiona had told me what a fag was, a boy who kissed other boys. Fiona didn’t say so, but I knew by then that was a bad thing. It was wired into me, though by then I’d already glossed over in my mind how I’d learned this the year before—a friend I’d kissed, but then feverishly convinced my teacher, the principal at the school, my friend, my parents, myself, that it was just a stumbling-into, not a kiss, an accident. Even with the self-deception accomplished, the specifics of the memory sealed away, the knowledge that boys kissing boys was wrong was part of what I knew about the world.
Matt was short and had a pug nose and a mess of jet-black hair, freckles asymmetrically scattered across his face, and he was pudgy. He caught a lot of teasing in school, then passed it on to me on the walks home. I don’t remember his older brother’s name, but he was a foot-taller mimeograph of Matt. On days when he was walking with Matt, he would punctuate Matt’s taunts with a fist to my shoulder or a slap to the back of my head or a rough hip-check. Or he’d try to rip my backpack off me, and I would run, and I was fast, but I wasn’t faster than him, so I’d end up with scraped knees, sometimes a bloody nose, my books and papers and pencils scattered over someone’s yard and the sidewalk and out into the road, tire-tracks across my homework.
After a couple months of that, Dad dug through the items for sale in the classified ads in the Sunday Meadowview Times-Journal and found replacement bikes for all of us. I ended up with a 1974 brown Schwinn Varsity, a for-real road bike, with drop handlebars and hand-brakes that would take me a few run-ins with trees to learn how to use. A little big for me, but at first we kept the seat post all the way down as far as it would go and my legs would have to stretch out all the way, knees straight, on the downstroke. But it was the ladies’ Varsity, with the sloped top-tube, so I didn’t rack myself when I came off the seat to stop and put my feet on the ground. But also, while I could outrun all the bullies and smart-alecks (the assholes, the jerks, the motherfuckers, as I would call them a few years later when I had the confidence of language in me), I would do so with cries of “Tommy’s riding a girl’s bike” ringing in my ears.
I didn’t care, though, because I was fast. Faster than fists. Faster than any kid in that school could run. Faster than all those kids on their BMXs and their Sears Huffy dirt bikes.
I pass Clark’s, the gas station/country store, twelve miles into my ride, just as I pass the forty-five-minute mark. That’s my fitness check, or maybe my ego check. I constantly measure and test and, when necessary, chastise myself. Clark’s in forty-five minutes or less means I’m pulling at least sixteen miles per hour. I smell sausage biscuits and bacon blowing out from the vents of Clark’s low-sloped roof. Pickup trucks line the parking lot. Weathered men in baseball hats and jeans and flannel shirts going in and out. Women in blouses and slacks or nurses’ scrubs. Everyone out the door and on their way to somewhere else to work their day. I’m lucky, with my job writing court briefs for a large law firm—after the pandemic, most of us lawyers realized we could keep doing what we do just as easily from home, and the firm realized it could cut its overhead with smaller physical spaces mainly for support staff, for big-ego corner-office types who want to be seen, and for the new hungry associates who need to be seen. I fall into none of those categories. I prefer invisibility. I ride my bike longer in the mornings. I see you earlier in the evenings when you get home from your job. I’m happier.
Night is fully gone from the sky. That fingernail of moon is faded in a pale-blue sky. A bright yellow sun has let loose from the eastern horizon and throws sharp shadows across the road, trees slicing staccato over asphalt. I leave Clark’s behind, hang a right onto a smaller road that begins a sharp rise to a small ridge that starts the undulations up into the Appalachian foothills. Locals call the ridge “Demon’s Backbone,” though no name for it shows up on any maps. Old-timers tell about banshee screams that echo from up there on foggy nights, and about a family of widows who used to live on the ridge during Prohibition times and kept everyone off of it—government men, moonshiners, everyone. By the top, where I’ll turn around, I’ll have gained almost 1,900 feet in elevation, short but sharp. As the grade steepens, my heart beats harder, faster, my breathing gets quicker, and my mouth falls open to load in as much oxygen on every intake as I can. If there were something really wrong with me, one of those true infirmities of age, this is where I’d feel it, a sharp stab in my chest, lungs wheezing, darkness tunneling down my vision, but everything continues to work exactly as it should.
Everything drains out of my mind except for becoming one with this bike, connected through my legs and feet and the pedals and crank and chain and gears and spokes and rims and tires to the road. Everything drains out, except one word: Woody.
Trees close in on either side of me, the blacktop barely one lane wide as it goes up this wild slope. The air is colder on my skin. I focus only on turning the pedals, downshifting, cranking in quick circles, propelling myself forward all the time. Everything drains out of my mind except for becoming one with this bike, connected through my legs and feet and the pedals and crank and chain and gears and spokes and rims and tires to the road, all of it just one continuum. Everything drains out, except one word: Woody. Woody. Woody. Over and over again as I push my way up this hill, waiting for the top where I can turn around and head back down. The summit in sight, I stand out of the saddle, stomp the pedals, push hard, try to squeeze even Woody out of my mind, want nothing but nothingness, but the Is. Tommy, Is. Tommy, Is. Left pedal down, then right pedal down. Tommy, Is. Tommy, Is. Tommy, Is. And then I’m at the top. Tommy Is. I sit back down on the saddle, spin the pedals, cut hard around to my left until I’m pointed back downhill, Woody in front of me again.
I rode that brown ladies’ Schwinn Varsity everywhere, all the time. As my legs grew longer, we raised the seat post. Then we got a longer seat post from an old man on the east side of town who did lawn mower and bike repairs out of his garage, and I kept on growing, and I kept on going.
I rode to school and back. I rode to the soccer fields behind the National Guard armory during spring and summer soccer seasons. I rode to the white YMCA downtown for basketball season in the winter. I rode to friends’ houses all over town. Throughout the west side of town and the poorer, Blacker east side of town and the 150-year-old historic core of the town that bridged the east and west sides. My friends and I were roving gangs. We rode through the shady dirt lanes of the old cemetery, dappled oak shadows and hanging moss, Civil War soldiers, settlers’ babies, lost loves, old ladies’ laps, granite marble slabs and obelisks and statues of angry angels, fists raised to the sky, small arched stones cracked and eroded smooth. We rode downtown, pausing in the icy air-conditioning of the Rexall drug store, drinking strawberry soda from glass bottles from an old twenty-five-cent soda machine and then trading the empty bottles at the counter for nickels, or ensconcing ourselves on the twirly stools with cones of soft-serve in front of the big plate-glass window at the Thirsty Boy, once the site of civil rights sit-ins, though we didn’t know about that because nobody talked about that, less than twenty years prior but supposedly far back in that town’s rearview.
Sometimes I wouldn’t ride to get somewhere or visit anyone. Sometimes I’d just ride, ride to leave behind jeers and taunts and disappointments. To make the heat disappear into an onrush of wind. To get away from an empty house, both my parents working long hours and Fiona always somewhere else or else wanting me to be out of her hair, some boy over to study or whatever. I peeked at that “studying” sometimes, but usually that just made me want to leave out of there on my bike with confusion to flush out of my brain.
I discovered freedom. It was a revelation. It was a revolution. I started riding out into the country, before daybreak, hours before school or on the weekend, alone, in the dark, greeting the early sun, miles up and down hills and around bends, cows in fields with dew in their eyes, early-morning pickup trucks. I’d cross the big highway and down into the warren of minor roads crisscrossing the flood land nearer the river, packs of dogs tearing loose from rickety front porches to chase me down the road, teeth bared, barking, growling, savage. I’d reach from my handlebars and hit them or kick out at them from my pedals as they tried to grab hold of any part of me they could with their ripping teeth. I’d squirt them with my water bottle. I’d bought a frame pump for roadside flats and I’d wield it like a baton and hit those dogs with that, keeping them out of biting range, and then they’d still tear off to chase when I’d pass but would keep their distance, performing an obligation, playing their part. The trees would tunnel close over the road, until the paved roads faded out into dirt tracks that sometimes would run all the way to the river’s edge and sometimes would only go as far as the river’s flood would allow, brown waters lapping up the roadway, swallowing the forest, carrying big catfish and alligators up into fields and yards. I would turn around at the water’s edge and head back the way I came, trees, dogs, highway, pickups, cows, bends, hills, sun higher now, morning later, my parents and sister waking up back at home, a bowl of cereal, a new day.
Maybe I’m wrong now to suppose that the second-grade friend I had kissed-but-not-kissed was my ninth-grade-and-beyond best friend. Memory is weird. Growing old is weirder.
By the time I was fourteen, I’d saved up five years of allowance and birthday money. I’d been subscribing to Bicycling magazine and fashioned myself a bicycle racer in the making. That summer, I’d watched snippets of reports on CBS’s Sports Sunday from the Tour de France, where a young American with a French name, Greg Lemond, ended up coming in third, just behind his team boss, the Badger, Bernard Hinault, both of them more than ten minutes back from repeat-winner Laurent Fignon. Hinault was dark and glowering, from the cold, wind-swept farmland of Brittany, and he was relentless, always angry, but he was still recovering from a knee injury from the year before, when his quest for a fifth Tour de France win had been put on hold and Fignon had earned his first win in the race. Repeating the feat the year that I turned 14, Fignon was beautiful, blond tresses streaming out behind him, little round-lensed glasses perched on his nose, but he was imperious, impenetrable, no emotions betrayed on his face at all. Lemond was just like me, though, I thought, some skinny American kid hanging out where he didn’t belong, because a bike got him there. I took my saved-up money and bought another Schwinn, a brand-new Traveler, dark burgundy, a man’s bike, sleek and so much faster than my 1974 Varsity, now a clunker in my eyes.
That same year, Woody moved to Meadowview, though I didn’t remember him as my friend from second-grade back in Tomsville. I must have lost him in a maze of reconstructed memory, of years in a new town with new people and new confusions. Woody arrived as we were starting as freshmen at Meadowview High School. It was a fairly big school, fed by the two junior high schools in town, Westside and Eastside, so you didn’t necessarily notice new people to town, but Woody was new to me as we rotated through all our classes. Maybe I had a twinge of something familiar, but I had no real recollection of him. I don’t think he remembered me, either. Our lives had doubled in the time that had passed. It dawned on me a few months into our re-growing friendship that I had known Woody before, that he was the kid I was such good friends with for the one year we lived in Tomsville, but if he wasn’t going to mention it, then neither would I. It’s possible he didn’t remember. It’s possible I was wrong. Maybe I’m wrong now to suppose that the second-grade friend I had kissed-but-not-kissed was my ninth-grade-and-beyond best friend. Memory is weird. Growing old is weirder. Doesn’t matter, because there in Meadowview, freshman year of high school, I suppose our new friendship was too good to worry about anything else or any time else.
We’d met in school in the perfunctory way kids acknowledge each other in class, mumbled “hey” in the hallway, but early on that fall we actually became friends on our bikes. A large group in Meadowview had signed up for a fundraiser bike ride to raise money for cystic fibrosis. A girl our age had died from it the previous year. In a town like Meadowview, an event like that brings out the whole small-town unity thing that these days seems to reside only on Hallmark Channel holiday specials, but when we were kids, it was just the way it was, at least in my un-jaded eyes. As I’ve grown older and lived in larger, more anonymous cities, I’ve forgotten what that’s like, the good part of everyone being up in everyone else’s business. I’ve also seen the lie in it, and wondered whether it was ever real, this coming together, but then I try to tell myself to stop being such an asshole.
A couple dozen folks from Meadowview, from kids like us up to fit retirees, would join a few hundred riders who would pedal 175 miles over three days in late October along the Natchez Trace from Tennessee through northwestern Alabama and into northeastern Mississippi, spending the nights in tents and cabins in state parks. That was a lot longer than I’d ever ridden, than many folks from Meadowview had ever ridden, so a local dentist arranged a series of weekend training rides, calling all of us to meet up and do gradually longer rides leading up to the actual event.
That first training ride, a twenty-miler early one Saturday morning in mid-September, Woody showed up in the parking lot of the municipal stadium where we were gathering. He had a brand-new Traveler just like mine, except in midnight blue. There was a whole range of bikes—from Raleigh and Peugeot racing bikes that looked like the ones they rode at the Tour, to Schwinns of various seriousness, to old upright, fat-tired cruisers. I rolled over to Woody, and we did the shy early-morning hello, acting all cool and aloof.
“Nice bike,” I told him. He checked mine out through half-closed eyes, and a thin smile crossed his face.
“Yeah, yours, too, though that’s a punk color.”
Of course. I asked, “You an Auburn fan or something?” The blue of his bike was like the blue in Auburn’s blue-and-orange color combination, and I suppose he saw the burgundy of mine as something akin to the red of Alabama’s Crimson Tide. There was no agnosticism allowed in this. These were the sides everyone growing up in Alabama must choose, regardless of any actual connection to the schools.
“War Eagle, Tommy,” he said. We both chuckled, but then the dentist spoke up, announcing the rules of the ride to the whole group.
Woody raised up out of the saddle and pedaled hard. I followed. We shifted up into the higher, harder gears, finding strength we didn’t know was there. We caught Brooks and his gang and went right past them.
“Today might be easy for some of you, but I know it’s also a big first step for others of you,” he called out in a reedy drawl. “We’re going to try to stay together, single-file when cars are coming, and two-across at most, but folks might be going at different speeds. That’s OK. Just make sure you’ve got at least one buddy you stick with. Nobody rides alone. We’ll have two leaders, me and Brooks,” and he pointed over to one of the older high school kids, the impossibly hip Brooks Ruck, a junior, wearing Wayfarer shades, who acknowledged his name with barely a raised eyebrow. “I’ll stay toward the rear. Brooks will take the lead. Don’t pass him, because he’s going to stop at each place where we need to turn, so folks can catch up or take a breather. If you pass him, you won’t know where to go.”
With that, we all rolled out of the parking lot onto the main drag out of town. Brooks sped out ahead of everyone, four other older high school kids bunched up with him, and Woody and I tried to keep up. We kept them in sight, though we rode mainly by ourselves, our own little twosome between the lead group and the main bunch back with the dentist. We talked as we rode, laughing about the dentist’s lazy eye, about freshman classes and our teachers, about whether Bama or Auburn were going to be the better team this year.
After the last stop for the last turn back onto the road that would take us back to the stadium parking lot, we were riding again just a little ways behind Brooks’s lead group. Woody looked over at me. “Want to take them by surprise?”
I could feel it in my legs, a desire to go hard, to give it everything. “Sure,” I said.
Woody raised up out of the saddle and pedaled hard. I followed. We shifted up into the higher, harder gears, finding strength we didn’t know was there. We caught Brooks and his gang and went right past them.
“Hey!” Brooks yelled after us, “You’re supposed to stay behind the lead!”
We only pedaled harder. I felt like laughing, but I was breathing too hard. We kept that up for the last two miles, as hard as we could, all the way back to the parking lot, trading back and forth in front. As we neared the end, I looked over my shoulder and couldn’t see anyone else. We bumped into the lot and over to where a few of the riders’ cars were parked and braked to a stop. We stood there, straddling our Schwinns, both gasping for air, but by the time anyone else rolled in, our breathing had calmed and we were both laughing.
When Brooks rode into the lot, he glowered at us but didn’t say anything.
“All right, Badger,” I said, because at that moment I felt like Greg Lemond to Brooks’s Bernard Hinault, and Woody was a Black Laurent Fignon by my side. We were the new generation.
“What’d you call me?”
“Nothing. Just a joke.”
Brooks was off his bike by then. He had an old Raleigh that I wished I had. He walked over to us. “Well, I ain’t laughing.” He didn’t say this in a threatening way, though, because Brooks was cool and would never be an overt ogre to anyone, especially to freshmen. “Seriously, though. Tommy, is it? And Woody? Dr. Deavers put it in my charge to keep everyone at the front of the ride safe. If something had happened to either of y’all, it would be me in trouble.” He took his Wayfarers off and looked from Woody to me. “Got it?”
I half-laughed, awkwardly, “Of course,” throwing my hands out to my side. I would never be cool like Brooks. But Woody just looked calmly and seriously back at Brooks, and held his hand decisively out, offering it to him. Brooks shook it.
I fly back down off Demon’s Backbone, not another person in sight. I’m in my highest gear, turning the pedals over smooth and fast. My bike app is hitting almost forty miles per hour on the few downhill straightaways. On the curves, I chance any oncoming traffic and swing wide to keep up my speed, knowing I’ll have to go off into the trees if the risk gets the better of me. That something catastrophic could happen makes it all the better, lets me hand control over to something not entirely manageable. Martha, you would kill me if you knew I did this. I know you already don’t like it that I head out on these roads every morning, that you’re convinced I’ll get run over or have a heart attack where no one can help me, but it’s so I can live as long as you and always get to be by your side. Healthy hearts and long lives don’t run in my family the way they do in yours, so I have to work for it.
I round one last curve and I’m down off the Backbone, riding up to a stop sign where I’ll turn back onto the two-lane highway that will lead back toward Clark’s and then on to our subdivision. The road off the Backbone is always over too fast, but I’m fully alive, which will keep me happy and keep you happy, too. I make the turn and have a tailwind pushing me home.
On the rest of the training rides around Meadowview before we head to the Natchez Trace, Woody and I were welcomed into the lead group with the older high school kids. We didn’t try to ride out ahead of them, but they also never left us behind. We all traded out turns pulling on the front. They asked our names, and we got to know them. Besides Brooks, there was his sister, Amy, who was a senior and so nice. She smiled at everything I said and acted interested in me, and I had a crush on her I tried to keep to myself. There was also Amy’s best friend, Allison, and those two “A” names would have confused me if Amy wasn’t so burned into my consciousness. And there were two other guys, a lanky kid named Jordan, a wide receiver on the football team who seemed maybe to be Amy’s boyfriend, and a quiet boy named Chase.
Woody was the only Black kid in our group, but no one made a thing about it, which was unusual. Not that everyone in Meadowview was a virulent racist, though quite a few were, but color was a thing that didn’t go un-commented on. Like, if the seven of us had been hanging out together at a restaurant, maybe someone would have laughingly said that Woody was the chocolate chip in our bowl of vanilla ice cream. Or sometimes hanging out in the library reading books with Woody and our other friend Shaun, someone might walk by and say, “Yo, look at that, an Oreo cookie.” It was cancerous, the way it just seeped into everything, even when folks thought they were just being good-natured. But at least then, out in the rolling hills around Meadowview on thirty-, forty-, fifty-mile training rides, with that group of kids, it was a different kind of thing from where we normally found ourselves.
But that was only inside our group. From the outside world looking in, it was all the way it had always been. We were freaks anyway, because we were all on bikes, riding on roads meant for cars and pickups and log trucks roaring by. By the time of the fundraiser ride up on the Natchez Trace, we were all lycra’d, up, too, with stretchy biking shorts, and we all had chipped in for special “Meadowview Bikers Gang” biking jerseys in neon orange. We were some kind of different out on those roads.
On the second day of the big ride, in deep rural Mississippi on the Trace, Woody and I were feeling good. We were riding at the back of our usual Meadowview high school group when he gave me that look. “Wanna go?” he asked. I nodded.
We were out of our saddles, then, just like that first training ride, and zoomed past Brooks and Amy and the rest. After a few minutes, I looked back, and the road was empty up to the last hill we’d just come over. With all the hills and curves on this stretch of the Trace, we might not see them again until the park at the end of the day.
Twenty minutes later, we heard the rumble of a large engine. I looked back and saw a red pickup truck, crusted with mud, coming up close behind us. Woody didn’t even glance back over his shoulder, but just started pedaling harder, faster. I tried to ignore it, too, ride hard, but it stayed glued there, right behind us. At the next straightaway, I waved my hand behind me, to indicate to the truck that it could get past us. Its engine grew louder as it drove up even with us. I didn’t want to look over. I wanted to ignore it, but then I heard someone yelling.
Woody rolled to his feet, facing them. I don’t know if he was trying to protect me, deliberately, but he was between them and me. I was still on the asphalt, bleeding, uncertain. “What, boy?” said Boss. “You trying to front me?
“Hey!” A deep bellow. “Hey! You hear me.” I glanced over. A big white man with a dark red beard was looking out of the rolled-down passenger-side window. Woody kept pedaling ahead of me, steadily, not looking over. “Hey, faggot, your nigger friend deaf?” the man yelled, then he turned and said something to the driver, a skinnier man with a crewcut. The one who’d been yelling at us was laughing, but the driver glanced over with no mirth in his eyes.
“I’ll bet y’all’re both faggots, ain’t you, with your little tight shorts, riding so close on each other’s ass,” the bearded one yelled out the window. I kept pedaling. Woody kept pedaling. I glanced over again. I don’t know why, but I smiled at them. Maybe I thought it would disarm them.
“You coming on to me, boy?” Then he reached down into his lap and came up with a beer can, took a swig, then threw it out the window. Woody flinched as it whizzed past his head, then it hit the asphalt between us and I swerved to avoid it. The pickup sped up and cut sharply over in front of us. Woody went off the side of the road and his tire caught in a rut. He went down. I locked my brakes up but couldn’t avoid him, and I went down, falling back out onto the roadway, scraping up the left side of my leg and arm. Worse, the pickup came to a stop forty feet up the road, then went into reverse and pulled back up toward us.
The driver looked across out the window. “Nigger and a faggot, boss. We oughta do something about this.” Then the bearded one—“boss”—had his door open and a booted foot out on the running board. Woody rolled to his feet, facing them. I don’t know if he was trying to protect me, deliberately, but he was between them and me. I was still on the asphalt, bleeding, uncertain. “What, boy,” said Boss. “You trying to front me? That what you niggers call it? You trying to front me, boy?” Woody just stood taller, and I started to get up. Boss bumped past Woody and used his boot to push me back down. “Stay out of this, faggot,” he said.
Then I heard yelling behind us. I looked back and saw flashes of neon orange and heard Brooks yelling, then I heard the others joining in. Boss backed up and into the cab of the pickup, slammed his door shut, then their tires squealed black marks across the pavement as it took off down the road.
I looked back up at Woody. He looked down at me, his eyebrows scrunched low, his lower lip trembling, and he shook his head at me, ever so slightly. What he meant by it, I still don’t know. He didn’t want me to say anything, or he couldn’t abide what had just happened, or he couldn’t believe shit like this in our land of the free, home of the brave, or he could believe it all too well.
“You all right, man?” I asked.
He turned away from me, swiped the back of his hand across his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, then said, low, “What do you think.” Not a question, but a statement.
Brooks, Amy, Allison, Jordan, and Chase rolled up. “Y’all all right? What’d they do? What’d they say to you?” came the questions. Woody smoothed up his expression, drew himself up straight, drew up what could even be described as a smile, as derision, as toughness.
“They was just being ignorant,” he said.
“You’re bleeding, Tommy,” Brooks said to me. I was embarrassed. The one time we had left our group and, of course, something like this, whatever exactly it was, had happened. And I had said nothing. Nor had I stood up to them. Woody had, though, literally, standing between me and the men in the pickup.
I struggled up, shrugged my shoulders. “Just road rash,” I said. “No big deal.” We picked our bikes up, checked them over. Some scraped paint, but nothing broken.
“Sorry we left y’all,” I said.
Brooks barely made a “psshh” noise and waved me off. Not even an “I told you so.” They closed ranks around us.
We all pedaled the day’s last miles together. The rest of the group joked around, even Woody joining in the good-natured conversation, but I stayed silent, trying to process it all. I’d heard the word “nigger” all the time growing up. It was in the air we breathed. White kids telling jokes after Sunday School. Old men the next table over in the downtown diner. Moms in the stands at the football game on a Friday night talking about their week. But it was the first time I’d heard someone directly call that name to the face of one of my friends. Wouldn’t be the last.
And “faggot” was nothing new. I’d been called “fag” or “faggot” at least weekly for years. It’s just what kids called each other, I figured. And I knew by then, of course, it wasn’t just boys kissing boys, that there was a lot more to it than that. One time in sixth grade, when we were still at Meadowview Elementary, I was riding my bike past Matt, the kid whose brother used to always beat up on me, when Matt called out, “Hey, wanna see something?” I stopped and walked my bike next to him. I’d felt sorry for him over the years, and his teasing and meanness had mellowed out, like his heart wasn’t in it. That day he told me I had to see something he’d found in the crawl space under his house. Turned out it was his dad’s stash of Penthouse, not even Playboy, and I’d never seen anything like that. This was way beyond the Victoria’s Secret catalogs I would grab out of the mail and keep in the back of my closet.
I was girl-crazy, in the most romantic of senses, moving from one crush to another in a series of flowers left on desks, sweaty-handed slow dances at birthday parties, daydreams that could destroy. Martha, you know this. You are the recipient of this.
We sat in Matt’s backyard up against the wall of their house by the crawl-space entry where the box with the magazines had been hidden away, and he pulled one out of the box and gave it to me, and he started thumbing through another one, when suddenly he reached over and pushed the Penthouse I was looking at out of my lap and grabbed the crotch of my shorts. “Boy, you’re right, you ain’t a fag, are you, hard like that from looking at these.” And then he stood up and pulled his shorts down, his own penis pointing straight out. “Unless you is. You wanna kiss that, boy? Come on, be my faggot. Do it.” I jumped up. This was strange. I stared at it, at him. I felt my face burn red. Then I turned and ran around the corner of his house to the front yard, hopped on my Varsity and rode as fast as I could home, put it out of my mind after a few days.
While I pretty much blocked the incident out of my consciousness—hell, I think that might’ve been the last time I ever even talked to Matt—it still changed me. That day behind Matt’s house quickly became just a black hole of confusion wrapped up with panic, but it also linked that word, “faggot,” with shame and the burning face of embarrassment and the stomach churning of uncertainty, with the guilt of having done something bad or of wanting something wrong. All of that was turning over in my head the rest of that ride after that bearded man on the Natchez Trace yelled “faggot” at us. It was a trigger, not that I recognized how all of it was connected then. I’ve never said anything about that to anyone.
Not sure why I’m telling you now, even, except it’s part of the passel of memories that has ricocheted around my head since Woody’s husband called me yesterday. Husband. Imagine that. I had no clue. Why didn’t he ever tell me? Write me? Call me? Invite me to his wedding? Our friendship only deepened over many years after that ride on the Trace, as if that experience (and maybe even the shame I felt about it?) bound us together. We rode bikes together, even after we started driving cars. Once we were at different colleges, we would still meet up for weekend rides in state parks. Our bond was spiritual, but it was muscular, too, until one day it just wasn’t. Time and distance can overtake anything.
Well, whatever. I never examined any of it back then, didn’t ask myself the deep questions, about why Matt had done what he did in his backyard, about why I felt shame on the Natchez Trace when those men coupled Woody and me together in their accusations, about what I really thought or felt about any of it. I tried not to think or feel anything about it. I just knew that I’d been told for my entire childhood that being a fag was a bad thing, and that the only other thing was to not be a fag. Bad, good. Fag, not fag. I was just trying to ride my bike, look unbothered, get to the end of the day’s road where I could take a shower and wash off the blood.
But one thing I knew was that, if fag meant not wanting to kiss and be with girls, then surely I wasn’t one. I was girl-crazy, in the most romantic of senses, moving from one crush to another in a series of flowers left on desks, sweaty-handed slow dances at birthday parties, daydreams that could destroy. Martha, you know this. You are the recipient of this. And the way I wanted Amy just confirmed all of that, if there was even an iota of confusion or shame from what was yelled at me from that pickup truck on the Trace, even if I was just a punk freshman and Amy was a senior. My love for you, and the things we do so well together at night when the kids are asleep and we reach for each other, confirms it, too.
That night at the park after the ride, we heard that the men in that pickup had terrorized several groups of riders and that there would be extra park police and state troopers patrolling the route the next day. But Amy sat beside me at the picnic table where our group was eating grilled hamburgers and potato chips and she stroked my arm for a moment, asked me how I was doing. I was sore as hell, but I was over the moon at her touch. That touch made me forget shame, forget pain. I knew, when she was touching my arm like that, I wasn’t a fag. And next time, I would be the one to stand between Woody and anyone calling him nigger. Amy’s touch reassured me in ways she did not know.
But then Jordan walked over and shoved in between us, said “Hey, babe,” and then they both ignored me while I wanted to smash his face in with my bike helmet.
I roll off the county highway into our subdivision and through the streets up into our driveway. I dismount, a little less pain in my hips, though I know they’ll start throbbing again in a while. I check my app. Final average of 17.3 miles per hour. I think about how strong I am, about the thirty pounds I’ve lost in the last year, about making love to you, the way you look at me a little differently, a little more hungrily, unless I’m just imagining it. Sometimes lately, though, you tell me I’m “too skinny,” but I can’t imagine what that would even mean. I’m glad to feel young again.
I walk into the house. The boys are both in their high school uniforms, eating eggs and toast before they run out the door. Justin will be headed just down the road to UGA in the fall, but I know we’ll miss him something fierce. Trey will have a couple years to grow stronger and more confident out of his brother’s shadow. Before I can say something wise to them, or funny, my cell phone rings. It’s you.
“Just saw that you arrived back at home,” you say. So many apps. So much information. We’re so connected. I’m not complaining.
“Yeah, you good? How is it out there?” You aren’t lucky like me, still having to go into an office. But I think you make a bigger difference out there than I do here at home writing briefs to defend a contractor against claims that he cut corners in laying the moisture barrier on an apartment complex he built a couple years ago. The formerly incarcerated kids who go through your nonprofit agency’s job-training and transition program probably bring more good to the world than I do. Maybe you’re luckier than me.
Woody wouldn’t have asked him to call me for nothing. We haven’t spoken in almost thirty years. But in all the remembering I’ve been doing, I’ve been ignoring the momentousness of that.
“Regular day,” you say. “Listen, before I left, that Philip fellow called again. He said that your friend, Woody, that they’re having to put him into an induced coma. Something about swelling in his brain. But he couldn’t stay on to tell me more. Told me to tell you.”
“Oh, shit.” I feel a hole rip open in me. After what Philip had told me last night, I knew it might be a little touch and go. Woody wouldn’t have asked him to call me for nothing. We haven’t spoken in almost thirty years. But in all the remembering I’ve been doing, I’ve been ignoring the momentousness of that. People make weird requests when they’re under the influence of painkillers. I’m just Woody’s weird request.
“Babe, what happened to him?” you ask. I hadn’t given you the full run-down after I got off the phone last night.
I think back to my conversation with Philip. He’d told me how he and Woody had moved back to Meadowview, of all places, the year before. The bookstore Woody had opened in the half-deserted downtown. How happy he seemed to be.
“He was riding his bike,” I tell you.
About the author
Tad Bartlett was born in Ankara, Turkey; grew up in Selma, Alabama; and married into New Orleans. His nonfiction has been published by Salvation South, online at Oxford American, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Peauxdunque Review, and others, and he has had a "notable"-designated essay in Best American Essays (2017). His fiction has been published in Massachusetts Review, Carolina Quarterly, Baltimore Review, and many others. Tad is working on a novel based on the characters from his short story, “We'll Start a New Country Up.” When not writing, he practices environmental and appellate law for the good guys.
- Tad Bartletthttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/tad-bartlett/
- Tad Bartletthttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/tad-bartlett/
- Tad Bartletthttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/tad-bartlett/
