The good folks at Bike Monkey asked me to do a short piece for them four or five years back. This is what they got on short notice.
Had my brother been born near the Madison or the Firehole River he’d have been a fly fisherman as sure as he’d have been a matador if born in Barcelona, but he entered the world surrounded by the woods of Northern California to a family of cyclists, and so it was that he become one of great standing. I used to think he was that rarity of a person born into their right place in time, but these days I’m not sure of anything. As a family we stood back and watched him, as he was so far beyond us in the metaphysical, ethereal aspects of being alive that it was all we could do.
Marcus was a giant killer, the skinny kid that kicked the crap out of the bully at school, the kid that shared his lunch with the class pariah. You couldn’t leave a markingpen near him. He was a random graffitist of high-minded, simple slogans that made adults look twice. RIDE A BIKE he scrawled on all the traffic signs in town. And just when the limelight began to show on him, just when people began to take notice, he’d duck out and you’d not see him for a week.
His life was the bike. Everything else orbited around it in a whorl of chaos. He cycled obliviously through as many jobs as he did miles. He cadged money from us to race on and he always paid it back and he won nearly every event he entered.
In his late teens the bike companies began sending their deal closing, slicked up mouthpieces to court him and they dangled their plated carrots. Ride the best bikes. Travel with the team. All of it paid for. He was prime fodder, a beautiful California phenom who on a bike could hammer almost anyone into pumice. The meetings always ended with Marcus acting out. I once watched him take the proffered gold pen and make the motion of signing. Then he put it in his pocket and ran out the door laughing. When I finally caught up with him he just smiled and shook his head.
They just wanna make a mouthpiece out of me, Jack. So don’t start.
Dad couldn’t understand. All that talent he’d say, shaking his head. But I think he knew Marcus signing a contract was as likely as him getting a second shot at the triumphs of his youth, which he got secondhand through his son.
Sometime before the Twin Towers fell, Marcus began to disappear for four and five day stretches on his cross bike. I remember he came back once, half starved, sunburned, rambling about this forest service road bridging across the spine of some mountain and the black bear he saw up there and how cold it was overnighting in some Tahoe ditch and here we were living near the coast.
I added up the rough mileage in my head while he spoke, dividing it by the days he’d been missing and I said Jesus, Marcus. That’s almost two hundred a day.
He stopped his monologue and his smile flattened. Two twenty seven, he said. It’s an affliction.
When the towers fell Marcus was off on rideabout. It was too much for all of us, particularly mom. For some reason she immediately lumped Marcus in with the travesty on the east coast, which in the end turned out to be not so inaccurate. Dad pedaled off to work with his face hanging and everyone and everything had the numbing pall of death on it and I really missed my brother.
He showed up sometime in the early morning on the thirtieth, reeking of old sweat, which is what woke me. He was standing over my bed nearly silent but for his slow, measured breathing. He was so gaunt and drawn he looked a starvation artist. Marcus I whispered.
How are things?
They’re fucked up, to be honest.
I know. Let’s go for a ride.
Now?
No. Yesterday.
You smell terrible. There’s a wire brush and a can of gas in the garage.
We pedaled around the old neighborhoods. MacDonald Avenue with its ghost trees, the amputated trunk of the massive Eucalyptus like a war beggar on the corner. Look what they’ve done to me moaned Marcus on our passing.
Where’ve you been?
Oregon. Washington. Idaho.
I took in the distances. I didn’t know what to say. After a while I said a fucking atrocity, this whole thing.
I joined the Navy.
We rode along with our tires humming and the crickets chirruping and the distant manic whine of young testosterone sopped boys winding their V-8’s to infinity. I knew he wasn’t kidding. He’d always needed missions and causes and now he had a big one. There was this sudden division like a dead body between us.
I’m leaving in the morning. I came back to say goodbye to you.
All right.
Dad always said to do something.
You never cared what he thinks.
I know. But it’ll make him happy.
Of course it didn’t. We didn’t see Marcus for six years. There were only cursory dispatches, enough to know he was alive and that’s it. We pored through the reports of warring and we dreamed terrible dreams.
Northern California was burning when he came home and looking back now it seems fitting. He and I stood in the tangerine light looking at the changes time had exacted on eachother. He had an eagle tattoo with the trident and flintlock on his right shoulder and he had shoulders where before he had none. And scars. He’d been to Afghanistan. Africa. Iraq. And now he was here again. We hugged and I knew he was staring off over my shoulder with his mouth tight and eyes blanked out on the horizon and I shuddered at the damage.
You been riding?
Yep.
A good thing he said. I thought about it every single day.
We had dinner at our parents and the conversation was careful and surface. Marcus was mostly quiet and he smiled sickly at the long thick silences. He was a stranger among us as he had always been only he was a different stranger now.
Afterwards we went into the garage and he took his old crossbike from the hook and looked it over.
I kept it up for you.
Let’s go he said.
We rode slowly out west of town, through monocrop houses with square lawns and flags hanging limp. He veered toward a covey of kids on BMX bikes and shouted at them, hopping the curb expertly like the Marcus of old. They looked at him like he was insane and one shouted fuck off as we wheeled away.
Hear that? He said.
Just a punk. Little gangbanger wannabe not gonna see twenty-one. Leave it.
He looked back over his shoulder longer than he should have then he faced forward and picked up the pace a bit. I looked over after a while and saw that his face was wet and all screwed up. Can’t do it he murmured.
Can’t do what?
This. He made a broad sweeping motion. You wouldn’t believe it, Jack. The things I’ve seen. The wasting.
I’m sorry, Marcus.
He looked over at me, like he was seeing me for the first time. He began to accelerate, this insane grin on his face, all the time marking me. I thought he might plow into something but he didn’t look forward until I drifted back and got in his draft. We rode that way westward into the twilight and eventually my legs gave.
I’m falling off, Marcus.
The sun through the stratified smoke boiled orange and alien into the Pacific below us. I stopped and watched. Marcus slowed, a black cutout against on an endtime sky. He did a few circles watching me.
What’re you doing? I yelled.
Taking it all in.
I’m gonna call Ellen. She’ll come get us.
I’m not goin’ back, Jack.
Oh yeah? Where’re you going then?
Down, brother.
He turned and rolled out of sight and that is the last I saw of him.
The Coast Guard did an obligatory search though it had been over a week. No body. I thought he was taking one of his rides until his crumpled bike was winched to the top of the bluff. A gaggle of curious onlookers. I watched, strangely detached.
A blond lady in an SUV pulled onto the shoulder and got out. Did someone die? She asked.
There was a big plastic yellow ribbon stuck on her back door, just over God Bless America and a W, Your President sticker and a No Blood For Oil slogan.
What’s that? I said.
Did someone die?
I don’t know.
Well that bike’s mangled. He must be dead. Or was it a she?
A he.
Those bicyclers are just crazy she said. They don’t belong on the road if you ask me. Only a matter of time.
I walked away from her. I had to. The tow truck driver was securing his retrieval hook.
That a Sharpie? I asked, pointing at his shirt pocket.
Yeah.
May I borrow it?
Here.
Thanks.
I thought about what Marcus would do, about what he’d say, about what he’d been through, and I scrawled it in big black capitals below the big yellow ribbon on Detroit’s best pearlescent champagne paint.
RIDE A BIKE