Differential Force

by Dayna Bateman

Set a bike loose, riderless, with a gentle slope beneath it to give it speed, and the bike will remain upright regardless of terrain. Rough road or no, the bike will correct itself when the world goes wobbly and all sense would suggest that it should fall to the ground. Scientists have been trying to explain the mystery of bicycle self-stability since the 19th century. The key to this enigma, they believe, is that when a riderless bicycle tips, it steers itself into the fall. A bike that cannot bend in the direction of its own disaster is unable, given the way the world spins, to set itself right again.

#

We rode bikes. Mine was a rickety yellow Bianchi ten-speed that my father bought used for a song, its taped handlebars coming undone. This was 1979. Danny and Ricky rode BMX bikes with big nubby tires and high swoop handlebars. Their bikes were boy bikes, and I wanted one too. It would be years before any of us could drive, and a bike like that – an upright bike, more solid and stable than the thin bones of my own with its racer handlebars – meant freedom on the scree-scattered streets of the res-town where our families lived on 99-year land leases allowed by the Suquamish Tribe.

Ricky and Danny were inseparable, and sometimes they let me come along. Ricky was built square and squat like a seawall, like the football player he became. Danny had the bookish build of a poet, slight, with a shy slouch and a tumble of blonde curls. His smile unmoored me. Danny and I lived in homes built side-by-side on a high ridge within sight of the Agate Pass Bridge. We were a mile down the beach from Old Man House, where Chief Seattle and his family once staged potlatches that blazed into the night sky. We often met Ricky there on the blue stone shore, midway between his house and ours. Tsu-cub was the true name of Old Man House, the long-ago longhouse that was once the largest of the many dozens that sheltered families up and down the Puget Sound. It was gone by the time we got there, marked only by a faded public park marker. The public beach was topped by trees and bulwarked with weathered old-growth timber that I imagined had long ago broken loose from a lumberjack’s raft on the watery ride to the mill.  A cracked concrete boat launch connected the Sound to the road above.

If the tide was high we tossed sticks into the Sound and Danny’s Black Lab Dizzy splashed and swam hard after them. He brought them back proud, slick and salty and laid them at our feet. Later, when the tide went out and the sand spit with clams, Danny and Dizzy and I walked home on the broad shoulders of the beach.

I was in love with Danny, but I never told him so.

I knew it for sure when he offered me a ride on the seat of his nubby-tired bike. He stood and pumped hard and carried us both at high speed through the woods, over rough trails, under mossy limbs and across narrow creek beds. It was unsettling to hold tight to his waist as the bike dipped to one side and then the next; as his body moved into the fall and then brought it right again. Something fired between us as we rode in electric proximity; something that lingered delicious just below my belly, but I didn’t understand what it was. This was junior high and we were passing through that strange place called adolescence. I was still unclear about how the intimate physics between two people might work.

Our family rented Danny’s old house. His folks had built a larger one next door. Dizzy the dog still called their old mud porch – now ours – his home, and most days Dizzy dozed just inside the unlatched screen door. He had a bare calloused spot on his tail where he had wagged the hair away against those weathered floorboards. I slept in Danny’s old room, and he told me about the secret of the gap at the top of the unfinished closet that looked into the room next door. It was his parents’ bedroom when he lived there, and he’d climb up to the high-top shelf and peer down to watch Belushi and Radner and Ackroyd on SNL from over their heads when they thought he was asleep. It was my brothers’ room now, and I wasn’t interested in watching them stage World Series playoffs with their baseball cards but I was intrigued to find, tucked into the exposed slats inside the closet, a ragged magazine page creased and worn where it had been folded and unfolded countless times. Inside was a woman barely concealed by her swimsuit, which thonged out in a V to reveal her belly button. The suit stretched tight over her shoulders, pressed against the perfect orbs of her ivory breasts.

I left the paper where I found it.

#

I’ve tried to separate out that last day in the woods from the other days when Danny and I walked home together from where the bus dropped us off, and we stepped from the asphalt onto the ancient footpath through the woods that smelled of mushrooms and mulch.

Most days our walk home was filled with patter and laughter. Once Danny looped Blondie’s Rapture rap, over and over. He stopped when he made a mistake and started up again from the beginning; did so so many times that I got the giggles. But on that last day in the woods Danny was agitated. Distracted. We didn’t talk much as I followed him on the trail. Then he stopped, turned, and said “Give me a blow job.”

These were new words to us both, courtesy of Penthouse Forum. We had talked of Penthouse and Playboy before, Danny and Ricky and I, of nudie-girl magazines found in unexpected hidey-holes at home. I found mine in the closed cupboard over the bathroom sink where the kids weren’t expected to reach. The Forum featured letters to the editor, fictions framed as micro-memoirs. Stories of naked pursuit and conquest. A kind of instruction manual.

In the woods that day when he demanded a blow job I laughed; same as I had laughed at his Rapture rap. It didn’t make sense. Sounded ridiculous. He insisted. I said no. He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me to my knees on the soft forest floor. The wet moss soaked through my jeans. Danny started to work open the big buckle on his belt.

His face was strange and full of fear. Uncertain, like he wanted to recheck the directions. I said no again, louder, with all my breath. I pushed myself to my feet, breathing hard, and headed home. I didn’t run. I walked out of the woods. Felt the cold of the wet around my knees. Danny walked a few feet behind me. Buckled his belt. We said nothing, not even goodbye when we arrived at our shared drive and forked off to our separate homes. I pushed through the screen door and chased Dizzy off the porch.

After that day in the woods, I avoided the footpath when the bus dropped us off and instead walked the long way home along the asphalt road while Danny cut through the woods. For some time we didn’t talk at all and then, when proximity required it, we negotiated an uneasy aphasia between us where we spoke of other things that weren’t complicated in the same way desire and will and power are. There were no more games of touch football, no more tossing sticks on the beach. No more bikes. Later that school year our family moved away to Colorado and we left things as they were, along with our aging cat Midnight, who was too rickety to travel with us. Danny and his family took her in.

#

The bicycle was a new consumer marvel in 1870 when U.S. Indian Agent William DeShaw set Tsu-cub ablaze, one hundred years before we lived along that same shoreline. At the time he torched it, the longhouse was sixty feet wide and nine hundred feet long. Measured in settler equivalents, that is as wide as an Olympic-sized swimming pool and longer than two and a half football fields set end-to-end. When it was alive and thriving Tsu-cub housed over forty families. Elders, parents, familiars gathered on the beach; siblings, cousins, friends made their way through the woods. An estimated eight hundred individuals, including, when she was a girl, Mary, the granddaughter of Chief Seattle who grew up to marry the Indian Agent who burned the longhouse down.

Mary was raised in Tsu-cub. Her husband DeShaw, empowered by the US government, thought it best that the Suquamish community should live in individual homes, like the White man, he said, instead of all together, like Communists. So he destroyed their communal home with accelerant and flame.

The families who did not scatter lived a while longer on the beach where we would later throw fetch sticks for Dizzy. This was the story that none of us knew when we sat on Old Man House Beach on those giant timbers under the watchful summer moon with our family and friends. When we built a blazing bonfire and sang in response to Ray Charles tunes that my dad called out as he stroked his guitar and the near tide lapped at the logs that served as our seats. He called in song and we replied all together with rock and roll groans and ohhhs.

We sang from those same logs–years would pass before I could see this–that were once the pillars and rafters that sheltered the family of the Chief.