The bike had been under the eave since before I owned the place, and it was mine the way a stray cat is yours — by proximity and default. Steel frame, cream paint gone to the color of an old tooth, a spot of rust blooming out from every chip like something the metal was thinking about. The tires held air overnight, which surprised me. I pumped them anyway. The valve caps were gone. Two of them had been replaced with the little rubber caps off medicine bottles, pushed on and never coming off again.
The front brake was the problem, though I did not know that yet. I knew it the way you know a stair is loose — later, and with your whole body.
I walked it down the drive first. That is a thing you do with a bike you don’t trust, walk it, listen to it. The chain had a dry click in it, one link stiffer than the rest, coming around once per revolution like a limp. The rear wheel had a small wobble that touched the pad on every turn, a soft breathing sound, shh, shh, shh. I could live with that. The bearings felt gritty when I spun the pedal by hand, a fine sand in the motion, the kind of feeling that means someday but not today.
I squeezed the front lever at a walk. It came back toward the grip, easy, all the way, and touched my knuckles. Almost nothing happened at the wheel. The pad kissed the rim somewhere in the last quarter inch and thought about it. I let go and looked at the cable where it left the lever. The housing was cracked at the bend, and the wire showed through, a few strands sprung loose and bright. The rest of the cable had that dark waxy look old cable gets, half grease and half the memory of grease.
The rear brake worked. I want to be fair to the bike. You pulled the lever and the wheel argued back, a real hand laid on the motion. So I had a brake. I had, precisely, one brake, and it was the wrong one — the back one, the one that doesn’t stop you so much as it lets you file a complaint.
I rode it up the flat part of the road first, where a brake is theoretical. The seat was too low and I could not raise it; the post was seized, one aluminum thing married to another aluminum thing by twenty years of nothing. So I rode with my knees coming up high, an undignified position, a grown man folded onto a child’s idea of a bicycle. The wind found the gap at my collar. The chain ticked its one stiff link. Somewhere a dog took an interest and then thought better of it.
The hill came the way hills do, invisibly, as the ease of pedaling turning into no pedaling at all. The road tips down toward the creek past the Hendersons’ and I was on it before I had decided to be. This is the part the photograph would not show. The photograph would be the bike leaned against the shed, cream and rust, a nice old thing, and everyone would think what a find. The photograph ends where the ride starts to mean something.
I pulled the rear brake and felt the back wheel begin to skid rather than slow. That is the arithmetic of one brake: the front brake stops the bike, the rear brake stops the wheel, and a stopped wheel on gravel simply slides, a long polite sentence with no period at the end. I let it off. I squeezed the front out of pure animal hope and it came to my knuckles and gave me the same nothing it had given me in the driveway, only now the nothing had a grade to it.
So I did the thing you do. I put my boot down.
Not down hard. You learn that fast or you learn it the other way. You lower the toe to the road and let it drag, and the road takes some speed off you and some rubber off your sole and gives you back a smell, hot and mineral, dust and leather cooking. My heel skipped once on a stone and I felt it in my hip. I feathered it. Toe down, ease, toe up. The creek got closer at a rate I was renegotiating the whole way. The front pad went shh against the rim, contributing its opinion, which was worth about what a suggestion is worth.
I made the bottom at a speed that was a decision rather than an accident, which is all you can ask. The road flattened and took the rest of it, and I coasted out onto the little bridge with my boot back on the pedal, both knees high, breathing like I had done something. A brake teaches you the difference between confidence and inspection. Confidence is squeezing the lever. Inspection is walking the bike down the drive first and finding out what the lever actually does before the hill finds out for you.
I got off at the bridge and looked at the front cable again, as if it might have changed its mind. It had not. The frayed strands stood up bright where the housing had cracked. I could fix it. It is a fifteen-minute job and a two-dollar part and I have done it before on better bikes. I leaned the thing against the bridge rail while I thought about it, and the low sun was on it, and it did look like a nice old thing.
The boot was the news, though. I turned my foot up on the rail to see. The toe was scuffed clean of polish and ground down at the outer edge to a pale slick patch, warm still, gritted with fine gray road dust that had pushed up into the welt. It would brush off, most of it. Some of it was in the leather now.