The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Dale Peck Dues

from The Threepenny Review

FIRST OF all, Adam. He creaked up beside me on a bicycle that seemed welded of leftover plumbing parts. “Pull over,” he said with all the authority of a Keystone Cop.

He was cute enough. In particular, the hair: black, thick, sticking out of his head in a dozen directions. His long thin legs straddled the flared central strut of his bicycle like denim-covered tent poles and he stared down at my own bike with eyes the color of asphalt-the old gray kind, with glass embedded in it to reflect light.

But this wasn’t a pickup.

“That is my bicycle,” he announced. A trace of an accent?

“I’m sure there's some misunderstanding,” I said. “I paid for this bike.”

“Then you bought stolen merchandise,” he said, his consonants soft. Eastern European. Shtolen mershendise. “I think you should show me where.”

I’d gone on a tip. Benny's East Village. “You won’t believe his prices,” a friend had told me. “Isn’t that the burrito place?” I’d said. In fact my friend had said, “They’re probably all stolen, but what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” “He steals burritos?” I’d said. “Bicycles” my friend said. “Come on.” By the time Adam and I arrived the shop had closed for the day. Adam's thin legs had labored to turn his creaking pedals, and it occurred to me I could have outrun him, but I didn’t. The sun was setting at our backs and our shadows stretched out in front of us like twinned towers. I thought we were a pair. I thought we were in it together.

Benny sat on a swivel chair on the sidewalk, a television propped in front of him on a pair of milk crates; a tin of rice and beans wobbled on his lap. We’d been there only a few minutes when a man half carried, half pushed a bike up the street. He held it by the seat, lifting the back wheel off the ground because it couldn’t turn: it was still locked to the frame. After inspecting the bicycle, Benny paid the man from a roll of bills he pulled from the breast pocket of his T-shirt, stowed the bicycle under the grate of his store, and returned to his chair.

I turned to Adam.

“I guess I should have investigated further.”

“You should have.”

He was pulling the kryptonite U-lock from its frame-mounted holder, and I inferred from this action that he wanted to trade bikes. I dismounted, and was unwinding my chain from the seat post when his lock caught me in the side of the head, just behind and below my left eye. Fireflies streaked through my field of vision when the lock struck me, but I didn’t actually lose consciousness until the sidewalk hit me in the forehead.

Charlie sponged the grit from my face. What was stuck to solid skin washed away easily, but the bits of gravel embedded in the gashes on my cheek and forehead resisted, had to be convinced to relinquish their berth. I closed my eyes against the water trickling from his rag.

One summer when I was seven or eight I carried cupfuls of water from a stream and poured them down chipmunk holes. The chipmunks would remain underground for as long as possible until, wobbling like drunken sailors, they staggered into the sunshine. Gently I lifted them into a tinfoil turkey tray I’d habitated with rocks, plants, a ribbed tin can laid on its side (a sleeping den, I’d thought), and then I watched as the chipmunks revived, explored their playground tentatively, and then, inevitably, hurdled the shiny wall and scrambled back down their holes.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to use a tweezers for the last of it.” I opened my eyes. Charlie was making a face, as if performing this surgery hurt him instead of me.

He asked me if it hurt me.

I was still remembering the way that last chipmunk had lain on its side after I’d fished it from its home, eyes closed, chest fluttering as rapidly as a bee's wings. I’d dared to stroke its heaving ribs. The chipmunk curled itself into a ball around my finger, its mouth and the claws of all four paws digging at me until I flung it away and it scurried to safety.

“It hurts,” I said, then caught Charlie's arm as he flinched. “My head hurts,” I said. “What you’re doing doesn’t hurt.”

Benny's East Village sold bikes every day except Sunday from eleven until seven, but seemed always to be bustling with activity. In the mornings a young woman worked on the bicycles. This was Deneisha, who seemed to live on the third floor. Every ten minutes a younger version of her leaned out the window to relay a request: “Deneisha, Mami says why you didn’t get no more coffee if you used the last of it?” “Deneisha, Benny says to call him back on his cell phone.” “Deneisha, Eduardo wants to know when are you gonna take the training wheels off my bike so I can go riding with him?” Deneisha, her thick body covered in greasy overalls, inky black spirals of hair rubberbanded off her smooth round face, ignored these interruptions, working with Allen wrenches and oil cans and tubes of glue on gears, brakes, tires. For bicycles that still had a chain fastened to them she had an enormous pair of snips, their handles as long as her meaty arms, and for U-locks she had a special saw that threw sparks like a torch as it chewed through tempered steel.

After the shop closed there was a lull until the sun went down, and then the bicycles began to arrive. Every thief was different. Some skulked, others paraded their booty openly, offering it to anyone they passed on the sidewalk, but few spent any time bargaining with Benny. The more nervous the thief, the less interest Benny showed, the less money he pulled from the roll of bills. He seemed completely untroubled by his illicit enterprise, absorbing stolen bikes with the same equanimity with which he absorbed tins and cartons of delivered food. Only the white kids, the college-age junkies selling off the first or the last of their ties to a suburban past, tried his patience. “I said ten bucks,” I heard him say once. “Take it or leave it.”

Charlie couldn’t understand my obsession. We’d only been together for three months, and what I’d learned about him was that he absorbed information with a stenographer's Zen. “Existence is the sum of experience,” he’d shrugged that first night, as though the events of our lives were drops of water and we the puddles at the end of their runneled paths, little pools of history. When I still wouldn’t let it go he prodded harder.

“Is it the coincidence that bothers you, or the fact that he hit you? Or is it that you pretended innocence of what you were getting when you bought the bike in the first place, and now it's come back and bitten you in the ass?”

At the time I couldn’t answer him, and of course hindsight makes it that much less clear. I offered him words like “cleave” and “hew,” words that could mean both cutting and binding, but Charlie waved my rhetoric away. “Context makes meaning clear,” he said. And then, more bluntly: “Choose.”

But I couldn’t choose. My life felt splayed on either side of the incident with Adam like his long thin legs straddling the ancient bicycle which he did, in fact, leave for me. Like conjoined twins, my two selves were linked at the hip, sharing a common future but divided as to which past to claim. And so every day I rode Adam's creaking iron bike to a stoop across from Benny's and waited for something like Deneisha's saw or snips to sever my old unmolested self, leaving my new scarred body to get on with things.

At a party Charlie took me to I told the story behind the bandages on my cheek and forehead a half dozen times. By then the two bruises had joined into one, across my forehead, down my left cheek, vanishing into the hairline. The single bruise was mottled black, purple, blue, green, yellow, but, like the story I told over and over again, essentially painless, and as the night wore on Charlie added his own coda to my words. “Victim,” he would say, turning my mottled left profile to the audience. “Thief,” he said, showing them my right.

“Uh-oh,” he said at one point, “here comes trouble.” Trouble was a man around our age, one hand holding shaggy bangs off his unlined forehead as though he were taking in a sight, the Grand Canyon, a caged animal. From across the room I heard his cry. “Now where did I leave that man?” His gaze fell on Charlie. “There he is.”

Charlie introduced him as Fletcher. From the name I knew this to be his ex-boyfriend, who had dumped Charlie last summer after a five-year relationship that Charlie referred to by the names of various failed political