The motor started, finally, with a stuttering put-n-put-n-put and as soon as I saw Harris begin to move I looked down at the clock. I couldn’t have had my eyes down for more than three seconds, but when I brought them up I was surprised to see that Harris had already moved toward me some distance.
Several other things were happening by this time that would determine Harris’s fate. The engine, starved of gasoline all its life on the washing machine by the mechanical governor, responded in explosive gratitude for the chance at freedom. It went from the subdued put-n-put-n-put to a healthy BAM-BAM-BAM that I could hear easily from the end of the driveway.
Then, too, there was the further bad luck that somehow, in some way, everything held together. Bolts, belts, the bicycle—everything miraculously stayed in one piece and all of the gasoline that poured into the wide open throat of the little Briggs and Stratton engine was translated into power at the back wheel.
Power and speed.
From that point on everything came in flashes, flickering scenes of disaster, like watching a stop-action film of a flood or a hurricane hitting the coast of Florida.
To give him his due, Harris was plucky. Early on the Bendix brake had jammed and the chain—and therefore pedals—had turned with the back wheel. Harris kept his feet on the pedals, or tried to, but as the speed went up and the pedals began to turn faster, much faster than they’d ever turned, his legs became at first a blur, then he held them up, the pedals slapping the bottoms of his bare feet as the bike approached something like terminal velocity with Harris just along for the ride.
It was amazing that nothing fell apart. As he got closer, his knees up alongside his cheeks, I could see that sense had at last come into his mind and his eyes were wide, huge with fear. His tongue hung out the side of his mouth, spit flying, and he turned into a blur.
Fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty—the bike had to be doing close to fifty miles an hour when he passed me standing at the end of the driveway.
“Helpppp meeeeee!” he yelled, the Doppler effect changing the pitch of his plea as he cleared the end of the driveway, flew across in front of me, and hit the ditch on the far side of the county road like a meteorite.
It was then, as he put it later, that he realized he was in trouble. Making the turn onto the road was clearly impossible but he claims he still thought he could “slow her down in the brush along the ditch.”
The brush slowed him, all right. It stopped the bike dead in a dazzling, cartwheeling spray of engine, spokes, wheels, frame, and tangled belt. For half a second it was impossible to tell where Harris ended and bicycle began; the whole seemed a jumbled mass of boy and machine.
Then Harris separated. His body high above the brush, spread-eagled—he claimed later he could see for miles—still moving close to fifty miles an hour, then fell down, down in a curving arc to hit the ground and explode in a flurry of willows, leaves, brush, and dirt.
Then silence, broken only by the soft hissing of gas running from the tank onto the engine and the ticking of the brass alarm clock.
“Harris?”
Nothing.
“Harris—are you all right?”
A spitting sound—leaves and dirt being expelled. Then a grunt. “Hell no, I ain’t all right. I was stuck in the dirt like an arrow and I’m all over scratches.”
“Do you need help?” I couldn’t see him for the brush and willows.
“Yeah. Help me find my bibs.”
“Your pants?”
“Yeah—they come off me somewhere.”
We looked for half an hour and more, Harris hiding twice when cars went by on the road, and we didn’t find them and we looked for another half hour and we still didn’t find them and we never did.
We finally gave up. The bike was a total loss but the engine was cast iron and undamaged and we put it on the seat of my bike and held it there while we wheeled it back to the yard and the washing machine, Harris walking alongside naked as a bird and all over scratches as he’d said.
Later that night we were lying in our beds in the dark, nightbirds singing outside the window, and Harris whispered, “How fast was I going?”
I shook my head, then realized he couldn’t see me in the dark. “I don’t know.”
“What did the clock say?”
“I forgot to look at it.”
“You forgot?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I go through this and have to tell Pa I lost my pants somewhere and you forgot to look at the clock?”
“I said I’m sorry.”
There was a long quiet. “How fast do you think I was going?”
I thought long before answering, remembered his eyes, his legs pumping, the motor pounding as he went by, the crash in the brushy ditch, the sight of him flying through the air, losing his pants.
“At least a hundred.”
Another soft silence, then a sigh. “I thought so—the fence posts looked like chicken netting. It was really something.”
“Yes. It was really something...”
12
In which all things change
The time of summer ended suddenly enough.
In the fields along the driveway there was a forty-acre piece in corn. It was silage, or field corn—as opposed to sweet corn—and meant to feed the milk cows in the winter and grew to truly gigantic proportions.
Plants seven feet tall were not uncommon and from our perspective—between four and five feet—as the stalks grew taller the field became an inviting green jungle. By lying on the ground it was possible to see down the rows through a cleared area about a foot high, before the leaves started. But standing limited visibility to a few feet in any direction and the field became a perfect place to play hide-and-seek.
Or ambush.
Or, as Harris put it, “It’s time for
