Christ on a Bike
by Will Sussbauer
“Christ on a bike!” shouted Ike Beyerholtz. He did not intend to be funny, nor coin a new curse-adjacent expletive like “Jesus Mary and Joseph!” or “Jesus H. Christ,” nor even call attention to himself. Ike, his coveralls mucked with beige dried manure, was not one to seek attention. He had been resting, and watching two squirrels circle up an oak-trunk, for quite some time when he was jerked away by a blur on his periphery. He shouted “Christ on a bike” merely because coasting quick down muddy Skunk Hill Road was a bicycle, ridden by a man who looked quite like the Savior.
Ike may have been the first in Birchfield to see Christ that day. Skunk Hill, a steep winding dirt road, was inhabited by the sorts of folks whose houses were tucked behind trees and whose eyes were focused on molding their pottery, or tying their dreamcatchers, or weeding their gardens. Besides, had they seen a dark-skinned bearded man in a tunic riding a wooden bicycle, they would not question it. Ike was raised on the farm, and his parents took him to Mass. He was awestruck as Christ passed, and, later, he would lament that he never saw His eyes. For, of course, He did not turn: His eyes were locked forward, somehow unmoving despite His velocity. He reached the end of Skunk Hill, where the dirt met the pavement of the highway, and began riding down towards town.
The cattle, too, were awestruck. Crowded at the fence by the highway, their tails stilled their swinging, their open mouths closed, their heads slowly craned up from their grazing as he passed. Across the street, Walt Glickman’s labrador barked from within her wire-fence playspace, his cat watched from upstairs, and Walt stood at the door. The wooden panda he placed every summer at the end of his driveway saw nothing. The Cyclist’s hair tangled in the wind.
He turned right at the next intersection, blasting past the car turning down the same road. The driver’s heart hurt hard enough that he could not look right, for that was where his wife sat until last week when she passed. He was driving to Muriel’s grave again, and knew by now to drive slow, to accommodate both his age and grief, for which he may have found comfort in Christ, had he seen Him, and had He seen the driver’s tears. But He did not, for He kept coasting down the slight steady incline into town.
Ike, once the Cyclist left his sight, turned back to the oak tree. The squirrels now sat on a branch and squeaked down at him.
The grackles in the trees did not fly flocked away when the Cyclist passed beneath. It seemed they hardly noticed Him. Nor did the cardinals at the lake’s edge, nor did the ducks swimming at its center. A dozen children played on the small sandy beach the town had built two decades before. Buoys bobbed. Mothers sat in one-piece swimsuits and shorts, reading Erdrich and Munro. The brand-new dock (the old had rotted and sunk) was perfect for leaping and clambering, thought most of the kids, except for the three little boys who sat alone making a sand castle, scooping mud with their hands and using their small plastic trowel to push away goose poop. The father of one, John Prum, a bearded history teacher with a plodding bearlike gait, walked down the beach to help. He could see his wife Jina’s head bobbing near the lilypads along her daily swim across the lake, and through the treeline he saw the Cyclist, and thought it odd He was not wearing a helmet.
But He was safe. He would not fall. His eyes were locked forward, His lips were pursed and shut as if sealed, His slit, mostly scabbed, dripped pus into the wind. He would not fall.
He flew past the gas station, where two old-timers sat on cast-iron chairs. Jim Belrush was wiry and odd-cheeked with hands like saucepans, and Rebus Mailer was the same. They spoke of the Little League finals, in which both had two grandsons. The discussion had lulled, as it did between every statement, and they watched the Cyclist pass silently until Jim said, pointing with a thick bent forefinger, “There’s not pedals on that fella’s bike.” “Aren’t there?” said Rebus. “No, there’s not.” “Huh.” “You can’t see a shoe from a pedal, Rebus.” “You can’t either.” But Jim was correct. His bike was pedalless, and nailless, ricketing down the road aided by only gravity and prayer. Ike and his cows had failed to notice this quirk, the former due to awe and the latter to ignorance. The cows had watched hundreds of bikes pass that summertime, and hundreds more in summers before, but cows are not attuned to many details except the thickness of the grass and the beauty of the daisies. Jim’s eyes, exhausted with eight decades of keeping open, remained keen to the quirks of bikes, having built and repaired the machines for almost as long. Rebus worked with him when school was out. When Gregory drove by a few minutes later on his way to the cemetery, they both lifted their hands to him and nodded. He nodded back.
The Cyclist seemed to move faster on the flat of Main Street. At the outlet to Lake Road stood Abigail Martin in her bright pink jacket. She bought it in college, and was so frightened of the blindness of drivers that she donned its fleece warmth always when she walked, even in the summer. And she walked daily. Rain or sleet or sunshine like today. She grew accustomed over years to pushing a stroller as she walked, but now her twins were old enough to just walk beside her, or go together alone on the small roads in town, where there were sidewalks and cars went slow. They had run ahead to the hardware store for a ¢50 peewee ice cream. When Christ burst by, she waved on instinct. She waved to most everyone she passed, fellow walkers and drivers alike. She waved moments later to Gregory, her neighbor.
At the hardware store, she waved across the street to Maren Merkowski, her friend, the librarian, and they chatted about Christ, and called him Christ, first with a laugh then quite earnestly. Abigail raised her children in such a way that when He passed they thought him just a cyclist, but all her first teachers were nuns. Passersby who were keen to notice such things may guess this history, for her shoulders were always tensed. Seeing Christ upon His bike made her remember her tension. Self-awareness is a spiral, and her shoulders oozed onto her face such that her son and daughter, sitting on the bench outside the library licking their cookie-dough ice creams, asked what was wrong. She said Nothing, and asked for a bite of their cones, one from each for fairness.
Andy giggled and handed over her cones. She knew her treat was her mother’s, too. The dollar they split and Thomas carried the two miles down to town (for Andy was more likely to somehow rip it, or drop it in the mud) came from the big pocket her little blue purse, where she stored her cash and, when she thought her children were busy tying their shoes and putting on too little sunblock, through which she rifled, counting the cash she had remaining. Andy watched her, though. She had a keen eye for such things, and sometimes asked Thomas if he ever noticed. He did not, and brewed a small resentment towards his mother for taking his ice cream, a selfishness that would flourish in adolescence then suffocate in maturity, when he found himself shockingly capable of caring for himself with the skills and awareness his mother taught. As Abigail bit into his cone and Andy tried to catch a cricket in the grass, Thomas sniffed up his allergies and looked down the street, just glimpsing the Cyclist coasting past the church.
His mother gave back the cone, saying to Maren, “Is He stopping at the church?” Maren leaned her lankiness as if around a doorframe and peered down the road. “Doesn’t look like it.” “Ha! Look at that.” Maren laughed with Abigail, but she did not rejoice in that irony like her friend. A bit of guilt tugged her like a gentle shepherd's crook. Abigail knew she went to church sometimes. The devout older folks who summered at the picnic tables on the town common were her friends. Maren knew that they would see the Cyclist and know He is the Savior, and gasp and hope to shout in joy at his Coming; that this was a confirmation, or could be if He said something, anything; that this could be a lasting puncture in the heart of their faith if He did not.
He did not. Eyes locked and lips pursed and pus spitting on the road behind Him, he flew forward with a faint whistle of wind that ruffled the collars of the folks sitting at the common. Two blue jays sat on the lowest branch of the tree beside the table. They cawed righteously, as blue jays tend to, and made Him blink.
“Where is He off to?” asked Dwight Beyerholtz, father of Ike, sitting at that picnic table. No one answered, caught in the awe and certainty that soon they would doubt. They had gasped when they glimpsed the kindness behind His steeled eyes, and had sighed when He kept riding, and kept silent as they watched Him burst past Baptist Corner Road and follow Main Street as it dipped steep and winding down and out of sight, towards the wastewater plant and the farmfields and the rest of the commonwealth.