Tom Foran Clark

Pike and Emery went out of Rome on Route 148 South, heading for Naples. Smooth, flat farmlands greeted them. They hardly pedaled. At their backs were favorable breezes, propelling them gently forward all the way to Terracina and the Tyrhennian Sea.

Raw, rugged mountains cropped up on their left. They crossed over narrow rivers and streams, passing by smooth ponds of mirror stillness, reflecting brightly painted boats and the gem-blue sky.

When they got to Sperlonga, the sun was golden, going down above shining aqua ocean waters. There were Quonset huts on the beach. Each staked a claim on a hut, and moved in. The temperature plunged that night. Pike walked back and forth on the beach, his arms crossed in front of him, his palms slapping his biceps (covered, like the rest of him, by two sweaters and that big lamb’s wool-lined coat of his). He was kicking up sand, muttering angrily to himself.

"What’s up?" Emery asked, though he doubted Pike would open up.

“I just can’t get over getting mugged in the Sistine Chapel,” Pike said.

“You weren’t mugged,” Emery said. “You just got a little claustrophobic, that’s all.”

“Somebody was trying to pickpocket me. Someone was trying to pull my jacket off.”

Emery didn’t know what to say. He just stood nearby, regarding the beauty of the evening, ready for anything that might be revealed or confessed. Something was eating Pike up. He went and got his bike and pulled it through the sand to where Emery stood. "By the way,” he said. “Someone has tinkered with my bike," he said. "I can’t figure out what’s wrong with it."

Emery went and got a flashlight and some tools and came back to have a look.

"It’s like the brakes are clamping down on the wheels," Pike said. "I checked, and there’s a good eighth of an inch gap, so that’s not the problem. I suspect foul play. Someone doesn’t want us to go to Spain."

“Will you please cut that out?” Emery said. ”You are paranoid. To tell the truth, you’re acting weird. It’s like Arlen Townsend put you under some kind of Voodoo trance or something.”

"If I’m just paranoid, Emery, then why has somebody been messing around with my bike? There’s more to this than meets the eye."

Emery checked to see if oil had drained out of the ball-bearings around the axles, but when he held the bike up in the air, the wheels spun freely. Then it hit him. Emery pretended he was giving the matter some thought, but in fact he was stalling, letting some time pass so that, when he spoke, Pike wouldn’t think he was being overly critical, jumping on him.

"Do you know what ‘drag’ is?" Emery said considerately.

Pike looked at him like he was some kind of moron. "It’s when a man dresses up like a woman," he answered, "or when a woman dresses up like a man."

"And?" Emery leaned on him.

"When you take a puff from a cigarette," Pike said.

"And?"

"A dull person. A let-down. Like you when we were at Townsend’s in Assissi."

"And what do you call that which slows down bicycle wheels when you pull said bicycle through beach sand?"

Pike said nothing. Then it dawned on him: "Sand! It’s the sand. Oh my God, I am an idiot. Emery, you are a genius."

That little episode cheered up Pike a lot. It turned out to have been a good decision, Emery's having been so cautious and diplomatic, drawing the answer out of Pike so that he could see it for himself, rather than Emery telling him outright, and then gloating over it. "Just look around us!" Pike said gleefully now, again flapping his arms. "We have this whole beach to ourselves, and the mountains roundabout, and the sky, and the ocean. Nobody messing with us here!”

The two took a long, long walk along the beach that night, and again the next morning. When the temperature warmed up, Emery was all for staying parked right where we were a second day and night, but Pike was eager to continue on. They flipped a coin, Pike won, and on they went.

"Paradise Coast," Emery dubbed it. Dramatic chalk-white cliffs plunged down to rocky bluffs and sandy coves of sparkling emerald and aqua shore waters.

They didn’t make much progress that day, in terms of miles traveled. There were orange trees everywhere on one side of the road, and the ocean on the other. It’s as if they'd come to that territory precisely because they were famished for precisely those two things. Pike and Emery must have stopped every two or three minutes to let the beauty of the sea wash over them, or to peel and ravage yet another delectable orange. It seemed to them they’d never get their fill of these.

They slept out in the open on the beach that night. It was only the next morning that Emery realized his lesson about how sand dragging on bike wheels really hadn’t come home to roost in Pike’s brain, for now he had planted his bike in the sand, and was standing on it, and performing antics. Emery could see Pike now felt very simple, and so he was going to great lengths to play the clown. Where Emery would have merely slapped himself upside the head and moved on, Pike had a gash -- stitches -- a dent.

While Emery stood there waiting for him, Pike jumped up on the bike, stood, waved his hands in the air, and then jumped off on the other side. Then he did the same thing in the other direction. Pike did this little entertainment six times, in all. When he finally seemed quite done, Emery waved his hand, signalling, Let’s go.

Back on the road again, Pike got the notion he’d try something like his circus stunt on his bike while the bike was in motion. Emery wished, afterwards, that he’d said something beforehand. This was somewhere south of Mandragone, right around noontime. Rolling along, and without warning, Pike kept both of his hands on his handlebars, but put both feet on his seat, then straightened out his legs. There had been, for about six or seven miles, two lines of barbed wire fencing running parallel to the road. A section of this had come loose, and lay on the pavement, directly in Pike’s path.

Just as Pike looked back at Emery, grinning, lifting his left hand from its handlegrip, his bike hit the barbed wire. He, the bike, and all his gear went four or five different directions. Emery braked, hit his back wheel, and crumpled right there, all of a piece.

Pike’s right hand, elbow, and shoulder bled profusely. Emery's shins and knees were sliced and gashed, but no blood spewed forth. Basically, he was stunned. He figured cars and trucks were heading toward them from both directions -- there would be a collision and all their folly would be ended. But nothing further happened.

Emery pulled himself together, got his bike and gear off the road, and got Pike and his things off the road. "Let’s have a look at that," he said, and ripped up a perfectly good shirt of his and applied a tourniquet and bandages in assorted places from Pike's knuckles to his neck.

Whatever was still on the two bikes, Emery removed. He made two neat piles, and began re-attaching their loads to the bikes. Pike’s bike now had two flat tires. Both bikes were skewered and wobbly, but Emery could see the damage was fixable -- no welding would be required.

The two walked with their bikes only a short way further on this road. Then they turned down a bumpy dirt path going in among young pines that got thinner and shorter as they again neared the ocean. Here was a little haven of low pines, wide bushes, soft earth, warmth of sun, cool of shade. They leaned their bikes against a couple trees and fell to the ground.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Pike asked meekly.

Emery didn’t. He just wanted to lay there awhile, in silence -- and that’s what he did. He remembered Arlen Townsend’s telling them how he liked to pass the time collecting his thoughts. That’s what Emery did, now -- he collected his thoughts.

They ate some lunch -- bread rolls with cheese and some red table wine -- and then kept going, walking with their bikes through the bushes toward the seashore.

They arrived at what looked like a Texas or Nevada ghost town. Walking past the deserted saloon, sheriff’s office, bank, dry goods store, and so forth, they concluded they’d happened on to a movie set -- the backdrop for a spaghetti western. They looked out back of the fascades and saw nothing but wooden supports, scaffolding, cinder blocks, cactus, tumbleweed, beach sand, and -- finally -- again -- the ocean.

"Are we going to sleep in the jail or the saloon?" Pike asked.

"Flip a coin," Emery said, but Pike was already gone -- with his camera -- taking pictures of this wholly unexpected place. Emery resumed his former meditations, sitting barefoot on the beach, collecting his thoughts. A tiny yellow chickadee came up to him and walked across his feet, then turned to look at him to check out his reaction. Seeing none, the bird went right back over my feet again, going the other direction. Then this chickadee flew away.

Pike now walked up and handed Emery a twin-flanged seashell, rough on the outside but pearly alabaster smooth and rosey on the inside. "Compliments of Poseidon," Pike said. Emery accepted this gift graciously -- without a fuss. He walked with the conch shell to the saloon porch, which is where they made their camp that night -- beneath its awning.

In the morning, Emery's chickadee friend and a couple dozen of his or her cohorts all showed up, singing away. Pike excused himself and wandered off to take more pictures. Already, even that early in the morning, it was hot. The sound of the lapping waters was soothing and relaxing. Emery went to work on the bikes.

For one thing, Pike’s headset was loose. Emery dissembled, cleaned, and re-greased the headset ball-bearing mechanism and the two sets of bearings at each end of the bike’s head tube, then put it all back together, making sure the cup rings were snug but not overtight. That stopped the rattling there. Next, Emery trued the wheels of both bikes, improvising as best he could, adapting a section of the saloon’s scaffolding to serve as a truing jig. He removed all the wheels and trued each one, loosening and tightening the spokes, adjusting the torque between the hubs and the rims until the rims were nearly perfect spinning circles. What wobbling remained was due to rim damage that couldn’t be bent or hammered into shape.

Then Emery de-greased the chain, using the same solution he’d used on the ball-bearings: powdered detergent dissolved in vinegar. This he applied with a toothbrush, scrubbing the chains clean. Then he re-greased the chains and put the assemblies back together and put the wheels back on and tightened everything back up, double checking the chains for just right tautness. He applied the leftover de-greaser solution to the sheriff’s front door with a paintbrush. This went quickly, in the glaring sun, from a glistening sheen to a dull matte.

Pike came back, whistling happily. To Emery's astonishment, it was already four in the afternoon. He hadn’t even paused for lunch. Emery was pleased with his handiwork. Pike indulged him as Emery had him sit down at the edge of the saloon porch. Emery paraded the bikes, one after the other, before him. "Eh? Do I do good work or what?" he cast out his line, fishing for compliments.

"My front wheel still looks wobbly," Pike commented. Emery wanted to add new wounds and gashes to the as yet uninjured side of him. That’s when Emery finally recognized that all Pike's cuts, scrapes, gashes, pocks, and bruises were all on one side of him -- the right side. Emery felt sure that meant something, but he didn’t know what.

Tenderly, Emery took Pike’s left arm in his hands and sank his teeth into it. He bit him on the left arm.

"Ow!" Pike cried out. "What are you -- Crazy?"

It wasn’t a deep bite, and it couldn’t have hurt him much, and it didn’t draw blood. But it did Emery a world of good to see his teeth marks on Pike. "Say, ‘Emery, thank you for fixing my bike’."

"Emery, thank you for fixing my bike," Pike said.

"Say, 'I am a moron'," Emery said.

"You are a moron," Pike repeated.

"Say, ‘I, Lawrence Pike, am a moron’."

"Go to hell," Pike said.

"Our bikes are good to go again," Emery pointed out. "I did the best I could."

"Hey, I’m sorry I said ‘Go to hell’," Pike said now, and added, "I probably deserved that bite." He pulled up his left pants leg and offered his hairy, uninjured shin, which Emery declined but, being still up for further shenanigans, he took him by the ankle and had Pike hopping.

"Who’s sorry now?" Emery jeered, and let Pike go. Livid, Pike chased him through seven different doorways leading nowhere. Finally, he gave up. The two dropped to their knees and began laughing. It wasn’t long before Emery was howling and swooning and Pike began to cry. In this way they purged a lot of the rage and frustration they’d built up and kept back. Pike went over and pressed his thumbs into Emery's neck and strangled him a little and after that they both felt much better. Emery let it go at that.

They left the next morning. Out on the main road again, they saw a dead dog splayed roadside -- a big wolf’s-gray, porcupine-haired beast that looked as much like a coagulated rug as an animal. The thing had obviously been dragged, shredded, and flattened to a gruesome pulp. Only the dog’s anger was left whole there by the road, like an ancient fossil showing only the beast’s vicious, snarling snout and teeth locked in an expression of terror and fury. That’s all that was left. They cringed, going by.

They could have sailed into Naples that same day, but they’d made a conscious decision to camp high up in the hills over the Bay of Naples before going into the city.

Pike and Emery had felt an almost overpowering apprehension on the road, drawing closer to Naples. The sky was blue and hypnotizing. It got harder and harder to keep alert. After being initially shocked at the sight of that first dead dog, they got used to seeing animals dead along the road as they went on. The carcasses were piled high: dead dogs, cats, mice, rats, birds, ducks, squirrels, deer. Equally abundant and troubling, mingling with the roadkill, were the heaps of garbage: mismatched shoes, mismatched socks, thongs, gloves, prophylactics, headbands, hats, kneepads, prosthetics, bottles, cans, cardboard boxes, and on and on.

This was no pleasant oceanside vacation. Though they’d planned on being in Naples for Christmas, the two were now seriously reconsidering this.

They were still in the hills at an outer fringe of the city, in Pozzuoli. Here were apartment buildings, stacked and crammed close together, right up to the edge of the woods. All over, women were shaking carpets and beating rugs from open windows; when they saw Pike and Emery, they looked at them angrily -- each and every one of them. From other apartments came the muffled sounds of banging pots, squabbles, scolding, crying children, stamping feet. Shots rang out; women screamed; a man hollered curses, perhaps commands; a car door slammed. From a little further away came the sound of sirens, honking horns, sputtering mopeds, colliding cars.

The two meekly retreated back into the camouflage of trees. They found a quiet clearing with an open view to the islands of Ischia in Naples Bay. At nightfall, they went still further back, and higher up. They found an only slightly tilting clearing on the slope, where they pitched the tent.

As often in their travels in Italy, they were astonished at the sea of city lights under the splendid panoply of never ending gadzillions of stars. That night Emery prayed for the safety of Pike and himself, and all sentient beings everywhere, and every animate and inanimate thing. He felt deeply the presence of the one big thing: the interweaving, unifying force, good for a lifetime. Many lifetimes. It suddenly seemed obvious to him -- nobody could work everything out in one lifetime.