Riddle
My friend wore a rabbit’s foot on a ball-link chain strung through his side belt loop. He squeezed it in his sweaty palm and flipped down the smoky visor, making his face a formless shadow. From the neck up he looked robotish—like a rock’m sock’m boxer.
He sat astride a monstrous bike, a 650 cc Triumph Tiger, 300 feet from the base of a thirty degree incline leading to the wooden floor of the Riddle Bridge. His knuckles went white as he choked and twisted the throttle—2,000 RPMs—then flung open his left hand as if violently baptizing the air with water from his finger tips, letting loose his death grip on the clutch. The die was cast. In an instant he was at the point of no return.
The back wheel found traction after a dozen rotations and the front wheel levitated six inches, then more. The Triumph sped along at that precise angle which keeps the front wheel clawing the air, the rider having found a neutral sliver of space between ground’s attraction and backward momentum…and here he rode an acrobatic, barely in control, ride that looks so cool—a perfectly executed wheelie feels almost supernatural. For 200 feet he scooted along on the back wheel before the front one again found purchase and the journey began in earnest. He was a blur when he reached the top of the incline.
In moments…a moment…a snap…he would shake gravity and be airborne. At the point where the road angled down to merge with the bridge floor he had lift-off. The rider stayed on a straight line path into the sky, cutting through it like a dagger sent sailing by a giant cartoon magnet. The rear wheel spun frantically; knobby tires finding no resistance, only empty air. The high winy sound of the two-stroke engine screamed. His hand, as if transformed into an immovable metal cast, held the throttle open wide.
He had flung his bike off the ramp’s end and was climbing through space toward the overhead cross-beam of a rusted metal arbor arching above Riddle Bridge—that now ancient and creaking blend of rusted metal spanning the Gasconade River. The Riddle was old style, comprising scores of steel beams and thick cables, all woven together in a spider web of triangles—a brilliantly functional and artistic design not seen so much anymore. Today, the cunning and intricate steel montage has been replaced by a grey featureless concrete slab.
My friend and his too powerful (for this maneuver) motorcycle were riding through the empty haze of blue sky at a terrifying speed. His helmeted head was an onyx orb sparkling in the bright summer sun, his leather gloved hands’ defiant fists jabbing the air as they squeezed the bar grips in a futile attempt to guide the missile. Incredibly, he was on target…his trajectory looked perfect. “His goal?” you ask: it was to raise high enough to slap the steel beam at the apex of his flight path…very tricky, this move. He had to release his grip on the handlebar—both hands was the rule—raise his arms touchdown style, and make clear and unmistakable contact with the metal beam. Slap it—make it audible—then, lightning fast, find the handlebar grips again, straighten the front fork and prepare for a teeth jarring arrival on the bridge floor.
We watched without breathing. The bike with the black-stone headed rider was a comet. Contact...smack! We heard it; he hit the cross beam. He hit it hard and dead center…with his head. And it came off—his head…all of it. The bike and Ichabod Crane completed the flight, skidding and tumbling across the bridge’s rough wooden plank floor, coming to rest in the thickets along the road ditch at the far end of the bridge. The body, in repose with the bike, quivered.
But we gave scant notice to the bike and body. We were watching, catatonic, as the helmet—the head’s casket—bounced and rolled toward the edge of the bridge. It was going over. No. We could not let that happen. I snapped to reality (if you can call an urge to chase down a rolling head reality) and dove for the helmet. My fingertips barely brushed the smooth hard plastic before it left the bridge and fell like a cannon ball to its dark-water grave.
My hand flailed in the air as I reached to the limits of my grasp. I brought back—oh God—a hand covered with blood.
The three of us—four had begun this adventure—bowed, as if in prayer, across the cable railings as far as we could and watched in horror as the helmet turned over in the water, its dark, shiny face cover reflecting the sun. The sun’s revealing rays penetrated the visor’s cloudy tint to give us a last image of our friend’s eyes, opened as big as half-dollars. They looked alive still, pleading, as the gentle current of the eddy sucked them under.
♦ ♦ ♦
Epilog…what really happened
The helmet I had chased and dove for was quite empty.
The blood on my hands was a scratch from the jagged boards of the bridge’s floor.
The empty eyes were starbursts glinting on the helmet’s reflective surface…our mind’s eyes obligingly giving us the macabre image we were expecting.
The quivering body…which eventually attracted our attention…still had a head, firmly attached.
Our friend was stunned and rattled, but smiling.
It was the best motorcycle jump I have ever seen, before or since.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Buzzard Hunting
Buzzard Hunting
In the 1950s, I was very young and living in East Texas, in a house at the edge of a town that itself seemed on the edge of a human diorama. From my house I could walk out of a brown grass yard, across a road emitting perpetually swirling dust and light bending heat waves and step onto what seemed an endless prairie. I could walk a short distance further and my small white house with red trimmed windows along with the world outside of my imagination disappeared from my view and my consciousness. The small buttes became mountains in a desert wilderness and the burnt blue sky framed no known horizon—I had entered the chimerical world of a child. Pat and I came here to trap a big bird—to latch onto a bony leg just above a monstrous talon. To do this we had a simple plan.
Buzzards, turkey vultures, were always circling overhead above the rounded, barren buttes. Thousands of feet up they rode thermals on wings spanning six feet...pretty and graceful. It wasn’t until they landed and folded away their elegant wings that the small, slick red head, bowed neck, and suspicious searching gate belied their majesty.
I knew they circled the dead, so I devised a plan for attracting and catching one. My friend Pat and I would spirit away bottles of ketchup from our ice boxes (that’s what we called refrigerators) at home and walk into the prairie and up the side of a butte. We would find a sun baked sandstone boulder and lie across it with ketchup dripping from our heads and arms. The buzzards would assume we were dead and begin to circle, eventually they would spiral down. We knew if we were patient enough they would land and try to pick our bones. It is then we would lash out and catch one. What we would do next was not planned; luring the buzzard, bringing it close enough to grab its crooked neck just below its tiny noggin was my only objective—tricking the buzzard was the thing.
We lay for a long time, breathing with shallow breaths to minimize movement. At last, eight-year-old Pat, in his Texas hick manner of speaking, said, “this ain’t never gonna work, Billy.”
“Yes it will. Now shut up, Pat,” I said. “Buzzards can see a mouse twitch its whiskers a mile away; they’ll see your lips move!” (Actually buzzards have unspectacular sight; it is their sense of smell that brings them to dinner…the putrid aroma of decaying flesh wafting along hot air currents is like to us an open window to a bakery.) Through squinted eyes and with great expectations we watched, ignoring trickling sweat and buzzing flies. One or two buzzards flew above us, passing by. No circle of birds ever formed. They were neither hungry nor fooled. In twenty minutes—a very long time to lay across hard rock in the blistering Texas sun—we gave up playing corpse, packed up our ketchup bottles and headed home. I assumed for a long time after that it was Pat talking or our impatience that foiled the hunt. In truth, I suppose it takes more than ketchup and an inert living body to fool a buzzard; very fortunate for us, I would learn later.
When I was a grown man, my Dad told me his buzzard story.
Dad grew up on a small farm in rural Texas in the 1930s. He had a neighbor that plowed rough dry ground with a three bottom plow and a mule. His neighbor was old (fifty maybe), rail thin, creased like an ancient desert Indian, and looked perpetually weary. He would plow long straight furrows in the hot sun for hours, then take a break and lie down in the shade of his mule, left hitched, for a short nap.
One day the neighbor must have been particularly done in because he fell into such a deep sleep he didn’t hear or sense the buzzard alight next to him. The mule did, and he danced in place nervously, only the weight of the plow preventing him from bolting. It would have been better if he had; then the old man may have awakened. But he didn’t. The old man slept like Rip Van Winkle as the buzzard strutted toward him. The sleeping man moved not at all…withered and dead he seemed through the buzzard’s beady eyes. The curious bird thought he caught the slightest delicious aroma of carrion. He sidled toward the sleeping farmer, growing more confident. Buzzards are not all that sharp, just macho. He hesitated only a moment before his neck sprang like a frog’s tongue after a hovering dragonfly. That quick he decided on eyeball for lunch. The old man stirred now, but not as fast as you might think. He awoke thinking he was in the throes of a headache from the sun now hitting his face when he saw, with one eye I suppose, the turkey vulture take flight with something dangling from its beak, glinting in the sun. The farmer’s boney hand went to the left side of his face to feel the blood stream at the same time that he closed his right eye to test the horrifying theory just dawning—that the buzzard had flown away with the left eye. It had.
This was, my Dad insisted, a true story. Man, I obviously didn’t know enough about buzzards to try hunting them that day long ago. What if one had landed on that sandstone next to me…would he have had my eye before I, his neck? Had we fooled them…there would be a story.
In the 1950s, I was very young and living in East Texas, in a house at the edge of a town that itself seemed on the edge of a human diorama. From my house I could walk out of a brown grass yard, across a road emitting perpetually swirling dust and light bending heat waves and step onto what seemed an endless prairie. I could walk a short distance further and my small white house with red trimmed windows along with the world outside of my imagination disappeared from my view and my consciousness. The small buttes became mountains in a desert wilderness and the burnt blue sky framed no known horizon—I had entered the chimerical world of a child. Pat and I came here to trap a big bird—to latch onto a bony leg just above a monstrous talon. To do this we had a simple plan.
Buzzards, turkey vultures, were always circling overhead above the rounded, barren buttes. Thousands of feet up they rode thermals on wings spanning six feet...pretty and graceful. It wasn’t until they landed and folded away their elegant wings that the small, slick red head, bowed neck, and suspicious searching gate belied their majesty.
I knew they circled the dead, so I devised a plan for attracting and catching one. My friend Pat and I would spirit away bottles of ketchup from our ice boxes (that’s what we called refrigerators) at home and walk into the prairie and up the side of a butte. We would find a sun baked sandstone boulder and lie across it with ketchup dripping from our heads and arms. The buzzards would assume we were dead and begin to circle, eventually they would spiral down. We knew if we were patient enough they would land and try to pick our bones. It is then we would lash out and catch one. What we would do next was not planned; luring the buzzard, bringing it close enough to grab its crooked neck just below its tiny noggin was my only objective—tricking the buzzard was the thing.
We lay for a long time, breathing with shallow breaths to minimize movement. At last, eight-year-old Pat, in his Texas hick manner of speaking, said, “this ain’t never gonna work, Billy.”
“Yes it will. Now shut up, Pat,” I said. “Buzzards can see a mouse twitch its whiskers a mile away; they’ll see your lips move!” (Actually buzzards have unspectacular sight; it is their sense of smell that brings them to dinner…the putrid aroma of decaying flesh wafting along hot air currents is like to us an open window to a bakery.) Through squinted eyes and with great expectations we watched, ignoring trickling sweat and buzzing flies. One or two buzzards flew above us, passing by. No circle of birds ever formed. They were neither hungry nor fooled. In twenty minutes—a very long time to lay across hard rock in the blistering Texas sun—we gave up playing corpse, packed up our ketchup bottles and headed home. I assumed for a long time after that it was Pat talking or our impatience that foiled the hunt. In truth, I suppose it takes more than ketchup and an inert living body to fool a buzzard; very fortunate for us, I would learn later.
When I was a grown man, my Dad told me his buzzard story.
Dad grew up on a small farm in rural Texas in the 1930s. He had a neighbor that plowed rough dry ground with a three bottom plow and a mule. His neighbor was old (fifty maybe), rail thin, creased like an ancient desert Indian, and looked perpetually weary. He would plow long straight furrows in the hot sun for hours, then take a break and lie down in the shade of his mule, left hitched, for a short nap.
One day the neighbor must have been particularly done in because he fell into such a deep sleep he didn’t hear or sense the buzzard alight next to him. The mule did, and he danced in place nervously, only the weight of the plow preventing him from bolting. It would have been better if he had; then the old man may have awakened. But he didn’t. The old man slept like Rip Van Winkle as the buzzard strutted toward him. The sleeping man moved not at all…withered and dead he seemed through the buzzard’s beady eyes. The curious bird thought he caught the slightest delicious aroma of carrion. He sidled toward the sleeping farmer, growing more confident. Buzzards are not all that sharp, just macho. He hesitated only a moment before his neck sprang like a frog’s tongue after a hovering dragonfly. That quick he decided on eyeball for lunch. The old man stirred now, but not as fast as you might think. He awoke thinking he was in the throes of a headache from the sun now hitting his face when he saw, with one eye I suppose, the turkey vulture take flight with something dangling from its beak, glinting in the sun. The farmer’s boney hand went to the left side of his face to feel the blood stream at the same time that he closed his right eye to test the horrifying theory just dawning—that the buzzard had flown away with the left eye. It had.
This was, my Dad insisted, a true story. Man, I obviously didn’t know enough about buzzards to try hunting them that day long ago. What if one had landed on that sandstone next to me…would he have had my eye before I, his neck? Had we fooled them…there would be a story.
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