Free Gypsy Davey by Chris Lynch

can go to the quarry and find nobody there and I can scream, loud enough and long enough so that I nearly pass out, and then I can stand there and listen to myself scream back at me. But on a Saturday afternoon you don’t find nobody at the quarry, you find a bunch of kids drinking beer in tall cans and pony bottles, smashing the bottles on rocks right near me with a pop like dropping a lightbulb. Kids with air rifles who shoot frogs in the water and who see a kid like me and start to run in my direction and say things like “Hmmm humm, maybe we ought to get the pants off of this young man and see what we got.” So I didn’t stay but a couple of minutes at the quarry before I pedaled so hard my great mountain bike that I got from my dad that I kicked up rocks and a cloud of quarry dust big as a hot air balloon.
    I rode the ten miles back into town, which is where I spent the rest of the time. Riding, looking at everybody. Riding up close to the little kids at the park because I cannot get enough of little kids at parks. I could go on watching that, little kids playing on the swings and slides and turtles mounted on great big springs that coil up out of the ground, I could watch it forever even if I wasn’t on my bike. I smilethere like no place else in the world just because I can’t help it. I can feel the difference in my face, the muscles all stretched out and tired at the corners of my mouth and on the balls of my cheekbones. And they like me back, little kids, because they run up to me and slap the fence with sticks and poke their tongues out at me and smile just as big as I do. But every time, I feel it, and I have to go. The deep heat of the stares I’m getting from the mothers who are sitting on the benches and sipping diet tonics and talking to each other but looking at me. And they’re all now scowling, or frightened, and then one or two or four of them stand up and inch their way my way and I have to go before they reach me.
    But I think I saw just about everything in town last weekend. That’ll happen when you ride for twenty-four hours. A lot of those hours though, the latest ones and the earliest ones especially, there’s not much to see except in the places Ma tells me not to go. “There.” Don’t go “there,” she tells me. Stay out of “there.” But I realized a while ago that there was about half the world I’d never see if I didn’t pass through “there” sometimes, so I started doing it.
    Turned out she was wrong about it anyway. Except for one time when they made a little circle around me, these guys with the sunglasses and baseball hats, and one of them said “Maybe , you’re gonna hafta give up the cycle, junior.” Well I just sat there on the bike and I looked at him and I didn’t say a thing. I slowly crouched down low over thehandlebars, practically lying on the bike the way a jockey does with his horse, and I wrapped my arms around it. I kept looking up at the man. Because he couldn’t have it, whether he was one big scary man—which he was—or six big scary men with their arms folded across their chests—which they were. They could not have the bike. It was then just as it is now and will be tomorrow, that you can take my bike if you have to take it but you’re going to have to take my life along with it. Because that’s what you’d be doing anyway, taking my life when you took my bike.
    So I got to keep it, I guess because I made everybody laugh so much the way I hugged onto my bike like I was going to keep it from them. “Go on now, goofy kid,” the man said to me. His name was Lester, and I did go on when he told me to.
    But I went back. I passed through there all the time, sometimes day and sometimes night, because I was forever riding and there are just not enough places in this world to ride if you ride forever. Unless you ride out and don’t come back.