Free Just North of Nowhere by Lawrence Santoro

on it, Bunch figured the bike probably had fallen off the bridge.
    He pictured the guy who probably owned it: There the guy was, taking a leak off the rail; there his bike goes, rolling down the bank. And there's the guy, a terrorist, probably; probably too clean to come down to the river to fetch back his own damn bike. And there the out-of-towner goes, figuring, “Oh well, I'll just buy me another one back in whatever city I come from.”
    Yeah, that's it , Bunch figured.
    The bike was barely broken. It straightened out nice. Bunch was good, mending.
    The bike was one of the most useful damn things had come along in a pretty long while. Last couple weeks that season, Bunch rode up and down town every day. For a time, he looked over his shoulder every couple of pedal shoves, half expecting to see the owner, running, pointing fingers, flexing store-bought muscles, dragging Vinnie the cop, shouting “There it is! There's my property!”
    Bunch could damn-near hear!
    Never happened.
    And the damn thing was pure use. Bunch used it to tote tools in a back sack when he started the new roof over by the Sons of Norway Lodge. He hauled screws, tape and mud-mix, in the same sack, dry-walling out at Valley View Bed and Breakfast. A couple times that season, Bunch swapped lawn-mowing chores for the use of little Whendol Rifkin's Radio Flyer wagon. Whendol didn't use the Flyer since he'd gotten big and bold and gone to play ball over at the Consolidated School and Bunch probably could have had the kid's wagon, permanent, for the asking, but what the hell would Bunch do with a kid's wagon permanent? Besides, mowing grass was pleasurable, smelled good, and was worth doing just for its own damnself.
    With Whendol's Flyer wagon tied behind his bike, Bunch dragged stuff everywhere: Paint, groceries; the widow Yeltz's cat—hauled to Doc Dog's place over to Harmony, twice that summer alone!
    And the bike was a pleasure. When he got over the worry about someone coming for the damn thing, he used it to chase terrorists off the streets or from the railroad rightyway had turned into a damn State hikey-bikey trail the last dozen years.
    Bunch also kept the out-of-towners from coming down his side of the river and from bothering that old house across the way. He sure as hell did at least that much, kept folks from things they didn't know better about! If anyone had asked, Bunch especially liked rolling down on city people at sunset. He'd give big-eyed hoots, scare the crap out of whole families for a second or two, then be gone, rattling around the bend, vanished like a spook.
    He enjoyed it, and nobody minded too much.
    “Bunch? Ah, heck, you can't mind him!” Karl Dorbler over at the Wurst Haus told the tourists as he weighed out their wienies on the scale. “Oh no, there! Bunch, he's local color, you know, ha, ha!”
    For the information, Karl thumbed a couple extra ounces on the scale. “Local color! Yep.”
    The damn bike gave him use all summer.
    Bunch figured the thing might be a pain in the ass when the deep snows came. Wouldn’t be in the way. Not exactly. He just figured he’d feel funny looking at it every morning, it being left out to cold and weather. Figuring further, he figured to winter the thing in the Italian Woman's shed.
    Then one morning, before he had a chance to ask her, the Italian Woman came to him.
    He was at his stool at the Eats, and she came up, stuck her hip out and propped her hand on it. “You,” she asked, “You will help me remove my small outbuilding, yes?”
    “Huh,” Bunch said.
    “The small one in the upper part of my yard? You will.” Didn't so much ask as tell him, but it sounded almost like asking.
    “Now that's a good shed!” Bunch said.
    “I don’t want it,” she said.
    “It's got that pretty good picture of carnival folk on it.” Bunch said, thinking of the wide-eyed dark woman clothed in slithering snaky monsters! He liked that poster picture.
    “It disturbs my thinking,” she