Free The Push & the Pull by Darryl Whetter Page B

bag of fine white powder.
    Andrew has never done anything close to cycling one hundred kilometres a day, day after day, so he can’t say whether it’s the drain of constant exertion or the prison camp of cycling shorts and saddle that has suddenly plucked sex from his thoughts. Six, seven, eight hours with nothing to think about, and for the first time since he was twelve, sex is not the steady hum beneath each thought, not the rising crescendo of every half-hour. He’s worried, absolutely. Before setting out, he considered, but did not buy, an expensive anti-impotency saddle with an accommodating trough running up its middle. If Betty’s flying back, and if he makes it home on schedule, he should still have a week or two to heal. Heal for what, he doesn’t know.
    Alongside the worry, though, there’s also novelty. Is this what life is like at fifty-nine, just three flaccid inches? Without his semi-hourly half-erection he realizes he can barely feel the thing. More than once he has reached down to his damp, warm crotch for a confirming probe.
    At night — bone-ratchet, carbo-loading night — he peels off the snug Lycra shorts as soon as he can. If he camps near the road, he’ll slip into hiking shorts or, in a chill, the rain pants. But if his campsite is secluded, he delights in a southern jailbreak, working pantless as he sets up the tent, his pouch swaying as he stoops to stir dinner or tend the fire. His isolation is measured here not just by his naked crotch but also by the socks, fleece jacket and toque he keeps on. Pantless but wearing socks — here is the official uniform of isolation.
    Originally, the chilly May air may have prompted the mild slapping and whacking that now marks the end of supper. Whatever took his large, open hands to the crate of his hips and pike soldier quads, they return largely out of amazement at the perpetual hardening of glute, quad and calf. Whose body is this?
    The bike frame usurps bone. All naked tubes and gracile strength, it is a second skeleton, and it stirs a sexual revolution in his. For seven, eight, sometimes nine hours, his nose rides closer to the ground as he de-evolves into a prowling mammal. The crotch is the fulcrum of this transforming body.
    With the legs constantly pumping under the rock overhang of stomach, the forest of pubic hair has quickly eroded into a saltwater marsh. Each night, he attempts to undo the day’s swampy erosion with a dose of soothing, arid powder.
    Obviously he didn’t buy baby powder. That’s the last thing this youth wants on his crotch. Just add water and . . . He stood in a brightly lit pharmacy, perfectly dry down south but thinking forward to the Petri dish that would soon be his crotch. There it was: Gold Bond Triple Action Medicated Body Powder. He had no idea that killing bacteria could feel so good.
    Of course, in the crucible of weight and space that is the bike, he didn’t pack the whole Gold Bond canister. Pouring the medicated powder into three tiny sealable bags, he thought equally of cocaine and of seventeenth-century flour, explorers with their precious burlap sacks of flour threatened by every river-crossing and storm. Out here on the road, he wonders if Cabot, Cartier or Champlain also became addicted to dusting his pole.
    Slapping his wide hands into his pillared thighs or the cliff of a buttock, hefting, whacking, Andrew climbs into the tent and stretches out in the narrow sleeping bag. Unable to spread his legs significantly in the sleeping bag, he rolls his heels together and apart. Each long leg rolls in then out, folding and unfolding the raccoon mask of his pelvis. His right hand, the more eager of two brothers, sweeps down stomach to thigh, while the calculating left reaches for the bag of magic powder.
    Refining this new, dry sensation, he has taken to sprinkling the powder onto the top of each thigh then driving inward. Starting from the stomach loses too much to the