Stop Breakin Down: Stories by John McManus

Author:John McManus [McManus, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2000-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

They formed a rotating double paceline. He stayed in the seventeen-tooth cog and relaxed and worked his way forward in the column as the front riders drifted back to refasten themselves onto the tail of the lines. The wind pressed against his cheekbones and he could feel it constant in his sinuses as empty air moved through them. Warring clouds were general upon the white skyline. The wheel he followed swerved suddenly to the right and flew behind him and he was in front, and he felt the spearhead of resistant wind against his head and torso and up-shifted to maintain the group’s pace and breathed deeply to combat his cramping stomach. He counted the seconds, and they crept in excruciation toward their end, and after half a minute he fell back and hooked onto the rear.

He looked at the cattle in the field beside him, and they looked back at him and tossed their mouths in ovals.

Brake, someone yelled.

Everyone was stopping. Jay screeched to a halt and in doing so slid sideways and undipped his left foot in time to right himself from landing on the road. The two riders in front had crashed. There were three down, four, tangled up in each other’s bikes and bodies. They had been going thirty, maybe thirty-five; it was a slight downslope. Jay clipped back into his pedals but there was no path through the men down and riders were standing across the road blocking it, and Jay dismounted and thrust his bike onto his shoulder and he was in the high grass running, and they were all running, and in the ditch he ran past the crashed riders and their blood and the gravel embedded in their red road rashes as their bruises rose up purple-red against the surface of their skin and they cried out in pain and lesions formed beside furious wheels spinning and their trapped legs beat against spokes.

He rode to catch the men ahead of him and men behind him rode to catch his own wheel. There were seven of them. A new paceline formed. The blond man wasn’t there; Jay looked up into the distance and saw a dot speeding around a curve. He had broken away. The blond man was going to win and the feed zone was still ahead of them and the man would steal any bottle he wanted. Jay saw red blue and yellow flashes of anger. They rode silently but swiftly. Jay wanted to keep the gap between them and the riders who had been blocked behind them, and he took the lead and scissored against the wind at twenty-six miles per hour for three minutes straight before he fell back and finally allowed himself the luxury of the slipstream, lurking behind the foreign muscles that now propelled him, exhausted and anaerobic.

There is no pain. You are receding.

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