Thrillville, USA by Taylor Koekkoek

Author:Taylor Koekkoek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

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I RIPPED BACK up the trail, took the service road, and forty-five minutes later I was busting ass on the empty highway. I’d left my windbreaker behind, tied around the trunk of a young pine to mark the entrance to the service road. I had my phone out, looking for reception bars to appear. Burns sits at the edge of what’s sometimes called Oregon’s empty quarter, the untenanted southeast quadrant of the state, a vast, aboriginal nothingness for the next two hundred miles or more. I was starting to think I’d made the wrong decision. I should have taken the trail maybe, taken the truck back to town at a hundred miles an hour. In fact, I couldn’t remember deciding on my present course of action at all, or by what logic I’d arrived at the plan. An hour ago I was a totally different person. Maybe I wouldn’t get cell service until I got all the way to Burns, and Burns, by bike, was at least a three, four-hour ride. Rod was in the dark now, maybe aspirating for all I knew, wondering if he’d been forgotten. I was trying to do math at high speed. If I turned back, I could make it to the trailhead and the truck in—I wasn’t sure—maybe an hour by the highway, but I’d still have to make the drive. However I looked at it, I thought I was screwed. I pedaled on with the unbearable feeling that I was pedaling in the wrong direction.

It’s awful that it required a disaster first, but I decided now that Rod obviously belonged to the highest order of men who’d ever lived. Not elitist, just elite, supreme. Generous and humble, kind and rich, with a tremendous capacity for grace and a remarkable body for a man of his late forties. I remembered a dinner party years ago at Andi and Rod’s. My wife and I were both there, and a partner of Rod’s from the clinic came with his wife, along with another couple that left zero impression on me whatsoever. We’d just finished an incredible meal. Andi was pouring wine like a frat boy. She had a little parrot in those pre-children days, which sat on his perch at the window, calling out, “Cookie, cookie.” We lazed about reclined and overfull on the couches and traded our heartfelt experiences so far of aging—debts coming due on years of bad posture, a now-familiar susceptibility to world-ending hangovers, the gentle, steady goodness of a heart that wasn’t on fire all the time. I asked Rod if he remembered how, as a young man, he could press up from an L-sit on the floor straight into a handstand. My uncle goaded him into it once when he was in his early twenties, at a family function. I was just a boy and it had amazed me then. Rod thought about my question for a moment, then, saying nothing, set his wineglass down on the windowsill, sat

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