His mother and brother were at home when he got there. His
mother had known that it was a holiday and reminded him that he had been told
about it a few days before. The narrator has already explained the strained
relationship between clocks, calendars, time in general, and the dolphin boy.
The boys’ mother said that she had a surprise for both of
them. The surprise for the younger boy was that he had gotten a super-cool Nerf
American football. The boy dolphin was instantly jealous and asked what he
would get. Surely, it would be the even super-cooler Big Wheel tricycle. The
only thing that was way cooler than the super-cool Nerf ball was a Big Wheel.
The mother shook her head and said that they had to share
the ball. The boy’s brother hooted and held the ball up in celebration. The boy
grew furious and slapped the ball out of his brother’s hand. The super-cool
Nerf ball was beginning to change into a hated, worthless piece of trash. The
boys tussled over the ball and finally the mother broke up the fight. She led
the boys outside to the backyard and presented a slightly-used banana-seat
bicycle with high handlebars. His mother told him that the bicycle was his,
that she had bought with the congregation’s money. It was a worrisome shade of
pink, but that was a small detail.
The boy was simultaneously stung with shame and celebration:
shame that he had stooped to petty jealousy over the ball and celebration that
he had his own bicycle. His mother said that he had to learn how to ride the
bike now that he was a big boy. He had skipped over the Big Wheel phase and was
directly going to a big-boy bicycle.
He eagerly wheeled the bike to the front street and tried
getting on the bicycle. It was a bit big for him and he had trouble swinging
his leg over the bar while he held it. He also could barely touch the bottom
pedal when he sat on the very tip of the banana seat. Nevertheless, he learned
to balance while his mother held the sissy bar behind the seat.
After a few pushes with the sissy bar, and a few spills that
involved scraped hands and knees, and mildly sprained ankles, the boy was able
to wobble a few metres down the street on his own.
It happened this way: his mother would push him a few feet
and he would pedal until eventually he picked up speed and then his mother
would drop behind, breathless. He wouldn’t even notice she had stopped holding
the bike and was riding all by himself. Whenever he turned to look for her, he
would invariably wobble to a stop or fall.
By the middle of the afternoon, he was riding down the
incline on one side of the street (so that he didn’t need a push), and turning
around halfway to the trivium (bicycles stay up because they tend to steer into
a lean, which keeps them up, not because of gyroscopic forces) in a U-turn to
come back to the driveway. He would then walk the bike up the incline a bit
past the house and start over.
Several times, cars would approach him from behind or in
front, and he would move as close as possible to cars parked on the side. Each
time he returned to the driveway after such an encounter, his mother would be
in hysterics about “almost dying” from crashing into cars. The boy felt that
his mother was overreacting and that, in the first place, dying was not such a
big loss, and in the second place, he was well in control of the parameters of
controlling the bike. He did not actually say as much, obviously, but kept
these thoughts to himself.
After his mother had gone inside and he was getting better
at riding in loops, a familiar car came up the street from the direction of the
hill. The two boys immediately recognised it as the one that had chased them the
day before and questioned them about the wire brush. They ditched their toys on
the grass in front of the house and ran through the garage and up to the back
yard.
They tried to creep around to the side of the house and
heard adults yelling and arguing. The four adults in the car had gone up to the
door and were now yelling at their mother. Their mother held her ground as she
was entirely capable of defending herself and had done so her whole life. Even
though her children were wild beasts at best, she defended them as strongly and
vehemently as any mother should.
She argued with them about how they even knew that her
children had made the scratches on their car. She argued that they had no proof
of how they had scratched the car. Her arguments faltered a bit when she learnt
that the whole street had been afflicted with scratches, but she regained her
composure and still required evidence.
The adults from the car showed her the driver-side doors of
their beautiful Ford Galaxie. She had to admit that the streaks were childish
but still maintained that anybody could have produced them. The adults alleged
that they had seen the two boys, the very same boys as were in front just now,
holding a wire grill brush. The boys had run away and given them the slip the
day before. Also incriminating them further was the fact that the boys had fled
in terror when the car drove up on them just now.
Their mother correctly stated that the boys were trained to avoid
strangers, which these men in a car clearly were. This was what they were
supposed to do when strangers approached and she was proud of them for doing
the correct thing.
The argument had died down to a conversation by this point
and the boys were unable to follow along any more. Their mother had apparently
made a deal with the four young men and they headed back into the house to find
some recompense in a “party”. The boys hid around the corner of the house for a
while until they heard music playing for a while, then they snuck to the front
yard and gathered the bicycle and Nerf football. They walk-ran as fast as they
could without drawing attention to themselves up the incline, then down the
hill to the park.
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