Read The Coyote's Bicycle for Free Online Page B

between the walls guided only by headlight and depth perception. This was a boy’s experience of navigating the footpaths between these piles and piles of bikes, bikes on top of bikes, machinery without end. For a kid who’d caught the bug of going fast and taking chances, there was nothing to compare it with. The place oozed possibility.
    Sometime before, my first brand-new bike, a white Huffy BMX with blue gel grips and matching rims, had vanished. As the neighborhood rumor mill had it, the Huffy had been stolen by local toughs who’d lifted a manhole cover on an unnamed street and dropped the small bike into the black hole. In my young mind, in my imagination, the bike had fallen like a stone into a dark abyss and continued on forever—through the sewer with the rain and wastewater as if on ajourney to the center of the void. When I saw the bicycle Valhalla of Rye, Arizona, I realized where my personal BMX had ended up. If only I had a compass, I thought, and provisions, and years to search for it.
    About as soon as I lost sight of my family members—we’d all cut our own trails—I encountered a man holding an old motorcycle tank. He was trying to flag down the proprietor. “Hello,” he called, “hello? Anyone running this place?” A gray-bearded man with a lank ponytail stood up from a pyramid of parts about twenty yards away. He wore coveralls and held a carburetor in his left hand.
    â€œWhat’ll you get for this tank?” asked the customer.
    â€œThat’ll be five hundred.”
    â€œI could get the motorcycle for that,” the man said knowingly. “How about fifty?”
    â€œYou asked the price, mister, and I told you.”
    â€œIt’s rusty.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDented.”
    â€œThat too.”
    â€œYou Solomon? Think all this junk is gold?” asked the man. “I’ll give you sixty-five.”
    â€œFive hundred.”
    The customer dropped the tank. It clunked between the frames of bikes. He walked off, disappearing into the metal. The proprietor watched.
    I decided to try my luck. People had a soft spot, I’d learned, for youths. “What about this bike?” I said, pointing to a burnt-orange Schwinn.
    â€œYou don’t have enough, kid,” he said, and bent to his work in the pile. Whatever the cost, he was right, because I didn’t have any. Back in the car, the family exchanged their various encounters with the owner, and we came to the conclusion that All Bikes was not, in fact, a retail operation. It was a hoarder’s paradise, the treasures anobsessive-compulsive had laid up for himself on his acre of heaven in Rye. He didn’t want any of the other kids to have any of it, not one little piece.
    No one deserved to be that lucky, I thought for a long, long time. And decades later, I felt the same way about this Terry Tynan.
    â€œYou can have any one of ’em for twenty, that’s what I sell ’em for at the swap meet. Long as they work; if not, maybe less.”
    Terry, God bless him, was not as particular as the proprietor of All Bikes. Someone dropping by the ranch with a twenty-spot was all the better for Terry. He liked bikes, but he liked to sell them from the same piece of dirt where he’d found them even better. “That’s a pretty good markup, don’t you think?” he asked.
    Within ten minutes of sifting through the possibilities, McCue and I had each mentally separated a bike for ourselves. Still, something inside me reserved the option for a change of heart. There were just so many. And despite our awe at the variety, complexity, and sheer number of his bikes, I’d later come to discover that Terry gleaned what he considered the very best and kept them stored away in a shed right next to the pile for safekeeping. But even if I’d known, I couldn’t have begrudged him because as soon as we’d marveled at his commitment and compulsion