John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

“Pick cotton, and it’s time to look for snakes.”

That sounded like nonsense, of a piece with the lingerie and the Crystal Light. Then Hunter spotted two men holding hands by the wall.

“I know who you remind me of,” Buck said.

“Who?” Hunter shut his eyes to brace himself for the shame that he and Buck would both feel if Buck turned out to be the man. He isn’t, Hunter told himself. Wrong name, wrong face, wrong everything.

He opened his eyes to find that Buck’s dumbfounded expression hadn’t changed.

“It was up in Kalispell, Montana. Middle of winter, blizzard conditions, but we figured out how to stay warm.”

“How old was he?”

“About like you.”

“Is this how you picked him up, too?”

“Honestly, I doubt I had to try as hard.”

Hunter glanced at the form sticking out of his journal. All he needed was a signature. Whoever Buck was, he would probably forge one in return for a kiss or something. They could even laugh together about Hunter’s thinking Buck was his dad, Hunter was telling himself when he heard, “Case you change your mind,” and saw Buck slip him a business card that read Arthur Flynn, National Park Service Ranger .

He stopped breathing. “What’s with your finger?” Buck said, because Hunter’s right ring finger was dangling limply as he picked up the card.

“Cycling injury.”

“Well, call me,” Buck said, and then he walked in back.

Sensing scrutiny from all sides, Hunter stopped breathing. Did all the men want him? Or were they laughing at his stupid hope that Buck would be worth talking to? The air thinned, the walls closed in. It was like his mother’s Lord was doubling down on the illusion, pressing his face into it, a face he wished to inspect for similarities to Buck’s. Did the sickle curve in Buck’s jawline resemble Hunter’s, now that he’d chiseled himself down to competition weight? Girls at school had started whispering about him, which had given him a shivery thrill. Now he only felt sick.

He laid two dollars on the bar. Back in the parking lot he called his mother collect from a pay phone. He’d lied that there was a bike race, and now he told Emily he and Cody had tied for second place. “Some twerp from Utah beat us. How are you feeling?”

“Better now that Joseph is here,” she said.

“Isn’t it kind of late?”

“He’s been worried about me.” She sounded warmed by the idea. “It’s more than just the wreck; there’s something else.”

“The prize was a thousand bucks,” he said, to test her reaction.

“Will you and Cody split it?”

“We each get our own.”

“Congratulations,” she said again, too neutrally to indicate much. Did she know about the petition somehow? He’d been hoping not to tell her about the proceeding until it was over. To obtain her signature, he’d disguised the form as a permission slip for a race.

“In the morning we’re riding our bikes down the Grand Canyon,” he said.

“That sounds beautiful. But be careful.”

“We’ll wear our seatbelts,” Hunter said, and then quickly hung up, feeling mean for making fun of her like that.

Was Cody rubbing off on him, he wondered, driving back to the motel? What had come over him? Did he believe it had been Emily’s idea for Buck to flirt with him at a bar? She could have warned him; she must have known Hunter would go looking someday. She could have argued for a different name. He turned Pearl Jam up loud. Trying to feel better, he drummed all his fingers but one to the beat. His right ring finger drooped lifelessly against the wheel, same as every day since the evening when he’d swapped out his toe clips for clipless pedals. He’d been waiting for Cody to come ride. Tugging with a wrench, he couldn’t get the pedal axle to budge. He grabbed the opposite crank, pulled hard. When the axle finally gave, the force slammed his hand down onto a chain tooth.

The metal cut straight through to white bone. Hunter fainted at the sight. When he came to, his mother was kneeling beside him, applying pressure to staunch blood that wasn’t real. It was a test of their faith, and it lasted until Cody showed up and drove Hunter to the hospital.

“Are you totally insane?” he said on the drive.

“I hardly feel it,” Hunter replied, still woozy.

The ER doctor, who said Hunter had sliced his tendon in two, sewed the wound up and referred him to an orthopedic clinic. By the time that office opened, Hunter still hadn’t asked for his mother’s consent for surgery. You couldn’t be made of matter if you reflected God’s nature. Afraid the question would erect a wall between them, he let it go. The tendon retreated up his arm, or appeared to, and his finger dangled limply from then on.

“Talk to him?” said Cody, back at the Motel 6.

Hunter held up his journal as if it contained the signature.

“Sweet. What’s Pussy Senior like?”

“Kind of fat,” said Hunter, knowing how quickly Cody lost interest in people who weren’t in riding shape.

“That’s lame. I found us a sick ride.”

“I found a sicker one,” said Hunter, piquing Cody’s curiosity. Where? Who’d told him? His dad? Some wino? A pro cyclist visiting the Center for High Altitude Training? Juli Furtado? Tinker Juarez? Hunter refused to answer until the eleven o’clock news, which confirmed that the US government had suspended its operations, and the entire park system was closed indefinitely to both visitors and rangers.

All the way up US 180, over blasting Metallica, Cody shouted into the predawn dark that they would be devirginizing the canyon. Not until they veered around the shut gate through a stand of pinyon pines did he quiet the music and fall silent as if in uncharacteristic reverence. A glorious sunrise was igniting the canyon prongs. “It’s surreal,” Hunter said, full of a strange unease, as if his mother was right, and his survival on the ride down depended on faith that the land was make-believe.

“Yes, another lovely painting this morning,” Cody said. He was masking his awe, thought Hunter. He didn’t want to admit that the world could seem too beautiful to be real.

“Think we’ll be arrested?” Hunter asked in the empty trailhead lot, pouring water into his bottles.

“Everest used to be off limits to climbers, too.”

“Is that a no?”

“It angered the gods. I say fuck that.”

He almost wished Cody would fear arrest, so he could pull out Buck’s card and say, Here’s how I know we’re safe. If he mentioned Buck out of context, it would seem like he needed to talk about him.

A solitary hawk was circling as they aired up their tires. They loaded their saddlebags. Hunter led the way into a stand of cliff-rose. The leaves of those twisty trees pricked him and made him shiver in the warm air. He wheelied over a fallen pine. Barely had he landed again before the world fell out from under him and he was soaring downhill, almost too fast to control.

To keep from flying over the bars, he hung back with his weight behind the saddle. The path narrowed to the width of his tires. Before him gaped miles of empty space. He leaned hard left. Over the wind Cody’s screams sounded like thrill-cries, changing in intensity so many times that Hunter paused at a wide place in the trail in case it meant something sinister.

Straddling his bike, he counted mesas that rose between him and the snowy North Rim. All part of the illusion, he was musing when Cody came careening around a bend. He skidded halfway to a halt before knocking Hunter over.

“What the fuck?” Cody said, as Hunter untangled himself from his bike.

“You screamed like you were in trouble.”

“You were winning again, dickface.”

“I’m only riding,” he said.