GAME DAY

Of all the animal carcasses I have seen on my bike rides this summer—snakes, skunk, raccoon, opossum, deer, newt, and a disemboweled frog whose uncrushed leg thrust itself out of a bloated mass of guts like a Swamp Thing appendage—there is none whose final moments of living I enjoy imagining less than the turtle. Something about the cracking of its shell and the crushing of its insides, subsequently reducing it to a flattened oval on the asphalt, makes my skin crawl. I’ve always liked turtles, always liked to watch them shrink into their shells, and thinking of them now brings to mind a cartoon—it may only have ever existed in my mind—from the 1940s that depicted the interior of one of these shells as a posh living room where a green, droopyeyed fellow—the turtle himself—wearing a robe and slippers relaxed in an easy chair with a pipe and a newspaper, suggesting that the inside of the shell was much bigger than it appeared from the outside, an idea which, of course, would make a flattened turtle carcass all that much more disturbing, since who can say that this is not how a turtle feels, more or less, after he retreats into his home? Thanks to a dude at the local bike shop I frequent—a guy who is often wearing a T-shirt printed with the schemata for Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon—I doubt I’ll ever be able to hear the word “carcass” and not remember that it is the name given to the protective interior layer of a bicycle tire—one that safeguards the tire’s sidewalls, which means that the phrase “I am riding on two carcasses” now often enters my head, unbidden, when I’m cycling, as it did a few days ago, when, as I coasted down the mountain, into the valley, I had a bad feeling; on the other side of the two lane, cars were speeding past, sometimes five at a go, with little maroon pennants whipping on plastic sticks affixed to the driver’s and passenger side windows. Inside, humans, mostly senior citizens, wearing clothes imprinted with university-approved logos, were on their way to the stadium. I couldn’t help but think I’d made the wrong decision by traveling this route on game day; though there were no cars headed out of town, there were a great many headed into it. At some point, I would have to turn around and become subsumed by this traffic, which also meant that I would become something of a problem for the drivers of these vehicles, especially if they approached me as I was rounding a sharp curve, since, if they wanted to avoid the possibility of a head-on collision, they’d have to slow down significantly, at least until enough space opened up to safely pass. On any other day, I could’ve kept riding in my current direction; game time was approaching, and traffic would eventually die down. But thanks to the generosity of friends who had left town for the weekend and had to get rid of their tickets, I too was headed to the game, a gladiatorial contest about which I cared very little, aside from the fact that the event embodied the very definition of “spectacle”: a kind of organized madness whose conventions were predictable but no less astonishing, thanks to the staggering enormity of the crowd, which, once the familiar riffs of a popular heavy metal song began to play, would soon be jumping up and down and howling inside a stadium that, what with its stonework and castlelike turrets, was truly colossal. So, eventually, I turned around. Knowing that cars would keep coming, I conscientiously kept to the right side of the road, clinging more or less to the white line that separated travelable road from its shoulder. A honk—sustained enough to sound indignant—made me flinch, and a red car, an American sedan of indeterminate make, passed me; the driver flipped me the bird. Because nothing sends me into an incandescent rage quicker than a bully behind the wheel of a moving vehicle, I flipped him the bird, too, cursed loudly, and began pedaling furiously. I knew it wasn’t likely, but on the very slight chance that he might have to slow down, or stop, I thought I might catch up. I searched every driveway I passed, even though I knew that the people who lived on this road were less likely than those who used it as a thoroughfare to honk and flip people off; cyclists who glide from plateau to the valley are simply part of the world in which they live, and there would be no more sense in flipping off a cyclist than a deer feeding at the road’s edge. I didn’t know what I would say to the guy if I caught up to him, except to ask him, in as self-righteous a timbre as I could muster, what in the holy hell he thought he was doing, and why I, as a cyclist exercising his freedom to make use of one of my local thoroughfares, deserved to be honked at, much less given the bird. Already, my mind was generating assumptions about the bird-flipper: he was a meathead; a country boy; a self-congratulatory right-winger; he had a conceal carry permit; thought climate change was a hoax; used to play a little football himself back in high school; dipped tobacco and trashed the spit bottles before his girlfriend could find them; thought it wasn’t possible, if a driver knew what he was doing, to drive recklessly, no matter how fast he was going; didn’t like having to share the road with anybody, much less cyclists, especially if they fancied themselves serious enough to wear those corny-ass getups that made them look like flaming homos; and didn’t much care for homos, flaming or otherwise, in fact would not disagree with the notion that gays could eat shit and die, or that they played a significant part—as did trans people, immigrants, socialists, hippies, druggies, and Arabs—in of this nation’s moral and spiritual decay. I couldn’t imagine how gratifying it would feel to tell him off, to get in his face and, surging with adrenaline, yell. Of course, if tensions escalated, I’d be a goner—I am not a fighter, and despite constantly getting into tussles and impromptu wrestling matches at the boarding school I attended long ago, I’d never had enough confidence, much less practice, to become a proficient fighter. I wondered then if maybe the driver of the red car was somehow in charge of this situation, that maybe it hadn’t simply been a random bird flip to somebody who presented a less masculine version of himself, and that maybe the guy was waiting for me, like those fabled drivers who skulk around at dusk without headlights and who were actually initiates into “Blood” gangs, waiting for cars to flash their lights at them, an action that the driver of the non-headlight-burning car would respond to by following the headlight flasher, with the intent to claim the initiate’s first murder. Maybe the antagonizing of cyclists was something that the driver of the red car got off on, and if one of the riders he flipped off shot him a retaliatory bird, the driver would park his car up ahead, and find a place to lie in wait, hiding behind a tree or a bush, listening for the zip of approaching bike tires, at which point he would step into the road and swing a crow bar or tire iron at the rider’s head. I imagined glasses shattering, the astonishing burst of pain radiating from the point of impact outward, the skid of flesh against asphalt. I imagined playing dead long enough to hear the squeal of his tires as he pulled away. In such a condition, I wondered if I would be capable of tapping out 911 on the screen of my phone and, despite the blood burbling in my mouth, mumble, “Help.” I would be too scared to touch my face, to learn the extent of the damage, knowing that despite whatever reconstructive magic surgeons might work, I would never be the same again. It may not surprise you to learn that this scenario failed to play itself out, and that the driver of the red car did not see me, nor I him, and no doubt I, as an idiot who would have the nerve to ride a bicycle on a road made for cars, am long forgotten, while the driver of the red car will continue to live a life inside my head, the inside of which, like his own, is far too vast to measure, filled with a stadium’s worth of faces he has seen but never known, and ones that, despite his efforts, he will someday forget.