If Bicycle had blinked while biking through Illinois, she might have missed it. She traveled through the very bottom of the state, where it came to a point, so two days of riding took her from one border to the other. Before she could get accustomed to Illinois’s open fields and grand old houses, she was biking over the Mississippi River. She wasn’t quite halfway across the country, but crossing the Mighty Mississippi was a milestone to celebrate. She stopped on the big metal bridge and gazed down at the wide swath of muddy water rushing far beneath her feet. Griffin hummed a patriotic song, and Bicycle solemnly saluted the rippling waves below. Clunk dropped a screw into the water.
On the other side, a green sign with curlicue writing announced WELCOME TO MISSOURI—THE SHOW-ME STATE.
Griffin shouted, “That’s right! Show me my hometown! Show me the fried-pie shop!”
Around dinnertime, Bicycle pulled out the other oversize postcard Chef Marie had given her and saw that she was near a SlowDown Café. She told a passing man on a tractor the address, and he directed her toward the next street. The café had a blackboard out front with the words NEW RIDE-UP WINDOW chalked on it, with an arrow pointing around the side of the building. It looked like Chef Marie’s café managers weren’t wasting any time trying out the new idea for attracting customers.
Bicycle coasted up to order her food. The ride-up window was clearly nothing more than a regular window in the kitchen that the chef had slid open. She showed her Free Eats card over the sill and was surprised when the chef said he’d been hoping she’d stop by—Chef Marie had called and told him to be on the lookout for her. He handed Bicycle a heaping plate of the daily special, a crawfish meatloaf with asparagus and mashed potatoes. She balanced her plate on her handlebars with one hand and pushed Clunk around back to look for a picnic table. Three of the seven tables were already taken, two by groups of cyclists, and one by a couple who had come on horseback. Bicycle smiled to herself. Word about the ride-up café was spreading already.
She finished every bite of her dinner, licking the last of the potatoes right off the plate with a contented hiccup. Reluctant to leave such a hospitable spot, Bicycle set up camp next to a picnic table that night.
When she awoke the next morning, she waited until the chef opened shop for the day and ordered the breakfast special—lemon waffles and chicken-apple sausages.
“Let’s get go-ing, let’s get go-ing, let’s get go-ing!” chanted Griffin while she ate outside. “We’re in the Ozark Mountains now, we’re getting real close!”
Bicycle finished swallowing a maple-syrupy mouthful and grumbled at Griffin, “Look, I have to eat if I’m going to pedal us anywhere, so just hold on.”
Griffin tried to be patient while she ate, but he kept asking, “Are you done now? How about now? Now? Can you eat faster?”
Finally, she gave up trying to eat. “Okay, okay, let’s get you home, Griffin G. Griffin,” she said, folding up her leftovers in a napkin. Right before she left, the chef came out with a paper sack of extra breakfast goodies, calling it a “Feed Bag,” and said Chef Marie had asked all the cafés to provide them to her. Bicycle added her leftovers to the sack and gratefully packed it up. She knew Chef Marie had said hope was a precious gift, but gifts of free food had to be just as precious. Probably more. Bicycle thought hope could take care of itself when her bike was stocked with homemade waffles.
The Ozark Mountains didn’t seem exactly like a mountain range to Bicycle; they were more like a monster-sized roller coaster. There were lots of short, steep hills placed very close together. Bicycle could race down one hill and then coast almost to the top of the next one before she had to pedal again. It was a grand way to bike.
“It hasn’t changed a bit, not a bit!” said Griffin as they roller-coastered along. Bicycle found this hard to believe, but she was full of waffles and in a good mood, so rather than argue with him, she said, “Yes?” and let him talk.
“The mountains go up and the mountains go down, same like I remember! It’s better on a bike than walking ’em, though, and more fun to be heading back to Green Marsh than it was to be walking off to war. And there’s trees, just like I remember! Trees!”
Bicycle was happy Griffin could find so much that made him feel at home. For every modern gas station or parking lot, the ghost also noticed old-fashioned fishing holes and kids playing ball. He cajoled her to stop and try something called a grasshopper shake, which he was sure would be full of grasshoppers. When she reported it was made from mint ice cream, he howled with laughter. When they camped at dusk, he begged her to catch spring fireflies. She put them in an empty water bottle to make a lantern, then let the entire twinkling bunch go at once to scatter in the darkness.
On the afternoon of their third Missouri day and twenty-fifth day overall, they coasted into Green Marsh. Griffin chattered the whole way into town. “Well, that farm over there, that was Old Man Roy’s—he was mean as twelve snakes in a sack. And that notch over there, that’s the top of a good trail for trapping raccoons. That mountain, that’s where I spent my first night camping. And those clouds, the big puffy ones, those are the exact same clouds I used to see, I swear!”
When Bicycle pedaled up Main Street, Griffin was almost yelling about the things he recognized.
“That’s right where the schoolhouse was, right there! Looks like it’s a post office now. And that place that says Pet Shop, that used to be the general store—you could get everything there, clothes and candy and shovels and string. Boy, things sure have changed!”
“I thought you said everything was the same,” Bicycle teased.
“Well, it’s both! I know that tree over there, and that lilac bush…”
Bicycle was half listening when she noticed that not a single shop was open. Not a single person was on the street. Colorful ribbons and streamers were draped from the streetlamps, so the street had a festive feeling, but the complete silence was more than a little sinister. “Griffin,” she interrupted, “where is everyone?”
“Huh?” He paused in his reminiscing. “You’re right. Where is everyone?”
“I haven’t seen anyone since we pedaled into town.” Bicycle heard a sort of rumbling behind them. She turned to see a cloud of dust puffing up one of the side streets. “I wonder what that could be?” she said, shading her eyes with her hand and squinting toward it.
Griffin listened. “Last time I heard a rumbling like that must have been the pig stampede in ’59 when Old Man Roy’s pigs escaped from their pen and stormed the schoolyard…” He trailed off. “Oh no,” he said in a small, horrified voice. Then he started shouting. “Bicycle, get out of the street! Get out now! I mean it, now! Pigs!”
“Griffin, get a hold of yourself,” Bicycle said. “Pigs? Why should I worry about pigs? They’re no taller than my knee, nothing to worry about—Aieeeeeeeeeee!”
Rounding the corner was a landslide of enormous pigs running at top speed toward Bicycle. They covered the entire road, pressed up snout to shoulder, a solid wave of pink-and-brown pig flesh. The rumbling sound of their trotters grew to a pounding thunder. Dust flew in all directions.
There was no time to ride to safety. Bicycle tried to jump off Clunk and get out of the way, but one sock caught on the edge of a pedal. She jerked her foot sideways in a panic. “Griffin, help!” she shouted. The dust started to swirl around her, blinding her. Then she was flying through the air and everything went dark.
When she opened her eyes, it was still dark, but the kind of dark that meant nighttime instead of unconscious. She was lying on a soft bed next to a window with a quilt tucked up under her chin. She sat up in the unfamiliar shadows. “Hello?” she called out. “Is anyone there? Griffin?” No answer. She pushed the quilt off and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She felt a little dizzy, so she sat still until the feeling passed. She noticed a sliver of light poking under the bottom of a door. She got up and pushed on the brass doorknob.
The door creaked open to a large room with well-polished logs forming the walls and wooden beams crossing the ceiling. An old man sat in a rocking chair reading a cookbook. His skin was as wrinkled as a peach pit crossed with a prune.
He looked up at Bicycle’s approach and his face wrinkled even farther with a smile. “You’re awake! I’ll be a monkey’s great-granduncle. I didn’t think we’d be seeing you until morning.” He put down the cookbook and rose slowly to his feet.
Bicycle walked over to him, and he offered her his hand.
“Jeremiah’s the name,” he said, shaking her hand. “And you are…?”
“Bicycle,” she answered. “What happened? Where is my bike? Where am I?”
“Let’s have some hot chocolate.” Jeremiah started slowly toward the kitchen. “Not often I get an excuse to stay up late and have hot chocolate.”
In the kitchen, he puttered over a pan with some milk and cocoa powder. Bicycle sat at a table covered in sloppy stacks of cookbooks. One was open and had some handwritten notes in the margin: Meat fillings: Buffalo? Polish sausage? Frog legs? She cleared a space for two mugs when Jeremiah brought them over to the table.
“Well, you’re a lucky little thing. Folks checked the streets before that darn Parade of Pigs got started, but you must’ve slipped by. I was in my shop makin’ sure everything was locked up tight when I saw you out the window, your eyes big as pie plates, watchin’ the pigs hurtle right toward you!” Jeremiah blew on his hot chocolate. “I was gonna run out and see if I could grab you in time, but near as I can figure, looked like your bike sort of wriggled itself and pitched up in the air, throwing you into that big lilac bush near the sidewalk. Durndest thing, like the bike was alive, pitchin’ around like that. Somehow your backpack came loose, too, and helped break your fall.” He nodded toward a corner of the room where her backpack sat with her helmet neatly perched on top.
“What is the Parade of Pigs?” Bicycle asked.
“You never heard of it? Lord, I thought that stupid thing was famous everywhere.” Jeremiah squinted his eyes and sipped a little hot chocolate. “Well, it’s a long story. Handed down through my family for three generations, but we don’t like to talk about it much.”
Bicycle gave him a look of quiet encouragement that she had perfected in Intermediate Listening class.
“Fine, okay, I’ll tell you the shortest version I can,” he said. “One of the first mayors Green Marsh ever had was a feller named José Marquez. Came here from Spain. He was a farmer and brought a couple of piglets with him. His piglets grew up into big ol’ pigs and had lots of little piglets. He started buyin’ up land and raisin’ more and more pigs until half of town was basically one big pig farm.
“He made a lot of money with his pigs, got elected mayor, and was sorta well-known and influential in Missouri, so he managed to get Green Marsh selected as the town to host the first Missouri Music Festival. All kinds of musicians were invited, banjo players and fiddlers and guitarists and singers, with judges from Saint Louis. It was a big to-do, I tell you. My great-grandpa, Joe Branch, was going to make fried pies for the event, and he figgered it was gonna make him world-famous. That was his dream, ever since he returned from the Civil War, to have a shop that sold world-famous fried pies. Even the governor of Missouri was comin’ to hear the music and taste my great-grandpa’s pies.”
Bicycle’s face lit up. She’d found Joe Branch’s fried-pie shop! She scooted up to the edge of her chair, listening even closer. Despite his protest that he didn’t like to tell the story, Jeremiah had gotten into storytelling mode—he had a far-off look like he could see the festival right before his eyes.
“My momma told me he didn’t sleep, makin’ fried pies day and night. He was going to sell them in a big tent he bought and put up right in front of the shop. Then the night before the festival, Mayor Marquez called a meeting and announced his big pig plan.” Jeremiah stopped talking for a minute, looking at Bicycle to make sure she understood the importance of this.
Bicycle couldn’t think of an appropriate response, so she echoed, “Big pig plan?”
“Ayup. He was from Spain, remember, and the town he grew up in was called Pamplona. He explained to everyone that in Pamplona, for hundreds of years, they’d been having this tradition called the Running of the Bulls. They get this big buncha bulls riled up and then they let ’em race through the streets of the town, chasin’ people. It’s how they start some festival there. Well, he wanted to do the same thing here, but with his pigs. Let ’em run down Main Street to kick off the festival. ‘We’ll call it the Parade of Pigs. It’ll give the festival some class,’ he said to the townspeople. I ask you, is there a battier idea than that in all of Missouri?” Jeremiah frowned and shook his head. “My momma said if Great-grandpa Joe had been at the town meeting, he woulda told the mayor not to do it. But he was too busy frying, so he missed the whole thing. The rest of this durn town, well, some voted for it and some voted against it. But I guess not enough voted against, and no one thought to tell my great-grandpa.
“The next day, people were streaming into town for the festival, the fried-pie tent was set up, and everything was lookin’ good. Someone said they’d seen the governor arrivin’ with his family. My great-grandpa went out to look, and what did he see? Well, same thing you saw, I reckon. A big ol’ mess of crazy pigs running down the street straight toward his tent.
“Nothin’ he could do.” Jeremiah sighed. “Pigs ran right into the tent and knocked over the tables. Whatever fried pies they didn’t trample, they swallowed down just like…well, pigs. Needless to say, the governor didn’t eat any of Great-grandpa Joe’s fried pies. No one did that day. The townspeople was real sorry about what them pigs did to the pies. But”—he sighed even more deeply—“the townspeople also seemed to think pigs runnin’ through the town was as funny as all get-out. They decided to have the Marquez family do it again the next year, and the next, and they’ve done it ever since.”
Jeremiah’s voice got quiet. “My momma said Great-grandpa Joe was never the same after that. He still fried pies, and still sold ’em in the shop, but he gave up tryin’ to become world-famous.” Jeremiah’s eyes were moist. He looked up at Bicycle. “More’n you wanted to know, I reckon, but that’s the basic story of why we got pigs runnin’ down our street.”
Bicycle was lost in the images of pigs trampling pies. “Wow.” Then she remembered why she’d wanted to hear the story in the first place. “But what about my bike?”
Jeremiah slurped a little more hot chocolate, then pursed his lips. “Well, missy, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this. Your bike threw you off like I told you, but it stayed in the street. It got run over by eight hunnert and thirty-eight pigs. It looks about as good as a tent fulla pies looks after eight hunnert and thirty-eight pigs come through.”
Bicycle gasped. Clunk! Griffin! “Where is it?” she demanded. “I need to see it now.”
Jeremiah looked at her with sad eyes for a moment. He gestured with his mug toward a blanket-covered bundle. “Over there.”
Bicycle pushed back from the table and flew to the blanket. She lifted it and dropped it to the side. Underneath, there was a heap of orange metal. If you knew what to look for, you could tell it was once a bicycle. Barely. Hoofprints had mashed the metal frame almost flat in places. The tires were no longer round, but semihexagonal. Bicycle felt a snap in her chest, like her heart had broken in two. She fell to her knees and put one hand on Clunk.
“Griffin?” she whispered to what she thought were the handlebars. “Can you hear me?”
No answer.
“Griffin?” she asked again, a little louder.
Silence.
“Griffin! You answer me!” she yelled, her voice cracking. “You can’t leave now!” She started to cry, tears streaming off her face and onto the mashed frame. “I just got you home! You have to be okay!”
Jeremiah shuffled up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Missy,” he said, “I think you’d better go back to bed and rest. We can talk more in the morning. Then we’ll have some pie. Everything looks better when you have a fried pie in front of you.”
“Fried pie.” She sniffled and snuffled, tears still flowing. “That’s why I’m here…for fried pie…I was…supposed to…find Joe Branch’s pie shop.” Her voice was hitching in her throat.
“Well, you found it, all right. Great-grandpa Joe started our family’s Paradise Pies fried-pie shop, and my grandfather and then my parents ran it after him, and I run it now. I made up my mind to try to make it world famous in his memory.” He paused for a moment and then asked, “Now, how would a young thing like yourself know the name Joe Branch?”
Bicycle felt a new wave of tears welling up. “Never mind,” she gulped. “It’s not important…now.” She stood up on wobbly legs as Jeremiah covered Clunk’s frame again with the blanket. He guided her to the room where she’d been sleeping, making soothing clucking sounds with his tongue.
“Back to bed, missy. Things will look brighter over pie in the morning.”
Bicycle took his advice and got into bed. I let Griffin down. He took care of me when I needed help, but I couldn’t do the same for him. She felt like she might never sleep again, but her eyes closed on their own. Her dreams were nothing but black.