SCENE SEVEN

The middle of the night. LEO is sitting in darkness.

VERA enters in her nightgown and turns on a light. Seeing LEO, she turns it off. It’s actually dark as opposed to “stage dark” so that we can only see their silhouettes against the window. She goes and sits near him. A silence.

LEO: So we were in Kansas, because—even though that was way out of the way we wanted to hit the center of the country, preferably around the Fourth of July for maximum earnestness slash unacknowledged irony factor. The timing worked out so it was July 3rd and we were approaching Gypsum, our small town America of choice, one bar, one diner, seventeen churches or whatever. And we were going west to east, so, wind at our backs. The wind comes out of the south in the summer, but more like the southwest, so in a way going west to east was a pussy move on our parts, but we kind of wanted to do the opposite of the historical—like American is east to west, so we were going the opposite way, also we lived out west, so. It was more honest to start there.

Western Kansas is like ass flat, the cliché, so you’re basically just riding the wind and if you pedal even a little bit in a low gear you hit fifteen mph no problem. Fifteen mph is a slow speed in a car, but on a bike it’s pretty good, it’s pretty good. So it’s morning and the sun’s pretty low; between the low sun and the flat ride and the good wind it’s the perfect time to take shadow pictures. That means you take a picture of your own shadow while you’re riding, totally a staple of the cross country bike trip, gotta have the shadow picture, and with our huge packs and panniers we were gonna have especially dope shadow pictures. Micah thinks he’s a really good photographer, he thinks he has talent, so he’s doing a lot of bullshit with shutter speed and framing and what have you and we’re both taking shadow pictures and we hear a truck coming behind us, or I hear it, I assume Micah does, I think he does because we both hug the shoulder a little bit, still taking our shadow shots, and the truck gets louder and closer and passes us and I see it’s a Tyson truck full of fucking crates of screaming chickens packed together and there are feathers flying out of the truck bed like some kind of I don’t know what kind of metaphor, and I scream up to Micah who did I mention was in front of me, look at that fucking slave poultry! And he looks back at me, he has his left hand on his handlebar and his right hand still on his bullshit professional camera and he looks back at me and he’s laughing and he starts to say something but the truck bed separates from the cab and flies backward and takes him off the road.

Silence, save for city sounds.

Before the ambulance came this PR lady from Tyson came. I didn’t realize I was still holding my camera. She was like, “I’m sorry sir, but I have to confiscate your camera.” She has to yell it for me to hear her over all these maimed and freaked out birds. I was like, “My best friend is under three thousand chickens.” She was like, “I understand you’re upset, but this will be easier for both of us if you just give me your camera now.” I was like, “I couldn’t get to him, he’s buried under there, where is the fucking ambulance?” And she was like, “I’m going to ask you one more time—” and I threw my camera on the ground.

Silence.

So what I don’t have is these pictures from Wyoming, we did these stupid corny timer shots at the top of the Continental Divide, in front of the sign that says the altitude and all that shit, there was still snow up there in June. He caught a fish in Yellowstone, with his bare hands, he stood really still and reached in and…I had a picture of him holding up this fish longer than his head and neck. Oh and we dipped our back tires in the Pacific, that’s another corny thing you do, because then you’re supposed to dip your front tires in the Atlantic when you get there. Which I have not done yet, incidentally, don’t know why. And I got a little video of him dipping his back tire and pretending to fall off this rock into the sea because he was a fucking clown, you know, he was a gifted physical comedian, he could have done that for real.

And then there are all the pictures of him I don’t remember taking, and maybe losing those is worse than losing the ones I do.

Silence.

It took them about forty-five minutes to get him out, and the funny thing was he hadn’t sustained any trauma to his head or anything but he had been face down in the mud with hundreds of pounds of weight on him and he had suffocated.

Silence.

So the part that everyone’s pissed at me about is that after I filled out all the paperwork at the police station and called his mom and my mom I got back on my bike and kept riding.

Long silence.

VERA: I’m not wearing my hearing aid. So I could only hear parts of what you said. But I didn’t want to interrupt.

He lies down on the couch with his head in VERA’s lap.