Previously, in Cycling Through a Storm One: Cycling Through a Storm Two: A House, a Boy, a Girl, a Car, a Dock, a Boat, a Hug Three: Starting Sequence Four: Yacht Race Five: Save the Hat! Six: Squid's Bar Seven: Sailors and Fishermen Eight: Maxhole Nine: Schwinn Continental Ten: Psycle Snobs Café Eleven: The Sultan of Strings
In the morning, Vic tried calling Sequoia again.
“Hello?” a man asked.
“Hi! It’s Vic again, returning Sequoia’s call about the bicycle.”
“Bicycle?”
“I left a message—”
“Oh, I guess I haven’t heard any messages yet.” The man’s voice had some gravel but seemed friendly. “If you left a message, I’m sure she’ll listen after she gets home.”
“Do you know when that’ll be?”
“Just another day or so, I think.”
Vic started pacing the length of his small living room. “Any way to reach her today? She have a cell phone?”
“No cell phone, but she checks in. I’ll tell her you called.”
“Take my phone number, and please tell her it’s Vic, the guy with the bicycle.”
“I don’t think she’s looking for a bicycle. She’s got a pretty nice bike already.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean she’s looking for a bicycle. See, she gave me a ride Tuesday during that big storm, and when she dropped me off, I forgot about my bike and left it in her car.”
“And you just figured that out now?”
“No, I’ve been trying—”
“I’m just kidding with you,” the man chuckled. “I think I understand. But if your bike is still in her car, it’s parked at the airport.”
Vic rubbed a hand across his head. “Ask her to call me?”
Vic felt paralyzed. So many things: The house needed work, there were any number of projects. Thinking of those things bored him. What was going on with Gust and Lisa? And, he wondered, what stage of cancer recurrence grief am I in now? He should be doing something—finding another oncologist for a second opinion, at least. His stomach, his back, ached. He sat, stared through, then at his coffee table book: The Ashley Book of Knots.
He had been meaning to bring a length of old rope home from Corvus for practicing. Ashley himself advises that a shoelace will do for learning many knots, so Vic took one from his hiking boot. He flipped the large pages, hoping for something novel. A lash for securing round or smooth items together caught his attention. He used his cell phone and an art glass candy bowl that was on the table. It took him a couple of tries to get them snugged together firm. His lace was barely long enough, so there wasn’t much tail left on either end. Of course, the phone rang. He couldn’t read the caller info through the bowl’s trippy curving colors, and he couldn’t squeeze a finger inside the bowl to answer the call. He ran to the kitchen for a knife and cut the lace to free the phone just as it quit ringing. Missed Call. He didn’t recognize the area code, so it could have been a spam call, or it could have been Sequoia trying to call from wherever she was. He returned to the couch in the living room. There was a voice message: This is the service department. We have been trying to reach you with important information about your car warranty …
Vic repaired the shoelace with a sheet bend knot. And now there was another voice message: Hi Vic, it’s Sequoia. I’m so sorry about the mix-up with your bike! I realized it was still in my car when I went to put my suitcase in! At least it isn’t stranded in my car at the airport, you’ll be glad to know. It’s safe—I put it in the shed behind my house. My husband should be around today to help if you want to go pick it up. Got a pen? Here’s the address.
Vic had converted his high-mileage minivan into a light-duty pickup truck with a fixed topper. The modifications were trivial: He pulled out all the seats except the front two and then hung an air freshener from the rearview mirror. Perfect for carrying bicycles: Lift the hatch, roll ‘em in.
While he was driving toward Sequoia’s address at Stillwater’s north end, Bob called, but the signal was weak. Twice the call dropped before Vic could say hello. At the top of a rolling hill he pulled onto the county road’s shoulder to call Bob back.
“I’m going to call again,” Bob said.
“I called you,” Vic said.
“I know, but it’s probably going to drop again,” Bob blurted. He was talking fast, for Bob. Bob always spoke slowly, with a flat affect, like it was important to impress upon people how very Zen he was. “So just hang up! I’m gonna call back and leave a message you can listen to!”
“Okay! Got it!” Vic shouted, mimicking Bob’s staccato pace. “I’ll hang up so you can call and leave a message. I’ll listen to it at the top of the next hill!”
“What?” Bob said after a few seconds of silence.
“Bye!” Vic barked, then ended the call. At each hilltop he glanced at his phone, but no new messages arrived.
Vic found Sequoia’s house two streets up from the river and a few blocks north of downtown. It was an arty rambler with a flat roof and front-facing walkout basement. He climbed the wooden stairway to the deck at the front of the house, tapped on the screen door.
“Right there,” a man called from inside. A moment later, Lloyd—the fiddler who had performed the night before at Psycle Snobs Café—appeared in a sleeveless T-shirt and cutoff shorts. After an initial double-take, they both laughed, and Lloyd invited Vic inside. They shook hands, Lloyd putting his free hand on the back of Vic’s. “The beer expert from the Psycle Snob Café!” he said, only slightly mangling the shop’s name.
“Lloyd! The Sultan of Strings! Renowned fiddler and novice beer lover!” Vic said, pressing his free hand onto Lloyd’s in an all-handed embrace.
“More infamous than renowned, I kind of think, but there’s no arguing with people’s tastes. Come in!” Lloyd released Vic’s hands and waved him inside. “I was just making sandwiches. Do you have time for lunch—or brunch I guess it might still be?”
“Sure!” Vic followed Lloyd through the front room and a sun room to the kitchen. The front room had an impressive collection of stringed instruments resting on stands and in cases—a couple of acoustic guitars, at least two fiddles, a banjo and a large string base. Other instruments were displayed in large glass-paned shadow boxes mounted above a loveseat: another fiddle and a mandolin. In the sun room was a square table with a bright yellow plastic tablecloth stacked with bricks of clay, still wrapped in paper and plastic—probably the ones Vic had had to move the other day in Sequoia’s Prius to make room for the bicycle—a couple of wooden cutting boards, and some clay carving tools.
“Move some of that stuff aside to make room to eat, will you?” Lloyd said.
Vic re-stacked the clay bricks and rearranged the tools, making space for sitting.
“Coffee?” Lloyd called from the kitchen.
“Yes!”
“Nothing fancy—just instant.”
“Fine.”
Lloyd returned first with two beautiful ceramic mugs that Vic guessed Sequoia must have made, and then with a plate of sandwiches, diagonal-cut and stacked high. “Egg, lettuce, and tomato. They all have butter; the ones on this side have mayo, too.” He set the plate down and spun around, back to the kitchen again.
“This is a lot of sandwiches.”
“You think so?” He came back out with a smaller plate with cheese slices. “If we don’t eat them all, I’ll have ‘em for dinner.” He sat down, pointed at the small plate. “Cheddar or Swiss, if you’d like some cheese, too. I was going to make BLTs, but I don’t think I have any bacon. Actually, I know I don’t, because there aren’t any pigs back there.” He gestured toward the windows in the sunroom.
Vic saw terraced gardens cut into the hillside, a large root cellar door at the front of what looked like an improvised garage or shed that may have been built up on top of what must have originally been a root cellar, and, on a more level area beyond both the gardens and the shed, a chicken coop. Chickens strutted in the yard.
“But we do have chickens,” he continued, “So instead of BLTs, it’s ELT sandwiches!”
“I like the bread,” Vic said, chewing.
“You do?” Lloyd looked surprised. “I don’t usually buy store bread, but I did this time. Sequoia bakes our bread, but she’s been busy. Just about everything else came from the yard.” Lloyd selected a sandwich and inserted slices of both kinds of cheese between the egg and the tomato. He chomped, then chewed with a contemplative expression. “Except the mayo, of course, and the cheese slices I suppose, but it’s home-grown and home-made as much as we know how to do.”
Vic sipped his coffee and ate a sandwich and Lloyd finished his first half sandwich and lifted his mug, held it up. Vic thought he was offering a toast, so he lifted his mug as well, and then saw that Lloyd was just looking at the mug. “Seems too pretty a mug for instant coffee. Maybe I should buy a grinder and some real beans.”
While they ate, they talked about coffee and gardening and Lloyd and Sequoia’s chickens. Lloyd said that he’d considered using the chickens for meat, too, after they’d gotten their first chicks and built the coop, but they’d gotten attached to the birds and regarded them as pets. “I could never bring myself to wring a chicken’s neck because they reminded me too much of our cockatoo,” he said.
“Cockatoo?” Vic looked around.
“Oh yeah, she’s out there somewhere, showing the chickens who’s boss.” Lloyd waved his sandwich at the big window.
Vic stood to better see out the window. He spotted the cockatoo sitting on a tree branch above the chicken coop. “She won’t fly away?”
“She can leave if she wants to, but she’ll come back. Her wings are clipped, so the only way she can fly is to climb up a tree and then hop off and glide. She can’t gain any altitude. She’s wound up in the neighbor’s yard a couple times, but she knows her way home.”
“She just comes and goes as she pleases?”
“Sort of. There’s a doggie door in the back for the pugs. Bindi’s not heavy enough to push through it on her own, but she follows the dogs in and out.” Lloyd went to the refrigerator again. “So, tell me about this big ride you were on the other day. The way Sequoia described it, you were nearly carried away by a funnel cloud.”
Vic laughed and explained why he’d been out riding in the storm.
“So, you were on your way to a sailing race?”
“Indeed, I was.”
Lloyd nodded and sipped his coffee, stared at the kitchen table for a few seconds. “I used to do some sailing.”
“Really?”
“It wasn’t something Sequoia encouraged, so I kind of backed out of it. But I’ve still got my boat.”
“What? Where? What kind?”
Lloyd nodded at the window. “Out back. Near the chickens, I guess. It’s nothin’ fancy—a kind of dinghy, I guess you’d call it.”
“Can we have a look?”
The screen door slammed behind them and immediately two pugs were scrambling, one behind the other on a narrow path from the top backyard garden terrace to the paver patio. They leapt at Lloyd, each pawing a shin.
“Down!” Lloyd scolded. “Hurley, Roxy, down!”
Both dogs hopped back from Lloyd’s legs. One sat while the smaller dog kept yapping while sniffing at Vic’s feet.
“Roxy! Quiet!” Lloyd snapped.
Hurley, the bigger one, kept still, stared at Lloyd, whined briefly.
“I got nothing for you guys,” Lloyd said. He pointed at the screen door. “Inside!”
The dogs trotted to the house and disappeared through the doggie door.
“Step up!” Lloyd raised one arm, held it outstretched at shoulder height and squared himself toward the tree where a shock-white cockatoo perched. “Bindi!”
The parrot shifted left, right: A cliff diver readying before a plunge. She tipped forward and jumped, wings spread, glided above the yard, then descended at the two men as if tracing a zip line. Drawing near, she tilted back, punched her slate claws forward, landed squarely and almost silently on Lloyd’s forearm. “Bindi bird,” She croaked, much the way frogs don’t.
“Good bird!” Lloyd said.
Bindi stepped sideways across elbow and bicep to Lloyd’s shoulder.
“Vic, meet our friend Bindi the sulfur-crested cockatoo.” He scratched behind Bindi’s head, beneath her feathers.
“Pretty bird!” Wings ruffling, Bindi hopped to Vic’s shoulder.
“Hi there, Bindi.” Vic stood frozen.
“She won’t hurt you,” Lloyd said. “You’re not wearing any jewelry, are you?”
“No.”
Lloyd nodded. “Bindi loves earrings, steals ‘em ‘fore you know. Looks like you’ve got a new friend.”
Next: CTAS 13 - Spelunking
Nice to read another chapter! So instead of Vic finally getting his bike back he might have found a boat!