|
1.
There was a message on the machine when El got home. They had found the bicycle and he could come and get it at the station.
El had never bothered to fill out a police report, just gone and told someone behind the desk at the bus station it had been stolen the night before.
2.
It had been Ash Wednesday 9 months previous. A local pub was having $1 pints so after the brief church service a contingency made their way for a post-worship reverie. El got a ride to and from, and was planning to stay for only an hour. But he ended up meeting his friend Bird from work and they got piss drunk.
He confided in Bird about the divorce.
"Man... Look," it was slow-and-earnest but still pre-slur drunk, "sometime you just have to do what you have to do."
"It's not really something that I have to do, " he said, "she just left."
3.
'Inane comments from drunk friends,' El thought. Really what more can you expect?
Bird was actually one of the more decent folks at the office. He was a single dad trying to get custody of his 7 year old son, which in Texas is pretty much impossible. Unfit single mother with no job, 3 kids from all different dads and it's still a losing battle for David. So naturally to celebrate this injustice they threw down enough pints that they actually award you an Irish surname.
The whole custody thing really bugged El. If you thought about it long enough you started believing those women-hating wackos you hear on talk radio. Paranoia!
'Bird really was a great dad though,' he thought. Driving 200 miles every weekend to pick up and drop off his son Allan.
4.
"So what did you do," Bird asked.
"Apparently not enough," El said.
"Well," he paused, "you've got something on your forehead."
"Ashes"
"Well, you've got ashes on your forehead."
"It's ash Wednesday."
"Ash Wednesday, Lent Friday," Bird said. "I'm Baptist, we don't really have that stuff."
"Today is supposed to be a day of mourning," he said.
"Too complicated if you ask me," Bird lifted his glass. "We like to keep it simple," Bird took a draft.
"Ashes are simple enough," El said.
"So you're mourning," Bird said.
"She left today," he said.
El had observed that friendships that are birthed within the workplace always seem to revolve around the job - mostly bitching about it. And sadly the shelflife of those friendships are often directly connected with your tenure. El had lost touch with several
folks this way. And he know that when moved on to some other job he'd probably lose touch with Bird also.
They went through a pack of cigarettes and drank more beer.
"so what will you do now, "Bird asked.
"I have no idea."
"Did she say anything?"
El couldn't think of anything. It was too early to have any sort of perspective. He knew that the best way to cope at this point was to enjoy cheap beer, get home and hopefully make it to work the next day.
"Are you going to talk to her," Bird asked? "I mean was there something going on?"
"Between my last two years of school my parents divorced. I was home for a month working at the local library and somehow I became the go-between." Everyone knows that beer is a catalyst. "At some point I realized that they were speaking different languages and somehow I was the only person who could understand both of them. By then they certainly weren't listening to each other."
"Hmmmm," Bird said.
More pints, more smokes. Bird had first agreed to take El to the nearest train station so He could catch his train but as the time passed, the last train came and went. And there was still more beer, so as it happens, plans changed. Pretty soon Bird was taking El to the trainstation by his house so he could pick up my bike and ride the 2 miles home. By this point very much intoxicated.
Everyone bad-mouths Drinking and driving but almost everyone El know had a DWI on their records. And most of them still did it. But that wasn't why El road the bike.
5.
It was a red mountain bike El's mom had given him about 10 years previously in college. It had collected dust nicely until El had recently decided that the perfect way to offset his Irish surname (and the accompanying weight gain) was to ride his bike to the train station. The fact that his VW van had caught on fire one day on the way to work had also cemented the plan.
So El had his my mom ship the bike down to Dallas from Oklahoma. He had taken it to the local bike shop to get it greased and oiled up and had been amazed at all the bike gadgets that you could get. Just the fact that bicycle shops still existed amazed him. Very 1953 he had thought.
At the time the bike had reentered El's life, Bird had chipped in with a fancy bike lock.
So at 2:14am, Bird and El were both a bit perplexed when they made it back to the station and couldn't find El's bike.
Insult to an already injurious day they had both laughed loud as Bird drove El home.
6.
But 9 months later there was the message on the answering machine. The bike had been found. | 
