A Yellow Three-Speed Schwinn With a Basket on The Front

This story came to me yesterday while riding my bike. For a few of you it might seem familiar. I wanted to use it for my Free Write Friday but fell asleep last night with my laptop. In keeping with tradition, this piece was written rough in about twenty minutes. I’ve cleaned it up a bit, but it still is rough. I hope you like it anyways.

A Yellow Three-Speed Schwinn With a Basket on The Front

There is an old train track, where the line has been pulled up for twenty years and then some. A path for walking and riding bikes replaces the old line. Gail follows it every day on her bike. A yellow, three-speed Schwinn with a basket on the front. She has called it The Big Banana since she first got it back in high-school. Sometime back in the eighties.

Gail and her bike start everyday where the sun has plenty of space between tall maples and oaks. Farther up the trail they go, eventually leaving the sun for the heavy shade of hemlocks. They soar over her as they cover the trail like a dark umbrella, holding the light out. Gail always shivers when the trail darkens, even on the sunniest of days a chill races through her.

Yet, she keeps riding her bike deeper into the woods. The trail slopes while she descends farther down in the narrow valley which is a cool misty web of trees and sandstone cliffs.

She reaches the end of her journey. Tunnel Three. She turns around after a few minutes of her arrival. Gail came to see if he had returned, but like every day for the last thirty-eight years, he isn’t there.

He pulls in the drive after a three-day long train ride. He doesn’t like to fly if it can be helped. He is spent from the travel, but determined to stay on task; Roy has a mission.

Roy gets out of the rental car and climbs the porch steps. He knocks on the door. He is certain whoever answers it will be someone he doesn’t know. Surely, after all these years a new family lives here, he thought.

He can’t believe his eyes when Sugar opens the door. She looks exactly the same, tanned skin with dirty blonde hair full of wild curls.  Her blue eyes are just as clear as the time he last saw them, not as icy as her sister’s, but still seductive. The only difference is her fifteen-pound weight gain. Even that doesn’t matter, she is still a knock-out.

“Sugar, I’d know you anywhere.” Was all Roy could muster.

“Oh, my god. Roy.” Sugar exclaims.

“May I come in?”

“You dirty son-of-a-bitch.” Sugar slams the door.

Roy stands there unsure what to do. He knows full well he deserves that.

Sugar opens the door and quickly steps out. She looks over her shoulder back into the house before she shuts the door.

“You need to leave here, right now.”

“I came to see your sister.”

“Well, she’s not here.”

“When will she get back?”

“If you don’t leave right this minute.”

“Sugar, please.” Roy pleads. “I need to see her.”

“Every day for the last thirty-eight years she has been riding her bike up to the tunnel looking for someone who we all know isn’t going to be there. She lost her mind looking for you. We did everything we knew how to help her, but she hasn’t been the same. None of us has.”

Roy stands in silence with his head hanging low.

“She keeps going up there on the same fucking bike she rode when she was sixteen. The same bike she rode when she last saw you. Do you remember that day, Roy?”

“Yes.” Roy could see the Big Banana parked next to the rock which held the door open to tunnel three. “Sugar, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t. Just don’t say anything and leave right now.”

“At least tell me, did she move on? Marry? Kids?”

“You have some nerve. After your stunt she was considered damaged goods. No one good wanted her. She ended up married to a complete asshole who played on her vulnerabilities.  After eighteen years of being treated like shit we finally convinced her to divorce him and it sunk her even deeper into darkness.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Roy starts to cry. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not. If you were really sorry you would leave.”

“You have to understand. There was nothing here for me. Hell, I didn’t even finish school. I was a kid. I get it. I did a stupid thing.”

“You look like you are doing just fine to me.” Sugar points to the black four-door Mercedes parked in the drive.

Sugar turns back to Roy. “How? How did you do it Roy?”

“I don’t know. It just was an impulsive moment, again I was a kid, barely seventeen.”

“We all did stupid things when we were kids, Roy. But you took it to a whole other level. We thought you were dead.”

“When I heard the train coming through the tunnel I climbed up over the door and something told me to just jump.”

“Yeah, I remember Roy. We all do. We all saw you jump that day.”

“I landed right between the engine and the first car. Half of me was dragging on the ground. I was able to finally pull myself up about a mile before town.”

“That would explain the shoes we found on the tracks and nothing else. But why didn’t you come back?”

“Like I said, there was nothing here for a kid like me. I was the kid who grew up on the wrong side of the track.”

“How ironic.” Sugar huffs.

“I was scared that if I came back, I would have been in trouble. When I read about it in the paper that I had been presumed dead, I decided to leave it that way and I took off for good.”

“Where did you go?”

Roy explained how he first made his way to Chicago and worked for a bit in a restaurant doing dishes. He had a group of friends in the art community and a few of them were saving for New York. He asked them if he could join them and after a year of saving, five of them took a Greyhound to New York City. They were squatting in an abandoned factory when it had been purchased by an investment company. They were only able to hide for about two weeks in the building during renovations, when they had been discovered and kicked out. Roy had asked the foreman for a job and was hired that day.

“I did mostly shit work, hauling garbage to dumpsters, that sort of thing. The foreman said I could stay there in a tiny apartment, if you can call it that, if I did night security.”

Roy went on to explain how he had worked his way up and eventually started buying small properties of his own to fix up and sell.

“I had met enough of the right people to help me get started in the beginning and eventually I had done well enough to start my own business.”

“Well how nice for you Roy.” Sugar glares. “What a wonderful story with such a happy ending. Meanwhile, my sister has been through hell and back.”

“I am so sorry about that; had I known.”

“Had you known, what? You would have come back sooner and made it all better for her?”

Roy stands there.

“You should have never had left her in the first place. She loved you, Roy.”

“I loved her; I still do.”

“Then why did you leave her like that?” Sugar yells.

“Did you think your family would have ever have accepted me back then? The punk-assed kid whose mother ran off and whose dad worked the third shift at the factory only to never makes ends meet?”

Sugar says nothing.

“Exactly!” Roy snapped.

“You need to leave Roy. Now.”

“Will you please do me one favor?”

“I don’t owe you any favors Roy.”

“Just tell her I was here. Tell her I’m staying in town at the Massie’s Bed and Breakfast.”

They stand in silence. Sugar has made up her mind to say nothing about Roy’s visit.

“Roy?” A weak voice says. “Roy, is that you?”

Roy turns around. Behind him stands a shell of a woman straddling a yellow three-speed Schwinn bicycle with a basket on the front.