“Do you know what that is?” I asked my son on his 14th birthday in 2008, nodding toward the new 21-speed NEXT bicycle in the garage, a Walmart beauty given to him by his grandparents.
“A bike,” he said, smiling, happy to field such a rare, easy question from his old man.
“Wrong,” I said.
He frowned, double-checked the object in question then looked back at me to see if I was crazy.
“That thing with the spokes, hand brakes, chain, kickstand, the SRAM shifter is not a … well, okay, it’s a bike … but it’s more than that,” I said. “That bike represents your freedom.”
He soon caught on. He didn’t need me to chauffeur him to important destinations like the city pool, the library, or the pizza joint.
Through May, June and most of July, my son made good use of his freedom, frequently pedaling his new bike to the library and returning with his backpack bulging with borrowed books.
In late July, though, he called me from the library.
“Can you come and get me?”
“But you’re on your bike.”
He was quiet for several seconds. “I lost it,” he admitted.
“You lost your bike?”
“I parked it in front of the library, went in, came back out 10 minutes later, and it was gone.”
“Someone stole your bike from the front of the public library in broad daylight?” I asked.
Surely not in our little town, I thought. I knew people here who didn’t lock their cars – or even their homes. Jasper had been billed as “one of the 25 best small towns in America.” This wasn’t Gotham.
But sure enough, I found my freedom-clipped son waiting for me with an open book by Hunter S. Thompson in his lap. There were no bikes at the library bike rack.
A bike thief was in our midst.
We drove the surrounding blocks, scanned yards, and scrutinized the mean streets that I thought Jasper was immune to. The most action we saw that afternoon were black-shirted kids on skateboards, the day mocking us with its innocent stillness.
“Who could have done this?” I muttered.
I pondered the meaning of it all.
Is the economy so dire that a kid can’t even leave his bicycle in front of the library – the heart of our town? Was the bike thief an adult fed up with high gas prices?
I thought about those freaks in the Guinness Book of World Records, the ones who eat entire cars, bolt by bolt, metal chunk by metal chunk, until the car is gone. Did one live here and simply go out for a light snack?
“Are there chop shops for kids’ bikes?” I wondered aloud, shocked to hear the words chop shop emit from my mouth for the first time ever. How did I even know such a term?
Around and around I drove, repeatedly applying profanity and tire tread to the same downtown blocks, obsessed with trying to glimpse shady dealings. For all I knew, someone at that very moment was busy with a chisel, rubbing out a bike’s serial number, numbers I previously failed to document.
Was the bike thief watching me search him out? Was he that crafty and diabolical? Were the same people on the stoops and sidewalks I kept passing starting to suspect me of something unlawful? Did the skateboarders think I was a stalker?
My uncharacteristic vigilant behavior unnerved my son. He seemed uncomfortable with the emergence of my inner Charles Bronson.
“It’s okay,” he said – pleaded? – in the passenger seat, not wanting to be an accomplice to someone on the verge of causing a public scene. “It’s just a bike.”
“It’s not just a bike,” I reminded him. “We’re going to the police station.”
He groaned and slumped in his seat. “Can you take me home first?”
The officer on duty didn’t seem too excited. He didn’t rush to the radio to announce an APB. The library grounds weren’t cordoned off with yellow tape.
The officer wanted just the facts. The color of the bike. The style. The brand. I wanted a sketch artist involved, a professional who could get the details just right so we could transfer the image to milk cartons.
The officer asked if the bike had been locked. No, I groaned.
Nothing resulted from the police report. A new bike was purchased. A bike lock was purchased, too. And yes, I wrote down the serial number.
For months, I continued driving the streets near the library, searching for the bike, the bike thief. I’m not sure why. My son had a new bike by then, newfound, newfound freedom. Maybe I returned to the scene of the crime because more than a bike had been stolen. Maybe I had hoped to find something else lost on that day. I began missing the town I once knew.
Contact: scottsaalman@gmail.com