A Few Bicycles More, page 2
One boy called out, “What’s the parade for? And where’s the rest of it?”
His words were muffled by the earplugs and earmuffs, but Bicycle heard him. She shouted back, “We’re just riding our bikes!” She tried not to be embarrassed by the attention and focused on pushing the pedals and following the directions. They headed west, not far from the trail where she’d been riding the Fortune the day before.
When they got within a few blocks of the Potomac River, the Fortune stopped playing the harp music. Bicycle looked down at its screen. It was flashing TURN RIGHT in big letters. This time, turning right would lead them smack into the side of a brick wall.
“Not again,” she said under her breath. She was glad the bike shop was less than half a mile away.
She turned the handlebars to the left. But they wouldn’t go. Instead, the brakes squeezed themselves under her hand. The pedals slowed themselves under her feet. The Fortune came to a dead stop. It had never taken over control of itself like this before, not in thousands of miles of riding together.
“Whoa!” Sister Wanda exclaimed as she narrowly avoided crashing into the two of them. “Remember to signal when you’re stopping!”
“I didn’t know we were stopping. The Fortune stopped itself,” Bicycle said. She didn’t want to block traffic, so she dismounted her bike and lifted it onto the sidewalk. “What is going on?” she asked it, hoping it wouldn’t keep blinking TURN RIGHT in reply.
The Fortune let out a blast of rock music. The Beatles started repeating the word “Help!” over and over out of its speakers. Sister Wanda brought her bike up on the sidewalk as well.
“Help’s right around the next corner,” Bicycle said to the Fortune through the rising niggle of a headache. “Do you want me to carry you there?”
I am not asking for help. I am still not controlling the music. I do not know what is.
“Maybe you’re picking up radio stations?” Sister Wanda asked.
No. It feels like a magnet is pulling these songs out of my database and forcing them to play. The magnet is also trying to pull me into a brick wall.
“I bet the bike mechanic has never had a problem like this to fix before,” said Bicycle.
It is very uncomfortable. TURN RIGHT. TURN RIGHT. TURN RIGHT.
Sister Wanda said, “We need to get you to the mechanic with all haste.”
Bicycle agreed. She gently placed the Fortune over one shoulder and carried it to the corner, where she and Sister Wanda turned left.
As soon as they stepped into the crosswalk, the Fortune’s blasting music changed. This next song was country-and-western-style guitar accompanying a singer crooning about mountains and trees and country roads taking him home to West Virginia. Bicycle gritted her teeth and kept moving until they found the Wheel World Bike Shop. Sister Wanda held the door open, and Bicycle walked partway through.
The owner came around the bike stand where he was working and waved a pedal wrench at her. “No one comes into my shop singing John Denver songs, nope! Stop that racket!”
“I’m sorry, sir!” Bicycle yelled back in as friendly a way as she could. “I’m not singing it! It’s my bike, you see—”
“Don’t care where it’s coming from, only care that it stops!” He raised his eyebrows and waited for quiet. “Not willing to abide by my rules? Then out you go!” He advanced on Bicycle and she stepped outside.
“Now, see here—” Sister Wanda began, but the mechanic grabbed the door handle and slammed the door shut, turning the lock with a stubborn jut of his jaw. He flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED and retreated back to his bike stand. “Well, I never,” said Sister Wanda.
Bicycle’s headache was growing from a little niggle into a throb between her eyes. She took the Fortune off her shoulder and shouted, “What do we do now?”
Sister Wanda shouted back, “I’d give that mechanic a piece of my mind, but he wouldn’t hear a word. We’ll try a computer repair store and hope for a better welcome.”
The employee who greeted them at Hackers, Inc., was considerably more gracious than the bike mechanic. Her name tag read HEAD HACKER. She said she didn’t mind the music since she usually listened to loud tunes through her earbuds when she was fixing things. Bicycle told her about the glitches the Fortune had experienced, including the ones on the morning’s ride.
“Even if you can do no more than get the volume down, we will be grateful,” Sister Wanda added.
The Head Hacker promised to see what she could do, and asked if they could leave the bike for the rest of the weekend for her to run a full diagnostic test.
“Sure!” said Bicycle lickety-split, thinking of going home for a nap to cancel out her headache. She then hoped the Fortune didn’t notice how eagerly she’d answered. It was hard to tell—the music kept on pouring out in waves of two-part harmony. She gave her bike a hug and explained that they’d be back to pick it up on Monday.
She climbed aboard Sister Wanda’s rear rack for the ride home. Even when they were far from Hackers, Inc., she kept the earmuffs on.
The rest of the weekend was mostly silent. No adventures were had. Nothing unexpected happened. Bicycle felt guilty about how much she enjoyed it. She’d left her friend, who clearly wasn’t well, somewhere unfamiliar and hadn’t even asked about coming to visit to check up on it. This might turn out to be a good rule of friendship: Try Not to Be Selfish, Even When Your Head Hurts.
The Head Hacker called on Monday during homeschool time. Sister Wanda put her on speakerphone in the monastery office.
“I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” the Head Hacker said. “Which do you want first?”
“The bad news,” Bicycle answered. In her opinion, get the bad news out of the way first, and hold the good news in reserve like an antidote.
“I couldn’t fix the Fortune. I barely understood its programming language. You have one complicated bike. I couldn’t even reboot it—and when I tried, it told me to please stop because I was tickling it. It also told me some knock-knock jokes, but I didn’t get the punch lines.”
“That part’s normal,” Bicycle assured her. It made her feel better to know the mysterious magnetic force hadn’t sucked away the Fortune’s sense of humor, such as it was.
“What’s the good news?” asked Sister Wanda.
“Well, I took it for a ride. I hope you don’t mind, but my coworkers asked me to give them a break from the music. I like to ride this trail that parallels a canal next to the Potomac River in Georgetown. It’s called the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Towpath, the C&O for short, so I took your bike over there. As soon as I hit the C&O, everything got quieter. Here, listen.”
The Head Hacker must have held her phone up toward the Fortune. Bicycle could hear the country roads song, faintly.
“Oh, thank Saint Euphemia and all her silent sisters,” said Sister Wanda.
The Head Hacker continued, “One more thing you should know. When I tried to ride back to my office, the volume went crazy again and the bike kept blinking at me to turn around. So as long as you don’t ride your bike anywhere but on the towpath, I guess you’re in good shape. In fact, would you mind meeting me here to pick it up? I said that my coworkers asked me to give them a break, but it’s more true to say that they threw me out and locked the door. I’m right near a coffeeshop.” She rattled off the name and address.
“Ah. Well, that will be fine. We will be there shortly. Goodbye,” Sister Wanda said.
She and Bicycle looked at each other.
The nun tapped her fingers on the table. “It sounds like your bike isn’t quite ready to come home, but it can’t stay where it is. This is a pickle.”
Bicycle thought about how the Fortune had said it felt like a magnet was trying to pull it into the Potomac River. The Head Hacker had said that the towpath ran parallel to a canal that had been dug next to the Potomac River. “Maybe we should try taking a ride on the C&O Canal Towpath and see what happens,” Bicycle suggested. Heading who-knew-how-far to find who-knew-what didn’t sound great. However, here was an opportunity to practice being an unselfish friend. “If you’re too busy, I can go alone,” she offered.
“Not on my watch.” Sister Wanda looked at the civics textbook on her desk. “I suppose taking advantage of a nice day to do our lessons from the seats of our bikes wouldn’t be the worst idea. You’re lucky to have a teacher who can instruct you about the Bill of Rights off the top of her head.” She checked her watch. “Please go get your backpack and fill it with some wholesome snacks and two water bottles. I can have Brother Otto cover for me while we’re gone. I hate to say this, but if we haven’t solved things by dinnertime, you’ll have to brush up on your sewing skills for Plan B.”
“Which is?” Bicycle said.
“Plan B is you sewing an eleven-comforter-thick muffler for the Fortune to wear over its speakers when we get home.”
Bicycle wasn’t very good at sewing. She pictured herself toiling away at the sewing machine so that the Fortune could end up partially swallowed by fabric like some unrideable thing that was half-bike, half-marshmallow. Wait, was she thinking selfishly? This was tricky. Where was the line between being selfish and being herself? She hoped doing something she was good at—cycling—would solve the Fortune’s problem, and Plan B wouldn’t happen.
She went to hunt for some wholesome-ingredient-type muffins in the monastery kitchen to power her and Sister Wanda’s pedaling.
TURN LEFT
Bicycle sat piggyback on Sister Wanda’s rear bike rack as the nun maneuvered them through light traffic to Schlagobers Café, the coffeeshop where the Head Hacker was waiting. They found her holding a cup of hot chocolate and sitting on the stoop outside next to the less-noisy Fortune. She pointed them toward a paved path bordering a waterway. This waterway wasn’t the rippling Potomac River, but a narrow canal contained by stone walls.
“That’s where your bike seems happiest. Sorry I couldn’t help you more.”
“You’ve given us a place to start,” Sister Wanda told her. “Sometimes, that’s all one needs.”
Bicycle thanked the Head Hacker, got onto the Fortune, and headed off with Sister Wanda. Once they started to pedal, Bicycle launched into a series of questions. “Fortune, can you still feel the magnet pulling you? Are we going the right way? How far do you think the magnet wants you to go? Can you tell what it is? Should we look for radio towers? Or giant U-shaped magnets like they draw in cartoons?” Since she could now listen to her bike without her ears falling off, Bicycle wanted some answers.
Yes. Yes. I can’t tell. I can’t tell. Perhaps. Perhaps. The Fortune was still playing the same country music that had so irritated the bike mechanic.
Bicycle eyed the shallow water next to the trail. The canal was about as wide as a two-lane road. “You said before it was telling you to go into the river. Is it still trying to make you dunk yourself underwater here?”
No. I do not feel I must submerge myself. It seems to be enough that we are now closely following the path of the Potomac River northeast. The Fortune reached the chorus of the song about country roads taking it home to West Virginia.
Sister Wanda surprised Bicycle by singing along in a clear soprano voice. “Until it was playing at a manageable volume, I couldn’t remember that I liked this song.”
“You and the monks always taught me that listening properly meant being sensitive to small details, but you never said what to do if you end up hit by huge sounds.”
“Sometimes we have desperate folks coming in to the Mostly Silent Monastery who talk very fast and very passionately. The monks are trained to catch it all in their minds like they’re corralling thrashing fish into separate ponds, giving the words a chance to settle down so they can pay attention to each one. . . .” Sister Wanda gave the Fortune a thoughtful look. “What songs has your bike been playing? Are they all different, or is it repeating some of them?”
“Repeating them, as far as I can tell,” Bicycle said. She asked the Fortune if it could make a list of the songs it had been compelled to play. It displayed:
Take Me to the River
Harp-A-Palooza
Ticket on a Ferry Ride
Help!
Take Me Home, Country Roads
She read the list to Sister Wanda.
“I wonder if that’s the jumbled pile of nonsense it seems at first glance,” said the nun. “Perhaps these songs are clues to where the Fortune is being pulled. Let’s see, we’ve got rivers, harps—perhaps that refers to ‘harping upon’ something, which means to speak persistently about a certain topic until it becomes tiresome. ‘Harp’ is also slang for a harmonica.” As far as anyone could tell, Sister Wanda knew everything about everything. “The ferry song might also refer to rivers and how to cross them. I believe there are water taxis still in operation on the Potomac. Then there’s the call for help, and asking for country roads to lead one home. . . . Hmm.”
The paved path joined a well-packed crushed-gravel trail. This was one of the places in the city where you could learn about history as you exercised. Every quarter mile or so, Bicycle started to notice placards, statues, and markers. One she could read from afar said BUILDING THE C&O CANAL 1828–1831. A lot of old railroad beds in the United States had been turned into trails because they provided long, flat stretches for walking and cycling separate from cars. This particular one hadn’t been part of the railroad system but had instead been trodden by horses and oxen towing barges up and down the waterway. Wherever the Fortune was being pulled, at least the path to get there was flat. For now.
Bicycle’s eyes were drawn to the Fortune’s list of song titles displayed on its screen. She liked making anagrams, rearranging letters to find new words hiding inside existing words. It was best when you could mix up every one of the letters into a whole new phrase or word, like making the letters in LISTEN spell SILENT. She could see right away that “Harp-A-Palooza” had POOL, LOOP, and POLAR in it. She got suspicious for a moment. She asked the Fortune, “You’re sure this isn’t a joke or some kind of puzzle you made up, where Sister Wanda and I have to solve clues and you pretend you don’t know what’s going on?”
I would never pretend that. I don’t like not knowing what is going on.
Bicycle decided that sounded true. She went back to anagram-searching. “Harp-A-Palooza” also had ALOHA. Another song, “Ticket on a Ferry Ride,” had EATEN, CAKE, and TACO buried inside. After some deep focus, she found that “Take Me to the River” had the word METEORITE in it. She grinned. An eight-letter word was anagram treasure.
Sister Wanda broke Bicycle’s letter-mixing reverie. “If there is a clue in those song choices, it isn’t particularly obvious. We may be looking for a ferry boat carrying harmonicas or an orchestra with harps that plays riverside concerts. Neither of which makes much sense. Have you any ideas?”
“Do meteorites have magnetic properties?” Bicycle asked.
“Most contain some sort of metal like iron, so they will attract magnets but not exert a magnetic pull. I feel confident that if a meteorite had fallen to Earth recently with enough magnetized material to call attention to itself, I would have read about it in the newspaper.” Sister Wanda addressed the Fortune. “Come now, your database is as wide as it is deep. Can you contribute any helpful suggestions?”
The country music was replaced by the harp music, which then switched after a few bars to “Ticket on a Ferry Ride” and then back to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” It started playing these same three snippets on a loop. It was like listening to a radio when someone kept flicking the dial around to different stations without being able to choose what they wanted.
“I will be frank with you. That is just as annoying as the loud music,” Sister Wanda informed the Fortune.
I am sorry. I still do not have control.
Sister Wanda sighed and signaled that she was coasting to a stop and pulling off the trail. Bicycle joined her.
“Let’s have a look-see at this trail map,” Sister Wanda said. “If a ferryboat sank with a load of harmonicas in this canal, I’m sure there will be a historic marker saying so.”
The map showed upcoming campsites, boat launches, restrooms, river dams, and canal locks. It also informed them that this trail was 184.5 miles long and would take them as far as Cumberland, Maryland. Bicycle let out a low whistle. “That’s a long way to look for sunken harmonicas or freshly fallen meteorites.”
“With a stop for lunch, if the trail is flat the whole way,” Sister Wanda mused, “fifty miles would be a reasonable distance for us today.”
Not for the first time, Bicycle wondered about her guardian’s age. She had a cap of silver hair and wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, but she could pedal a bike at a steady speed forever and a day.
“There’s a Nearly Silent Nunnery in Harpers Ferry where we can spend the night. It’s about fifty miles away.” One of the nice features of Mostly Silent Monasteries and Nearly Silent Nunneries was that they kept bedrooms available for travelers in need of peace and quiet for a night.
The Fortune called up its own map and blinked Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, is 51.94247 miles from here. Light winds from the south. We can be there well before dinnertime. I can provide lunch.
It popped out two Complete Nutrition pellets from its handlebar end, which Bicycle caught and stuffed into her pocket. She’d eaten these brown, oily-flavored niblets to survive when food was scarce before. She knew that if any other lunch option existed along their route, she and Sister Wanda would prefer the other option, no matter what it was.
They got back on the trail. “The best we can do is to keep our eyes peeled for anything peculiar. Especially you, Mr. Fancy Bike.” This was what Sister Wanda called the Fortune when she was lecturing it. “Stay alert, and let us know the instant you notice something that might make sense of your troubles.”
I will do my best.
