June sits outside of Arthur’s at three in the morning with a broomstick strapped to her back, picking through her french fries for the ones with the crunchy brown ends, ends that were once potato skins. She looks around as she eats. Were the white Christmas lights strung up above the picnic tables an intentional decorative choice or did owner just forget to take them down and end up liking it? Is a pistachio milkshake really what she’s feeling with so many flavors written on the wall? Why is the group of guys a few tables down from her snickering and throwing trash at each other?
She doesn’t trust those guys and this is one of the occasions she doesn’t trust herself either. Or instead she wouldn’t trust herself, if she didn’t know how she ended up here like that, if she was someone else. Mostly it’s the broomstick that makes her feel that way.
Beth gave June the broomstick because Beth is a badass, jaded kind of person. June is trying to become a badass, jaded person but Beth has been one for a long time. June is historically kind of a butter muffin.
According to Beth, when she was June’s age, she was “winning all her bar fights.” June doesn’t go to bars, but she thinks secretly of Arthur’s as a bar, when really it’s something like a concession stand. There are picnic tables under a big awning outside, and a window where people can order food and, at most, beer. June wants to tell the guys at the other table to shut up, but she figures she’ll be leaving soon anyway. Or maybe that’s what she tells herself.
June has been searching unsuccessfully for a bicycle all night. She doesn’t know where it is, what it looks like, or what kind of condition it’s in. As her search wore on into the night, she considered taking the wheels off of her own bicycle and saying she found the frame, or maybe saying she found the wheels because her bosses would recognize the frame. But who finds wheels?
Not June. June has not found any part of a bicycle yet tonight.
II.
“You don’t want to use your hands in a dumpster, too many nails and sharp edges. Turn things over with this,” Beth said when she gave June the broomstick the night before. They were standing over a dumpster behind a housing complex, looking for bicycle parts they could reuse. Beth told June how she and Danny were always able to find a few when the semesters ended because all the students moved out.
They spoke in whispers. June loved the risk of it.
But when someone confronted them angrily, threatening to call the cops and being generally unreasonable, June did not love the risk of it. Beth had found a blue bicycle frame and was putting it into the cardboard-laden back of the car when the guy came out onto his balcony.
“You going through peoples’ trash?” he asked.
“Yeah, uh, my roommate threw my coffeemaker out,” June said. She was still sitting on the edge of the dumpster.
“You don’t fucking live here,” the guy said. He started coming down the stairs and June bolted back to the car.
Beth met the guy near the bottom of the stairs. “What do you care for? That your bike?” she said.
“You better leave. If I see you around here again I’m calling the cops.”
“Do what you want. It’s not illegal.” Beth stepped toward the guy, leaving June slightly further behind her.
“I’ll bet it is. I’m calling them now. You better get the fuck out of here,” the guy said.
“You do that,” Beth said.
The guy started climbing the stairs again. Once she was satisfied he was backing down, Beth started walking back to the car. The guy called down from his balcony. “I better not see you and your daughter around here again.” Then he went inside.
“How fucking old did he think you were?” June said as Beth drove.
“You kinda backed out there, didn’t you?” Beth said. June felt that the age comment was not wise.
“He just surprised me. That’s all,” June said.
“Your roommate’s coffee maker?”
“I said he surprised me.” June slouched in the passenger seat and propped her feet up on the dashboard.
“I just thought you’d yell back at him. You just gotta have some confidence and most people will back off. Maybe I just grew up fighting with those kinds of assholes more.”
June thought that Beth was being kind of an asshole herself.
“Hello?” Beth said.
“At least we found a bike,” June said.
“There were still more dumpsters,” Beth said. “We might have found more.”
June decided not to say anything else until the headlights panned across the front of the bicycle shop as Beth parked. They could see Danny coming out of the back room with receipts in his hand, long hair flowing behind him. He liked to sweep the place first thing after closing, then move on to going over the day’s receipts, and then do any leftover work on the bicycles before heading home. Beth knocked on the glass and held up the mountain bike like something she had killed. He let her and June in and they all walked together toward the back of the shop, passing under the racks of upside-down bicycles with dangling price tags. The smell of rubber was everywhere but they were all used to it by then.
June kept it simple. “Well, see you Thursday,” she said.
“Would you like to clock out first?” Beth said.
“Sure.” June wrote the time next to her name on the sheet and left. The door chime ringed after her in the dark.
“What’s with her?” Danny said.
Beth told him about the confrontation. They went through the back room with the cluttered workbenches and hanging tools to get to their tiny office. The only real furniture was two metal folding chairs and the desk. The computer monitor was the only source of light in the room. Danny pulled two beers out of a mini-fridge that barely fit under the desk.
“She completely folded when that guy started yelling,” Beth said.
“Well she’s just a kid, man. She’s never gone out and done that before.”
“Yeah well she should have told me if she wasn’t going to stand up for herself.”
“She just wants to help out.”
Beth took a sip of her beer.
“I swear though, man, one night I was driving home. I was doing what you guys were. Real good finds too, a couple old Raleigh single-speeds that just needed to be polished and a couple junky frames that were good for parts. I was done for the day and I figured I would just take the bikes home and then to the shop the next day. But I was driving and I started to notice this real shitty smell.”
Beth laughed. “It’s probably because it was in the fucking trash, Danny.”
“No way, man. It didn’t smell like trash, and I would have noticed that when I picked it up anyway. I can’t even describe it but it was sort of evil smelling y’know? Like I could feel all this negative energy in the car.”
She laughed and covered her face, “And then red eyes appeared in the rear-view and spoke to you in a deep voice right?”
“You’re not taking this seriously, man.”
“Danny,” she said in her cross-eyed impersonation of Satan, “give me back my bicycle.”
He shifted in his seat. “Look,” he said, “I’m just trying to say. I threw that bike right back into the trash because I thought it wasn’t worth it, but that was a stupid thing to do. There was one thing wrong with it, but that was such a nice frame, vintage, good condition, everything.”
“So what?”
“You know what I mean, man.”
The animated waves glittered on Danny’s ridiculous, tropical screen saver.
III.
June is not without hope. After the confrontation she ended up keeping the broomstick because Beth forgot about it, which is a plus. June also has big work gloves, knee pads, and a head lamp that barely fits through the gap when she wears her Bulls hat backwards. June isn’t even from Chicago, but she thinks the hat is cool. She feels prepared.
The first place June goes is right back to the housing complex where the guy accosted her the night before.
June rides away from her dorm and past a lot of houses, down Sylvia street to where people are still gathered on picnic tables outside Arthur’s. She passes Arthur’s and takes Porter for a block and then she’s there. The area is like a wide alley lined with parking spaces and bushes, and the dumpsters are in two clusters near the ends. She estimates that there’s still like ten dumpsters they didn’t check.
She leans her bike against some bushes and scopes it out. She is pretty nervous at this point but tries to accept it, but in a way she’s really trying not to accept it.
She can see a car idling with its lights on. A guy in a baseball cap is standing outside the car and talking to the driver through the window but it’s not the guy from the night before. She can’t really make out what they’re saying but she lights a cigarette and hides behind the bushes. Maybe the cigarette will calm her nerves a little, she has to wait for the guys to leave anyway. But then maybe the cigarette is a bad idea because it will make her more obvious or if her luck is really bad the bushes will catch on fire or something. She smokes it anyway. She wonders like she always wonders why Beth sees her as some sort of younger version of herself. Maybe that’s the reason Beth hired her at all.
She smokes two cigarettes waiting for the car to leave and then the guy talking to the driver waves and goes inside a house. The car drives away in the other direction. She can feel her broomstick across her back. Tonight she’s not a butter muffin anymore. She is a badass jaded person. Maybe she is still a little nervous, though.
When she finally works up the courage to hop up onto the closer clump of dumpsters, it’s almost like the trash company came earlier in the day, but not really. The first one is pretty much empty and so are the next two, so all she has to do is flash her headlamp around real quick and she knows there’s nothing in them. It’s easy because they’re the short kind of dumpster. She sort of ducks down behind them when she hears someone, but mostly no one is really paying attention.
As she rummages, June thinks about how back home her older brother would get arrested sometimes. Her parents would yell and threaten him but he’d end up doing it again. She thinks about the time she was walking across Graham Park one night and the cops stopped her. The flattop took her I.D. and then handed it back. “How’s old Connor doing?” he said with a grin, then he shined a flashlight in her eyes. Colemeyer wasn’t a common enough name to hide behind, wherever it came from, but in the end they let her go.
Somehow she feels like the second group of dumpsters will look about the same inside, and they’re so far away, no real cover or anything between them and her. She has to think about it, so she smokes another cigarette. There’s so many balconies where people can see her too. Why did Beth even think it was a good place to dive at all?
But she does it. Tonight she is a badass jaded person. She sort of creeps out casually from the dumpster she was hiding behind and walks along the sidewalk like she lives there. She keeps an eye on the deck where she thinks the guy yelled at her from but there’s no one there. She can hear people talking somewhere but she thinks it’s from the other side of a fence, or maybe from an open door. The decks are all empty. It’s getting too cold for it, maybe. She’s not that nervous.
In the second cluster of dumpsters, the closest thing June finds to a bicycle is a halved skateboard deck and some plywood. She hopes the person didn’t hurt themselves too badly.
June rides back to Arthur’s. She doesn’t check the dumpsters because Arthur’s is still open. Instead she orders french fries and sits down. After eating, she decides she’ll check a couple more places and head home. She checks behind a McDonalds and a hardware store with no luck. She decides her odds are pretty bad and she has work in a few hours, so she starts to ride home. She passes a church on the way, and for some reason decides to give it one last shot. She can’t decide if her refusal to give up after giving up is stubborn or resolute.
June rides up to the church. It’s small and only has one dumpster. She opens it and reflects darkly on the mound of disposable forks and Solo cups lying on top of several pizza boxes. All that plastic in the ocean. Her vague eco-consciousness is something that rubbed off of Beth and Danny onto her. It seems like the church is too small to even hold enough people to justify all that pizza. She takes her broomstick and halfheartedly pushes the pizza boxes aside, scattering the Solo cups and revealing a silver track bike frame with the word “CANNONDALE” printed down it.
She sort of stares at it like it’s probably something else. It probably should have been something else, given everything it could be but it’s actually a bicycle frame. She hauls it out, scattering more Solo cups. “Holy shit,” she says. She tries not to think about it too much. How it got there, if it belonged to the church, why it’s in nearly immaculate condition. She doesn’t think about any of that.
Instead she thinks about when she went into the bike shop and asked for an application, about how she started filling it out right there leaning against the counter but Danny told her she could just fill it out in the back. He led her to one of the workbenches and pulled up a stool for her. “Behind the scenes,” he said. When she was done, Beth told her they would give her call in a week or two, but a few days later when June was riding up Lombard she saw Beth and Danny coming the opposite way with three other cyclists behind them. Beth told June to join them and when everyone paused at the next intersection Beth asked her how many hours a week she wanted.
June takes the Cannondale frame and rides with it hanging on one of her handlebars, pinned down under her hand. She drifts back to the shop this way, occasionally brandishing her broomstick with the other hand. The breeze feels good in the wide open parking lots she crosses.
IV.
She reaches the bicycle shop, unlocks the door, and goes inside. She lays the silver frame across the counter where the cash register is and attaches a note that reads “found this behind a church! whoa!” Then she goes into the office to get an energy drink out of the mini-fridge but she wonders if that’s a good idea. She has work in just a few hours. Instead she sits down and puts her head on the desk for a minute to think about whether or not to drink the energy drink. She falls asleep before reaching a decision.
When Beth and Danny arrive to open the shop a couple hours later, they find the bicycle frame and June sleeping in the office. Danny shakes her shoulder to wake her up.
“Rise and shine, man,” he says.
June groans.
“Sleeping next to the computer isn’t good for your brain, man. Did you go diving alone?”
“Yeah,” June says.
Beth stands in the doorway of the office. “That frame is unreal,” she says. “You found it behind a church?”
“Yeah,” June says and rubs her face. She wonders if she ever actually fell asleep and then she remembers that she did.
“Which one?”
“The little one on North Street, ‘Bible Gate’ or ‘Bible Place’ or something.”
“I don’t think it’s ‘Bible Place,’” Danny says.
“Why a church?” Beth says. She crosses her arms.
“I don’t know. Took me all night,” June says.
“It must be blessed or something, man,” Danny says, grinning. He leaves the office and goes into the back room where he starts moving metal things around. Beth goes out to the front to get the coffee she brought in and June follows. They lean against the counter and stare out at the street through the big glass windows.
“Just needs wheels,” Beth says.
“Hopefully,” June says.
“Did anyone bother you?”
“Nope. Just rode around all night and dove wherever I could.”
“Y’know if you were out all night you should just go ahead and go home. We’ll pay you for the whole day,” Beth says.
“Really?”
“You were working.”
A woman with a young girl enters the shop and the door chime sounds. Beth greets them and then goes around the counter to see if they need any help. June goes into the back to get her bicycle and her Bulls hat.
“What are you gonna do now?” Danny asks.
“Probably go to College Market and get a donut and then go home and sleep,” June says.
“Oh man,” Danny says. “I remember when Beth and I lived in Bloomington we used to hit this donut place called Ginny’s all the time. We’d get a huge trash bag full of donuts, all arranged by type because they just emptied the display cases at night. Didn’t even have to get dirty since it was on top of everything else in the dumpster, and we’d just leave it there in the middle of the kitchen for a couple days and everyone who lived there would take them.”
“Sounds like the life,” June says.
“Yeah, man. Here, have a donut on me.” Danny takes out his wallet and hands June two crumpled ones. She takes them after he insists and then she walks her bicycle out into the store, says goodbye to Beth, and leaves. Outside it’s overcast and a breeze carries some brown leaves and a plastic bag past her. She gets on her bike and rides down to the intersection and stops at the light. When it turns green again she takes off and tries to build all the speed she can. She wants to take the big hill on Lombard as hard as possible so she doesn’t slow down the traffic behind her. She pedals until she rises up its slope and then she pedals until she’s over the crest and then she’s gone.
Erich Brumback is a so far unreceived signal emitted from the swamps of Virginia. You can find more of his writing at electronicerich.neocities.org.