Pedaling After Ghosts

Chapter 1: The Storage Unit

The padlock was rusted shut, which felt about right.

Hugh stood in the concrete corridor of Bellingham Self-Storage on a Tuesday afternoon in July, holding a key that had arrived in a manila envelope from the Whatcom County probate office along with a death certificate and a form letter expressing condolences for his loss. The key was brass and small, the kind you'd use for a diary, and it didn't match the padlock at all. He'd brought bolt cutters.

Unit 114. Roy's last address, in a manner of speaking.

He fitted the bolt cutters around the shackle and squeezed. The metal gave with a dull snap that echoed down the corridor, past identical roll-up doors marked with identical numbers, each one holding somebody's leftovers. Hugh crouched and hauled the door upward. It shrieked on its tracks and stopped halfway, and he had to duck under it like entering a cave.

Inside: the smell of mildew, motor oil, and something sweeter beneath—old paper, maybe, or the ghost of pipe tobacco. Roy had smoked a pipe exactly twice, both times at Christmas, both times burning a hole in something. Hugh remembered the second time clearly: a scorch mark on the arm of his mother's reading chair, her quiet fury, Roy's booming laugh that was supposed to make everything forgivable.

The unit was ten by ten. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling, and Hugh pulled its chain. Yellow light fell across a landscape of boxes, a rolled carpet, a floor lamp missing its shade, and—leaning against the far wall like a patient animal—a bicycle.

Hugh hadn't expected the bicycle.

It was a steel touring frame, Reynolds 531 tubing, painted a deep blue that had gone chalky with age. The handlebars were wrapped in leather bar tape gone dark with old sweat. Front and rear racks, both rusted. A Brooks saddle, cracked but intact. The tires were flat, of course, deflated down to the rims, but the wheels were true. He could see that even in the bad light.

He touched the top tube. The steel was cold.

Roy had been a merchant mariner for eleven years, a bartender for six, a car salesman for two, unemployed for stretches that blurred together, and an alcoholic for all of it. He'd been Hugh's father for forty-two years, though "been" was doing heavy lifting in that sentence. He'd been present in the way weather is present—you felt it, you dressed for it, you sometimes got knocked down by it, but you couldn't have a conversation with it.

He'd died on a Thursday in June, alone in a studio apartment on Lakeway Drive, sitting in a recliner with the television on. Heart failure secondary to alcoholic cardiomyopathy, the death certificate said. Hugh's mother, who'd divorced Roy twenty-three years earlier and moved to Tucson, had called to tell him. She'd been brief and kind, as if delivering news about a distant acquaintance, which was more or less accurate.

Hugh had not cried. He'd told his ex-wife, Sandra—no, his ex-wife's name was Laura. Sandra was the name of his department chair, and the fact that he'd confused them told him something unflattering about the texture of his days. He'd told Laura, who said she was sorry, and he'd told Fern, his fifteen-year-old daughter, who said nothing and then asked if she could go back to her room.

That had been three weeks ago. The probate envelope had arrived last Monday.

Hugh moved through the storage unit methodically, the way he moved through his classroom—touching things, categorizing, trying to build a narrative from artifacts. Box one: paperback westerns, Louis L'Amour mostly, their spines cracked and pages yellowed. Box two: a set of navigation charts for Puget Sound, rolled and rubber-banded. Box three: photographs.

He sat on the concrete floor with box three in his lap. The photographs were loose, unsorted, jammed into the box like someone had swept them off a table. Roy at twenty-something, shirtless on a ship deck, grinning with a cigarette. Roy and Hugh's mother at a restaurant, both young, both looking at the camera with the startled delight of people who couldn't believe their luck. Roy holding a baby—Hugh, presumably—at arm's length, studying it like a man who'd been handed a live grenade and was trying to figure out which end was dangerous.

Hugh set the photographs aside.

Box four was smaller, a shoebox wrapped in a plastic bag. Inside: a leather-bound logbook, its cover embossed with a compass rose, and a folded sheet of paper that turned out to be a hand-drawn map. The map showed the Pacific coast from Blaine, Washington, to the Mexican border at San Ysidro, California. The route was traced in red ink, with dates and mileage notations at each stop. The handwriting was Roy's—Hugh recognized the aggressive forward slant, the way the capital letters leaned into each other like drunks holding each other up.

The dates ran from June 4 to July 19, 1979.

Hugh opened the logbook.

The first entry was dated June 4, 1979. The handwriting was neater here, as if Roy had been trying to impress someone—himself, maybe, or posterity.

*Day 1. Blaine to Bellingham. 22 miles. Started at the border marker at 6 AM, which seemed poetic, though I couldn't say why. The bike is loaded heavy—too heavy, Charlie says, but Charlie also said I'd never make it past Anacortes, so his opinion is worth what I paid for it. Legs feel good. Sky is clear. I have the whole coast ahead of me and nothing behind me worth turning around for. This is either the smartest thing I've ever done or the dumbest. Probably both.*

Hugh read it twice. Then he read it a third time, because the voice in those words—cocky, self-aware, a little scared—was a voice he'd never heard from his father. Roy's voice, as Hugh knew it, was either too loud or too quiet, either performing or absent. This voice was neither. This voice was just a young man on a bicycle, writing in a logbook at the end of his first day.

He flipped through the pages. The entries continued daily, sometimes two or three paragraphs, sometimes just a line. The handwriting deteriorated as the days went on—looser, more hurried, occasionally illegible. There were sketches in the margins: a lighthouse, a pelican, a bridge that might have been the one at Newport. Water stains blurred some pages. Others were pristine.

He turned to the back of the logbook and found, tucked between the last written page and the back cover, a folded sheet of lined paper. He unfolded it carefully. The creases were deep, the paper soft as cloth.

*To my son, when you're old enough to understand:*

*I am writing this because I don't trust myself to say it right, and because by the time you read it I will probably have proven every bad thing you think about me. I want you to know that there was a time when I was better than what I became. I want you to know that this ride—these miles, this coast—was the truest thing I ever*

The sentence stopped there. No period. No continuation. Just the word "ever" and then white space, as if Roy had been interrupted, or had lost his nerve, or had simply run out of whatever fuel had gotten him that far.

Hugh sat on the concrete floor of the storage unit with the unfinished letter in his hands and felt something move in his chest that he couldn't name. It wasn't grief, exactly. It wasn't anger, though anger was there too, banked and familiar. It was something older and stranger—the feeling of being addressed by a dead man who'd never managed to address him in life.

He folded the letter back into the logbook and put the logbook in his jacket pocket. Then he went back to the bicycle.

He wheeled it out of the storage unit and into the corridor, where the fluorescent lights turned its faded blue frame the color of a bruise. He squeezed the brake levers. The cables were stiff but intact. He spun the pedals. The chain was dry but unbroken. The bottom bracket turned with a faint grit.

He could fix this bike. He'd been a competent mechanic once, back when he used to ride, before Laura, before Fern, before the slow accumulation of desk hours and takeout dinners and evening whiskeys that had turned him into a man who drove everywhere and walked only when the parking lot was full.

The whiskey. That was the thing he didn't say out loud, even to himself. Three fingers of Bulleit every night, sometimes four, sometimes the bottle just stayed on the counter and he poured without counting. Laura had mentioned it exactly once, near the end, in the careful voice she used when she was trying not to start a fight. "You're drinking like your father," she'd said, and he'd told her that was a cheap shot, and she'd said, "It's not a shot, Hugh. It's an observation."

That had been in February. By April, she'd moved out. By May, they'd filed. By June, Roy was dead, and Hugh was living alone in a house that still smelled like Laura's shampoo, teaching summer school geography to sophomores who'd failed it the first time, and pouring four fingers of bourbon every night while telling himself it was three.

He stood in the corridor of Bellingham Self-Storage with his dead father's bicycle and his dead father's unfinished letter and thought: I could ride this.

The thought was absurd. He was forty-two years old, twenty pounds overweight, and hadn't been on a bicycle in six years. The route on Roy's map was 1,700 miles. His knee had been bad since a skiing accident in his thirties. His teaching contract resumed on September 3rd, which gave him—he counted—roughly forty days.

Forty days to ride 1,700 miles on a forty-five-year-old steel bicycle with a bad knee and no training.

He thought about the letter. *I want you to know that this ride—these miles, this coast—was the truest thing I ever—*

Ever what? Ever did? Ever felt? Ever ruined?

He pulled out his phone and called Fern. She picked up on the fourth ring, which was two rings better than usual.

"What," she said. Not a question. A wall.

"I found Grandpa's storage unit. He had a bicycle in here."

Silence.

"He rode the whole Pacific coast in 1979. Before I was born. Before he was—" Hugh stopped. Before he was what? Before he was a drunk? Before he was a disappointment? Before he was my father? "Before everything," he finished.

"Okay," Fern said.

"I'm going to ride it. The same route. His route."

A longer silence. Then: "Why?"

It was, he realized, an excellent question. He didn't have an excellent answer.

"Because he left a letter he never finished. And I want to know what he was going to say."

"That's not a reason. That's a feeling."

"Maybe. Will you meet me at the end? San Diego. The border. I'll be there in forty days."

"You're serious."

"I'm serious."

He could hear her breathing. He could hear the television in the background—Laura's house, Laura's television. Fern lived there now, in the house that used to be theirs, in the room that used to be hers, in a life that used to include him.

"If you actually make it," she said. "If."

"If I make it."

"Fine. But I'm not going to feel sorry for you when you quit."

She hung up.

Hugh stood in the corridor with the phone in one hand and the bicycle in the other and thought: forty days. He thought: 1,700 miles. He thought: I don't even own cycling shorts anymore.

Then he wheeled the bicycle to his car, wrestled it into the back seat with the front wheel removed, and drove to the bike shop on Holly Street.

The mechanic was a young woman named Tilda with grease-blackened fingernails and a sleeve tattoo of the Olympic mountain range. She looked at the bike the way a veterinarian looks at an old dog—with professional tenderness and a realistic assessment of remaining life.

"Reynolds 531," she said, running her hand along the top tube. "Beautiful frame. Somebody loved this bike."

"My father."

"He's not riding it anymore?"

"He's dead."

Tilda nodded, unsurprised. People who brought bikes into shops often came with stories attached, and the stories were often about dead people. "What do you want to do with it?"

"I want to ride it from the Canadian border to the Mexican border."

She looked at him—at his soft middle, his office-pale skin, his shoes that were not cycling shoes—and to her credit, she did not laugh.

"When?"

"I'd like to leave in a week."

Now she did something that wasn't quite a laugh but was in the same neighborhood. "Okay. We can do the bike in a week. New tires, new cables, new brake pads, overhaul the hubs and bottom bracket, new chain and cassette. The frame is solid. The wheels are solid. Everything else needs work." She paused. "The bike will be ready. Will you?"

Hugh looked at the bicycle. The bare bulb in the shop caught the blue paint and turned it almost alive.

"No," he said. "But I'm going anyway."

Tilda shrugged the shrug of someone who'd heard worse plans and said, "I'll have it ready by Thursday."