They stopped on the bridge. The cars were gone, swallowed by parking lots for Monday errands. It was only Gia and Leo, the bike and the glittering bay. Gia wished she could open her arms and step inside the bay, more than she already was.
“What a dump.” Leo pulled a cigarette from his pocket, pointed to the shell of a rusted car in the marsh below. Bay water flowed through the windows. In the distance a garbage barge trudged along, seagulls swarming overhead. The lighter sparked a flame, and Leo inhaled deeply, hopped up to sit on a ledge covered in bird shit, his back to the water.
“The whole city dumps their junk right here. Lucky us.”
It wasn’t a dump. There was trash, yes, but it was part of it somehow. In the distance, a bayman leaned over the side of his boat with a pole and pulled up a fishing trap. Shiny things slithered over one another until he dumped them into a bucket, reset the empty trap, and chugged off. It was late for baymen. The sun was long up, and baymen in their yellow slickers preferred to be out with just fish and seabirds. Gia understood the need to be alone with the water. It filled her lungs with air.
Their ancestors had been fishermen in Sicily before they’d crossed the Atlantic, leaving behind their boats and traps for a better life, but part of them was in her blood, even if it had skipped Leo and her parents.
“Someday,” Gia said, feeling bolder, “I’ll make them stop dumping trash and put oysters in the water.”
“Yeah? How’re you gonna do that?”
“I don’t know,” Gia said. “But there used to be oysters as big as dinner plates. You could walk across from one side to the other on shells.”
Leo squinted into the sun, tossed his cigarette over the bridge. He’d probably rag on her later, but he was OK now. He was better without everyone else around.
“Yeah,” she said, making the story a fact. “Oysters change gender to spawn more babies. And they clean the water. Actually clean it. They don’t just make pearls like everyone thinks . . .”
It felt good to spew out facts she’d bottled up because no one would listen. A trash barge passed beneath the bridge. Leo glazed over. Gia sped up. There was only so long Leo could be bored.
“Leo?” she worked up the nerve to ask. “What was it like? That stuff at Ray’s house?”
In the sun, he had a grubby look to him, like a flag on a pole for too long, but he was amused. “You want to know?”
In one swoop, Leo was standing on the ledge, the street on one side, water on the other. The ledge was the same width as his sneaker. He walked on an angle, part of his shoe over the water. Gia’s stomach squeezed into a panic. One truck would rattle the bridge, or one breeze, upsetting the tightrope walk over the water below, which wasn’t very deep at all.
“Leo . . .”
“If I jumped, I’d land in that trash heap.”
“Leo, get down, please.”
But he wasn’t listening. His face was drawn as tight as the line he was walking. She should hold the back of his shirt or something, but she was frozen near the bike, which she didn’t even know how to ride. Gia squirmed as Leo balanced, arms out to either side, fighting the wind kicking up off the water.
“Leo, can we just go?” The pleading in her voice was pathetic.
He laughed, the sun blurring his face. He stood on one leg, the wind catching his shirt like a sail, and laughed as he jumped and landed with both feet on the sidewalk.
“That’s what it’s like,” he said, pushing the hair out of his face, but it blew right back. “The realest you’ll ever feel.”
Gia’s heart banged in her ears as Leo got on the bike and revved the engine.
“On the way back, look for Help Wanted signs.” He smirked.
Gia climbed on behind Leo, just like the way they’d been born, anxious to get home without anything to explain. The bike kicked to life, but Gia was ready this time. She stretched her arms out to either side just to be reckless too. Air whooshed between her fingers, cooling the blisters, as another summer day rolled past.
The scrub brush ended abruptly as stores came into view. Leo turned into a gravel lot, tires crunching. The air stilled as the bike slowed in front of a mechanic’s garage with cars on a lift. A tire bounced and rolled to a stop as a man in a greasy jumpsuit cranked a tool on another wheel.
“Hop off,” Leo mumbled.
The mechanic tossed an oily bucket into the gravel as Leo rolled the bike forward. Gia cringed at the chemicals dumped on the ground under her feet, evaporating invisible plumes around her like seaweed swaying underwater. She took a few steps back, held her breath for as long as she could.
The bike gleamed. Leo had even shined it. The mechanic was her father’s age. The sun had turned him the color of a catcher’s mitt. She didn’t know his name but knew where he lived. He heaped old things on the front porch and kept a cooler next to a plastic lawn chair, flying a torn-up skull and crossbones from a weathered flagpole. Beside him, Leo was wiry in his sweat-stained T-shirt and greasy jeans, needing a belt and a haircut, his skin different suntanned colors and scraped from taking down the fence, in a mechanic’s shop piled with rusting car shells beneath a mosquito cloud. He might grow up to be this man, Gia realized, not a war hero or a Hells Angel.
The mechanic pressed the tires, bounced the handlebars, inspecting metal like a doctor telling the bike to open up and say ah. He shook Leo’s hand with a wad of cash, and Leo walked away without the bike, gravel crunching, sunlight gleaming off his forehead. He looked less without it, more like the fifteen-year-old he actually was. It made Gia feel less too.
“You sold it? Just like that? How do we get back?”
“Walking.”
“What?” The sun was so hot, the air still. Gia pulled a face, but Leo was already ahead.
“How much did you get for it?”
“Enough for two sodas. One if you’re annoying.”
“But really. How much?”
“I don’t ask about your babysitting money.”
“Is it enough to fix the fence?”
Silence. Maybe losing a bike was like losing the boat. They walked in silence; Gia stopped only once to pick up a palm-size squirrel skull from the overgrown brush, its teeth still intact. She would put it with her mother’s seashell collection on the windowsill and see how long it took her to notice.
Power lines buzzed staticky and hot. Too loud. Up ahead, sparks flew from a transformer. The traffic lights went dead. Cars stopped all over the street, blared horns, daring each other to move. People came out of stores to look around. Yes, it was everywhere, not just theirs.
This was exciting. Stores would give away ice cream before it melted. Tonight, there’d be real stars usually hidden by streetlight haze. No airplanes. Everything would be quiet and dark like it had been when people had lived off eels and oysters. It was perfect, even if it meant her father would be called in to protect from looters and people who used the absence of light to do bad things.
Cars inched along Cross Bay. Up ahead, a car slowed at the traffic light before peeling through the intersection, burning rubber to make a U-turn over the grassy divider. Ray and Tommy. When everyone else was going home to wait out the chaos, Ray drove right into it.
“Hop in,” Ray called, shaking the hair out of his eyes.