Pieces of Iowa Pt. II

Josh's house was down the street and a block away from the town's axis road. I pushed my bicycle into his garage while he took two bottles of beer from the fridge, passing one to me as I set the bicycle against the wall, and we went inside with them, wiling away into twilight with beers and wandering talk. I fell into asleep on the couch around midnight as the music stream flowed from the ebbing speakers, or Josh strummed on his reverberant guitar to a vast invisible undulating audience, me a member listening from my quiet kaleidoscope dreaminess. And upon sober early morning, I left a thanks note on the kitchen table and the town behind, into an off-white haze of fog and intermittent blankets of vapor rain falling, and to what would have been a bleak day.

After a couple miles down the Amish country road, a truck pulled into the shoulder ahead and stopped my riding. A man opened the door and stepped out from the truck-side into the haze. “Heard you got a little drunk last night,” he said with raised eyebrows and a grin, throwing me for a loop. A girl of her early twenties came from the passenger side, around the truck and stood next to her father, akimbo, “I'm Amanda,”. They knew Josh and asked if I wanted to hang around town a few more days for the weekend ride they had planned. “This town you're just leaving is actually a really big biking community,” she told me.

All I knew was I didn't want to ride in the rain, so without resolving any plans we put my bike into the truck bed, went to Amanda's dad's house and dropped it off. Then in the truck I was taken into Cedar Rapids where they were moving Amanda's sister Laura Lea's things into her new apartment. We hopped through town picking up some chairs, a table, a recliner. “Betcha didn't think you'd be doing this today,” as we lifted a round glass table out of the truck, “Needed somebody to help out. That's just why we picked y'up, you know.” Nothing they ever said was serious. Afterward off to a dim restaurant for dinner, them conversing in family sarcasms through an appetizers and meal. It was indeed a day of work, but was more comfortably spent than in suspense riding under threat of rain.

When we were back to Independence, Amanda and I rode on bikes through the fogged empty streets a couple of blocks from her dad's to her house. Her covered front deck space was lined by broad window panes, looking onto the lane. We took seats in the hanging canvas chairs, rocking forward and back as the dull, shadowy sky turned a deeper gray. The neighborhood was empty and quiet and calm with early evening stillness as we swayed, talking about what to do, which itself became something to do. A vapid, indecisive moment for the quiet contemplation of nothing, or passive hearing of the hushing sound of a raindrop mesh drifting over the wooden steps and grass carpet, all of it originating from the kind circumstance of Amanda's company.

Eventually we went across the lawn to the neighbor's garage. A bunch of guys were drinking inside. The place had been fashioned over time into a sort of beer den. They talked, sitting on extracted car seats up against the walls, and yellow light bulbs hanging on tethers from the ceiling like a makeshift lounge, amusing themselves with nothing in particular, delaying tomorrow. “Just a low-key night,” sipping, bottle in hand. They were friendly with a natural, unsullied, middle-western friendliness that would give to the end of giving, given a recipient in honest need. They were genuinely happy simply to be, if things would be maintained and remain undisturbed. After a while Amanda and I returned to her house over the damp dark lawn and went inside, sitting down before the television, the billowy recliner and alcohol-fog lulling me soon to sleep.

At waking, the television still flickered idly, but the room was empty and I sat watching cartoons awhile. Soon, though, I lost patience, scrawled another note, and took off under the new day's old gray sky, onto the two-lane highway stretch west to rumble along against the wind with fury, being pecked by raindrops. I donned my gray sweatshirt, pulling the hood up over my hat, and knotting hood-lace in a bow for warmth and shield against the wind and rain. A dark, bitter hour slowly turned by, schlepping away incrementally into the windy, rainy blaze. Miserably wet and cold, with no shelter, I kept telling myself it could be worse, but was relieved when a white pickup slowed down beside me, and through rolled-down window the driver yelled out, “Hey, are you wanting a ride?”

“Yes, please!” I said looking over through blurred squinting eyes, nodding and smiling. He pulled off ahead and helped me load my bike into the truck bed. I lifted the front end, he the back, and I pulled it in by the handlebars, laying it down. The shoulders of his polo and the front of his his khakis were shaded by the spatter of rain when we got into the truck.

“I figured this is no weather to be riding in,” he said, shaking his head. The seats were comfortable and warm. He shook my hand. His hair speckled gray, he looked the part of a burly blue collar who'd labored his way behind a desk. Then we took off, zipping on fast down the road. Seeing everything go by so quickly made me somewhat uneasy, so I mostly watched northward as the perpendicular plains passed in the window. The blanket of clouds' tattered edge broke against a thin sliver of blue, settled on the horizon like oil at the bottom of the watery sky. He went on a bit about where I was headed if I were going west, about Waterloo and then Fort Dodge where he'd be stopping.

We were flying down the road, 80 miles an hour, and he switched the conversation, “You find many kinky girls along the way?” I brushed his question off with a laugh. Then he threw me off, “How about any guys, then?”

I laughed again in hesitation, then,“What do you mean?”

“You know kinky guys trying to get with you. I only ask cause I get like that once in a while.”

The truck became a bit uncomfortable, “Uh, nope.”

“Would you ever?”

“I'm just into girls, really.”

“How about for fifty bucks? You know, I just want to rub it a little.”

My eyes were broad and staring down as the road continued by and, though chuckling avertedly, I grew a pinch nervous now and squeezed out a weak “No thanks.”

Wise to the tension he'd made he graciously wiped the slate clean, “Well just thought I'd ask. Gotta respect it, when somebody says 'no'. That should be that. It's just... a guy like that gets lonely out here,” trailing off. He couldn't call himself anything but 'a guy like that'. There was a shame in him. 'A guy like that' would get lonely in this part of the country, and while I was still uncomfortable I couldn't grudge him and actually grew a little sad for him behind a recomposed facade. He grew quiet and fading, and in his blank blue eyes staring ahead I saw his own sadness, his remorseful mourning from loneliness sadness.

He dropped me off shortly after, taking me a little past the town and away from the traffic, leaving me at a little park with a concrete table underneath a tree where I could keep partly out of the rain, and then he left. The rain soon slowed and ceased, but the pallid spread of clouds remained, keeping all in dull shadow, and the shriek of wind continued, howling against me throughout the day as I pedaled on to nowhere.

More pictures for you on Facebook Albums 1, 2, & 3. Just click on the numbers. Currently in Phoenix at my parents' house for a couple weeks of total meditative rest.