Spokes (20 page)

Christopher went home to a cold and empty apartment, where no one and nothing waited for him except an email.

"What are you going to have for us on the
Driedaagse de Panne-Koksijde
?" Ron wanted to know. "Biondi kicked some ass,
huh?"

Fuck, wasn't like he had anything else to do. Christopher opened a document and began to write.

***

Luca had a few rest days, which Christopher hoped he'd spend riding lightly and eating frequently. If he didn't top off his glycogen
reserves while he could, there'd be a crash and burn of epic proportions come Sunday. Flanders Week sucked it all out of a rider, and Luca had
worked harder than his rivals.

No race meant nothing to congratulate. What else could Christopher say? **I'm sorry, I miss you** begged to text itself, but the thought of total
silence in return kept his fingers away from the keys.

His phone did chime around eight a.m. **30 km recovery ride, nothing happened**

**Thanks for saying. I worry.** Would this be another message thrown into the void?

If the phone had turned into a frog in his hand, Christopher couldn't have been more startled.

**I know**

And that was all.

***

They fell into a pattern: an early text from Luca on a rest day to relay his safety, a hopeful reply from Christopher, and total silence. If he was racing,
and he took Paris-Roubaix in a brutal group sprint, there would be a single line to announce the real story afterwards. What the hell did it mean? Did Luca
just feel sorry for him having to suffer in ignorance because he might think Luca had met his turtle that day? Or was there more?

**Why do you keep texting when you never answer me?**
Please, please, please, God, is it because he
'
ll forgive me one day?
Or
did he just want to turn the knife twenty thousand euro' worth?

**Do you want me to stop?** shook the phone out of his hands.

Nevernevernevernever, just please answer when I text back, so we can talk and I can tell you how sorry I am and we can get past this. I
'
ll support your aged parents myself if you
'
d just talk to me.
**No**

Luca said nothing more that day, but in the morning he went out and kicked two hundred well-toned asses up and down the Mur de Huy, steepness be damned,
and fucking owned the fucking Fleche Wallonne like that classic race had insulted his mother.

Christopher watched the race in two chunks--the cyclists' five hours on the road got interrupted by having to go to work, and then he
spent another twenty minutes arguing Brendan into letting him hook his laptop into the big display TV that usually ran a canned cycle of ads.
"Come on, it's a Classic, and our local teams have been doing really well. We'll sell a ton of whatever they're
wearing." He'd make sure of it.

He and a customer watched the final ascent of the Mur with matching gapes. "Nineteen percent grade. That's one hell of a
climb," the man sputtered. "Biondi's got legs of steel."

"Yeah." The strain in Luca's face signaled the alchemy of steel turning to lead: his bared teeth and slitted eyes reminded
Christopher of his ride toward Ward in the company of the team. Luca wouldn't fall off, though, he wouldn't lie in the gutter fighting
for air, but he'd know the bite of lactic acid chewing his muscles to tatters. He had only a short distance to go, and then he could rest.

"The team rode up to Ward and beyond Jamestown to train." This wasn't news to anyone but the customer: Christopher could say
that without pissing anyone off.

"Huh." The Philistine turned his attention back to a rack of helmets: Christopher had to let the rest of the race finish without his
rapt attention, though he noticed a clump of turquoise jerseys finishing together about a minute back of Luca. "Any reason not to use the
cheapest certified helmet?"

"If it fits, it will work, but you really don't want terminally ugly and you do want good air flow." Pulling a Vuelta
Asturias helmet off the shelf, he told himself he had good reason for what he'd say next. "I saw a picture of Luca Biondi wearing one
of these." And so would everyone else who read
CycloWorld
and its competition. "It's supposed to be especially well
ventilated, and you remember how hot last summer was."

The man shook out the straps and tried it on. "Yeah, I can see that." He turned back to the television screen, where Luca dragged
himself across the finish line, his pedaling tempo wildly high and dropping while he fought with gears instead of raising a hand to the screaming crowd.
"Biondi wore one of these, huh."

"Yeah." For an hour or so. Christopher rang up the helmet and figured its maiden voyage might be on the road up to Ward. He needed to
sell a hell of a lot of helmets to make up for the saddle incident. Everyone in Boulder was going to have a Vuelta helmet.

***

The text, when it came, was chattier than usual. **Two minor races in next three weeks. Rolf can have Tour de Romandie.**

This was Luca as Christopher knew him. Not a word of complaint, damned little of explanation, and a whole lot of information in between the lines. The last
two weeks had been non-stop racing, all at top effort. He had to be bone tired. He hadn't just ridden the plains and the
hellingen
of
Belgium and northern France, he'd destroyed them and most everyone who'd come with him, and ended up owning a season's
palmares that would suffice for a career for almost anyone else. And either he was almost saying that he'd be glad to stop,
or... there had been an invitation in there once.

**My passport came** The money hadn't, or not enough of it, but he had a credit card and a laptop: he could pay back the one by wringing more
words out of the other. Dared he hope?

Hours later, Christopher dragged through his front door. The blue pamphlet with its unmarked pages mocked him from the table next to the futon. He threw it
into a drawer. The passport wasn't going anywhere, and neither was he.

Fuck that. Okay, he'd screwed up, he'd screwed up big-time, but he was sorry and he deserved at least the chance to promise that it
wouldn't happen again, explain that he deserved a second chance. Okay, he'd said that, maybe said it a lot, but he wanted Luca to look
him in the eyes and tell him, face to face, that there was nothing he could do to ever make this right between them. And if there was some begging in
there, and promises, and atonement, he'd do it all, if Luca would just stick around long enough to hear it. This text-once-and-disappear shit was
getting really old.

Not a damned thing he could do about it without being in the same place as Luca. And that wasn't going to happen for months and months, not until
the grasses turned brown of the cold and the racing season shifted to warm and more distant places like Australia and Oman. And if Luca raced
there....

Fuck it. He needed a plane ticket, and he needed it now. Last week. He needed to redo time and make himself clear on quoting, and see if Luca's
face brightened or went stormy when Christopher hove into sight. He needed to fix what he'd broken, he needed not to be whatever that long ago
man was, the one who put fear on Luca's face at the thought of getting close. And to do that, he had to talk to Luca. Really talk.

Come on, fingers; do your stuff.
Christopher wrenched open the laptop and started a new document. "The Hell in the Hellingen" hit the top of the page in a clatter.

Watching Luca Biondi power up the steepest
helling
in Belgium to win the Fleche Wallonne was to watch a man in hell. These Belgian hills have the perfect shape to create agony. A short,
shallow lead-in is the only warning that soon the rider will have to push up a near vertical road, and the only thing that hurts more than an 18% grade
is a 19% grade, which you find on the
Mur de Huy
...

He finished his applied geology for cyclists and hurled it toward
CycloWorld
.
Take that, Dave Pauwels. I can get off the sidebar without stepping on your toes.

Chapter 19

"You do love your local teams," Ron wrote about Christopher's coverage of Luca's 2.1 "keep in
practice" race. Luca had claimed in an interview to be riding only for the chance to catch up with his old Duclos-Wurth teammates, something the
racing world believed every bit as much as they believed all the stars backed out of the Driedaagse de Panne-Koksijde's last stage because of
toothache. But Luca hadn't ridden to shame his old teammates or overshadow his new ones--he finished in the top twenty and applauded his
sprinter's intermediate points and his climber's new polka-dot jersey.

Yeah, what little coverage that race had gotten was only because Luca had attended, since the bulk of the skilled motos in Europe were chasing Rolf and
company up and down Alps in the Tour de Romandie, and most of the rest had packed up for California. The Tour of California wouldn't end before
the Giro started, something Christopher had unhappily ascertained before letting himself dream of Luca in the States in one of the few big events. Riding
as a home-town favorite in the Giro was a foregone conclusion for Luca, a decision made the moment the racing calendar came out. The best American riders
would be noticeably absent from the Giro too. And they'd be riding much wider roads.

Rolf wasn't doing too badly: he'd made top five in two stages, neither of them a time trial, which Christopher dutifully wrote up for
CycloWorld
as well as the other stages where Antano-Clark cyclists collected sprint points or King of the Mountain points but no jersey-bearing
triumphs. Wasn't half bad seeing his byline every other week in a publication that ate content like pizza.

He'd like to not be ripping off covers from unsold magazines, but the new editions were out, and the unsold copies dated two weeks or a month ago
had to get credited. The covers would go to the distributor, and the rest would get recycled here. At least he already had pristine copies of all the
magazines with Luca on the cover.
Velo News
,
Gear Up
, and
Shifting Times
had also covered the big races, and the frequent winner shone
from all of them at least once this season.

The defaced magazines hit the bin with sad thumps; pages fluttered on their landings. Luca's face and a white helmet peeked out and disappeared
again. Christopher tore another cover, tossed it into the return pile, and stopped. He thumbed through the remaining pages.
Yes!

He went to find the manager, printed carcass in hand. "Hey, do you mind if I take this?"

One lazy glance toward Christopher's handful, and Brendan said, "I suppose it's okay. One less thing to recycle."

Hah, this was going to be the best recycling ever.

Once home, Christopher took a blade to his prize. He carefully sliced out the masthead, the table of contents, and his neatly formatted article on saddles.
With his biggest, blackest marker, he circled the paragraph that mentioned Luca.

"Have you talked to Luca Biondi about why he rides this saddle?" he scrawled. He added his phone and email address near his byline. Ten
minutes of Google-fu and he had the name of the K-Aero marketing manager and a corporate address.

He stuck every stamp he owned on the envelope and carefully licked the flap. If he'd been licking Luca, he couldn't have been more
precise--if this worked, it would be Luca under his tongue again.

Maybe. Maybe it would just be a happy retirement for
Signor e Signora
Biondi. Maybe the pages would never get past the receptionist. Christopher
mailed the envelope anyway.

***

A dozen cyclists whizzed down the hill the other way. Wusses. Anyone who got to the top of Gold Hill by going up Sunshine Canyon was taking the easy way
out. Bet they'd cry on the
hellingen.
So what if they'd already traveled close to twelve miles and gained three thousand or so
feet in elevation and wanted to come home fast. Christopher ignored their efforts and wiped sweat out of his eyes. He'd taken the steeper Four
Mile Canyon route, and maybe he'd come back the same way, too. High time he got over coming down a high grade.

Back to taking risks, I see,
Stu muttered in his ear. Yeah. He was.

Christopher had little company--no one passed him and he passed no one, and the rider up ahead disappeared for minutes at a time around curves.
They were halfway up the 10% section when he caught up with the man ahead.

For an old guy, he wasn't doing too bad. Silver hairs twinkled on the back of his neck, and the grin he threw over his shoulder had some deep
canyons around it. How he heaved that beer belly up the mountain was a mystery, but he wasn't stopping, and he wasn't waving
Christopher around, either, though he stayed close to the shoulder.

Christopher could pace him or go around. Or he could try to go around. Maybe pace until they got to the false flat, and then he could pass. Stupid tactics.
The one thing he didn't want to do was crash and burn in front of someone twice his age. He didn't need a reminder that he'd
slacked off on his training, or rather, hadn't pushed himself to get out on the bike as frequently as he needed to maintain his pre-crash
fitness.

You will know when the time is right to ride again
Luca reminded him. Hah, that was more than Luca had texted for the last three weeks. Those were all **rode this, did ok** or **rode that, crashed but ok**
Maybe the lack of oxygen was making the Luca in his head more chatty. Well, the right time had to start right now, because Christopher wasn't
going to humiliate himself on this climb.

Who was this old guy? Christopher pondered that for another mile, looking at a much-wider-than-Stu's back end. Boulder was full of old athletes
who still performed better than most of the world. Of course, last he'd seen, Davis Phinney wasn't packing that kind of gut.

When they reached the false flat, a climb of a mere 3% that felt wonderful after the last mile, Christopher shifted gears and buzzed around his temporary
companion, nodding on the pass. The old guy waved him on, waiting a few yards to start his own acceleration. Christopher's phone would have to
chime right when his pride wouldn't let him stop. Whether he responded now or in half an hour, Luca wouldn't have a real conversation.