Page 8 of Rhodes

THREE

Rhodes

Old-Growth Cypress: Cut from Louisiana swamps and dense enough with resin to turn away rot and termites for a century, cypress was called the eternal wood. Builders spent it on sills and framing, the parts of a house nobody would ever see again once the walls went up.

The berm trail runs the top of an old drainage cut for a quarter mile. There's a solid pine wall on the left, six-foot drop into black ditch water on the right, and the far turn goes loose right where you'd want it to hold.

I slide back down into second gear out of the yard, third by the gate, and then I open it up on the straight where the ruts smooth out. The front wheel goes light over the whoops, and everything that was in my head this morning goes out the back of it.

That's the whole point of the thing. Sixty miles an hour on dirt, and there's no room left over to think about capital funds, or adult responsibilities. There's the trail and the next rut and my own breath loud inside the helmet, and that's it. That's the entire world, and it's enough.

Coop's behind me on the old CRF I keep for him. That one is really his at this point, since he's the only one who rides it.

I can hear him back there when I let off, that lumpy idle we still haven't gotten around to tuning. I hit the straight and pin it. The pines turn into one green smear, and the ditch comes up on the right where the trail necks down. I set up for the far turn the way I've set up for it two hundred times, weight forward, trail the back brake, let the rear step out on the loose stuff and ride the slide through the whole arc of the corner with the drop sitting right there off my boot.

It comes out like a dream. That is the rush I live for. My teeth are rattling in my skull from the ruts, and I'm grinning like an idiot inside the helmet. I roll off and coast and wait for him.

He comes around the turn a lot more sensibly than I did and rolls up alongside and flips his visor, not grinning.

"You're gonna put yourself in that ditch one of these days."

"Haven't yet."

"That's not the flex you think it is." He kills the engine. Mine's already off. The quiet drops down over both of us the way it only does out here, no highway humming under it, nothing but wind moving through the tops of the pines and the tick of two hot motors starting to cool.

He works the helmet off. His hair is flat and dark with sweat. He gives me the look he's been aiming at me since we were nine years old and riding dirt bikes together. His chin is down, eyes level, the one that means he's decided to be the grown-up in this again. "One of these days I'm not gonna be around to fish you out."

"You have never once fished me out of anything, dickhead. Stop trying to act like you're somehow more mature than me."

"Lake Pontchartrain, freshman year. You told everybody you'd make the pier. Did you forget that, Evel Knievel wannabe?"

"I made the pier."

"I swam out and got you halfway to the pier."

"That's an escort." I thumb the kill switch back and forth just to have something in my hand. "You escorted me. Completely different thing."

"You were doggy-paddling and cussing. And you ruined your bike."

"Strong current that day."

"There was no current, dipshit. It's a lake." But he's laughing now, and it knocks the hard look clean off him. For a second, he's just Coop, river mud drying on his boots, no dead mother in his face and no plane ticket in his pocket.

Any afternoon out of a hundred, we've burned out here since he moved to New Orleans for college. And before that, summers when the family would come out for vacation with us. That was back when the biggest thing either of us had to decide was whether we had the daylight left for one more loop.

He shakes his head at me. "You remember when your dad brought us out here and made us dig the whole first section of this trail by hand?"

"He said it'd build character."

"It built blisters. I couldn't hold a fork." Coop wipes his forehead with the back of his glove. "Then he rode it once, told us we'd put the drainage on the wrong side, and made us do it again."

"That's about right." Robert Stone never once let a thing be seventy percent right when it could be redone the whole way. Especially when he wasn't the one doing the manual labor. I spent a lot of years reading that as him being hard. Standing out here on a trail I dug twice, I don't read it that way anymore.

"Last loop," Coop says, dropping his visor. "Then you're buying me a beer."

I let him lead it back. He takes the ditch turn at a civilized speed, and I sit in behind him and take it the same, not stepping the back end out. I can't say exactly why, but it bothered him, and the bother of it stuck to me somewhere I couldn't scrape it off. Maybe it is about time to grow up a little.

The cabin's a low cypress box with a tin roof that sounds like a standing ovation when it rains. There are twenty acres out here that my family's owned since before I was born. We leave the bikes ticking and cooling in the yard while I unlock the door, walk to the refrigerator, and pull two beers out.