The Boneshaker (4 page)

Natalie groaned. She'd ridden a boneshaker before, or at least she'd
tried
to ride it: Mr. Minks still had his father's Michaux velocipede somewhere in the shop, and if you could get going on it (which was a very big if), it rattled and shook you even on the smoothest roads till your teeth fairly chattered in your skull. Instead of tires with air in them, boneshakers had wooden or metal wheels, so every bump on the road went straight from the wheels to the frame to the rider.

"But what if we put better tires on it?" she protested, looking wistfully at the upward curl of the front fender. It would be such a pretty machine if it was fixed up. "And what about all the springs? Won't the springs help it ride better?"

"I think they're there to compensate for a bad design," Mr. Minks said, scowling at the springs in question. "In fact, I don't remember ever seeing a frame so over-designed before."

"What about the hinge in the middle? Didn't you say that was to help it steer and turn better?"

"Well, that's the idea, but ... but I'll tell you what. We'll fix it up with the best parts we can find. I'll do my best to make it smooth and fast. Then you can decide how you like it."

He'd finished the red bicycle when he was supposed to be working on Doc Fitzwater's car, and it was everything Natalie had believed it would be. But sure enough, despite its supporting springs and brand-new tires, it bounced along like a century-old boneshaker. And the pedals were in a weird place.
And
it was geared funny, so that each cycle of the pedals turned the front wheel, the one that drove the bicycle, in two complete revolutions. This was one of the tricks her father had used to make it faster, but it was messing up Natalie's best running starts. And worst of all, it turned out, was that pivoting hinge in the middle. It meant the bicycle responded to the slightest angle, the slightest lean. It meant Natalie had to totally relearn how to balance and steer, and it meant she ran into things a lot.

She loved it, nonetheless—all she had to do was figure out how to ride it before her father found out how much trouble it was giving her. But something about this bicycle—this weirdly perfect, beautiful bicycle—was impossible to control. It seemed to
want
to fight her, and for some reason, it always won.

After attempt number ten (in which, during a particularly fast running start, her pant leg got caught on one of those hooks on the front wheel as she was trying to hold her feet out of the way of the whirling pedals), Natalie decided she'd had enough. No way was Ted Minks's daughter going to fail to ride any bicycle, not with nearly a decade of prime bicycle-riding experience under her belt. Today, however, the bicycle won. Again.

She heard the music as she limped out of the alley. Back on Bard Street, Old Tom Guyot sat on the ground

Something about this bicycle—this weirdly perfect, beautiful bicycle—was impossible to control.

with his back against the front of the livery stable, legs stretched out in front of him and his tin guitar on his lap. The round brass resonator set into the middle of the instrument caught the reddening light and shone like a setting sun all by itself.

Old Tom spoke without looking at her. "Y'all right there, darlin'?" His words came out just a little muffled by the flattened crown cap he held between his teeth.

Natalie felt a flush hot as a midsummer sunburn sweep over her face, but she was too tired and sore to run away from him the way she'd fled Miranda.

"Did ... you see?" Was her voice always that small?

"Can't see much of anything with that old sun comin' down right in my eyes. I heard something like a..."

Natalie held her breath.
Don't say fall....

Instead, the long-nailed fingers of his right hand halted their nimble plucking and scrabbled in the guitar strings, fumbling a little as her feet had fumbled for the pedals, and then he struck the flat front of the guitar with his palm. The noise was exactly like Natalie falling elaborately off her bicycle, kicking a few spokes on the way down, and finishing with a swinging handlebar whacking the ground before bouncing back to hit her in the head. The sounds he made were so strange and improbable and fascinating that she hardly minded that they were mimicking one of her humiliating spills.

"How do you ... do that?"

Tom slid his left hand up the neck of the guitar. On that hand, the fingernails were short and neatly trimmed, and on one finger he wore a piece of brown glass like a finger-length ring that he slid along the strings. The instrument wailed like an opera singer on a Victrola record.

"Lots of voices in a guitar." He let the operatic note hold for a moment, then started back into the song he'd been playing when she'd first come out of the alley, pausing only to take the flattened cap from between his teeth to use for a guitar pick. After a little while, he closed his eyes and started humming along.

The memory of her battles with her bicycle faded; the sounds of horses in the stable and buggies in the street dissolved. Tom's humming turned into strange syllables, sounds that weren't words but sort of
broken pieces
of words, bits and bobs of song dodging and darting over and around and under the music of the guitar, rising and falling and ducking, and every once in a while climbing sharp and clear and plaintive....

Tom's teeth flashed bright against his dark skin. Lines came and went between his eyes and on his forehead, and the corners of his mouth twisted into smiles and scowls to make room for those pieces of words to escape. Sometimes he would stop singing and slap the side of his hand against the strings or his palm against the tin front of the guitar as if it were a drum, nodding his head along and then picking right up where he'd left off.

It made a strange tableau, and plenty of people paused to look: the old black man singing blissfully with the guitar flashing sunset colors on his knees; and the sweaty, bruised, and scraped girl, unmoving and rapt, absently holding on to a bizarre bicycle with her head cocked like a bird's. Neither of them noticed anyone else's stares.

I know something about Old Tom.
The thought had barely taken shape in Natalie's consciousness when his voice launched into a string of syllables bursting with
Z
s and
B
s and she forgot to think about what that something was.

Inevitably, the song came to an end. Tom's eyes opened at last, and he smiled at Natalie. What was it, that extraordinary thing about Old Tom Guyot?

As she stood there thinking, trying to remember something just out of reach, it hit her again, harder this time: the sense of something happening, or something poised to happen, perhaps; something she could sense but not put a finger on. Something strange in her already odd little town that she could feel to the marrow of her bones, and that made goose bumps come springing up on her arms.

A sudden motion of Tom's hands made a piece of metal near the top of the neck of the guitar catch a flare of sunlight. And then, with a dizzy, lurching sensation that started at the back of her throat and flowed upward so that for just the briefest second her whole head spun, two things popped into Natalie's head. The first was a crystal-clear image of Old Tom Guyot, sitting beside a fire at the crossroads outside of town, hammering something round and gold-colored into the folded piece of metal that now held up the strings of his guitar. The second thing was what she had been trying to remember while Tom and his guitar sang with their peculiar voices. Two words:
the Devil.

Natalie muttered something about home and dinner, grabbed the bicycle's handlebars, and ran, so hard and so blindly that she almost sprinted straight into the side of a passing carriage. The carriage horse shied sideways, stamping in annoyance, and Natalie turned to call out an apology to the driver. As she glanced back, she noticed something strange.

Tom had tucked his crown cap pick between his teeth and begun playing again, only this song was sadder, softer, remorseful. Or reproachful, perhaps. He wasn't looking at Natalie anymore. She followed his eyes to the saloon across the street at the corner of Bard and Sanctuary. On the porch, Mr. Maliverny the saloonkeeper was pouring tea from a cracked pot into a china cup on the table in front of Simon Coffrett. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, Mr. Coffrett's eyes were on Tom. Then, when Mr. Maliverny didn't move away after he had finished pouring, Simon looked at the saloonkeeper.

There it was again. Natalie, frozen over her bicycle, felt something tighten in her throat, a moment of dizziness at the root of her tongue. Once, her mother had told her of how, as a little girl, she'd suffered from vertigo, which had sounded a lot like the way this felt. The world twitched, and instead of one Simon Coffrett she saw him separate into multiple specters that danced neatly around the first, like photographic negatives without shadows. Natalie shut her eyes and pressed on her eyelids. Only once before, when she'd been hit by a baseball, had Natalie's vision ever done anything like that.

Thud.

When she opened her eyes, she was flat in the street, the bicycle lying in the dirt beside her. Natalie pushed herself up, rubbing her head. Puffs of dust settled around her. It felt as if she'd fallen straight back onto her tailbone, hard.

From opposite sides of the street, Tom Guyot and Simon Coffrett were coming toward her, concern on both their faces. The specters that had moved around Simon were gone.

Face burning, Natalie scrambled to her feet on her own, righted the bicycle, and ran away without looking back.

The last of the sun cast long purple shadows, painting a stretched-out, abnormally tall skeleton of wheels and frame on the road as Natalie arrived home. The bicycle, of course, was perfectly fine; she herself was a mess, and she could not get those two words out of her head.
The Devil.

She found her mother already in bed upstairs, reading
Harper's Magazine
and listening to Enrico Caruso on the Victrola.

"What on earth were you up to?" Mrs. Minks demanded. Natalie submitted to a thorough examination of barked elbows and shins. "Not another fight?"

"No. Just had a bumpy ride. Is it that late?"

"Not since there's no school tomorrow. Natalie, these scrapes are filthy!" She pushed back the covers with a sigh. "Go get some water."

Natalie scrambled down the stairs ahead of her mother, grabbed a pitcher from the kitchen, and walked outside to the pump by the vegetable garden.

Inside, her mother chipped ice from the block in the icebox into a bowl. "You're sure this wasn't a fight, Nattie?" she demanded when Natalie returned with the pitcher. Mrs. Minks carried the bowl to the table, dropped into the nearest chair, and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. "I mean to say,
absolutely
sure?"

"Positive." Which wasn't entirely true, but Natalie was fairly certain her mother wasn't talking about fights with inanimate objects. She dunked a towel in the water and scrubbed at the scrapes until she thought they might pass for clean. "How's that?"

"Passable." Mrs. Minks twisted the ice up in another towel and handed it across the table. "That goes on your leg before that goose egg gets any bigger." She rose and rummaged in a cabinet for a tube of ointment.

"Are you going back to bed, Mama? You look tired."

"I am, sunshine. You can stay up, though. Not too late, but a little longer is fine."

"If I wanted a bedtime story, though, are you going to sleep right now?"

Mrs. Minks paused in her search and regarded Natalie cautiously. "
You
can't be tired." Natalie faked a yawn. Her mother, ointment in hand, gave an exaggerated sigh and started up the stairs. Natalie followed, grinning, up to her own little bedroom, shucked off her clothes, yanked her nightgown on backwards, and sat primly at the edge of her bed.

"So you're telling me you're ready for bed before it's even dark out?" Mrs. Minks's eyes were suspicious. "Which story did you want?"

There. She was hooked. There was nothing,
nothing
Natalie's mother liked better than telling stories or explaining things, except maybe questions that prompted stories or explanations. Natalie pretended to mull over the choices.

"Paul Bunyan?" Mrs. Minks suggested. "One of the Clever Jack stories, maybe?" Natalie rolled her eyes. Her mother loved Clever Jack stories, and there were about a million of them where he was always getting the best of some arrogant king or stupid giant or somebody. He never lost, so the stories got boring after a while. "How about the one where Jack wins three wishes from the angel Saint Peter and uses them to fool the Devil?" Natalie's mother asked. "That's the one where everyone thinks he's a pretty nice fellow, and then he starts using his wishes for terrible things, remember?"

Natalie shook her head. "Tell me about Old Tom Guyot and the Devil," she said.

And there it was: the look that, in the kitchen, always meant burned pancakes.

"Aaahh."

As Arcane settled down for the evening amid the sounds of katydids and chattering crickets and Annie Minks paused to remember a story, a little train of wagons sped along the east-west road toward the town. The creaky sounds of wood and metal and old wheels and the crystalline tones of bottles clinking gently together in warped and knotted crates accompanied the rougher noises of the ragged mules exhaling great, steaming gusts of smoky vapor into the summer night with each stamp of their hooves.