"I can ride a bike, though. And I know how to use a clutch, I told you that. Please, Larry. If we don't waste time we can camp in New Hampshire tonight and be halfway there by tomorrow night. We - "
"It's not like a bike, goddammit!" he burst out, and the guitar came to a jangling stop behind him. He could see Joe looking back at them over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed and instantly distrustful. Gee, I sure do have a way with people, Larry thought. That made him even angrier.
Nadine said mildly: "You're hurting me."
He looked and saw that his fingers were buried in the soft flesh of her shoulders, and his anger collapsed into dull shame. "I'm sorry," he said.
Joe was still looking at him, and Larry recognized that he had just lost half the ground he had gained with the boy. Maybe more. Nadine had said something.
"What?"
"I said, tell me why it's not like a bike."
His first impulse was to shout at her, If you know so much, go on and try it. See how you like looking at the world with your head on backward. He controlled that, thinking it wasn't only the boy he had lost ground with. He'd lost some with himself. Maybe he had come out the other side, but some of the old childish Larry had come out with him, tagging along at his heels like a shadow which has shrunk in the noonday sun but has not entirely disappeared.
"They're heavier," he said. "If you overbalance, you can't get rebalanced as easily as you can with a bicycle. One of these 360s goes three hundred and fifty pounds. You get used to controlling that extra weight very quickly, but it does take some getting used to. In a standard shift car, you operate the gearshift with your hand and the throttle with your foot. On a cycle it's reversed: the gearshift is foot-operated, the throttle hand-operated, and that takes a lot of getting used to. There are two brakes instead of one. Your right foot brakes the rear wheel, your right hand brakes the front wheel. If you forget and just use the hand-brake, you're apt to fly right over the handlebars. And you're going to have to get used to your passenger."
"Joe? But I thought he'd ride with you!"
"I'd be glad to take him," Larry said. "But right now I don't think he'd have me. Do you?"
Nadine looked at Joe for a long, troubled time. "No," she said, and then sighed. "He may not even want to ride with me. It may scare him."
"If he does, you're going to be responsible for him. And I'm responsible for both of you. I don't want to see you spill."
"Did that happen to you, Larry? Were you with someone?"
"I was," Larry said, "and I took a spill. But by then the lady I was with was already dead."
"She crashed her motorcycle?" Nadine's face was very still.
"No. What happened, I'd say it was seventy percent accident and thirty percent suicide. Whatever she needed from me... friendship, understanding, help, I don't know... she wasn't getting enough." He was upset now, his temples pounding thickly, his throat tight, the tears close. "Her name was Rita. Rita Blakemoor. I'd like to do better by you that's all. You and Joe."
"Larry, why didn't you tell me before?"
"Because it hurts to talk about it," he said simply. "It hurts a lot." That was the truth, but not the whole truth. There were the dreams. He found himself wondering if Nadine had bad dreams - last night he had awakened briefly and she had been tossing restlessly and muttering. But she had said nothing today. And Joe. Did Joe have bad dreams? Well, he didn't know about them, but fearless Inspector Underwood of Scotland Yard was afraid of the dreams... and if Nadine took a spill on the motorcycle, they might come back.
"We'll go tomorrow, then," she said. "Teach me how tonight."
But first there was the matter of getting the two small bikes Larry had picked out gassed up. The dealership had a pump, but without electricity it wouldn't run. He found another candy wrapper by the plate covering the underground tank and deduced that it had recently been pried up by the ever-resourceful Harold Lauder. Lovesick or no, Payday freak or not, Larry had gained a lot of respect for Harold, almost a liking in advance. He had already developed his own mental picture of Harold. Probably in his mid-thirties, a farmer maybe, tall and suntanned, skinny, not too bright in the book sense, maybe, but plenty canny. He grinned. Building up a mental picture of someone you had never seen was a fool's game, because they were never the way you had imagined. Everybody knows the one about the three-hundred-pound disc jockey with the whipcord-thin voice.
While Nadine got a cold supper together, Larry prowled around the side of the dealership. There he found a large steel wastecan. Leaning against it was a crowbar and curling over the top was a piece of rubber tubing.
I've found you again, Harold! Take a look at this, Sergeant Briggs. Our man siphoned some gas from the underground tank to get going. I'm surprised he didn't take his hose with him.
Perhaps he cut off a piece and that's what's left, Inspector Underwood - begging your pardon, but it is in the wastecan.
By jove, Sergeant, you're right. I'm going to write you up for a promotion.