The Sponsor told me everything I need to know,” he says. All kinds of changes will be coming on inside of you all the while you’re expected to keep pedaling.
You won’t know the route, the dances, or how to pace yourself. “A man’s first migration is the most dangerous,” I say. “Welcome to the migration.” I introduce him to Keith and Hector. For him it’s the most important day of his life so far. Our Sponsor chats him up about all the new components on his bike. “This is Theo Anders, boys, and he’s going to make me proud!” The Sponsor tries to act like one of the good old boys, but there’s a billion dollars and ownership issues between us.Ī trailer pulls up with our bicycles, and Scotty runs over to them. He smiles at Keith, who must be the leader, I can see him thinking, because he’s the youngest and strongest. He has thick black hair, olive skin, and a five o’clock shadow even though it’s only noon.
He’s too skinny–someone should have told him to fatten up–but otherwise he looks tough enough. It takes a while to get used to the eyes. The new rider comes out of the car and blinks like he’s just waking up. You can’t get them to talk to you, I’ve tried. Other doors on his car open and men that look like him, but with cheaper clothing, get out. Now he’s showing off his white-as-paint teeth and looking at us like we are racing horses: profitable flesh. He threatened us with life in prison, even though we all knew he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. He was yelling and calling us murderers as we all stood around the broken body of Siv. We smile at him, each of us thinking, I reckon, about the last time we saw him. Even though they have enough money to buy life, they have that look to them like it’s been a long time since they’ve lived at all.
He steps out wearing sunglasses and skin stretched so tight over his face that he looks like he might pop. Our Sponsor arrives in a long black four door car spewing enough exhaust to make my eyes water. He didn’t show any weakness, not up until the very end. Fourteen migrations without any big accidents: a stretch so long I think we all forgot what could happen. It had been a good seven years without any casualties. “Any one seen the new guy yet?” Keith asks. “Ready to ride.” Christ, I’m only fifty-six. I feel his eyes looking me over, wondering about me now that I’m the oldest: now that Siv’s dead.
But once you see us dance, then you know we belong together. We’re a strange migrating flock, not much in common, nothing like the huge numbers of wild birds who used to travel across the US and wore a monotony of feathers on their bodies. He doesn’t speak Spanish but his wife and kids do. There’s Keith who’s twenty-eight, the youngest and darkest skinned of us–he’s mixed Scotty, gay, thirty-seven, and a beast of a rider and Hector, forty-four, Mexican but from the US. There are three other men waiting on the road. Despite her words, she and I both know what I will do, if I have to. She doesn’t say goodbye to me, but holds me tight and then lets me go. Marion drives our old griesel out to a lonely stretch of road in Glacier National Park. Later there will be an intensity burning in her as she takes me into our room and undresses me, touches every part of my body as though there will be a test later and she must memorize it all. She doesn’t want to touch me, to be any more vulnerable than I have already made her. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow morning.” I reach out for her hand, but she pulls away from me. We’ve been avoiding this for the last month as though time was not passing–as though summer was not heading toward fall. We’ll manage, somehow.” She cries harder. This is another sign, as real and inevitable as all the others.
My wife drops her fork onto her plate and starts to cry. A mercy that the genetic modifications left me normal eyes for summer and winter, but when it changes, it is unsettling for everyone. The cornea and pupil widen so that the white is barely visible. My senses grow more intricate–smells carry layers of meaning, gnats and mosquitoes become visible everywhere I look, and the normal sounds of human civilization hurt my ears with all their chaos.Īnd now my eyes have changed. My appetite increases and I develop a layer of fat on my belly. The night sky is even more persistent–every constellation in the big Montana sky makes arrows pointing south. The sun hums to me all day long that it’s time to go, go, go.