Ixion Jungeblut has the rad-piznin’, though not nowhere near as bad as Ma. She’s tent-bound these days, and swole up so bad you can barely see the tops of her eyes.

Ol’ Ixion, he just can’t stand still, and he got real mean. His man-wife Joey takes care of him, most of the time, a lot more than Ixion likes to let on. Joey tells me You Give A Little To Get A Little. I told him I know, that’s why I take care of Ma, and Joey got tears in his big brown eyes and said Good Boy.

Ixion must be hard to look after. On top of being sick half the time, his feet got burned real bad, and he says after just a little ways that it’s like walking on hot coals. He doesn’t say that to me. He doesn’t say much to me at all. I just hear everything while I’m working. And I see.

I see the white in his skin, and the little marks like the suckers on an octoped’s legs. I see the way he’s always sniffing while he’s running around the bike shop trying to talk folks in off the street with their trikes or choppers or scoots. Hov or ground, wheelchair or whatever, he just don’t even mind giving Athol-Brose all that work he can’t do because he says he’s too sick except once in a while when the price is right.

The Feds think Joey owns the business, but all Joey did was put up the money. He doesn’t know a bike from a hole in the head. I wish he did run the business, though. Things would be a lot different.

With Ixion in charge, the whole shed’s always full and we have to tell people it’ll be a week till we get to it after Ixion’s done getting them through the flap of our main tent. Then they come screaming back in a week when it isn’t done, and Ixion says, this here’s our technician. Say hello, Bezoomny, and then I tell them a bunch of stuff he told me to say and they go away.

I see the way he wipes at his nose, the way he goes up and down, nice as pie one minute and screaming off the handle the next. I might be slow and tetched, but Ma never raised any fools, she says. Not even Billy, even if he did go off and let all that stuff ruin his great big brain that made so many beautiful toys for us. I love the Furie chopper he made me more than anything in the whole world. Furie’s sick and no one here will help fix it. So I’m about to walk off the job.

Ixion has an electric wheelbarrow he made himself. That’s what gave him the idea to go into business. It’s got a seat, too. He said when him and Joey were living up in the hills he couldn’t get the cow to pull it. So they took that old wheelbarrow and they lecterfied it with a little bitty torquey old wheelchair motor on the front wheel, right and left drives, and a big old controller with a switch that would give it both barrels and walk the barrow up to about thirty miles an hour. Somebody asked them how they did it, and Ixion said bring your bike to us, and what did you say you could pay again?

When nobody much is asking, Joey says they were up in the hills on the run from some get-rich-quick scheme or another in some “San Francisco” place my grandmamma talked about too before she rode off with Jesus on His Bike Everlasting. Ixion’s old. Got to be at least fiftysixty. That means he was born Before. Ma told me what that means. So was she.

Ixion has him a line of bullshit a mile long. He says to customers all the time, you’re in good hands, I was a physicist before the Big One, and on and on. I asked Ma what a ‘physicist’ is. She says it means he made bombs. No wonder he’s such a mean old drunkie and probably on the hex too.

Ixion runs the Bike Co-Op in our quarter of PDX-FedQ-9, down in the big vacant lot where there’s no tents for a while and the sky cups its hands down at you and the big cetam trees full of bees nod all everywhere like some of the old deaders still hanging from the telephone-trees with their hanging vines that Ma says can still kill you.

I work for Ixion when he can pay me. I make him mad a lot. He doesn’t like muties. But he says I remind him of some kid he used to know.

What was I talking about? My head hurts. I was out in the sun all day. Ixion said it was over a hundred and thirty degrees. I’m built like a shit brickhouse, he says, whatever that means, so the sun only made my skin start to harden, like it does until it gets dark, when it’s that hot or really cold. I don’t really mind. Tell the truth and shame the devil, I don’t really notice.

I was born After, so I’m sturdier than the pale sick ones from Before like Ixion, no matter how much his eyes light up or how much he grins through his white beard like the Devil made him do it. Anyway, I hauled out moldy four-by-sixes for him a while. Then he took a level reading for the rest of the porch he wanted to build onto the one outside the main tent. Then he threw a fit about something, called me a couple of nasty names, and went away for a while.

I was mad at Ixion today, and all the rest of those FUCKERS at the Shop, too. We had to bail water out of the repair shed all morning because one of the plastic pipes from the cistern broke and Ixion and Joey were yelling at each other and throwing pottery around and it was just enough to make me want to go home. So I did.

Then I came back, and Ixion says, Bezoomny, you can’t just come in and work for an hour and leave when you feel like it! If everyone did that, there wouldn’t be a shop here, just a bunch of fucking mutants dealing drugs and no, Joey, I will not shut up, the boy’s feeble-minded and probably doesn’t even know the meaning of the word—

I tugged on his sleeve and told him that if he wanted drugs, he should talk to my brother because I’m a Christian and we don’t do that hexometh­amphetamine or that Morphoxyn or that maltlikker. Or smoke. He almost put out the home-made hemp cigarette he had going, then just looked kind of worn out by me. I spoke up again.

When are you going to fix my Furie, I says, you told me two weeks ago that Athol-Brose would have it ready by that Monday, with a new charger and a throttle that’ll do something besides Reverse—

Joey, Ixion bawled, wired into his computer through the shiny hole in the back of his neck, Get this fucking mutant out of my hair, I got shit to do!

I just went back outside the main tent and started hauling away big rocks from the lot, piling them in the trash-midden three blocks down. Ixion wasn’t himself. He must have been really sick today.

They’re always really behind at the Shop. They’ve got four people (five, if you count both of Athol-Brose’s heads, which I do sometimes) doing the work of eight or ten. What do they care for one retard-mute’s skimmer platform with a fake chopper body on it, just some old kick-hov with extra battery packs, barely worth the time it takes them to look at it and tell me why they can’t make it run? FUCKERS.

Ixion apologized to me later. He said he had His Own Mental-Health Issues and I’m Just A Bitchy Old Queen. I said You’re Not Old, and he laughed again, fit to split. I wonder why.

Anyway, I decided to sneak Furie out of the shop shed when they were all busy. I’m gonna work on it myself. I don’t care what they say. I’ve watched Athol and Brose work. I can do it too. I can.

I can.

The back service tent was connected to the Boneyard shed at the Co-Op. It was full of mellow, incandescent light from hanging bulbs of a thousand different wattages, their filaments a tonal spectrum of sizzling little worms. Two long picnic tables on the tent’s far side were bolted together and piled high with tackle boxes, pill bottles full of rivets and bolts, fuses and roll-pins, and everything else labeled after its kind.

At a bare space past the C-clamp and the anvil, Ixion’s best tech — or techs, depending on your point of view — had just laced up a hub-motor onto the wheel of an electric bike. The motor’s plate was positioned like a hubcap, easily removable. Athol had it off, and both of them were giving its guts a final once-over before turning it around for a big bottle of home-brew, a quarter-pound of dope, or a few chickens. The boss could preach about the gift economy all he wanted to, but the brothers were tired of getting paid in chickens — and the home-brew and dope were neverending sources of argument.

“You trying to get us another Dewey-ticket? Put the pipe down.” Athol twisted around in the two-hooded black cotton poncho that encased them both and reached for the clay pipe. Brose held it up out of reach, then put it aside, squinting at the other head occupying the body they shared.

“No,” he murmured in his fuzzy bass voice, a diametric opposite to Athol’s clear, calm tenor, “You got the DUI. I was sleepin’.”

Holding a humming, battered Laspik fuse-wand above the innards of the old-time three-phase motor, Athol’s hand, the left hand of Athol-Brose, shook the tiniest bit. “And I get to blow on the little strip of plastic with whatever it was you injected into our blood.”

Brose blew pot smoke in Athol’s face, sticking out his tongue and handing him the front plate for the motor at the same time. “Think they’re gonna piss ya anytime soon? One more week of them dumb re-education classes. Everyone there’s stoned out of their gourds anyway.”

But he capped the pipe and put it back in the right-hand pocket of their overalls, his pocket, watching as Athol fused the last tiny connection into place and snicked the metal plate over the guts of Mrs. Jimenez’ prized market-rocket. “You heard from the boy yet?”

Athol squinted through the half-rims of his hand-me-down glasses. Brose wore glasses too, but rarely, only to read fine print on a kit-motor or faded stickers half in Mandarin on the inside of a fender or battery case, the lost lingua franca of The Directions staring out in the last places any bikemech would usually look.

Athol remembered reading in a broadsheet that Before, the Cubans rebuilt cars this way on their isolated island; Boneyard parts, chewing gum, spit and baling-wire, garden hoses and coathangers, whole landfills of odds and ends cannibalized under the flag of What the Hell, It Runs.

“What, were our heads momentarily detached?” he sniped now. He hadn’t seen Bezoomny since he snuck off with his chopper.

Brose looked at him oddly. “Wonder if he up and put that thing together himself. No disrespect, he’s a great kid, but I was thinkin’ it looked like a... like somebody a little bit slow put it together. Musta worked at one time, or he wouldn’t a’brought it in. You know how he ever got the parts together?”

“I heard his brother made it. Stole most of the parts. There’s most of a BMW hydrogen motorbike in the electrical—” Here he began ticking off parts on his greasy, spindly fingers, “CityBug two-wheeler handlebars, hammered out a whole bunch to look like ape-hangers, four different kinds of aux motors from Currie to...” He pursed his lips. “Oh, yeah, something called a ‘Dirt-Devil Upright”. The main motor was a Wankel electric engine the brother must have stolen from some cop-shop somewhere.”

Brose chuckled in his beard. Athol was clean-shaven but for razorback wisps around the chin and upper lip. “No way that thing should have ever run, mathematically speakin’.”

Athol’s fingers played over the spokes of the wheel like a harpist’s. “Da. I hear ya cluckin’.” He slapped themselves on the back. “And he wanted us to make a silk purse out of that.”

The smile in his eyes spread to the rest of his face, as it so often did. “It’s just one of those science projects they piece together and expect us to fix for a bag of hex. Love to meet the brother. Must be a piece of work.”

Brose shrugged, shouldering the wheel. The brothers bent as one behind the back assembly of the little rebuilt trike, and fit the axle into place with a thunk.

When Bezoomny came back, they’d send him out into the blocs with all the repair orders that were ready. The boy couldn’t read much, but he knew what number went to what tent, and had most of the ’hood on a first-name basis. Mamacita Jimenez would pinch all four of their cheeks and rant and rave to Ixion about what good boys they were.

Both heads smiled reflectively with crooked teeth, thinking about the same thing. They’d earned their keep, that night. When she brought the wreck in, the motor was in shards. They had to weld the forks back onto the frame. Long night. But all differences of particulars aside, after some final tweaking of the current work-order they were about to sneak away for a well-deserved nap.

I don’t know what I did. I’ve been up all night and I don’t know what I did.

Ixion doesn’t lock the little box on his desk. He says he’d trust me in the room with a hundred-dollars in food coupons laying on the table. I came back while they were gone. I have a key. I was so mad at him I stole some of his drugs and did them, but I’ll confess my sins later. At least it wasn’t hex. This was a different drug: white, not yellow, and powdered like chalk instead of in crystals and it felt nice, like an icicle from the side of a downspout that time and I remember it like it was last week ’cos to me it is, but that’s okay.

It made everything light up like a snow was just about to fall, not the black snow now but the snow Before, the way Ma talks about it, falling on the cedars and spruces and all the other trees there used to be, the ones whose names she told me.

I took Furie out to the vacant lot where all the old Dumpsters are smashed on the rocks and no one can see down into the gully. I brought every tool I could find, and now... and now...

I went someplace else when I tried to start Furie up the last time. I couldn’t get that damn old throttle off “Reverse” but I didn’t really go any direction but what felt like Through. It don’t make no sense.

The engine made a bubble come out around it, and around me, and there was a noise that made my face hurt. My feet lifted up off the ground a little.

I felt like I was getting lectercuted only there was no smoke the way there was with the Sawyer boy when he touched the telephone vine that time, and I didn’t piss in my pants like him or get a big black burn hole out from the armbone.

I just stood there and shook, and I couldn’t let go of the handlebars. My right hand was locked on the throttle and the motors were all making that bubble all around me and that godawful noise but Furie wasn’t moving at all. It has a jack-type kickstand Billy parted from a Harley softail. It was up on the jackstand, and the hovs were just humming, humming, humming, like wheels going round and round, backwards... I was gonna go insane, my head was gonna come off, and—

Thud. The bubble let go. The noise got a little softer. My hand loosened up a bit, and the throttle went back down to “Idle”.

All around me, there were trees. Trees, and trees, and trees, and some guy on a different kind of bike who saw me on my chopper and ran off the road and went over his handlebars, and screamed like a little girl. He musta never seen a bike like mine. Maybe they don’t have them back then.

It was Before. I could smell it. I wanna go back, now. It’ll probably work again, but I wanna wait a little. I don’t know how much of a charge I have left and my skin’s still smoking.

I remember the sign, “82^ND AVE” and the cars, all the big shiny wonderful cars. There were little two-stroke gas scooters pooting around everywhere, but it must have been way Before because I didn’t see kick-hovs or motored bikes.

By then it felt like I was on fire like old dry garbage, and it was actually starting to hurt so I WRENCHED that throttle into Forward with my hand whose skin had gotten all hard from the heat, and—

I’m back now. Back here in the smelly, smoky New Portland that’s the only one I know, still picking at my lip and trying to remember the way the sunlight looked through the branches of that big tree with the soft needles, the thick one that looked as old as old God and just went up and up and up. It was outside of a big shiny glass building, part wood, with a big sign that said ‘B-U-F-F-E-T’. I don’t know what a b-u-f-f-e-t is, but it must be something good. The street around the building smelled the way I think food smells in dreams, like no food we ever had in my tent, I’ll tell you what.

And when I saw and heard and smelled all that, I got so mad I wanted to rip Ixion’s head off with my bare hands. This was the way things were Before. There were cars, and trees, and b-u-f-f-e-t-s. He made the bombs that took all that world away from us, then comes along afterwards and makes slaves out of people, and cheats them.

All Ixion does is take, and take, and take. I’ll bet he was like that even before he got sick. It’s not just the rad-piznin’. I’m done giving him slack. My Ma says Don’t Piss Down My Back And Tell Me It’s Raining.

The sound Furie made is still ringing in my head. Whatever I did, I think it’s right. It’s better. Better than anything ever was. I want to be happy about this and jump up and down, but all I can hold onto now, all tired and sweaty and shaky in the new light, is that sound. That sound. That sound.

Ix went off the deep end when he saw the Fed vans pouring into our Ward and just about running people over in the road to get to Mrs. Wright’s tent. Mrs. Wright, Bezoomny’s mother, was flabbergasted, of course, but when she saw how much Federal scrip they’d brought with them to ensure her cooperation, she settled down in a hurry.

The Feds came into the shop, too, and started writing down violations right and left, everything from exposed electrical outlets touching our metal counter to our three little untaxed marijuana plants out in the shed. They seized our books and shut us down and took my silly sick boy away for a week of questioning.

Ix kept going downhill after they sent him back to me. By then, we were broke and back to Square One, but not for the first time. I always get by and so, as a consequence, did Ix. He was getting worse for a long time, although he’d never admit it. But I’m the one person he could never bullshit. I called bullshit on him that day, and he lost it.

“Joey, we built it!” Ixion screamed at me, unplugging his Navy neck-port from the little potato laptop Athol-Brose built for him two Christmases ago (a repair-tech’s diagnostic device more valuable in our ward of New Portland than a healthy male child.) “We built the fucking thing and now they’re going to make Bezoomny rich from it? I’m a scientist, goddammit! I’ve been waiting my whole life to have some invention, any invention, come out of this white elephant...”

And on and on. "We didn’t build it,” I told him flatly. "Bezoomny’s junkie brother did. Get your story straight.”

But there’s just no talking to Ix sometimes. Eventually, I got him to smoke a joint, take his morphine and go lie down.

I wish the kid well. I have no idea about the ‘tachyon bubble’ they say the chopper makes, or all this nonsense about worms and stringholes, or however they say it works. That was always more Ix’s area, and he won’t discuss it. It’s Greek to me. What the hell? It runs.

It was my basement hoard of pre-Blast goods that financed this whole co-op to begin with. And I believe, as founding member, that Bezoomny is touched by God. Even babies, let alone mutants and the profoundly retarded, see and hear and comprehend so much more than any of us ever credit them.

I have a precious Polaroid of the big, squat, scaly creature swamping out the shed one afternoon, looking back toward the camera with a twinkle in his close-set eyes as if to say, even then, Screw you guys, I’ll build my own. That was what he told the government broadsheets, and those are the words for which History, even in this dark age, will remember him.

However the hell it runs, our bike shop spawned it. And none of us will ever get any credit for it. And we shouldn’t. My lover broke himself on that wheel, and has no one else but his own ungrateful self to blame.

This business was no good for us. Ixion wants to twist in the wind for a while. I have work to do. He’ll come begging back soon enough, when he uses up whatever twink he managed to connive for a cot. This time, though, he doesn’t come back in here.

Mother always told me that I enable people, but what the boy did has made me remember that I have the rest Of my life, too. And as he changed, so must we change ourselves.

Bezoomny has his own shop now, way down the Southeast Slope, close to the black river. His shoppies are Fedtechs in plastic suits carefully trying to duplicate whatever the hell his older brother built and his own subsequent tweakings. They need locals badly. And I’ve been told that they really need a cook.

It’ll be nice to go back to work and not have all the stress.

Hell, I feel ten years younger already.

©2006, Edward Morris