Read Online Ride Around Shining by Chris Leslie-Hynan - Free Book Online Page B

destinations in my past life as an ordinary Portlander, with a job at a nonprofit and a social life beyond my place of employment. I’d hardly been back from Northern a week when I realized all that was gone, that the whole scene I’d known had moved on, to marriage or to new discontentments I had no place in, or to California. My return to this city of youth, this city I’d once moved eighteen hundred miles to on the basis of a simple Web survey at FindYourSpot.com, had made me a stranger again. On my third morning off, I got a text that said “home soon,” and I was glad.
    Antonia’s absence had made me feel the leanness of my life, and that night I bought a magnum of Belgian tripel, to remind myself of my proximity to eminence. As I drank I wandered through the bachelor’s rooms, looking for treasures. I found a collection of foreign hotel soaps, a couple of bottles of white rum with faded Spanish labels, and, lying in a corner amid some camping gear, an old hickory switch, as smooth as if it had been oiled. A closet I’d never inspected before went back and back, and I took a flashlight in, expecting a grow room. Instead I just found the light switch, and, in an immaculate corner, a small lamp that lit up a tiny shrine to the bachelor’s departed cat. The shrine had a Buddhist air, but its centerpiece was a Polaroid of the old tabby crouching proudly behind a dead bat. The cat was obese, and it was hard to believe the thing had come across a bat pitiful enough to be killed by it. It looked a little puzzled at its own prowess, crouching there in a crooked shadow that must have belonged to the bachelor himself.
    As I reached down to flip the Polaroid over, my phone chimed back in the kitchen. “Late nite pickup?” it said, and I drank my glass down and watched the foam lace my empty chalice. For a moment in the garage I considered my sobriety, but as Calyph once assured me, only black men got pulled over in Jaguars.
    Twenty minutes later I hit the chalk in Dunthorpe, and there under the floodlights Antonia stood on her steps, shivering in a party dress. She got her own door before I could, and I could see the gooseflesh coming down her shoulder.
    â€œWhy didn’t you wait inside?”
    â€œI wanted to wake myself up.” She spoke fast, and her breath seemed short from the chill. “I walked around the house. You ever walk around outside your own house at night? And look up at the walls, and there’s so much out there you never really looked at? It’s like how could it be your house really, until you knew about it all?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “Never.”
    â€œThere’s all this wood out there,” she said. “There’s all this stone. Come and look.”
    I looked at her there, dolled up, lined around the eyes like I’d never seen her, shivering through some unknowable mood. A woman puts on eyeliner and suddenly she’s nocturnal and difficult. She looks like she could be a fatal problem. “The climate’s controlled in here,” I said.
    â€œCome and look,” she said again. “It’s the wilderness out there.”
    I left the car running and let myself be led upon the lawn, around the side of the house, to where the chimney rose up. It didn’t seem remarkable. They just looked like some white-bread quarry rocks to me. She strode toward the chimney and put her little slipper-shoe up on one of the stones of the corner and hoisted herself. I remember her little knee flashing, and the unexpected freckles of her leg as it bent in the moon.
    She stepped into a little hop and slapped a rock at the apex of her jump, damn near seven feet in the air. “I own you,” she cried at the rock as she hit it.
    She landed in a crouch and still her eyes were on the chimney’s tower of moon-white stone. “I own that,” she said, in a puzzled voice.
    When we came back to the car, I saw movement in the