John Woodington

We never called him Bobby Swanson, but we had plenty of names for his mother. Old Yeller. The Punisher. Godzilla. She was a demon lady. Large. She'd once speared a three-foot gopher snake in half and left the spade shovel sticking up out of her front lawn for the neighbor kids to see. We called her son Swan, though as a short, pudgy, ginger kid, there was nothing graceful about him.

There was a clan of us kids that took up bike jumping early on. We started with Toys-R-Us Huffys and plywood boards angled against stacks of two-by fours we'd stolen from home construction sites in our neighborhood. By the time we were twelve, we had four-hundred-dollar GT BMX bikes with three-piece cranks and aluminum frames, and we'd repurposed the edge of a farmer's field with dirt jumps we'd shoveled and packed ourselves. Swan never had a bike like ours. He had a black junker his mother found at a garage sale with a dented fork and mismatched handlebar grips. He kept up though. We built a step-up jump and he took it right in line with the rest of us. We built a trail of doubles where if we lost speed, we'd crash into the muddy, rocky pits between the mounds. He hit them, fearless, his sandy bowl cut flopping in the breeze, his freckles fusing as summer wore on.

We had injuries. Scraped palms and knees from failed wheelies on the hot tar. Half a dozen concussed pukes from endos over the handlebars. Lacing pink scars running the lengths of our fuzzy shins when our Airwalks slipped the metal teeth of our custom pedals. Wrist bones popping out through palms when we landed too hard and didn't let go. One kid in our circle got upset and decided to stand in the center of the trail to prevent us from jumping. Swan wouldn't have that. He told the kid he was riding anyway, and when the kid didn't move, Swan crashed through him and broke the kid's tibia. We sat on our bikes and laughed and patted Swan on the back as the ambulance carted the kid away, leaving us free to jump again.

Swan was always the first one out there. In the mornings we heard his mother unleashing hell on him, then the rumbling of his garage door across the street. We'd meet him at the edge of the farmer's field before the sun had cleared the trees, already sweaty and grinning, his shitty bike coated with dirt and scraped down to the shiny steel beneath the paint. We thought he was crazy. We thought he'd inherited it from his mother. We once bet him to drink an entire kiddy pool of water and damnit if he didn't suck down water until his belly turned hard as a medicine ball. Then he laughed it off and peed on his mother's rhubarb the rest of the afternoon. We didn't understand how a kid raised by a mother like that could be so carefree and brazen.

One guy in our group had a dad who worked construction, and he got him to build a six-foot-high curved plywood ramp that we shimmied down to the edge of the local pond at the base of a hill. We had no idea how deep the water was out there. The pond was a couple hundred feet across and mudbottomed. Some of us thought it was too shallow, that somebody'd crack a dick off when their wheels struck the pond basin. Some of us thought it was too deep, that the first person to hit the jump would get sucked down by a whirlpool riptide in the center of the pond caused by the ribbed sewers that regulated the water level. All of us thought our bikes were worth too much money to jump into a suburban pond.

While we toed the edge of the water with our front wheels, Swan pushed his bike back to the top of the hill. He'd brought his sister's pink lifejacket, and he strapped it around the crossbar of his bike to protect his junk and to help the bike float. When we saw him up there we shouted to him. Urged him on. He looked small and thick. He stood up on the pedals, pumped his short fullback legs, swept down the length of the hill and hit the ramp so fast it sounded like we'd all zipped up our flies in unison.

He flew up into the sunshine and kicked the bike away from his body at the peak of his flight, and as he crested through the air, he spread his arms and straightened his legs and floated out more gracefully than anything we'd ever seen. He arced down, hit the water, and blew out a tidal wave before him. When he burst to the surface a moment later, he screamed in triumph, a primal shriek, his fist in the air. We all cheered and highstepped in and helped him drag his bike back onto the shore. We thought he had done something braver than the rest of us would ever do in our entire lives.