by Alex Batty
(10/17/07)

In the bike church there was mostly grease. Grease on my fingers, grease between my eyes, swipes of greasy fingerprints on my skin where my shirt rode up. On a good day I was as covered and gritty as a greased watermelon on the beach. I mentioned this to Dov once and he called me la sandia ever after.

Officially the shop was called the Put the Fun Between Your Legs Community Bike Shop, but everyone called it the bike church, on account of it being in the basement of an old Baptist clapboard. I spent most of my time truing wheels and overhauling hubs -- the extent of my skill -- and rarely did anyone seem to have the leisure to teach me anything else. It got to be a ceremony, me coming in, dumping my bag in the corner, tinkering until I couldn't see straight, and then retreating to my area of mild expertise: hubs, hubs, hubs.

All the kids who volunteered at the shop had names like a punk-rock cartoon: Diner, Rob Two-Cents, Swamp, Gin. Napoleon and Nod always worked in the far corner on a tandem bike built of salvaged parts. It was an ongoing project, as were their forays to the park to woo whatever set of boys they'd picked out for the afternoon. Only Dov had a non-hardcore name: His parents had given it to him.

His mother was a Catholic from the Dominican Republic whose one concession in her marriage to Dov's agnostic Israeli father was to give their middle child a Hebrew name, Dov, meaning "bear." Once, when he was showing me how to dismantle a freewheel, I asked him about the cross he kept dangling from his bike stand, and he said, with typical economy of words, "For when my mother comes by. Emergencies." He looked up at me with a half-smile. I'm pretty sure bikes were Dov's religion.

He spoke a sort of Spanglish when he spoke at all, but especially when he was concentrating on a bike. He muttered strings of curses like prayers. He was, though, the only one there who spoke any amount to me. He let me tag along to pick up new tricks and skills and helped me fix every bottom bracket I jumbled and chain I mangled. Thus I knew that he was twenty-three; that he had let his older brother give him tattoos of bear paws on the back of his neck with a sewing needle; and that, while drinking old coffee in the back of the shop, he liked to pick the names of world leaders out of the newspaper and dream up fitting ways for them to perish.

"Calderon," he'd say, pointing at the pasty-faced Mexican President. "Overdose on Coca-Cola, American dollars shoved in his orifices." Catharsis comes in all forms.

"Hilary Rodham Clinton?"

"Tied up with a bike chain by the League of Women Voters. Left by the side of the carreterra."

"Bike chain?"

Dov drained his cup and shrugged. "Holy war, right?"

I could understand having religion as a tangible thing. My own path to divinity was plants. Botanist, artist, and now budding volunteer bike-mechanic for the bike church, I was obsessed by the way that bike mechanics mimicked a plant's: cog systems versus vein systems, chain functions paralleling chemical functions.

There were other things to believe in, of course. Dov's smile, for one. His T-shirts were always black or army green, with grease smeared over them; his teeth were surprisingly immaculate in comparison. A romance writer would describe his rare smiles as wolfish; it was the sharp canines. He always wore a black belt with a multi-tool in a black pouch. The belt had silver metal grommets which echoed his eyes: grey irises rimmed as if with a fine-tipped charcoal. His sneakers had definitely had previous owners. When he wasn't muttering while concentrating, he turned the ring in his lip with his tongue.

One miserable Sunday I decided to work on a beater, an actual bike, in its entirety. I had abandoned my garden to the rain, and it was warm and well-lit in the bike church. A non-profit largely-volunteer run bike shop needed all the help it could get, I figured, and I really couldn't fuck the bike up more than it already was.

And yet I found my way to a minor disaster. As I attempted to tool with the shifters and gears, one hand rotating the pedals, the chain somehow corralled my middle finger into the rotation of the freewheel, while my sleeve went round and round into the spokes.

Nod and Nap were too intent on the tandem to hear my yelps, but Dov, of course, had watched the whole thing go down. With a wrench between his teeth -- in a romance novel it would have been a dagger -- and a long smear of grease from his forehead to his nose like he'd picked a fight on Ash Wednesday, he used both hands to unwind me from the wheel and extract my finger.

He squinted at the wheel. "Some of those spokes are dead."

"What makes you say that?" I said. "They seem very alive to me." I cautiously moved the mangled finger, patterned with rust and smashed from the shifter. A single bead of blood appeared from one of the cuts inflicted by the cogs.

"Something in the way you shrieked," he said.

I narrowed my eyes.

"Need an ambulance?" he asked.

I shook my head. "Soap." The throbbing was making me a little teary.

"Liquor?"

"Please."

With my finger bound up in a paper towel to stem the now copious bleeding, we walked to a collectively-owned bar a block away, by the university, where we both ducked past familiar faces. Dov wrangled a first-aid kit from the bartender and we crammed into the ladies' room.

It was a hip, bare-light-bulb sort of place, where a marker hung from the TP dispenser for the purposes of free expression on the shit-green walls. "G-spots are a lie," someone had scribbled. "Lick cunt."

"Throne of wisdom, huh," said Dov, running the hot water and holding my finger under. He bent over the sink and from over his shoulder I could see a delicate line of blood circling the drain.

"What's wrong with Lick Cunt?" I watched the nail turn purple and black.

"Lick?" He squirted some soap.

"Yeah."

"No." He turned his head to lift an eyebrow. "Eat." We looked speculatively at each other. He asked, "Do you have any blood-borne diseases?"

"What?" I looked away from his face to my finger. "No. No."

He stuck my finger in his mouth.

I watched the tattooed bear paws wave on the back of his neck as his jaw moved around my sorry finger. I put my free hand to the hem of his shirt where a palm print of grease dragged across his spine.

"Dov."

He turned the water off and straightened up, finger still in his mouth. He looked at me. I let my free hand fall and the first two fingers hook over his belt. With his tongue in my palm, he pushed me into the wall. Really it wasn't very far to go; the bathroom three by three feet, less with sink and toilet. His crown brushed the bare bulb and he tilted his head to avoid it, shadows swinging around the room and the tungsten coil flashing in the mirror.

"Lucia," he said in my ear, my name becoming Spanish, "Creo que, I'm going to bite you." He said it like a curse, suitably horror-movie sexy.

I stuck my tongue in his mouth. I had to stand on my toes, being a small curvy woman from a family of small curvy women. His lip ring was smooth and cool and charming. I let my tongue do its ritual, touching every top tooth and then every bottom tooth and then sliding along the underside of his tongue. Our teeth clicked. He sank his incisors into my lip and pulled, and I moved forward like a chain, sliding into motion. He slid his hands under my bum and pushed me firmly into the wall. My messy hair, up in a bun, bumped awkwardly; I pulled the wooden stick out, and my long dark curls fell around us. Cascaded, a romance writer would say. I wrapped him up in my legs and opened my eyes to the wall opposite us as his mouth moved to my neck. The graffiti on the wall read, the swing in my waist, the joy in my feet, hickory dickory dock. Nonsense, I thought. Like sex.

"Sandia Lucia," he said at my ear.

"Huh?"

"Do. You. Want to. Drink. Beer?"

"Beer?"

"Or go somewhere else?"

"My house is close," I said, adding for safety, "There might be beer."

As we picked our bikes up at the shop it really looked like the day was going to baptize us, murderous clouds and crows screeching among the power lines. The wind cut right through my hoodie and my nipples started to hurt from the cold. I focused on the way Dov's butt barely touched his seat, he leaned so far forward on his handlebars. My heart fell up and down as I followed him between traffic and tight turns. In the middle of Broadway, the heavens opened. Dov had on a black slicker; I had none.

I lived in the basement of a dilapidated brownstone which my cousin and I had made into something livable before she had married an Orthodox Jew and moved to New York to bear his children. We were both raised Jewish, but of course I mostly stuck to the stuff I believed in, like Passover, since it was about spring and plants and rebirth. Upstairs lived the kids with real jobs: a Wobbly carpenter, two non-profit organizers, and a punked-out school teacher. The basement was two rooms connected by a bathroom; we parked our bikes in the back yard and passed through my garden to get to the door.

"Whoa," Dov said, stopping short. "What's the pattern?"

They don't call a garden a sanctuary for nothing. The plants I was currently cultivating I picked for their thousands of years of use as culinary, medicinal, and spiritual plants. Each species was planted in a concentric ring, one ring inside another. Roses were planted in two perpendicular lines, forming crosshairs with the outermost ring, which was a blackberry hedge.

"Well," I said, and he leaned in to hear over the rain. "Blackberry is ferocious, you know? They say it's the manifestation of our desires into the world. And the next ring in is mugwort, protection for the traveler, and it causes dreaming."

"What's that small one near the center, the purple flower?"

"Violet. Lots of medicine in that one, and also an ancient aphrodisiac."

"The garden kind of looks like a freewheel."

I laughed. "It does, you're right."

We gazed for a moment, rain running down the neck of my hoodie, and then I felt his hand at my back. "Let's go in," I said. "There's more."

My room had a bed, a bookshelf, a lamp, and plants on every available surface. My windowsill looked like an altar to the Jolly Green Giant. We hung our wet outer layers in the entryway, and shivering, I turned on the lamp and plucked a handful of jasmine flowers through the open window, which I scattered into the room.

I had lost a lot of juice on the ride, and I stood dripping and tired in the doorway.

Dov looked around. "Do you have a shower?" he asked, and I nodded over my shoulder. I couldn't make myself move. He took the ends of my sleeves and wrung out a cup of water.

"Useless, verdad?"

I squinted my eyes at him in a way that indicated both the vast discrepancy in our relative drynesses, and that if I was able to I'd sink my nails into his chest.

"Humph," he said, and pushed me into the bathroom.

He ran the water in the shower, and I began to twitch and thaw as steam rose around us. He raised my hands and drew the soggy hoodie off me. Two layers of sodden shirts and then suddenly my black bra surprised us both with its silk and shine. He took my hands to his mouth and breathed into them for a minute, rubbing his palms over them. He put one of my hands on each of his shoulders and looked at me.

"Tell me to stop."

I just looked at his face -- and then his chest, void of its shirt, and the forepaws tattooed there to match the hind ones on his neck.

He blinked at me slowly and then bent to tackle my belt. I leaned into him, balancing while he slid one leg out of the sodden Carharts, then the other. My underwear surprised him too, boy-cut black silk with lace around the legs, like bloomers. And then he knelt to read the tattoo that started at my spine and circled toward my belly button: Whoso draws this sword from this anvil will be rightful queen of all the land. He grasped my hips with his thumbs at the hipbones and ran his tongue over the letters in "rightful." I wiggled my nose, shivered. He pulled the underwear off, the bra, and nudged me into the steam.

"In with you."

I stood in the fine hot pressure, delighted that I could feel my extremities. The light from the ancient light fixture in the bathroom was weak and yellow, but I could see the faint down that grew on his body, catching the water in trails on its way to his feet, as if it regretted gravity. There wasn't anything extraneous on him: nicked hands, muscles that rose off his body like hill country. I stood on my toes and leaned into him, knocking him back as he uttered a little cry of surprise, which I swallowed like pudding.

He slid down the tile wall with my body between his legs, a bar of Dove soap in his hands. The bike grease ran off of us reluctantly. I occupied his mouth while his soapy hands wandered from my neck to my spine to my bum.

"Better?" he asked.

I nodded.

He pulled back to look at me through the spray of water, and then slowly he took my lip in his teeth. Overhead, the light flickered and went out. Ceremony.

We held still against each other in the steamy darkness, still except for his tongue swiping lazily through my mouth.

"Apagón," he said when he drew back. Blackout.

"Been happening all month," I said.

We rubbed down hastily with beach towels and scurried into my room. I used a headlamp to dig around for a short candle, and miraculously, the lighter from my pants' pocket worked. I pulled myself up onto the tall platform of my bed and opened my legs, and Dov slid between. I felt the goosebumps on his skin, felt him take the weight of my breasts in his hands. Then he knocked me back into the covers, the comforter spouting feathers into the air. He shoved his warm belly against mine and said, "Finally," with a big sigh like a great black Lab sinking into his bed, and he took my nipple into his mouth, lip ring sliding around and around.

I slid my hands between his legs and wrapped my fingers around his cock. It had a feel of dependability to it. I pulled my fingers in upward strokes, and then suddenly it was gone from my hand, and Dov was sliding his tongue down my belly. He paused to look up at me and I blinked and he returned to his ritual. He circled his tongue around my navel three times in each direction, and I imagined him tightening a nut on a hub until the wheel rolled just so. Then he pulled my clit into his mouth and his finger made long strokes inside me, and I was pretty sure that every time I saw him with a bike from now on, I would feel jealous that the bike was the one under his hands.

Eventually I cried mercy and we produced a condom and slid together. He flexed inside me experimentally and I sucked on his lip, enjoying the pulse at his heart and his hip.

"Sandia," he said, "you're greased up." I laughed and lifted my hips.

"Roll," I ordered, and suddenly I was on top of him, and the jasmine flowers were crushed under us, wafting tendrils of scent between us. I looked at the vines crawling in the window above the bed and lifted Dov's hands above his head, sliding each carefully into several loops amidst the tangle.

"If you don't behave," I said, "You'll break the vine."

He nodded, barely.

"Dov," I said, laying a hand on either side of his head and rocking my hips, "It appears to me that I am in a position to ask favors." I took a bite of his mouth, followed a slow lick up his neck, and then pulled gently on the shell of his ear. A soft curse of appreciation.

"When I see you at the bike shop," I continued, "Will you show me how to adjust gears?"

He thrust up suddenly and I cried out.

"Will you be there?" he whispered. He pushed again and I couldn't hold on. I fell.

"Ah. Um. Yes," I said.

"Okay." He slid his hands from the vines, put his right thumb to my clitoris while his left hand held on to my hips like they were warm bits of gold.

I let him watch me come and felt his hand slide up my belly and between my breasts. I felt him begin. I leaned down to his mouth and took the sounds and swallowed them inside, where they waited until the next ceremony.

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