Where I finally saw him again, it was at the pond the low part of the trail had become, downtown.
He was standing there, one foot down in the water.
There's no way I was making any more noise than the flooded creek, but still, as soon as I rounded the corner, he whipped his head back settled his black eyes on me.
I gave him a cocky two-fingered wave from my grips. He didn't wave back. He was watching the water again.
My big plan was to walk my bike up beside him, so as to keep from whipping water into his face. Not like we weren't both already soaked, but manners are manners, even at two in the morning, in the dark and the rain.
He never gave me the chance.
I was fifty feet away when he hauled his bike around, rode the lapping edge of the water through the wet grass, all the way up to the road, stepped down for just long enough to lift his bike up onto the cracked sidewalk that runs up there. He didn't lift his bike because he didn't have momentum—the climb he'd just made would have even taxed my sprinter's legs in their prime—he lifted it because road bike rims, especially old aluminum ones like he was running, they'll crimp in from that kind of action.
I bared my teeth just like he'd done, and I gave chase, having to run my bike up the last ten or fifteen yards, when my narrow road tires started to gouge into the mud.
By the time I clipped in on the sidewalk, he was a receding black dot in the car lane.
I ramped down off the curb at a handicapped place, and I gave my bike every last bit of myself I had.
We took the turn—on the road, not the path—up into the canyon maybe ten seconds apart, him running the beginning of the red light, me catching the end of it, leaned over too far for wet asphalt but I didn't care anymore. My left pedal snagged on the blacktop, hitching the ass-end of the bike over a hiccup, but the tire caught somehow, and I rode it out. Watching my line. I was watching my line.
It led straight to him.
He looked back just like Coach was forever telling us not to, but it didn't slow him or tilt him even a little.
A half mile after the turn, the road started its wicked uphill slope.
Twice I'd gone up it, but that was fifteen years ago, and the road had been barricaded off for the event, and I'd still been pretty sure I was going to have to sag wagon it. Not because I was a sprinter. Because I was human.
I'd promised myself never again.
But this was now. This was tonight.
I geared down, stood on the cranks.
He was there in my headlight. Not riding away. Just crosswise in the road, like a barricade himself.
I rear-braked, my rooster tail slinging past without me, like my intentions were going where I couldn't.
The night cyclist wasn't smiling. He wasn't anything. He was just looking at me.
"I've got your—!" I said, pulling the clear glasses away from my neck, against the elastic.
He turned in a huff, uphill, and, because I had the jump, I figured I'd be alongside him in two shakes.
Wrong.
He was faster on the climb than I was. It wasn't even close. Even with me screaming for my lungs to be deeper, for my legs to be younger, for the grade to flatten out.
It was like the mountain was sucking him uphill. And when he looked back on the first turn, his mouth wasn't haggard and gasping like mine. He was calm, even. Not winded in the least.
Two miles into it, blood in my throat, I had to stop.