I stop for cigarettes, a noteworthy action for two reasons:

Number one, I'm on a kick for healthier and cleaner living. I've abandoned junk food, cut way back on beef, and put down over a thousand dollars on exercise equipment, the largest expense of which has been a bicycle. I've lost 40 pounds and lowered my cholesterol from 245 to 185 in less than a year. Last week, I heard a woman at work call me a health nut.

Number two, I don't smoke. Never have. Unless you count the Swisher Sweets stolen from somebody's dad when I was in high school. We smoked them on camping trips, sporting them like the classic phallic symbol.

I'm 43. My bike is a Trek 1000. At 650 dollars, it cost just enough to convince myself I'm serious about this cycling thing. Not like the hundred-dollar weight set or the rowing machine Lisa sold in a yard sale.

Jeremy and I ride 25 to 30 miles every Sunday. Through the week, we have our own 10- to 12-mile routes that we compare and contrast when we get together. Three mornings—Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday—I run. I competed in my first 5K in September. Didn't place, but I finished the damn thing. That was the whole point anyway.

Soft drinks are a thing of the past for me. So are cheeseburgers—except at cookouts. I'm not willing to give up the comraderie of a well-orchestrated grilling, the charcoal smoke that reaches out to a whole neighborhood.

My 40 lost pounds brought me from 260 to 220. I'm tall—six-foot-four—so I can carry considerable heft without looking fat, but I can feel it the same as anybody else.

I glance at my watch as I'm paying for the cigarettes: 6:42. The cashier is younger than me by 25 years or more, I'd say, but she looks like she's lived hard. It's not the years, it's the mileage. Early stages of meth addiction, maybe, or just a shitload of hamburgers and potato chips and Coca-Colas. I consider warning her, but who am I to offer advice? I've only been on this health kick for 12 months. She's cute, though, this cashier; she has some basic sex appeal, so I smile as she hands over my change and I crack some comment about how early it is. She doesn't smile back but just gives a sleepy, half-ass nod. Serves me right.

Serves you right, you horny, middle-aged bastard.

I smoke the first Winston in my car with the door open. I draw in a slow breath and try not to cough. I light a second and walk to the rear bumper. I just stand there in the Quick Mart's lot and stare at my bike, on its rack. The store lights reflect in the glossy blue frame. It's pretty.

Jeremy waits for me at Mabel's, a truck stop where we meet for our Sunday ride and sip coffee that has an aftertaste something like canned tomato soup.

"I found 'em, man," he tells me as I walk in.

"Who?"

"Them them. In the blue Ford Ranger."

I give him an expression, or at least try to, that says I can't believe you're still hung up on sins of the past, but I don't think it goes through.

He rushes me as I grab a coffee to go, and we drive over to Arnold Fork in his Jeep. He slams more than one pothole hard, and coffee sloshes onto my bare knee.

"Shit!" I say.

"That's it." He points to a doublewide. A blue Ranger is parked out front, beneath a walnut tree that spreads like a giant spider. Jeremy's hands are at ten and two o'clock on the steering wheel, and we're dead-stopped in the middle of a county road. Not that there's any traffic this early on a Sunday morning.

"No," I say. I take a careful sip and wince at the soup taste. "It didn't have a crew cab."

"Yeah, it did."

"Nope. And it had that bumper sticker about coal or coal mining. It wasn't 'Coal keeps my lights on,' but it was something like that."

Jeremy stares and loosens his grip on the wheel, uncertain now. I actually watch him deflate.

"Oh, and the dent in the right front fender," I remember.

Jeremy half-barks through clenched teeth. "Dammit. I thought that was it."

We backtrack to Mabel's and take down our bikes, put on our helmets and riding shoes. A coal truck driver wolf whistles at us, and Jeremy gives him the finger.

I always let Jeremy choose which of our regular combinations of routes we take, and today he opts for 293 over to Holy Water Road and then up and over Station Ridge, down to the four-lane and back to Mabel's. At the peak of the ridge, we take a break in the lot of Holy Water Community Church.

"You can still see it," he says after he swallows about a pint of water. "I'm lucky I didn't need stitches."

"It's lucky one of us didn't get hit in the face."

"Assholes," he says. "Redneck, shit-head, son-of-a-bitching assholes."

"They might've been from West Virgina. Or Virgina or anywhere."

"No. They were local. I got that feeling."

He crosses his arms as he stands astraddle of his bike, and we look off down into the valley, at the poplar leaves already well on their way to their peak fall yellowness. A vein stands out on the center of his bicep. Unlike me, he has stayed loyal to fitness since high school, although the cycling is new to both of us. I guess that he's never gone more than three days without push-ups and crunches.

He laments: "A man tries to improve himself. He shells out seven hundred goddam dollars on a bicycle, knowing good and well that his plus-forty knees can't handle too much running anymore. He scouts out a nice, challenging ride in his home county and starts working on those extra pounds he's picked up, fighting the obesity that all the Wake-Your-Ass-Up-America shows are whining about. He gets some quality time with his best friend from high school. And what happens? Some little teenaged shits chunk a beer bottle at him."

"We're lucky we didn't get hit in the face with that bottle," I offer. I'm anxious to get back on the road. I'm surprised that I'm also looking forward to another cigarette. "We could've lost some teeth, or worse."

I clip my shoe back into one pedal, but Jeremy isn't finished.

"You know what really chapped my ass?" he says. "It wasn't even the bottle. It was all the whooping and hollering they did after they threw it."

"Yeah. And the way that one on the passenger side leaned out and looked back at us."

Jeremy looks straight at me and folds his arms again, and the vein atop his bicep rises.

"I didn't see that," he says.

"Yeah, he laughed and made that heavy metal sign." I fold my middle and ring finger into my palm and hold up the pinkie and index fingers.

He slings a line of phlegm at the pavement and mumbles a curse.

"I swear I'll find that truck."

We coast off Station Ridge. We sail through kudzu, the biggest patch I know of. It's on both sides of the road - acres and acres. It's pulled the tops out of the trees that used to be there. It's climbed up the steep banks and has begun to creep up on an abandoned trailer at the edge of the clearing. It's starting to wrap itself around some rusty oil tanks that are forgotten a couple hundred feet off the road.

I like kudzu. So does Lisa. That's one of the few common grounds we've shared in the last year. After some of the quarrels we've had, the ones that have given both of us chest pains and what Dr. Watts has diagnosed as anxiety, we've more than once found ourselves on a drive, and those drives have invariably taken us through patches of kudzu like this one on Holy Water Road, though not as big.

"Wow," she'd say, both our faces still hot from our argument.

"Yeah," I'd agree.

"This is bad," she'd say. "This stuff, I mean. It takes over doesn't it? It destroys a lot of land?"

"Yeah."

"But it's pretty."

"Yeah, it is."

Its presence is even more powerful on a bike. Jeremy and I breathe directly from the humid air the mass of vines has churned up; we're struck by its silence. We hear only the whir of our wheels and clicking gears, sounds that I'm sure may numb me someday to the point of crashing into a guard rail. During a ride down this same road about a month ago, we saw fawns leap from the edge of this tangle of green, as if the kudzu had been merciful to them and allowed them to escape.

That was the same day the boys in the Ford Ranger flung the bottle.

Back at Mabel's, I sneak another cigarette in the men's room as Jeremy is loading up his bike, and it makes me queasy, but I feel okay after I splash a little water in my face. Jeremy and I order gravy and biscuits—an indulgence we've allowed ourselves once a week, in the name of rewarding a rough work-out and celebrating friendship.

Over breakfast, our conversation turns to a new hypnotherapy place that just opened over on the Bypass. It was opened by some guy from Cincinnati.

"This guy I work with," says Jeremy, "his wife went through several hypnosis sessions to quit smoking. So, okay, she gives up cigarettes. The thing is, every time she hears a doorbell, she takes her pants off."

"Who told you that bullshit?"

He explains how this co-worker of his has spoken to a lawyer. He thinks he might have a good case against the therapist for, you know, taking too many liberties with this guy's wife.

"But you know what," says Jeremy. "The lawyer says he can't do jack. The going theory is you can't be hypnotized into doing something you don't already want to do in the first place."

"So, this wife, she was consciously or subconsciously warm to the idea of yanking her britches off when the hypnotist went ding-a-ling-a-ling?" I offer.

"You got it. She just needed half a reason."

Over the next week, I miss two of my runs and one of my solo bike rides. I tell myself it's because, on the couch, I'm not sleeping as well. I don't hear any tossing and turning from the bedroom, so Lisa must be sleeping just fine, or else she's as lost in thought as I am.

I think about the kudzu, silent and enormous, growing where it wants to grow. It was promoted by the federal government and kudzu clubs at one time, touted as a miracle plant to prevent erosion on steep Appalachian hillsides. And, by God, it did its job, where it was planted. The thing was, they couldn't convince it to stay where they put it.

I wonder how many individual, distinguishable kudzu plants are really there on Holy Water Road, whether or not it all erupts from the same, complex root system.

I think about how pleasurable cigarettes are, and I'm surprised I enjoy them so much after just one pack. On the couch at night, I stare up at the ceiling and imagine the white smoke. It slips down my windpipe like a thin waterfall and pools in my lungs.

On the couch, I image that, when Lisa and I end this, as we will, I find a woman who strips when she hears a bell. I ask myself how I'll adjust. How easy will it be to find an apartment at this stage in my life? What kind of housing market is even out there? It's been so long since I've looked. Maybe, I think, I'll find an affordable loft over near the college.

I tell myself in the dark of the living room that I'm tired of improving myself, tired of nursing a dead marriage, tired of seeking vengeance on redneck asshole teenagers who throw beer bottles at fat cyclists. And tired, yes, of a fitness fanatic friend I'll never stack up against. Jeremy and Lisa: the Type As who've always made my decisions for me.

Maybe I'll fling a beer bottle or two myself. When I start over.

The following Sunday, Jeremy tells me he's had his mind on a new route, and I follow him for 36 miles—a record for me. It's a morning of fog and drought-dried leaves that fall prematurely.

As we pedal, I note that my lungs strain harder than usual, probably because of the cigarettes, but I enjoy the crispness and the foggy gardens and parked coal trucks. During the first half of our ride, my mind is as focused as a monk's. I concentrate on the intricacies of my impressively engineered bicycle, my pace, my form, the exchange of oxygen within my cells and, ultimately, my muscles.

Behind gravy and biscuits at Mabel's, I feel my legs twitch as Jeremy repeats, "Great ride. Great ride."

We sit in the greasy formica booth that's jammed against the ATM machine. Our regular table is occupied by three old men that look familiar to me. I've probably seen them around town my whole life, but I've never learned who they are. Jeremy addresses them by name: Jed, Frank, Marvin.

Halfway through breakfast, I close my eyes and concentrate on my inhales and exhales and listen to a conversation among the old men about a road commissioner busted for using the county dozer for a personal project.

"There!" Jeremy shouts, and he slides out of the booth before I know what's happened.

I peer out the window, between yard sale, lost dog and wrestling flyers, and see a blue Ford Ranger rolling away from the gas pumps. My stomach draws tight. It's the one. The Ford Ranger. The dent, the bumper sticker. A teenager behind the wheel.

Jeremy is at the door by the time I get to my feet. I cradle the biscuits and coffee to my chest and limp out after him.

"Get in, get in!" he says. He leans across the seat of his Jeep and pushes my door open. We're in motion, spraying gravels, before I can close my door.

"We've got those assholes!" he says.

We travel a good five miles, over dips and coal-truck-pocked roads before I think of the bikes: his bangs around on the rack at the back of the Jeep; mine rests unguarded at a rural truck stop.

When we finally roll to where the Ford Ranger is parked, I think for a second that Jeremy will weep. We'd lost it 20 minutes before, in a spot where the mouths of four hollows converge at the main highway. Jeremy had had to guess which hollow had swallowed the truck, and his first choice had proven to be a dead end.

He's giddy now, and he rubs his hands together. "We got 'em! We got 'em!" He slaps me on the shoulder.

My face burns with what we might do, with what sins we might be on the verge of committing, but I breathe a little easier when I see that he's content to plan and plot for now. We turn around in the driveway of the small house where the truck is parked and head back to Mabel's.

I don't hear much of what Jeremy says on the way back. I watch the countryside go by. I realize that I may move away from here, and I don't realize it with joy or sorrow. I just see it as a possibility. One of many. I also realize that I don't want to get involved in Jeremy's vendetta. I don't want to ride bikes or eat breakfast or have holiday get-togethers with him anymore. We've been friends since fourth grade, but at this moment, I can't imagine why. Jeremy with his perfect life. His toned arms and chest. His executive job. His big-titted wife and straight A kids. His confidence in all the decisions he's ever had to make.

"You know that dog over on Log Cabin Road?" I ask. We've just turned into Mabel's lot.

He cocks his head at me. "Dog?"

"The one at the big brick house that always runs out and nips at our ankles?"

"Oh, yeah. The Saint-Bernard-looking thing."

"Yeah."

"What about it?"

"He won't be bothering us anymore."

Jeremy glides into a space next to my Cavalier and half-smiles in my direction. He gives me a look like I'd just shown up at a funeral with my pecker hanging out.

"I rode over there a few days ago," I tell him. "I was ready for that dog."

I watch the three old men who had been sitting at our usual table shuffle out into the parking lot and disperse to their pickups.

I go on: "I parked just around the bend from that house. Out of site. Where that gravel pull-off is. And I rode my bike past the house, but the dog didn't come out."

Jeremy gives me his full attention, like he gives to the sports anchor on the local news.

"So I turned around and rode back past the house, back toward my car. But this time, I coughed and whistled and let my brakes rub. Just getting his attention, you know?"

Jeremy nods. He rests his forearms on the steering wheel.

"Sure enough, that son-of-a-bitch came running out from behind the house, barking like he was gonna make lunch out of me."

I get out of Jeremy's car and go over to mine. Jeremy gets out, too, and leans his back against the side, waiting for me to go on.

"Make a long story short, I lured him out of sight of the house and hit him across the skull with a steel bar. It was a piece of road sign or something that I had found. He tried to get back up, but he couldn't. He had blood running out of his eyes and his mouth and nose, and he was whimpering and slobbering."

"Are you serious?"

"I rolled him up in a tarp that I'd brought and put him in my trunk. I drove over behind the VFW, to where that big patch of kudzu is. I tossed him in there, doused him with some camp fuel and set him on fire. He was still alive and struggling when I dropped the match."

Jeremy's eyes shine at me like those white reflectors on our bicycle wheels.

I laugh. It's a laugh I don't recognize, and I'm pretty sure it's never come out of me before. It sounds arrogant.

"You should've heard him yelp! Then I drove like hell away from there."

Jeremy stands, slips his hands into his pockets. He doesn't say much, just a muffled, "Damn," emphasized with a forced smile. We exchange clumsy see-you-next-weeks. I'm not all that surprised that he doesn't mention the Ford Ranger. As he drives off, I know we won't have any more meals together or go on any more rides.

I light a cigarette.

Oh, we'll run into each other now and then. Too small a town not to. Unless I move away.

I look at my bike again as I draw on my cigarette. I can probably get four hundred out of it easily. Maybe I'll hang onto it—not for any challenging fitness rides, but for an occasional, relaxed coast along one of the kudzu roads.

What I told Jeremy about the Saint Bernard was fiction, of course. I don't know what became of that damn dog. He might've just had a notion to leave and left, and food and shelter and petting couldn't lull him into betraying the voice within him.

All I know is that, one day he was there, gnawing at my ankle, the next day gone.

More often than not, those are all the facts we can really say we have about anybody.