Past Trucks, on toward a gray hill that rises from a desert barren of even weed and insect. Destroyer stops at the edge of the desert. The red cradle is rocking on high, the Newbie is shrieking, going nutso. “Hold yer pants on!” Destroyer calls, and laughs. He digs the clothespin from his pocket, clips it onto his nose, honks “Hold yer smeller!” and churns onward. Closer, the hill resolves itself into shades and scraps of gray … into … Socks. It is a heap, a mountain of dirty socks so disgusting that life in all its forms steers clear. In the red cradle the Newbie victim gets his first whiff, and now the red cradle rocks and lurches to the peals of terror from the doomed Newbie.
Breathing through his mouth, Destroyer churns on. The air itself becomes gray, mossy. Destroyer doesn’t bring BullDogger to a halt until the front tires are noogling into the flank of the monstrous heap. He wishes he’d brought cotton for his ears; the screams are deafening. He lowers SuperScoop till it sways a mere body length above the gray slope, which close up seems to be roiling from the power of the stench. He reaches for the remote. He punches FLIP. The red cradle abruptly turns upside down. Into the unholy heap falls the Newbie.
Destroyer backchurns, turns and pedals off as fast as his legs will go. He discovers it’s almost impossible to pedal hard and laugh hard at the same time.
JACK
THREE AMIGOS LEAVE TWO BIKES in the brush at the foot of the hill. If one can’t ride, nobody rides. Sunlight is sour on the tongue.
Squinting in the yellow dust, Jack says, “Let’s split up. Cover more territory that way.”
“Rippin,” says Dusty.
“What do we do if just one of us finds her?” says LaJo.
“How many you need to stop a girl?” says Jack.
“Yeah, LJ,” says Dusty, grinning. “Want me to come with you? ’Case you need help, Amigo?”
Jack pokes them both. “Just do it. I don’t care how. Just get the bike back.”
They start off in three directions. LaJo mutters something.
Jack stops. “What?”
“He said on foot,” says Dusty, swallowing a giggle.
Jack stares. “OK, fine. LaJo, just stay here. Go lie down there in the weeds and kiss your bike.”
LaJo sniffs. “No.”
“No? What no?”
“No, you ain’t my boss. None of us is boss. We’re equal.”
Jack and LaJo commence a stare-down, neither knowing what to say next. After a while LaJo’s eyes drift to the side, causing Jack to turn. Dusty is standing square at the foot of the hill, looking up.
“What’re you looking at?” says Jack.
Dusty doesn’t appear to have heard the question. His eyes are slits in the sun but he doesn’t shade them. His voice is dreamy. “She came down that hill—” They wait for more but that’s all, until he says it again, this time with a touch of wonder on the word down: “She came down that hill—”
Jack opens his mouth but says nothing. He gives up. What’s the use? He spits in the dust. “Good.” He walks off. But feels LaJo’s stare. Stops. Turns. LaJo is not just looking. He’s not just staring. He’s staring funny. Strange. Jack shows his disgust with a blow of breath. “Now what?”
LaJo shrugs, blank-eyed. “Nothin.”
“I’ll stand here all day, man.”
Another shrug. “You’re different. That’s all.”
“Different?”
“Yeah.”
“Different how?”
A third shrug. Unlike normal people, LaJo prefers to communicate with his shoulders.
Jack turns to Dusty. “I look different to you?”
“Lemme see.” Dusty curls his hands into tubes, stacks them and peers through the telescope. “Yes … yes … I think I see …”
Jack is taken aback. For a second he half believes his goofy pal is actually detecting something. “What?”
Dusty continues to study, nodding. “Yes … yes …”
“What?”
Dusty looks up. His face is serious. He speaks: “Your bike … is”—he peers down the tube a final time—“gone.”
Jack blinks. If he doesn’t leave this instant, he’ll kill them both. He turns and heads off. And hears … something … something far away … a sound he’s never heard before and yet he somehow knows. He thinks to turn, ask them if they hear it, but they’re busy yukking at Dusty’s big joke.
He doesn’t look back. He knows they’re already heading off in other directions. He’s in too bad a mood to say it out loud, but he knows, in their own bumbling ways, they’ll try.
He walks. It feels weird—walking. He can’t remember the last time he did it. Running, yes—baseball, football, races, horsing around—always running. But starting the day he mounted his first nag, he’s never walked anywhere longer than back-to-back spits.
He’s forgotten how slowly the world inches along when you’re walking. He’s forgotten that walking, specifically walking by yourself, leads to thinking. He remembers the day Scramjet came into his life.…
The three of them—himself, Dusty, LaJo—were idly cruising Great Plains when the wild herd went thundering by. The Amigos pulled up to witness the awesome spectacle, unconscious grins on their faces. The magnificence, the unbridled wildness! The dust plume they raised shone golden in the sun, as if a celestial cloud had just then set them down from their home in some paradise of gods.
But what got Jack’s attention most on that hot and steamy day—iced him as surely as if a slushy hokey pokey had been dropped down his shirt—was the sight of the leader, a stallion the likes of which he had never seen in all his days, a black-and-silver beauty who led his mustangs as regally as any emperor.
The Amigos sometimes amused themselves by chasing down and roping an old grandpa straggler, then releasing him with a laugh. Stories of prime mounts taken from the wild herd were legendary—and rare. Most kids rode hand-me-downs. Jack’s wasn’t even that. It was a bent, wobbly-wheeled misfit he should have scrapped long ago.
He dismounted. He grabbed his junker by the handlebar post and mangy saddle and hurled it across the parched land. He shoved Dusty from his nag, climbed aboard and took off after the golden cloud. For in those brief seconds he had for the first time seen both his own miserable condition and his glorious future.
Normally it was phantoms, or maybe history, the wild herd fled from, and the flights, though many, were brief, as these things come and go. But this was something else, this was a boy riding not just a bike but a mission, and what he lacked in speed he made up for in got-to. It wasn’t long into the chase before the cloud broke into spatters as all but the leader peeled away, and it came to Jack sharp and solid as a bat fat on a fastball that the herd was quite unaccidentally leaving the field to the two of them and their shared destiny.
Jack bore down. Sweat popped from his eyelashes. His cap was long gone. All his fire funneled down to the balls of his feet, which he had to mightily concentrate on or they’d go flying off the pedals.
Across the crackling Plains they raced, the stallion a home-run poke ahead, when all of a sudden it slowed down. Slowed down and stopped. And turned! Turned to face its pursuer.
Jack pulled up—shocked, puzzled. He looked behind, looked around, saw nothing but Great Plains, nothing but dust and smears of wild rye and tumbleweed. Dead ahead stood the great beast, perfectly still, at once magnificent and terrible, emitting a faint, silvery radiance that Jack swore he could hear. The tires, where the rubber met the dust, were faintly heaving. Steam rose from the black leather saddle. Somewhere a coyote howled.
Every atom of the steed was aimed at Jack. Was it going to charge? The stallion was now moving again, moving forward, slowly, unmistakably, right for him. He foot-pushed Dusty’s bike backward. He turned the front wheel to two o’clock. He pressed one foot down, ready on the high-side pedal …
And on that morning of surprises, experienced another: fear did not come. Feeling unright, he reached for fear, but it was not there. He blinked. Onward came the stallion?
??he could now hear the tires’ groundcrinkle—yet stare as he dared, he found no menace. In goggle-eyed, gape-mouthed shock he stood there like a dummy as the steed advanced until in all its imperial presence it stood no more than two feet in front of him. And somewhere in his mortal brain a miraculous thought unfolded like the morning wings of a dragonfly: I have been blessed. Something in his undeserving, unremarkable boyself had apparently caught the eye of the King of the Plains, and the King was doing no less than conferring on him a kind of knighthood of equals.
Well (Jack smiles to recall), with a small condition—for as he shed Dusty’s nag and curled his trembling fingers around the steed’s regal, ribbed handlegrips, as he solemnly placed his left foot in the left stirrup, as he brazenly swung his right leg over and settled into the sunwarmed saddle, the King rose up on its hind wheel, pawed at the clouds and proceeded to give him the fright and the thrill of his lifetime. Thinking back on it later, Jack decided that it would have been an insult to the Law of the Plains for any great wild one to submit without a fight, even to an equal. A steed must be himself. A rider must prove himself.
But for the moment there was no thinking, only hanging on for dear life as the stallion bucked and pitched and snapped and lurched in untamed fury to unseat its sitter. Most of the time the only parts of Jack in touch with the careening bronc were his hands, as his feet, legs and butt went flouncing in the air. But somehow he hung on, and finally, finally the steed slowed to a trot and—just like that—was no longer wild.
Was his.
AMIGOS
DUSTY AND LAJO have started out in different directions but now find themselves dovetailing back to each other. “Maybe we should separate,” says Dusty. He looks at LaJo but gets no answer. “Jack said.”
“So?”
Dusty pokes him. “You know what?” No answer. Pokes him again. “Man. Don’t you even want to know what?”
LaJo’s eyes are on his sneaker tips, kicking dirtballs. “What?”
“I’ll tell you what. You always say so.”
“So?”
Dusty cracks up. “See?” Pokes. “So. I’m gonna call you So Man.” Still walking, he puts his face directly into LaJo’s, sees the faint lipcurl. “See. You wanna say it again, don’t ya? You’re ready to say it again.… So.”
LaJo grins—he can’t help it. “So what do you think’s gonna happen if we find her, you all that big talk back there.”
“I don’t know,” says Dusty. “Lasso her.”
“Yeah.” LaJo smirks. “Right.”
Dusty kicks dirtballs. “I’m just saying … I don’t know … I just feel bad, is all. It’s one thing to lose your bike, or to crack it up, but for somebody to steal it … man. And of all bikes, that one. And a girl did it. That girl!”
“Ain’t just him,” says LaJo. “It’s costing us too. Look”—he takes two running steps and kicks a stone—“we’re walking, ain’t we?”
Dusty nods vigorously. “You got that right. I hate it.” Looks at his feet. “Can’t believe I’m doing it. All I’m saying is I feel bad. It could happen to any of us.”
“Yeah.” LaJo shoves him sideways. “Would you feel bad if it was my bike she stole?”
Dusty shoves back. “Hey, you know it, LJ. We’re Amigos.” He holds his fist out for a bump. LaJo gives it a weak pat. A posse of Snotsippers crosses their path. They’re pedaling trikes furiously, chasing a rider in front of them, jabbing, firing cap pistols, some shouting along with the cap-pop: “Pow! Pow! Pow!”
Dusty lunges, holds the last kid by the trike seat. “Hey, you seen Jack’s bike around? Scramjet? It was stole by that girl. Jubilee. Huh?”
The Snotsipper tries to pedal but goes nowhere. He tries to smack Dusty’s hand away. “Hey,” he whines, “lemme go!” His arms are flailing.
“Let him go,” says LaJo.
Dusty lets him go.
They walk some more.
LaJo scans the horizon. “You talk too much.”
Dusty stops, shocked. “Huh? What’s that s’pose to mean?”
LaJo shrugs. “What it says.”
Dusty stays behind, talks louder as LaJo continues to walk. “Where’d that come from? What’s that got to do with anything? Huh?” Louder. “Huh?”
All he sees is LaJo’s back, LaJo’s shrug. And now he’s glad LaJo isn’t turning, because he’s feeling his eyes sting, his lip quiver. He snatches at a blue chicory flower, chews it, chews away the tears, the quiver, tells himself LaJo doesn’t know, Jack doesn’t know, nobody knows that he still cries—of all the Big Kids in Hokey Pokey, him, still.
He trots to catch up, says with a blithe, sobless flip, “Hey. I almost forgot. What did you mean back there—he’s different?”
LaJo shrugs, looks ahead, thankfully doesn’t check his face for tear tracks. “Just that. He’s different.”
“OK,” Dusty persists, “but how? How’s he different?”
LaJo rolls his eyes. He’s tempted to say it again—You talk too much—get that chin quivering, but a Newbie, littlest of the little, bolts from nearby Tattooer screaming, “I’m a kid!” The Newbie trips over his own feet, belly flops, picks himself up, lurches suddenly sideways and runs smack into LaJo’s legs. LaJo, fright on his face, backs up, but it’s too late. The tiny galoot is already yanking up his shirt and showing off to LaJo his brand-new, barely dry tattoo. His skin is chalk-white. His hair is the color of a cherry hokey pokey. He yips it again: “I’m a kid!”
LaJo stares down, freezes.
Dusty laughs a whopper. This is LaJo’s nightmare come true. When a first-day Newbie pops out of Tattooer, he goes to the first Big Kid he sees and shows off his tattoo. It’s instinct for the Newbie—duty for the Big Kid. It’s his job to spend the first day with the Newbie, get him squared away, tell him what he needs to know about life on Hokey Pokey. Dusty has done it many times. He hangs around Tattooer just for the chance. Not LaJo. LaJo isn’t good with little kids. He’s always managed to avoid first-day Newbies. Until now.
Dusty stops laughing long enough to call, “Go, big bro!”
The Newbie looks straight up into LaJo’s stern eyes. He says it again: “I’m a kid!”
“Congratulations,” LaJo replies dryly.
It tickles Dusty to see the Newbie take LaJo’s hand—finger, actually. The tiny white hand curls around the giant brown finger. “My name is William!” the Newbie chirps. “What’s yours?”
LaJo doesn’t answer.
LAJO
CANNOT BELIEVE this is happening. How did he get stuck with this runt? What was he doing anywhere near Tattooer anyway? He’s losing it. He’s off his game. And he knows why. It’s Jack. But not what Dusty thinks. Dusty can’t see farther than the snot at the end of his nose. It’s not the stolen-bike-and-girl thing. It’s something else. Something he saw back at the tracks. But what he saw wasn’t the thing itself. What he saw was like a rustle in the bushes, a hint of something. He doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t understand it. He can’t see it. He doesn’t want to see it. He only knows this: it’s bad. Way worse than a stolen bike. Way, way worse.
William the runt keeps pulling LaJo’s finger. “What’s your name?” the runt whines. “What’s your name? What’s your name?”
“LaJo!” he yells, and yanks his finger away. The runt staggers backward, falls on his butt as if hit by a gust of wind. The runt is getting ready to cry but sees LaJo is laughing—LaJo can’t help it—so the runt joins in. He pops up. He starts skipping along, pulling the big finger, piping to the world: “LaJo! … LaJo! …”
The runt points. “LaJo—what’s that?”
“Cartoons.”
“What’s Cartoons?”
“Pictures.”
“What’s—”
“Don’t ask.” Up on the big screen Road Runner is chasing Wile E. Coyote. By law LaJo is supposed to stay with the runt the whole first day. And do everything the runt wants. But who’s going to know if he sneaks off while the runt is staring gaga at some cartoon? ??
?Why don’t you stay here and see for yourself,” he says to the runt.
The runt thinks about it for two seconds. “No!” he blurts, and lurches off, dragging LaJo.
It’s LaJo’s ordinary world but it’s all new to the runt. “What’s that? … What’s that? …” It’s not enough just to see. The runt has to touch everything, try everything.
Trucks. “You can drive them.” The runt does, his tiny legs churning pedals. Garbage truck. Semi. Tanker.
Doll Farm. “For girls,” LaJo says, but the runt goes and digs up his own anyway.
Tantrums. “It’s where you go bananas,” LaJo tells him.
“What’s bananas?” says the runt.
Hippodrome. The runt makes LaJo join him in the mouth of the green hippo. Then the pink one.
Snuggle Stop. LaJo waits outside while the runt goes in. When the runt comes out, he shocks LaJo, cuddles LaJo’s leg. LaJo shakes him off.
Jailhouse. Thousand Puddles. Playground.
LaJo is getting desperate. Every step along the grand tour of Hokey Pokey, he’s on the lookout for a chance to ditch the runt. And finally it happens. Halfway between the DON’T sign and The Wall he spots a herd of puppies—followed, as always, by a herd of Newbies. “Look,” he says, stuffing excitement into his voice, “puppies!”
The runt is already taking off when LaJo remembers the Four Nevers. He has to give them to the runt. It’s the law. He grabs the runt. “Wait.”
The runt wails, “Puppies!”
“Just a sec. I gotta tell you something.” With the runt squirming in his hands, LaJo recites: “Never pass a puddle without stomping it. Never go to sleep until the last minute. Never go near Forbidden Hut. Never kiss a girl. OK, go.”