300 Miles to Galveston by Rick Wiedeman Read Free Book Online Page A

believe I have to push this piece of crap back home. I. Just. Fixed. This!”
    He rubbed the dirt off his face and, after two tries, stood. The girl looked at him. Without speaking, he approached, and when he got close, he did something with the handle of his cane, which popped open. He shook out a small screwdriver with variable bits, selected one, and after groaning and steadying himself, got to one knee and pried her chain back onto the gear’s teeth.
    “Thanks, but it’s just gonna pop off again.”
    “Then I’ll fix it again.”
    She smiled, and as she peddled slowly, he followed, back through her neighborhood.
    When she paused at her driveway to introduce him to her dad, he had stopped fifty yards before, and simply waved goodbye.
    “Who was that?”
    “I dunno. But he was nice.”
    “He doesn’t look nice,” said Kurt, smiling and waving back.
    “I think he’s sick.”
    “Ah.”
    Bane zigzagged back to the gang house along FM35. His recumbent bike was where he’d left it, on the shoulder of the road. The gang’s old farmhouse was gone, except for one wall and a chimney, and a haze of smoke that spread to the horizon.
    As he set his cane into its holder on the bike and worked the hand cranks to peddle home, he felt useful again. 
     
     

Chapter 6: Long Spear
    Bane turned his cane again, and it finally stopped rattling. They were crossing a rough patch on a bridge a quarter mile south of Arapaho Road, where wind and rain and lack of maintenance had turned the surface into a pizza with concrete toppings.
    They were about an hour into their ride, and settling into a rhythm. Kurt had found his karate training had kept him limber and his light weight training had kept him reasonably strong, but his endurance wasn’t great. He’d always thought of Dallas as flat, but realized that was from the perspective of a car. On a bike, he was becoming intimate with long, gentle slopes that burned his upper legs and squeezed sweat from every part of his body. Fortunately Bane, with his hand crank and electric assist, and Sophie, as a kid, needed frequent breaks. They were equally unathletic.
    In the morning sun things didn’t look bad. Weeds pushed through the street like varicose veins, and though the glass fronts of strip malls had been smashed by looters, the air was peaceful. Blackbirds and grackles argued, squirrels ran along rooftops, and lanky, white egrets plucked frogs out of drainage ditches. It was like a Disney tour of unthreatening suburban wildlife, until they got to LBJ.
    Highway 635, the Lyndon Baines Johnson freeway, was once the northern limit of civilization. Anyone who lived north of LBJ was a hick. In earlier times, anyone who lived north of Northwest Highway was a hick. Every generation of moneyed Dallasites moved north. At first it was whites fleeing blacks and Mexicans, then it was all three fleeing overpriced houses and crumbling public schools. As they took over the next small town to the north, old farms were turned into cookie-cutter developments with brick mailboxes that looked like retarded Daleks.
    The only people interested in old houses with big trees and skinny mailboxes were loners, fashionable homosexuals, and DINKs – Dual Income, No Kid couples. Everyone else wanted new, new, new.
    The concentric east-west rings of proper folks went like this: Northwest Highway, LBJ, Beltline, George Bush, and 121 – the last two of which were toll roads. Kurt, Sophie, and Bane all lived north of 121, which made them at best new money, at worst working class hicks, or as a compromise, city folks who couldn’t afford their own neighborhoods anymore. It made them anything but cool, back in the days when people had a media-driven consensus as to what cool was. Now, few people left their hoods, not due to coolness, but just because it wasn’t worth the risk. Once you had fresh water, game, and a group of friends, there was little else to look for. Go nowhere, young man. There be monsters beyond