Trace threw up the hand holding the shotgun. “Stop that. I can’t see jack, now.”
“Can’t see Jill neither.” Wayman laughed and ran into the night, yelling, “Come on. The meteor shower starting around midnight.”
“Idiot!Wayman, wait!I can’t see!”
Wayman’s laughter trailed away into the dark.
“Idiot.Idiot!” Trace shouted into the night. “Where are you?” And he said a worse word but too soft for Wayman to hear. His daddy’d beat his butt if he ever heard about it. And Wayman had a big mouth.
Daddy was a traveling preacher, and after they’d been kicked out of Alabama for reasons he had never heard explained, they’d settled in Texas, with four Texas churches in Dickens, Ralls, Crosbyton, and Spur. Daddy and Mama parked their RV in a different town every weekend, leading hellfire-and-damnation services in homes or small churches or empty storefronts, meeting all day, every Sunday, with an occasional fourth Sunday off, and every fifth Sunday off. Those were the weekends his daddy stayed fighting drunk or passed-out drunk.
They didn’t stay anywhere long, except Dickens, where they rented a small furnished house with a root cellar. It came with real beds, which was a nice change. It even had a window unit air conditioner to keep the place sorta cool. Trace liked Dickens, and he liked Wayman. Making friends was hard for the son of a plastered pickled preacher man—which is what he’d heard his daddy called once. Friends had been scarce most all his life. But Wayman was his best buddy. Wayman played pranks on him just like he played on everyone, treating him no different—like blinding him with a flashlight and then running into the night.
“Wayman!” Trace shouted. “Blast it all! Where’d you run off to?” His vision was clearing from the spots cast by the flashlight-to-the-face joke by Wayman, but not fast enough. He’d have to follow the footprints in the sandy bottom of the wash—Wayman’s and the bobcat’s. The cat had been this way several times, the prints overlapping one another. Bobcats were generally more scared of humans than humans were of them. But this one was bigger than normal. Way bigger than normal.“Wayman!”
This was a fourth Sunday, and he and Wayman had gone into the hills to camp and watch the meteor shower. And hide from his daddy’s fists and his drunken sermonizing, and from Wayman’s mama’s boyfriend who was a little too friendly for Wayman’s comfort level.
From up ahead, Wayman squealed his little-girl squeal, and Trace at least figured out what general direction his friend had run off to. “Stupid idiot.” Trace trudged along the wash, casting the occasional glances up into the night sky and the millions of stars that city folk never saw. No meteors yet.
“Over here, you ass crack!” Wayman shouted.
“We’ll never get back to the tent and the wagon and the bikes,” Trace shouted as he trudged around the small hill. “And there ain’t even a path to the top. You ever heard of rattlesnakes?”
“Come on!”
From the side of the wash, Trace heard a whistling sound and a rough vibration, kinda like a purr, like a housecat would make. A huge housecat. Probably the maker of the bobcat prints. Biggest he’d ever seen. “Dang idiot. Rattlesnakes and bobcats.Sheesh.” Louder, he said, “I got a gun, cat. I’ll shoot you if you come at us.”
“Meow!” Wayman shouted, jumping into the light of his flash.
“Dang idiot,” Trace said, startled, flinching back.
“This hill right here,” Wayman said, laughing. “It’s got a flat top, no rocks to hide snakes and it’s right beside the wash, so we can find our way back by following our own footprints.”
And the bobcat prints they had seen and been trailing through the sandy bottom, but Trace didn’t say that. It might sound like he was afraid, and “bein’ a-feared” was “fer wussies,” according to Wayman’s Texan-accented accusation.
They climbed up the hill and studied the surrounding land. Just like Wayman had said, no rocks, no plants, high flat land, unappealing to snakes and other critters.
“Here,” Wayman said, passing him a bottle of water. “I brung six in the bike basket, along with salt tablets in case we sweat too much. With your three water bottles, the Spam and the bread and the potato chips, we got enough water and food to last two days. And if we run out, I know how to find water most anyplace. My grampa done showed me.”
Grampa Iron Mountain was pure Comanche, or so Wayman’s mama said, and she had the black hair and eyes of the local tribal people. Redskins—that’s what his daddy called Wayman’s family when he was drunk and no one was around. Trace’s mama shushed Daddy when he talked bad about people. Trace kinda thought she might like Wayman’s mama and want her to be a friend. They talked about cooking sometimes. But Mama had a hard time keeping friends too, thanks to Daddy.
Daddy couldn’t hide the smell of liquor on his breath on Sunday mornings, and his congregations tended to dry up and drift away after a yearor two, so Preacher Oakum and his wife Miz Lizzie were always moving around. Trace had learned to make friends fast and give them up just as quick, as they moved on to find another town on a crossroads that led to still other towns that needed saving.
But Trace was tired of traveling. He liked Wayman. Wayman was the best friend he ever had. And he didn’t want to leave. He was thinking about running away and hiding out when his parents moved on this next time. There were plenty of abandoned houses he could live in.
“You want it or not?” Wayman demanded, nudging his arm.
Trace took the water bottle, glad his friend knew so much about camping and the outdoors and the wilderness around them. The towns where they had lived were smaller than Satan’s mercy—according to his daddy—but Trace had never spent any time in the wasteland. He opened the top and drank. Recapped it. He lay down on the small Indian blanket Wayman had brought, his hands behind his head. It brought his sweaty underarms up to his nose, but there wasn’t nothing wrong with a little sweat, and nothing he could do about it in August neither.
Together, they stared up at the sky to watch the Perseid meteor show. The meteors came in bunches, shooting across the heavens like fireworks or missiles, some seeming directly overhead. One, closer than the others, blasted down in the hills to the northeast, exploding with a flash of light and a faint tremor through the ground.
They both sat up fast, eyes on the faint halo of light in the dark. “Dayum, Trace. I bet we could make us some money picking up the pieces and selling ’em.” Wayman pulled a compass and shined his flashlight on it. “Got it.”
Trace sighed, not wanting to tell his best and only friend that, even with the compass reading, it would be nigh to impossible to pinpoint the landing location and then even harder to find and pick up the meteor pieces. “Yep. Maybe we’ll go there some day and find diamonds all over the ground.”
“Space diamonds!” Wayman said. “We’ll be rich.”
Getting far enough away from Dickens, Texas, to see the night sky and the meteor shower wasn’t hard. Wasn’t like Dickens had many streetlights or nothing. The town had 280 people in it, with about as many deserted buildings as families. It was hot and miserable during the six months ofwinter, and he’d heard his daddy say it was hotter than Satan’s anvil the other six. In August, even at night, the heat seemed to suck the life right out of him.
