Free Nathaniel by John Saul Page A

was straining to match his cousin’s ease with the machine, but it wasn’t easy. Unlike Ryan, Michael had not grown up on a bike, and the one time he had risked Ryan’s no-hands technique, he had nearly lost control.
    “Whatcha going to do about school?” Ryan suddenly asked, braking his bike so he fell back alongside Michael,
    “What do you mean?”
    “Aren’t you going back?”
    Michael shrugged. “I guess not.”
    “Then what grade will you be in next year? Will they pass you?”
    “Why wouldn’t they?”
    “Don’t you have to take tests?”
    “Our school doesn’t have tests,” Michael replied. “It’s an experimental school.”
    Ryan’s look was one of disbelief. “No tests? How do they know who to pass?”
    “Everybody passes.” Suddenly, Michael slowed the bike and called out to Ryan, “Is that Findley’s place?” He pointed off to the right, where an old farmhouse, its paint peeling and its porch sagging slightly, huddled in a grove of scraggly elms at the end of a rutted driveway. A barn loomed twenty yards from the house, and between the two buildings some chickens scratched at the dusty surface of the unkempt and unfenced yard. As he looked at the place, a man appeared on the front porch, dressed in overalls, cradling a shotgun in his arms.
    “Let’s get out of here,” Ryan said. Without waiting for a reply, he pumped hard on his bike, spewing a cloud of dust into Michael’s face. Michael paused a moment longer, his eyes leaving the figure on the porch and concentrating on the barn. For a second, he thought he’d seen something—something he couldn’t really identify—but as he studied the barn there was nothing. And yet, even as he rode after Ryan, something tugged at him, an ill-formed thought—a feeling, really—that made him look back once more. The man on the porch was gone, and the barn looked exactly as it had before.
    He pedaled harder, catching up with Ryan, but it wasn’t until they’d passed over a slight rise that Michael’s uneasy feeling—that feeling of something pulling at him—passed.
    A little further on, they came to another drive, overgrown with weeds. A mailbox dangled from a post by a rusted nail—the only sign that anyone had ever lived there. Ryan pulled his bike off the road. Michael had to slam on his brakes to keep from running into him. He finally spotted the house, nearly invisible in the tangle of weeds that surrounded it.
    “Is this where Eric lives?” he asked, his voice reflecting his incredulity at the idea that anyone could inhabit such an abandoned-looking place.
    Ryan shook his head, grinning. “This is where you live.”
    Michael’s mouth dropped open, and he stared at the house for a long time. “Mom’s gonna croak,” he said at last.
    Ryan nodded. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you, but I couldn’t resist. Isn’t it something?”
    “It doesn’t look like anybody’s ever lived there.”
    “Who’d want to?”
    “Let’s go look at it.”
    Michael started maneuvering his bicycle up the drive, but Ryan stopped him. “I wasn’t even supposed to tell you about it, and if we go look, Mom might see us. She’s helping clean it up.”
    “Why don’t they just burn it down?”
    “Search me.” He paused, then: “You won’t tell anyone I showed you where it was, will you?”
    “Hell, no.” Suddenly Michael grinned. “But I can hardly wait to see the look on Mom’s face when she sees it.” Then, as he gazed at the old house, his voice dropped to a whisper. “No wonder Dad never said anything about it.”
    “Hunh?”
    “My dad never told us about this place. Mom just found out about it the other night, when Grandpa told her.” He was silent for a little while, then turned to his cousin. “Ryan?”
    “Yeah?”
    “How come my dad didn’t like it here?”
    Ryan glanced impatiently at Michael. “I already told you I don’t know.”
    “Well—didn’t anyone ever talk about him?”
    “What do you mean by