Free Chicken by Chase Night Page B

passing eighteen-wheeler, but Mathis must hear it as thunder because he starts in making Unholy Ghost noises. 
    It don’t take but a second for the others to chime in like a pack of hyenas. I might be scared if their actions didn’t speak so much louder than their spooky nonsense words. All those grimy fingers let go of my shirt, slide off my skin, and the guys take off as quick as they can without running. Only the stench of lunchmeat chewed by unbrushed teeth remains. 
    Brant stands like a tree unbending in their cackling stream. When they’re finally past him and the suck-and-pop of their boots in the mud has drowned out their gibberish, he ambles on over, yawning and stretching and scratching his chest.
    His hand falls next to mine on the rubber grip. “I’ll take it from here.”
    I sling my leg over the back of the seat and hop off the other side. He looks me over like he’s inspecting for wounds. I’m fine, but his gaze makes me shaky. 
    “You know you don’t have to do this, Casper. You’ve got a girlfriend. You’ve always got an excuse to be busy.”
    I look away, down the Ditch toward the west where fast-moving clouds have turned everything below the trees into a big, black wormhole. Maybe if I run straight at it I’ll come out the other side in an alternate universe where I never have to lie or hide.
    “I want to.”
    Brant shrugs, maybe even shakes his head. Hard to say. He throws his leg over the seat, nearly kicking me in the chest, but I don’t step back. He looks up at me, and then glances at the rack on the back, the place where coolers and camping gear and heterosexual guy friends ride. I shake my head, but for some reason, I still can’t get out of the way. He puts a hand on my shoulder and pushes me back like I’m a little brother being dismissed. My skin flushes hot enough to dry my coat of mud. What he does accidentally is worse than anything a hundred guys like them could do to be mean.
    He kicks into gear and squeezes the gas, leaves me coughing in a dirty cloud of exhaust. An unmistakable crack of thunder drowns out his engine. After it fades, I hear the first raindrops skittering across the leaf canopy. Somewhere beyond those trees, out in the middle of the hay field, a bunch of girls are squealing and half a dozen trucks are revving up.
    A strong gust makes the skinny old pines sway and creak, rattling their brittle branches and sharp needles against the sturdy limbs and soft leaves of the hickory trees. It’s barely even cool, but I shiver and hunch my shoulders, drawing an invisible coat tight around my chest. I walk as fast as these heaped-up ruts and pools of liquid sludge allow, willing my ears not to turn the whistling wind into a drowning man’s screams.
    A couple hundred yards up the Ditch, there’s a ramp that Brant and Brother Dean carved into the north slope for getting the four-wheelers in and out without gruesome accidents. By the time I climb the ramp and wade through a brambly stretch of woods, the last pickup’s tail lights are bouncing over the cattle guard way across the field. They turn left on the gravel road and vanish behind the honeysuckle grown up over the fencerow. 
    Brant waits on the green four-wheeler under the umbrella of an enormous cedar tree. He scrapes fresh mud off his dog tag with the edges of his thumbnails. When he sees me, he lets it fall against his chest with a jingle and a soft thud. He juts his chin at the black four-wheeler sitting out in the field where a hard, fast rain is mercifully washing the sweat from Mathis’ ass crack away. 
     
     
    We stow the four-wheelers in the old red barn at the foot of the tall, piney ridge the Mitchells’ cabin sits on. There’s a dog path up through the briars and trees, but it’s steep and slippery so we take the long way around. I let Brant keep the lead even though he’s not running near as fast as I’d like to be. His cowboy boots gouge chunks of blue gravel from the uneven driveway,