Free A Busted Afternoon by Pepper Espinoza Page A

this rain.”
    “We could hitchhike.”
    “Maybe, but I haven’t seen anybody on this
road for the past hour.” Ed hit his head against the steering wheel.
“This was a really bad idea. I’m sorry I got you sucked into this.”
    Sammy chuckled good-naturedly. “No, man,
it’s cool. I wanted to get the hell out of Evanston, didn’t I? You’re
doing me a favor.”
    Ed glanced up from the corner of his eye,
feeling miserable. “This is a favor? Really? Getting you stranded in
the middle of the godforsaken desert is a favor?”
    “It’s better than being stranded in the godforsaken wasteland that is Evanston.”
    Ed couldn’t help but smile at that. A
small, tired smile. The decision to run away to California hadn’t
actually been a spur-of-the-moment, spontaneous thing. Ed had spent
most of the past year scrimping and saving his pennies, putting away
everything he could, working every odd job he could find in a
twenty-mile radius. His body had hardened over the previous year, his
skin turning rough, his face taking on a permanent reddish hue. He had
been almost as pleased with that as he had been with the money he kept
hidden in a jar behind the barn. But the decision to invite Sammy Neff
had been completely spontaneous and more than a little desperate.
    “I didn’t know you hated it there so much.”
    “You didn’t?” Sammy brushed his hair away
from his face, sending a tiny shower of water over Ed’s shoulder. “I
thought that’s why you asked me to come with you.”
    “No. I asked because I heard you were a good mechanic, and I was hoping to get some free labor out of you.”
    “If you had told me that, I would have
grabbed a few parts from the garage before we took off. Hey, you mind
if I turn on the radio?”
    “No.” Though Ed didn’t think that Sammy would be able to find any signal. “I have a few 8-tracks, too.”
    The clouds around them were almost purple
in their fury. They stretched down to the ground in long fingers, as
though the weight of the water was so great, it could pull the very sky
down. A bolt of lightning struck so close, and so hard, that for a
moment, the entire world was nothing but white light. Ed reared back,
away from the window, blinking rapidly to clear his vision.
    “Oh, right,” Sammy said. “The radio doesn’t work. You okay?”
    “Yeah, I’m good. Why?”
    “You’ve got a death grip on the wheel.”
    “Oh.” Ed took a deep breath and forced
himself to loosen his hold. His knuckles were already turning white,
and his armpits were damp. It was either nerves, or the humidity in the
air. A humidity that only got worse with each second. “I didn’t think
it was supposed to rain like this in the desert.”
    “I think my old man told me once that there was always the danger of flash floods in the desert.”
    “That would have been good information to have.”
    Sammy smiled. “Yeah, it would have been. Sorry about that.”
    As far as Ed was concerned, there was
nothing as delightful as Sammy’s smile. It was so easy. Sammy had
always been a good-natured boy, bestowing smiles on the world
regardless of what was happening around him. When they were eight,
Sammy had crashed face-first into a wall during a pick-up game of
football. His face had been covered in blood, his eyes already starting
to swell, and every kid on the playground stopped to stare in horrified
fascination. Two teachers rushed over, as flustered as wet hens,
prepared to drive him the forty-two miles to the nearest big hospital.
And in all the chaos and confusion, Sammy had smiled at them. Missing
teeth and all. Ed had been quite close to the point of the accident—he
had been sitting against the wall reading when Sammy slammed into the
bricks—and he never forgot that moment.
    Now, thinking about it again, he wondered
if maybe Sammy had seen him there and threw his body at an awkward
angle in a bid to avoid trampling the smaller boy? Ed was consumed with
curiosity, but he couldn’t think of