Free As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth by Lynne Rae Perkins Page A

area of expertise, but it must have been some kind of a rodent. I couldn’t say what kind.”
    “Probably the predators chomp them right up, even their skulls,” said Ry. “Probably fifty percent of what we’re walking around on is undigested skull bits.”
    Del grinned. “You might be right about that,” he said. “Though I’d prefer to think about it a little less graphically.”
    A spattering of cars and trucks had zipped past in one direction or the other as they walked down the road, but no one had stopped. Finally the rasp of a dragging muffler approached from behind and slowed to keep pace alongside them. The muffler trailed from the underside of a road boat, a slab on wheels, an Oldsmobile. The car rolled to a stop. It was white, with a spray of rust speckled thick across the hood where blowing sand had blasted away the paint. The window lowered and thedriver leaned over and said, “You fellas need a lift?”
    Del stepped up, rested his hands on top of the door, and peered in.
    “Just to the next town, if you’re going that far,” he said. “We’re having a little car trouble.”
    “Hop in,” said the man. “You’ll both have to ride up front; the backseat seems to be full.”
    They could see that was true; the back was piled high with cardboard cartons.
    Ry slid to the middle and Del sat down beside him and pulled the door slab shut. Ry fished surreptitiously behind himself, searching for a seat belt in the crevice, but with no luck. The driver wore no seat belt and Del didn’t seem to have found one either, and Ry guessed that no seat belts had been worn in this car for a long, long time.
    They lurched forward and slammed to a halt to let another car fly by, then peeled out onto the highway. In no time they reached their cruising speed of Mach one. Ry was just guessing at this; the speedometer needle lay lifeless at zero. The landscape rattled by. The air-freshening cardboard pine tree jiggled a few inches in front of his nose, intertwined with a Saint Christopher’s medal.
    Ry slipped his hands between his knees to take up less space and to conceal his crossed fingers.

RIDING WITH CARL
    T heir host was Carl. Wooly coils of silvery-white hair forested the back and sides of his head, thinning to a zone of barren scrub at the tree line of the shiny dome of his head. His mustache was waxed into handlebars. He was comfortably rounded, like a small planet, with an atmosphere made up of warmth and good humor and aftershave.
    “So,” he asked, “are you from around here, or just passing through?”
    He wanted to hear all about their car trouble and where they were headed and where they were from. When they told him, he said, “Is that right.” Or, “Isn’t that something.” As if it was the most interesting thing he had come across yet.
    The sediment of dirt deposited evenly across thewindshield, punctuated by the dried fluids of unfortunate insects, glowed incandescent in the sunlight. It was like trying to see through dandelion fluff.
    Carl fiddled with the wiper wand until a spit’s worth of fluid came out and the wiper blades did their best to spread it around. This smeared the dirt into a translucent blindfold. Although it did clear off a few small areas to almost-transparency. Ry hoped Carl could see through them.
    “It’s all right,” said Carl calmly. “I can look out the sides. We’re okay so long as we stay between the ditches.”
    He leaned out the window.
    “I can’t see much anyway,” he said, just as cheery. “Cataracts.”
    Ry noticed that though they were staying between the ditches, they were drifting from side to side, all the way across the road. He couldn’t see out the front, but he could see that sometimes there was a lane to their left, sometimes to the right. And he felt the physical sensation of veering one way and then the other. There wasn’t a whole lot of oncoming traffic, but still. It made him nervous. He glanced at Del, but Del was leaning out of his