Free Spit Delaney's Island by Jack Hodgins

and the two men rode motorcycles around and around her getting so close to her toes she cried out at
last for Shelley. Try telling her they were perfect reflections of God too
like everybody else when they tried to get her on their bikes. (“Too scared,
eh C.P.? Too scared to sit a motorbike.”)
    â€œNot scared, just sensible. I got this funny ambition, I want to grow up
alive.”
    And Shelley too, on the front step combing her long black hair andsinging, “She’s only fourteen,” as if it were a crime or an affliction that
couldn’t be helped.
    â€œThere’s fourteen and fourteen,” she said.
    â€œAnd you’re the scaredy kind,” Shelley said. “If I ride one will you the
other?”
    So she had sat on Bysshe’s seat, arms clamped around his chest, a voice
inside saying “He might not have much brains but he’s kept himself alive
on this thing, maybe I have a chance,” and rode that black machine four
times around the yard (chickens scattering at every turn). And was just
breathing easy that it would soon be over when he turned left instead of
right and went out onto the road, spraying gravel like chicken feed in every
direction, and speeded up.
    â€œGo back,” she cried, and would have pounded his back if she could
have pried her hand loose. “Stop and let me off, I’ve had enough.”
    But enough or not there was more. Twenty miles more up Cut Off Road
at sixty miles an hour at least, then onto gravel and dust for fifteen more
of logging road; down into the ditch and up again to avoid the watchman’s
gate (her screaming now and considering her chances if she just let go and
fell), around two small lakes as flat and smooth as corners chipped from
mirrors, and up a dozen switchbacks through newly logged-off mountainside (him rising as natural as a huge black bird up those slopes) until
they skidded to a stop by a river and waited while their own dust caught
up and swirled around them and thinned out.
    â€œNow there’s just one thing I want to do,” she said, when her feet were
on the ground, “to show how much I appreciate the ride.” She tightened
her fist, pulled back her arm, and hit him as hard as she could in the middle of his chest.
    But he laughed. “You’re no fighter,” he said, and took off. Glided down
the slope as if all of this, all this mountainside and sky belonged just to him.
    â€œCaliban!” she yelled after him, but he didn’t hear, and anyway he
wouldn’t have known what she meant.
    She was left, spitting dust and curses, at the top of that hill. When his
brown cloud had settled, she looked down on the road ahead like a
dropped rope leading round-about back to home. She was left with nothing but a noisy whiskey-jack for company and thirty-five miles to walk.
    I bet they think I’m scared of a big old brown bear jumping out of thebush to eat me, she thought, and (glancing behind to be sure) started walking. I bet they think I’m terrified to know I couldn’t possibly get home before dark. I bet they’re sitting down there in their mucky yard laughing at
me, sure I’m listening for sounds of footsteps behind or cracking branches
in brush.
    She sang two verses of a hymn her father had taught her but got too
interested in the wild blackberries at the side of the road to go on. She was
knee-deep in vines, face smeared with red juice, when Mrs. Starbuck’s old
paint-peeling car came chugging up the hill and stopped. “Weren’t you
even going to try getting home?” Mrs. Starbuck said.
    â€œI forgot,” she said. “I knew someone would come. I just wish I had a
bucket with me though, these berries are too good to leave.”
    Mrs. Starbuck got out and pried off a hub cap. “Here’s all the bucket I
got, so pick. We’ll make jam together and I get half.”
    They picked three hub caps full before Mrs. Starbuck’s back