Free Renewal by Jf Perkins Page A

wiped his tools on a rag to clean off the major clumps and placed each one back in the tote in turn. He lifted the old bicycle out of its own mud hole with a slight slurping sound and set about tying the tote back on the rack. The bailing twine had broken in two places and he was forced to join them together with anchor knots he had learn from pappy. By the time that was done, the hot spring sun had turned his mud coating into a stiff, crumbly brick veneer. He pushed the bike onto the bridge and left a trail of ragged globs of clay on the concrete.
     
    He could see that someone had put a plank across the gap in the bridge, and after he picked up his tape measure from the scorched edge, stood for a long time trying to decide exactly how stupid it would be to try to walk across it. One look down to the river below, which was about 4 inches deep, and his command of math failed him. He was sure he intended to try and calculate the ability for a two-inch thick plank, roughly ten inches wide, to span a fifteen foot gap over a thirty foot drop into shallow water, but the numbers would not come. Eventually, he decided this was another challenge he could not fail to meet, if he wanted to pass his initiation, and decided to cross on some irrelevant aspect of faith.
     
    In his fear, Terry was almost surprised to find himself on the other side. Not a problem. The north side of the river had a dirt path access to the water. He decided to clean himself up, and when he reached the far end of the bridge, he leaned the bike against a large limestone boulder and skidded his way down to the water. The hot May midday and a coat of mud had Terry convinced that the entire world was sweltering hot. When he removed his boots and socks and stuck his billfold in the left one, he found out the truth. The water was cold! He flopped down in the shallows and rolled around on the smooth river rocks underneath. Soon, he stood up shivering and decided that was as clean as he would get without a mild case of hypothermia. He dribbled streams of water as he splashed out of the river, took a quick look into the trees, and carried his boots up the short hill to his bike. He wanted to get moving quickly, due to the schedule he was trying to keep, and due to the fact that his entire generation was raised from birth to think like predators and prey. Sitting in the bottom of a tight valley made him itch with an imaginary target circled on his back. He threw his boots on top of the tote and walked barefoot up the hill.
     
    At the top, he was no longer dripping. Terry was just miserably wet. He wrung his wool socks out and put them back on, along with his boots. He got remounted the bike and pedaled on, up Powers Bridge Road. Before long, he was passing an old school on his left. The sign was gone, like every other sign in the world, but his map told him it was once an elementary school. Now it was just a burned husk of ragged cinder block walls, the original brick cladding piled around the foundation. The rusting playground, ironically, still stood in relatively good shape off to the side. The road right at the entrance was devoid of pavement and blackened between scraggly weeds. He knew that meant that cars had once burned there, and they burned so hot that the ground underneath was just now recovering. He wondered if anyone knew the story of Hickerson Elementary. Maybe he could find it in the library, but there were literally thousands of battles fought in Coffee County after the whole country collapsed and there was no guarantee that this one would be a fight that was big enough to be recorded.
     
    Terry started pedaling again as the hills near the river gave way to huge, flat fields, clearly operating as farm or pasture land when things went bad, but not in use today. It was still too far from town to make it feasible, he guessed. If this was too far, then it was sure bet he was being sent on a wild goose chase into the wilderness, since he still had a couple