Free The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) by Mark Reynolds Page A

said he was a
good boy. She didn’t like him going up on the roof, and she didn’t like him
being out in the rain, but she said he was a good boy. And sometimes Gramma let
him go up on the roof anyway, and sometimes she sent him out in the rain for groceries,
or to pick up something from Engle’s Drugs. You won’t melt, silly boy ,
she would tell him. And sure enough, he never had. Gramma was never wrong.
    You’re a good boy, Jasper, Gramma would say. So clever
with your hands. You just don’t think so good .And Gramma was never
wrong. Thinking made his head fill up, and things spilled out. Then he would forget
things. And then he would get in trouble.
    Forgetting things was what found him at Benway’s salvage yard
that afternoon. Had he remembered to tell his grandmother, she would never have
allowed it. He wasn’t supposed to go to the junkyard, to trespass inside the
fence, to be in that part of town. It was dangerous, all of it, every step of
the way.
    But if he hadn’t been at Benway’s that afternoon, hadn’t
found what he did, just imagine how it would have turned out.
    Imagine .
    Gramma was watching
television, drinking a glass of ginger ale and fanning herself with a magazine. Lord, it’s hot , she would say over and over. And it was. So he said so.
Then he said he was going to go ride his bike.
    “You mind the traffic. Look
both ways before crossing the street, and only ride your bike in the park.”
    “Yes, Gramma.”
    “And you be back before
supper, you hear me?”
    “Yes, Gramma.”
    “You’re a good boy,
Jasper.”
    “Yes, Gramma.”
    Too many things filling
up his head; something always spilled out.
    He carried his bike
downstairs to the street. Engle’s Drugs was on the way to the park. He would
stop and buy a cherry Blowpop; cherry was the best flavor in the world.
    Digging in his pocket for
change, he found one of the flyers from this morning; flyers he collected off
windshields and out of mailboxes from all over the neighborhood. He had taken
them up on the roof, folded them into planes and watched them fly. All of the
flyers had the same picture, a winged contraption just right for making a
person fly. Flights of Fancy , it said. He could read; he wasn’t stupid.
And it sure was a fancy flying machine, yes it was. It looked a little like a
bird. Birds knew all about flying. He wished he could fly, be a bird. Gramma
said that was just make-believe. People couldn’t fly and they couldn’t be
birds. That was crazy nonsense, and he wasn’t crazy. Gramma said so.
    But an airplane could
fly. He could make one like the paper airplanes he’d made, only bigger and more
like the picture. Then he could fly. Like the paper airplanes. Like a bird.
    He forgot the cherry
Blowpop and Engle’s Drugs and even his grandmother’s warning to ride his bike
only in the park, and to mind traffic, and be back before supper. He was
thinking about building a plane, one like the picture, and where he could find
the parts he would need. When he thought too much, something always spilled
out.
    This was how Jasper Desmond found himself at Benway’s salvage
yard that afternoon when his grandmother thought he was riding his bike in the
park.
    And the world would never be the same.
    Jasper leaned his bike against the junkyard fence of rusty,
corrugated sheet metal and mildewed plywood slabs wired to the chain-link
hiding everything inside from view, and topped with a triple row of barbwire.
But Jasper knew the way in. Billy Wicker showed it to him back when Billy
Wicker was his friend. He and Billy had gone to school together at first. Then
one year, Billy went to a different class. Then a different school. And
finally, Jasper and Billy weren’t friends anymore. He asked Gramma why, and she
didn’t answer him right away, but gave him a long hug. Then she said, “Because
sometimes that’s the way it is.”
    But back when they were friends, Billy showed him the place
in the fence where the links had been cut