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

and never repaired. The plywood sheet
inside could be pushed aside, giving access to a small space hidden by a triple
stack of cars, all bent and crushed and rusted nearly through, their pieces
folded together until they fused into one car, tall and malformed and dying.
Billy told him that the bums used the hole to get into the junkyard. They snuck
in, he said, and fell asleep in the old cars and drank and swore and jerked
each other off. Jasper wasn’t sure what that meant, but he laughed when Billy
said it because Billy laughed, and Billy Wicker was his friend.
    Jasper Desmond walked the
edge of the fence until he found the place where the chain link had been peeled
back, the flap held open by a twisted coat hanger. He slid the plywood sheet
back just the way Billy used to all those years ago when they would sneak in
here and drink soda pop straight from the bottle and look for strange treasures
in the cast off wreckage. And just like he remembered, it opened a way that he
could crawl through, a secret doorway into the heart of the junkyard. The
rusted cars were still there: still rusting, still rotting, flaking away in
chips and peels. Eventually they would dissolve and become dust, but for now
they seemed trapped in a perpetual state of permanent decay.
    He took the museum flyer
from his pocket, staring at it, concentrating on each aspect of the image, on
each line and shape. Sweat beaded upon his forehead and across his neck and
back in prickly patches. Clouds skittered across the sun, and the sweat ran down
his face to fall upon the paper. And still he concentrated on the image,
building a picture in his mind of each and every piece, each exactly like the
one in the flyer… only bigger . Then he would build a plane, and it would
fly. And it would be big enough to carry him, and he would fly. Gramma said he
was clever with his hands, and grandma was never wrong.
    He would fly.
    He started walking, the paper
gripped tightly in front of his face as though wrestling it away from a
whirlwind. He talked aloud, unaware. It was why everyone called him jibber jabber—everyone
except Gramma. Whenever he tried to think really hard, what came out of his
mouth was a discordant string of words, a tossed salad of phrases and ideas
that he was unaware of. Jibber jabber.
    “Need wings, wings that
flap, flap like a bird, flap like a bird’s wings, a big bird, but not that big
bird on television, but a real big bird with big wings, big wings that flap,
gotta be big and long and light, light as a feather, birds got feathers,
feathers float on the air just like a bird, just like a bird or a plane, but a
plane’s not made of feathers, a plane’s made o’ metal. Light metal makes a
light plane, not feathers ‘cause feather’s won’t work, feathers just blow apart
and fall down, gotta gotta go up, can’t go down unless you tryin’ to land, and
I’m already on land, gotta go up and fly and need to make the wings big and
light and—”
    “You aren’t supposed to
be here,” a voice said from out of the junkyard.
    He stared about, seeing
no one. It was about to be a day very different from any other Jasper Desmond
had ever known.
    “Over here,” the voice
said.
    Jasper turned and saw what
he thought must be a broken scarecrow collapsed in the shade of a rusting
fender, its twisted straw body slowly sagging down into the earth, its shade
half-eaten by the sun. It clutched a long metal rod in one hand, sharp and a
little bent. In the other, it held one of Jasper’s paper airplanes. Not a
scarecrow, but a man splayed out in the dirt, the wide brim of his hat crooked,
revealing a single eye as bright as the summer sky. His face was cut and
swollen, the pale blue eye regarding him from a sea of shiny flesh the color of
an overripe plum. There was blood under his nose, and around his lips, and spat
out upon the ground around him in dirty patches.
    “Somebody beat ya up,”
Jasper said. “Beat ya up real bad. Real bad. They beat ya