[From The Cyclone Release, Chapter 9…]
It had been a strange day the day Brendon learned Carlos was leaving. They were racing through an apricot orchard, miles long and miles wide, a full day of riding and racing without ever seeing cars or crossing the paved road into the plums. Carlos was way ahead of Brendon, turning, then riding a little ways, and then for some reason stopping suddenly, kicking up a lot of dust. He was looking down, and as Brendon made the turn and came up behind him, he could see that Carlos was looking at an intersection. A paved intersection. The orchard road was dirt, then all of a sudden, there was asphalt there, new asphalt, shiny and black with tiny glitters in it.
“That’s really weird,” Carlos said. “What would they put this way out here for?”
Brendon stopped his bike next to him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess there’s going to be a street out here.”
There were cement curbs and gutters, and the other orchard road did the same thing as the one they’d been riding on. Dirt, then all of a sudden, asphalt. And the cement curbs and gutters made corners, so there was an intersection there in the middle of the orchard.
“Why would they put this out here like this, though?” Carlos said.
“Maybe there’s more, and we just didn’t see them.”
“They must’ve had to have some big equipment out here to do this.”
Carlos coasted his bike into the intersection. Brendon followed him, thinking how it was weird to just be coasting in the middle of an intersection, knowing no cars would come. Their tires made knobby dirt prints on the shiny dark asphalt.
“They’ll know we were here,” Brendon said.
Carlos just looked at him, then down at the tire tracks, and said nothing. He pushed himself along, then stopped. From the middle of the intersection, he looked down the orchard road. You could see trees for as far as you could see, but there were no more intersections. And there was no big equipment parked anywhere either.
Just then, another friend, Mike, rode up. “You guys! Look what—hey!” He had one hand on a handle bar and one held in a fist at his side. “What’s this doing here?” He rode into the intersection and settled next to them.
“We don’t know,” Carlos said.
Mike looked around. “If we set up some ramps here, I bet we could do some really long jumps.”
“Yeah,” Brendon said. “You’d have that whole long road to work up speed.”
Carlos squinted against the glare. “I wouldn’t want to fall on that asphalt, though.”
“We could make it so the landing is in the dirt,” Mike said. They all thought about this for a minute. “Hey, look what I found.” Mike held out a handful of shiny new nails, some of them bent a little.
Carlos leaned in to get a closer look. “Where’d you get
those?”
“I scrounged ‘em from some houses they’re building next to the creek. We can scrounge wood, too, and build a tree fort.”
“Where?”
“There’s that big willow in the plums out behind school.”
Brendon turned to Carlos. “Let’s go get the wood.”
“We’ll have to get a wagon or something, and go at night.”
“Let’s just go see what’s there,” Brendon said.
“I have to go home,” Carlos said.
Brendon looked in the direction of the building site, and it was quiet. You could hear Ross Creek, a little ways away, where the water ran in waves around the rocks, clear water, pollywogs swimming, and grass on the banks where the frogs would hide.
