Hokey Pokey Read Free

Dusty curls his hands into tubes, stacks them and peers through the telescope. “Yes … yes … I think I see …”
    Jack is taken aback. For a second he half believes his goofy pal is actually detecting something. “What?”
    Dusty continues to study, nodding. “Yes … yes …”
    “What?”
    Dusty looks up. His face is serious. He speaks: “Your bike … is”—he peers down the tube a final time—“gone.”
    Jack blinks. If he doesn’t leave this instant, he’ll killthem both. He turns and heads off. And hears … something … something far away … a sound he’s never heard before and yet he somehow knows. He thinks to turn, ask them if they hear it, but they’re busy yukking at Dusty’s big joke.
    He doesn’t look back. He knows they’re already heading off in other directions. He’s in too bad a mood to say it out loud, but he knows, in their own bumbling ways, they’ll try.
    He walks. It feels weird—walking. He can’t remember the last time he did it. Running, yes—baseball, football, races, horsing around—always running. But starting the day he mounted his first nag, he’s never walked anywhere longer than back-to-back spits.
    He’s forgotten how slowly the world inches along when you’re walking. He’s forgotten that walking, specifically walking by yourself, leads to thinking. He remembers the day Scramjet came into his life.…
    The three of them—himself, Dusty, LaJo—were idly cruising Great Plains when the wild herd went thundering by. The Amigos pulled up to witness the awesome spectacle, unconscious grins on their faces. The magnificence, the unbridled wildness! The dust plumethey raised shone golden in the sun, as if a celestial cloud had just then set them down from their home in some paradise of gods.
    But what got Jack’s attention most on that hot and steamy day—iced him as surely as if a slushy hokey pokey had been dropped down his shirt—was the sight of the leader, a stallion the likes of which he had never seen in all his days, a black-and-silver beauty who led his mustangs as regally as any emperor.
    The Amigos sometimes amused themselves by chasing down and roping an old grandpa straggler, then releasing him with a laugh. Stories of prime mounts taken from the wild herd were legendary—and rare. Most kids rode hand-me-downs. Jack’s wasn’t even that. It was a bent, wobbly-wheeled misfit he should have scrapped long ago.
    He dismounted. He grabbed his junker by the handlebar post and mangy saddle and hurled it across the parched land. He shoved Dusty from his nag, climbed aboard and took off after the golden cloud. For in those brief seconds he had for the first time seen both his own miserable condition and his glorious future.
    Normally it was phantoms, or maybe history, the wild herd fled from, and the flights, though many, were brief, as these things come and go. But this was somethingelse, this was a boy riding not just a bike but a mission, and what he lacked in speed he made up for in got-to. It wasn’t long into the chase before the cloud broke into spatters as all but the leader peeled away, and it came to Jack sharp and solid as a bat fat on a fastball that the herd was quite unaccidentally leaving the field to the two of them and their shared destiny.
    Jack bore down. Sweat popped from his eyelashes. His cap was long gone. All his fire funneled down to the balls of his feet, which he had to mightily concentrate on or they’d go flying off the pedals.
    Across the crackling Plains they raced, the stallion a home-run poke ahead, when all of a sudden it slowed down. Slowed down and stopped.
And turned!
Turned to face its pursuer.
    Jack pulled up—shocked, puzzled. He looked behind, looked around, saw nothing but Great Plains, nothing but dust and smears of wild rye and tumbleweed. Dead ahead stood the great beast, perfectly still, at once magnificent and terrible, emitting a faint, silvery radiance that Jack swore he could hear. The