Yard War by Taylor Kitchings Page A

if it wasn’t too far, but he was hungry.
    Mama and Daddy weren’t home, which was a good thing, because they would have told me I was pushing too hard at everybody’s limits, like I do. I could explain it to them later; I just had to get past Willie Jane. I told her we wanted to ride bikes and we would stay on the right side of the road with the traffic and use hand signals and be very careful, and we wouldn’t be gone long—which was all true, depending on how long “long” is. She was loading the washing machine and said, “Okay, but hurry back.”
    I hadn’t ever ridden my bike all the way to the club before, but all we had to do was pedal up to Old Canton, take a left, and keep going. It wasn’t until we got out to the shed that I remembered there were only two bikes and one of them was Farish’s. It was small and pinkish with pink and red and white plastic streamers coming out of both ends of the handlebar. I didn’t know what else to do but play Rock, Paper, Scissors. Dee won, and I called for best two out ofthree. Dee won again, and I had to rethink the whole plan.
    What if some of the guys saw me riding this thing? What if Coach Montgomery saw? He’d find a reason to paddle me every day from here to June. Did I want this bad enough to be pinky boy with streamers all the way down Old Canton Road? I almost told Dee we oughta forget the whole thing. Then I thought about all those mean people who called up and complained about us playing football together and I hopped on Farish’s bike.
    We had to ride single file on the edge of the street and sometimes in the dirt along the edge. A couple of cars blew their horns at us. One guy yelled, “Get off the road!” I think it was about us slowing down traffic more than anything, but I bet they were wondering what a white kid and a colored kid were doing riding bikes together. When we got to Shipley Do-Nuts, Dee wanted to rest for a minute in the parking lot.
    “You said it wasn’t that far,” he said. “I’m starvin’.”
    “We’re more than halfway there,” I told him, hoping that was true. “It would take longer to go back than it would to keep going, and we wouldn’t have gotten any food.”
    “We can get a donut right here.”
    “You got some money to get a donut?”
    “I ain’t got no money.”
    “Me neither. Where I’m taking you, we don’t needany money. We can eat all we want and I just have to sign a ticket.”
    “What kind of a restaurant doesn’t take money?”
    “It’s not a restaurant, it’s a club.”
    “What kind of club?”
    “The kind that has the best cheeseburgers in town. Come on.”
    We rode past the shopping center and the big church and blocks of houses with shingles that all look alike and then it was fields and we started going uphill. I knew we were getting close. After a while, my lungs were burning like they do on the last lap in gym class when it would feel so good to stop. But I never do stop, no matter how much it hurts. If I’m going to play split end next year, I have to show Coach I can run all day. I’d rather be last than stop. But it was a lot of uphill, and I had to stand up on the bike to keep going. I looked back at Dee and he was standing up, too.
    “We’re almost there!” I shouted over the cars. I was breathing so hard it was hard to talk at all. “It’s…gonna be up on the right.”
    “Well, it needs to hurry up and be there,” shouted Dee.
    Finally, there it was, the big country club sign. We had to lay our bikes down and rest. My legs were killing me, but what hurt worse was how wrong I had been about this ride being easy. It had been too far, too full of cars, too uphill. How could the real rideturn out so different from the one in my head? I knew I should tell Dee I was sorry for being that wrong, but I could barely admit it to myself.
    Luckily, the road that curves around to the main entrance was all downhill. We took the left side of the entrance drive and leaned our bikes