SOBS: Fiction: Thunder Road by John Moss

All he had had to do was pump up the tires of this bike, but it was almost three in the morning now and he hadn't done anything.

The air pump still lay on the opposite side of where he sat in the garage. His stomach boiled with grease from the salt and sour chips. Ratso's popularity had reached apical measures after that appearance at Markus's baseball practice, which turned out to be the publicity event of the summer season. Bikes now came non-stop, sometimes four a night. Emerson had fixed every bike in the county. Thrice. He would probably fix them all again four times over.

Markus had a date to the end of the summer dance at the youth center with the girl who wasn't wearing stripes that day at baseball practice. Things just kept getting better for him. Tonight he was at a boy's house, Bobbie Wolff or something, and who knows what they were doing and with whom. Maybe Emerson should sleep in the garage tonight. Upstairs Ginger would be asleep, a state he had found harder to reach and more dreamlike in its untouchable essence than in the actual horrors he had been experiencing since that day on the baseball field. It was terrible and not in a rats, bats, or coaches kind of way. No, sometimes at night, his most important work, thoughts, and ideas well behind him, and his dear wife beside him, he worried about those full-bodied girls, those young, daring beautiful girls who had come for his son and where exactly they were going to take the boy.

The End