Where It Comes From Desmond Everest Fuller Wade had never hitchhiked before. I knew those white shoes of his wouldn’t last the day unscathed if he came along. But when our thumbs snagged a ride, he matched me, lean and long legged; for a moment, clapping down the blacktop, we were horses, racing to the tailgate of Corey Foss’s Chevy pulling over in a mess of white exhaust and break lights. We hopped up in the truck-bed and benched ourselves on the toolbox. Corey was a sheep farmer, and his truck carried the residual stink of lanolin. Wade looked around as if this new vantage showed him things about fallow pastures that he couldn’t have seen before. I’d been working the fields and watching my dad and the other men like him sweat into their dirt for almost half of my fourteen years. I’d never seen anything to suggest that anything changes. I had told Wade that he’d have to find his own way home. There were chores to get done before Dad started passing around blame by the fistful. Mr. and Mrs. Wellhouse had moved their boys, Walt and Wade into the new residential community Mr. Wellhouse developed on land where we used to find arrowheads and catch frogs. Now, it lay stripped and veined with isolate pockets of caul-du-sacs surrounded by farmland. I’d been sitting in the Wellhouse’s living room, admiring Wade’s new Adidas. Johnny Quest wore them in all the new episodes. I felt too old for Hana-Barbera shows; cartoons
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