Read Online The Middle of Somewhere by J.B. Cheaney - Free Book Online

is a real town, right? Not just a tourist trap?”
    “Sure. A real cow town. Ranchers used to herd their cattle up from Texas and load 'em on railcars in Dodge or Wichita or Abilene. The cowboys could get pretty wild after weeks on the trail, so all those towns needed a tough sheriff to keep order. Like Wyatt Earp—he was the sheriff of Dodge at one time.” (In my opinion, somebody would have to be tough to live up to a name like that.) “There was a TV show about him, too….”
    As usual, Pop was hitting his stride just about when my interest started to slip. He went from lawman to outlaw so many times I couldn't tell one from another, but any cow-and-tourist-town had to have some stores, too. I leaned back and squinted my eyes against the glare, thinking up an excuse to stop at one.
    This part of Kansas was what people mean when they say
flat
. Even the creeks and ponds were flat, in a way I'd never seen back home. Instead of flowing in ditches orsettling into dips, they just kind of lie there, right on the surface, like glass. We rolled past pale-yellow wheat fields so thick the tractor tracks looked like the squiggles you make with your finger on fur. Two cattle trucks passed us, each with a whiff of rolling feedlot:
whoosh, whoosh
.
    “Yeah,” Pop said. “It might be fun to see ol' Front Street again. We could get there by two, spend a couple hours, and then look for a campsite. You see any on the map, Ronnie?”
    I folded the map to a square with Dodge City in the middle, and was looking for the little triangle camp symbols, when Gee suddenly let out a yelp, unbuckled his seat belt, and threw himself at the windshield. “LOOK!”
    Pop slammed on the brakes; we slewed to the right and stopped. “Look at that!” Gee yelled, pointing at the long white trailer that had just passed us. It was already too far away to make out the logo on it.
    Pop, both hands on the wheel, was breathing deeply but seemed to be in control. Which was more than you could say for me. I grabbed my little brother by the neck and marched him back toward the dinette table. “If you do that again, I'll… lock you in the bathroom. All you have to do when you see something is stay put and—”
    “But, Ronnie, didn't you see what was on the side of that trailer? It was the Human Cannonball!”
    “I don't care if it was the president! What I'm saying is, stop with the yells and the jumping around while we're on the road. Save it for when we stop. You get my point?”
    My real point was, if he cut short my RV odyssey, I would have a tough time turning a negative into a positive.I tried to get this across by staring at him really hard as Pop restarted the RV. Instead of pulling back onto the highway, though, the vehicle rolled slowly forward and stopped again. After a minute, Pop said, “There's something you don't see every day.”
    I crept forward and stared, trying to figure out what the heck we were looking at. At first glance, it was a long, skinny junkyard stretching for maybe a quarter-mile along the right side of the highway. But the junk was moving. In fact, the junk was shaped and bent and punched and welded into a chorus line of moving parts.
    “Whirligigs,” Pop said. “Somebody's got a lot of time on his hands.”
    Each figure was welded to a steel fence post and mounted about three feet from the ground. There were so many it was hard to concentrate on just one at a time, and they didn't seem to have any overall purpose or plan: chickens, tomatoes, rabbits, cornstalks, all kinds of human-like shapes, with only their busy-ness in common. The wind played them like an orchestra. I rolled the window down to listen:
Clank-clank. Whirrrrrr. Buzzzzz
.
    “Cool!” Gee yelled, and jumped out the back door. I reached for my own door latch, ready to head him off. Pop caught my eye and shook his head.
    Gee was running up to individual creations, where he'd pause for a second, half-crouched, then imitate whatever it was doing. His arms