Sprout

said, reaching for the bottle. “Give this to me!”
    “Hey,” Ty took the bottle after I’d downed about half of what was left. “Just cuz I’m a straight-D student doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. It’s much too soon for us to be feeling the effects of the alcolol.”
    “Alcolol? Alcolol ?”
    “Car!” Ty cawed. “Car, car!”
    Suddenly he sat up.
    “Where’d the river go?”
    “Whuh?” I looked around. Sure enough, the river had vanished. Since the Arkansas River is almost 1,500 miles long, this was slightly disturbing. I prodded the Taurus’ cracked dashboard with my index finger. “And the GPS is on the fritz too! We’ll never find it.”
    “Don’t worry, cap’n, I’ll be your navigator.” Before I knew it, Ty’d rolled down his window and hoisted himself into the open ledge. Cold air rushed into the cabin. I felt it on my forehead, throat, forearms. Realized Ty wasn’t the only one who’d started to sweat.
    He hooked a couple of fingers around that mysterious handle that car manufacturers install on the ceiling right inside the passenger door and banged on the roof of the car.
    “Yee-haw! Floor it, cowboy!”
    “Ty! Get your butt back in here!”
    “That’s a negatory,” he called faintly, unselfconsciously mixing his pastiches. “River’s just a little ways north. There’s a left coming up in about a quarter mile. You need to take it.”
    I did take it, hard, and Ty slid even further out the window. Only his knees were hooked over the edge of the door, and his eyes went wide in surprise—and delight.
    “Whoo-hoo!” he hollered, hoisting himself back up. “Thass what I’m talking a bout .”
    If I had to guess, I’d say Ty’s “thass” had more to do with the rum than ebonics, but I didn’t really care. I floored it, and the car sputtered up to fifty miles an hour. The great thing about old rattletraps, though, is that fifty feels like a hundred, especially on dirt roads, what with all the shaking and skittering and bouncing, and that effect is multiplied about a hundred times more when you’re drunk (yes, it felt like we were going ten thousand miles an hour). Every once in a while Ty would scream out “Left!” or “Right!” and then he began screaming “Left! Right! Left-right-left!” in marching cadence, and I swung the wheel back and forth and the car fishtailed down the road. My eyes flickered between Ty’s writhing legs on my right side and the meandering river, never more than a mile away, on my left. For some reason I felt that as long as I stayed between these two poles we’d be fine. If I didn’t go near Ty’s legs or dump the car in the water everything would turn out okay. The road played along, supplying a left or right turn at convenient intervals to bring us closer to the river each time it meandered away, but not so close that we ever felt like stopping and walking to it. We passed Yoder, Haven, Mt. Hope even, which is not so much a town as two houses planted a quarter mile apart. A needy-looking road sign—read me, please read me!—annouced 279th Street, and I knew we were closer to Wichita than to Hutch. I’m sure I’d’ve kept going all the way to the Missouri border if physics hadn’t gotten in the way, or chemistry, or mechanics, or I don’t know, maybe just math, by which I mean:
    We ran out of gas.
    Oops.
    I’d never been in a car that ran out of gas, so I don’t know if the experience was typical. The first thing I noticed was that the power steering disappeared, and then when I glanced down at the gauges I saw that all of them had gone to zero, and we were losing speed rapidly. The rattling was so loud that I didn’t realize the car’d actually turned off, however, until Ty slid back in his seat.
    “Why’d you turn the car off?”
    “Whuh? I didn’t turn the car off.” I stomped on the gas, which did even less than it usually did. By now we were inching to a stop, and even I could hear that the engine wasn’t running.
    “Um, Daniel? You didn’t happen to check the gas this morning, did you?”
    I tried to look in my brain, but in order to do that I had to lift it out of a vat of dark fumy liquid, and even after I’d managed to hoist it up for inspection it kept dripping in my eyes, so I dropped it back in with a drunken splash. Just before the dark liquid swallowed it I remembered the twenty-dollar bill on the counter, the note that’d been with it.
    “Well, that little turd.”
    “Who?”
    “My dad . He