Daredevil Club by Pam Withers

Author:Pam Withers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV000000
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2006-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

chapter eight

Saturday dawned bright and warm, yet I awoke nervous.

“Snap out of it,” I told myself. “It’s a perfect day, and this is the last stunt. We’ll be celebrating tonight.”

Still, as I headed toward the bridge, I couldn’t relax my face muscles or loosen my shoulders. Ever since my accident, I’ve been able to tell how a day is going to go the minute I wake up. At the start of a good day, my left leg feels tingly, like it’s full of electricity. I get a bad-day warning when I feel a dull pain pulsing up and down it. Andrew told me that my left limb lost lots of nerve endings. But I swear that when it lost its job of helping me walk, my leg decided to try out for a new position: psychic. I’d learned to listen to my leg. This morning, I’d listened hard. But strangely, there’d been no sensation at all. It refused to tell me how things were going to turn out. Like it had turned in its psychic badge.

I reached the bridge at nine o’clock. The only sign of life was a couple of grizzled-looking homeless people. They were asleep in tattered sleeping bags. I shook my head. Even Peever had homeless people? I guessed the bridge protected them from rain and wind on less glorious days. I looked up. Crows flapped their wings and rested on supports high above us, peering down like gargoyles.

I paused upwind of the vagrants’ smelly camp. I sat and stared at the ironwork above. Way above. If two guys stood on one another’s shoulders, they could reach the beams under the bridge where it starts. But the ground drops rapidly away where the gravel bank runs down to the lake. By the time the bridge is over the water, the beams beneath it are almost forty feet up. That would be like looking down from the roof of a four-story building. Falling into the water from there could be seriously bruising.

I focused on the long steel beams that ran horizontally beneath V-shaped supports. The beams vibrated a little each time trucks passed over. Straddle the beam, I told myself, and place your hands in front of you. Like a cowboy on the horn of his saddle. Lean forward, weight on your hands, lift the buttocks, and keep shuffling. No swaying, ’cause the second you go off-center, you have no power to stop a fall.

Maintaining balance when your hands are busy requires two legs. I’d have to make do with one. I looked out to the water. I studied it closely. My breath ran out of me; my chest tightened. There was a shadow—a hidden boulder lay twenty yards offshore. Directly under the beam. No falling off there.

We’ll have it dialed by then, I told myself.

Shouts, whistles, and laughter broke my concentration. I turned around and frowned. Three Wildmen were approaching. Quickly I stepped behind a bridge pillar. They drew up beside the vagrants, pointing and guffawing. Then they started tossing small stones at the still figures.

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