The bikes came from Wildwood. End of season, boardwalk rental place, twenty-five dollars each. Sting rays. Banana seats. High handlebars. Coaster brakes. They were the kind of bikes that made everything before them feel like a mistake and Trout’s father had showed up with two of them in the back of the truck one evening in a way that suggested he had been planning it longer than he let on.

They were the best gift either boy had ever received.

This was not discussed. It was just true.

The balloons were Pee Wee’s system. Long ones. You blew them up and tied them to the horizontal strut above the back tire and rolled the bike forward carefully until the balloon made contact with the spokes. If you did it right you got a sound like a motorcycle, deep and serious, the kind of sound that came up through the handlebars and into your hands and made the bike feel like something with an opinion about speed.

A third of them popped just going on.

The ones that held could last an hour if you were lucky and rode carefully and didn’t think too hard about the fact that the whole operation depended on a balloon.

They had been motorcycling around the church parking lot since after supper, playing can soccer, trying to kick a tin can past a goal line the other one defended, the balloon motors going on both bikes, the sound carrying across the empty lot in the long summer evening while the light held and held and then started thinking about not holding.

Everyone in town was in their gardens. Everyone had a garden. It wasn’t a thing. It was just what you did in the evening when it got cooler and the day’s work was finished and the light was still good enough to see what needed doing. The whole town was outside which was why everyone saw it.

The meteor came from the north. It crossed the sky fast and loud, not silent the way things in space were supposed to be, but with a sound like the air itself was getting out of the way, and it was close enough and bright enough that for a full second the parking lot went the color of noon.

Then it was gone.

Over the rise past Fisher’s fields.

Trout and Pee Wee stood with their bikes and looked at where it had been.

“It landed,” Pee Wee said.

“Just over the rise,” Trout said.

They looked at each other.

The operational logic was immediate and complete. A meteor had landed in Fisher’s fields approximately one mile from where they were standing. Meteors were from space. Space rocks had value. There would be a crater. There would be evidence. There would be newspaper people and possibly scientists and two boys who got there first would be famous and possibly rich and definitely in the paper with their pictures.

They dropped the bikes by the side of the road without discussing it. The balloon motors were still going when they left them.

Fisher’s fields ran long and flat and then rose toward the tree line at the back. The grass was tall and already wet with evening dew and by the time they reached the first rise their jeans were soaked to the knee. They went over the rise and the town disappeared behind them and the fields opened up dark and wide and the sky above was enormous and clear and full of stars that had nothing to say about where the meteor had gone.

No crater.

No glow.

No evidence of anything that had come down from space.

Just fields running on toward the next rise and the next one after that and the dark coming up from the east the way dark came in summer, slowly and then completely.

“Further,” Pee Wee said.

They went further.

It was fully dark by the time they were a mile in. Not lost. Trout had the landscape memorized in a wide radius, the tree lines and the fence rows and the way the ground rose and fell, and he knew where they were the way he knew most things out here, in his legs and his sense of direction rather than in any map. The town was behind them. The road was behind them. The bikes were somewhere back there with their balloon motors finally gone quiet.

The meteor was in China probably.

Neither of them said this yet.

Trout hit it first. He was moving forward through the dark and then he was on the ground and the grass was wet against his face and for a full second he had no explanation for what had happened.

Pee Wee laughed.

“What are you doing,” Pee Wee said.

Trout got up.

“Something hit me,” he said.

“Nothing hit you,” Pee Wee said, and walked forward.

Then Pee Wee was on the ground.

He did not laugh.

He made a sound that had no category and went down hard the way big kids went down, with more weight behind it, and stayed there a moment longer than Trout had.

They crawled forward slowly. In the dark, barely visible, two silver strands of smooth wire ran parallel through the grass at shin height and chest height, taut and patient, connected to a post ten feet to the left that neither of them had seen coming.

They looked at it.

They both knew immediately what it was.

Electric fence. Cattle fence. The wire pulled the current from somewhere up the line and held it there continuously and waited for whatever walked into it in the dark and completed the circuit, which turned out to be two wet boys who had been walking through dewy grass for forty minutes and were soaked through completely and therefore excellent conductors.

Pee Wee sat back in the grass. He assessed the situation the way he assessed situations.

“Meteor’s not here,” he said.

“No,” Trout said.

They sat there a moment.

“China maybe,” Pee Wee said.

“Probably,” Trout said.

They got up and turned for home.

They saw the flashlights when they were halfway back. Coming across the fields from the direction of the road, spread out in a line, moving through the dark with purpose. And voices. Not calling names. Just sounds. Hey. Hallooo. The kind of sounds that carried across open fields at night without saying anything specific, just announcing presence, which in the dark a mile from the road was the most frightening kind of announcement there was.

Trout stopped.

Pee Wee stopped beside him.

They stood in the wet grass and watched the flashlights move.

“Who goes through fields at night,” Pee Wee said.

His voice was different than it had been.

Trout watched the lights spread and advance in a line and thought about every bad answer to that question.

“We should go,” he said.

They went wide around the lights, cutting south through the tall grass, moving fast and low the way you moved when you didn’t want to be found by whatever was in the dark with flashlights making sounds that weren’t names. The dew soaked them the rest of the way through. The lights kept coming, methodical, sweeping back and forth, the voices carrying across the fields.

Hallooo.

Hey.

Just that.

Never anything specific.

Never their names.

They came out on the road a quarter mile from where they’d left the bikes.

They ran.

The bikes were still there. The balloon on Trout’s back wheel was gone. Pee Wee’s had one last breath of air left in it and made a faint sound against the spokes as they rode, not a motorcycle anymore, just a whisper of what it had been.

They rode hard all the way to Trout’s house.

His father was in the kitchen. He looked at them. Two boys soaking wet, grass-stained, electric-fence shocked, convinced they had been chased across a mile of dark fields by persons unknown.

Trout told him about the meteor first. Then the fields. Then the fence. Then the flashlights and the voices and the sounds that weren’t names.

His father listened to all of it.

Then he told them what the flashlights were.

The sheriff. Pee Wee’s father and his brothers. Some townspeople. Out since ten o’clock moving through Fisher’s fields looking for two boys who had left their bikes by the side of the road and disappeared into the dark after a meteor.

Trout thought about the lights coming across the fields in a line.

About the sounds carrying across the dark.

Hey.

Hallooo.

“They never called our names,” Trout said.

His father looked at him.

“No,” he said. “They didn’t.”

He said it in the tone he used when something was too obvious to explain and too true to argue with and the best available response was to let it sit there and be what it was.

He had stayed home.

Not because he was worried. He knew Trout had the fields memorized, knew the landscape was in him the way it got into boys who grew up running it in every season and every light condition since they were old enough to go out alone. He wasn’t worried about the dark or the distance or two boys a mile off the road.

He had stayed because Trout’s mother wasn’t home.

And he knew what it felt like to come home to an empty house when you were already scared.

He didn’t say any of this.

He just looked at them both for a moment.

“Meteor landed in China,” he said.

“We figured,” Pee Wee said.

They were grounded for a week.

Famous for two.

The story moved through twenty-two houses by morning. The sheriff told it to Carol’s father at the store. Pee Wee’s brothers told it to everyone else. By the time school started in the fall it had been told enough times that some of the details had improved, which happened to true stories in small towns the way weather happened, naturally and without anyone deciding to do it.

The electric fence part stayed exactly as it was.

Nobody improved that part because nobody needed to.

The bikes sat in the yard all week. Trout looked at them from the window sometimes.

On the last day of the grounding he went out and checked the balloon struts on both of them. Empty. He went inside and found two long balloons in the kitchen drawer where his mother kept them for some reason he had never investigated and came back out and blew them up and tied them on carefully and rolled each bike forward until the contact was right.

The first one popped immediately.

The second one held.

He rolled the bike forward once more slowly.

The sound came up through the handlebars and into his hands.

Deep and serious.

Like something with an opinion about speed.

Pee Wee showed up at the gate twenty minutes later like he knew. He looked at the balloon. Then at Trout.

“Still works,” he said.

“Still works,” Trout said.

They took the bikes out of the yard and rode.

.