He nodded.
'Yep. In this morning's mail.'
'Lemme see, lemme see!' She reached for his backpack, and he quickly
jerked it back.
'Hey, easy! I don't want you to damage it.'
'I'll damage your head if you don't give it up right now!'
He laughed. From inside the backpack, he produced the object in
question--a new boomerang.
And not just any boomerang, but a Larry Takahashi
KinuHa--& Silk Leaf--a paxolin MTA L-Hook identical to the one that
Jerry Prince had used to win maximum time aloft at the Internationals
last year. It had cost him sixty-five dollars, plus insured shipping,
and it came pre tuned and ready to throw. Prince had spiraled his up
at the Internationals in Sydney last summer and hung it for five
minutes and sixteen seconds--with a thirty-klick-per-hour wind blowing.
On a calm day, word was he could keep it in the air a whole lot
longer, in practice anyway.
The boomerang was lightweight, thin, and flexible, made from layers of
linen and glue, and colored a psychedelic electric blue with a black
leaf stenciled on the long arm. The blue made it easier to spot if you
missed a catch and it augered into the grass.
'Wow,' Nadine said.
'So, are you going to come with us?'
She looked up from the 'rang.
'I dunno. My mom planned to have me doing yard work this summer.
Mowing the lawn, helping the old lady across the street with her
garden, like that.'
'It's not the whole summer, it's only three weeks. My mom said she'd
talk to yours. C'mon, Nadine, how often are you going to get a chance
to enter the Junior Nationals, if they aren't here in town?'
'Oh, I'll ask, 'cause I'd love to go. Oregon.' She pronounced it
'Ory-gone.'
'My dad is borrowing an RV from somebody he knows,' he said.
'It'll be cheaper than staying in motels and eating out. It'll sleep
like eight, and there's only four of us. Dad says we'll take five or
six days to drive out, spend a week there, then a leisurely drive home.
We'll get there like two days before the JN, have time to practice.'
'It sounds great. Doesn't it rain all the time out there, though?'
'Nope. My dad goes out there in the winter sometimes for survival
training. It's desert and snow and all on the eastern side of the
state in the winter, but pretty green and sunny in Portland in the
summer.'
'They still have Indians out there, don't they?'
'Yeah, they own casinos. And the cowboys herd cattle in helicopters or
riding on ATVs. It's the northwest, dummy, not Bali.'
'You talk too much. Show me what you got.' She waved at the new
'rang.
'No, you get to throw it first,' he said.
'Really? No, I couldn't.'
