RICH'S mother kicks him out of the house in a drunken fury when he refuses to eat kidney beans. The sixteen year old is put on a bus and rides cross-country to meet his father, whom he had been conditioned to fear as the monster who abducted him as an infant. Two months later, his step-mother offers him a one-way bus ticket to anywhere he wants to go. After perusing a road atlas for a place to finish high school, the protagonist devises a plan. He'll "Go Greyhound" from Idaho to his former hometown, Lindale, Texas. He'll build a fort in the woods behind the high school where he'll sleep until...

When he was four years old, doctors told Duane Hale's parents that their son had Spinal Muscular Atrophy and that he wouldn't live past his teens. That was forty-two years ago and he has now outlived some of those doctors. What happens to a rambunctious little boy whose disease turns him into a man who can't move? How does such a man graduate high school as Student of the Year, work twenty years for the police department, buy a house, get married, father and raise a son? This is the story of a man and the strength he derives from his family and his community. Even as the disease paralyzes...