As I headed back around to the front of the house, I heard a sound like a huge chainsaw chopping through a hundred trees. Just when I thought it was as loud as it could get, it got louder.
A huge-normous bearded man on a giant, black motorcycle pulled up into the drive. That’s when I realized that this was the ride Eli had gotten for me. And that’s when I felt, for maybe the tenth time that day, as if I’d made a massive mistake.
Chapter Six
Each person in my family—Mom, Will, Dad—had guts in their own weird way. A touch of bravery. A sense of adventure. Not me. For whatever reason, I had none. When the motorcycle pulled up in front of me, all I wanted to do was run and hide.
The guy cut the engine.
“Casey, right?” he said, taking off his sunglasses. He wore a leather vest and chaps over his jeans. Tattoos blackened his arms, from shoulder to knuckle. His neck was as big around as a gallon jug of orange juice.
I just stood there frozen, not even blinking. Seriously, my stomach went cold, like it was filled with ice.
“Right?” he repeated, putting the death machine’s kickstand down. “You’re Casey? Casey Moe?”
Casey? This guy couldn’t possibly be Eli’s ride. I began to back slowly away and, just as I was about to sprint down the street, he said it:
“You don’t trust anyone. That’s your problem.”
I wavered. His eyes were black. Unreadable.
“What did you just say?” I managed.
“‘You don’t trust anyone. That’s your problem,’” he repeated and then explained, “Your dad said you might be nervous. He said if you heard that, you’d know it was okay.”
I blinked, and then nodded. My dad? Did he mean Eli? I couldn’t piece it all together.
“Sorry about your grandma,” he continued. “Dying’s never a fun business.”
This really was Eli’s ride. This wasn’t some Carl/Chicken Farmer mix-up. I rolled my eyes—well, just in my mind. Apparently Eli thought it would be just peachy to ride with this guy.
“The name’s Lloyd,” the man smiled, sticking out his hand. “Lloyd Lloeke.” He said it like Loy-kee. When he smiled, his teeth shone white through his black beard. Lloyd? I marveled at his name as he shook my limp hand. He looked like a Rocky or a Rambo or something. I could even see him as a Mike or a Jim, but a Lloyd Lloeke?
“And you’re Casey,” he prompted. I just nodded.
Casey. Sure. That’s me.
“Boise’s a long trip for a funeral, but I bet your dad will be glad you’re there with him,” Lloyd said in a friendly way. I just kept nodding like a bobblehead, trying to think of a way to get out of going with him. Because I sure as heck wasn’t getting on a motorcycle with Lloyd Lloeke. If I did, I was pretty sure we’d be going to my funeral in Boise.
“Here, let me get your bag.”
That’s when he stood up and I took in the fact that he was almost seven feet tall. Lloyd didn’t notice the terror on my face—or maybe he did but was used to that. He just plucked my suitcase from the sidewalk like it was a lunchbox and strapped it to the side of his bike.
While I gawked, Lloyd brought a shiny, black, mixing-bowl of a helmet down on my head.
“You can wear mine,” he said, buckling it for me.
“Thanks.” Without the helmet, I could see Lloyd was bald. Very bald. His head was so bald, I imagined air molecules squeaked past it as he rode.
“You okay wearing the backpack?”
“Yep,” I answered. My voice seemed very high for some reason.
“All right then,” he said. “Let’s get a move on!”
I wasn’t sure which scared me more: Lloyd or the motorcycle. I mean, even Mom called motorcycles death traps. (And coming from someone who walks on high wires and shoots herself out of cannons, that’s saying something.) But I willed myself not to be nervous. Will wouldn’t be. He’d be hooting and hollering, itching to ride.
But then again, I’m not Will.
However, there was the teensy hiccup of having to rescue my mom. I wasn’t going to solve anything sitting in front of a house in Cowboy Town, Oregon. If I didn’t get on the bike, I might as well give up.
I took a deep breath, trying to use this thing called the “Instant Calm Breath Method” that Mom had taught me. It’s supposed to help you stop the body’s flight-or-fight reaction (for me, it was more a flight-or-faint reaction).
Breathe in for four counts. Hold it for four. Breathe out for four. Slow breaths…
“You okay, Casey?” Lloyd asked, looking concerned.
“Yep,” I squeaked. “Fine.”
“Isn’t this great?” Lloyd shouted over the roar of the Harley.
“Great!” I screamed back. I tried not to look at the road curving ahead of us. Or at the pavement zooming below me. Pavement that would rip the skin off my bones if I touched it even for a second.
Instead, I focused my eyes on Lloyd’s ear lobes. They held big round earrings with hollow centers that you could see all the way through. I suddenly felt like an uptight nerd in my collared shirt and tie.
“Nice day!” he said over his shoulder. “Makes you glad to be alive!”
“Yeah!” I said. “Alive!”
Lloyd twisted his head to get a glimpse of me, which didn’t seem very safe.
“You’re not looking!” he said. “Open your eyes!”
“Okay!” And I tried to look.
“Beautiful! Sun! Air! Fantastic! Who wants a car?”
I did, for one.
“We’re safe!” he said. “Completely stable!” With that, Lloyd swerved back and forth on the road.
“Don’t!” I shouted.
“Sorry!” He straightened out. “Trust me! Best ride ever! Or your money back!”
So I loosened up a little. I kind of had to, or my body was going to be seized by a full-body charley horse. I took in the scenery but wasn’t all that impressed. It looked kind of like home, flat and brown. But the air felt good.
“Thanks for the ride!” I shouted after a moment.
“Glad I could help you out!” he called over his shoulder.
I remembered Eli’s story about the funeral. But why was I going to Idaho? I mean, the real me, not Casey.
“You going to Boise anyway?” I called.
“Yeah! Always go there for my lectures!”
“Lectures?” I yelled back. Lloyd, with his tattoos and tunnel earrings, gave lectures? Maybe I’d heard him wrong. Lectures? Dentures? Sweatshirts?
“Comparative anatomy lectures! Osmoregulation! Tissue structure!”
At least, that’s what I thought I heard.
You can only shout so much on a motorcycle. We fell silent after that.
When I was in fourth grade, Mom slid down the flagpole from the roof of Brenville’s post office. Dad’s co-worker’s husband saw it happen and there was a lot of talk around town. Dad really chewed her out for that one.
After the yelling stopped, she said something to me that I never forgot: “It’s okay when everyone else doubts you. It’s when you doubt yourself that it gets hard.”
Riding on the back of Lloyd’s motorcycle, my own doubts about the Rescue Mission started creeping into my mind. I’d never admitted it to Eli—and barely even to myself—but I couldn’t help wondering if we were wrong about this whole kidnapping business. I thought of the way Dad looked at me like I was crazy every time I brought it up. I thought of how the cops completely ignored me. What if I’d somehow misunderstood it? I mean, I was the guy stupid enough to believe that Will would have taught me to dive because he’d had a change of heart. As Will put it, Who gets kidnapped by the circus? It was a ridiculous idea.
And it wasn’t like Bartholomew was keeping Mom hidden. In the few months she’d been with Bartholomew,
“The Amazing Athena” had set an honest-to-god Human Cannonball World Record for summersaults and was featured on both the local news and on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! website. That didn’t make much sense if they were keeping her against her will.
But kidnapping was the only thing that made sense, wasn’t it? Maybe she was brainwashed. The postcards with the messages, the horrible rumors about Bartholomew, the black van, the near-destruction of our house, the fact that Mom hadn’t come home to visit us: there was just too much evidence. There was no way I was wrong.
But what ifI was?
Lloyd pulled off the main road into a gas station’s gravel parking lot. Everybody stared at our roaring motorcycle as we pulled up to the gas pump. The bike shuddered to a stop and I hopped off, my stiff legs barely able to hold me up.
Lloyd stretched, his back sounding like someone shuffling a deck of cards.
“Gotta empty the pipes,” he said, heading for the restroom.
After he had peed and gassed up the bike, Lloyd bought us a couple of Cokes and we went to a picnic table. It felt very, very good to be on solid, non-moving ground.
Lloyd opened his Coke with one hand while looking at me strangely.
“So, your name’s Casey, right?” he asked.
“Right,” I said, taking a swig. Yup. I’m Casey. Going to a funeral in Boise.
“Strange,” he said. “Earlier, I called your name about five times and you didn’t turn around.”
Uh-oh.
“I, uh…must have been thinking about something else,” I said. He nodded and let it drop.
I studied Lloyd’s tattoos while he checked his phone. There was a snake in a figure eight, eating its own tail. A Rubik’s cube. Something that looked like a math equation. On his left forearm was a bunch of words on a big scroll. I realized with a small shock that I knew the words—it was an old Rolling Stones song.
“I like that tattoo,” I said, pointing and hoping the small talk would distract him from the whole Casey issue. “My dad likes the Stones, too.” I felt even cooler because I knew to call them “the Stones” and not “the Rolling Stones.”
“You know the song, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’?” he asked, looking down at his arm. I nodded. Dad listened to it so much, it had grown on me.
“Reminds me to face my fears, you know?” he said, and he held out his arm so I could see the whole thing. “My dad wasn’t easy to live with. He was—he was sometimes a bad guy. He died when I was seventeen. I got the tattoo then. Sympathy for my dad, I guess.”
I realized what he was saying: sympathy…for the devil, meaning his father.
“You been to Boise a lot?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Uh, yeah,” I lied hastily. “We used to visit our grandmother, Nana, in the summer.”
“I like it there,” he said, taking a loud slurp of his soda. “I took my mom there with me once so we could see the Boise Opera. It was pretty good.”
Lectures? Opera? Maybe I’d completely misread scary Lloyd.
A few hours later, and just half an hour outside Boise, Lloyd stopped on the wide shoulder of the road.
“Is everything okay?” I asked nervously. Why were we stopping in the middle of nowhere?
“I think we’ve sprung a leak,” he said, turning off the motorcycle.
“Uh-oh.” I inspected the ground below the bike.
“Not the bike,” he said. “Your backpack.”
He pointed a giant finger over my shoulder and I looked behind us. My postcards. Somehow, my bag had popped open. Cards littered the road and the nearby field. They blew in the breeze, trailing far behind us.
I took off at a dead run.
“Casey! Watch out!”
A truck barreled by, going about a hundred miles an hour. If it’d been any closer, I’d have been flattened. I only stopped for a second, letting that fact sink in. Then I bolted again.
I snatched up a postcard from the side of the road, then another. Minneapolis. Green Valley. Deadman Reach. They were all I had of Mom. Not just the ones with the clues, but the others, too. And her picture! The one with her by the cannon. I’d forgotten about that, and now it was gone!
“Hey, hey,” Lloyd said, coming up behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I answered, wiping a palm across my cheek like I had an itch, hoping he wouldn’t notice I was crying.
“Before you shoot off across that highway, you need to relax.”
“I’m fine,” I said, my voice cracking in the middle of the words. Another huge truck blew by, sending more postcards swirling. I made to go after them, but Lloyd’s heavy mitt of a hand stayed on my shoulder, holding me in place.
“When you’re cool, you can go.” At first I was mad. Who was he to tell me what to do? But I took a few deep breaths. I felt calmer.
“All right,” said Lloyd, pulling his hand back. “I’ll help you. They haven’t gone too far.”
I nodded. We made our way down into the field, picking them up as we went. Winnipeg. Little Hope.
“Want to talk about it?” Lloyd asked, stooping for a card.
“Uh, well, it’s just that Mom is…well, she’s in the circus,” I said. “These are the only letters she sends. I think, well, because she couldn’t make it home for the funeral, I’m a bit…touchy.”
And just like that, I discovered the secret to being an incredible liar. All you had to do was take the truth and bend it to fit. Why hadn’t I ever thought of that before?
“The circus!” Lloyd exclaimed. “No way. Which circus? What does she do?”
“Bartholomew’s Circus. She’s the Human Cannonball.” I found the picture of my mom. The one with her in her human cannonball suit. I handed it to Lloyd.
“I’ve heard of them! Bartholomew’s Awesome Circus of the Stupendous something-or-other, right? Man, I love that kind of stuff!” he said. He looked from the picture to me, and back again. “Spitting image, you two.”
I nodded, not correcting him about the name of the circus. He was so fired up, I had a hard time not smiling. I’d never heard anyone get so excited about my mom being in the circus.
I snagged another postcard, the one Will had torn up and I taped back together. Philadelphia.
“Man! And you’re named Spartacus to boot? Crazy,” he said, shaking his head.
When he caught my shocked look, he held up his hands in surrender. “Sorry, I couldn’t help but see the name on the cards.” He gave me the ones he’d picked up. I smiled weakly at him, then counted them. I was still missing two.
“Audentes fortuna iuvat!” Lloyd cried, raising his giant fist in the air. “That’s Latin for ‘Fortune favors the bold.’ Not that it was Spartacus who said that, but still. That’s a wicked name, man.”
I nodded stiffly and Lloyd pursed his lips.
Another tough subject.
“I guess Casey is just easier to go by? Kids tease you?”
“Well, yeah…I mean, no,” I said hastily. “I mean, yes, they tease me, but it’s not about Spartacus. Mom’s the only one who calls me that. Dad, well, he doesn’t like it. He makes sure everyone knows my name is…my name is Casey.”
I was so close to saying “Ryan,” it wasn’t funny, but Lloyd thought the pause was just me choking up again and his face fell in sympathy.
“That’s rough, kid,” he said. “But it really is a great name. The movie Spartacus? Phenomenal. I still know parts of it word for word.”
“I, uh, I’ve never seen it,” I admitted.
“Never seen it? And you’re the hero in the whole thing?”
“It’s not on Netflix,” I said lamely.
Lloyd dramatically threw his hands up in exasperation, but I just shrugged. Honestly, I was afraid watching it would just drive home how lame
I really was.
“You have to see it,” Lloyd continued. “I’ll send you a copy.”
“Well, I did read a couple books about him,” I said defensively, picking up Farewell, Arkansas. “He was pretty cool.”
“More than cool,” Lloyd said. “What an excellent, courageous dude! So you know how he was born a slave, without freedom. But he didn’t accept it. He inspired all these other slaves to lead a revolt against the ruling classes. There’s this great line in the movie, when Spartacus is getting ready to face certain death. The guy goes, ‘Are you afraid to die, Spartacus?’ And Spartacus goes, ‘No more than I was to be born.’”
“‘No more than I was to be born,’” I echoed, thinking about what that meant. I suppose if you didn’t exist before you lived, why should you be afraid of the same thing happening again?
We continued picking through the dirt in silence for a moment before I spoke up again, “I forgot; did Spartacus become a king or something? He won the war and became free?”
“Well, no.” Lloyd coughed. “He got crucified. Nailed to a cross. He died a horrible death.”
“Oh.”
“But,” Lloyd said, “the point of his story is that your freedom is worth fighting for—and even if you die trying, your effort gives others the inspiration to fight for themselves. It was true then—what was that, like 100 BC?—and it’s still true now.”
I paused, absorbing, before realizing what his story meant to me.
“But all this you’ve been saying, about how great he was, that’s why I should be Casey,” I said. “So no one expects too much from me.”
“You have a point,” he said, looking thoughtful. “It is a whole lot of name to live up to. I guess if my parents had called me Coolest Man Ever, it might cramp my style, but then again, it’s still an awesome name.”
Lloyd and I climbed back up the ditch to the road so we could check up there for the last missing card. As we did, I felt a small smile creeping onto my face. This big tattooed biker, maybe the coolest person I’d ever met, wasn’t laughing at my name. And, even though I was pretty sure I wouldn’t ever go by Spartacus…well, his enthusiasm was sort of contagious.
Spartacus Ryan Zander and the Secrets of the Incredible Page 7