Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous

by J. B. Cheaney

  “‘The Mystery of the Empty Bus Stop.’” Alice’s jaw must have dropped or something, because as soon as Kaitlynn saw a reaction, she swooped down on the bus seat beside her. And stayed there for the rest of the school year.

  “Here’s what I’ve got so far,” she began. “There’s a magic bus that takes kids away to the world of their imagination, where everything they dream about comes true. So every morning, the bus makes its rounds and picks up all the kids who had dreams the night before, only not all of them, because we all have dreams but we don’t always remember. I’m thinking maybe the bus picks up the kids who wake up in the morning with the dreams they had still on their minds. The ones they can’t quit thinking about. What do you think?”

  “Well…” Alice wasn’t used to being asked what she thought. She had to cough once and clear her throat. “That might not be so good. What if you have bad dreams? Like…your parents are missing or somebody died or gets really hurt?”

  Kaitlynn considered this. “Okay, I’ll work on it. Maybe only some dreams come true, after they run them by headquarters or something. Anyway, the bus comes by this one bus stop every day because somebody’s signed up to ride it, only he’s never there. And that’s because he’s a prisoner of his wicked stepmother who locks him up every time the bus comes around. But one of the riders is this really brave girl who uses her own dream-come-true to get into his dreams and—why are you staring at me like that? It’s just a story.”

  Alice knew about stories. But she knew other things too, and what Kaitlynn was telling her was a reflection of those things, totally rearranged. It was like going through the looking glass, for real. “Why does the stepmother lock him up?”

  “Why? Because she’s evil.”

  “But…” Alice started to get the hang of objecting. “Suppose the boy is sick, or…can’t walk or something like that, and the stepmother—or maybe just mother—thinks she’s doing the right thing by keeping him home?”

  “Do you want to hear this story or not?”

  “Sure.” Alice mentally zipped her lips. “Go ahead.”

  But Kaitlynn had lost momentum. She pulled a strand of hair from behind her ear and twirled it around her finger. “See, somebody has to be evil, or else it’s not a good story.”

  “I know. But people can do the right thing for the wrong reason, or the wrong thing for the right reason, and sometimes that’s more interesting.”

  Kaitlynn stuck the strand of hair in her mouth and chewed on it. “You think so?”

  “Uh-huh. Like, what if the boy was crippled in a—a tragic accident, and he lives in an underground hideout, and his mother won’t let him out because she thinks he’ll only get hurt again, only somebody—like his grandmother, maybe—thinks he should get out and toughen up, and they’re always fighting over it?”

  Kaitlynn kept on chewing. “Hm. What kind of tragic accident?”

  • • •

  Actually, the accident would have been a lot more tragic if Ricardo’s seat belt wasn’t buckled, but it didn’t have to happen at all. Daddy had driven their old Ford Galaxie to the convenience store in Arrowhead Rock to buy a half-gallon of milk. They couldn’t afford a whole gallon—Alice remembered her parents fighting about that before her father stomped out of the house, taking Ricardo with him. They took the long way home (what they called home at the time, an abandoned farmhouse on a foreclosed cattle ranch) so Daddy could cool down. This being Oklahoma, where roads were straight as ladders, he was already going a little too fast when he came to the top of a long steep hill. There was a creek bridge at the bottom, and the only other traffic was halfway down the hill, a single tractor carrying a round hay bale.

  “I hate it when tractors hog the road like that,” Daddy said. “What if we throw a little scare into him, make him move over?”

  “Go for it, Daddy,” Ricardo said. At least, that’s what Daddy said Ricardo said. They flew downhill in the Galaxie, laying on the horn, and were rewarded by the sight of the tractor lumbering to the shoulder. Daddy laughed before noticing the patrol car in the opposite lane.

  He stomped the brakes, forgetting the right front brake shoe had a way of seizing up. The vehicle scissored across the highway and slammed into the concrete bridge abutment.

  • • •

  Friendships were best, Alice discovered, if each person brought something different to it. She and Kaitlynn were the same in the kind of stories they liked but different in what they got out of them. Kaitlynn wanted action: one thing after another, bam-bam-bam. Alice wouldn’t mind the story going a little slower, because she wanted to know about the people: How did they grow up? What were the saddest or happiest things that ever happened to them? And (especially) why did they do the things they did?

  “Because,” Kaitlynn would explain frustratedly, “it’s time for something to happen.”

  “But…things happen because of people, don’t they?”

  It led to some interesting discussions (okay, arguments) that made the bus rides go faster and helped them both determine what they were working toward. Before either of them realized it, the story became Alice’s as much as Kaitlynn’s. The magic-dream-bus idea was abandoned—or rather, it kind of drifted away while they were deciding who the missing boy was and why he couldn’t ride the bus.

  Albert (as Kaitlynn decided to call him) was crippled (Alice’s idea) because of experiments by his mad-scientist uncle (who should have just used mice). Having an uncle that cruel was almost too much for Alice, who objected when Kaitlynn wanted the mad scientist to lock the poor little boy in a snake pit. (Kaitlynn was probably more spooked by her experience with Cornelia on the bus than she cared to admit.) “We’ll need more obstacles for the hero to overcome on her way to rescue Albert! And snake pits are about the worst kind of obstacle there is!” Alice thought it was way too creepy, but they compromised by leaving the pit in and taking Albert out. That is, the uncle didn’t actually throw him in there but was always threatening to. That ought to be evil enough.

  • • •

  Actually, Alice could see the need for obstacles—in real life, they sort of happened anyway, whether you needed them or not. After the accident, their whole life became an obstacle. First the hospital, where surgery saved Ricardo’s life but couldn’t save his legs. Then Daddy disappearing because he felt so bad. Then GeeGee’s arrival to take care of things (which Mama wasn’t too good at).

  GeeGee was the only person they could call on, being Mama’s mother, but her coming meant terrible arguments, during which GeeGee called Daddy a screwup who was better off gone and Mama screamed that she just wanted to be left alone to make her own mistakes. But she couldn’t be left alone with two kids to take care of, could she? That’s when GeeGee made her an offer, and Mama had no choice but to take it.

  The offer was to move to GeeGee’s old house, which was empty and needed a little fixing up, and use her truck when she didn’t need it, and get Ricardo into physical therapy. All that, in exchange for one thing: that Daddy stayed gone. Mama said okay. But after they moved, one of the first things she did was get a library card so Alice-the-little-reader could check out books. But also so Mama could use the library computer to get in touch with Daddy and let him know where they were.

  Somewhere in north Texas, he got the message. Then he hiked and hitched his way right to them, arriving after midnight on August 16.

  “What did you expect?” he asked as he was explaining into the night. “Did you think I’d skip off to Mexico? Family’s family, Brenda Kay; no moral dilemma there. And we’re staying family, and we can look after each other with no help from anybody.”

  It stunned him to see the shape Ricardo was still in: no strength, few words, had to be carried everywhere. Alice saw Daddy blink and swallow hard before saying, “But we can’t turn the clock back, can we? First order of business is a wheelchair—we’ve got to get him out of bed ASAP.”


  “We’re waiting,” Mama said. “They haven’t got us in the system yet.”

  “Phooey on the system. We’re staying out of the system as much as we can. Anybody know where we can get a wheelchair?”

  Alice did.

  She’s the one who told him about the one the Pasternaks had. She knew what Daddy would do, and stealing was the only name for it, no matter that the Pasternaks weren’t using their wheelchair and he meant to return the item as soon as Ricardo didn’t need it anymore. That made her accessory to a crime, but it felt good to have somebody in charge again.

  But he wasn’t in charge of where she lived and where she went to school. His mother, Mary Ellen Hall Truman, had offered to let Alice live with her so she could ride the school bus to Centerview. Daddy was dead set against it: government schools were for government drones. He could teach her everything she needed to know or how to find out what neither of them knew. They’d done it before, hadn’t they? She’d missed big chunks of second, third, and fourth grade and never saw the inside of kindergarten at all. However, this time the only person on his side of the argument was Alice. Both grandmas were against him (even though they didn’t know it, because they didn’t know he was around), but so was Mama. Like it or not, Alice was going to school.

  She found a way to show her appreciation to Daddy, though. One Saturday afternoon in September, she and Mama stopped by the library on the last day of the semiannual book sale, and Alice noticed five boxes left under an Everything must go! sign. She whispered to her mother, and her mother talked to the desk clerk, and the next minute, they were loading boxes of books in the pickup to take home and be rewarded by one of her dad’s huge smiles: “These’ll get me through the winter!”

  Daddy read everything: old westerns and romance novels and biographies of people you’d never heard of; college textbooks and county histories and seldom-read classics like Moby-Dick. But the real find was Basic Principles of Physical Therapy, third edition. Besides giving Alice the idea for her science fair project (which won a first-place ribbon for her age-group), that book helped prove Daddy’s point that anything you want to know, you can teach yourself (exactly why school is such a big fat waste of time). Using a few Basic Principles during the fall, he almost got Ricardo on his feet and walking again, or so he claimed. Daddy was positive that if the unfortunate incidents of late January hadn’t happened, Ricardo could have kissed his wheelchair good-bye.

  • • •

  Their story got more complicated over the winter. Kaitlynn wanted to hurry up and get to the rescue by the really brave girl on the bus, but Alice was more interested in Albert and his family and exactly why he was a prisoner. They decided that the uncle wasn’t all bad, because after crippling the boy, he now wanted to cure him. But maybe that wasn’t so good either. Kaitlynn insisted that the uncle wanted to claim all the credit for himself, which meant keeping Albert a prisoner so he could continue his experiments. And she still wanted Albert to spend one night in the snake pit. “But just one. It’s an accident. And they’re supposed to be healing snakes, not poisonous. Uncle Ralph didn’t mean to leave him in there.”

  • • •

  And actually, Daddy didn’t mean to crash Ricardo a second time. That happened on a nice January afternoon—the day before the science fair, in fact—when the weather broke at sixty degrees and he pushed Ricardo up to the bus stop while Mama was taking a nap. Daddy wasn’t supposed to do that, because GeeGee could show up at any time. But he’d been reading about the healthy effects of natural sunshine, and a warmish, sunny afternoon in January was too good to pass up.

  Ricardo stood up. In fact, he actually walked a few steps, which made them both so giddy they started a game of tag—with Ricardo back in his chair—that got a little wild. It ended when Daddy ran behind the shed and Ricardo followed in his wheelchair and got so excited he overbalanced and fell over. He made a grab for Daddy while going down, but only broke off the belt buckle that was specially engraved with his high school logo. Ricardo hurt his back again, leading to a big fight between their parents and other complications.

  Daddy never found his buckle either.

  • • •

  Once or twice per week, Kaitlynn would climb aboard the bus with a new idea that had just popped! into her head the night before. Like giving Albert a talented but snotty big sister who sucked up all the family money to launch her showbiz career. One of Kaitlynn’s best ideas was having the little prince send messages to the outside world by a friendly bluebird named Blackie. (Why Blackie? Because it sounded better than Bluey.) That’s how the hero of the story (a girl bus-rider who sounded suspiciously like Kaitlynn) came to know of his predicament and decide to rescue him.

  “Don’t tell anybody,” she confided to Alice, “but Bender got a Christmas card from the bus stop—I mean, from somebody in the house. He wrote this dumb note to their address, and the kid who lives there wrote back.”

  “How did Bender know it was a kid?”

  “You would too if you’d seen it. He showed it to me: big letters, a little shaky, like a second grader would write.”

  • • •

  Actually, Ricardo would be in fourth grade if he were going to school, but the accident messed up his brain a little. Or so the grown-ups thought. Alice didn’t think so—he’d misplaced some words and took longer to say anything while searching for them, but his brain was working fine otherwise. And he was as fond of practical jokes as ever, especially after he’d learned to get around in the wheelchair. Alice was the one who gave him the pompom that Shelly left at the nursing home back in September (the one she should have returned except she knew Ricardo would love it). She should have guessed what he would do with it. And who would help him.

  What happened with Bender was even worse—or better, depending on how you looked at it. Ricardo wanted to know everything about the kids on the bus, so Alice told him about the rolled-up papers Bender liked to stick behind his ear. When she saw that paper rolled up in the mailbox, she was so surprised she tried to distract Bender with a spitwad, which totally didn’t work. Then there was the Christmas card—actually two Christmas cards because Miranda got one too. Alice read the poem to Ricardo (which she knew was Miranda’s because of an overheard conversation on the bus), and Ricardo figured out a way to let her know he liked it.

  Sweet, in a way, but it was probably a good thing GeeGee finally surrendered in her campaign to get Ricardo in school. If she’d kept on turning down Farm Road 152 every morning, he would have been discovered sooner or later, and Mama just wanted everybody to leave them alone. Daddy wanted the same thing, especially since no one was supposed to know he was even there.

  • • •

  In March, Kaitlynn had the idea that a pet would be nice to add to the story: a little dog Albert could find under a bush or hiding in a tunnel. “Like where you found Panzer! How did you think to look in the culvert?”

  Alice shrugged, even though she’d explained already: holes are great places to hide.

  Actually, she knows this from experience.

  Friday and Saturday nights were some of her best memories of the winter just past: her family sitting around the woodstove like a scene from Little House On the Prairie, Daddy with his book and Alice with hers, Mama with her needlework or a crossword puzzle and an open box of Cheez-Its, Ricardo with his sketchbook and pencils. Ricardo didn’t read so well. Mama could read perfectly well but said she couldn’t concentrate when Daddy was in the room. He’d always have to share whatever he was into. “Hey everybody, listen to this,” he’d say, then he’d read out loud about the great blizzard of 1934 or how gold mining got started in South Africa.

  “Wow!” said Ricardo almost every time.

  “Um,” said Mama, stubbing out a cigarette. “What’s a five-letter word for ‘cured meat’?”

  The sappy wood popped in the stove, Ricardo’s pencils clicked softly on the w
heelchair tray as he swapped colors, Mama hummed as she erased a word, and Alice wedged a bite out of her apple, crunching it to tall slivers of tangy-sweet juice. It was the kind of scene to make Kaitlynn jump up and down and wave her arms and say What’s happening?!

  Good memories are stitched together from plain materials.

  However…if an outside sound invaded their cozy little scene, namely the mash of rubber tires on gravel, Ricardo would say “Hark!” Her parents would lay aside whatever they were doing and calmly but swiftly stand up. Daddy—without a word—would move his chair back to the table, put on his coat, tuck his book under one arm, and look around to make sure he left no visible clues behind. Mama, meanwhile, would go into the bedroom, flip over the rug beside the bed, and tug on the rope pull under the rug to lift up a slab of floor. She held it up while Daddy let himself down into the crawl space (stocked with food and blankets and a flashlight), and then let it carefully down. He pulled the rope back through the hole, she replaced the rug, and by then it was just about time to answer the door.

  The visitor was usually GeeGee, stopping by to visit or drop off some groceries. But once it was a social worker, and another time a truant officer, wanting to know why Ricardo wasn’t in school. Mama handled that visit all right, because Daddy was right there under the floor. She couldn’t handle things too well when he was gone, and he was gone for two whole weeks in February.

  That was after the big fight following Ricardo’s spill, when Daddy stormed out of the house and hitched rides to Oklahoma to see his buddy Ed. After a week or so, Ed gave him the money for a bus ticket back.

  The whole incident was silly; he didn’t have to lose his temper and take the risk of catching pneumonia while hiking over the countryside in dead winter. But risk-taking was in his nature—one of the reasons GeeGee called him a screwup. GeeGee began to suspect he was hiding out in the neighborhood but didn’t know for sure until she found a box of library-sale books in the bedroom closet. That led to a fight between her and Mama, which Alice didn’t hear but Ricardo told her about.