The Middle of Somewhere

by J. B. Cheaney

  “Sorry, darlin'.” Pop tossed me a preoccupied grin. “This is a business trip, you know. Wagon train's gotta roll.” He frowned at his shirt rack. “What do you think? Polo or oxford?”“Stuffed,” I muttered under my breath. “What's that?”

  “Nothing. Pop? Could you maybe come back before dark and take Gee for a walk?”

  “Huh?” He looked at me, the way he hadn't up to now.

  “I could use a break, that's all.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay, I could probably do that after we run the numbers for today. Now, how about some privacy?”

  About ten minutes later, he left the RV, in clean khakis and a button-down shirt, trailing a scent of Old Spice. “Be good,” he called, gunning his Yamaha.

  Gee ran over with two handfuls of mud to give him a good-bye hug, but Pop scooted off just in time.

  I dragged out the charcoal, remembering all the times in Kent Clark's book where he says to break out of your old routines. “Oh boy!” yelled Gee. “Can we roast marshmallows again?”

  “We're out of 'em.”

  “Then let's roast Gummi Bears!”

  “Why don't you go do something for a while, okay?”

  What he did was enlarge the mud puddle he'd been working on and teach Leo how to make paw prints— mostly on the lower edge of the RV because it was so nice and white.

  I decided that after roasting our hot dogs—which were getting very old-routinish—we'd take a nice long walk to the pay phone and call Mama. Melba told us earlier it was fixed. Since our neighbors kept giving us hostile looks, it seemed like a plan. Especially after the unopened sodacan—the one Gee left too near the coals—overheated and blew up, spraying Coke everywhere. “Cool!” he yelled.

  When we got to the phone, he was so sticky he'd caught a few flies. I dialed the number, and when Mama answered, he had to talk to her first. She finally got the full story of Leo in one piece—or rather, several pieces put together more or less in order: how he found us during a storm and we hid him for three days before I won him fair and square in a poker game, and Gee was having the most fun he'd ever had. Leo got a chance to talk to Mama, too, though he didn't have much to say until Gee pulled his ears.

  When I got on, she sounded a little worried. “Is all that true?”

  “Pretty much. If you factor out the Gee-ness.”

  She knew what I meant. “But do you mean to tell me your grandfather gets along with the dog?”

  “He doesn't have to get along with the dog. The dog takes off like a shot every time Pop shows up.” I told her about Leo's peculiar personality, which just worried her more.

  “I'm not sure we can keep him. We'd have to get him checked out by a vet, and I don't have the money right now. …”

  I had the phone cord stretched so I could keep an eye on my brother while he tried to get Leo to lick the flies off him. “Don't worry about it. This dog may ditch us before we ditch him.”

  “Is Gee behaving himself? Has he worn out Mad Mechanix yet?”

  I ignored the first question. “Mad Mechanix? It's still in the original box, mint condition.”

  “What? You mean he's been staying busy without it?”

  “That's one way to put it.” I changed the subject. “How are you doing?”

  “Really good, sweetie. Wait'll you see how much I've done. …” While she tallied up the snowman, stocking, and wreath count, I noticed that Gee was no longer in sight. I left the receiver for a minute, just to reassure myself. They—the dog and his boy, I mean—were crouched by the roadside, staring at the ground. Probably at the world's unluckiest earthworm. Back at the phone, Mama was raving about “… these darling little crocheted bells Lyddie found in a magazine. Wait till you see them.”

  “Cool.”

  “Ronnie? To tell you the truth, it's kind of bittersweet. I love having all this time for crafts, but I sure miss my munchkins. Still, I'm really proud of you—and your grandfather, too. I guess he's finally stepping up to the plate. Sounds like an experience Gee will never forget—”

  Just then a high scream pierced the night—not Gee's. “He's not the only one,” I said. “Listen, I'd better go see what he's up to. Talk to you later—bye!”

  Gee was still by the road, only now he was on his feet, waving his arms like one of those whirligigs. Meanwhile, Leo was setting a new speed record for distance covered while dragging a nylon rope. But what really caught my attention was the lady standing next to a bicycle, screaming bloody murder while a man tried to calm her down. Melba came marching from her trailer across the road,while Pop stood at the open door with an expression I couldn't describe.

  It took a while to sort everything out. When I'd seen Gee and Leo staring at the ground earlier, what they were looking at was a black snake with its long white belly turned up. Gee thought it was dead, but when he picked it up by the middle, it whipped around and tried to bite him on the hand. That startled him so much he threw it out into the road. Anybody would.

  But in Gee's world, if he does what anybody would do, the results aren't what anybody would get. The place where he threw the snake happened to be occupied at that moment by a young couple on bicycles, out for a pleasant ride around the lake. She got hysterical, he ran his bike into hers, and the snake didn't come out so well, either. Let's just say he wasn't pretending to be dead anymore.

  “I didn't mean it!” Gee bawled. “I didn't mean to!”

  He might have been apologizing to the snake, for all we knew. But Melba assured the two cyclists that it was an unfortunate accident, and I made Gee say he was sorry. The man accepted his apology, but I wasn't sure the lady did. Anyway, they rode on.

  Pop never budged from the trailer, leaving the parenting talk to Melba: “I hate to tell you, Gee, but this afternoon I got a complaint from a gentleman who was down at the beach when you swam out. …”

  The lecture was for me, too, the gist being that I'd shirked my duty as brother's keeper. “But of course that's not all your fault. I've been telling your grandfather he shouldn't leave you alone so much, even though you're avery responsible girl. …” Duh, thought I—and who made him leave us alone tonight?

  Before anything else could happen, I dragged Gee to the shower to scrub off the mud, exploded Coke, flies, gnats, and possible snake spit—even though it was still at least three hours from bedtime.

  “Are we leaving tomorrow?” he called through the shower curtain.

  “Sounds like it.” I could have said more but restrained myself.

  And that was just as well, because as it turned out, we weren't leaving tomorrow. Pop had everything packed up when we got back to our campsite, and the first thing he said was, “Let's go.”

  A dozen questions could have exploded out of me right then, mostly variations on “Huh?” But after taking a good look at Pop's face, I decided questions could wait. Even Gee decided that. He took his place at the dinette, and Leo hung around the bike trailer, ready to jump on when it started rolling. I was dousing the campfire when Melba rode up on her scooter. She'd brought half of a cheesecake wrapped in foil, and handed it over to Pop along with a few words.

  Apparently, she'd given him an earful during their dinner for two; Pop's stony face didn't change even when she stood on tiptoe to peck him on the cheek. Then she gunned the little motor and swung away. Before hitting the road, though, she beckoned me over.

  “Well, Ronnie, it's been fun. Good luck—” She stopped just short, I think, of adding, “You'll need it.”

  “Thanks.”

  She squeezed the handlebars, as though wondering whether to say what she finally said. “By the way, a couple of nights ago … in that third poker round? He had you beat.”

  “How's that?”

  “He drew a full house, twos and fives. I saw it—maybe because he let me. But he folded instead of calling you.”

  I just blinked at her like a dork.

  “I thought you should know.” She smiled and kicked the scooter back. “Hope to see you again someday. W
ho knows? I'll tell Howard you said good-bye.”

  At the moment I wasn't saying anything, so she handled both sides of the good-bye for me as she waved and swerved the scooter.

  It was a little after six when we left the state park and turned north at the first crossroads. We traveled awhile before I got up the nerve to ask, “Where are we going?”

  He drove about a mile farther before answering, “Chalk Pyramids. To set up a met mast.” Then, after a minute, “Please tell your brother to stop kicking the dinette seat. I can feel it from here.”

  I went back to communicate the message and stayed to play rock-paper-scissors until Gee got bored and sleepy. Then I returned to my seat and pulled the map from the door pocket. The highway we were on headed north as straight as a needle. I followed it past Scott City, not sure if Chalk Pyramids was a town (black letters) or an attraction (red letters). Then it jumped out at me, on its tinyred-letter feet: CHALK PYRAMIDS, next to MONUMENT ROCK, both represented by red squares surrounded by white, at the end of a double-line track that meant a dirt road. Something about it, stuck at the end of that hollow road, hit my chest with an empty feeling.

  But that was nothing compared to the feeling I got when we actually saw the place.

  Even the worst experiences can teach you something.

  Learn the lesson!

  —Kent Clark,

  preaching again

  By the time we'd turned off the highway and bumped and shuddered up a long dirt road, the sun was sitting on the horizon like the yolk of a fresh egg right after you break it in the skillet. “Twenty after eight,” Pop read off the dashboard clock. “Should have about half an hour till dark. I'll set up my stuff. Then, with any luck, we'll get to the next campground by ten.”

  When the driver's door slammed, Gee woke up. He'd been asleep for the last half hour or so, his head rolling against the back of the dinette seat in a way that made my neck sore just looking at it. “Where are we?” he yawned.

  “Chalk Pyramids.”

  He unbuckled his seat belt and came forward, squinting through the windshield. “Those aren't pyramids.”

  What he meant was, they weren't big triangles with camels and palm trees around the base. They were like Egyptian pyramids might look if you held them up to a fun-house mirror—stretched-out, lopsided structures bitten by the wind.

  “Awesome!” Gee breathed in my ear. That was a good way to put it—as in Awe. Some. As in, not-quite-part-of-this-world.

  Leo was already whining by the door because our grandfather had kicked him off the trailer in order to get at the equipment in the storage garage. I could hear Pop rummaging back there.

  “Go ahead and run around,” I told Gee, “but don't go anywhere near him.” Usually when I say “run around” that's what he does—or even if I don't. But after hopping out the RV door, he just stood there, hugging Leo, as if he'd slammed into an invisible wall.

  If you were a Martian, you might have felt right at home. In the pinkish glow of twilight, it looked like another planet, where they built houses from plans drawn by Dr. Seuss. The colors were all reds, browns, and grays, with some pale green mixed in. When I walked all the way clear of the RV, the west wind hit me with a sandy sting. That's what made the pyramids—years of wind and sand playing around with the rock. Now it was playing around with me—if I stood here long enough, I'd become a pillar of sand myself.

  It made me hungry for company, even Pop's. He had found a spot on the other side of a column to set up his met mast. When I reached him, he was running out lines to stabilize it, while the weather vane on top spun like the Tasmanian Devil. “Come over and hold this steady for me,” he commanded. “The ground is hard as a rock.”

  I took hold of the mast while he screwed a stake into the stony soil, then attached a stabilizer line to it. “Isn't this, like, public property?”

  “Yeah. Got a permit to set up a temporary station.”

  “But nobody's going to build a wind farm here, are they?”

  “It's for comparison.” He strapped a boxy instrument the size of his hand to the mast.

  “What's that?” I asked.

  “Anemometer. Measures wind speed.”

  Since he was talking, however little, I sprung the question that was bugging me. “What's your hurry, Pop? I mean, why'd you change your plans so you could do this tonight?”

  “Well.” He took a paper from his pocket, slipped it into a plastic sleeve, and fastened it to the post. “That is—” He gave the pole a shake to test it. “All of a sudden, tonight seemed better than tomorrow.”

  That was a non-answer, but it confirmed what I'd already figured out on the way here. He was going to rush the second half of his assignment in order to get rid of us sooner. The original plan was to spend a few days in southwest Kansas, a few days in northwest Kansas, and a day or two somewhere in between. Then we'd retrace the whole route to get another set of readings before heading back to Missouri. But Pop could come up with a Plan B as well as I could. He was hurrying what he had to do out here, and then Gee and I were homeward bound—I was pretty sure.

  “Go round up the herd,” Pop said then. “Time to hit the road.”

  To affirmatize my attitude, I tried on the idea of going home sooner than expected. Big hugs from Mama, finishing my closet project, calling up this girl Marie that I'd started to make friends with and asking her if she'd like to go to the pool some afternoon. Sure it was old routine, but after all, routines were important for getting things done. Gee's counselors were always telling us how he needed to be on a schedule.

  But still… going home early was admitting to failure. I mentally ran through my short-term goals for this trip:

  Learn to organize better. Are you kidding? What made me think Gee on wheels was easier to organize around than Gee at home?

  Build relationship with Pop. So maybe he wasn't mentor material, but every time we started to build something, Gee would smash it.

  See new places. Okay, but there was a lot we'd missed— what about the Wizard of Oz Museum and the World's Largest Ball of Twine?

  Get away from old places. Exactly—and I wasn't ready to go back.

  I started down the slope with an angry snort that Pop didn't appear to notice. Gee had loosened up enough to start a game of hide-and-seek with Leo around the boulders, but when I called, they both trotted over like cooperative little lambs.

  Pop climbed into the cab and buckled himself in, then turned the key in the ignition.

  The motor kind of burped. Then it didn't do anything.

  The ignition clicked as Pop turned it off, then on again. “The battery can't be dead. It's brand-new.”

  I didn't know much about internal-combustion engines, but this didn't sound good. “Are we out of gas?”

  He didn't answer but popped the hood and yanked open his door. “Did something fall out?” Gee called after him. Pop didn't answer that question, either.

  For about ten minutes, he either stared at the motor or trudged back and forth from the storage garage, muttering a little louder with each trip. Then he jerked open the door and hiked himself up on the seat.

  His lips looked too tight for talk. Then he said, “I think the alternator's shot.” A few more seconds passed, while I held up a warning finger for Gee to zip his lip. “The warning light must not be working. I'm sure I would've seen it.”

  “What's an alternator?” I asked, very quietly.

  “Starts the battery. If it goes bad, the whole electrical system is kaput.”

  I thought about the sour milk that morning and wondered if the electrical system was already kaputing back then.

  “I'll take the bike and go get one,” Pop said. “Y'all can stay here.”

  “Wh-what?” My voice didn't come out right at all—it sounded about eight years younger than me. Maybe because I felt like a scared little kid just then.

  “You'll be fine. Just make up your beds and go to sleep. I'll be back before you know it.”

  “But
why can't you wait until tomorrow? There won't even be anything open now!”

  “And while you're gone we could be attacked by bears!” Gee protested. “Or lions!”

  Pop made an effort to hold on to his temper. “Look. Once I get back on the highway it's only about sixty miles to the interstate. There's a truck plaza right at the exit that's open all the time—I'll be back in two or three hours, install the alternator, and we're good to go. If I wait until tomorrow, it's a whole day's work gone.”

  How does that compare to a boy and girl gone? I wanted to ask. Not that I really thought we'd be eaten by lions, or anything like that, but still… this place was so big and empty I could almost feel it swallowing me.

  “Furthermore, Gee, there aren't any bears or lions out here.” Pop was using an exaggerated let's-be-reasonable tone of voice. “Nothing will get you if you just stay inside.”

  All that did, of course, was reinforce Gee's idea that there might be something outside to get us. He continued to protest—bringing up tigers in addition to the other wild animals—but of course it didn't do any good. As soon as Pop had unloaded his bike and reminded us about staying inside, he took off in a flurry of dust. We watched the little taillight all the way to the point where the horizon gulped it down. The dark closed around us.

  “We're all alone!” Gee wailed.

  “No we're not,” I said, desperately looking for positives, even while the aloneness boomed all around us as big as the wind. “Leo's here to protect us, right, Leo?”

  At the sound of his name, the dog—who'd been cowering under the rear axle—crept out, whimpering.

  Gee clutched him like he'd never let go. “He's scared, too.”

  “Then maybe you can protect him.”

  “We don't like this place.”

  That makes three of us, I could have said. In the sunset it was kind of neat and spooky, but now it was just spooky, period. The light of a quarter-moon and a slew of stars made the chalky columns rear over us like black ruins—the hideout of mummies and zombies in every scary movie I wished I'd never seen. I shivered, and it wasn't just because the temperature had dropped. “We'd better go inside.”