Gee begged to bring Leo, but I wouldn't allow it. To tell the truth, I was mad at everybody: Pop for leaving us here, Gee for cutting short our trip, and Leo for being a dog—which wasn't fair, I'll admit, but Leo had certainly helped push Pop to the limit.
“Inside” didn't seem much better than out after I switched on the overhead light and got only a weak, eye-straining glow that seemed worse than nothing. “Oh yeah. Our electricity's gone.” That meant no radio to keep us company; even farm reports would have sounded like music just then. I turned off the switch and reached for the flashlight. “Let's find our jammies and go to bed.”
“No!” he protested, exactly like he was three years old and afraid of missing something good if he went to bed. Seriously, I wouldn't have minded missing the next few hours. “I won't go to bed without—without a shower!”
This was a new one. “But you already had a shower, back at—”
I was interrupted by Leo, who was crouching just outside the door. He let loose with such an odd noise— between a moan and a yap—we both stopped to listen. Out of the silence came a sound I couldn't describe. It was more like a police siren than anything—a lot of police sirens. Just when I started wondering if the cops were coming to tell us Pop had been wiped out on the highway, the noise broke up into sharp little yips. Leo scratched at the door, whining.
I said, “No telling what he's scared of now.”
“I know!” Gee exclaimed suddenly. “It's coyotes. I heard 'em at the campout last fall.”
His Sunday-school teacher took the boys on an overnight to Smithville Lake, which wasn't quite overnight for Gee when he fell out of a tree and cracked his head. “Are you sure?”
“Wouldn't you be sure about a noise like that?”
Sometimes he makes sense. “Are they, like … dangerous?”
“My teacher said they were scared of humans. But—”
“Let's just stay inside.”
“But Leo's out there! You said I had to protect him!”
Me and my big fat mouth. It led to a big fat argument: Gee's side was that we either let Leo in, or let Gee out. My side was that when Pop found dog hair on his cushions we'd be heading home a lot sooner, maybe on the first east-bound truck. Besides, I was tired of bending over backward for a mutt who could probably take care of himself. The fight went on while Leo scratched at the door, making every noise a dog could make that wasn't a real bark.
Gee finally won, with a pretty good tactic: he stopped breathing.
Not exactly on purpose; it was his asthma kicking in. His attacks are getting fewer and farther between, which is the upside. The downside is that they're scarier when they happen. First he starts choking, next his eyes get big and round, and finally these ugly noises like a rusty saw start coming from his throat. By then Mama is telling him to stay calm while she looks for the inhaler, and if she doesn't find it fast enough his lips turn blue. So now I was looking for the inhaler, and not remembering where I put it.
“Just stay calm,” I kept saying. “Sit down and concentrate, okay? In … out… I know it's here, I remember packing it—”
Trying not to panic, I turned over the sofa cushions and rattled through the closet shelf and every kitchen cupboard. The flashlight beam darted like a terrified mouse— “In! …Out! …That's good!”—while his raspy breath was sawing my nerves apart.
I even climbed up to Pop's bunk and checked the storage bins there, screeching when a stack of books spilled on my toes. One of them caught my eye because it didn't have a cowboy on it; barely believing my eyes, I read, Seize the Way.…Pop was a Kent Clark fan, too!
But no time to wonder about that. “Hold on—we're getting close!” We'd better be, because I was running out of places to look.
“Leo …,” Gee croaked, feebly waving toward the door.
I decided that desperate times called for disobeying your grandparent. Jumping off the bunk, I opened the door. Leo bounded in, Gee slid off the dinette seat, and they met in the middle of the floor. Dog hair wasn't exactly good for asthma. But Gee was still breathing—or gasping— so I figured Leo's love outweighed his allergens.
The inhaler was under the dinette seat. I snatched it up and checked the batteries and plugged it into Gee almost before he could get his next gasp. Then we all settled down like flurried leaves drifting back to earth. Leo was panting like a big old machine of dogginess, I was taking long deep breaths, and Gee was sucking on his tube while the hiss of the inhaler filled a space that had never felt so tiny before now.
Meanwhile, the coyotes were carrying on outside like a maniacs' convention. The wind was making a low, steady moan that rattled the thin walls. “Make up your beds and go to sleep,” Pop had said. Sure.
The RV felt just the opposite of safe. It felt more like a pressure cooker that was slowly filling with the inhaler hiss and every thump of Leo's tail—which, whatever comfort Gee found in it, was probably stirring up even more dust and dander. My flashlight picked up the gleam of Gee's eyes, which didn't look any less scared than before. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“All right, here's what we do,” I said. “We'll build a fire.”
Gee blew the tube out of his mouth. “In here?”
“Of course not! While we were outside a while ago, I saw a little rock circle on the other side of the RV where somebody built a fire. There's even some wood left. It'll scare the coyotes away and be a signal for Pop when he comes back.” The thought crossed my mind that maybe Pop wasn't coming back, but that just shows what being alone on the Kansas prairie at night will do to your thinking.
I found some matches and a blanket and herded Gee and Leo out of the RV. Whoever had built the last fire in that spot had even left a pile of papers for kindling—about twenty sheets held down by a rock. They looked all the same, like some kind of advertising flyer. Gee sat on a blanket nearby with Leo tucked around him like a rug, while I wadded up some of the paper flyers and rearranged the half-burned logs and twigs in a tepee on top. Three matches made the paper blaze and the wood crackle, sending sparks into the air.
“Cool,” Gee breathed. “Fireworks.”
“It's just cinders from the paper.”
“No, I mean in the sky. Look!” I turned on my heels, just in time to see a couple of shooting stars. Two more showed up right after, and for a couple of minutes the sky was full of them. We watched, holding still as though we were afraid they would notice us.
Gee spoke up, in a trembly voice. “ 'Member what Howard said? How they're heading for us but the angels bat 'em back before they can hit us?”
That's not at all what Howard said, but I couldn't help picturing a heavenly host with baseball bats, whapping away into deep space. The idea wasn't too far-fetched—if they were stuck with this guardian-angel gig, why shouldn't they have some fun with it? We watched for a while, keeping score and feeling less alone. The universe looks friendlier when you can see it as part of one big game.
“I guess they're looking out for us,” I said, in what was meant to be a reassuring tone. The wind gusted, making the flames twist.
Gee worried, “Maybe it'll blow out like a candle.”
“No—see how much brighter the fire gets when the wind blows? Air's like food to a fire. Hey, how about we write another postcard? We still have the sunflower one left.”
“What's that?” The wind had carried off my stack of unburned paper, and Gee jumped up to chase them.
“Come back here!” I yelled. “You'll get your asthma going again!”
After a minute, he raced back, with a fistful of papers and Leo at his heels. “Look what I found!”
“It's just some kindling left over from the last person who—”
“No, look!” Since he was waving the papers right under my nose, I couldn't see anything until I snatched one sheet out of his hand and tilted it toward the fire. It was an advertisement with a photocopied picture that looked all pebbly. The words read:
Coming soon to Hays, Kansas!
Speci
al engagement!
Don't miss the blazing, amazing,
spectacular
CANNONBALL PAUL!!
Ellis County Fair, June 14-15 …
“He was here!” Gee shouted, jumping up and down. “Right here!”
I had to admit, that was the likeliest explanation. Who else would have enough Cannonball Paul flyers to burn but Cannonball Paul himself?
And why did we keep following him, like rats behind the Pied Piper?
This. Was getting. Too. Weird.
Some downsides just stay down for a while.
—Veronica Sparks,
who knows what she's talking about
(unlike some bestselling authors she could name)
The sound of a lone motorcycle puttering up a gravel road at two-fifteen a.m. can be more beautiful than a fifty-string symphony orchestra—at least if you know who's on the motorcycle. The wind had died down and the night was so clear I could hear Pop's Yamaha while it was miles away; at least twenty minutes went by before the headlight finally came in view. It was just me and the coyotes awake by then, because Gee had sacked out on a doggie-pillow by the fire (with pictures of Cannonball Paul clutched to his chest and blazing, amazing visions dancing in his head). Leo woke up long enough to creep under the axle.
I had stayed awake to keep the fire going, but Pop didn't say anything about that, or anything about the late hour except, “Took longer than I thought.” I'd noticed that. He grabbed a shovel from the storage garage and helped me smother the fire, then unsnapped a bungee cord, untying a square box from his fender rack. “I'm going in for a few hours of shut-eye. I'll try to get this thing installed at dawn. Then we'll see where we are.”
I knew where I was: out in the middle of nowhere with a next of kin who didn't even bother to ask “How'd you manage out here all by yourself?” Or say “Sorry for takingso long,” or “Good night,” even. I gave him a couple of minutes to get settled, then dragged Gee inside. Just before crashing on the sofa, I tucked our latest postcard into the mail rack, little suspecting I would never get a chance to mail it.
What woke me up, in the pinky dawn, was Pop banging on the motor. I tried to guess by the speed and loudness of the bangs whether his mood had improved any, but they didn't tell me much. When I got up to wash my face, the weak dribble from the faucet warned me that our water had almost gone the way of the electricity. If this alternator thingy didn't work, we'd be stuck out here with the rocks and the sagebrush until some tourist with a lot of time on his hands happened by.
I opened the passenger door and hopped to the ground, pausing by the rearview mirror. The hood was up, making a crack I could see through without being seen. Pop didn't look too bad. That furrowed brow and down-turned mouth probably just meant heavy concentration. He tapped with a hammer and turned a couple of screws with a socket wrench. Then he reached into the motor and gave a sharp tug. The engine turned over so loud and sudden I jumped. When he slammed the hood, his mouth was still turned down, but his eyes looked a lot more cheerful. “I'll let it run for fifteen minutes to charge up the battery,” he told me. “Then we're outta here.”
That's not exactly how it happened, though, because Gee woke up with his own agenda. “Are we fixed? Are we on the road?”
“As soon as Pop loads his bike,” I told him. “And Leo might like to be fed, so—”
“Pop!” Gee bounced out of the RV, trailing the blanket I'd tucked around him. “Pop! We have to do something!”
One thing for sure: our grandfather was in no mood to be told what to do. I dashed out behind Gee, too late—he was already hopping from foot to foot and waving pieces of Cannonball Paul in front of Pop while the latter was trying to load his bike onto the trailer. “… and he was already here, maybe just before us. He's following us! No, I mean we're following him. Look: he's gonna be at this place called Hay. We have to find him, we just have to—”
I grabbed him by the arm, hissing, “Not now! We can bring this up at—”
“Po-op!” Gee wailed. Our grandfather had managed to keep his temper, wrestling a two-hundred-pound bike while a very annoying kid waved papers in front of his face. Now he snapped around with his hands up, waved them as though batting away flies, and stomped between us, headed for the cab.
“Did you understand the body language?” I said. “Let's just get on board and shut up.”
“But I didn't feed Leo!”
There was no time now to unpack the dog food, so we tossed a Pop-Tart into the trailer. Leo sniffed at it, probably wondering why they didn't make a bone-marrow flavor.
For the half hour that it took to get off a gravel road that didn't know when to quit, Gee sniffled and whined. Pop's knuckles, gripping the wheel, turned whiter and whiter. Finally, I unbuckled my seat belt and slipped backto the dinette table to lay it on the line: “He's just about ready to stop this vehicle and throw you out. And if you don't stop the whining, I'll open the door for him. Suck it up and deal.” Not too sympathetic, maybe, but I wasn't feeling much sympathy at the time. And it shut him up, which was my primary goal.
Later on, I wondered if more sensitivity could have changed the unfortunate direction events were soon to take, but who knows.
Pop finally came to the end of the gravel, and we turned north, bidding a fond farewell to the Chalk Pyramids. We'd gotten an early start, just like he wanted. A bleary-eyed sun was swimming up through the haze that promised our first really hot day. It didn't promise much else, though; another lonely campground with not much to do except ride herd on Gee & Leo, Inc. My attitude was about six feet under by then, flat on its back with a rock on its stomach, and for once I didn't care one bit.
That's when Gee screamed, and Pop gasped, and the RV swerved off the road.
Once we were stopped, Pop's temper finally snapped. He started pounding on the steering wheel: “Don't you ever, ever do that again!”
Gee was pointing straight ahead, at a billboard on the right side of the road advertising the Ellis County Fair. Featuring—did you guess?—Cannonball Paul in his shiny suit with the golden helmet tucked under one arm.
“There he is!” Gee pointed out the obvious. “There he is! Are we going that way? Pul-eeease?”
Pop was gripping the wheel. I could feel the exasperationin him—no, on second thought, I could feel the rage in him, building up to a big crescendo, like the place in the movie where the building explodes or the stalker leaps out of hiding. Only this crescendo was totally silent. Which is even scarier, in a way. The feeling rose to the point where I was sure we were toast, but then it started going down. Without the explosion. I thought that was a positive sign until he said, in an almost-normal voice, “We are now.”
He started the ignition again and eased onto the road so carefully you'd think we were in Chicago during rush hour instead of so far in the boonies that another car would be an event, almost.
Gee said, “We are? Oh boy!”
He's not what you'd call sensitive to nuance. But I knew something wasn't right. Once we were on the road, I carefully asked, “Um … what do you mean, Pop?”
“I mean this is it. The last straw. The point of no return. In other words, I'm taking you home. Right now.”
I spun around to glare at Gee. But he was gazing back at that stupid billboard, which quickly shrank to the size of a postcard, then a stamp, before disappearing altogether. Then he turned around and said, “Can we stop at Hay on the way?”
I would have screamed, except we were going over a bridge just then, and if Pop lost it we might end up at the bottom of a ravine. So I took a breath and said, “Pop, you don't mean that.”
“I beg to differ, Ronnie.” He seemed perfectly calm now, the worst sign yet because it told me he'd made up his mind and was fully comfortable with the decision.
“You'll lose a whole day's work! And you won't have me to help you run numbers.”
“More like two days' work. But I'll make it up easily after a little side trip to Missouri. And thanks to your
excellent assistance in getting me set up—which I appreciate— I'm capable of punching in numbers for myself. Now please explain the situation to your brother in any way he understands.”
I heaved a huge sigh, snapped off my seat belt, and hurled myself to the little-brother situation room (meaning the dinette table). “Okay,” I told him, “vacation's over. As of now we're headed home—you know, little house on Maple Street, Mama on the couch—”
He just blinked at me. “Uh-huh.”
This was not the response I expected. “So … try to keep quiet until we get there. Did you know we have Mad Mechanix? In this very vehicle?”
“How far is Hay?”
I grabbed the tail end of my temper. “First of all, it's Hays, not Hay. Second of all, don't even bring it up, okay? Just let it go. It won't take much to shove Pop over the edge, and if he goes he might take us with him.”
“Uh-huh. But how far is it?”
I keeled over on the dinette seat and put a pillow over my head, feeling like a gerbil on a treadmill. What was the point of even trying to reason with him? Our budding relationship with Pop was wrecked and our vacation cut short, for what? A seven-year-old's obsession with a guy in a golden helmet. If I hadn't dozed off from lack of sleep, Iwould have steamed myself into a red-hot tamale by the next stop.
When I woke up, feeling no better, Pop was steering the Coachman onto the asphalt surface of a huge truck plaza. The place was like a little city, with three restaurants and two repair shops, an auto-parts store, and roughly a hundred vehicles breaking every rule in the driver's-ed manual. Nearby, the interstate thundered with traffic—I hadn't seen so much action since we left Missouri. When the RV had dodged a few semis and pulled up in front of a gas pump, Pop turned off the motor and made an announcement.
“First I'm going to fill the tank. Then I'm going to find the restroom and wash up like I haven't had the chance to do since night before last. Then I will call your mother. And finally we'll start for home. Headed due east on I-70, I figure we'll be there before suppertime.”
The Middle of Somewhere Page 12