Stormy’s eyes got squintier. He always hated any mention of the fact that Dani was older than he was.
She went on hurriedly. “And in the second place, if I disappeared my mother would know why, and she’d probably guess I’d gone back to Sea Grove. So, if she was really worried, all she’d have to do is come after me. But if you disappeared your mother wouldn’t know why, or where or anything. So she’d be a lot more apt to get hysterical.”
Stormy only shook his head, glowering up at Dani from under his eyebrows and muttering something under his breath.
“Mutter, mutter, mom, mutter, mutter, care,” it sounded like. Or possibly, “My stupid mom wouldn’t even care.” Dani thought of asking him if that was what he’d said, but on second thought … Everybody in Rattler Springs, at least everybody at Rattler Springs school, knew better than to say anything at all to Stormy about his mother. They knew because a few of them had tried it, and one of them had lost a front tooth. Stormy wasn’t very big but he was tough and determined and where his mother was concerned he could get pretty violent. He’d slugged a boy once just for calling her Gorgeous Gloria, which was what everybody called her, at least when Stormy wasn’t around. So Dani changed the subject to why. “Why on earth do you want to run away? I thought you said you liked Rattler Springs.”
At first Stormy only shrugged and scowled, but at last he said, “I don’t really want to. Not for good anyway. I just want to go along till you get there. Then I’ll probably come back.”
Dani couldn’t help laughing. “That’s crazy,” she said. “You mean you just want to go along for the trip? Like a tourist or something?”
Stormy didn’t laugh. “No!” he said loudly, and then more softly, “Yeah, maybe.” His squinted eyes rounded a little. “Well, why not? What’s so funny about that?”
“What’s so funny?” She was laughing again. “Well, for one thing.” She struggled to straighten out her face. “For one thing it’s not going to be the kind of trip you go on for fun. It will probably be the kind where you might have to walk part of the way, or stow away in the back of a truck. And it might even be dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Stormy’s eyes were really round now.
Dani nodded.
“Who …? What …? What kind of dangerous?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Because of dangerous people, I guess. Like maybe people who pick you up when you’re hitchhiking. Or just because it takes too long to get there and you run out of money and starve to death.”
The starving bit was good, she thought. Anybody who liked to eat as much as Stormy did would be sure to hate the idea of starving. But to her surprise it only seemed to make him more stubborn than ever. “I’m going,” he said. “If you go you have to take me too.” He wasn’t raving now or whispering. Just speaking in an ordinary dead calm voice. Dead calm and determined.
But Dani could be determined too. She shook her head and was still shaking it when Stormy said, “Promise. Promise I’m going too. If you don’t I’ll …”
“What? What will you do?”
Dani was still sitting on the edge of the bed with the broken pig bank in her lap, and Stormy was standing in front of her holding the hammer in both hands. Hands that were clenched so tightly the knuckles were turning white. Keeping the hammer in the edge of her vision, Dani asked cautiously, “What will you do if I don’t promise?”
Stormy’s face had turned back into an angry mask. “If you don’t promise—I’ll tell.”
Dani couldn’t believe it. Stormy Arigotti wasn’t exactly perfect. She’d always known that he was a sneak and a shin kicker, for instance, not to mention a hyperactive nonreader. But it was hard to believe that he was actually threatening to snitch on her running-away plans. Sitting there silent and blank-eyed as a statue, Dani told herself she didn’t believe it. But at the same time, her mind was racing around like crazy. Around and around, picking up ideas and then putting them down again.
First of all she thought of telling him what people thought of snitches. How snitches were just about the lowest of the low and … But then she realized that wouldn’t help at all. Stormy didn’t care what people thought of him. Some of the time he didn’t even care what Dani thought of him.
Then she had a great idea. At least for a moment, it seemed like a great idea. “If you do,” she started, making every word count. “If-you-tell-I’ll-never …” She stopped there. What she’d been planning to say was that she’d never read to him again. But, of course, that was pretty stupid because if he didn’t tell, she would go ahead and run away, and there’d be no more reading anyway. Stormy might not have been the smartest kid in the world, but he was smart enough to figure that out.
Finally she gave up. At least she gave up on trying to come up with an argument that would convince Stormy to keep his mouth shut. And that only left letting him come too. Or—she thought for a moment longer—or at least letting him think he was going to come too. Putting one hand behind her back—the one with the crossed fingers—she said, “All right. I give up. I guess you can come with me.”
“I can? You promise?”
Dani nodded.
Stormy lifted the hammer over his head. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s smash the pig.”
Chapter 5
THE MONEY IN THE pig bank turned out to be a big disappointment. It had felt so heavy that Dani was sure there would be at least fifty dollars, but it turned out to be only thirty-three dollars and seventeen cents. And that meant there wasn’t anywhere near enough. Dani knew she’d have to transfer twice and by checking the bus schedule in the post office she’d discovered that the first leg of the journey, from Rattler Springs to Reno, would be thirteen dollars and fifty cents. At least that was what it was for an adult ticket, which meant anyone twelve years old or older. The trouble was, she wasn’t sure exactly how much the ticket on to San Francisco and then the one to Sea Grove would be. And she didn’t dare ask anybody for fear of giving away her plans. But as near as she’d been able to figure, the tickets to go all the way to Sea Grove by bus would be almost forty dollars. And that was just for one person. Of course Stormy could buy a child’s ticket, but that would only be a few dollars less.
“For two of us,” she told Stormy, “we’re going to need almost eighty dollars and that’s not even counting money for stuff to eat.”
Stormy said that was all right because he could bring lots of Beer Nuts, and then he insisted on counting the money all over again. He was much better at counting than reading, particularly money counting, but when he’d finished the results were just the same. Thirty-three dollars and seventeen cents.
“Not enough,” Stormy said gloomily.
Dani shrugged. “Nowhere near.” Then, slanting a sideways look at him, she started to say, “Well, too bad. I guess you’ll have to stay—”
“No,” Stormy interrupted. “No I won’t. We’ll both have to wait till we get some more money.”
Shaking her head fiercely, Dani said, “No. No, I can’t wait. I have to go. I have to get out of here.”
“Why?”
Dani glared. “Why?” She took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you why.” And then she began to do something she’d never done before. To tell Stormy something she’d never told anyone in the whole world. All about that day back in 1947 when she was only eight years old and she and Linda had arrived in Rattler Springs on a scorching summer day. How they had climbed out of their ancient truck into the ugly nothingness and lung-scorching heat of Rattler Springs. “And it was right then,” she told him, “that very first day, that I began to hear the desert telling me I’d have to stay forever. I could hear it plain as day. Not with my ears really, but sort of inside my head. And I still hear it. Not all the time. Not so much when I’m indoors, but almost any time when I’m outside. Whenever I look around at all the dry, dead …” She paused, waving her arms in a circle. “… or up at the sky. When I look up at the sky I can hear it almost every time. The sky is part of it, and the sun, and the
wind too. It’s like a lot of voices but all of them put together are the desert talking to me. And they’re all saying the same thing.”
Stormy had collapsed into the beanbag chair in his usual listening position, with his backside sunk into the deep dent he’d made in the middle of it and his arms and legs sprawling out in every direction. His usual twitchy movements had disappeared, and his eyes had gone wide and glittery. Now and then his head nodded slightly, the way it always did when …
Suddenly Dani saw what was happening. Stormy thought he was listening to a story. He was just sitting there dreaming along with what she was telling him, exactly as if she were reading Tom Sawyer, or some book of fairy tales. As if the whole thing about the desert and the way she felt about it and why she had to get away were all part of some kind of fairy story she’d been telling herself. Like Linda’s daydream stories about princes or pirates or handsome cowboys who were going to come along someday and make everything wonderful. The thought made Dani very angry because … She didn’t really know why it made her so angry, but she knew she was going to find out.
“Hey, you,” she whispered so sharply that Stormy jumped and blinked. “Wake up. This isn’t some dumb daydream. This is for real.”
“For real?” Stormy’s eyes were back to normal now. “What kind of for real?”
“Something that really happened. And real plans about what I have to do next.”
“Plans?” Stormy asked. Then he scratched his head and let his eyes roll thoughtfully and very slowly from one side to the other. Which, as usual, made Dani want to shake him. “I don’t get it,” he said finally.
Between clenched teeth Dani said, “What don’t you get?”
“I don’t get the difference.”
“What do you mean you don’t get the difference?”
“The difference between plans and daydreams.”
Dani shook her head in amazement. “You don’t? You don’t know the difference between plans and—”
But suddenly Stormy was pushing himself up out of the beanbag. “Hey,” he said. “Listen. Somebody’s knocking. Real loud.”
Dani heard it too. Someone was pounding on the back door.
“Who is it?” Stormy asked, looking at Dani as if he thought she had X-ray vision or something.
Dani made her shrug say she didn’t know and didn’t care. But she was curious. Just to be safe she started gathering up the money from the pig bank and putting it in the top drawer of her dresser, and then scooping up the broken pieces of pig. She had just finished dumping the pig scraps into the wastepaper basket when there was a light rap on her bedroom door and Linda came in.
Linda was looking puzzled, Dani decided, and maybe a little bit pleased.
“What was that?” Stormy demanded. “Sounded like someone breaking the door down.”
“It was Ronnie,” Linda said, “with a message from some people who are staying at the hotel.”
“Yeah.” Dani rolled her eyes. “Should have known it was old Ronnie. Who else knocks like that?”
Ronnie was the fifteen-year-old son of the Grablers, who owned the General Store and Grand Hotel and Bar, as well as the land around it, which included the historic old Jerky Joe cabin where the O’Donnells lived. All of which, some people in town said, the Grablers had kind of stolen from Jerky Joe’s descendants. So Linda knew the adult Grablers, Howie and Brenda, pretty well. Knew too much about them actually, like the fact that they were lousy landlords, raising the rent all the time and refusing to repair anything. And Dani knew a lot about Ronnie Grabler too. At the Rattler Springs school Ronnie was practically famous for pounding on anything that got in his way. Like doors, for instance, but also car fenders, and other people’s belongings. Not to mention the faces of quite a few of his classmates. But right at the moment Dani couldn’t think of any reason why Ronnie might be mad at her. Stormy seemed to be pretty much in the dark too.
“Was that all old Ronnie wanted?” Dani asked cautiously.
“I think so,” Linda said. “All he said was that some people who are staying at the hotel want to talk to me.” Linda looked at a piece of notebook paper. “Some people named Smithson?” She looked at Dani and Stormy questioningly as if she thought they might know who the Smithsons were. They both shook their heads.
“I’ll just run over and see what’s up,” Dani’s mother said. “You two go on reading. I’ll be right back.” Linda picked up Dani’s hairbrush and gave her flyaway hair a whack or two before she went out.
Dani didn’t expect her mother to be gone long since the hotel was only a few yards away, if you went in the handy back way through the lunchroom kitchen. While she was gone Stormy went back to the subject of how they could make some money for bus tickets. He even suggested some things they might try—like starting a car-washing business, or else maybe robbing a bank.
Dani pointed out that the car-washing idea might work anywhere else but in Rattler Springs where all the cars were so old and ugly that nobody bothered to wash them. And as for bank robbery, she thought he was kidding, but with Stormy it wasn’t easy to tell. She was thinking of telling him that her bank-robbing license had just expired, when Linda returned. She had, she told them excitedly, wonderful news.
Dani wasn’t too thrilled. Optimistic Linda was always dreaming up great things that were about to happen. Like the wonderful cattle ranch they were heading for when they left Sea Grove, for instance. “What kind of wonderful news?” Dani asked suspiciously.
“Well, the Smithsons.” Linda took a business card out of her pocket and studied it carefully. “Well, it seems that Ivor and Emily Smithson are geologists and they—”
“Are what?” Stormy interrupted. “What are ge—what you said—what are they?”
“Geologists are people who study the earth,” Linda told him. “Rocks and minerals and things like that. Anyway, it seems the Smithsons are going to be doing some work in this area and they’re staying at the hotel while they look for a place to rent. I guess someone told them about the ranch house and they thought it might be just what they’re looking for.” Linda smiled and blinked in a dazed sort of way. “They actually wanted to talk to me about the possibility of renting it for a few months.”
“For sure?” Dani felt a little dazed herself. Dazed and astounded. “Did they say for sure?”
“Well, no. Not yet,” Linda said. “They have to see it first, of course. But tomorrow they’re going to pick me up and drive out to see if it suits them.”
“They’re going to pick you up tomorrow?”
Linda nodded. “Yes. According to the Grablers they have a very unusual car. Specially made for going over rough ground. Howie said it looks like a cross between a Cadillac and a Sherman tank. Custom built and very expensive, Howie says.”
“And you think people who drive custom-built cars would want to live in our ranch house?” Dani asked in amazement.
Linda shook her head. “Doesn’t seem possible, does it? But they seemed interested even after I told them all about it. Even about no electricity and all. And Howie Grabler said he heard them say they could go as high as seventy-five dollars a month.”
Linda was looking very excited. Her cheeks weren’t as pale as usual and her eyes had a kind of shine to them. Before she left the room she said, “Just think, Dani, how much that would help with the bills.”
Dani thought about it, but she didn’t get too excited. For one thing seventy-five dollars a month was an awful lot of rent to pay for a house that didn’t even have electricity or an indoor toilet. Dani didn’t know much about geologists but she had a feeling that they were probably pretty intelligent people. The kind who’d be too smart to pay seventy-five dollars a month for a place that didn’t even have an indoor toilet.
After Linda had gone back to the kitchen Stormy said, “Hey, that’s great about the seventy-five dollars, isn’t it? Maybe your mom will let you have some of it for—”
“Oh sure,” Dani interrupted him in her most sarcastic tone
of voice. “Oh sure, just as soon as my mom starts getting some extra money she’ll be glad to contribute to my running-away fund. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll pass the hat or something.” Dani paraded around the room pretending to be passing a hat. “Hi, folks,” she said in a phony radio-commercial tone of voice. “How’d you like to contribute to my running-away—” She got about that far before Stormy charged.
Kicking and slugging, he yelled, “Shut up. Stop it. I didn’t mean that. You know that’s not what I meant.”
Backed into a corner, Dani held him off with both hands, and watched while his angry face crumpled into misery. “That wasn’t what I said,” he kept saying. “I just meant she might give you an allowance or something and then you could—”
“Hey, I know. I know what you meant.” She wouldn’t tell Stormy she was sorry, but she was, at least a little. She knew how Stormy worried about being dumb and how he hated it when people teased him about saying dumb things. And actually what he’d said did make some sense when you stopped to think about it. Dani never had had an allowance but she supposed she might get one if Linda weren’t so broke all the time. And an allowance could be spent for almost anything. Even bus tickets.
“Hey,” she said. “We haven’t read yet. Where’s the new book?”
A few seconds later Stormy was back in the beanbag and Dani was beginning the first page of White Fang.
Chapter 6
DANI DIDN’T BELIEVE IT when Linda said the geologists were going to pick her up and take her out to see the ranch house. Not for a minute. Lying in bed that night, Dani told herself that the whole thing was just another of Linda’s hopelessly optimistic daydreams. There was absolutely no use waiting around indefinitely for rent money from the ranch house to provide an allowance. If she was going to escape it would have to be right away, even if she had to hitchhike or stow away in the back of a truck.
But the very next day Dani was in the living room when she noticed a strange purring noise that seemed to be coming from Silver Avenue. Getting on her knees on the daybed, she peered out through a rip in the ragged drapes, in time to see a strange-looking black vehicle pulling to a stop right in front of the cabin. Built high off the ground, the black car-truck-tank—whatever it was—had oversized wheels and huge fat tires. There were carrying racks on the roof, and in front of the racks there was a roundish thing that looked like some kind of turret or fuel tank. She wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. But she had. And not only the weird car, but also the two fairly weird people who got out of it.
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