Runaways

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Dani was relieved to hear that they hadn’t missed the bus after all, but with that worry taken care of the look and smell of the big, juicy hamburger took over. She only halfway heard the rest of what Pixie was saying. Something about all the things she’d been doing while she waited. One of which had obviously been done at the Silver Grill. Dani swallowed hard and, without even deciding to, took a big bite of hamburger sandwich.

  “Hey,” Pixie said. “You’re eating my sandwich.”

  “I know,” Dani said with her mouth full. “I couldn’t help it. Come on. I’m taking the rest of it to Stormy. We’re starving.”

  They found Stormy right where Dani had left him, propped up against the wheel of the truck, but to her relief, the shade and the peanut butter seemed to have helped. He was looking and sounding a lot more normal. And when he saw the half-eaten hamburger he looked even more like his old self. Clutching what was left of the sandwich in both hands, he managed a one-sided grin before he began to eat by using his peanut butter sandwich technique, breaking off little pieces and squashing them before he pushed them between his lips. He was getting better at it, but it was still a slow process. Before the hamburger was gone Pixie and Dani had each taken a turn sneaking out to the parking lot to check on the bus. When Pixie came back for the second time she was running. “Come on,” she called as she skidded to a stop. “It’s here. The bus came. Hurry.”

  Chapter 28

  THEY HURRIED TOWARD THE bus stop, or at least went as fast as Stormy could shuffle. But, as it turned out, they needn’t have. When they reached the parking lot the bus was there all right, but the passengers were all on their way across the street heading for the Silver Grill or the bar at the Grand Hotel. They watched from behind a beat-up old Buick as the bus driver, a tall, scrawny man wearing a sweat-stained uniform, locked the bus door and followed his passengers across the street and into the restaurant.

  “There he goes,” Dani said angrily, slamming her fist down on the fender of the car. “He’s already two or three hours late and now he’s going off to have dinner. We’re not going to get out of here for hours, and by then everyone in town will be looking for us.”

  “I know,” Pixie said, and then she added, “I’ll find out how long it will be.” Before Dani could stop her she took off running across the lot and the road, and disappeared into the Silver Grill.

  “Well, that’s it,” Dani said to Stormy. “She’s going to get us caught for sure.”

  Stormy swallowed the last of the hamburger before he asked, “Do they know about us?”

  “Does who know?”

  “The cafe people?”

  Dani shrugged. “No. I don’t suppose so. But the Smithsons might be looking for Pixie by now. And my mother too. My mother might go in there looking for me. She’s probably been home by now and …”

  She stopped as she was suddenly seeing, almost as if it were happening on a kind of movie screen inside her head, her mother walking in the door and calling out the way she always did. Calling out and then beginning to look around the cabin. Imagining Linda searching more and more frantically, caused a sharp pain in Dani’s chest and a swollen feeling in her throat. She swallowed hard, telling herself she was being ridiculous. After all, it was a little late to start worrying about how Linda would take it when she found out that her only kid had disappeared. Dani was still telling herself she was being ridiculous, and to just stop thinking about it, when Pixie dashed back across the lot.

  “Hi,” she said excitedly. “I found out everything. I talked to the bus driver and he said they’d be leaving soon. I told him we’d been waiting for hours and there were three of us. And he said there was plenty of room and that he’d be leaving in half an hour. So we’re all set. We just have to keep hidden until the bus leaves.”

  They went on waiting, watching from behind the old Buick while the short desert twilight deepened toward night and Rattler Springs Main Street became dim and shadowy. But then, finally, things began to happen.

  The first thing Dani noticed was a familiar figure coming down the street and crossing over to the parking lot. A huge mountain of a man with a dome-shaped head surrounded by straggly hair. It had to be Gus. And then, about the time Gus reached his parking lot, the bus driver emerged from the Silver Grill and came back across the street. Peering carefully around the Buick, Dani and Pixie watched while Gus and the bus driver chatted and worked on the bus, filling the gas tank and doing things under the hood.

  “Get ready,” Dani whispered. “Pixie, where are the tickets?” When Pixie had given them each a ticket, a blue adult one for Dani and green ones for herself and Stormy, Dani said, “Now. As soon as Gus goes back inside the station we’ll start out. We should just walk calmly over to the bus, give the driver our tickets and get on.”

  Pixie nodded excitedly. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll walk right over and get on.”

  “Calmly,” Stormy said. “After Gus goes away.”

  Only it didn’t turn out to be that easy.

  The bus driver said no. The scrawny, sweaty bus driver looked at the three of them and at their tickets, and then he shook his head and said, “No way, kids. ’Fraid I can’t let you on without a parent’s say-so.”

  “But I told you,” Pixie almost shrieked. “I told you about how our mother was dying and we don’t have any father so we were going to go live with our aunt in Reno. I told you in the restaurant, and you said okay.”

  “Yep, you told me that,” the bus driver said. “That and a whole lot of other stuff, as I recall. But I thought there’d leastways be someone here to put you on the bus. Them’s the rules, kids. No kids riding alone unless their folks put them on the bus and tell the driver where they’re supposed to be let off.”

  Pixie was starting to shriek again when Dani interrupted. Reminding herself to be calm, she said, “But our mother can’t come. She can’t come to the bus stop.”

  “Yes,” Pixie said more calmly, following Dani’s example. Calmly—and pitifully. “She’s too sick and we can’t stay any longer because she’s running out of food. If we stay any longer we won’t have anything to eat.”

  “Is that right?” the bus driver said. “Well, that’s a real sad story for sure. Real sad.” He looked from Dani to Pixie and back again. Then he sighed, and started saying, “Well, now, maybe I could …” But he stopped in midsentence. Pushing past Dani, he said, “Come here, kid. Let me get a look at you.” He was talking to Stormy.

  Forgetting that he should stay back in the shadows while Dani and Pixie did the talking, Stormy had moved closer. Had moved into the light, and now was wincing and trying to pull away from the driver’s hand on his shoulder. But the hand held on, and as he pulled Stormy forward into the light, the bus driver said, “Good Lord, kid. What happened to you? Who did this to you, son?”

  But Stormy only shook his head and went on shaking it. Both Dani and Pixie started trying to answer but neither of their stories was going anywhere or making much sense. And anyway the bus driver had stopped listening. “You girls just be still a minute,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but it looks to me as how something’s happened here that’s not the kind of thing the bus company would want to get mixed up in. So why don’t you kids go talk to someone here in town? Someone in charge, like the sheriff, maybe.”

  They tried, both Dani and Pixie tried to argue, but the bus passengers had started to straggle back across the street by then, and the driver turned his attention to them. At last Dani whispered, “Come on. Let’s go. It’s no use staying here.”

  “But where?” Pixie whispered frantically. “Where can we go?”

  “I don’t know,” Dani said, and she didn’t, but her feet seemed to be moving, taking her back into the deeper shadows. When they stopped she was back behind the Buick, and so were Pixie and Stormy. “Okay,” Dani said, trying to sound calm and confident. “What we need to do now is—is to make a new plan.”

  “Okay,” Stormy said, “a new plan.�
��

  Pixie nodded, but for once she didn’t say anything. And, in the next minute or two, neither did anyone else. But when a voice finally broke the silence it was Pixie’s, and what she said was, “What about that truck idea?”

  “What truck idea?” Dani asked. She knew what Pixie was talking about, of course, but she didn’t feel like saying so.

  “No. No truck.” Stormy’s voice was loud and clear. The clearest it had been all day.

  “Why not?” Pixie asked him.

  Stormy moved closer to Dani in the semidarkness. “Because,” he said quickly and firmly, “because Dani says so.”

  Suddenly Dani was fighting a weird urge to do something she’d never done before or even wanted to do, and that was to reach out for Stormy and hug him. And she might really have done it, too, except she remembered just in time that a hug, even a small one, would probably hurt him a lot. So she just swallowed hard instead and said, “Yeah, I said no trucks, but …” She paused, thinking that stowing away on a truck might be their last chance. Stormy’s last chance to get away from—from Rattler Springs. Of course, the odds weren’t very good that, at that particular moment, the right kind of truck would be there in the yard. But then again …

  “We’ll look,” she said. “We might as well go see what’s here.”

  There were a lot of vehicles in Gus’s parking lot that night, most of them parked near the garage, waiting, no doubt, for their turn over the grease pit. But out front, in the short-term parking area, there was only one truck. One van-type truck, closed and padlocked. So there was no hope there. But there was another parking area on the north side of the service station. And it had been there, Dani remembered, that she had seen the canvas-covered truck—and met the driver with the Gila monster face.

  Clenching her teeth and shutting her mind to nightmare memories, she led the way behind the service station. As she picked her way past the door of Gus’s famous rest room, and between piles of junk, mysteriously unrecognizable in the near darkness, she tried not to think about what had happened the last time she’d been there. But she couldn’t help remembering how confidently she had climbed up on the box, and then … She was shaking her head, refusing to think about it, when suddenly a huge, shadowy shape loomed beside her. She tried to scream but her breath caught in her throat, and as she backed away she tripped and fell into a stack of old tires. She was still struggling to get to her feet when she heard Stormy’s voice. She heard what he said, but there was another split second of terror before she understood.

  What Stormy had said was, “Hi, Gus.”

  “Stormy?” Gus moved closer and switched on a flashlight. The beam moved from Dani’s face to Pixie’s and from there on to … “Stormy!” Gus said. “What in blazes happened to you?”

  And then everyone was talking at once. Everyone, that is, except Stormy.

  Gus was asking, “Was it that Grabler kid? Did he do this? I’ll tan the hide off that …”

  Pixie was saying, “And it’s not just his face. You should see his back, and his legs.”

  And Dani was trying, without much luck, to make Gus hear her whispered, “Gus. Gus. Don’t ask him. I’ll tell you what happened.” It wasn’t until she got hold of one of Gus’s overall straps and jerked hard that he started paying attention. But once he started listening he quit asking questions.

  The bus had gone by that time, had taken off on its belated trip to Reno, and the main street of Rattler Springs was very quiet. Inside his incredibly cluttered office Gus managed to uncover enough chairs for them all to sit down before he went back out to his electric ice chest and pulled out three root beers. He opened the root beers and passed them around, but after he’d watched Stormy for a minute, he pawed around among the bills and maps and newspapers on the counter until he found a box of drinking straws. Then he sat down and, turning to look at Dani, he said, “Awright, little lady. I want to hear what’s going on here.”

  Dani gave him a long, cold stare before she said, “Well, what was going on was, we were running away. We were trying to get on the bus to Reno, only the driver wouldn’t let us.”

  Gus nodded solemnly. “Awright, you were running away. All three of you?”

  They nodded and Gus nodded back. “And why’s that?” he asked, speaking directly to Dani. “Why’d you want to do a thing like that?”

  Dani actually thought, None of your business. Even opened her mouth to say it. But somehow it didn’t come out that way. She looked up into Gus’s sad, droopy eyes under their shaggy eyebrows, and to her surprise she heard herself saying, “Because I need to get back home. Back to where I came from. I’ve been planning it for a long time. At first I was just going to go alone but then Stormy wanted to go too.”

  Gus looked at Stormy but he didn’t ask him why he was running away. “Stormy’s been part of the plan for a long time,” Dani said. “You remember the lemonade stand? That was to get money for running away.”

  “I shorely do,” Gus said. “And I recollect how Stormy here run off with your bankroll to save it from that Grabler kid.” Dani couldn’t help grinning a little, remembering Ronnie and the grease pit, and Gus chuckled too, showing his snaggly teeth and making his walrus mustaches bounce up and down. And even Stormy’s swollen lips twitched a little.

  But then Gus turned to Pixie and said, “So how ’bout you, little lady? Why were you fixing to fly the coop?”

  So it was Pixie’s turn. Dani leaned forward and stopped slurping up the last of her root beer. She couldn’t begin to guess which story Pixie would tell Gus. Whether it would be the Frankenstein one or the forgotten kid one, or maybe something in between. But she felt sure that whatever it was it would be worth listening to. But then Pixie sat back, folded her hands in her lap—and proceeded to tell the truth, or something pretty much like it.

  She told how her parents were scientists, not mad scientists or anything, but just people who loved studying and learning and making discoveries more than anything on earth, and how they’d always gone all over the earth to do it. “And then I guess I came along sort of by accident,” she said, “but they took good care of me, at least they did when they remembered to. But sometimes they went where they couldn’t take a little kid. Like on a glacier or in the middle of a desert. So they would leave me with my grandmother and most of the time that was okay with me. Only after a while I started wanting to go with them, and when I heard they were coming here, so close to home, I decided I was going to come too.” She stopped and shrugged. “And so I did.”

  Gus nodded, his ugly old face puckered into a thoughtful frown. “And it warn’t what you ’spected, I guess,” he said.

  Pixie shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, it wasn’t.” And then to Dani’s astonishment she began to cry. Pixie’s crying was like everything else she did, different and dramatic and very impressive. For a moment Dani was really shocked. She put her arms around Pixie and patted her and tried to get her to stop, but for quite a while Pixie went on sobbing and wailing and thrashing around like a wounded wild animal. And then she stopped. Stopped wailing, sat up straight, wiped her eyes and looked up at Dani through soggy eyelashes. She didn’t smile or anything, but in between the clumps of wet eyelashes Dani saw that weird flicker starting up again—or maybe it had been there all along.

  “Awright,” Gus said. “So what comes next? What are you kids going to do now that you’ve missed the bus?”

  “I don’t know,” Dani said, “except that I better go home and tell my mother that we’re all right. She’s probably running all over town looking for us by now.”

  Gus shook his head. “Naw,” he said. “Don’t think so. Leastwise I saw your mom just a few minutes ago and she wasn’t running around none.”

  “You saw my mother?” Dani couldn’t imagine where. She would have been at the store until around five-thirty or six and then she would have gone home and after that … For a while she’d have been home waiting but by now she’d surely be out looking for Dani. “Where was
she?” Dani asked Gus. “Where did you see her?”

  Gus grinned. “Right where she usually is,” he said. “In the bookstore. I was walking up Main just a few minutes ago, and I saw as how the lights were still on in the bookstore so I sauntered by to take a look-see. And sure enough, there she was, along with Al Cooley and two or three other folk. Seemed to be some kind of a meeting going on.”

  “A meeting?” Dani said uneasily. She looked at Pixie and made her eyes say that didn’t sound good. Leaning closer, she whispered, “With the sheriff, maybe. Maybe they’ve called the sheriff already.”

  “The sheriff?” Pixie sounded pleased. “Do you think it’s the sheriff? Let’s go see.”

  Chapter 29

  STORMY DIDN’T WANT TO go. When he heard Pixie say the sheriff might be at the bookshop he shook his head, and looked like he meant it. Dani knew why. He didn’t want to have to answer questions about what had happened to him. Dani looked at Gus, asking him for help. “That’s fine,” Gus said. “You little gals go on down and see what’s what, there at the store. Stormy and me’ll just stay here.” Then he lowered his voice and said, “Maybe I can get him down to the Careys and have Mabel take a look at him. See if there’s anything she can do.”

  “Good idea,” Dani whispered. Then she told Stormy he could stay with Gus and, grabbing Pixie’s arm, pulled her out of the station.

  “Mabel?” Pixie asked as they hurried down Main Street. “Who’s Mabel?”