The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise

by Dan Gemeinhart

  “Okay. I will. The same goes for you, I’m sure.”

  “Thanks. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Tammy. Take care.”

  And with that we hung up.

  I looked back at Lester. He took his eyes off the road and gave me a “well?!” kind of look and started to open his mouth to say something.

  “She says goodbye, Lester,” I said, and handed him his phone. He took it, his mouth still hanging open.

  I sat for a minute, thinking it through. Tammy had given me a lot to think about. Lord, life could be complicated. It was so hard to tell sometimes whether you were being the security guard, or the violin player, or the violin player’s friend, or someone else altogether. Was Tammy being selfish in asking Lester to give up music, or was Lester being selfish in picking music over Tammy? Was Rodeo being selfish in not wanting to take me back … or was I being selfish in making him go back?

  Out of nowhere, tears came stinging into my eyes. I just wanted everyone to be happy. Lester and Tammy and Salvador and his mom and his aunt and Val and me and Rodeo. It’s hard, though, when everyone carries around a heart inside them that is so loud and so strong and so easily broken.

  I stood up and headed back toward my bedroom.

  I was tired.

  And something else, too: I was almost home. And I was terrified.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-TWO

  Now, there are plenty of ways to wake up. There are good wake-ups, like when you drift out of sleep slow and easy and wake up curled up all warm with your cat. There’s waking up on Christmas and waking up on your birthday and waking up to the smell of bacon cooking. All good wake-ups.

  And then there are bad wake-ups. Rodeo waking up with Ivan clawing him bloody and me reaching for his neck comes to mind. And there’s waking up vomiting. I did that once when I got food poisoning from eating a buffalo burger in Texas. Not great.

  But I gotta say that the afternoon after I broke up with Tammy, I discovered a whole new level of bad wake-up.

  As far as I know, there is no worse way to wake up than on a speeding, out-of-control bus full of people screaming and crying and begging for their lives.

  I was sound asleep when it all started. I was snoozing along quite happily when someone screaming “Help us, Jesus!” kind of half woke me up and then a whole bunch of screams (some religious, some secular) all-the-way woke me up and by the time I could gasp and jerk upright, I could hear all kinds of hollering and blubbering and wailing and the bus was shaking under and around me. Then the bus lurched wildly to the side, nearly tossing me to the floor, and I tell you I just about peed the bed.

  I jumped up and ran right out through my curtain to see that all hell had broken loose on board ol’ Yager.

  It was still bright in the afternoon, which was fortunate. So the whole terrifying scene was well-lit, if nothing else.

  We were heading down a hill, and it was a steep downhill, too. All around us were big, pine-dotted brown hills. The trees were blurry on account of the fact that we were hurtling along at, oh, I don’t know, two hundred miles an hour. Not really, of course, but in Yager anything over about sixty feels like two hundred. And we were definitely over sixty.

  Concepción was at the wheel. Even from the back of the bus I could see her fingers in a tight death grip on the wheel, her shoulders hunched and rigid. She was doing the most consistent screaming: a high-pitched, screeching, repetitive sort of wail, like a siren.

  Rodeo was crouched on the floor next to her, pointing at things and hollering and being not at all his normal laid-back self. Lester was up behind Rodeo and Concepción, and he was shouting and pointing and carrying on just like Rodeo was.

  A gray blur came tearing toward me and I realized it was Ivan, ears back and eyes huge and fur standing up. I thought he was running to me, but he rocketed right through my legs and dove under my bed. Fair enough.

  Before I could take in the rest of the scene, Yager did another dramatic sideways swerve that tumbled me to the floor with a breath-snatching oof. I shook my head and pushed myself up to my hands and knees, keeping my legs and hands spread wide for balance. Standing upright seemed like a foolish and short-term proposition, so I started crawling up toward the front of the bus, passing my fellow passengers in a tour of terror along the way.

  First I passed Ms. Vega. She was bracing herself on the couch, her eyes closed and her lips moving in what I’m guessing was a prayer. She was far too busy pleading her case to the lord to notice me slinking past her.

  Next came Val, sitting stiff and wide-eyed in the Throne. She was screaming, too—well, not so much screaming as wailing “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god” with tears streaming down her cheeks. I crept past her and into the aisle between the seats.

  Salvador was kinda surfing in the middle of the aisle, standing up but bent low, holding on to the seats on both sides, screaming his head off. Not words so much as sounds, though if they had been words I bet they would’ve been words I wouldn’t want to repeat in front of my grandma.

  Yager careened violently to the side again so hard it knocked me down to my elbows. Books avalanched off shelves, and I heard at least one tomato plant bust loose and crash to the floor.

  “What’s going on?!” I screamed as I pulled myself up to one knee and braced myself against the seat.

  Salvador’s head swiveled back to me. His eyes were like Ping-Pong balls.

  “Coyote!” he shrieked, and he was way past trying to act tough at all. “Stay down!”

  “What’s going on?!”

  And then Salvador told me.

  Now, just like waking up, news can be good and news can be bad. Or, news can be flat-out terrible. Well, Salvador gave me some news that was definitely in that last category.

  “The brakes went out! We’re out of control!”

  I hadn’t eaten a buffalo burger in about two years, but I just about vomited when Salvador gave me that news. I eyed Rodeo way up at the front trying to help Concepción however he could.

  I started crawling forward again, rocking with the movement of the bus. Salvador had his legs spread wide and I crawled right through them, hoping that he wasn’t as close to peeing his pants as I was.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. So I kept crawling.

  The truth is, I was freaking terrified. My stomach was somersaulting and my muscles were shaking and my lungs were heaving and my heart was drumming and my eyes were blurry and I … I wanted my dad. I just wanted my dad.

  I ain’t allowed to say that, though. That d-word, that’s a no-go.

  So I just kept my mouth shut and crawled up behind Rodeo.

  He looked back over his shoulder and saw me coming up behind him.

  “Hold on, honeybird!” he shouted. “And stay down!” He turned his eyes back to the front, and I did the same.

  Almost wished I hadn’t.

  We were flying down that highway. We were passing cars left and right, which was where all the lurching and swerving was coming from. They had no way of knowing we had no brakes, so they didn’t bother pulling to the side when we came up behind them and then Concepción would have to cut the wheel and careen around them, honking the whole way to try to warn ’em.

  It musta been something for them, driving down the road minding their own business when out of nowhere a rattling old school bus full of screaming people roared by them like a drag racer.

  Yeah. We got a few looks.

  I wasn’t worried about the looks, though. I was worried about the two semis in front of us, one in each lane, blocking our whole side of the highway. We were coming up on ’em fast.

  “Guys?!” Concepción asked between shrieks. “Any ideas? What should I do?!”

  “Lay on the horn!” Lester shouted, and even though Concepción had already been honking it, she switched to just holding it down in one long desperate hooooooooooooonk.

  But the trucks either didn’t hear us or
couldn’t adjust in time. They were exactly side by side, with only, like, a foot of space between them.

  “How about the oncoming lane?” Rodeo hollered, and Concepción drifted across the yellow highway line, but then she yelped and cut back hard into our lane just in time to avoid a line of cars coming the other way.

  “No good!” she screamed. “Too much traffic!”

  The trucks were close now. In four seconds we were gonna smash into them.

  “Help me, Jesus!” Concepción screamed skyward. Then she yanked the steering wheel the other way, to the right. We roared across one lane and my heart jumped up into my neck when I saw what she was doing. She steered Yager right onto the shoulder of the road, all the way over so that our right wheels were rumbling and crunching through the weeds and dirt, and we missed the back corner of the semi by what looked like, I swear to god, about half an inch.

  Yager was really bouncing and shaking now and a fresh round of screaming and crying and praying erupted behind us.

  Thanks to our unreasonable and horrifying speed, we didn’t have to spend too much time driving on the shoulder, which I suppose was the silver lining to the whole nightmare.

  Once we cleared the semi, Concepción veered us back onto the asphalt.

  “There!” Rodeo cried, pointing out the front windshield. And we all saw it: in the distance, the highway flattening out, leveling out to a nice, long straightaway.

  Salvation.

  Between us and that, though, there was still at least a mile of road, plenty of traffic, and one decently sharp turn to the left.

  “You got it,” Lester breathed out, reaching to squeeze Concepción’s shoulder. “You’re doing great.”

  We weaved left, we weaved right, splitting the traffic and racing our way toward that blessed flat stretch up ahead.

  We came up to the curve, all four lanes of highway bending off to the left. We were in the left lane and it was wide open in front of us. We were gonna make it. We just had to take the curve, pass a couple of cars, and then coast to a stop.

  But then. Oh, there’s almost always a “but then.”

  A car in front of us, one that was over in the right lane and not causing any problems, decided to pass the car in front of it. Which meant, of course, that it pulled over into the left lane. You know, the one that we were rocketing down.

  Lester said a couple words I won’t repeat, but with which I totally agreed.

  Concepción cut to the right, going for her insane shoulder trick again. I mean, it had worked before, hadn’t it?

  But before, there hadn’t been a van parked on the shoulder, up on a jack and missing a tire.

  There were a few more bad words from the crowd up front, possibly even including me.

  We cut back to the left, but both of our lanes were taken.

  We all knew what she had to do.

  I shouted, “Help us, Jesus!” so Concepción could focus on the driving.

  We drifted into the next lane over. The one where cars were supposed to be heading the other way.

  It was clear.

  There was a red pickup coming our way, but it was a ways off. At our speed, it looked like we’d be able to pass the car and get back on the right side before we met that pickup.

  “You got this, Concepción,” Rodeo cheered.

  We pulled up beside the car we were passing at the same time it was passing the car next to it.

  Our hood passed its taillights, then its rear doors, then its driver, who was glancing down at his cell phone and didn’t even notice us sneaking past him in our gigantic, bright yellow school bus.

  Then our nose was past its hood, and it was sliding on back behind us. We had it.

  But then we hit another “but then,” of course.

  That red pickup was getting closer.

  “Get over,” Rodeo said.

  “I can’t,” Concepción said between clenched teeth.

  “Get over,” Lester said.

  “I can’t!” Concepción snarled. “We’re not past him yet! We’re not passing him at all!”

  All three of our heads swiveled to see what she was seeing in her rearview mirror.

  The car with the cell phone driver was not receding safely into the distance behind us. It was holding steady, right next to us.

  “Is he speeding up?” I demanded.

  “No!” Lester answered. “We’re slowing down!”

  It was true. We’d hit the bottom of the hill. The slope was fading away, and so was our madhouse speed.

  “Hit the gas!” I screamed.

  And, after all that stress about going too fast and wishing we could stop, Concepción floored the gas pedal.

  Yager’s engine revved high in protest, but it answered the call. We surged forward.

  The cell phone car dropped back to our rear. The red pickup was cruising toward our front. Concepción gave the rearview mirror one last check, and then jerked the wheel hard to the right. We barreled out of the path and back into our own lane and she kept going into the far right lane and took her foot off the gas and we rolled a little less fast and a little less fast and then there was a highway exit with a nice, long, steep uphill ramp. She took it and we rolled even slower up the slope, and when we were rolling along at, like, bicycle speed she pulled off onto the shoulder and then, thank god, we came to a sweet, sweet stop.

  Concepción grabbed the gearshift and clicked us into park and yanked up on the parking brake. She turned the key and killed the engine.

  We all sat or stood or crouched there for a few seconds, breathing and panting and slowing our hearts back down to a more survivable speed.

  Rodeo straightened up. He blew out a big breath.

  He turned back to the rest of us. I could still hear Ms. Vega praying, and Val sniffling.

  His eyes went from person to person as the color slowly came back to his face. They settled on me and his eyebrows dropped, and he grabbed a blanket off a seat and handed it to me.

  “Wrap this around yourself, little bird,” he said quietly, and I realized that I’d come running out in such a hurry that I’d neglected to check my clothing situation. I was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and my underwear in front of Salvador and the whole world, which at any other time would have made me about six different kinds of mortified, but at that moment I was alive and just grateful to be so, so I just took the blanket and kinda tied it around my waist and didn’t worry one bit about it. I glanced back at Salvador, but he was looking very conspicuously away from me and out the window, which I thought was very gentlemanly and honorable.

  Rodeo wedged a shaken little half smile onto his face.

  “Well,” he said, “we’re making good time. Anyone else need a bathroom break?”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-THREE

  Rodeo crawled out from under Yager, his shirt and hands stained black with oil. He had a smear of dark grease across his forehead, too.

  Me and Salvador and Val and Lester stood there on the shoulder of the road, waiting for the verdict. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the air smelled of pine trees—and I was twisted in knots of worry. My heart was pounding a ticktock clock beat in my chest, counting down the seconds and the minutes and the hours I had left. We were, according to Lester’s phone, about eight hours of nonstop driving away from Poplin Springs. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, the day before that park and my irreplaceable memories would be destroyed forever. Compared to where we’d started in Florida, home was right around the corner. But if our bus was stuck and staying that way, we might as well have been on the moon.

  Rodeo didn’t bother standing up. He sat there in the gravel, his back against Yager’s tire, and wiped his hands with an old rag. He squinted up at me, then looked away.

  “Well?” Lester asked.

  Rodeo shook his head, looked back at me.

  “Sorry, butterfly” is all he said. My eyes burned hot.

  “Sorry, what?” Salvador demanded.

  “Sorry, this i
s a big repair. Whole brake line snapped. I need parts. Parts we ain’t likely to find around here,” he added, waving a hand at the country around us.

  “So … what are you saying?” Salvador asked, though I think he knew as well as the rest of us exactly what Rodeo was saying.

  Rodeo huffed out a sigh.

  “I’m saying … I’m saying we ain’t gonna make it. Not in time. It’ll be a couple days before this thing is moving again, and that’s best case. I’m sorry, blueberry.”

  He said he was sorry. He said he was sorry. I wasn’t so sure he really was, though.

  My hands, which had been nervously tugging at my braid, dropped down defeated at my sides. My eyes burned and my throat got tight and my breathing came in big, broken gasps. No. No, no, no.

  Lester tsked and shook his head and turned around.

  Salvador, though, wasn’t giving up.

  “Can’t you, like, patch it or something? Just for now?”

  “Kid, there ain’t no patching a brake line. And I’m not heading down any road without brakes I don’t trust. Not after today.”

  “Well, couldn’t Coyote, I don’t know, take a bus or something?”

  Rodeo shook his head.

  “No, man. She ain’t going without me. And I ain’t going without Yager. She’s our home, our life, everything we have is on her. And what about Ivan? Nah. Sorry. We’re both stuck here as long as Yager is stuck here.”

  I looked away. Because I knew.

  Rodeo wasn’t worried about Ivan. He wasn’t worried about our stuff.

  He was worried about himself.

  I’m sure he wasn’t lying about the brakes. Or about how long it’d take to fix them. But I knew he was lying about being sorry. He wasn’t sorry one bit that we wouldn’t make it home. Wasn’t sorry one bit that he wouldn’t have to dredge up those old memories he’d worked so hard to keep buried.

  I ground my teeth together, hard.

  He’d probably been hoping for an excuse, a chance to call it off. I bet he’d been praying for a way to not keep his promise to me.

  But I couldn’t let him have that excuse. Nope. No regrets, sister.