I heard Salvador’s steps start to jog after me, but then Lester shouted “Wait a minute!” with enough I’m-so-out-of-patience-it’s-not-even-funny frustration in his voice that I very reluctantly stopped, huffed out a breath, and turned around.
“What?”
“Why do you two think that this is your decision to make?” Lester demanded. He pointed his finger at his own chest. “Hello? Grown-up? This is crazy, kid. I’m bigger than you and I’m stronger than you … Why shouldn’t I just hold you and stop you from taking this bus and risking your lives and breaking, like, ten laws to go back and do this?”
His voice started out angry, but it ended softer. Sincere. Lester wasn’t just bossing me around. He wasn’t arguing. He was actually asking. And I had a feeling he’d actually listen. So I took three steps toward him, and I tried (and failed) to keep the wobbles out of my voice when I answered him.
“Because you’re not my dad. Because my dad isn’t even my dad, most days.” Lester blinked when I said that, but he didn’t argue. I think we were both a little surprised that I’d said it out loud like that. But, hey, the truth does a lot more good most of the time if folks have the nerve to say it out loud, even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts, maybe. “Because once upon a time, I had a mom, and once upon a time I had two sisters, and now I don’t. I lost ’em. And I left ’em behind. And now I have to fight for them. I have to. Because they woulda fought for me. I don’t know if I’m already too late, but I do know, I know, that if I don’t try, I’ll never forgive myself.”
Lester shook his head at me. He rubbed a hand over his head. He closed his eyes for a solid five or six seconds, then he lowered his head and opened his eyes and looked up at me from under his eyebrows.
“You really know how to drive that thing?”
I shrugged.
“At least as good as Rodeo does.”
He shook his head again.
“Oh, Lord.” He waved me away. “Go on, then, hurry up.”
Then he bent down, grabbed a handful of highway shoulder dirt, and rubbed it into the perfect white of his T-shirt chest.
“What’d you do that for?” I asked.
“This is from where I tried to stop you and Salvador pushed me to the ground,” he said.
“Bull,” I shot back. “That’s from where you tried to stop us and I pushed you to the ground.”
Lester cracked a one-sided grin.
“All right. Whatever. Just go. Before I change my mind.”
So I went.
I scrambled up onto the hood and then up to the Attic and over to the hatch. I pulled it open and climbed down the rope ladder inside.
Salvador was right behind me every step of the way. When he skipped the last couple of rungs and landed with a thud behind me, I said to him, “You know you could’ve just waited and I’da let you in the door.” He nodded thoughtfully and said, “Huh. Yeah. That woulda made more sense.” Boys are idiots.
I pointed up at the painted sky above us, and the hatch in the middle of it.
“Down through the clouds,” I said, and Salvador nodded.
Ivan, lying on my bed, just looked up at us and yawned.
Gladys, though, was happy to see us. She bleated and did a little hoof tap-dance and spun in a circle. I gave her a pat as I walked quick as I could up to the tomato plants, poked my hand through the pots, and grabbed my special one, the one painted all over with feathers. I picked it up and hugged it against my body. Then I grasped the thickest part of the plant’s stem and tugged, twisting the plant just a little and rotating the pot until the whole caboodle slid out, the plant and its roots bringing all the dirt along with it in a big messy pot-shaped ball.
“Grab it,” I grunted, “down at the bottom of the pot,” and Salvador reached through my arms and scraped his fingers around in the pot and then pulled out a dull, dirt-covered key. I plopped the plant back in its home and slid it onto the shelf and took the key from Salvador and held it up in front of his eyes. “Go to your roots,” I said, and Salvador nodded again and smiled.
Salvador followed me up to the front.
I sat down in the driver’s seat. I wiped the key off on my pant leg. There was still some grit in the grooves, so I stuck it in my mouth and sucked it clean and then slid it into the ignition and gripped it in my fingers, ready to turn it. And then I stopped.
Not because I was scared. I wasn’t.
Not because I wasn’t sure I should do it. I was.
Not because I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do or not. I did. And it was.
Nope. It wasn’t anything like that.
It was the opposite.
I stopped because I knew exactly what I was doing, and exactly why I was doing it, and the absolute true-blue rightness of the moment darn near took my breath away. I wasn’t doing this for Rodeo. I wasn’t doing this to take care of anyone else. I was doing this to take care of me. And it was a good thing. When I fired up that old engine, I wasn’t gonna drive us away from anything. I was driving us toward something. And that was a good thing, too.
There wasn’t a no-go in sight. This was all go, and I loved it.
I turned the key. Yager roared and rattled and shook and then stood rumblingly ready.
The world waited for me out the windshield.
I looked out the window and saw Lester standing, watching us.
He gave me a loose farewell salute. I gave him one back.
I punched the power button on the radio and some rambling, shuffling rock song came blaring out.
Salvador was kneeling on the first seat, leaning over my shoulder. I cocked my head at him.
“Give me a howl,” I shouted over the music.
“A what?”
“A howl!” I said, then threw my head back and belted out a wild, let-loose coyote howl. Salvador took only half a second to catch on and open his throat and add his own howl to mine, and I dropped Yager into gear, let out the clutch, released the hand brake, hit the gas, and launched us onto the highway.
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
The steering wheel vibrated in my hands. The gas pedal pulsed with the life of the monstrous engine it fed. The world whizzed by as we hit highway speed and raced down that black ribbon of asphalt toward destiny. I bobbed my head to the song on the radio.
Salvador said something, but I couldn’t hear him over the music, so I clicked it off.
“What?”
“Aren’t you scared?”
I swallowed.
“More scared than I’ve been in my whole life.”
I focused on the yellow dashes of the highway dividing line and on keeping all my emotions out of my throat. Because I could feel them. And by “them,” I mean my mom and my sisters. Out there in front of me, leading me home. And I could feel Rodeo, too, could see that look in those eyes when he said to me, You gotta do this, little bird. Because I did. Have to do it, I mean.
“So … what’s Eureka? What’d that little clue mean?” Salvador asked me.
“Eureka is a city in California. That’s where Rodeo taught me how to drive this old thing. He said he didn’t know if or when I’d ever have to get behind the wheel—you know, if he had a stroke or an aneurysm or something—but he figured I better know what I was doing. So in this big old empty parking lot at the edge of town, he ran me through the whole shebang. He was really kind of a drill sergeant, running me through everything over and over again until I had it down pat.”
“California? I thought you were coming from Florida when you picked us up.”
“We were.”
“When were you in Eureka, then?”
“Oh, gee,” I said, screwing closed an eye, trying to remember. “This musta been, lord, last summer, little over a year ago?”
“A year ago?!” Salvador squeaked. “You’re driving us down the road based on one lesson you had a year ago?! You told Lester you were as good at driving as Rodeo!”
I shrugged. “Rodeo’s not that good a driver
.”
Salvador sat down quick in his seat and gripped the back of mine with both hands, holding on like he was afraid we were gonna go careening off the road any minute, which was pretty darn unlikely.
“I’m telling you, man, I got this down. Once you’re cruising, it couldn’t be easier. I mean, we’ll see how stopping goes, but for now we’re looking good. Relax.”
In the rearview mirror, I could see Salvador shaking his head. His knuckles were white on the seat back. Big baby.
He saw me looking and he tried to glare, but I shot him a big, teeth-flashing smile and he smiled back in spite of himself.
“This is crazy,” he said to my reflection.
“Sure is,” I said. “But it’s the good kind of crazy.”
“You look like a twelve-year-old.”
“I got bad news for you, Salvador. I am a twelve-year-old.”
“Yeah, I know. But twelve-year-olds aren’t supposed to drive. Someone might notice.”
I glanced around thoughtfully. I wasn’t prepared to admit it out loud, but Salvador had a point.
“Hand me that hat,” I said, pointing at a floppy-brimmed hat Rodeo had hanging on a hook on the wall. Salvador complied, and I slapped it on my head and then grabbed Rodeo’s gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses off the dashboard and slipped them on.
“How do I look now?”
“Like a twelve-year-old wearing sunglasses and a hat.”
“Well, what do you want me to do? Smoke a cigarette?”
Salvador shrugged.
“Do you have one?”
“Very funny. This’ll have to do.”
We passed a big green highway mileage sign and there was Poplin Springs, right there at the top.
Poplin Springs 6
Six miles away.
The highway wound along a little blue sparkling river. Both river and road curved between big hills that rose up toward the sky. The shapes of those hills felt familiar to me. I hadn’t been here for five years, but I remembered them, or my eyes did, or my heart did. Their shapes, their curves and folds—they looked like something to me. Not something new, either. Looking at the shapes of those hills felt like when you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re all dream-confused in the dark and you get up and go to the bathroom and you see your own face in the mirror, looking back at you. If home is a feeling, those hills looked like the soft edges of that feeling. I got all tingly, looking at those hills.
I turned the radio back on and let the rollicking music drown out any more conversation. I drummed along on the steering wheel and kept my eyes straight ahead on where I was going.
It was only, like, a minute later that Salvador shouted over the radio, “Hey! How long did that cop say it’d take him to get back there?”
“He said twenty minutes,” I answered, “but I’m guessing more like twenty-five. He seemed like the type who always gives himself more credit than he deserves.”
“Okay. And how long since he left us?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen?”
I looked at Salvador in the rearview mirror. He was up on a knee, craning his neck to see behind us, chewing his lip nervously.
“Why?”
“Well. Don’t freak out or anything. But there’s a cop behind us.”
“What!?”
“I said don’t freak out.”
“How could he be back behind us already?!” I looked in the side mirror and sure enough, I saw the unmistakable shape of the authorities behind us.
“I don’t think it’s the same cop. His car was brown, right? This one’s white. Just drive casual, okay? Their lights and siren aren’t on or anything.”
Before I could give Salvador the are-you-kidding-me side-eye he deserved, I saw something that took the spark right out of my sass.
It was the cop’s turn signal. It blinked an on-and-off yellow warning, and then the cruiser glided over into the left lane and started pulling up alongside us.
“Uh-oh,” Salvador said, but my throat had gone too dry to say anything back. In a matter of seconds that highway patrolman was gonna be right up next to me, looking in at little old twelve-year-old me behind the wheel. And I was all out of cigarettes.
I tightened my hands on the wheel, took a deep breath, and then pressed the gas pedal to the floor. Yager’s engine whined, but she found some more “go” somewhere in her rattly gears and we shot forward with a little surge of speed.
“What are you doing?” Salvador hissed at me.
“Speeding up.”
“Why?”
“If he pulls up and sees me driving, it’s over.”
“Um, yeah. That’s, like, the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Of course I knew that. But I mean, come on—when you got no other options, the one option you got left is just kind of automatically your best option. Isn’t it?
The cop hit the gas, too. He stopped falling behind and started gaining ground again.
“Come on, Coyote. This is stupid.”
I didn’t respond.
“Didn’t we just go over this with your dad?”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“Because he had a good chance of being let go. Me, not so much. I hate to break it to you, Salvador, but I don’t think I’m gonna be able to talk this cop into letting me go with a warning.”
“Well, maybe not, but you’re sure not gonna outrun him.”
“I don’t have to outrun him. I don’t have to escape. I just have to get there.”
“And then what?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m busted either way, right? So I’m gonna get there. And I’m gonna get that box. Then this cop can do whatever the heck he wants. But if I pull over now, this whole thing is over for good. And I’ve come too far for that.”
It must’ve become obvious to the cop right about then that I was clearly not pulling over on purpose, because the lights on top of the car started flashing and that siren kicked in.
I kept my foot mashed on the gas pedal. The needle on the speedometer inched up above seventy.
Salvador and I were officially fugitives from the law.
The cop hit the gas hard, zooming up beside us. I looked down and saw an angry face behind sunglasses, and an arm waving me over violently. I waved back and tried to smile innocently. It didn’t work.
The cop grabbed his radio thing and started barking something at me through his loudspeakers, but I just turned up the radio so I couldn’t hear it. I was pretty well committed by that point, and I knew that whatever the cop was saying was probably just gonna stress me out.
The cop accelerated even more, starting to pull ahead of us. I gulped.
“Well, shoot,” I muttered.
I knew what he was planning. And I knew it would work.
He was gonna pull in front of us and slow down. Block us.
Yager was a beast and Yager was reliable, but Yager was not particularly nimble. If that cop got in front and blocked us, I wouldn’t be able to maneuver this eight-ton behemoth quick enough to dart around him. And I wasn’t quite sure I was determined enough to actually ram a police car with a bus. I think Rodeo and I would both agree that that particular course of action was best left as a no-go.
But then I saw it. Coming right toward us, and not that far away.
The exit. The exit.
Poplin Springs.
Home.
It was coming up on the right side. Maybe a half mile away.
The patrol car inched past us. Its rear bumper pulled in front of our hood. The cop gave it a sudden burst of new speed and shot well past us. Gladys bleated out a cry of alarm. Yager, even giving it all she had, was no match for a highway patrol cruiser.
“Almost there,” I said, eyeing the exit. Gladys bleated again. Between the shrieking goat, the blaring music from the radio, the screaming of the siren, and the roaring of Yager’s straining engine, it was a bit of sensory overload.
The cruiser slid over into our lane. The brake lights lit up. We roared toward its fender.
The exit was a hundred yards away.
We weren’t gonna make it.
I jerked the wheel, faking a move to the left.
The cop fell for it. He sped up and matched me, blocking the move he thought I was trying to make.
That one move was all I needed.
I drifted back into the right lane and the cop drifted with me, speeding up to stay ahead of me.
We were there, at the exit. The white painted lines of the exit lane veered gently off to the right. I ignored them, staying straight on the highway.
“What are you doing?” Salvador yelled.
I waited until we were just past the white lines of the ramp entrance.
“Hold on!” I hollered. Then I cut the wheel hard to the right. Yager veered across the painted lines and over a gravelly triangle of highway shoulder and then onto the exit ramp. There was a jolting crack as we flattened a plastic reflector post, but all in all I thought I pulled the maneuver off pretty well.
By the time the cop realized what I was doing, it was already too late. When I swerved onto the ramp, he was already well past it and with the pedal to the floor. He hit the brakes and there was a squeal of rubber on asphalt, but the goose was cooked; the last I saw of him as we climbed up toward the overpass bridge, he was skidding to a dusty stop on the shoulder under the bridge a hundred yards past the exit.
“Woohoo!” Salvador whooped, jumping up out of his seat and raising a fist in the air. “You lost him!”
“Nah,” I shouted back, though I was grinning so hard my face hurt. “He’s just gonna back up on the shoulder. I only bought us, like, forty-five seconds. But I think that’s all we’ll need.”
Poplin Springs had never been a big town, and even though Grandma had said it was growing, it still wasn’t, like, a bustling metropolis or anything. It’d been years, but I knew exactly how to get to Sampson Park. As we came charging off the exit, I slowed to a city-street speed.
The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise Page 22