Savvy

by Ingrid Law

  Further now from the crowd of voices inside the restaurant and the voice of the homeless man, I was disappointed, but not surprised, when Bobbi and Carlene and Rhonda all rolled back into my head as loud and rowdy as if they owned the place.

  ‘Lester’s sure got his foot stuck in a deep bucket of mud now…’

  ‘The man sure has a way of doing it.’

  As Lester struggled to open the door of the bus and balance the stolen pie at the same time, the rest of us leaned up against the side of the bus to catch our breath. Despite everything that had just happened, Bobbi was staring at me almost calmly, arms folded, with a probing, yet guarded, look on her face. Will Junior stood behind her, his expression unreadable.

  ‘Tell me what I’m thinking. Do you know what I am thinking?’ that little angel on Bobbi’s back sang through my brain. Carlene’s and Rhonda’s voices took backstage to Bobbi’s angel, their never-ending Lester-bashing sounding like back-up vocals to Bobbi’s newest tune.

  ‘Tell me what I’m thinking. Do you know what I am thinking?’ Bobbi pushed her thoughts at me, louder and louder.

  ‘Tell me what I’m thinking. Do you know what I am thinking?’

  ‘Tell me what I’m thinking. Do you know what I am thinking?’

  She was driving me crazy. As Lester finally got the door open, I put my fingers in my ears and started to hum the national anthem just as loud as anyone can hum. But Fish spun me around, pulling my finger out of my right ear, and whispering tightly, ‘What are you hearing, Mibs?’

  ‘Bobbi’s got herself a tattoo on her back and it won’t stop yammering at me,’ I whispered back. ‘She knows, Fish, remember?’

  Fish threw a glance Bobbi’s way. The girl was leaning up against the side of the bus watching me like I was a mouse and she was a cat – a cat that liked playing with its food before eating. Will Junior was standing just a bit behind her, his face screwed up now as though trying to decide if he understood the punch line of a joke. Bobbi didn’t look at Fish; she was too busy burning her eyes right into me.

  ‘Tell me what I’m thinking. Do you know what I am thinking?’

  ‘Tell me what I’m thinking. Do you know what I am thinking?’

  ‘Stop it, Bobbi,’ said Fish, one hand raised in a tight fist, as Lester and Lill climbed up into the bus with Samson.

  ‘Stop what?’ said Bobbi, overflowing with fake flibbertigibbety sugar.

  ‘You know what,’ said Fish, angrily throwing his burger on to the ground. A gust of wind blew Bobbi’s hair up around her head in a flurry, and the air turned humid and hot. Bobbi stopped leaning against the bus and stood up straight. Narrowing her eyes across the light from the streetlamp at Fish, and spitting at strands of hair caught in her gum, Bobbi threw down her own burger, as though accepting a challenge to fight.

  ‘I’m just thinking. Do you want me to stop thinking?’

  Fish’s next gust was stronger, blowing Bobbi’s hair straight back and plastering her clothes to her body as though she were facing straight into a tempest. Will Junior took a step back and turned to shield his eyes – and his burger – as dirt and gravel, lifted from the crumbling pavement by the strength of Fish’s wind, swept towards him and Bobbi. Ragged shreds of plastic sheeting whipped and snapped along the alleyway like a multitude of wild, ghostly spectres. From out of nowhere came a spatter of biting rain that hit the side of the bus with the sound of a sprinkler hitting a chain-link fence.

  Fish was standing in front of me now, acting like a shield between me and Will and Bobbi Meeks. He had his feet planted and his arms out at his sides like some kind of comic-book Superkid, his own hair whipping up a frenzy as he pushed out powerful storms of wind and rain that started the bus rocking and knocked Bobbi backwards into Will.

  Lester poked his head out of the door of the bus, his combed-over hair flapping madly like a grocery sack on a barbed-wire fence. All Lester could see was the harum-scarum hurly-burly of a rising storm. Despite everything, he didn’t realize that the disturbance was coming from Fish and that, behind Fish, I didn’t have a single hair out of place or a single rustle in my skirt; it was as though I were standing in the still, calm eye of a cyclone.

  But Bobbi and Will Junior saw it all and now they understood perfectly. Now they knew, sure as sure as sure.

  Bobbi and Will no longer had any doubts whatsoever that the Beaumont kids were different. That the Beaumont kids were extraordinarily, freakishly not normal. But all told, when it came right down to it, Bobbi and Will realized that the Beaumont kids were also pretty amazing.

  21

  ‘Scumbling a savvy is like spreading a thin layer of paint over yourself,’ Momma had told Fish and Rocket when she’d had them painting pictures with her on a winter morning before the holidays. I’d stayed home sick from school that day and was enjoying lying on the sofa watching my brothers render stormy ocean waves from memory. My ears had perked up when Momma started talking about how to scumble, and I paid close attention to her words.

  ‘If you don’t use enough paint,’ Momma continued, ‘your savvy will come through too strong, causing some pretty big problems for both you and the rest of the world.’ Momma laughed as Fish and Rocket both made faces – they already knew far too well about such troubles.

  Momma went on, ‘If you use too much paint, you’ll not only obscure your savvy completely, but most everything else in life will become dull and uninteresting for you too. You can’t get rid of part of what makes you you and be happy.’

  Momma took her paintbrush and dipped it into a colour much lighter than that already on her canvas. She brushed the light paint over the dark, completely covering it. But the light paint didn’t block out the dark paint all the way. Instead, that pale colour had a softening, blending effect, making the darker shade harmonize with the rest of the painting.

  ‘So a well-scumbled savvy gives you clarity and control,’ lectured Momma. ‘You have to let your own know-how, your own unique colour, shine through as a something-special others can’t quite put a finger on.’

  Momma had made it sound so easy. But managing that kind of success with a savvy could be more of a high-wire act than a cakewalk. Depending on the person and the savvy it could take years to gain enough control to mingle easily with the rest of the world, and even adulthood didn’t offer any guarantees of an effortless fit. That’s why, back in Kansaska-Nebransas, home-schooling went way, way beyond reading, writing and arithmetic.

  Fish’s wind blew stronger and stronger through the dark alleyway. I wasn’t sure he’d stormed that mightily since the day his hurricane had sent us packing. After turning thirteen, Fish had never stopped needing to work extra hard to let his own particular colour shine through all his dark storm clouds. Having a really powerful savvy like his was similar to waking up with a savage temper: it required a lot of extra effort and patience to control.

  There in Emerald, far from home, with Fish storming his storm and The Great and Powerful Ozzie knocked down to size inside the diner, I was starting to feel low on heart, and my brains and bravery weren’t so sure either. Fish and I weren’t in Kansaska-Nebransas any more and we didn’t have any yellow bricks to guide us, just a big pink bus and the yellow stripe-stripe-stripes on the highway.

  I let out a shriek as a four-cornered ‘No Parking at Any Time’ sign ripped from its post and spun through the air in the spiralling wind.

  The sign flew towards Bobbi and Will as I screamed, ‘Watch out!’

  Fish caught sight of the plummeting sign and spun on his heel. In a wink and a blink he turned aside the hurtling object with a controlled burst of deflecting wind.

  Controlled. Fish had controlled his outburst – aimed it even. The sign clattered to the ground from its midair path, like a kite plummeting to the earth when the wind suddenly dies. Fish took a step back in surprise and his storm shut down faster than it had started. My brother looked at his hands, and it was as though he’d just grown up without noticing. He appeared to have finally found the r
ight colour paint to complement his savvy.

  ‘Cool,’ he said under his breath. Fish then turned towards a sagging cardboard box that had come to rest about three metres away. Looking at the box, he squinted his eyes, making his eyebrows come together above his nose with the intensity of his concentration. After a second, the box lifted slightly and then tumbled away down the alley, carried on a focused gust of air. Fish smiled, then turned back to Bobbi and Will, concern rearranging his features, his fury gone with the wind.

  “You two okay?’ he asked, taking a hesitant step towards them. For once, Bobbi was speechless; not even her little angel had much to say. Bobbi nodded, looking dazed. Behind her, Will Junior was grinning at us like he was finally sure he understood the joke.

  ‘Excellent,’ pronounced Will with a satisfied laugh.

  Lester Swan was still hanging out of the door of the bus, looking up at the rising moon and the clear, tranquil sky. ‘Twister country,’ he muttered, oblivious to the true nature of the haywire weather. ‘Come on, kids. Everybody in. It’s time for us to move on.’

  Climbing back on to the bus, Will sat down next to me, still smiling, his left knee bumping my right one. To my surprise, and everyone else’s too, Bobbi sat down by Fish. Will picked gravel from the fries in his burger basket before offering it around to the group. Aside from Samson, who sat happily digging his finger into the centre of the stolen pie now resting on Lill’s knees, Will had the only remaining dinner, the other baskets littering the ground between the diner and the bus.

  ‘I think we ought to put a bit of distance between ourselves and Emerald, Lester,’ Lill suggested, looking anxiously out of the window. Lester nodded his head and started the engine, worn out by his uncharacteristic exploits and glad to have someone else tell him what to do.

  ‘Where should I take you, Lill?’ he said over his shoulder as he pulled the bus out of the alley behind the diner.

  ‘Well, I don’t think I want to go back home just yet,’ Lill replied. ‘Ozzie knows where I live, and after the way we left him…’ she trailed off with a shiver, then continued. ‘You were on your way to Salina with these kids, Lester. Maybe we should just head down there. That is, if y’all don’t mind me tagging along?’

  Lill looked around to each of us. We all shook our heads and bit our tongues. It wasn’t like any of us would tell her no. We hadn’t even asked permission to be on that bus ourselves.

  ‘Lester?’

  Lester hardly had to answer the big woman. He was so glad Lill wanted to travel on with us that he had tears in his eyes.

  ‘I’d take you anywhere, Lill Kiteley,’ he said.

  My heart leaped at the thought of getting to Salina and of seeing Poppa at last. I knew, after the report on the TV in the diner, what Rocket’s electrical damage might mean for Poppa – my brother had to be fearfully upset to cause such monstrous mayhem. Even if I couldn’t do anything to help Poppa after all, I needed to hold his hand and kiss his cheek and let him know that I was there and that he was loved.

  As he drove, Lester’s shoulders began to convulse more violently than ever and the thin man started squirming in his seat like a small child.

  ‘What is it, Lester?’ asked Lill, seeing his discomfort. Lester cast a glance over his shoulder at us kids.

  ‘Well,’ he said, all milk-toast and mouse-like. ‘I’ve got a delivery to make in Wymore in the morning and my b-boss won’t be too pleased if I miss it. I’ve already gummed up the rest of my deliveries today, if I b-bungle another… well, I might lose my job,’ he sniffed. ‘I might lose my bus.’

  ‘Ob poor Lester,’ Carlene sniggered. ‘Poor, stupid Lester. What would he do without his precious bus?

  ‘He’d sell coffee at the bus station, that’s what,’ clucked Rhonda.

  ‘But –!’ we all began to protest.

  ‘We have to get down to Salina Hope, Mister Swan! We just have to!’ I pleaded. But Lester had set his mind and refused to even look in our direction.

  ‘I can’t lose my b-bus,’ was all he’d say, quiet but firm, as though all his gears had locked into place.

  Lill looked perplexed.

  ‘It would be a shame for you to lose your job too,’ Lill said with a sigh, looking down sadly at her green waitressing uniform. ‘But the kidlings, Lester? What about them? What about Salina and their father? Surely there are some folks down there waiting for these kids?’

  To this, nobody replied. Lester twitched. The rest of us worried and fidgeted. Lill’s eyes narrowed as she looked around at us all inside the dim interior of the bus. Bobbi busied herself with unrolling her last bit of Bubble Tape. Fish whistled noiselessly. Will Junior just stared at his knees, running a hand through his curly hair, and I tugged at a loose piece of white rickrack that hung down from the sleeve of my dress. Only Samson managed not to look noticeably guilty, as he sat next to Lill, alternating bites of hamburger with snitches of pie.

  Lill stiffened and crossed her arms over her chest. ‘All right, what’s going on here? I may have a knack for being tardy, but I’m not usually so late to catch on. I’m getting the feeling that this really is the bus for the bad kids. I think maybe someone ought to start explaining to me exactly what I’ve got myself into the middle of. Right now.’

  22

  It was with more than a little chagrin that we told Lill what we’d done. Wanting to leave Emerald behind, Lester headed east through the dark as we took turns telling Lill how we’d snuck aboard Lester’s bus believing he would be returning to Salina. We told her how Lester had turned left instead of right, north instead of south, and how we’d found ourselves heading away from Salina and the hospital and our poppa.

  Lill’s face did not change throughout the telling or for several minutes after, when an awkward silence fell throughout the bus. The only sounds came from the knocks and pings of the engine and from the voices in my head.

  ‘We’re dead, we’re dead, Bobbi’s tattoo repeated over and over like a nervous heartbeat.

  Lill sat still for a long, long time. Samson had finished his burger and had carved a substantial crater in the pie, and now he reached out to sneak fries from Will’s basket. The rest of us hadn’t touched its contents. We’d all lost our appetites.

  Finally the big woman let out a long, slow sigh with a sound like an angel falling down from one cloud to another.

  ‘I sure know how to find my way into trouble,’ Lill said, more to herself than to any one of us. ‘Today I’ve lost both my car and my job. And now it looks like I’ve gone and lost my senses too.’

  The rest of us turned to look at Lill, cautiously hopeful that she wasn’t going to turn us in.

  ‘Listen here, all of you.’ Lill raised her little voice over the noisy engine. ‘I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do.’ Lester smiled. He seemed to dote on women who told him what to do, but at least Lill wasn’t anything like Carlene or Rhonda. Lill laid down the law. The plan was to continue east towards Lincoln to find a motel, giving us some distance from Emerald but getting us off the road sooner rather than later. Lill didn’t like the thought of us being out on the highways at night and she wanted us kids to call our parents to let them know we were safe and sound and headed for Salina in the morning. I could tell Lill was struggling with knowing the right thing to do, unsure how much messier one day could get.

  I contemplated that for a while myself. The last thing I wanted was to get Lester and Lill into any hot water just because I’d had the stupid idea that I could find my own way down to Salina. I knew that it was my job to look after the grown-ups now. It was my job to keep them safe and out of trouble, and I supposed if that meant waiting until morning to get to Poppa, that would just have to be the way things were going to be, even if it felt almost too much to bear.

  In the short hours since we’d climbed aboard that bus, we’d become an odd band of renegades. We kids promised Lill that we would call home as soon as we reached the motel, but I kept my fingers crossed behind my back. Lester seemed rel
ieved to have someone else making the decisions; it seemed he’d used up every last drop of his tiny reservoir of nerve to keep the bus on its original course for his deliveries.

  Lill didn’t say anything more about losing her job and no one brought it up. She counted out the cash that The Great and Powerful Ozzie had paid her, squinting at it in the dim light inside the bus.

  ‘Well, kidlings,’ she announced half-heartedly. ‘I believe that I’ve got more than enough here to pay for a couple of rooms at a motel. Can you find us someplace out of the way, Lester?’

  ‘Anything you say, Lill.’

  I watched Lill gaze fondly at Lester. I could tell by the way she looked at him that she found something in the man she admired. Maybe it had been the way Lester stopped to rescue her from her broken-down car, or how he’d helped her pick her money up off the floor, or his spur-of-the-moment plunder of the pie from the diner. Lester might not have looked the part of a hero, but I suppose you never can tell right off who might have a small piece of Prince Charming deep down inside.

  Lester drove on for some time before finding us just the right motel. The Lincoln Sleepy 10 had only a few cars in the parking lot, and its vacancy sign was buzzing and blinking like a bug light.

  The Sleepy 10 was located on the far side of the city, across from a Mega Mega Mart and a row of loud red and yellow fast-food restaurants. We all stayed on the bus, which Lester parked well away from the motel, while the deliveryman did the checking in using Lill’s cash. After seeing my face on the TV at the Emerald Truck Stop Diner, I was none too keen on waltzing around in public any more than I had to, so I was glad to wait on the bus with the others.

  Lill told Lester to get two rooms, though Lester insisted he’d be sleeping on his bus to ‘p-protect his inventory’. I hoped the motel would come complete with thin white soaps wrapped up in paper, little bottles of shampoo and crisp white towels folded up snug in the bathroom, all of which would make me right pleased.