Hokey Pokey (15 page)

He figures she’s about to go, but she surprises him.
She plops her butt in the dust and stares at him, her delight endless. Finally she looks up at Dusty. “So—why?”

Unlike Jack and LaJo, Dusty sometimes actually speaks to girls in a normal voice, but this girl has him practically peeing his pants. Dusty looks to LaJo, but LaJo offers only a scowl. “It’s hard to explain,” he croaks. His chin is quivering.

The girl sneers, “You’re not gonna cry on me, are ya?”

He lashes out: “Cry? Waddaya mean cry? I don’t cry.”

“So what’re you afraid of? Why did you do this to your A
-meee
-go?”

Dusty squeaks, “I ain’t afraida nothin. It’s hard to explain, that’s all.”

For a while everybody just blinks at each other. There’s no sound, not even the tootle of Hippodrome, which is too far away. Then, out of nowhere, LaJo speaks: “The Story.”

The girl stares. “Huh?”

“The Story. You know The Story, don’t you?”

The girl stands. “Yeah, I know The Story. So what’s that got to do with the price of beans?”

LaJo glances at Jack. “It’s happening to him.”

It’s paining Jack’s neck to keep the girl’s face in view, but he wants to see it now more than ever. Her face is a story. Now that he thinks of it, he’s always noticed that about her. It’s like she doesn’t even have to speak. If you want to know what she’s thinking or what she’s about to say, just read her face. It’s there.

And what he sees now is that she’s thinking about The Story. She’s hearing it again in her walnut shell. She’s paging through it, episode by episode, and so is he. The time The Kid rode his tricycle down Gorilla Hill and hit a rock and went flying over the handlebars. The time The Kid threw a stone at a groundhog and knocked it out and held it in his lap and cried until the groundhog came to. The time the kids of Hokey Pokey tricked him out to Thousand Puddles and torture-tickled and mudded him into a statue so he wouldn’t go away.

He thinks:
At least they didn’t take me out to Thousand Puddles
.

She looks at him, grins, touches him with her sneaker toe. “At least they didn’t turn you to dried mud.” She smirks. “So what’re you saying? The Kid’s come back?”

“It’s no joke!” Dusty cries.

LaJo faces the Plains, speaks as if to the tumbleweed:
“One day when he woke up …”

The girl stares at LaJo, follows his gaze across the Plains, finds the rest of the words among the purple sage, whispers:
“… the tattoo was gone.”
She kneels before Jack. With great delicacy she takes the hem of his shirt between thumb and fingertip and slowly lifts it. What she sees makes her gasp. She releases the shirt. She falls back. The shadow of the brown bird races between them.

G
ETS UP, DAZED
. Walks. Walks. The open range yawns.

They cannot take their eyes from her.

They watch her walk in the sun, in the dust. The figure of her becomes smaller with each step. They see her stop. Stop and stand still: girl, tumbleweed, Great Plains, Mountains. She does not move and she does not move. What does she see? What does she hear? They see something, on the ground in front of her, a little something. A prairie dog. It has come up from its hole in the dust. It seems to be standing on its hind legs, facing her, not running. Perhaps it is unafraid
because she is so still. Or perhaps there is something about her. As they watch the two of them in the distance, they begin to believe that the girl and the prairie dog are not just facing each other in silence. They begin to believe that one or perhaps both of them are speaking.

N
O ONE HAS SPOKEN
since the girl walked off, until now. Suddenly Dusty won’t shut up. “What’re we—crazy? Look! She left her bike here—
your
bike, Jackaroo—and we ain’t even doin nothin about it. We’re a disgrace.” He kicks dust over the tires.

“So if it’s Jack’s,” says LaJo, “why are you kicking dirt all over it?”

Dusty’s hand goes to his mouth. “Oops.” He rushes to the bike, brushes off dirt with his hand. “Well, she ain’t getting it back. That dumb chick’s messin with the wrong dudes.” He wrenches off the pink handlegrips,
flings them in the direction of the departed girl. “Mucho mistako, chico! Don’t mess with the Amigos!”

“Put ’em back,” says Jack, loving Dusty for fighting the unfightable.

Dusty turns, points. “No way, Jack.” He rips tufts of white fuzz from the seat cover. “We’re gonna paint him, Jack. Just like he was. Black and silver.” He takes one smart step back. He salutes. “Scramjet rules!”

“It’s hers now,” says Jack. He’s feeling weary, tired of talking about the same thing, tired of being in the same place. He needs to move.

Dusty turns on him. “Don’t
say
that! The bike is yours and you ain’t goin
nowhere
.”

Jack lays his head on the mitt, closes his eyes. Soon he hears LaJo, the smirk in his voice: “You’re grass now, Dustman. Here comes the lawn mower.”

E
YES THE GIRL
’
S RETURN
. He feels a fillip of fear for Dusty, for he knows how ornery this girl can be. But she merely glances at the desecrated bike and keeps coming, straight to him. She kneels. She tilts her head to align her eyes with his. She stares. She says, “You
really
going away?”

He nods against the mitt, smells the sweet leather, the scent of his life.

“Is
that
why the tattoo is gone?”

“I guess so.”

“When did it happen?”

“Today. All day.”

“When are you going?

“Tonight … I think.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. It’s like”—he stares up into her eyes—“I’m on a bike I can’t steer, can’t stop.”

“So …,” she says, “where
to
?”

He hangs full-weight from her eyes. “Beats me.”

Somewhere in the space between them their eyes meet and something happens. He doesn’t know what it is. He only knows it’s never happened before and it’s not a bad thing.

She doesn’t speak. She reaches out. Someone yips, “Hey—” but that’s all. She unties him from the bike. She tosses the rope over her shoulder. It lands at LaJo’s feet. She stands. He stands. He rubs his wrists, flexes his legs, straightens his cap.

She turns and goes to the bike. She makes no attempt to retrieve the pink handlegrips. She walks the bike away. He rights his borrowed nag and follows. No one speaks.

T
HEIR FOOTFALLS
are the only sounds upon the land. Shadows spill from sage and tumbleweed.

“You can have your bike back,” she says.

“It’s yours now,” he says.

“I didn’t steal it.”

“I know.”

“Really.”

“I know.”

“I
thought
about it a million times.”

He grins. “I know.”

“I came close once.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I found it parked by the sliding board. I was going to take it, but I chickened out. But I
did
do something.”

“What?”

“I spit on the seat. Probably the biggest slobber-bomb I ever dropped. It was so big some of it even spilled over. Remember?”

He nods, remembering. “Yeah. Shoulda known that was you.”

She grins, looks at him. “What did you think? Were you mad?”

He grins. “Not at first.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t see it.” He looks at her. “Then I sat in it.”

They howl.

“I hated you,” she says.

“You hated all boys,” he says.

“Yeah. But I hated you the most.”

He feels chesty, as if a general has just pinned a medal on him. But also a little sad. “I hated you too.”

They walk on, out of Great Plains, into Hippodrome’s tootle range. War rages ahead of them. Tank trikes. Pinecone grenades.
Pow! Pow! Pow!
Golden
guns spout red streamers of caps, burp the sweet burn of powpowder.

Jack wades in. Jubilee starts to follow, now stays, sensing this is his. A grenade bounces off Jack’s head. He picks it up, tosses it over his shoulder. Everyone falls dead. Standing tall amid the carnage, Jack reaches into his pocket, says, “OK, who wants something?”

Bodies spring up, surround him.

“What, Jack, what?”

He pulls out his prize marble, his master mib. He won it as a Gappergum and has been winning with it ever since. He holds it up between two fingers, but even in the full light of the sun the murky blue-gray swirl obscures the center, a mystery he has been sorely tempted to solve by cracking the mib but could never bring himself to do. He is content to believe he holds in his hand, encapsulated, the very birth moment of the universe.

A dozen tongues wag, two dozen hands reach. “Me, Jack, me!”

He plunks the marble into the nearest hand. The kid flies off shrieking.

Next out of the pocket is his lucky stone. Pink quartz. He remembers the day he got it. He was exploring
down by the creek and he spotted it in the water. He took one step to the right to pick it up, and just then a rotten branch from a tree fell where he had been standing. From then on he never went anywhere without that stone. And never saw another one like it. He hands it to a kid.

Next, his rock-hard wad of bubble gum. It’s his standby lucky stone, just in case he ever lost the real one. He’s glad he never had to put the gum stone to the test. Another kid runs off cheering.

One by one the priceless treasures of his pockets fall to the groping, ecstatic Snotsippers: raven’s feather, mystery tooth, four-leaf clover, root beer root, cat hair ball, scrap of shed garter-snake skin, mummified salamander, petrified snake turd, two-headed raisin.

He stands alone, his pockets empty except for the walnut shell. That he’ll keep.

Jubilee joins him. “What was that about?”

“Gave away my stuff.”

“Why?”

He thinks about it. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t you want to take your stuff wherever you’re going?”

He looks at her, blinks, looks away, shrugs.

“L
ET
’
S RIDE
,” she says.

“Good idea,” he says.

She leans the bike toward him. “One last time?”

He snorts in mock contempt. “Me? On a yellow bike? Named Hazel?”

They laugh.

They ride.

They reach out and flick the
DON’T
sign as they pass, making it flutter.

They circle Tantrums, the dome pipe now puffing Category Three gas: aqua.

“This way,” says Jack. He leads her beyond Tantrums, to the excavation site. Mitchell seems to have the massive fossil complete and upright now. He’s chipping at the spokes.

Jubilee gasps. “Wow!” She dismounts. “What is it?”

“Not sure,” says Jack. “I think it’s the bones of some giant extinct bike, some species that doesn’t exist anymore. Big, huh?”

Jubilee fifes a wonderwhistle. The dug-up bike stands above them, on a low hummock. She kickstands Hazel and approaches carefully. She stands beside the gray, stone-crusted colossus. She stiffens to attention. “Look!”

It’s amazing. The top of her head falls well short of the top of the front fender. When she raises her hand, her fingers waggle far below the handlebar. She bounds back down the hill. “D’ja see?”

Jack nods. “Yeah. It’s something, huh?”

They ride. A siren floods the land with three short guttural bursts:
Bawlk! Bawlk! Bawlk!
Silence. Then three more bursts.

“Badword jailbreak,” says Jack.

Jubilee nods. “Did one ever catch you?”

Jack nods sheepishly. “Yeah. Couple times.”

“Me too,” says Jubilee.

They head for Hippodrome, where they dismount for a spin on the hippos. Normally only Sillynillies and smaller can ride a mouth, but Jack and Jubilee find a pair of yawning maws they can squeeze into. The little kids go wild at the sight of two Big Kids joining them.

They ride their bikes onto the stage at Cartoons, dismount, tap-dance, bow, exit to cheers and whistles.

They pull up to Snuggle Stop. “One last time,” he says, and goes in. Comes out. “That was good.”

They ride through Doll Farm … Trucks. He laughs. “That time you came after me with the fire truck and aimed the hose at me and nothing came out.”

She laughs. “The time you stole my football and I chased you all the way to the creek and you threw it in the water and it floated away. You thought I was going to cry.”

He grins at the memory. “But you didn’t.”

“Nope.”

“You never cried.”

“Neither did you.”

“Boys aren’t supposed to.”

“Little boys are.”

“Sometimes I did, when you weren’t around.”

“Sometimes I did too, when you weren’t around.”

He chuckles. “I used to think:
A girl that don’t cry. She can’t be real
.”

She looks at him. “So what do you think now?”

He looks. The ribbon ends peek from behind her cap. “Yeah, you’re real.”

She grins. “Race!”

They race across the flats. Dust boils. Jack’s nag is no match for his old Scramjet. They slow to a biketrot, laughing.

“Follow me,” he says. He leads her to The Kid. He kickstands the nag. “I need my old bike.” She hands it over. He stands in the stirrups, balances, wobbles, stills himself, whispers, “Steady, boy, steady.” He hauls one foot onto the saddle. Now both. Crouching. Arms out, teetering. Wobble … wobble. She reaches to steady the bike. “No!” he says. “I’ll be OK. He knows it’s me.” Slowly, carefully, he straightens until he’s standing tall in the saddle. He reaches up, almost to the outstretched arm, the pointing finger. He jumps, curls both hands around the arm. “OK—pull it away.” She pulls the bike away. “Count,” he says. She counts aloud as he does five chin-ups on the arm. He releases, drops to the dust, gasping: “Alwayswanted … todo … that.”

They ride.

Around Socks … past Tattooer … in and out of the junky mounds of Stuff.

“I never hit you,” she says, marvel in her voice.

“So?” he says. “What’re you saying? You wish you did?”