Savvy (13 page)

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

The sign flew toward 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. He appeared to have finally found the right color paint to complement his savvy.

“Cool,”
he said under his breath. Fish then turned toward a sagging cardboard box that had come to rest about ten feet 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 toward 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 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 onto 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 center 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 the window. Lester nodded his head and started the engine; he seemed 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.”

“Oh 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, Mr. 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 think maybe someone ought to start explaining to me exactly what I’ve got myself into the middle of. Right now.”

I
t 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.”

We continued to watch 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 lay down the law. The plan was to continue east toward 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 was clearly relieved 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 halfheartedly, “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 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.

“You’re all up on the second floor,” said Lester when he handed Lill the room keys and watched us climb down out of the bus. He was just as tense and jumpy as ever, and he looked almost sad as we left him there. For a second I wondered if Lester might panic and leave us there in the middle of the night; I supposed even less humble heroes might’ve thought about it. But the way Lester looked at Lill made me doubt it.

“Promise you’ll be here in the morning, Mr. Swan?” I called back to him before he closed the door of the bus. Lester tilted his head like a listening dog, and gave me a funny look.

“Where would I go?” he asked. And that was all the answer I needed.

Lill ushered us toward stairs that led to our rooms. Fish sniffed the air as we passed a locked door with a single window down on the first level. The sign next to the door said
Pool—Guests Only
.

“Water,” Fish said simply.

The pool sat, still and empty, reflecting dancing green light across the walls and ceiling of the small room. At any other time, being so close to that much water would’ve made Fish nervous and fidgety, but when I glanced his way he looked calm as calm.

Lill didn’t miss the way we all looked at that pool through the window, but she ordered us up the stairs ahead of her with the command of a drill sergeant in green and white camouflage. When we reached the second floor, Lill took the lead, holding Samson’s hand while looking for our rooms and fumbling one-handed with the room keys.

The rest of us dropped behind.

“We can’t call home,” I whispered to Will. He looked from Lill back to me, his eyes questioning. Lill was farther ahead of us now, moving up the long hallway. I reached forward and tugged on the back of Bobbi’s shirt, noticing the way the angel tattoo on her back now reclined on one elbow, wings folded in, picking its teeth with the end of its pointed tail indifferently.

“Bobbi, we can’t call home,” I said to her.

“Duh,”
she replied and rolled her eyes at me.

“Of course she knows that,”
said the angel. But I ignored it.

“Fish?”

“I know, I know,” he whispered back at me. “We can’t call home. But just how do you think we’ll get away with
that?
”

“I’ve got a plan,” I said.

“Oh goodie,” said Bobbi. “She’s got a plan.”

T
he trick would be in the timing. Wrangling Lester earlier in the day had been surprisingly easy, but I knew flimflamming Lill was going to be a lot harder—she had to believe, without a doubt, that we’d called home or she wouldn’t be satisfied.

I remembered Bobbi mimicking her mother over meat loaf at the dinner table the night before and how she’d sounded just like Miss Rosemary. I also remembered how Will Junior had threatened Bobbi with telling their parents how she called in to school, using her mother’s voice, to excuse her own absences when she ditched classes.

With two motel rooms, one across the hall from the other, I figured we just might be able to pull off my scheme.

It was for Lill’s own good, I told myself again and again. I had to keep her and Lester out of trouble. If we called home now, who knew what might happen? But if we could lay low until we reached Salina Hope Hospital tomorrow, maybe Lester and Lill could get on their way without anyone knowing that they’d helped us out, or blaming them wrongly for carrying us off.