Savvy (18 page)

As the living, breathing Carlene stopped throwing things and stared at Lester, speechless for the first time, she remembered that she had an audience, as Bobbi, Fish, Will, and I all shifted in our places.

I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and the little hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle. Carlene looked from one of us to the next several times, and I could see her slowly dawning recognition. It was time to go.

“Bless … my … stars. Lester, these are the kids on the TV,” Carlene said low and slow like the first warning hiss of a poisonous snake. Lester looked from Carlene to the rest of us, obviously confused.

“The TV?” he repeated.

“The alert on the TV …” Carlene continued, stepping away sideways while keeping her eyes on us. “The missing kids. Land’s sake, Lester! Did you help these kids run away?”

“W-what?” Lester stammered. “N-no … I mean yes. I mean—not on purpose, Carlene. Just l-let me explain!”

But Carlene was already reaching for the telephone. “You can explain yourself to the police, you defective dolt.” She punched the buttons on the phone with one long, sharp fingernail.

“The p-police?”

“Not the police, Lester!” I shouted, running out from my corner of the room. I grabbed Lester’s arm and tried to pull him to the door. “We have to get to Salina, Lester! Everything will be fine when we get to Salina, but we have to go
now
!” Bobbi, Fish, and Will all joined me in pushing-pulling Lester out of the trailer and back into the bus.

“We’ve got to go, Lester!” we shouted as we prodded him into the driver’s seat and Will pulled the lever to close the door behind us. Lester moved slowly, like he was in a trance, starting up the bus and putting it in gear without hardly paying attention. His brain was still trying to catch up, trying to figure out if he was doing the right thing.

“What’s happening?” Lill wanted to know, having stayed on the bus to give Lester some room to fight his own battles. But we spared no time for her on explanations.

“Just drive!” shouted Bobbi as Carlene stepped out of the trailer with her cordless phone to her ear, waving and pointing as though the operator on the other end of the line could see us driving away.

We were back on the highway, Lester sweating buckets and Lill’s face drawn tight, bewildered and worried. Sitting on the edge of our seats, we kept watch out the windows for the first glimpse of flashing lights or the first sound of sirens on our tail. I remembered again that this was all my fault, that we wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me and a savvy that had come and dropped me into hot water fast.

That hot water turned cold as ice as I stopped thinking about how sad and sorry my life had become and realized something even more terrible with the same sudden pain as a brain freeze. I stood up and looked around, and my heart skipped a beat.

“Where’s Samson?”

“W
here’s Samson?” I repeated frantically. I stumbled to the back of the bus and turned over Lester’s army cot. The others joined me, dumping out the bigger boxes and checking under every seat. But it was no use. Samson wasn’t hiding anywhere on that bus. He simply wasn’t there.

“We have to turn around!” we all started shouting. “We have to go back!” But Lester had his fingers knuckle-locked onto that steering wheel and was staring forward along the stretch of highway in front of him with the look of a man accepting the fact that his life was over and that he was probably going to end the day in prison for trying to do the right thing the wrong way. I felt bad, remembering my vow to keep Lill and Lester safe and out of trouble. But I couldn’t sacrifice my own brother on that account; we couldn’t
not
go back—even if the police were on their way

Lill got to her feet and stood up tall between us kids and Lester as he continued driving away from the Tuttle Terrace Trailer Park.

“Just what’s going on here, kidlings?” she wanted to know, calm but firm, her tone as parental as any mother’s.

“Samson’s not on the bus!” Fish shouted, and a gust of wind blew Lill’s hair away from her face as the temperature and humidity began to rise perceptibly inside the bus. My brother set his jaw and clenched his fists, wrangling his savvy self before continuing. “Samson must still be at Carlene’s. We’ve got to go back!”

Lill’s eyes widened and she looked at us in shock. “We left the critter behind?” We all nodded at her mutely. Then Lill spun around toward Lester.

“Lester, turn the bus around!”

“B-but …” Lester stammered. “Carlene’s called the police.”

“It doesn’t matter, Lester,” Lill assured him, resting one hand on his nervous, shuddering shoulder. “We’ve got to go back.”

Lester drove forward another quarter mile before he gave in. He made a wide-arcing U-turn faster than any old school bus should ever do, and for a moment I thought for sure that the big pink bus was going to tip right over. We all held on to whatever we could to keep from falling, and boxes of Bibles tumbled and slid.

We were nearing the trailer park when we heard the first siren in the distance. At the wheel, Lester had gone as pale as Gypsy’s imaginary ghosts. The bright afternoon sun slipped behind thick dark clouds rising up from the distance, and the sky began to turn a funny shade of gray green. I remembered how close we were to that fair-sized body of water, Tuttle Creek Lake, and threw Fish a warning look.

“I’m fine,” he barked at me through clenched teeth. Nevertheless, I kept my eye on those clouds. Trouble was brewing.

Ignoring the sirens, Lester turned into the trailer park. He’d hardly gotten the door of the bus open before the rest of us, including Lill, blew right out like we were riding on a gust of Fish’s wind. Lester followed on our heels, looking around him at the rising weather, at the trees bending and swaying, and at Carlene’s lawn chair clattering down the street along with other rubbish picked up by the impending storm.

Carlene stood just inside her doorway. “The police are on their way, Lester,” she shouted over the wind as we ran toward her through the first drops of rain.

“Where’s Samson?” I demanded when I reached the woman. I could hardly catch my breath, I was in such a panic. “Where’s my brother?”

Samson had to be inside. No one remembered seeing him leave the trailer. Bobbi and Lill moved toward the door, but Carlene blocked the way with her rawboned arms outstretched.

“This is my home and you are all trespassing,” Carlene said, her pink lipstick sticking to her teeth as she sneered. The sirens were getting closer. Carlene smiled. “Left one behind, did you? Well, the boy is safe and sound and locked up tight until the officers get here.”

“Locked up?” Lill boomed, her little voice growing as big as the thundering sky overhead. “Locked up? He’s just a child!”

“Where is he, woman?” Lester demanded without a stutter or a stammer. The sky grew darker and darker and the wind sashayed in every direction, carrying the sound of the approaching sirens away and back. But Carlene just looked at us, smug and priggish, laughing at us with her eyes.

“You’ll never find him,” she said. “That one’s got a knack for keeping hid, I can tell.”

“You know where he is, don’t you,” Lester proclaimed, stating facts more than asking a question. Carlene just shrugged. Lill rose up to her full height, hovering like a heavenly avenger over the smaller woman; the look in her eyes was as fierce as the storm rising up from the lake, the storm that Fish was trying hard not to unleash in full.

But it was all just too much for my brother. His anger and worry got the best of him and he let loose with a blast of wind, directing it straight at Carlene, knocking her all the way to the far wall inside the entryway. We tumbled into the shaking trailer, leaping past Carlene to look everywhere for Samson. The first place I thought to look was under the long tablecloth over the table by the kitchen bar. But Samson wasn’t there.

Everyone spread out, looking under the bed and behind the furniture. We checked in closets and cupboards. We dumped out the laundry basket and looked behind the drapes and the shower curtain. I even looked inside the oven—just in case. All the while, Fish’s fury raged both inside and out, making the curtains thrash and wave, and setting every loose piece of paper and every stringy gray ball of dust flying through the air, his wrath threatening to pull the roof right off that old trailer.

I was searching the closet in the entryway as the first police car roared through the rain to stop behind the big pink Bible bus in a frenzy of multicolored noise. That was when a thought struck me. I knew how to get Carlene to tell me where Samson was.

All I needed was my pen.

I
reached down deep into the pocket of my skirt, looking for my fancy silver happy birthday pen, but found only the broken, useless bar of paper-wrapped soap. I remembered that Will Junior still had it.

Will was searching the bedroom at the back of the house and I could hear Carlene in there with him, shouting at him to stop pulling all of the blankets off her bed.

Through a slim window set into the front door, I watched as two police officers stepped out of their patrol car and dashed through the rain toward the trailer. I quickly locked the dead bolt in the door and pulled a heavy chair in front of it to buy us more time, hoping that there might be another way out. Then I dashed down the narrow hallway toward the bedroom, passing the others on the way. Lester and Lill were in the kitchen looking again in all the cupboards. Bobbi was searching inside the washer and dryer. Fish was sitting on the floor in the bathroom with his head in his hands and his eyes squeezed tightly shut. He was struggling to keep that storm outside under control.

“It’ll be all right, Fish! I know what to do!” I shouted to my brother, trying to reassure him as I ran past. Fish got up and followed me into Carlene’s bedroom with Bobbi right behind him.

“Will! I need my pen!” I cried.

Will stopped a violent game of bedsheet tug-of-war with Carlene, letting go of his end so abruptly that the bony woman fell backward and landed in her now-empty laundry basket, her arms and legs flailing and kicking, one fuzzy slipper falling off, the other sailing through the air to hit the ceiling just over Bobbi’s head—Bobbi ducked to keep from getting hit. We were almost out of time. I could hear the police officers pounding on the front door.

“Will! My pen!” I thrust my hand out like a surgeon asking for a scalpel. Will dug deep into his own pocket and slapped the shiny pen into my hand, knowing exactly what I had in mind. We all shimmied around and over the bed, converging on the woman in the basket and trying to hold her down. Carlene started up such a noisy, hissing, spitting yowl, it was like trying to catch hold of a feral cat. The police pounded again on the door and I knew my time was up.

Carlene screamed, “Help! Help me!” So Fish blasted her with another whip of wind, making her flinch and turn her head aside, but it didn’t stop her caterwaul.

“Help me! I’m being attacked!”

To shut the woman up, Bobbi pulled her roll of Bubble Tape from the pocket of her jeans, yanking a full arm’s length of gum from the package and tearing it off. Quickly wadding the long ribbon into a tight tangle in her hand, Bobbi leaned forward and jammed the big gob of gum inside Carlene’s open, roaring mouth, muffling the woman’s shouts, at least momentarily.

Uncapping the pen, I grabbed for one of Carlene’s kicking feet; it was the only part of her I could get close to.

“Lemme go!” the woman garbled around her enormous mouthful of sticky juicy Bubble Tape, trying to spit it out but finding it difficult to dislodge the gum from her teeth. Kicking at me again, Carlene pulled her foot out of my grasp, her big hair flying up around her head like a mane as though the angry cat was turning into a lion.

“Try to keep her still,” I shouted. “I only need a second!” As Fish and Bobbi struggled to pin Carlene’s arms, Will grabbed hold of both of her feet. Carlene landed a rock-solid kick to Will’s chest, knocking him backward against the bed, but he got up quickly and took hold of her feet with a tighter grip.

It took less than an instant—a dot, a dot, and a line—just long enough to draw a simple face on the bottom of Carlene’s cracked and calloused left foot.

“Where’s my brother?” I demanded, trying to shut out everything except Carlene’s voice inside my head, but finding it difficult to ignore the increasingly loud pounding at the front door and the sound of the rain now pummeling the metal siding of the trailer. “Where is he?” I repeated, shouting to Carlene, then pausing to listen for the single voice of her thoughts.

“He climbed in himself, the mangy, snooping little dog,”
the Carlene voice in my head replied as the two dots blinked above the scowling line of mouth.
“I just latched the panel so that he couldn’t get back out.”

“What panel? Where is he?” I demanded, and for a moment Carlene stopped struggling, looking at me in surprise. “Where did Samson climb into himself?” I asked again.

Carlene finally managed to spit the thick, sticky mess of bubble gum from her mouth, sputtering it out so that it landed on the carpet near Fish like a piece of chewed-up meat. But she didn’t start screaming again. Carlene didn’t say a word. Instead she looked at me shrewdly, curiously.

“How did the girl know about the panel?”
the inked face I’d drawn on Carlene’s foot wondered in my head. Her eyes narrowed as she considered me carefully The woman gave me the chills. It was almost as though she could read
my
mind, and for a moment I got scared. What if someone bad like Carlene ever found out about us Beaumonts and the things our savvies let us do? I hoped I’d never have to find out.

But before I could think any more about this new worry, I was distracted by a brand-new voice inside my head—muffled and distant like a hidden chime that seldom ever rings. The voice reminded me of …

“Samson!”

“I’m in the wall,”
the voice said in my head. Then it doubled.
“I’m in the wall—I’m in the wall.”
As I listened, the seconds ticking by as I ignored Carlene and everyone else, I heard Samson’s voice multiplying again and again and again until it overlapped upon itself so many times that the words grew together into a gabble of chiming gibberish.