The Creek (13 page)

“He’ll come,” Mac said.

She heard screeching tires, and Oren hissed, “He’s here! Get ready, you guys.”

The Trans Am was sitting in the Bukvics’ driveway, like a red tomato ripening in the sun. Caleb climbed out and sauntered through the front door.

“Time to go,” Benji said. “Got the tools?”

Penny nodded shakily, clutching the heavy clippers.

“You okay?” Benji asked, taking in her white face.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry,” Zachary assured Penny and Benji. “I’ll whistle if I see him come back out.”

“Okay, let’s do it.”

They took off across the street, dropping low when they reached the Bukvics’ driveway and scuttling up to the Trans Am like crabs. They lay on their backs and inched their way across the hot blacktop under the car, Penny’s heart beating a million miles a minute. Heat radiated off the engine in gasoline-tinged waves, and Benji was sweating like a fiend.

“Now what do we do?” Penny asked, breathing hard.

“Hand me the clippers,” he ordered, like a surgeon at an operating table.

She slapped them into his outstretched hand. Benji stared up at the mess of tubes and wires above him.

“Hurry!” she said, fear making her voice shake.

Benji held the clippers to a piece of black tubing and then paused. He turned to Penny, his face strained. “I don’t know which one to cut.”

“What do you mean? I thought you asked your dad.”

He shook his head in frustration. “I did, but I don’t see anything like what he was talking about.”

Penny took a deep breath and said, “Cut them all!”

“But—”

“Just do it!” she whispered fiercely.

He nodded shortly and cut through a thick black tube.

Blue windshield-washer fluid rained down on them. It got into Penny’s mouth and soaked her shirt. She spit it out.

“Jeez!” Benji cursed, wiping his eyes.

Penny looked past Benji, feeling faint.

A pair of boots was standing there.

Benji caught the look in Penny’s eyes and froze.

She pinched her eyes shut for a moment, hoping the boots would be gone when she opened them.

They weren’t.

Then she heard Zachary’s whistle, but it was too late—the windshield-washer fluid was already rushing out from under the car, pooling on the blacktop, flowing around Caleb’s heavy black motorcycle boots. Penny watched in horrified fascination as the fluid ran down the driveway in a weirdly blue stream, shimmering iridescently.

Caleb said, “What the—?”

“Go!” Benji mouthed in a low urgent voice, shoving Penny in the direction away from Caleb. She rolled onto her belly, the windshield-washer fluid soaking her straight through, and crawled out from under the car, Benji right behind her.

Benji was just about out from under the car when Caleb’s hand grabbed his foot.

“What are you doing to my car?” Caleb glowered at Benji, but Benji just kicked hard, hitting Caleb in the face. Caleb roared in shock, and then Benji was off and he and Penny were running up the street, as fast as their legs could carry them.

“Hey!” Caleb shouted.

They rounded the curve on Lark Hill Road and were gone.

P
enny and the boys were somewhat calmer by the time they scrambled into Mr. Schuyler’s pristine yellow pickup truck that evening, just as the sun was setting.

Mr. Schuyler kept the truck in perfect condition for just such occasions. Usually a trip to Wallaby Farms required some sort of chore in return, and as tomorrow was the Fourth of July block party, he had a list ready for them. In return for free ice cream, the kids were going to have to help out.

“Now, you critters hold on tight,” he warned. “I don’t want any personal injury lawyers sniffing after me!”

Mr. Schuyler, outfitted in worn blue overalls and a John Deere cap, drove his truck at a sedate pace. But when he reached the Farm Road, on the outskirts of the neighborhood, Mr. Schuyler hit the gas and the truck went flying down the dirt road, hitting every
bump and pothole, causing the kids in the back to bounce around, taking their breath away.

“This is better than the roller coaster!” Zachary shouted exuberantly, clinging to the side.

In spite of all the excitement, Penny was silent. But then, she had a lot on her mind.

After Penny’s near-death experience with Caleb that morning, her mother had returned home, corralled her into the minivan with Baby Sam, and driven them to the mall. Her mother was on a mission to get Penny a dress for the Fourth of July block party. She had dragged Penny to the girls’ section of a large department store and sat outside the curtained dressing room, bouncing Sam on her knee, while Penny tried on a daisy-patterned cotton sundress.

“This is a stupid dress,” Penny had said sulkily from behind the curtain. She couldn’t believe her mom was making her do this.

“Come out and let me see it on you.”

Penny had walked out reluctantly, slouching her shoulders, her arms crossed defensively in front of her flat chest.

“You look lovely, honey,” her mom had said encouragingly. “It’s the perfect sort of dress for a summer party.”

“I look stupid.”

Her mother had looked at her and murmured, in a soft voice, “I’ll bet Amy will be wearing a dress.”

Penny had stared at herself in the mirror. The simple sundress made her look even younger than she was. She imagined what Amy would wear. Nothing like this, she knew instinctively. Why was she even trying?

“The boys are gonna make fun of me.”

“No, they won’t. Come on, it would make your dad so happy if his little girl wore a dress one day of her life.” Her mother had stood behind her and smoothed her hair back, squeezing her shoulder. “You look so pretty. Don’t you feel pretty in this dress?”

Penny had looked at her mother, standing behind her in the mirror, and known that she could never hope to be as beautiful as her mother, whose heavy fall of hair was shiny as a buttercup. Penny knew that even with this dress, even with a million dresses, she would never come close. She would never be the one boys stopped to admire.

And then there was no more time to think about the shopping trip, because they were at Wallaby Farms. The kids fell over one another to get in line at the old-fashioned marble counter, where stout-looking women spooned out obscenely huge scoops of ice cream. After
they’d all gotten their cones, Mr. Schuyler piled them back into the truck and drove them to a big empty field not far down the road. They took their cones and sat on the grass, watching the stars start to come out.

Mr. Schuyler looked around appraisingly. “This was my farm. This piece of land was my family’s farm for over one hundred years,” he said.

“We know,” the kids chimed in.

“And do you know who owns it now?” he asked.

“The government!” Penny shouted, in unison with everyone else. Mr. Schuyler gave the same speech every time.

“You got it, boys! The United States Federal Government,” he said, emphasizing the word “federal.” “Just you remember that. Don’t ever trust no one, not even the government. The only person you can count on being true to you is yourself. You hear me?”

“Yes, Mr. Schuyler.”

A cicada chirped mournfully.

“Can you trust policemen?” asked Penny, remembering Officer Cox.

“Nope.”

“But if you can’t trust policemen, who can you trust?” Teddy asked, a smear of strawberry ice cream on his thin cheek.

“Yeah,” Benji said. “And what about firemen?”

“What about the FBI?” Mac said.

“And the Secret Service?” Oren added.

Mr. Schuyler sighed heavily. “Nope, you can’t trust any of them. Nothing but thieves and liars, every one. They’ll steal your farm, sell your tractors, slaughter your livestock.”

“But what if something bad happens?” Penny whispered tremulously, the shadow of Caleb looming large over them all, a specter in the dark, a harsh whisper on the wind. “Who do we tell if something really bad happens?”

A frog croaked nearby. Zachary seemed to curl into himself, his chocolate cone forgotten.

“Well, I guess you can always tell me, but I’m not gonna be here forever.” Mr. Schuyler scratched his scraggly gray beard. “Nope. One day you’ll learn: the only person you can really count on is yourself.”

On the way home, Mr. Schuyler managed to hit every single pothole on the Farm Road. Penny was having a hard time keeping her ice cream down.

“Your dad coming to the block party tomorrow?” Penny asked Oren.

Oren stared ahead into the darkness, his dark hair
framing his face rakishly, so that he looked like a pirate. “I don’t know. My mom told him to stay away,” he said.

“Do you see him much?” she asked, clinging to the side of the truck, forcing herself to keep talking to take her mind off her nausea. If Mr. Schuyler kept driving like this, she was going to barf all over the bed of the truck.

“He’s always busy with his stupid girlfriend. I can’t believe he won’t come home with all the stuff that’s going on with Caleb! I thought he’d come home! How can he leave us by ourselves? How can he?” he asked, his voice breaking.

The truck hit a massive pothole, and all the kids were thrown into the air.

“Ugh,” Penny said, as she felt the ice cream slosh around in her stomach.

“I hate her!” Oren said vehemently, his black curls flopping on his forehead.

Penny met his eyes, and almost flinched at the emotion simmering there. “Who?”

“My dad’s girlfriend.” He looked at her and said, “I hate her guts.”

And then it appeared.

The sleek red car roared out of the pitch dark,
engine roaring throatily, a demon from hell with its headlights glowing eerily like disembodied eyes. Clouds of fumes billowed behind it, and music was blasting from the stereo. A lazy arm hung out the driver’s side window holding a bottle of beer, and the kids didn’t need to see the skull tattoo on the back of the hand to know who it was.

“Teddy!” Penny shouted, scrambling to the rear window of the cab, where Teddy was sitting with Mr. Schuyler. She banged furiously for Teddy’s attention.

The driver of the car gunned its engine and nosed up to touch the back bumper of the truck.

“He’s going to hit us!” Oren yelled.

There was grinding as the two vehicles met.

“What’s going on back there?” Mr. Schuyler hollered.

“Drive faster! Drive faster!” Penny shouted to Teddy through the cab window.

“What?” Teddy asked.

“It’s Caleb!”

Teddy craned around, looking out the window. The arm hanging out the car behind them lifted the beer in a silent toast.

He paled and then hauled himself over to Mr. Schuyler’s side and yelled in his ear, “Hurry, Mr.
Schuyler! The car behind us is bad news!”

“You got it, boy,” the old man said. “Hit my truck, will ya?”

Mr. Schuyler hit the gas and accelerated for the curve ahead, spurred on by the kids in the back shouting for him to hurry. The Trans Am was nearly on top of them now. Penny clung to the side of the truck, and all she could do was stare at that muscled arm. The car kept trying to pass them, weaving dangerously back and forth, nearly forcing the truck into a gully.

“Wanna play, do you?” Mr. Schuyler shouted. “No punk kid is going to get the best of Al Schuyler! I’ll show you what’s what!”

“All right!” Mac shouted with a grin. “This is more like it!”

“Hold on!” Mr. Schuyler cried, eyeing the approaching curve.

Penny braced herself.

Mr. Schuyler took the curve, braking slightly, then turned the wheel hard so that the truck went sailing off the main road and onto an old dirt cattle path. The truck skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust as the car sped by, a beer bottle sailing out of it to land with a crash on the road.

“Hooligan!” Mr. Schuyler shouted, waving a fist
out the window of the cab.

Teddy was still gripping the dashboard, his knuckles white.

“You okay, boy?”

Teddy nodded, gritting his teeth.

Mr. Schuyler leaned through the cab’s rear window to survey the kids in the back of the truck. He looked at their pale faces.

“You kids okay back there?” Mr. Schuyler shouted.

“Yeah, we’re okay,” Penny said with a gulp. “Just great.”

And watched as Zachary barfed up his chocolate ice cream, along with chunks of cone and rainbow sprinkles.

T
he Fourth of July dawned hot and humid, the air as sticky and moist as the gym showers at school after ball practice.

Penny was in the garage, helping Teddy put the finishing touches on his astronaut-themed bike. She had gotten up at the crack of dawn and decorated her own bike, twining black and yellow crepe paper around the spokes of the wheels, constructing long antennae out of aluminum foil, and fashioning a stinger from a sharp sliver of wood that she had painted black. It was long and thick and tapered down to a sharp point.

Her mother had seemed a little unsure about the wood. “Isn’t that stinger thing a little sharp?”

“Exactly,” Penny had said. “It’s a bee.”

Her parents had exchanged a worried look.

Now she was nearly done with Teddy’s bike.

“No, put it there,” Teddy ordered from his perch on the stool.

She glue-gunned silver tinsel to the spoke of a wheel.

“Okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I can’t wait to set off the fireworks,” he said.

The kids were going to take the fireworks they had been stashing in the hollow tree along with them to the municipal park later that day, where the town was staging its own fireworks display. Mac figured a few more fireworks wouldn’t be noticed in the noise and confusion, and they could always disappear into the crowd if anyone gave them trouble.

Teddy, Penny knew, was excited to be out and about, even if he was on crutches. He had been keeping a low profile since his accident, but nothing was going to ruin the Fourth for him. Or her, she thought, feeling light for the first time in days, excitement rushing through her veins. She would not think of Caleb today, she promised herself.

“Now go ride around the driveway,” Teddy ordered. “I want to see how it looks.”