The Middle of Somewhere (17 page)

I said, “No telling what he's scared of now.”

“I know!” Gee exclaimed suddenly. “It's coyotes. I heard 'em at the campout last fall.”

His Sunday-school teacher took the boys on an overnight to Smithville Lake, which wasn't quite overnight for Gee when he fell out of a tree and cracked his head. “Are you sure?”

“Wouldn't you be sure about a noise like that?”

Sometimes he makes sense. “Are they, like … dangerous?”

“My teacher said they were scared of humans. But—”

“Let's just stay inside.”

“But Leo's out there! You said I had to protect him!”

Me and my big fat mouth. It led to a big fat argument: Gee's side was that we either let Leo in, or let Gee out. My side was that when Pop found dog hair on his cushions we'd be heading home a lot sooner, maybe on the first east-bound truck. Besides, I was tired of bending over backward for a mutt who could probably take care of himself. The fight went on while Leo scratched at the door, making every noise a dog could make that wasn't a real bark.

Gee finally won, with a pretty good tactic: he stopped breathing.

Not exactly on purpose; it was his asthma kicking in. His attacks are getting fewer and farther between, which is the upside. The downside is that they're scarier when they happen. First he starts choking, next his eyes get big and
round, and finally these ugly noises like a rusty saw start coming from his throat. By then Mama is telling him to stay calm while she looks for the inhaler, and if she doesn't find it fast enough his lips turn blue. So now I was looking for the inhaler, and not remembering where I put it.

“Just stay calm,” I kept saying. “Sit down and concentrate, okay? In … out… I know it's here, I remember packing it—”

Trying not to panic, I turned over the sofa cushions and rattled through the closet shelf and every kitchen cupboard. The flashlight beam darted like a terrified mouse— “In! …Out! …That's good!”—while his raspy breath was sawing my nerves apart.

I even climbed up to Pop's bunk and checked the storage bins there, screeching when a stack of books spilled on my toes. One of them caught my eye because it didn't have a cowboy on it; barely believing my eyes, I read,
Seize the Way
.…Pop was a Kent Clark fan, too!

But no time to wonder about that. “Hold on—we're getting close!” We'd better be, because I was running out of places to look.

“Leo …,” Gee croaked, feebly waving toward the door.

I decided that desperate times called for disobeying your grandparent. Jumping off the bunk, I opened the door. Leo bounded in, Gee slid off the dinette seat, and they met in the middle of the floor. Dog hair wasn't exactly good for asthma. But Gee was still breathing—or gasping— so I figured Leo's love outweighed his allergens.

The inhaler was under the dinette seat. I snatched it up and checked the batteries and plugged it into Gee almost before he could get his next gasp. Then we all settled down like flurried leaves drifting back to earth. Leo was panting like a big old machine of dogginess, I was taking long deep breaths, and Gee was sucking on his tube while the hiss of the inhaler filled a space that had never felt so tiny before now.

Meanwhile, the coyotes were carrying on outside like a maniacs' convention. The wind was making a low, steady moan that rattled the thin walls. “Make up your beds and go to sleep,” Pop had said. Sure.

The RV felt just the opposite of safe. It felt more like a pressure cooker that was slowly filling with the inhaler hiss and every thump of Leo's tail—which, whatever comfort Gee found in it, was probably stirring up even more dust and dander. My flashlight picked up the gleam of Gee's eyes, which didn't look any less scared than before.
Thump. Thump. Thump
.

“All right, here's what we do,” I said. “We'll build a fire.”

Gee blew the tube out of his mouth. “In
here
?”

“Of course not! While we were outside a while ago, I saw a little rock circle on the other side of the RV where somebody built a fire. There's even some wood left. It'll scare the coyotes away and be a signal for Pop when he comes back.” The thought crossed my mind that maybe Pop wasn't coming back, but that just shows what being alone on the Kansas prairie at night will do to your thinking.

I found some matches and a blanket and herded Gee and Leo out of the RV. Whoever had built the last fire in that spot had even left a pile of papers for kindling—about twenty sheets held down by a rock. They looked all the same, like some kind of advertising flyer. Gee sat on a blanket nearby with Leo tucked around him like a rug, while I wadded up some of the paper flyers and rearranged the half-burned logs and twigs in a tepee on top. Three matches made the paper blaze and the wood crackle, sending sparks into the air.

“Cool,” Gee breathed. “Fireworks.”

“It's just cinders from the paper.”

“No, I mean in the sky. Look!” I turned on my heels, just in time to see a couple of shooting stars. Two more showed up right after, and for a couple of minutes the sky was full of them. We watched, holding still as though we were afraid they would notice us.

Gee spoke up, in a trembly voice. “ 'Member what Howard said? How they're heading for us but the angels bat 'em back before they can hit us?”

That's not at all what Howard said, but I couldn't help picturing a heavenly host with baseball bats, whapping away into deep space. The idea wasn't too far-fetched—if they were stuck with this guardian-angel gig, why shouldn't they have some fun with it? We watched for a while, keeping score and feeling less alone. The universe looks friendlier when you can see it as part of one big game.

“I guess they're looking out for us,” I said, in what was
meant to be a reassuring tone. The wind gusted, making the flames twist.

Gee worried, “Maybe it'll blow out like a candle.”

“No—see how much brighter the fire gets when the wind blows? Air's like food to a fire. Hey, how about we write another postcard? We still have the sunflower one left.”

“What's that?” The wind had carried off my stack of unburned paper, and Gee jumped up to chase them.

“Come back here!” I yelled. “You'll get your asthma going again!”

After a minute, he raced back, with a fistful of papers and Leo at his heels. “Look what I found!”

“It's just some kindling left over from the last person who—”

“No, look!” Since he was waving the papers right under my nose, I couldn't see anything until I snatched one sheet out of his hand and tilted it toward the fire. It was an advertisement with a photocopied picture that looked all pebbly. The words read:

“He was here!” Gee shouted, jumping up and down. “Right here!”

I had to admit, that was the likeliest explanation. Who else would have enough Cannonball Paul flyers to burn but Cannonball Paul himself?

And why did we keep following him, like rats behind the Pied Piper?

This. Was getting. Too. Weird.

The sound of a lone motorcycle puttering up a gravel road at two-fifteen a.m. can be more beautiful than a fifty-string symphony orchestra—at least if you know who's on the motorcycle. The wind had died down and the night was so clear I could hear Pop's Yamaha while it was miles away; at least twenty minutes went by before the headlight finally came in view. It was just me and the coyotes awake by then, because Gee had sacked out on a doggie-pillow by the fire (with pictures of Cannonball Paul clutched to his chest and blazing, amazing visions dancing in his head). Leo woke up long enough to creep under the axle.

I had stayed awake to keep the fire going, but Pop didn't say anything about that, or anything about the late hour except, “Took longer than I thought.” I'd noticed that. He grabbed a shovel from the storage garage and helped me smother the fire, then unsnapped a bungee cord, untying a square box from his fender rack. “I'm going in for a few hours of shut-eye. I'll try to get this thing installed at dawn. Then we'll see where we are.”

I knew where I was: out in the middle of nowhere with a next of kin who didn't even bother to ask “How'd you manage out here all by yourself?” Or say “Sorry for taking
so long,” or “Good night,” even. I gave him a couple of minutes to get settled, then dragged Gee inside. Just before crashing on the sofa, I tucked our latest postcard into the mail rack, little suspecting I would never get a chance to mail it.

What woke me up, in the pinky dawn, was Pop banging on the motor. I tried to guess by the speed and loudness of the bangs whether his mood had improved any, but they didn't tell me much. When I got up to wash my face, the weak dribble from the faucet warned me that our water had almost gone the way of the electricity. If this alternator thingy didn't work, we'd be stuck out here with the rocks and the sagebrush until some tourist with a lot of time on his hands happened by.

I opened the passenger door and hopped to the ground, pausing by the rearview mirror. The hood was up, making a crack I could see through without being seen. Pop didn't look too bad. That furrowed brow and down-turned mouth probably just meant heavy concentration. He tapped with a hammer and turned a couple of screws with a socket wrench. Then he reached into the motor and gave a sharp tug. The engine turned over so loud and sudden I jumped. When he slammed the hood, his mouth was still turned down, but his eyes looked a lot more cheerful. “I'll let it run for fifteen minutes to charge up the battery,” he told me. “Then we're outta here.”

That's not exactly how it happened, though, because Gee woke up with his own agenda. “Are we fixed? Are we on the road?”

“As soon as Pop loads his bike,” I told him. “And Leo might like to be fed, so—”

“Pop!” Gee bounced out of the RV, trailing the blanket I'd tucked around him. “Pop! We have to do something!”

One thing for sure: our grandfather was in no mood to be told what to do. I dashed out behind Gee, too late—he was already hopping from foot to foot and waving pieces of Cannonball Paul in front of Pop while the latter was trying to load his bike onto the trailer. “… and he was already here, maybe just before us. He's following us! No, I mean we're following
him
. Look: he's gonna be at this place called Hay. We have to find him, we just have to—”

I grabbed him by the arm, hissing, “Not now! We can bring this up at—”

“Po-op!” Gee wailed. Our grandfather had managed to keep his temper, wrestling a two-hundred-pound bike while a very annoying kid waved papers in front of his face. Now he snapped around with his hands up, waved them as though batting away flies, and stomped between us, headed for the cab.