The Middle of Somewhere (20 page)

For a moment, I couldn't move. Mr. Clark can say what he wants about expecting the unexpected, but this was too much. Howard scrambled down to get a closer look. “Is he dead?” I yelled.

“No,” he answered, and the word felt like a Swedish massage on my gnarled-up nerves.

I made my own way down the slope. It made me a little queasy to see blood soaking Pop's jeans from a nasty-looking cut on his leg, but even worse was how helpless he looked: unconscious, with his Adam's apple sticking up like a shark's fin from his stretched-out neck. I put a couple of trembling fingers against the place where a vein was twitching. “Feels regular, I think. He doesn't seem to be in shock.” I wasn't sure what “in shock” looked like, but first-aid manuals always mention that accident victims should have their feet elevated, if possible, so blood can flow to the head and un-shock them. Pop was already lying that way— his blood should have been flowing like the Mississippi.

“Don't move anything,” Howard said. “I'll get my phone and call an ambulance. You stay here and watch him—”

Like I would go anywhere? While he climbed back up to the road, I felt around in my pockets for something to
fan with, and came up with a Cannonball Paul postcard. “First help you've been,” I muttered to the picture, fanning hard at the base of the helmet so the air could get to Pop's face. I saw his Adam's apple bob. Then he sneezed—not a little achoo, but a great big honking
ahhhh-CHOO
that made the helmet bounce. While I stared at him, he reached up and pulled it off, then lay there blinking at me.

“What are you doing here?”

Nice greeting, but that's Pop for you. While I flapped my lips trying to come up with an answer, he bent his elbows on the ground, like he was intending to sit up.

“No, don't!” I cried. “You might break—”

He just sat up anyhow, favoring his right side and making faces like he was being tortured. Howard skidded down the slope, with his phone in one hand and a Kansas map in the other, stopping himself so short he almost tumbled over on us. “Whoa! You're not—I mean—should you be sitting up, Mr. Hazeltine?”

“I'm sitting, aren't I?” No just-call-me-Jack small talk now.

“Pop, what happened?”

“Durn rock on the road. I must have been dozier than I thought or else I would have seen it. Front wheel slewed, I lost control, ended up—well, you see.”

Howard spread his map on the grass. “I'm fixing to call 911. Where are we?”

“Don't bother with an ambulance. All I am is sore. I just need a minute to get back on my feet.”

“Pop—” I began.

“Mr. Hazeltine, you could have internal injuries you
don't know about. You could be bleeding like a stuck pig inside. One time my uncle turned his tractor over and—”

“Spare me the cautionary tales.” Pop bent his knees, steadied his two feet under him and his left hand behind him, and rose bit by bit. It seemed to go fine until he wobbled, and put out his right hand to grab my shoulder, and made a noise halfway between a groan and a scream. Leo, who was still on the bank looking down on us like an anxious mama, pricked up his ears and whimpered.

“What's wrong?” I gasped.

“Sharp pain—here.” Pop was gasping, too, one hand on his left side.

“Might be a rib broken.” Howard probably didn't mean to sound this way, but there was a definite
a-ha
tone in his voice. “That's what happened to my uncle. You'd better get an X-ray, at least—”

“All
right
. But put away the phone. We can get there quicker in your truck.” Pop was already on the way, climbing the slope with his right arm out for balance.

Howard fiddled with his cell phone, as though tempted to call 911 anyway, but I just shook my head. “You don't know how stubborn he is.”

“Hey.” Pop was almost at the top of the slope when he turned around. “Can y'all bring up my bike?”

It wasn't a big monster Harley, just a medium-weight, buzz-around Yamaha, but try dragging one uphill sometime. Howard took a lot more than his share—“This is nothing, next to horsing hay bales around”—but even he was puffing pretty hard when it came to hoisting the thing into the truck bed.

Leo was pacing the width of the bed, and I could almost swear he grinned at the sight of his old traveling buddy. The bike, I mean, not Pop.

We had to backtrack a couple of miles to a convenience store where we could ask directions, but soon we were on our way to relief—for Pop, anyway. He sat between us in the cab, wincing with every bump. Leo trotted from one side of the pickup bed to the other, making the rear end sway like a hula dancer's hips.

“What's the matter with that mutt?” Pop grumbled.

“It's a good thing we had him along,” I told him. “He's the one who saw you in the ditch and made us stop.”

Pop turned his head in my direction, but his neck was so stiff he couldn't turn it far. “Will wonders never cease,” he said—and the funny thing was, he didn't sound sarcastic at all.

At the Ellis County Hospital, the emergency-room hustle and bustle was just like when Mama went in for her knee. Funny to think that happened only two weeks ago. The cut on Pop's leg had to be sewn up, and the X-ray showed hairline fractures on two ribs. Not too bad, the ER doc admitted, but he still insisted on consulting a specialist about possible internal injuries. Pop was fully alert through it all, and able to answer all those next-of-kin questions himself. When they asked him about insurance, he just took a wad of cash out of his wallet and slapped it down on the desk. “Who needs insurance?”

My eyes bugged out—my grandpa was
loaded
.

After he was bandaged up, we all sat in the waiting
room while the specialist was supposed to be looking at Pop's X-rays. The lull only reminded us of our bigger problem, that Gee was still missing. When Howard's cell phone rang, all three of us jumped. He fumbled it out of his shirt pocket, finally answering, “Hey?” Then he said, “Hold on, sir,” and moved the phone away from his mouth. “It's the highway patrol.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I didn't get a chance to tell you, Pop, but the clerk back at the truck stop called them, and—”

Pop took the phone, with a grimace-y look at me, and for the next few minutes we heard, “Yes … No … Uh-huh … Right…” All the good stuff was on the other end of the conversation. But then he said, “I don't know about that. … I understand, but… Well, as to that, here's the person you should talk to.” With no further warning, he stuck the phone at me.

I took a breath. “Um … hello?”

The voice on the other end sounded frazzled. “Who's this?” I told him. “Oh. Ronnie, this is Officer Hadley I'm the one who talked to you at Trucker's Rest.” After my assurance that I remembered him well, he went on to say that they'd really expected me to stay put so they could reach me easily, but since I didn't—

“I'm sorry,” I said, hoping to speed this up a little.

“Well, anyway, I'm at the county fairgrounds, where I just talked to Mr. Dominic.”

“Excuse me?”

“Better known as Cannonball Paul,” he said impatiently. While I blinked in surprise that a human cannonball even had a last name, Officer Hadley went on to say that
Mr. Dominic was astounded to hear he was a kidnapping suspect, and more than willing to have his trailer searched. The patrolman admitted that Paul could have been hiding Gee elsewhere. But he, Officer Hadley, had been in this business a long time and knew all the standard ways people acted when they were trying to cover up, and Mr. Dominic seemed like the real deal. So—

I'd been trying to break in for the last three sentences at least. “But… But, sir … Just a minute …” Finally, silence at the other end. “What I'm trying to say is, I don't think Gee was kidnapped. He volunteered.”

After a pause, the patrolman said, “Yeah, you told us. Frankly, it's a little hard to believe, and even if he did stow away on that trailer, I don't know how we could have missed him. Officer Garcia and I went through every conceivable hiding place.”

I could have told him about the time Gee squirreled himself away in the wheel well of our dad's truck when he was only two, but didn't want to get sidetracked. So while he went on about the unlikelihood of the thing, I stood up and paced all the way to the opposite side of the waiting room, trying to think what to do now. “Anyway,” the patrolman was saying, “I just called to let you know. How long can you be reached at this number?”

Howard was tilting his chair against the wall with his arms folded. I made a guess: “Um … at least until six.”

“Okay, let me give you my number. Got a pencil?” After taking the number down, I walked back to return the phone.

Pop was sitting one seat over from Howard, with my
empty chair between them, and as I came nearer he looked more and more like a stranger.
Old
, for one thing—still kind of gray in the face, with sagging shoulders and a something in his eyes that the pain left there. It made me feel kind of responsible. At the beginning of this trip, it seemed like he owed us, like he had some grandfatherly dues. Mama sure thought so. But maybe the credit balance was more on his side now.

I gave the phone back to Howard and sat down, trying to think what to say to Pop. “Uh … I hope you know … Gee's not a bad kid, it's just—”

“He's like me,” said my grandfather.

“Huh?”

“I was just like that, only my family wasn't so long-suffering. That's why I spent two years at the Collins County Boys' Home.”

“The … Collins County …”

“Reform school.”

“Whoa,” Howard said under his breath, just before getting up to visit the men's room or whatever.

Kent Clark has a whole chapter on Conceptualizing Conflicts: it's about how to understand where people are coming from so you can work with or around them. But this floored me. What did Pop do to get stuck in a reform school? And did he get all the way reformed? I had to ask: “Are you, like, an ex-con?”

He sighed. “Here's the story. At twelve I accepted stolen merchandise my best friend cadged from a hardware store. At thirteen I robbed the hardware store myself. At
fourteen I stole a car and drove it into a telephone pole. That's when my folks gave up and the court took over.”

“Does Mama know about this?” I was wondering if she'd have let us go on a road trip with him if she had.

“Look, Ronnie, I learned my lesson. Crime doesn't pay. So I got my life straightened out and stayed out of trouble, and there was never any reason to bother your mother about it.”

So why bother
me
about it? He must have been more shook up than I'd thought. “Pop … if you knew what Gee was like—because that's what you were like—then why did you turn your RV around that day and come back to Partly for us?”

He didn't say anything for the longest time. Then, slowly, he reached around to his back pocket and pulled out a square of folded paper. Unfolded, it turned out to be a piece of light blue construction paper with a picture drawn in colored felt-tip markers.

Even though Mama and I could write the book on felt-tip markers and what happens when they get into the wrong hands, I had to admit it was a cute picture: a house with windows and a chimney, with smoke coming out of the chimney in a pig's-tail curl. Just the way every kid draws a house, except this one was on wheels and had a box stuck on one side that looked a little like a truck cab. Inside the box was a grinning face with a cowboy hat.

Stapled to the upper corner was a typewritten note from Gee's Vacation Bible School teacher at Partly Baptist Church. The note said, “Dear parent, Today in our discussion time we talked about our families. Each child in the
class drew a member of his or her family and shared what that person meant to him or her. We helped each child think of one thing they appreciated about that family member, and give thanks for him or her. Your child wanted you to have this.”

Under the vehicle was printed, “My Pop is strong and loud and chases wind. He drives a big shiny truck. He won it being a hard body. When I grow up I want to be like him. Thank you God. Love, Gee Sparks.” The printing was so neat I knew somebody else wrote it, but
Gee Sparks
was in my brother's own hand.

Pop said, “I found this on my bunk, that first night after I left your house.”

And it melted his frosty heart. The funny thing is, all this time I thought he'd softened up and come back for us in spite of Gee. But no—it was
because
of Gee.

Expect the unexpected.

I looked up to see a nurse standing in front of us with a clipboard, saying, “Mr. Hazeltine, Dr. Achmed thinks it would be wise for you to check in for some tests—”

“Tests,” Pop repeated. “What kind? Spelling tests? IQ_ tests?”

Her smile twisted to one side. “In accidents like this, there's often internal bleeding or fractures that the victim—”

“The only bleeding I'm concerned about right now is in my bank account.”

Everybody in the waiting room was staring at us. I grabbed his sleeve and tugged on it, like I do when Gee's acting up.

“Mr. Hazeltine,” the nurse began in a low voice, “I don't think you appreciate the ramifications of…”

Pop turned his face halfway toward me and winked— seriously, even though it was only a little tip of an eyelid. Then he murmured, “Go get the truck.”

I took off as Pop raised his voice to say, “I appreciate how much a Band-Aid goes for around here, not to mention a test. Now, what did you bloodsuckers do with my
hat
?”

I turned a corner and ran into Howard, who was studying the contents of a vending machine. “We're outta here,” I panted.

Less than five minutes later, we pulled up to the ER entrance, and there was Pop, hat in hand.