The Middle of Somewhere (6 page)

When it got too dark to see them, we went back to our campsite. Pop sent us to the camp shower—a disappointment to Gee, who wanted to take an itty-bitty shower in the RV. But the long day and the crustacean experience had settled him down, and he was mostly quiet and polite about it. Also about getting his jammies on while I made up the sofa (for me) and the dinette seat (for him). And sometime during the night, he quietly and politely wet the bed.

He's almost stopped doing that, but sometimes slips up in a new environment, or when he's upset or worried or scared. At first, I forgot about turning my negatives into positives. “How
could
you?” I hissed at him, gathering up the sheet before Pop could see it. “Now I have to figure out some way to do laundry.” Gee stuck his thumb in his mouth, which he hasn't done for years.

Kent Clark says not to major in minors—meaning don't freak out over details. Pulling out Gee's thumb, I said, “It'll be okay. Better than okay—once you get used to traveling, it'll be fun. You'll just have to … you know, practice thinking before you kiss crawdads or scream or…” I
wasn't sure how he'd practice not wetting the bed. “Anyway, you'll do better next time, right?”

I stuffed the sheet in one of the RV's outside compartments and sponged off the dinette mattress. Then I found eggs and bacon in the fridge and cooked them up to order (scrambled, a little on the wet side; bacon crisp). Pop was in a good mood when we hit the road.

Gee was feeling good, too, after crunching down four slices of bacon—but a lot more fidgety than the day before. After only fifteen minutes, he was unbuckling his seat belt for the least little reason, like to straighten the pockets on his jeans. Pop was feeling talky, so while one side of me was listening to him explain all his vitamin and mineral supplements and why he took them, the other side was making signals and frowny faces at the backseat.

Fortunately, we didn't have far to go—less than an hour. Gee had taken the laces out of his shoes and was making a noose when Pop steered into a shady parking lot in front of a red-brick building. “… so the chelation cleans all the metals out of my system,” Pop was explaining. “You'll have to listen to that tape sometime, Ronnie. You wouldn't believe all the heavy metal that's floating around in your body.”

“Wow,” I replied, making a lunge for Gee, who'd just stuck his head in the noose and pulled it, making his eyes cross and his tongue poke out. No telling what was floating around in his body.

Pop reached behind the seat for his hat and a briefcase. “This is the science building,” he told us. “The meeting
will probably last an hour or so, so why don't y'all… take a walk. Be good.”

I waited until he was almost out of sight before letting my brother loose, and Gee barreled down the sidewalk so fast he almost knocked over a lady with a baby stroller. “Sorry,” I gasped while chasing after him. I'd almost caught up when we turned a corner and ran smack into a glorious sight: a fountain splashing in a shady plaza. An inspiration flashed in my brain that would have made Kent Clark proud. Every downside has an upside!

Gee attacked the fountain the way he sometimes attacks playground equipment (I've seen smaller kids flee in terror). Catching him just before he took the plunge, I said, “Hold it! We've got something to do first.”

Back at the RV, I pulled the damp sheet from the storage compartment and poured a little detergent into a jar. “We're going to use the fountain as a washing machine. You can be the agitator.”

“What's that?”

“That thing in the machine that stirs up the water.”

“Cool!”

In the fountain he tried out at least a dozen agitator moves, but what worked best was jumping up and down while the white sheet billowed under his feet like a cloud. The detergent was a little sudsier than I expected and got us more attention from passersby than I was looking for, but otherwise it worked great. Gee went snorkeling (as he called it) while I wrung out the laundry and spread it over a bush to dry. That also worked until a passing dog took off with it. The upside of
that
was giving Gee something else
to do, namely chase the dog around the fountain while I rinsed the dirtiest corner of the sheet. This day was showing more upsides than a skillet full of pancakes.

When Pop found us, we were sitting on a bench near the RV with a dampish bedsheet spread out behind us. He didn't appear to notice it. He'd had a good morning, too; there was a spring in his step and a new laptop tucked under his arm. “Head 'em up and move 'em out!” he said. “We're on our way!”

Back in the RV, I gave Gee an orange to peel, along with his lunchbox of cars and gladiators. If we were lucky, we might get through another day without breaking out Mad Mechanix. When he'd eaten half the orange, he made a slingshot out of a rubber band and used it to shoot seeds and bits of peel at his gladiators. Little “pow”s and “bam”s came from the dinette as we left Pittsburg, heading west.

Pop chuckled in a grandfatherly manner. “I wish he'd sell me some of that energy.”

Actually, I've often wished I could sell Gee's energy. “Do you think it's possible to use kid-power somehow? Like with a treadmill?”

That earned another chuckle. “If power could be generated that way, I'd be making a fortune in hamsters. In the old days, treadmills were used to turn fireplace spits and simple machines, but we've moved way beyond that now. If you had ten little brothers like Gee, that could add up to something.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, “my funeral.”

Pop laughed out loud—he sure was feeling good. “Hear that, Gee?” At the moment, my brother was playing demolition-derby-in-the-Colosseum, and didn't hear it.
“You know,” Pop went on, “he just seems like a normal boy to me. Sure, he gets a little out of hand sometimes, but I don't think it's anything some old-fashioned discipline can't fix. I could tell you stories about myself at that age. …”

I glanced back in time to see Gee aiming a matchbox car at us with a rubber band, which made me lunge toward him and slash a finger across my throat. He knows what that means.

“Before we head out west,” Pop said, “let's be tourists. There's a sight I want to see a little ways south of here.”

Up till now, I'd thought that “tourists” went to see sights like Buckingham Palace and the pyramids. “What is it, Pop?”

“A shovel.”

He grinned, so I knew there was more to it. There
had
to be more to it. “Cool! Is it very far?”

“About an hour and a half. You want to rustle up some sandwiches for us?”

That gave me something to do—and Gee, too, since I usually let him make his own sandwich. The rule is, if he makes it, he has to eat it, even if it's peanut butter and ketchup with bananas. The whole lunch thing took about forty minutes, after which Gee settled down with his eyelids at half-mast. That left me free to watch the scenery.

While Pop was explaining to me how the medical establishment was in cahoots with the drug companies, I began to notice Kansas looking less like Missouri. The roads were straighter, like they'd been drawn with a ruler. They went on longer, too. We drove due west for miles and miles, then made a sharp left to go south. I lost count of
how many sharp turns we made until I started seeing signs that pointed the way to “Big Brutus.” “What's that?” I asked.

“That's our destination,” he said with another grin.

Thinking this might be better than it had sounded at first, I looked back at Gee, who was beginning to stir out of sleep mode. “Did you hear that? We're going to see a shovel named Big Brutus!”

He blinked a couple of times. “A big shovel? You mean like Mike Mulligan?”

“Right!” Mike Mulligan's steam shovel was so far back—like in kindergarten—I'd forgotten about that happy-jawed hunk of iron crunching up rock. But I was glad to be reminded. Now I had some idea what to expect.

Except I didn't.

First of all, this thing is out in the middle of
nowhere
. We're driving by open fields and little towns with water towers, wondering how much farther, and then all of a sudden it's THERE, rearing up behind a row of rooftops. It's an orange-backed monster with one huge black arm reaching up (“That's the boom,” said Pop) and another one reaching down (“That's the dipper stick—it operates the shovel part”). The whole machine just kind of jumped up against the sky, so sudden I was speechless for a minute. But that's nothing: so was Gee.

More turns, more straight roads and gulpy views, until finally we pulled into a parking lot facing an open field, with a pond and a visitor center—and Big Brutus himself, in all his jaw-droppingness, tall as a skyscraper way out here on the Kansas plains. Pop grabbed his camera.

Gee couldn't wait to get at it, even though the machine looked like it could eat him alive and not even burp. But Pop is the type who likes to “orient” himself, meaning at least half an hour in the visitor center looking over the exhibits and letting us know what he learned. “Hey, kids! It says the bucket holds ninety cubic yards!” “Listen to this: the body of the steam shovel is sixteen stories high!” Meanwhile, I was chasing Gee from window to window and blocking doors to keep him in.

The postcard rack distracted him for a while; he couldn't decide which card to send to Mama first. His favorite was the one with a cowboy sitting on a giant jackrabbit over the caption
Herding Cattle in Kansas
, but I told him we should send pictures of things we were really seeing. “And jackrabbits don't grow that big here—or anywhere.”

He rolled his eyes. “I know that. But it's funny, and Mama could use a laugh.”

I sometimes forget—he's weird, but he's not stupid. So I agreed to the jackrabbit, and since cards were three for a dollar we each picked one with Brutus on it. To kill more time while Pop was chatting up the salesclerk, I dragged Gee over to the brochure rack. “Look—here's all the cool stuff in Kansas we might be able to see. Rock City, Wizard of Oz Museum, World's Largest Hand-Dug Well. Or how about the World's Largest Ball of Twine …?”

“What's this?” He pounced on a card at one end of a row. The full-color picture on the front showed a man in a silvery outfit with a golden helmet under one arm. That's
all I could tell with Gee waving the card in front of my face. “It says
Human Cannon
!”

“Hold still.” I snatched the card out of his hand and read,
The Blazing, Amazing Cannonball Paul! Limited Engagement! See back for dates and locations
.

“But what is it?” Gee demanded. “What's a Human Cannon?”

“Cannon
ball
. It's a guy who goes around getting himself shot out of a gun.” I pointed to the huge rifle-barrel thing behind the man.

My brother's eyes went big and round. “You mean over and over? Like, he never gets killed?”

“Of course he doesn't get killed. He knows how to do it.” As a career choice, though, it was definitely weird.

Our grandfather called, “Y'all ready to see Big Brutus?”

“Pop!” Gee grabbed the card from my hand and bounded over. “We've gotta see this guy!”

“What's that?” Pop glanced at the front of the card, then turned to the schedule of dates on the back. “Maybe. If we're in one of these places at the right time.”

That wasn't good enough for Gee, who kept pestering him all the way out of the visitor center.

I stayed behind to pay for the postcards, while the clerk gushed at me, “You kids are going to have a great time seeing Kansas—you're lucky to have such a nice grandfather!”

That must have been some impression he made on her. She looked like a sensible lady, aside from a heavy hand with the mascara. I couldn't stay to talk, though; Gee might at that very moment be driving our nice grandfather to distraction.

I'd learned from the visitor-center exhibits that Brutus was built right where it stands (being too big to move). There used to be a lot of coal here, and Brutus's job was to remove the rock and dirt on top of the coal so smaller shovels could get at it. Once the coal was gone, Brutus didn't have anything to do. Instead of scrapping it, the mining company donated the shovel and the land it was on to some local organization that fixed it up for tours.

Pop sure did like a tour. He stopped at every single site listed in the self-guiding brochure and read the explanation out loud. Stop number one was the bucket, or “dipper, which held ninety cubic yards or approximately one hundred forty tons of material.” Area-wise, the dipper was as big as our living room and almost twice as high.

Gee was acting sulky—he and Pop had probably had words about Cannonball Paul—so he refused to stand with me in the dipper to have our picture taken. But the iron teeth that stuck out from the lower jaw might have spooked him a little; in fact, now that he was up close and personal with this humongous thing, he seemed subdued—as if its sheer size had packed him into a ball of subduedness.

Once we were
inside
the humongous thing, though, he started expanding again. Inside Big Brutus is an ADHD fun house: rollers, gears, cables, ladders, and lots of portholes labeled KEEP OUT.