Scumble (10 page)

I leaned against a row of mailboxes across the street, not realizing my error until too late, when I toppled them all—seven in one blow. I fell with them, making a raucous racket.

The din brought Sarah Jane to her window. She opened the circular pane set into the small tower at the very top of the old house and leaned out, shaking her head.

Hobbled and kicking, I picked myself up, trying to be cool even though my left foot was trapped inside one of the curved aluminum mailboxes. I may have gotten free of Cabot's side-show study, but I still looked like a clown in a three-ring circus. All I needed was a banana peel, an exploding cigar, and a human cannon launcher. Then my life would be complete.

T
HE MOMENT HE STEPPED AROUND THE side of his truck, Autry found me stuck up to my knee in the Cabots' reinforced mailbox. My uncle stopped and stared, scrubbing his face with one hand. I guessed he might've been rethinking my potential for any future savvy
finesse
.

“If that's the worst damage done here today”—Autry nodded toward the mailboxes—“I think we can count ourselves lucky. Do you think you can make it back to the ranch in the truck?” Autry's voice was rigid, but a corner of his mouth had begun to twitch.

I looked down and shook my leg again. A stifled snort erupted from my uncle. It took a moment before I realized that Autry was doing his darndest not to bust a gut and guffaw out loud.

“Can you can make it a few miles without, you know—” He waved a hand toward the scattered rubble around me, still trying not to howl with laughter. “Without
recycling
my truck?” Autry did what he could to compose himself as I stared at him without a lick of humor. One look back at the Cabot house did the trick, sobering him fast. I hadn't made out the words that passed between him and Mr. Cabot, but I'd heard enough of the tone to know there'd been an argument.

“Any idea how I might go about doing that?” I asked, sitting down on the pavement to pry the mailbox from my leg. If I was going to learn to control my new anti-talent in time to get back home before school and the father-son half marathon in the fall, I was going to require some concrete advice. I was willing to give anything a try. If my uncle told me sit on my hands, cross my eyes, and sing “Yankee Doodle” with a peanut shell up my nose, I would've given it a shot. But Autry's reply was even less helpful than a nostril full of salted nuts.

“You'll put it together, Ledge. At some point you'll figure out what you need to learn from this savvy of yours and then everything will get a little easier. I promise.” Holding out a hand, he hooked his thumb around mine and pulled me up from the ground. Then he kicked the rest of the mailboxes out of the street before climbing into the truck.

I followed my uncle, crossing fingers and toes, hoping that God or luck or sheer force of will might keep the automobile intact.

Turning the key in the ignition, Autry spared one last look at the hulking Cabot house and the collection of stumps surrounding it, letting his gaze linger on the highest branches of the tall white birch. Sarah Jane was still at her window, pencil in hand, scribbling rapid notes. Then she leaned forward, long braids dangling over the windowsill, and called out:

“Hey, Ledge! I'm signing you up for a free issue of
The Sundance Scuttlebutt
! But the next edition might take a while. It's going to be a super-duper humdinger!”

Free issue
. I snuffed out a breath. Meeting Sarah Jane had already cost me plenty. Money, candy, comics, Grandma's jar, and
my entire future
should've been enough to foot the bill for a lifetime subscription if I'd wanted one—which I
didn't
.

Autry shook his head, giving me a look of warning. “I don't know what drove you to run all the way to town today, Ledge,” he said. “But it's best you stay away from Sarah Jane from here on out, got it? Noble doesn't want you, me, or anyone else like—” He stopped before finishing his sentence, roughly jamming the truck into gear before turning it around, tires kicking gravel—
ping, clang, ping
—against Mr. Cabot's prison-like fence. “Well, he just doesn't want anyone around his daughter, that's all.”

“What about
Mrs
. Cabot?” I asked, remembering the portrait above Mr. Cabot's desk. “Doesn't she want SJ to have any friends?”

“Is that why you ran all the way to Sundance?” My uncle sounded surprised. “To make friends with Sarah Jane?” Suddenly, his expression changed. His eyebrows shot up and his mouth formed a silent
oh.

“I think I understand now,” he said. “The sheriff said something about both of you being at Willie's Saturday when things . . . er . . . fell apart?” Autry coughed once meaningfully, glancing sidelong at me as he drove us out of town. “Did all that five-and-dime damage happen when you met Sarah Jane?” He flashed me a quick grin. “You know, Ledge, I used to get nervous around the ladies too. Sarah Jane is a pretty gir—”

“Aaagh! No! It's not like that.” I cut my uncle off before I had to find the nearest mine shaft and dive in headfirst. Heat rose up my neck, flooding my face, and the
Welcome to Sundance
sign spun like a pinwheel on its remaining bolt as we passed it.

“Y-you've got it all wrong,” I spluttered. My stomach flip-flopped like a fish caught in the jaws of a bear. I didn't want to talk about what happened at the five-and-dime. I didn't want my uncle thinking I was sweet on Sarah Jane either. But when the unbidden memory of kissing Sarah Jane popped into my head like a horror-movie monster trying to eat my brain, the connection between my gray matter and my vocal cords was temporarily severed. The dashboard panels inside the truck began to rattle. And when a radio knob flew off and hit me in the nose, Autry was at least kind enough to flinch instead of laugh.

Embarrassment, anger, pain, fear, frustration—I had my very own trigger-happy Wild Bunch gang of emotions. Pinching my nose where the knob had hit it, I took a deep breath through my mouth and let it out slow, determined to pull myself together.

“I found Sarah Jane's notebook,” I explained slowly, trying to keep my voice steady as I spoke the partial truth. I pulled the small notebook from the pocket of my cargo shorts and held it up. “It has her address in it. See?” I showed my uncle the cover, then flipped through some of the pages.

“I just thought I'd return it to her . . . and make sure the sheriff found her Saturday night.”

Autry raised an eyebrow. Stopping to let a rafter of wild turkeys cross the road, he took Sarah Jane's notebook from me to read what she'd written above a wacky sketch of a horse wearing shorts, suspenders, and a jaunty feathered hat.

“How in the world is Hal Gunderson training his mare to yodel in time for the county fair?” Autry murmured. We were quiet for several minutes as he appeared to consider the idea of Mr. Gunderson's horse performing a whinnying
yodel-eedle-idle
in front of a fairground crowd. Shaking himself as the last gobbler cleared the highway, Autry laughed abruptly, like he'd just thought of the answer to a riddle that had been bugging him for months.

“Maybe Sarah Jane takes after her mom after all,” he said as he handed the notebook back to me.

“Takes after her
dad
, you mean,” I corrected him, sticking the notebook full of bunk back into my pocket. “Have you
seen
her dad's collection?”

Autry's face fell into a scowl, his foot heavy on the gas pedal as we passed the foreclosure sign in front of Neary's Auto Salvage Acres.

“I've been watching Cabot's ‘collection' get bigger every day,” he muttered.

Then, in a louder voice: “Well, Ledge, I'm sure Summer Cabot looked down from above, glad to know that you were watching out for her daughter. But since
Noble
Cabot's the one we all have to worry about—”

“Down from above?” I echoed. “Sarah Jane's mom is dead?”

Keeping his eyes on the road, my uncle shifted in his seat. His answer came slow and his words were measured: “Summer's been in the earth for some time,” he said. “She got sick when Sarah Jane was just knee-high, and . . . well . . .” He trailed off. It was only then that I remembered that Autry's own wife was buried in the town cemetery too.

“. . . And people don't always get better,” I finished for him, feeling like a bonehead for bringing up the subject. “Sorry,” I added as an afterthought. Autry dipped his head to the side, but said nothing more. I wondered if he was thinking of Summer Cabot's passing or his own wife's. From what I could tell from my brief run-in with Noble Cabot, it was the only thing he and my uncle had in common.

“Look, I don't have many rules for the summer, Ledge,” he said at last. “But this is one: Stay away from the Cabots. I'm sure Sarah Jane can find herself a new notebook. Promise me you'll steer clear of her after today.”

“I promise I'll never put a shoe inside the Cabots' house again.” I raised my hand and vowed. It wasn't the exact promise Autry had been looking for, but seeing the remaining radio knob begin to spin, he let the subject drop.

I
SPENT THE NEXT FEW DAYS ignoring Fedora and the nut-mix of cousins I was stuck with for the summer. I woke at dawn every morning, just like Rocket. While my cousin did his best to move quietly around his small house, I did my best to stay on his good side by pretending to be asleep until he was gone.

When I wasn't running, restlessness chewed on me the way Bitsy chewed on rawhide. Not wanting to risk my uncle's phone or computer, I didn't talk to my parents when they called or ask to e-mail my friends. Josh, Ryan, and Brody were probably too busy riding bikes and water coasters to even notice I was gone.

Alone, I moped around the ranch, pitching pinecones into the river or climbing the birch trees in the glade. I constructed stone towers and knocked them over. I even built a fort. But when a squirrel leaped onto my lean-to of fallen branches, the whole thing fell in on my head. Rounding out its imitation of me, the shaken squirrel took off running.

Wanting to avoid another disaster of my own, I kept my distance from the main house, Rocket's potting shed, and the orchard of bee boxes in the meadow. Once, I got too close to the conservatory and Marisol levitated me six inches off the ground, while Mesquite propelled me in the opposite direction.

Even as I did everything I could to avoid the Bug House, Gypsy was drawn to it like it was built for her. She spent hours watching the butterflies inside, or picking flowers in the meadows around it. With her thirteenth birthday still a few months off, I could only guess what sort of savvy Gypsy might get. I pictured my cousin blowing out her birthday candles and sprouting pixie wings, shrinking down to the size of Thumbelina to spend the rest of her life living on a toadstool surrounded by dandelions and daisies, farting glitter and singing
kumbaya
.

Autry lit the evenings with enormous, crackling campfires, staving off the rapid cool down of the Wyoming summer nights, while keeping me away from the main house at the same time. By our third night at the ranch, Fedora was in full fire-safety mode:

“Always build campfires away from dry grass and leaves, Uncle Autry!”

“Do we have enough water handy?”

“What about a shovel?”

“It's all good, Fe,” Autry laughed. My uncle was in a good mood. That morning, he'd received another over-night delivery box, this one filled with butterfly chrysalides. He'd spent all day inside the Bug House, as happy as me when I got my first Transforminator toy on my sixth birthday.

Grandpa Bomba dozed in his armchair, holding his helmet full of golden jar lids. According to Gypsy, Samson was never far from Grandpa, even when Marisol and Mesquite lifted him in that chair and gently sent him wherever he wanted to go. Already, I'd seen Grandpa sitting in the shade of the big cottonwood by the river, out in the meadow, and in a clearing high on the north ridge, where he swore he could see all the way to the massive stone columns of Devil's Tower.

“I always dreamed of moving that monument closer to the ranch,” Grandpa had chuckled when I found him there. “But now I couldn't budge that rock more than an inch or two—not even with help.”

While Grandpa napped comfortably in his soft chair by the fire, the rest of us sat on sawn-off stumps, spearing tofu dogs on the ends of sticks and roasting them black over the fire. Fingers licked clean, Marisol and Mesquite cleared everyone's dishes without getting up, floating plates and cups up and over the fire, stacking the dirty dishes on the picnic table. It killed me to watch the twins control their talents so easily. I had to remind myself that they'd started levitating things before they'd learned to read. But their skills still made me stew. Not only was their control perfect, their talents were
useful
.

To distract myself from the twins' excess of awesome and my total lack of it, I concentrated on the pages of Sarah Jane's notebook, straining to read by the light of the fire.

“What's that you got, Ledge?” asked Marisol. I lifted my head. Everyone was looking at me. I closed Sarah Jane's notebook fast.

“Are you keeping a diary these days?” asked Mesquite. “Or writing love letters to some unfortunate girl in Indiana?”

My face burned as I tried to cram the notebook back into my pocket, but the thing jerked and tugged in my hand as the twins tried to levitate it away from me. The girls managed to free the cover, tearing it from the spiral binding.

“
The Sundance Scuttlebutt
?” Marisol howled as she read what was written there, the name of Sarah Jane's newspaper acid in her eye. “How did you get this?”