Runaways (14 page)

“What?” Mr. Smithson stared down at the bicycle and then up at Dani. It was obvious that he either didn’t believe his ears, or just didn’t believe Dani. “But she was here just an hour or so …” He stopped, pulled up his sleeve, glanced at his watch and then, turning to his wife, he went on, “… just a few hours ago.”

“But she was only beginning to learn how to ride,” the woman said. She stepped out past Dani onto the veranda, looking around as if she thought Dani was lying and Pixie was still out there somewhere in the darkness. “How could she have ridden …”

Dani was beginning to feel angry. “Well, she did,” she said shortly. “But she fell off and skinned her knees, so …”

“Fell off?” Mrs. Smithson’s voice was thin and quick. “Is she all right?”

“Well, she’s skinned up a little. But it’s not too bad. We put Mercurochrome on the skinned places. But it hurts when she bends her knees. She wants you to come in the car to get her. And we came all the way out here to tell you. On her bicycle.”

“Yeah. On the Black Phantom.” It was the first time Stormy had spoken since the Smithsons had made their appearance. “We rode the Black Phantom.”

There was a long moment while the Smithsons looked at each other and then at Dani and Stormy. Before anyone got around to answering, Dani repeated, perhaps a little too impatiently, “We came to tell you she needs a ride. That’s why we rode all the way out here.”

At last Pixie’s mother sighed and, turning to her husband, she said, “I guess one of us had better drive in to town right away, Ivor.” She was starting to pull off her gloves as she said, “I’ll go. You’ll have to carry on without me.” Then to Dani she said, “Come on then. Just leave the bicycle here on the veranda.” She pulled some keys out of a pocket and set off toward one of the storage sheds, and Dani, after tugging Stormy loose from his grip on the Black Phantom, followed close behind her.

As soon as the weird-looking, high-wheeled automobile crept out of the storage shed with its headlights blazing, Mrs. Smithson called for Dani and Stormy to climb in beside her. To step up onto a kind of running board and from there up on to a smaller one, and then scramble into the wide front seat. When they were both in place she said, “All right. Here we go.” After that, while the tanklike car slithered across the bumpy, potholed yard and then started down the only slightly less bumpy Rattler Springs road, no one said anything at all.

Dani didn’t know why no one was talking. Of course Stormy was often pretty speechless around people he didn’t know very well. But, on the other hand, Dani usually wasn’t. Of course it was a rather weird experience to be riding with a strange woman in an even stranger car, but that wasn’t the kind of thing that usually made Dani hush up. As for Mrs. Smithson, Dani had no way of knowing if she was always so quiet. Probably not, Dani thought. But, at the moment, she did seem to have something very much on her mind.

The expression on Mrs. Smithson’s face made Dani think of the out-of-it stare Linda had when she was reading a book, or maybe Stormy’s when he was listening to a story. And watching Mrs. Smithson, Dani had a feeling that what she was thinking about probably wasn’t Pixie and her skinned knees. And it probably wasn’t about saying thank you to certain people for going to the trouble of riding all that way across the desert to let her know about her daughter’s accident. Dani had almost worked herself up enough to start bringing Mrs. Smithson’s attention to some of the things she might be thinking about, when the lights of Rattler Springs appeared on the horizon.

It wasn’t until they were almost there that Mrs. Smithson turned to Dani and said, “I’m sorry if Ivor and I seemed a bit doubtful about your story at first. And perhaps a bit out of touch with Portia’s activities. We’ve been particularly busy lately. That’s why we thought a bicycle would be helpful, give her something challenging to do.” Then with a weak smile she added, “We certainly would have noticed her absence sooner ordinarily, but this evening we were involved in …” She paused, and for just a moment her eyes once again had that strange gleam. “… involved in some especially important work, and I’m afraid the time got away from us.” Her smile was tight and brief. “And, I guess it just didn’t seem possible that Portia could have had time to ride all the way into Rattler Springs.”

“Yeah,” Dani said stiffly. “That’s okay.” And that was it. They had pulled to a stop in front of Dani’s house and Dani and Stormy were climbing down from the high seat when Pixie hobbled out the front door. Linda had come out onto the front porch too, but Mrs. Smithson only rolled down the window, waved to her and called, “Thanks ever so much, Mrs. O’Donnell. In a bit of a hurry just now. We’ll talk later.”

Pixie was chattering, of course, saying good-bye and thanks, in between a lot of dramatic moans and ouches, as she climbed up onto the seat. But no one else said much of anything. It wasn’t until later, when Dani and Stormy were safely back in the O’Donnells’ kitchen, that the real talking began.

At first the conversation included Linda. In fact for a while it was mostly Linda because Dani’s and Stormy’s mouths were too full. Particularly Stormy’s. Linda had made tamale pie, which was one of his favorites.

“What with all the excitement,” Linda said, “and worrying about Pixie’s poor little knees, it wasn’t until after you’d ridden off that I realized it would be way past dinnertime before you got back.”

Dani swallowed and said, “Me too. I didn’t even think about being hungry until we walked in the door and smelled the tamale pie.” She sighed. “I guess we had a lot of other stuff on our minds until then. Huh, Stormy?”

Stormy nodded, mumbled something and went on eating.

“It was a long way to ride, especially since you were both a bit out of practice.” Linda smiled ruefully. “It must be a couple of months since your poor old bike bit the dust.”

Dani held up four fingers and mumbled, “Four. Four months.”

“All right, four,” Linda said. “So your bicycle-riding muscles weren’t in the best of shape. But you made pretty good time. You must be very tired.”

More mumbling.

Linda asked some more questions about the ride and what the Smithsons had said when they heard about Pixie’s injuries, but at last she must have gotten tired of the mumbled answers because she excused herself and went into the living room to read. It wasn’t until then, while Stormy finished off the tamale pie, the rest of the canned peas and a couple of doughnuts, that the real talk about the ride began.

Dani finished eating, took a last sip of milk, sighed and said, “Well, the whole thing was pretty scary. Wasn’t it?”

Stormy nodded hard, rolling his eyes. Stuffing the second half of a doughnut in his mouth, he chewed, swallowed and said, “Real scary. I thought we might see one. You know, right then when the door opened, I thought it might be one.”

“One what?” Dani asked.

Stormy swallowed again and whispered, “A monster.”

Dani covered a grin with her napkin. Shaking her head, she said she guessed she hadn’t thought about that.

“You didn’t?” Stormy sounded amazed. “I did. It was awful.” He stared into space with unfocused eyes. “But the rest of it was okay. Riding the Black Phantom was”—he sighed—“okay.” He sighed again and went on, “I thought I’d never get to. I never thought I’d even get to see one.”

He got up then and went over to look in the cooking pots to see if there was anything left, and when they’d been scraped clean he started putting them in the sink. Dani went on sitting at the table, watching him and thinking about what he’d just said. He’d agreed that the ride had been scary, all right. But it obviously had scared the two of them in very different ways. Stormy had been frightened of what they might find when they got there but she herself had been afraid of … It took a minute to put it into words. What she had been afraid of was what might happen if for some reason they didn’t get there. If for some reason they’d been stuck out there in the desert. Just thinking about it made her shudder.

Watching Stormy scrubbing pots and pans, Dani suddenly giggled, remembering how frightened he’d been when they got to the ranch house yard, and what he’d just told her about thinking a monster might come to the door. Stormy, she told herself, was a really superstitious kid. Standing out there at the edge of the open desert and refusing to walk up to the only house in miles and miles because he actually believed a monster might come to the door. That was pretty superstitious, all right. But then she stopped giggling, remembering how he’d come along when she’d started off alone.

B
Y THE NEXT DAY
the muscles in Dani’s legs and back were pretty sore, and Stormy was walking strangely too.

“I’m stiff,” he told Dani and Linda. “Gus said he thought I needed a grease job.”

“Oh yeah, when did old Greasy Gus tell you that?” Dani asked.

“This morning, at the bar,” Stormy said. “I saw him in the bar.”

Linda raised her eyebrows at Dani and sighed. Dani knew what that meant. Linda didn’t like the way Stormy was allowed to spend so much time in the bar. “Why were you in the bar this morning?” she asked.

“To get some money,” Stormy said. “My mom gave me money for breakfast. I got a Butterfinger and some potato chips.”

Linda didn’t say anything but her lips tightened as she got down the box of oatmeal and poured it into a pan. Stormy was about to get a second breakfast of good, healthy oatmeal.

When the oatmeal was gone and Linda had gone off to work, Dani and Stormy went out to sit on the front porch, where, in the early morning, there was still a little bit of shade. They were planning to sit on the steps and talk, and maybe read another chapter of
The Jungle Book.
But the talk came first and most of it was about Pixie.

“I was really mad at her right at first,” Dani said. “I thought she just went ahead and got that really expensive bike with the money she’d promised us for tickets. I was so angry. Weren’t …”

What she had started to say was, “Weren’t you?” but remembering how Stormy had looked when he came into the house pushing the Black Phantom bicycle, she realized the fact that they’d just lost their ticket money probably hadn’t even occurred to him. At least not at that moment.

Actually he still wasn’t looking particularly angry. Worried, maybe. “Are you still mad at her?” he asked.

Dani sniffed. “Not much, I guess. Looks like she really didn’t plan for it to happen that way. Like, maybe she really didn’t figure her father would just up and buy her a bicycle instead of giving her the money.”

Stormy looked relieved. “I guess she didn’t.” He bit his lip, rolled his eyes and leaned forward to look up Silver Avenue. “I wonder when she’ll come back,” he said.

“Huh!” Dani said indignantly. “Is that all you can think about? Well, I guess I’ll just go on in then and find something better to do. And you can just—”

“No. No,” Stormy said. “Don’t go in. Let’s read the last chapter. Let’s see if Mowgli runs away.”

So Dani started to read but it was a long chapter and she noticed that Stormy wasn’t really into it, the way he usually was when he was being read to. Every once in a while she caught him leaning out to look past her up Silver Avenue. For some reason it bothered her a lot.

“Okay,” she said finally, when she caught him staring up the road for about the umpteenth time, “what did I just read? I’ll bet you weren’t even listening.”

“I was,” he said. “I was too. Mowgli and the wolf were talking about the tiger. But I was just looking …”

“Yeah? What were you looking for?”

Stormy did his guilty, squinty-eyed thing. “For the Black Phantom,” he confessed. “I was looking to see if she’s going to come on the Black Phantom.”

So Dani told him he could just go on out to the road then, and wait for his beloved Phantom. Or he could settle down and listen. But not both.

After that Stormy did stop looking, but Dani thought he was still listening because his ears seemed to be quivering. Sometimes in the past when she’d been reading a really exciting part Dani had thought she could see his ears quivering, but this time she wasn’t sure if his ears were tuned in to the story or to the whirr of bicycle wheels. It wasn’t until Shere Khan was about to be trampled to death by the buffalo that, for a little while at least, they both forgot about Pixie and the Black Phantom and started concentrating on the story.

It was a good thing they forgot too, because Pixie didn’t show up at all that day. And not the next day either. For those two days Stormy was at Dani’s house even more than ever, doing all his usual things. Things such as eating and bugging Dani to read to him. All his usual activities with a few more or less unusual ones thrown in for good measure—like running to the front window every few minutes and asking Dani over and over again if she thought Pixie was all right.

“Sure, she’s all right,” Dani kept telling him. “Why wouldn’t she be?” She went on, using her most sarcastic tone of voice. “If a person could die from skinned knees I’d have been dead years ago.”

“No. It’s not that.”

Dani frowned and shook her head disbelievingly. “You’re not still worrying about her folks chopping her up, are you?”

Stormy looked embarrassed. “No,” he said. “Course not.” But Dani didn’t know if she believed him.

“Look,” she told him. “Forget all that Frankenstein stuff. Okay? I mean, you saw her parents. Both of them. And they didn’t look anything like crazy scientists, did they?”

Stormy shook his head thoughtfully. “Nooo,” he said, dragging the word out in an uncertain way. “Not crazy, I guess. But strange. They did look kind of strange.”

Dani thought of saying that a lot of people had strange parents and that didn’t mean they were about to get chopped up into monster parts. But instead she just shrugged and changed the subject.

Pixie didn’t show up at all the rest of that day either, but when Linda came home from work she had news. She said that Pixie was fine and that she would be visiting tomorrow. All day tomorrow. “Mr. Smithson stopped by the bookstore this afternoon,” Linda said, “to ask if it would be all right if Portia spent the day with us tomorrow while he and Mrs. Smithson were away. He said her knees were healing up nicely, and they wanted to thank you for doing such a good job with the Mercurochrome.”