Runaways (2 page)

The book was called
White Fang
and the picture on the cover was of a wolfish-looking dog. It looked kind of interesting. At least a little bit better than some of the stuff Stormy brought her. Dani sighed. The trouble with Stormy was that he had a problem. Well, actually, a couple of problems that didn’t fit together worth a darn. On the one hand, he had this reading block. Like when Stormy looked at a word the letters got all mixed up so what he saw didn’t make much sense. But on the other hand he had this mad love affair with stories. Particularly stories about animals. Most of the time Stormy was a really active-type kid. He could run around for hours playing a stupid ball game, or chasing somebody who’d called him a bad name. But if someone was reading a story he’d do a complete personality switch. Listening to a story, Stormy Arigotti could sit still for so long you’d think he’d been turned to stone. You might, at least, if you didn’t notice his eyes. When Stormy was listening to a story there was something about his eyes that always reminded Dani of the sparklers kids play with on the Fourth of July.

When Stormy lunged at the book again, she held it up over her head, grinning at him teasingly. She was thinking about telling him to forget it. After all, if she was going to be running away in a few days, she was going to be too busy getting ready to sit around for hours reading out loud. She was still keeping the book away from him when she saw his face tighten with anger and she got ready, watching his fists, but most of all his feet. Stormy was a mean kicker when he got mad enough, and she had the scars on her shinbones to prove it. He was almost kicking mad, one more teasing grin would probably have done it, when Dani decided to cool it.

Handing the book back to him, she said, “Okay, here it is. And I’ll read it. But not now. After dinner. Okay?”

“Okay. After dinner.” Stormy’s snub-nosed face split into a jack-o’-lantern grin. “I’ll bring pretzels. Okay? Or Beer Nuts?”

“Okay, okay,” Dani muttered, and started on across the street to the historic old Jerky Joe cabin, where she and her mother had lived since right after they arrived in Rattler Springs. As usual, the sagging gate refused to open. Shoving and kicking it, she growled, “Grrreat. Just great.”

Right behind her Stormy was bouncing around like a clown on a pogo stick. “Which?” he kept saying. “Which?”

One more violent kick and Dani gave up on the gate and whirled to face him. “Which what?” she bellowed.

Sounding hurt and startled, Stormy whispered, “Pretzels or Beer Nuts?”

Dani stopped to think. She liked them both, but you could buy pretzels at the store and the only place in Rattler Springs where you could get Beer Nuts was on the counter at the Grand Hotel bar—where no juveniles were allowed. No juveniles, at least, except someone whose mother worked at the bar and looked the other way while her kid snuck in to snitch Beer Nuts.

“Okay, Beer Nuts,” she said. She watched Stormy clump happily off clutching his precious book and wondered how much money there’d be in her running-away fund if she had a nickel for every book she’d ever read to Stormy. Giving the stupid gate a final kick, she gave up and, walking down to the hole in the fence, she cut across the pitiful remains of a lawn and up the front steps and banged open the screen door. As she crossed the tiny combination living room-bedroom a voice called, “Dani. Is that you?”

The voice belonged, of course, to Dani’s mother, Linda, who at the moment was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a book.

“There you are,” she said as Dani entered the room. “I was beginning to wonder.”

“Oh yeah?” Dani asked. It crossed her mind to say that she was surprised to hear that a certain person had pulled her nose out of her book long enough to notice that her one and only kid was missing. But she didn’t. Instead she went to the sink, rummaged around for a halfway clean glass, ran some lukewarm water and drank it, looking over the rim at her mother.

Linda O’Donnell was a pale, wispy woman who might have been almost pretty if she’d halfway tried. Tried to dress in something modern, for instance, instead of the long, saggy, flowery things she usually wore. And if she’d comb her flyaway hair once in a while and put on a little lipstick, which she might have time to do if she didn’t waste so much time listening to soap operas on the radio. Not to mention reading dumb books about rich people, or else about poor girls who wind up marrying rich people and living happily ever after.

“What is it this time?” Dani asked, and when Linda turned the book to its front cover Dani couldn’t help grinning.
“The Pirate’s Bride,”
she read in a dramatic voice. “Wowee!”

Linda smiled sheepishly, saved her place with a bookmark and closed the book. The bookmark was an embarrassing old thing that Dani had made for her a long time ago. It was decorated with pictures of daisies along with some flowery print that said “I love to read.” Dani had made it before she started noticing how her mother wasted so much time reading instead of doing something useful, like—Dani put her glass back down on the cluttered sinkboard—like washing a few dishes now and then, for instance.

After Linda closed her book and started making dinner Dani plopped herself down in her mother’s chair and began to flip through
The Pirate’s Bride.
It looked boring, like most of the stuff her mother read. Just a bunch of mushy stuff about a handsome man who acts mean and dangerous at first and then turns out to be positively adorable, and a beautiful woman who doesn’t know she’s in love with him even though it’s perfectly obvious. Dani hated the books her mother read. And she hated the way her mother spent so much time reading and daydreaming instead of doing something about the mess they were in. Or at least worrying about it.

Linda said she didn’t worry much because she was a natural optimist, which meant that she really believed in happy endings. Happy endings as in finding a better job so she could pay off their debts and save up enough money so she and Dani could leave Rattler Springs forever and move back to Sea Grove. But in the meantime she only sat around reading books like
The Pirates Bride.
Dani slammed the book shut and shoved it away from her.

Her mother, who had started peeling things at the sink, looked back over her shoulder.

“What’s the matter, Dani?” she asked.

Dani shrugged. She couldn’t very well tell her mother that she was feeling a little nervous and jumpy because she was about to run away. But she could talk about the stupid book. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just that I don’t see how you can waste so much time reading stuff like that instead of doing something to …” She took a deep breath and then went on, “to get us back to Sea Grove.”

Linda sighed. She came back to the table, bringing the carrot she was peeling. Sitting down at the table, she peeled another long strip and then just sat there, staring at Dani. Not an angry stare. Dani wished it were. She could be angry too then, and not feel guilty about it. Finally Linda said, “Like what? Just what do you see me doing that might change things?”

“Well, like … like …,” Dani began, and then stammered to a stop. Her mother was smiling at her in the pitiful way that always drove Dani crazy. “Well, in the first place you might … Well, in the first place we never should have left Sea Grove. That’s what’s in the very first place.” Then she went into her bedroom and threw herself down on the bed.

T
HAT MUCH WAS THE
truth for sure. If only Linda hadn’t quit her job and given up the lease on their Sea Grove house before she’d even seen Rattler Springs.

The house in Sea Grove. Even after four years Dani could close her eyes and see exactly how it had looked. It hadn’t been very big, that was for sure, and maybe it was a little bit shabby in an artistic sort of way. But it was on a hillside, beside a grove of incredibly tall redwood trees, and from one end of the front porch there was this incredible view of the ocean. And the school where Dani had gone ever since kindergarten was only about a mile away. A school where she liked everybody and nearly everybody liked her, instead of hating her just because she was new and different. And where Heather Brady, her best friend, lived just down the road with her big, friendly family.

Dani had only been eight years old when they’d left for Rattler Springs, but she’d known right away it was a bad idea. Even right at first when everybody thought that Linda had inherited a real ranch, like something out of a Roy Rogers movie. The whole inheritance thing had happened because Chance Gridley, who had been Linda’s husband for a while when Dani was around five or six years old, had always had a dream about being a big-time cattle rancher.

Actually Dani had some pretty good memories of Chance. For one thing she remembered what a good storyteller he’d been. But according to Linda, it turned out that she and Chance didn’t have very much in common, and besides he had this little problem with drinking and gambling. Like going to Reno and gambling away all his money so they had nothing to live on but Linda’s salary. So there was a divorce and Dani’s mother went back to being Linda O’Donnell. And Chance went off to live in Nevada. He must have gone right on gambling because all at once some kind of miracle happened and he won a whole bunch of money. Enough money anyway to buy a lot of land. At least that was what his letters to Linda began to tell about.

It had been a more or less friendly divorce, and every once in a while Chance would write back to Linda and Dani and tell them how much he still loved both of them, and about the huge cattle ranch he owned now. A cattle ranch near what he said was a nice little Western town called Rattler Springs. And every once in a while he’d send Linda a little child support money even though he didn’t have to, because Dani’s real father had died in the war before Chance and Linda had even met. So Linda would write back to thank him and tell him how she and Dani were getting along.

And then one day they’d gotten a letter from a lawyer saying that Chance had died of a heart attack, and that he’d left more than a thousand acres and a big old ranch house to Linda and Dani. And it just so happened that right at that time Linda was in the middle of her Western romances period, reading lots of books by people like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Dani remembered that when Linda began to talk about moving she’d made it sound as if the ranch were in a big green valley with all kinds of barns and corrals scattered around, and horses and cattle and handsome cowboys everywhere you happened to look. And then, without even waiting to see the ranch first, she sold their car and bought an old wreck of a truck, packed everything they owned into it, and they took off. And it hadn’t been until they’d gotten to Rattler Springs that they’d found out the awful truth.

The truth about Rattler Springs was that there’d never been much ranching in the area because there just wasn’t enough water or grass. And the truth about the ranch house was that even though it was big and kind of interesting in some ways, it didn’t have electricity or an indoor toilet. And it was about six miles from town, which was a big problem because Linda’s old truck had broken down for good by then, and there wasn’t enough money left to buy even a cheap old car. Nobody could live six miles from Rattler Springs without a car, so they’d only stayed a few days on their so-called ranch. And when Linda had finally given up and decided to sell the ranch and move back to Sea Grove, she’d found that nobody wanted to buy their worthless, dried-out land. Not even if she practically gave it away. So Linda had found a lousy job in town, and they’d rented the so-called Jerky Joe cabin, and they’d been there ever since. Linda kept saying that they’d move back home as soon as she’d saved up a little money, but four years had gone by and she never saved anything. Instead she read and daydreamed and got more and more into debt, and the desert kept right on telling Dani how it had her now and she was never going to get away.

“Only not for much longer.” Dani rolled over onto her stomach and smashed her fist into the pillow. “You hear me? I won’t be here much longer.” She got up then and started rummaging around in her closet looking for the duffel bag she’d had ever since they’d left Sea Grove. When she found it she dusted it off, opened it up and dumped it out on her bed.

There wasn’t much in the bag. Just a few almost forgotten toys. Little-kid stuff she’d insisted on bringing to Rattler Springs and then had almost immediately outgrown. Things like a small, bristly teddy bear, a Raggedy Ann doll and a homemade stuffed toy that kind of resembled a deformed elephant. After emptying out all the junk Dani climbed up and got her hideous pig bank off the high shelf where she always kept it.

The bank had been a present from Stormy. He’d won it at the school fair almost two years before and he’d insisted on giving it to Dani. Sitting back down on the bed, Dani held the bank in both hands and studied it carefully. It was made out of very heavy pottery and it was supposed to look like some kind of wild boar. Its enormous snout was covered with warts, there was a ridge running down its back and big fangs jutted out of its lower lip. Actually it was kind of artistic looking, in a disgusting sort of way. Dani shook it, trying to guess how much money was inside. If there might be, for instance, anywhere near enough for a one-way ticket to the coast of northern California with transfers in Reno and San Francisco.

It was hard to tell. The pig did feel pretty heavy, and she could remember putting quite a lot of money into it, on her birthdays and Christmas and when she earned a little by babysitting or helping out at the bookstore. But she also remembered shaking some out now and then when something urgent came up, like a new inner tube for her bicycle. She kind of hated to break the ugly old bank but she knew from experience that you could only get the small coins out by shaking. This time several minutes of shaking only produced a dime or two and three nickels. Not even a glimpse of the bills or silver dollars that she knew were in there. So after a while she gave up and went out to find a hammer.

When she got back to her room, she put the wild boar bank in the middle of her bed and stood over it, telling herself that it was a hideous thing anyway and she’d always hated it. “Okay, pig, this is it,” she whispered, and closing her eyes, she gave it a hard whack. But when she opened them there it was, still pretty much in one piece except for a broken front leg. She raised the hammer and was getting ready to try again when she heard her mother calling her to dinner.