Scumble (8 page)

“Relax, Dinah. The kids will be fine,” Autry had assured Mom as she and Dad prepared to leave. “How many summers did we spend here as kids? Remember when the Beachams were here with us? We all ran wild—including you.” Autry grinned. “This place never did us any harm.”

“You broke your leg here, Autry,” Mom stated flatly. “Your collarbone, too. You also fell in the river and nearly drowned before Cam Beacham fished you out. The two of you weren't even dry before you wrestled him into a cactus patch and got nearly a thousand stickers in your—”

“What?” Autry quickly cut Mom off. Then he'd winked at me and Fedora. “I don't remember any of that. Besides, we'll have Fe here to keep us safe.” My uncle gave Fedora's new brain bucket a thump. Marisol and Mesquite had found an old motorcycle helmet in the attic for my sister after she gave her football helmet to Grandpa Bomba. Red and orange flames blazed across its scuffed white dome, making Fe as happy as a clam with a showy new shell. She'd been more proud yet when she learned that she, at eight years old, was old enough to stay at the ranch, while Tucker, at seven, was not.

Mom sighed and Dad grabbed her hand, stopping her before she could reach out to comb my hair flat with her fingers.

“Ledge will never learn to control this thing if you're always doing it for him, Dinah.” He punched my arm with his free hand as if to say:
Right, Ledge?
I mustered a reluctant shrug, wishing I could crawl under a rock.

“A boy's got to fall a few times so he can learn to pick himself up and put himself back together,” Grandpa Bomba wheezed from his armchair on the porch. Stretched at his feet, Bitsy snuffled at Dad's old football helmet. The helmet wobbled next to Grandpa's chair, still packed full of jar lids, reminding me of all the memories of Grandma Dollop I'd destroyed the night before. Seeing Grandpa fumble through a football helmet full of useless lids was like watching someone eat crackers and call it cake.

“When I turned thirteen,” Grandpa carried on, “my savvy opened a crack in the earth so deep, I fell in and conked my noodle on the earth's very core. I was nearly a grown man before I found my way back up from the depths and the darkness. And the headache I got lasted years.”

“You should've been wearing a helmet,” Fe said, nodding gravely. She was too young to know that Grandpa Bomba had a dozen different tall tales about his savvy birthday. No one knew which were true and which were super-sized servings of deep-fried baloney.

Mom sighed again. Autry wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Don't worry, Dinah. Gypsy and Samson are staying too.

“You'll see,” Autry went on. “A few weeks with us and Ledge will get his feet under him.”

“Yes, because we can all see how well that plan worked for Rocket.” Mom served her words with a hefty side of sarcasm.

Autry looked toward the garden, where Rocket was picking pieces of the barn out of the lettuce beds. No longer glowing blue, Rocket had gotten up before dawn with Autry, Dad, and anyone else who'd been able to stay to lend a hand. He'd repaired the downed cables and re-juiced the generator, while the others assessed the damage and tried to clean up what they could of my mess. Nobody let me help.

My uncle rubbed his jaw thoughtfully as he considered his oldest nephew. “Rocket's got one last thing to learn about scumbling,” he said. “And he's got to figure it out himself. I'm confident he'll find his way off this ranch someday.”

The thought of
someday
hadn't made me feel any better.

Yet, as I sat at the picnic table with the other kids the next day, I realized that there was a bright side to my forced stay at the Flying Cattleheart. I'd tossed and turned the night of the barn disaster wondering how I'd ever make amends. If I went straight home, Autry might never know how sorry I was about the ruined barn. And I still needed to get Grandma's peanut butter jar back from Sarah Jane. Now, at least, I might have a chance to try to fix some of the things I'd broken.

“Hey, Ledge! What if your parents never come back for you?” Mesquite jabbed my elbow again, clipping the wing of my positive attitude.

Marisol forged her features into a mask of concern. “If your parents leave you here for good, you'll have to live with Rocket
permanently
. I hope the two of you can get along. If not . . .
zzzzttt!
” She playacted giving her sister an electric shock, then laughed as Mesquite collapsed against the picnic table with her eyes crossed and her tongue sticking out.

“You'll be toast, Ledger.” Overflowing with mock melodrama, Marisol sniffed, then dabbed her eyes with a paper napkin.

I spewed muffin crumbs as a wave of panic hit me. If I ever managed to get home again, I didn't want to show up on the steps of Theodore Roosevelt Middle School roasted, charred, or extra-crispy. The feeling of ants swarming beneath my skin returned and both of my knees hammered up and down beneath the table.

I knew I shouldn't listen to the twins, but that didn't stop unwanted savvy energy from building as I watched their skit depicting my demise, every crackerjack retort dying on my tongue.

I looked from the house to the conservatory to the windmill to the trucks in the drive. With a flash forward, I saw everything in ruins. My savvy may not have made me supersonic fast, but it did give me plenty of steam to vent. And, until I learned to scumble, there was only way I could think to do it.

“I'm going for a run.”

S
EEING ME TAKE OFF, BITSY LEAPED down from her place on the porch, hobble-bobbling next to me like she intended to come along.

“Go back!” I said, shooing her away. “You're not fast enough, girl. Go back to Grandpa!”

When I reached the ranch's entrance sign by the highway, I stopped to catch my breath, struggling to adjust to the thinner, dryer Wyoming air after sprinting up and over the south ridge full throttle. The sign over my head was a towering ten-gauge steel construction with the name of the ranch and the hand-cut figure of a butterfly with upside-down, heart-shaped spots: the Montezuma's Cattleheart—the butterfly Autry had been following in Mexico when he met the twins' mom.

The heavy sign shivered over my head. Moving away from it, I turned east, following the road, telling myself I'd turn around before I reached Sundance.

I settled into a lung-pushing, blood-pulsing rhythm. The soles of my sneakers slapped the pavement. My arms pumped at my sides. Not wanting to cause an RV wreck or blow apart another bike, I stepped off the road whenever someone passed me.

I tried to forget about the twins' playacting. To forget what they'd said about my parents leaving me at the ranch for good. I didn't know how long I could live with Rocket and survive. The last two nights, I'd been forced to hit the hay up at his small, rammed-earth house at the top of the east ridge. With its thick, cement-like walls, sparse furnishings, and lack of electronic equipment or gadgets, everyone agreed it was the safest place for me.

Rocket and I had barely spoken as he set up a place for me to sleep after I wrecked the barn.

“Got what ya need?” he'd asked, tossing me a sleeping bag.

“Y—
oof!
” I answered, getting the breath knocked out of me as I caught it.

“Toothbrush?”

I nodded.

“Need a pillow?”

I paused before nodding again, not wanting to seem too demanding.

Rocket's final question came with a baleful look:

“Do you snore?”

All I could do was shrug and repeat over and over inside my head:
Don't snore, Ledge . . . Don't snore . . .

As Rocket disappeared to grab a pillow, I glanced carefully around the room. He'd taped maps and pictures of motorcycles to every wall and stacked travel magazines and books about adventure on every surface. There were photographs too, pictures of family, and people I didn't recognize. Rocket may not have left the ranch in years, but he obviously dreamed about it.

Shaking out the sleeping bag, I accidentally knocked down a bunch of his photos. I'd rushed to pick them up and stick them back on the wall. But one kept slipping down—a photo of a much younger Rocket holding hands with some girl. The girl was tall, with blond hair, long bangs, and a pink gum bubble the size of a grapefruit hiding half her face.

If I hadn't been afraid Rocket would light me up like an X-ray skeleton, I might've asked for tape to re-hang the picture. But I'd been pretty sure it would've been safer to ask an angry grizzly bear to dance.

 

Autry might not have stopped me from running from the Flying Cattleheart, but I soon realized he hadn't let me go alone. A tight group of cobalt dragonflies zipped beside me like a squadron of Blue Angels. Executing coordinated loops and rolls, the insects jetted so close, I could feel the vibration of their wings against my skin.

Halfway between my uncle's ranch and town, I stopped. On the south side of the road, a salvage yard sprawled beyond a low hill, nearly hidden by a stand of dark pines. The sign for
Neary's Auto Salvage Acres
was overshadowed by a foreclosure notice, just like the ones I'd seen in town. It seemed as though the people in these parts were having trouble making the payments on their loans. But I knew times were tough all over.

Looking between the trees at the sea of crumpled cars and trucks, I wondered if a junkyard would be the best spot in the world for me . . . or the worst. Was I looking at my life to come? I shook my head, and picked up my pace.

Sweat-soaked and parched, I reached the town of Sundance twenty minutes after I left the ranch. Ignoring the inner voice hollering at me to turn around, I made one last push past the heavy equipment yard of a building whose sign read:
CAD Co
.—
Cabot Acquisitions & Demolitions
. The name on the sign made me think of Sarah Jane. In a town the size of Sundance, there couldn't be too many Cabots.

When I reached the
Welcome to Sundance
sign, I stopped, my mind still full of Sarah Jane Cabot. Cars moved along I-90 in the distance, and a low mountain rose up above the rolling hills. Autry's dragonflies landed near my feet, taking up resting positions along the white line on the pavement, tiny aircraft queued up on a four-inch-wide runway.

Pacing beneath the sign, I pulled the
Sundance Scuttlebutt
notebook from my pocket. Unable to sleep, I'd glanced at some of Sarah Jane's crazy notes the night before. The girl had a way with words, that was solid. In the dead of night, I believed every one of them, until the light of morning came and common sense returned. It was hard to stay convinced for long that Sundance was being overrun by Axehandle Hounds—small dogs that ate the handles off unattended axes—or that there was a race of tiny people who lived in the stacks at Crook County Public Library, coming out at night to shelve books for the librarians.

I slapped the notebook against my palm, still pacing beneath the
Welcome to Sundance
sign. She'd written her name and address on the paperboard cover. The longer I paced, the looser the bolts holding the sign to its post became, until the sign lurched, swinging like a pendulum from a single remaining bolt. I stopped and stared again at Sarah Jane's address, realizing that I might be able to use the notebook as leverage. Maybe Sarah Jane would want her notebook back badly enough to make a trade. I knew if I could just get Grandma Dollop's jar, I'd feel a whole lot better. It would be easier to learn to scumble my savvy if I didn't have that shanghaied jar lingering cruelly on my conscience.

Fifteen minutes later, I found myself on the front porch of the Cabot residence, after getting directions from someone on the street. It had taken a while. The town was as quiet as it had been two days before, and the few people I ran into hadn't been eager to tell me how to find the Cabots.

The house was a hulking Victorian structure that sat alone above the town, surrounded by dozens of stumps and one tall birch tree. It looked like a maniac logger had hit the place overnight and been chased away by Axehandle Hounds before he could cut down the last tree. The remaining paper-white birch bent over the house, its branches hugging the place like pale arms. A spiked, wrought iron fence encircled the entire property.

Cautiously, I moved through the gate, climbed the stairs to the porch, and reached for the door knocker, hoping that nothing would fall apart.

Sweat dripped from my hair, stinging my eyes. Autry's dragonflies pestered me. When the Cabots' housekeeper opened the door, I took a step back. Standing in the doorway, the frizzy-haired, bug-eyed woman clutched the handle of a carpet sweeper in one hand, and a glossy, rolled-up supermarket tabloid in the other, a headline about UFOs barely visible between her fingers. Whether it was the rolled-up paper that motivated them, or something else, Autry's dragonflies gave up their bullyragging and struck off in a blue streak.

Without blinking, the housekeeper raised her eyebrows a fraction of an inch, indicating quite clearly, and with the smallest possible effort, that I should speak quickly or get my little dogies
yippee-ti-yi-yo
gone.

“Um, did Sarah Jane get back okay the other night?” I asked, my words tripping over themselves, as if Mom were standing over my shoulder telling me to be quick. “I mean, is Sarah Jane here? Can I see her?” I held my breath, watching out of the corner of my eye as the screws that held the doorknocker in place began to work their way loose.

A full ten seconds passed while the housekeeper stared at me blankly. My request to see Sarah Jane appeared to have left her baffled.

“Are you a . . .
friend
. . . of Miss Cabot's?” she asked, and the way she said the word
friend
made me guess I was the first kid to come round knocking in quite some time. Maybe Sarah Jane had been telling the truth when she'd told me she had no friends.