The Middle of Somewhere (18 page)

“Did you understand the body language?” I said. “Let's just get on board and shut up.”

“But I didn't feed Leo!”

There was no time now to unpack the dog food, so we tossed a Pop-Tart into the trailer. Leo sniffed at it, probably wondering why they didn't make a bone-marrow flavor.

For the half hour that it took to get off a gravel road that didn't know when to quit, Gee sniffled and whined. Pop's knuckles, gripping the wheel, turned whiter and whiter. Finally, I unbuckled my seat belt and slipped back
to the dinette table to lay it on the line: “He's just about ready to stop this vehicle and throw you out. And if you don't stop the whining, I'll open the door for him. Suck it up and deal.” Not too sympathetic, maybe, but I wasn't feeling much sympathy at the time. And it shut him up, which was my primary goal.

Later on, I wondered if more sensitivity could have changed the unfortunate direction events were soon to take, but who knows.

Pop finally came to the end of the gravel, and we turned north, bidding a fond farewell to the Chalk Pyramids. We'd gotten an early start, just like he wanted. A bleary-eyed sun was swimming up through the haze that promised our first really hot day. It didn't promise much else, though; another lonely campground with not much to do except ride herd on Gee & Leo, Inc. My attitude was about six feet under by then, flat on its back with a rock on its stomach, and for once I didn't care one bit.

That's when Gee screamed, and Pop gasped, and the RV swerved off the road.

Once we were stopped, Pop's temper finally snapped. He started pounding on the steering wheel: “Don't you ever,
ever
do that again!”

Gee was pointing straight ahead, at a billboard on the right side of the road advertising the Ellis County Fair. Featuring—did you guess?—Cannonball Paul in his shiny suit with the golden helmet tucked under one arm.

“There he is!” Gee pointed out the obvious. “There he is! Are we going that way? Pul-eeease?”

Pop was gripping the wheel. I could feel the exasperation
in him—no, on second thought, I could feel the
rage
in him, building up to a big crescendo, like the place in the movie where the building explodes or the stalker leaps out of hiding. Only this crescendo was
totally
silent. Which is even scarier, in a way. The feeling rose to the point where I was sure we were toast, but then it started going down. Without the explosion. I thought that was a positive sign until he said, in an almost-normal voice, “We are now.”

He started the ignition again and eased onto the road so carefully you'd think we were in Chicago during rush hour instead of so far in the boonies that another car would be an event, almost.

Gee said, “We are? Oh boy!”

He's not what you'd call sensitive to nuance. But I knew something wasn't right. Once we were on the road, I carefully asked, “Um … what do you mean, Pop?”

“I mean this is it. The last straw. The point of no return. In other words, I'm taking you home. Right now.”

I spun around to glare at Gee. But he was gazing back at that stupid billboard, which quickly shrank to the size of a postcard, then a stamp, before disappearing altogether. Then he turned around and said, “Can we stop at Hay on the way?”

I would have screamed, except we were going over a bridge just then, and if Pop lost it we might end up at the bottom of a ravine. So I took a breath and said, “Pop, you don't mean that.”

“I beg to differ, Ronnie.” He seemed perfectly calm now, the worst sign yet because it told me he'd made up his mind and was fully comfortable with the decision.

“You'll lose a whole day's work! And you won't have me to help you run numbers.”

“More like two days' work. But I'll make it up easily after a little side trip to Missouri. And thanks to your excellent assistance in getting me set up—which I appreciate— I'm capable of punching in numbers for myself. Now please explain the situation to your brother in any way he understands.”

I heaved a huge sigh, snapped off my seat belt, and hurled myself to the little-brother situation room (meaning the dinette table). “Okay,” I told him, “vacation's over. As of now we're headed home—you know, little house on Maple Street, Mama on the couch—”

He just blinked at me. “Uh-huh.”

This was not the response I expected. “So … try to keep quiet until we get there. Did you know we have Mad Mechanix? In this very vehicle?”

“How far is Hay?”

I grabbed the tail end of my temper. “First of all, it's
Hays
, not Hay. Second of all, don't even bring it up, okay? Just let it go. It won't take much to shove Pop over the edge, and if he goes he might take us with him.”

“Uh-huh. But how far is it?”

I keeled over on the dinette seat and put a pillow over my head, feeling like a gerbil on a treadmill. What was the point of even trying to reason with him? Our budding relationship with Pop was wrecked and our vacation cut short, for what? A seven-year-old's obsession with a guy in a golden helmet. If I hadn't dozed off from lack of sleep, I
would have steamed myself into a red-hot tamale by the next stop.

When I woke up, feeling no better, Pop was steering the Coachman onto the asphalt surface of a huge truck plaza. The place was like a little city, with three restaurants and two repair shops, an auto-parts store, and roughly a hundred vehicles breaking every rule in the driver's-ed manual. Nearby, the interstate thundered with traffic—I hadn't seen so much action since we left Missouri. When the RV had dodged a few semis and pulled up in front of a gas pump, Pop turned off the motor and made an announcement.

“First I'm going to fill the tank. Then I'm going to find the restroom and wash up like I haven't had the chance to do since night before last. Then I will call your mother. And finally we'll start for home. Headed due east on I-70, I figure we'll be there before suppertime.”

This was when the news finally sank in with Gee. “We can't go home!” he yelled. He unbuckled his seat belt and hurled himself at Pop. “
Please
! We haven't seen Cannonball Paul yet!”

Pop tightened his lips, like I'd seen him do a lot lately, unwrapped Gee's arms like they were tentacles, and marched him back to me with a look that told me this was my problem. After he left, I said, “Forget about Paul, okay? It's not going to happen.”

“It
has
to happen!”

I drummed my fingers on the table, trying to think how to distract him. “When we get home, I'll go to the library and look him up on the Internet. He's bound to
have a Web site with his schedule. So when he comes anywhere close to us, we'll go see him, I promise.”

“What's today?”

I counted up days on my fingers. “It's the thirteenth.”

“
June
thirteenth?”

“Duh. Of course.”

“He's in Hay tomorrow. I'll bet he's going there right now—where is it? Show me the map.”

I yanked the map out of the door pocket and showed him where we were in relation to Hays.

“It's only a
inch
” he protested.

“More like seventy miles—”

“Just one more day? Please?”

I wadded up the map and threw it into the sink. What was the point in trying to organize anything if your little brother always blew in like a Kansas tornado and tore your plans to shreds? “Get this through your thick brain—we are
not
going to Hays! We are going home, and it's all because of you, screwing up my life as usual!”

He balled up one fist, but didn't let fly—smart enough to know I'd pop him back if he did. So he stamped his foot and yelled, “I don't care! I'm going to Hay!” He ran to the door, threw it open, and jumped out.

Next minute, his red T-shirt disappeared behind a corner of the convenience store.
Good riddance
, was my first thought. Leo had jumped off the trailer, but with all the cars and trucks and noise he got no farther than the nearest pump island. There, he turned a few circles as though looking for a scent, then slinked back and crouched next to
the right back wheel, debating whether to crawl under or not.

I grabbed a piece of Melba's cheesecake from the fridge for something to chew on. Besides nails. Pop was still fueling, calm as a pond, and for all his face showed, he'd never even heard of such a thing as “grandchildren.” My heels slammed against the storage bin under my seat, harder and harder, as though trying to make a dent. Finally, Pop topped off the fuel tank, replaced the nozzle, and stuck his head inside. “You want anything?”

A nice, normal family, I thought. A real vacation—and how about some control over my life
?

But he was talking about convenience stores. Sighing, I pulled myself up and went to fulfill my mission in life: managing my little brother.

Gee wasn't in the main building. I searched the convenience store, the taco stand, the pizza stop, even the fullservice sit-down restaurant, but no sign of him. The other side of the building was the truck port, a maze of roaring semis and towering trailers.

Circling around outside to the cars and minivans, I noticed that Pop had moved the RV to a parking lot beside the store and locked it. Leo whimpered at me from the trailer as though asking where Gee was. “Go find him yourself,” I snapped, but of course he wouldn't venture beyond the nearest curb.

By the time I'd scouted the store again, the worry weasel was starting to creep up on me. Pop was in the restroom—maybe Gee was there, too. Not knowing what else to do, I hung near the door marked GENTLEMEN,
waiting for one or both of them to come out. The two restrooms faced each other, making a short passageway to the back entrance and the big glass doors leading to the truck port. A pay phone was nearby, plus a couple of newspaper stands and a rack with brochures about local attractions. Of course Cannonball Paul was there, next-to-last on the third row. I was reading headlines at the newsstand, when the reflection of a vehicle on the glass made me turn around.

For a couple of seconds, I couldn't believe it. Rolling by just outside the glass doors was a big white trailer with gold letters: BLAZING, AMAZING, and you know the rest.

The trailer was already past me. Hardly thinking, I pushed open the glass doors and shouted, “Hey!”

The driver didn't hear or see me, and the vehicle was already rolling so fast I couldn't catch up, even while running and shouting “Hey!” like a total maniac. And even if I could catch up, what would be the point—to ask for his autograph, or if he'd pretty-please stuff my brother into his cannon? It was only after I stopped, watching the truck hit the highway and head for the interstate ramp, that the thought hit me—

What if Gee had found that trailer and stuffed
himself
in the cannon? What if he was at this minute being carried away by none other than Cannonball Paul?

I ran back inside, hoping my crazy idea was wrong and Gee would be playing dodgeball with the ice dispenser or demolition derby with soup cans. Something normal, at least for him. But no—I checked down every aisle and behind every revolving book and CD rack without catching even a glimpse of him.

Then back out the front door. Leo had crept off the trailer and was sniffing around the tires. When he caught sight of me, he let loose with one of his strangled yelps. He swung in the direction of the highway and yelped again, then hopped up on the trailer and turned around to look at me. There was something on his mind, for sure. Could it be something like,
My boy is in the big white rolling box and we need to go after him right now?

After a few seconds, he went through the whole pantomime again, and I was convinced. Rushing back through the store, I found Pop at the pay phone with calling card in hand, getting ready to punch in our home number. “Wait!” I gasped. “Don't do it yet!”

He lowered the card and stared at me.

“Gee's gone. I mean, really gone. Here's what I think—”

“What I think,” Pop said, “is that he's outside climbing a pole, or else he's hiding from us, for spite.”

I just shook my head. Gee didn't do anything from spite; that took too much thinking. But when I went on to tell Pop my suspicions, he refused to believe a seven-year-old boy would be bold enough to stow away in a stranger's vehicle.

I made a big effort to keep both feet on the floor and speak quietly, ticking points off my fingers the way Pop did. “Number one: Paul doesn't seem like a stranger after Gee's been obsessing over him all week and sleeping with that promotion card under his pillow. And number two, boldness doesn't have a thing to do with it. He just does stuff without thinking, or maybe he thinks by doing. I've never figured that out. Whatever—” This became point three: “It's like when he climbed up the side of Big Brutus. He wasn't being brave or showing off—he was just doing what was in his head right then. See?”

Pop moved the receiver toward the phone, then back toward his ear, then hung up. “Well, maybe.”

“Pop! He's getting farther away from us every
second
.”