by Beth Kephart
“How much time will you need?” he asked me.
“Fifteen minutes,” I said. “At least.”
Now I find Ilke Vanderveer’s card in Hawk’s room, where he left it, pressed between the pages of Treasure Island. I head for Mom and Dad’s room, sacred country. The one place on the whole farm that belongs only to them. The door is closed but it’s never locked. It creaks on its hinges, and I’m in.
The room is full of blue-sky sun—windows on three sides and a skylight up top, one wall the color of Phooey’s best eggs, the rest of it the color of regular shells. There’s a chest of drawers and a king-size bed. The bed is neat with its blue covers on. The winter quilt is folded on one end. But it’s the old-fashioned ivory-colored phone by their bed that I want, its cord all tangled like it gets. I walk in my socks, as quiet as I can, as if Mom and Dad could hear me from outside.
It’s obvious. They can’t.
It’s now or never.
It’s now.
I pick up the phone. Study Ilke Vanderveer’s card. Press my hand over my wild, too-big, thumping heart.
One. Two. One. Two. I start, pressing the numbers with the sweaty tip of my index finger. Five. Five. Finishing the number off. Practicing the lines I thought up when I was making the plan. Somebody answers two rings in. A woman with a smart voice who is busy, I can tell.
“Bright Star Publishing,” the voice says. Crisp and clipped.
“Hello,” I say. I barely say it. It’s like all my words have suddenly fallen straight down to my wild, thumping heart.
“Bright Star?” it repeats. Even quicker this time. More curt.
“Yes,” I say. “Please.” Trying to sound like an adult. “I’d like to speak with Ilke Vanderveer?”
“Your name?”
“Sara Scholl.”
“Sara who?”
“Scholl.”
“What is the nature of your call?”
The nature? I think. The nature?
The voice on the other end starts talking before I can. It rattles off a list of nots, a speech it seems to always give. “If you are calling about a manuscript, we do not accept unagented submissions. If you are calling about rights, I’ll connect you to our rights department. If you are calling about our fall list, I’ll connect you to publicity.”
The voice stops. Waits.
“It’s none of that,” I say.
“Please be specific.”
Outside, I can see Mom and Dad and Hawk filling the last blue barrel with the rain of bowls and pots. I can see the hurry in the operation, how the more they get done, the faster it goes, and how Hawk can’t slow it down.
“It’s top secret,” I blurt out.
“Top secret?” The voice almost laughs. “You think you’ve heard everything,” it says, “and then you hear this. Top secret.” The voice practically shakes its head.
“It concerns M. B. Banks.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how many times a week somebody calls and tells me that?”
“No, ma’am,” I say, instantly kicking myself. I say “ma’am” and I’m a kid. I say “ma’am” and I’m a kid straight off a farm. I’m a kid, and my phone cover is shot, this receptionist is going to cut me off, this plan I have is falling flat, I need to speak to Ilke.
“You hear one M.B. story and then you hear another,” the voice says. “M.B. sightings. M.B. hoaxes. M.B.— We do not currently have a publication date for Roundabouts: Book Three,” the voice says, interrupting itself, going back to the script, it sounds like a script, a machine talking. “We can put you on our e-mail list, if that would help. We could—”
It’s a spiel. Dad likes that word, “spiel.” I have no time for a spiel.
I break the spiel. “Ilke Vanderveer met my brother, Hawk,” I say, giving up my cover. “She talked to him. She gave him her card. She said to call if—”
“If what?”
“If something came up.”
“Is that right,” the voice says.
“Something’s come up,” I say.
“I’ll give her a message,” the voice offers, after a moment. I can hear people in the background, the ring of other phones, the noise of Bright Star.
“Talking to her would be best.”
“You know how many times I’ve heard that? Ilke Vanderveer’s in a meeting. She can’t speak with you right now.”
Mom is pouring the last bucket of water into the third blue barrel. She’s holding the tin above her own head and watching the rainwater spill down, a little waterfall. Done. She kisses Dad on the cheek, she hugs Hawk with both arms, she straightens her lace collar. She’s coming.
“Acquisition meeting,” the voice says now. “Not available.”
“Will she be available tomorrow?”
“Perhaps you should write to her,” the voice says. “Do you have our street address?”
“Ilke Vanderveer asked us to call. She gave us her card. Gave it to Hawk, who is my brother. Gave it to him with a special delivery and said there’d be a reward. I have news on the special delivery. We want our reward.”
I can hear the voice deciding. I can hear it—suddenly not precisely sure, as if my story might be a true story, as if maybe, just maybe, it’s heard of the Scholls before, of the town in Pennsylvania, where a kid shows up on a dirt road talking about a pig on the run. “She could be,” the voice says. “Available tomorrow.” As if it almost trusts me, or almost wants to think that I am telling the truth, that Ilke met Hawk, that Ilke told Hawk to call, that whatever has gone wrong with Roundabouts: Book Three, is finally about to go right. She’s isn’t sure. She stalls.
“You could try again tomorrow,” she says.
“In the afternoon?” I ask. “Tomorrow?” Making sure, doing it fast, because Mom’s really, really coming now, she’s definitely on her way. Leaving the back drive, walking around front, a couple of empty buckets in her hand. They’re fruit buckets. They live on the front porch. She’s headed there to put the buckets back, and I drop to the floor, talk as quietly as I can to Bright Star reception. Under the apple trees, Mom comes. I hear the buckets hit the wood porch floor. I hear her open the door. She’s coming in. She’s almost here. She’ll find me in her room.
“If nothing changes, Ilke will in fact be here tomorrow afternoon,” the voice says. “You can call back then.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you so much.” Hurrying the phone back into the cradle. Hurrying away from this room. Hearing Mom’s flip-flops flapping and the hinges on the screen door and Mom inside now, calling my name, looking right into the kitchen first, then looking left, and I’m here.
“How’d it go?” I ask.
“Three full barrels,” Mom says, her white shirt damp, her eyes still full of sun. “That was one beautiful storm.”
“Cistern’s going to fill like a swimming pool,” I say.
“You know it is.” She smiles.
I take a picture of Mom smiling in my mind.
I take a picture, which is like a seed, the way it keeps its beauty folded in.
The way it wants to go on forever.
Tell Me When
I hear Hawk before I see him—his Doc Martens splashing the path ahead, his lungs rasping. He climbed the hill fast as that kid can climb.
“Got it,” he says. Still out of breath. He pulls the hanger from under his shirt and holds it high. The metal catches a piece of the sun. The tree leaves rustle.
“Got this, too,” he says. Pulling his wallet out now, which is fat full of cash. He stands straight, still breathing hard, his Spyglass dangling, his brass whistle. He thumbs through the bills, a grin on his face. He reaches through the leaves, hands me the wallet, and more rain falls. It’s the heaviest wallet I’ve ever seen—mostly one-dollar bills and a couple of fives, every bill looking like it’d been wadded up and tossed into the trash and smoothed out crinkled-flat again.
“Hawk,” I say, taking my whole brother in.
“How did you—”
“Kind of a long story.”
“I mean—”
“I’ll tell you. I promise. But not now, Sara, don’t make me.”
He reaches past me, grabs the branch above my head, and hoists himself up. He sits in his tree seat. I stay on the ground.
“What’s next?” he asks.
I want to know how he got the cash. I want to know if Isaiah said yes. I want to know if this plan is going to work. “Next,” I say, “is we wait.”
“We wait for what?”
“For him, The Mister. We wait for him to take a walk.”
“Not that again.”
“That again.”
“He in a walking mood?”
“Better be, Hawk. Only way we work the plan is if The Mister walks.”
“So The Mister walks,” Hawk says. “All right. The Mister walks.” As if it is all already in the works. As if my wish is the command. Hawk works the lookout, primo.
“Then what?”
“Then you pop the lock on the Silver Whale.”
Hawk whistles. Then he hums. “Pop the lock. With the hanger.”
“Pop it.” I show him what I mean with my hands.
“Like a regular criminal,” Hawk says, with a new whistle. “And as soon as we’re in?”
“We collect.” I say it like I’m completely sure. I say it like this is the perfect plan.
“What do we collect?” Hawk says quietly. “Precisely?”
“Some of the best of Roundabouts: Book Three. Just to borrow. Just to prove. Just to work our persuasion on Ilke.”
“It’s a risky operation.”
“It’s what we have.”
“We’re sure?”
“We’re sure. There’s half a million readers waiting. There are the shoes themselves. The shoes gotta choose their ending.”
“So we wait,” Hawk says.
“You watch,” I say, looking up into the tree, seeing just his boots, feeling yesterday’s rain kerplunk onto my head. “You tell me when.”
When
And… we’re… on,” Hawk says.
“Serious?” My heart bumps.
“Taking his constitutional. Look.”
Hawk pushes his Spyglass my way. I see. The red door on the lighthouse is cracked. A walking stick pokes. An old man’s leg. A second leg. A hat on a head and a head.
“It’s him!”
“Of course it’s him!”
“We’re on!”
It’s now or never!
The Mister makes his way to the Silver Whale, opens the door, and hauls himself in. He turns the engine with his key, and the front wheels spin, tossing the mud to the sky and back to the puddles and up on the windshield. The noise scatters a bunch of birds. Birds the size of mosquitoes. I watch the birds for half a second and then I watch The Mister—his head thrown back against the cushion.
Where would he go if that Silver Whale could swim?
What would he think if he could see us here, on the top of the hill, in the Hispaniola, waiting for him to walk away, down the road?
Hawk and me, like two Robin Hoods. Straight out of another Scribner.
He’s given up. He hauls himself out of the car and slams the door and stands there, and now he’s walking, slow slow slow down the road toward the village of pigs, toward Mountain Dale Road, looking for whatever he looks for when he walks, swerving as he goes between the puddles that are full of the glisten of the sun. He could be a turtle the way he moves, his head pushing ahead of the hunch in his shoulders, but he moves, and I catch sight of his shoes and their red polish, their sky and dirt, their speed and stop, their everywhere of anything—those shoes standing on a cliff deciding what they want to choose.
Hawk jumps down and his Doc Martens throw up a soft, muddy splash.
“It’s now,” I say, and he’s off. I watch him run the path until I can only hear him run. I set off myself, and by the time I’m down the hill and around the pond and across the field, and to the car, The Mister is out of sight, and Hawk has done the hanger trick, popped the lock, opened the door to where the treasure is, sprawled across the seat.
Falling Out of Time
You weren’t lying,” Hawk says, looking in over the beautiful mess in The Mister’s car, which is definitely packed for leaving. “You were straight-up true. This is—”
“I know it,” I say.
“Crazy beautiful,” Hawk says.
He leans in beside me, past the wheel of the one-wheel bike and strapped-up suitcase and the pair of suspenders. Past me toward the crate, the watercolor spills and ink, the pictures that are half-done or hardly there, sometimes complete. All these places where the red shoes have been, where The Mister has put them, drawn them, thought them. The Mister’s seen it, and then he’s dreamed it, filling parts of it in with blues and greens and leaving parts of it to brown-gray sketch.
I want to stay all day, look hard and think, but I can’t; we have to hurry. We have to choose three or maybe four of these and get out quick, and now I sort while Hawk stands and keeps the lookout, marks the time, makes sure The Mister doesn’t catch us here, busting his privacy.
Proof is what Ilke needs. Proof that his version of his story is better than her version of his story. Proof that he has the perfect ending, the best Book Three. Our farm is here, more of our farm than there should be. More than he had the chance to paint since he moved in. I know it’s true. I feel it.
The bell on the barn, the cracks in the fence, Phooey’s eggs in the cab of Dad’s truck, the hay dust that falls like miracle snow, and now, shuffling through, leaning in, moving through the strokes and starts of these pictures, I stop and catch my breath. I don’t believe and then I do believe what I am seeing—these pictures of Hawk and me. Us. Hawk with his pigs and me with my seeds and Hawk with his tractor and me with Jolly and Hawk and me, in Roundabouts: Book Three, the red shoes following us, in the shadows of us, on our roads with us, and beneath our trees with us and now, toward the bottom of the dig, Hawk still keeping watch, I find a picture, half ink, half sketch, of a tall boy and a taller girl side by side at the edge of a pier, a Spyglass lifted high to the boy’s eyes, fireflies freckling the skies.
“Hawk,” I say. “Jeez. Hawk.” So much burn inside of me. So much that hurts my heart.
“You have to hurry.”
“You have to see.”
“Can’t, Sara. Not right now. Go on and make it quick.”
I’m quick.
I’m really quick.
We are falling out of time.
“The Mister’s coming!” Hawk whispers loud. “You have to make it quick!”
“No kidding,” I whisper-shout.
And stand up straight.
And shut the door.
And run, both of us running.
The Morning Will Never Come, It Comes
I hear Hawk washing up. I hear him pulling on his better jeans and buckling his belt, and then he slides back down the hall with his clean socks on and knuckles my door and says, “All yours.”
I hurry.
I shower, quick, because it never matters how high the cistern is, there could be another drought tomorrow.
I dress.
It could work, my plan.
It could be the worst disaster.
The pictures we stole are in a soft leather pouch, except that they’re not stolen, they’re borrowed. The cash is thick in Hawk’s wallet. We’ve left Roundabouts: Books One and Two, behind, stuffed beneath our beds, but Hawk’s got his Spyglass and his special delivery, and we have our map of New York City thanks to a homeschooling project we did last spring about the cities of our United States, the biggest and most famous. The maps came in the mail, with the rest of the homeschool stuff. I found New York tucked up onto the pantry shelf late last night, with the excellent help of Hawk’s flashlight.
The last piece of our puzzle.
The Silver Whale is still out there, its
wheels dug into the rain-carved ruts. The moon is low in the sky, but there’s still no sun. The fireflies sleep and the stars are moving on, and I know this because Hawk says this, because he’s standing here, in my room, beside me now, looking out the window past the waves of hay we never put in the shed, the hay that has no home now.
“You ready for this?” Hawk says.
“I’m ready.”
En Route
Isaiah’s there at the end of our road, just like he said he would be. The sun has cracked the horizon and a splat of yellow runs like a highway stripe from the far hill, across the far field, over Mountain Dale Road in the direction of the Pig Village, putting shine into the wet things, a low glow. Spots flicks the flies with his tail, and Hawk and I are in. Nobody out here, and the day is still cool. Isaiah turns to us and smiles.
“You were right, Hawk,” he says.
“Told you so.”
“It gets in your head, and sticks,” Isaiah says, and I don’t know what they’re talking about and now, sick feeling in my gut, I do. “It’s far away and fiction, but you read it again and it’s not. It’s—”
“Hawk?” I say, my stomach Ferris-wheeling beneath my heart. Spots clops out in front of us. The breeze reaches us in the back. Hawk won’t look at me, he won’t turn, he won’t answer the question I haven’t asked him, I don’t need to ask him. Kind of a long story, he’d said, up at the tree, meaning the cash, and it occurs to me, just as I’m sitting here, that I saw no Treasure Island tepee in Hawk’s room late last night when we had our last rendezvous, maybe I saw not one single Scribner Classics classic on his shelves—maybe I didn’t because they weren’t there, because Hawk has sold his classics for cash, because cash is what we needed, and I asked.
“Did you—?”
Hawk shakes his head, sheepish. And that’s all the answer I’ll get, that’s all the proof he’ll give that he has sold his Red Badge of Courage, his Yearling, his Last of the Mohicans, Peter Pan, and Robin Hood, his Treasure Island, his Blind Pew, his Long John Silver. He gave the classics up, for this.
