by Lois Ruby
As usual, Cee Dubyah’s truck was gone before the sun came up, so at about nine I went to his cottage to clean up, just in case we happened to get a whole load of people from a bus that broke down or something. And guess what. There was Tag sleeping on his stomach, in his gray underwear; the sheet was kicked to the floor. His jeans were heaped like the dress of the melted Wicked Witch of the West, as though he’d slid out of them and down under the floorboards. A belt buckle stuck up at a funny angle: FFA, FUTURE FARMERS OF AMERICA, it said. I was so surprised to see Tag there that I just kept staring, with clean sheets slung over my arm and a dust mop standing next to me like a dance partner. Pretty soon he opened one eye. Now, any other kid would have jumped up and run for cover, but not Tag.
“What are you here for?” he asked.
“I’m cleaning the place. How about you?”
“Sleeping, can’t you tell?”
“Well, Cee Dubyah’s gone, so I just wondered.”
Tag sat up and glanced around the room. He had this funny way of moving his eyes while he kept his head perfectly still, almost like that portrait of George Washington that has the eyes that follow you wherever you go.
“I knew it. He went and left me here.”
“For how long?” I asked.
“I dunno. He won’t be gone too long.”
“Is Cee Dubyah really your father?” I asked. What kind of father would leave his kid in a grungy red-shuttered cottage alone?”
“Of course he’s my father, stupid. Let’s see, I gotta have a plan.” Tag ran his fingers through his hair, but it took some doing because it was so gnarly.
“You could take a shower and wash your head,” I suggested.
Tag’s eyes narrowed as he asked, “And what good’s that gonna do me?”
“It may not do you much good, but it would sure help the rest of us who have to smell you.”
He nodded soberly, and I could see something, some plan of action, forming behind his eyes. He hopped off the bed and started rummaging through the papers on the desk and in the drawers until he found what he was looking for.
“What’s that, Tag?”
“A note. I knew Cee Dubyah’d leave me a note.” And he pulled a crisp ten-dollar bill out of the envelope. The little brat just sat there reading the note and didn’t tell me a word of it. I decided I’d have to sneak back in when Tag was out of the room and see what Cee Dubyah had had to say.
I forgot about Tag for a while because I had to get busy over in Yellow Cottage 6, where I was setting up housekeeping for my cousin Stephanie and me. That afternoon Stephanie was coming in from Wichita to spend a couple of weeks. If she liked the restaurant business, why, she’d just stay all summer. She wasn’t my favorite relative in the world, but we all liked her and felt sorry for her because Stephanie’s mother was so ordinary, and I thought it wouldn’t be too bad having someone near my age to hang around with at the Pig-Out.
Johnny drove me to the bus depot during the afternoon lull. “What the hey,” Johnny said. “I got nothing else to do but sit here counting cans of beans and wishing I was fishing in the mountains.”
Stephanie was the first one off the bus. She dropped her huge canvas suitcase on Johnny’s toe and threw her arms around me. “Dovi Chandler, I thought I’d never see you again. I mean, I’ve missed you sooo much. I brought a yearbook to show you. I’m in it twelve times!”
“I know, I know; I was there when you counted. Remember?”
She gave me a painfully patient glare. “Yes, Dovi, but that was before Him. After Him, everything changed.”
“Him Larry, or Him Scott?”
Stephanie shoved me away for a second. “We—are—out—of touch. “Didn’t I write you? Him is Wayne Firestone. You didn’t know him because, of course, you were only an eighth grader. Wayne was a freshman.”
“This is Johnny,” I said. “He’s a senior.” Johnny grunted and picked up Stephanie’s suitcase. Well, old Johnny was hardly competition for someone as wonderful as The Wayne Firestone, but Stephanie let him take her suitcase anyway, acting as though she’d been brought up with a whole staff of servants. She hadn’t; her father was a mailman, and her mother worked the airplane-part assembly line at Boeing.
“Wayne Firestone is already playing baseball for the high school team,” Stephanie said, “and he doesn’t even start school there until fall. Can you believe it? And he’s playing in a summer league. He’s a first baseman. A classic left-handed first baseman.”
I wondered if we’d get around to talking about anything other than Wayne Firestone. I wanted to tell her about the train depot in Spinner where this old retired railroad man kept his pride and joy, an actual working steam engine and a coach car. He’d stand there in his conductor’s uniform all year round, even in the snow, handing out free tickets for kids to climb up into the train and crawl around the engine and blow the whistle and everything. It was even in Life magazine. I figured Stephanie would love to hear about the train depot. When I was eleven and she was twelve we saw Doctor Zhivago on cable TV four times in one week, and that got us dream-talking about taking a train trip the whole width and breadth of Russia, back at the time of the czars. We’d be the rich people, of course, not the peasants.
But I couldn’t get a word in edgewise; Wayne Firestone was apparently the topic of the day. Du jour, as my mother said. That and au jus were on our menu, but I’m sure people like Cee Dubyah didn’t pay any attention to stuff like that.
“He’s five foot nine, and he hasn’t even had his major growth spurt yet,” Stephanie said dreamily. She worried about height, being five seven herself.
“Wayne Firestone,” I repeated, nodding as though I could picture him in my mind. But he had a conductor’s cap on and warts all across his nose. I wasn’t prepared for this new, updated Stephanie, woman of the world. But I should have been; a few weeks can make a big difference at our age. After all, Stephanie was through-and-through a city girl, and in the city they had a Ninth-Grade Graduation and a Ninth-Grade Formal Dinner Dance. Here in Spinner, ninth graders like I was going to be were just the babies in the high school. Baby Cows, they were called; the school mascot was a longhorn steer. Believe it or not, I was looking forward to being a Baby Cow in the fall.
“But you haven’t told me anything about what life is like here,” Stephanie said, surveying the dingy bus station. Johnny was already out of sight, and I hurried Stephanie along to his pickup.
“You haven’t given me a chance,” I muttered.
Stephanie hugged me again, slamming her purse against my back. “We just did You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown at the Art Association. You would have loved it. I was in charge of props. Oh, and remember Donna Sperling? She broke her leg water-skiing the weekend before we opened. She had to do Lucy in a cast, and it was disgusting what people wrote on it. Oh, I’m so happy to see you, Dov. Wichita just isn’t the same without you. Of course, we couldn’t be in the same school since I’m going to high school next year and you’ll still be in junior high.”
“Not here in Spinner. Here we have four-year high schools, the way you’re supposed to.”
“So this is Spinner, Kansas,” Stephanie said, turning this way and that to take it all in. “It’s positively a picture postcard!”
She probably thought it was the hick spot of the universe, Hayseed, U.S.A., but to me it looked like a reasonable place to sink some roots. Sometimes, in Kansas City and Chillicothe and Salina and Dallas, I felt a little like a weed. You know how a weed springs up overnight, then grows stronger than the daffodils and tomatoes and starts to take over, until someone yanks it out by the frail roots. Every so often, when I couldn’t sleep and lay awake at three o’clock in the morning, I’d have this urge to be a potato, with the best part of me sunk deep into the soil. By dawn I’d come to my senses, though. One look at Stephanie, who’d never lived anywhere but Wichita and who couldn’t think of a thing these days besides her love life, was enough to remind me how beautiful and full of surprises s
ome weeds could be.
FIVE
Packed like sardines in Johnny’s pickup, it was pretty hard to do much but point out the local sights. “See, we have a McDonald’s,” I said, “and a Taco Bravo, and a TG&Y five-and-dime just like you do in Wichita.”
“Stay away from that taco place,” Johnny warned her. “It’ll give you food poisoning.”
“Oh, come on, Johnny. He’s always trying to drum up business for our place. You’ll see it, just around the next bend,” I said, surprised at this little bubble of pride I felt. “There it is.” Right away I saw the Pig-Out through Stephanie’s eyes: a little pink shack sort of leaning into the Kansas prairie wind, with a bunch of small square windows across its face and a yellow neon sign stuck at the top of a big clumsy pole. We were always forgetting to turn off the sign in the morning, and now it was flashing KLONDIKE CAFE AND COTTAGES.
“Klondike? You said Pig-Out.”
“The girl has pigs on the brain all the time. Yells ‘Stop!’ every time we pass hogs in a field around here,” Johnny grumbled. “To me, pigs are just ham waiting to be sliced up thick.”
Stephanie got a sickly look on her face, as though she’d never sat down to a plate of ribs in her life—which she had, with me as a witness, and she got as greasy as the next guy. Or maybe it was the Klondike Cafe that made her look sick.
“This—place—is—a kick!” she cried. “I love it! And I’m so excited about being in the restaurant business with you. Is your mother going to stay here long? Is she going to pay me?”
“Yeah, I’m the only one works for free,” Johnny said.
“He does not. She’ll pay you, but only minimum wage and only during the peak hours, like eleven to one thirty and five to seven.”
Johnny never believed in gradual slowdowns. He pulled into the gravel parking lot and jammed on the brakes. We almost flew through the windshield. “You trying to kill us, Johnny?”
“The thought crossed my mind,” he said charitably. “What the hey is that kid doing over there?”
I spotted Tag, wearing a faded green alligator shirt with the back tuck-in end hanging over his rump, wheeling and dealing from a turned-over wooden carton.
“Ice cold beer,” he crooned, “ice cold beer right here.”
“Who’s that?” Stephanie asked.
“An orphan. This kid who’s been dumped on our doorstep,” I said. “His name is Tag.” I ran over to him and demanded, “What are you doing?”
“Community service for truck drivers. Picture this,” he said in his growly voice, spreading a scene out before us in the sky. “You’re coming in off the road, ready to call it a day. Your neck’s aching, your back’s stiff, your fingers are sore from curling around that wheel, your throat’s as dry as Death Valley. An ice cold beer would feel so good sliding down your dusty throat.”
“But we sell beer inside,” I shouted. “You can’t sell it out here and compete with us.”
Tag shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a free country.”
“Besides, you can’t sell beer at all. It’s against the law at your age.”
Tag sighed, pretending to summon up all the patience a saint would need to deal with us. “You see this beer, which I don’t mind telling you I only have two left of, out of six? This is the beer you sold Cee Dubyah last night. How old are you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Well, that tells me you’re against the law too. You gonna turn me in, or am I gonna turn you in first?” A big ITT diesel semi pulled in just then, and Tag shooed us away. “Ice cold beer, cheap,” he sang into the exhaust of the truck. “Taste mighty good going down after a long day on the road, hey mister? No? Well then, how ’bout some Life Savers?”
“This is too much,” said Stephanie. “Nothing like this ever happens in Wichita!”
It was nearly four thirty. We had just enough time to get Stephanie’s things into Yellow Cottage 6, grab aprons, and face the dinner crowd; I’d have to deal with Tag later. Stephanie changed into some jeans and a T-shirt, and I took her into the cafe for her first taste of the restaurant business. Momma came running out of the kitchen and threw her arms around Stephanie. “You’ve grown so much, sweetie.”
“I hope I stop soon. I’m taller than half the boys at school,” Stephanie said sadly.
“Oh, this good country air will slow down your growth,” Momma said.
“Why?” Stephanie asked, puzzled.
“It seems logical,” said Momma. My mother was intelligent, but certainly not at all logical. Still, she always believed everything she said. “You’ll see. You’ll be at least two inches shorter when you leave Spinner, but I can only guarantee it if you stay all summer.”
“Aunt Marilyn, you haven’t changed a bit,” Stephanie beamed. “My mother is so terminally middle-aged. How could you possibly be sisters?”
“Your mother does PTA. That explains it,” Momma said.
I showed Stephanie the station where we kept the silverware and the napkins and salt and pepper and sugars, and I gave her a crash course in using our ancient cash register, and I showed her the menu and told her what we were out of, like baked fish, which we hadn’t had since we opened because Johnny didn’t like the smell of fish. We were both squatting down, checking out the contents of the little fridge under the counter, when the bell above the door tinkled.
“Omigosh, my first costumer,” Stephanie whispered. “Do you think I’m ready?”
“Oh sure,” I whispered back. “You’ve seen it done in movies a thousand times.” Then she stood up, twisted around a little bit to get her T-shirt just right, and flashed this incredible charm.
“Good evening. What’ll it be?”
The guy was Palmer, from the gas station across the street. He always had a little something here before he went home to dinner. He was the one whose wife was the worst cook in the county, and a mean old bird besides.
Palmer said, “What’s with that kid out there? He come into my place this afternoon begging for some ice. I told him, ‘I don’t give ice away.’ He wants to pay $1.29, I’ll give him a sack. But no, he said he had no use for a whole sack. Just needed enough to keep a few cans cold. I said I wasn’t opening up a ten-pound sack of ice to give him a handful. So the kid said, ‘Okay, let’s make a deal.’”
“Uh, sir, would you care to order from our dinner menu?” Stephanie said, batting her eyelashes.
“Who’s this?” Palmer asked.
“Our new waitress. She’s from the city.”
“Swell. So my ear perks up, you know, ’cause this twerp of a kid is about to offer me a deal I can’t refuse. He says he’ll take five sacks of ice, but he’s gonna store ’em in my freezer and just take a little bit at a time when he needs it. To pay for the ice, he’s gonna mop my floor every night at closing, for five nights. Seemed like a good deal. So then I look out my window and see he’s in business over here,” Palmer said, frowning.
“Roast beef au jus?” suggested Stephanie.
“Naw, the usual,” Palmer said. Stephanie shot me a frantic look.
I pulled her over by the cash register and whispered, “A bowl of chili and a small dinner salad with French dressing, and a Diet Coke.”
“I’ll have that ready for you in just a moment, sir,” Stephanie said. Then she turned to me and hissed, “Where do I find the chili? Why aren’t things clearly marked around here?”
“Who is that kid, anyway?” Palmer asked.
“He belongs to this guy, Cee Dubyah, who comes in a lot. Cee Dubyah left him here for a couple of days, I guess.”
Johnny slammed a bowl of chili down on the pass-through, and I grabbed it up and rushed it to Palmer. “We serve the chili fast,” I whispered to Stephanie, “before it cools down and the grease floats to the top.”
Stephanie nodded, taking this fact in along with all the others that were going to make her a success in the restaurant business.
Before Palmer left, there were half a dozen other guys in, and a coupl
e with a two-year-old kid—which translates into spoons and forks all over the floor, plus twenty crackers’ worth of crumbs—so we were pretty busy and didn’t think much about the fact that just about every guy who paid his bill bought a six-pack of beer, all different brands, on his way out.
As we found out later, they were stocking Tag’s roadside beer stand. Lord only knows what kind of deal Tag had offered them.
Well, no self-respecting trucker drinks beer in the morning, so the next morning there was Tag at his stand, flogging newspapers. “Wichita Eagle and Beacon,” he sang out. “Kansas City Star. Cheaper than newsstand prices, right here.”
Wise to this kid by now, I ran to the little newspaper boxes parked outside the door of the café. Sure enough, they were both empty.
“You pried open the boxes and stole our newspapers,” I shouted.
“I didn’t pry the stupid boxes open.”
“Then how did you get the papers?” I asked with my arms folded across my chest like Mrs. Tideman, the P.E. teacher at my last school.
“I put in a quarter to get the box open, like any other customer,” Tag explained. “I just borrowed the other newspapers, that’s all. I’m paying you back.”
“You little thief!”
“You don’t have to get so worked up over a few crummy pieces of paper. It’s just a temporary arrangement until my supply gets here.”
“Your supply?”
“Well, yeah. I ordered a few dozen copies on consignment. They’re delivering ’em to me about five-thirty tomorrow morning. I told them what we had here was an untapped market. Who wants to pay those dumb newspaper box prices you charge?”
“I swear, I’m taking you to small claims court,” I warned. “You’re getting out of hand. When is Cee Dubyah coming back?”
Then this sort of shadow passed across Tag’s face, and Stephanie nudged my arm. “He’ll come back, don’t you worry for a minute,” Tag rasped. “But even if he didn’t, I could get along just great. You know what? I’m going to be a thousandaire and then a millionaire and then a trillionaire before you even quit getting allowance from your mother. You watch.”
