The Talent Show

by Dan Gutman

  The Talent Show

  Also by Dan Gutman

  The Homework Machine

  Nightmare at the Book Fair

  Return of the Homework Machine

  Getting Air

  Race for the Sky

  Back in Time with Thomas Edison

  Back in Time with Benjamin Franklin

  The Secret Life of Dr. Demented

  The Talent Show

  DAN GUTMAN

  AUTHOR OF

  The

  HOMEWORK MACHINE

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,

  real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names,

  characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s

  imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or

  persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Dan Gutman

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in

  part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a trademark of

  Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Book design by Krista Vossen

  The text for this book is set in Edlund.

  Permission to use “Stacy’s Mom“

  Lyrics by Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood

  Copyright © 2003 Monkey Demon Music/Vaguely Familiar Music

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  0410 FFG

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gutman, Dan.

  The talent show / Dan Gutman—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After a devastating tornado destroys much of Cape Bluff,

  Kansas, residents come together as a community to put on a talent show as a fund-raiser.

  ISBN 978-1-4169-9003-1 (hardcover)

  [1. Talent shows—Fiction. 2. Tornadoes—Fiction. 3. Community

  life—Fiction. 4. Kansas—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G9846Tal 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010005128

  ISBN 978-1-4391-5827-2 (eBook)

  To all the folks at Simon & Schuster

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Wendy and Jason Blau, Yonca and Jean Gerlach, Beth and Eric Levin, Meg Gallwitz, Mike Wilson, Kathleen Delaney, Nina Wallace, Donna Tambussi, and Caroll Stoner.

  Chapter 1

  When the Tornado Hit …

  Paul Crichton, a fifth grader at Cape Bluff Elementary School in Cape Bluff, Kansas, was alone in his basement with his Fender Stratocaster guitar, trying to master the intro to “Stairway to Heaven.”

  Julia Maguire, a Cape Bluff fourth grader, was on pointe at The Fontaneau Ballet Studio, rehearsing her relevés and tour jetés for the grand allegro in Giselle.

  Elke Villa, a sixth grader, was in the shower, belting out “I Will Survive,” Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 disco anthem, into a loofah that she was pretending was a microphone.

  Richard Ackoon, a third-grade aspiring rap star, was sitting on his back porch, paging through his rhyming dictionary, and trying to find a word that rhymed with “humiliate.” He looked up and saw his father in the distance, working in the fields on his small farm.

  Dan Potash, sixth grader, was listening through headphones while watching a stand-up comedy DVD, Jerry Seinfeld: I’m Telling You for the Last Time.

  Lucille Rettino, the fifty-five-year-old mayor of Cape Bluff, was being photographed with the members of the Cape Bluff Garden Club at their annual fund-raiser.

  Jon Anderson, the principal of Cape Bluff Elementary School, was at a desk in his office doing paperwork and sipping coffee.

  Justin Chanda, a multimillion-selling pop star who grew up in Cape Bluff, was a thousand miles away at a recording studio in Los Angeles, overdubbing vocals for his next album, Back to Kansas.

  “Honest Dave” Gale was on the lot of his car dealership, Honest Dave’s Hummer Heaven, trying to talk a reluctant customer into buying a Hummer H3T pickup.

  Mary Marotta, a stay-at-home mom and proud member of the PTA, was watching Oprah while making peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwiches for her two young children, who had just come home from school.

  But everybody in Cape Bluff, Kansas, stopped what they were doing when the tornado alarm sounded.

  Chapter 2

  Cars Were Flying

  Around Like Frisbees

  The animals were the first to realize something was wrong. They always are. At 3:48 p.m. that Tuesday afternoon, the birds in Cape Bluff suddenly stopped singing. Cows huddled close together in the field. Dogs began running around erratically.

  Animals have a sixth sense about these things. Maybe it’s infrasound—low frequency rumbles that are below the threshold of human hearing.

  Anyway, the animals knew before the people. They just knew.

  To anyone’s eyes in Cape Bluff, at first it looked like a whopper of a thunderstorm was approaching. The cumuliform clouds that dotted the sky all morning had, without anyone noticing, joined into one gigantic darker cloud mass covering the sky and blocking out the sun.

  But there was something different this day. The sky took on a sickly yellow/greenish hue. At the local weather station a few miles down the road, a meteorologist jotted down the time in his logbook.

  The rains came down for a while, not too heavy. There was even some hail. Then there was an eerie quiet.

  Richard Ackoon, the young rapper sitting on his porch, looked up. There had been a sudden change in pressure. The air felt heavy, and hot, like it was too close to his face. He found it hard to breathe.

  The enormous cloud was moving fast, and then, suddenly, the wind stopped. It was peaceful. The leaves in the trees tilted up gently, as if they were looking at the sky.

  No funnel cloud was visible. Not yet. There was a subtle swirling mist, but nobody could see it. The tube of air was horizontal at first, but gradually the rising air pushed it vertically, until it resembled a spinning top.

  Elke Villa, the girl who had been singing in the shower, suddenly stopped when she heard a tornado siren go off in the distance.

  Cape Bluff is in the heart of Tornado Alley, a vast area that stretches from parts of Texas to Minnesota. Everyone who lives within that region knows what to do when the tornado siren blares. In school they had tornado drills once a month.

  Elke quickly rinsed off and got out of the shower. She threw on a T-shirt and shorts, went into her bedroom, and pulled the mattress off her bed. Then she dragged it into the bathroom. She picked up her dog, Lucky, climbed into the tub, and pulled the mattress over the two of them. She and Lucky would stay there in the bathtub until the all-clear signal sounded.

  Mrs. Mary Marotta quickly screwed the cap on the Marshmallow Fluff jar and grabbed the remote control to her TV. She flipped away from Oprah and turned to The Weather Channel. The screen was flashing tornado warning for four state area. But almost instantly the power in her house went out and the screen faded to black.
She rushed to get a flashlight and transistor radio from her pantry.

  “Mommy, the TV went off !” cried her daughter, Elsie, from the living room. Elsie was in second grade, and her little brother, Edward, was in first.

  Mrs. Marotta grabbed each of them by the arm, and hustled them outside to the prefab bomb shelter constructed belowground in the backyard. It had been built in the 1950s, in case of a Russian atomic blast.

  When he heard the siren, Paul Crichton, the young guitar god, grabbed his most precious possession—his Strat—and crawled under the workbench in the corner of the basement. That’s what his parents had taught him to do. If anything was going to fall on him—like the entire house—he would be protected.

  At The Fontaneau Ballet Studio, Julia Maguire and the other students were hustled away from all that glass—the picture window in the front and the giant mirror that covered one whole wall of the studio. The school had no basement. The students were led—in an orderly fashion—into the office and instructed to crouch down in the corner to make as small a target as possible. The leotard-clad girls covered their heads with notebooks, backpacks, or in some cases, just their hands.

  All over Cape Bluff, people rushed to prepare for a disaster. Some were hiding in closets, hoping to put as many walls as they could between themselves and the wind. People huddled on the floors of interior rooms, avoiding halls that opened to the outside in any direction. Kids rushed to put on their bike helmets, batting helmets, and hockey masks. Anything to protect themselves from flying objects. Some people crawled into metal trash cans. Parents were exchanging final glances, just in case they would not see one another again.

  The storm picked up momentum as it rushed through town. People who were unfortunate enough to be out on the streets of Cape Bluff watched the black funnel approaching, fully aware that a falling tree, power line, or lightning bolt was just as dangerous as the tornado itself.

  The smart ones jumped in a nearby ditch and lay there. That’s the safest place outdoors, unless of course, you get swept away by a flash flood.

  All over town, a continuous rumble could be heard in the distance. As the funnel moved closer, it became a muffled whooshing sound, like a waterfall or air rushing past an open car window driven at high speed. The roar grew sharper and louder, until it sounded like a freight train or jet engine.

  It was officially an F4 tornado. The wind speed topped out at 260 miles per hour. But nobody knew the speed for sure, because at the weather station the device they used to measure wind speed blew away. Trees began to bend, and finally snap.

  Some people—some foolish people—ran around their houses frantically opening the windows. They had been told that if the windows are open, it allows a tornado to pass through more easily and cause less destruction.

  They were wrong.

  The black funnel, now visible for miles, began to stab the earth like a dagger from the clouds. The snakelike tail flipped back and forth underneath it, licking one neighborhood for a minute or two before dancing on to the next one, like a bee trying to decide which flower to pollinate. It lashed out as if it had a purpose, an insatiable twisted mind intent on destroying anything below.

  Like a carousel out of control, debris was swirling overhead. Bricks, beams, concrete, chairs, tables, clothes, toys, jewelry, and family heirlooms. Kitchen knives were flung 150 feet per second, impaling anything in their path. Years later, one would be found at a construction site, eight feet below the ground.

  At Pete’s Lumber Company on the north side of town, two-by-fours were being tossed around like Popsicle sticks. A hundred-year-old oak tree was yanked out by the roots. Cars were flying through the air like Frisbees.

  At Cape Bluff Elementary School, the door to the library was ripped off its hinges. Water flooded inside, and virtually every book in the library was ruined.

  At Booker’s Stamps and Coins, the entire inventory was swept away. In an instant, a lifetime of work that had been so carefully collected and stored was gone.

  Objects were plucked off the ground and thrown every which way. A pair of German shepherds was picked up and carried a quarter mile from their home. Miraculously, neither was hurt. An entire maple tree would be found, intact, two miles from where it grew. Forty miles away, a phone bill from a Cape Bluff resident would be found on the street. Debris would be picked up as far as eighty miles away.

  Don Potash, the young comedian, had been home alone, watching his portable battery- powered DVD player. He had headphones on and hadn’t heard a thing. As he listened to Jerry Seinfeld tell jokes about doing laundry, Don’s house began to shudder as if a giant was shaking it. The building vibrated as the roar grew steadily louder. Don was concentrating heavily as he copied down the jokes in his special notebook that was filled with his favorite comedy routines.

  By the time Don realized anything was going on, the aluminum siding was being ripped away from the frame of his house like a banana peel. And then, the building literally exploded and flew away. Seconds later, you couldn’t even tell that a house had ever been on that spot. It had been wiped clean.

  All that was left was Don Potash, sitting where his house used to be, dazed and confused, with the headphones still on his head.

  And then, after all that … nothing. The tornado had done the only thing it knew how to do—destroy things indiscriminately. It suddenly dissipated, exhausted, like a car that had run out of gas.

  Just ten minutes after the tornado started, it was all over.

  Chapter 3

  A Crazy Idea

  “I’m just about busted, George.”

  Honest Dave admitted it to an old friend as they trudged up the steps of Cape Bluff High School three days later. Even though the tornado caused just minor damage to Honest Dave’s Hummer Heaven, business had been way off for more than a year. Few people in town had enough money to buy a new car, especially the big gas guzzlers at Hummer Heaven. And the only people from out of town who were coming to Cape Bluff were gawkers who wanted to see what it looked like after a tornado had just about flattened a town. The tornado had delivered a knockout blow.

  Honest Dave wiped his muddy feet before entering the auditorium. He wore a jacket and tie, like always. People treat you with respect when you wear a jacket and tie. Nobody wants to buy a car from a slob. That’s what Dave always said. He was a salesman’s salesman. There are three kinds of people in the world, according to Dave: old customers, new customers, and potential customers.

  A large percentage of Cape Bluff citizens (population: 1,098) had gathered at the high school for the seven o’clock town meeting. The football field out back had been torn up pretty badly, but the tornado had mercifully left the school alone. The auditorium was half-filled by the time Honest Dave got there, and people were still streaming in.

  The official estimate, according to The Cape Bluff Tribune, was $34 million worth of damage, 168 trees down, thirty-five houses destroyed beyond repair, thirteen stores damaged, and nine cars totaled. One of those cars hadn’t even been found yet. There had been hundreds of injuries, including twenty-four broken bones, a punctured lung, and at least one concussion. Miraculously, there had been no deaths. People in this part of the country know what to do when there’s a tornado.

  A brief history of Cape Bluff, Kansas. If you don’t like to read brief histories, that’s okay. Skip the next couple of pages.

  The town is located where the flat plains and rolling hills of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas just about meet at the corners. It was founded in 1842 as an Indian trading post. A U.S. army officer, LaRue Bluff, surveyed the town, and the Reverend Harris G. Cape founded the first Methodist congregation in the area. When it came time to give the place a name, Reverend Cape and Captain Bluff agreed to flip a coin. Defying all odds, the coin landed on its edge, and the town was officially named Cape Bluff in 1859.

  There were about a thousand residents by the time of the Civil War, but Cape Bluff didn’t get on a map until the arrival of the Missouri W
estern Railroad in 1872. Around the same time, zinc and lead were discovered in the area. Southern and Eastern European immigrants poured into Cape Bluff, starting up a foundry, a furniture factory, woolen and grain mills, a plow works, and other businesses. Cape Bluff grew, and at the turn of the twentieth century, ten thousand people lived there. It was one of the first towns in Kansas to have electricity.

  An interesting side note: in 1933, Bonnie and Clyde spent several weeks hiding out at Cape Bluff after pulling off a string of bank robberies across the Midwest.

  After World War II, the price of lead and zinc plummeted, and the fortunes of Cape Bluff with it. Most of the mines closed down, and the population dropped by half.

  Today, there isn’t much evidence of Cape Bluff’s glory days. You can still find a few badly marked open pit mines and shafts that occasionally cave in, creating sink holes big enough to swallow large animals and small cars. The main street—Main Street—is cluttered with a Burger King and a few other fast-food joints, gas stations, a supermarket, a movie theater that doesn’t show movies anymore, and the faded signs of businesses that picked up and moved elsewhere many years ago.

  The rich folks, with their summer homes and designer cars, live in Kansas City, Tulsa, or Little Rock, each about three hours away. Cape Bluff is working class. You have to be tough to live there. Resilient. The people have survived two World Wars, one Depression, countless recessions, gas shortages, crop failures, not to mention the occasional “weather event.” Four tornadoes touched down in the 1990s, ruining countless lives.

  There were a lot of downcast faces as people filed into the high school auditorium that Friday night. Many were wearing ripped clothes and soiled shoes, or walked with a limp. Some people had lost everything they owned. Tornado insurance was a luxury not many people could afford.