His eyebrows shoot up, like that hadn’t occurred to him. But then he shrugs and slumps down again. “I don’t know, Ariel. Why tempt fate? Maybe it’s a sign.”
I look out the window, confused. “What’s a sign?”
“My life. My Harley days. My motorcycle rally days. They’re over,” he says. “I have to move on.”
“Just like that?”
“If I was still that person . . . well, I wouldn’t be here on a bus, would I? I’d be meeting you in Sturgis because I rode there on my motorcycle.” He taps the armrest between us. “I’ve changed; my methods of perambulation have changed.”
I poke my head up over the seat back, where Andre’s sitting with his mom and Cuddles behind us. Mrs. O’Neill has suddenly gotten interested in this “sitting with family” concept, too. She and Mom are conspiring, no doubt. “Perambulation?” I ask Andre.
“Technically it means tour of duty, but he probably means getting around,” Andre replies instantly. Then he asks, “Your uncle gets around?”
“Not like that. On a motorcycle,” I explain.
“Well, dudes on motorcycles sometimes do get around, you know.”
“Shut up,” I whisper. “You’re talking about my uncle.” I smile, then sit back down, while Uncle Jeff is explaining that Sturgis has a gigantic motorcycle rally every August, and how he used to go, how that was always his summer vacation week, how he’d arrange it far in advance, and how he met so many fellow carriers and even had a romance there once with a postal inspector named Sandra.
I look out the window at the signs, trying to miss some of the intimate details he’s sharing. We’re heading toward a town called Deadwood, which sounds familiar for some reason.
I feel a pen press on my ribs, and reach between the seats to grab it. Andre and I wrestle for it until a shadow looms over me.
“I’ll be confiscating that highlighter now,” Mrs. O’Neill says.
“That’s the first thing they take away in jail. The pens,” Andre comments.
As everyone gets off the bus in Deadwood, I sit and wait until I’m the last one. “We are still going to Mount Rushmore, right?” I ask Jenny, who’s sitting in the driver’s seat. “Even though we’re not rushing it.”
She laughs. “Yes, of course we’re going there.”
“And I can still run that race on the twenty-first. The one in Keystone,” I say, hoping to jog her memory, so to speak.
“Possibly, yes,” says Jenny.
“Possibly?” I want to scream, but I hold it inside.
“I don’t see why not, but on the other hand, you never know. The trip is ten days, and how we spend those ten days . . . well, it’s not all set in stone.” She shrugs and adjusts something in the little compartment above her seat.
“You know what? I don’t know how you guys stay in business. This is the most wishy-washy trip I’ve ever been on in my entire life.”
“Wishy-washy? What are you, twelve?” She snorts.
I glare at her. “No, that’s my sister, Zena. The one whose name you keep calling me? My name is Ariel, okay?”
“Are you interested in achieving personal growth or not? Just relax,” she says to me.
And what are you, my mother? I want to say. “Relax? How can I relax when I don’t know where we’re going? When one day you tell me I can do this race, and three days later suddenly you’re not sure. Can I or can’t I?” I demand.
“We’ll see!” Jenny responds with a phony smile. “Now move along; I have to go park the bus.”
When I stomp off the bus, my family is waiting at the bottom of the steps, looking concerned by my behavior.
“How can you get so riled up about running? God. It’s just running,” says Zena.
“Thanks for the support, as always,” I tell her.
Fortunately, Grandma falls into step beside me. “Jenny’s not exactly known for her people skills, is she?”
The first place we head to is Saloon No. 10, and Lenny tells us that this is where the famous Wild Bill Hickok, criminal at large in the 1800s, was killed in 1876. He was shot in the back of the head while playing cards. He had what is now known as the “dead man’s hand,” a pair of aces and a pair of eights. No news on the fifth card, but apparently also a dead man’s card.
There are actors in historical costumes dressed up and walking around the streets, and it turns out we’re only a day early for the town’s Wild Bill Hickok Days, which is kind of annoying, because I bet those would be pretty fun.
I can’t believe I wrote that sentence, either. But I’m serious.
We’re also too early for the reenactment of the shooting, which happens every day at three p.m., which is okay because I don’t like to think of poker players getting shot in the back of the head. Wild Bill’s “dead man’s chair,” or a replica of it, hangs from the wall.
I start to get that nauseated feeling again. I try to hide it, but it really grips my gut like the way I can feel sick before a race.
Mom isn’t doing much better. She’s gone a bit pale. She’s standing in the doorway, not committing to coming in, just staring at the chair plastered to the wall above the door, as if she’s thinking of the title for her next self-help book: Deadwood Dad, Deadbeat Dad.
Come to think of it, I haven’t asked her in a while if she’s working on a new book, and if so, what it’s about, but I have a feeling I’m on the right track with this. The Flackjack Track, that is.
Lenny goes over to her, looking concerned, and asks, “You feeling all right, mate?”
“Not exactly,” she says.
“Why don’t you come over here and sit down?” He tries to guide her to a seat at the bar.
“No—no, thanks,” she says.
I watch her for a second, wondering if she’s feeling the way I do. Dad isn’t here, but yet he is. People are slumped at slots or bouncing on toes at card tables. He worked his way up—or down, depending how you look at it—and was proud of it, like he was really achieving something. Starting at nickel slots. Then quarters. Then dollars.
Then all the dollars.
He told me all about it the first time he apologized, trying to make amends when he started going to Gamblers Anonymous meetings. How once you got the adrenaline rush you couldn’t stop. How every time you had the potential to win big, really big, and sometimes you did and it was exhilarating and you couldn’t forget how on top of the world you felt, so you were always chasing that feeling again.
Then he told me how he started doing whatever he could to improve his luck, how one time he carried one of my cross-country race medals in his pocket and he won, so he kept carrying it. Which was sweet, I suppose, but also made my medal seem like a carnival token. If I ever win a real medal—gold or silver or bronze—he’d probably steal it and melt it down, or else just pawn it.
In some ways I’d like to cash in a couple dollars and go try my luck at the slots right now, but Mom has this piercingly sad look on her face, and I just can’t walk away and ignore that, as much as I want to.
“Hey,” I say, going over to her.
She sighs. “Hey.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I don’t know.” She frowns, more so than before. “That your father would love it here?”
“No. I was thinking we should go get ice cream,” I say, trying to change the subject, because how many times can you beat a dead horse?
“Maybe we should. Or maybe we should stand here and try to understand.” She gets this very serious look on her face, like she’s channeling the ghost of Wild Bill Hickok, and it hurts her to do so.
“Or there’s a realsimple solution,” I offer. “We could just leave.”
As I look around, not wanting to abandon Mom, but not really wanting to hug it out or hang out and talk either, I see a banner in the back of the room that says: SEND AN EMAIL FROM DEADWOOD! FROM WILD BILL HICKOK!
“Excuse me, Mom. Gotta go,” I tell her. Family’s one thing, but Dylan’s another.
>
I start to type:
Dylan, we’re in Deadwood, which is reallyreallyclose to Wyoming. I saw Devils Tower on the map and we’re really close but probably not going. Any way you can get a day pass??? Or whatever they call it? After this we’re going to Rushmore. Meet me online at 9 tomorrow night and we can Gchat.
Mom is behind me. “Come on, Ariel, we’re leaving, I’m sorry.” She tries to take my arm as if I’m six, and she pulls me over to where Lenny is leading the charge, chanting, “Lemon, lemon . . . cherry! Ah, mate, try it again!”
“Lenny, what were you thinking? This isn’t appropriate for the kids,” Mom is saying, and just as she does Dieter lets out a whoop because he has gotten three in a row and coins are spitting out of the machine like hail from the sky.
“This is supposed to be fun. Relax, Tammy, relax.” Lenny puts his arm around my mother and tries to give her a shoulder rub, and she gives him a warning look, backing off.
“It’s Tamara,” she says. “Not Tammy.”
Jenny, who’s been off parking the bus at one of the lots reserved for tour buses, walks in just then and sees Lenny kind of accosting Mom, and she comes over and starts hitting him and accusing him of flirting with Mom. Which is extremely ridiculous, but I don’t tell her that because she’s been so unpleasant that I kind of enjoy watching her squirm with jealousy.
Lenny and Jenny start yelling at each other, and Mom’s trying to counsel them about their marriage, and we’ve suddenly turned into the white-trash Jerry Springer bus tour.
Later in the afternoon, Andre and I skip the day’s strange museum of choice in favor of people watching, and for some reason this is okay with our mothers. We have Cuddles with us, which is our excuse. We pick up a couple of coffees and park on a bench on historic Main Street.
Andre holds up Cuddles, checking out their reflected image in the coffee shop’s window. “I’m like a glorified dog walker. I mean, how much does this ruin my image?”
I step back and look at him, at his semi-cut body, with his latest cool T-shirt, his great sneakers, his low-rise jeans, his stylish eyeglasses. Carrying a tiny Chihuahua.
“Are you trying to meet someone?” I ask. “’Cause if so, here, I’ll hold him,” I offer.
He pushes my arm away. “No, it’s okay.”
“No, come on, let me,” I insist. “Maybe I’ll meet someone.”
Andre rolls his eyes. “Yeah, lots of middle-aged women. Trust me on this.”
“I didn’t know so many people would be here,” I say. “In Deadwood.”
“Why wouldn’t they be?”
I shrug, then take a sip of my iced latte.
“I have a question. Does being here make you freak a little?”
“A little,” I say. “Yeah. I mean, it looks fun. The thing is that I’d probably like it in the casinos. Or genetically I’d maybe love it.”
“You think that kind of thing is inherited?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Does anyone know?”
“Well, are your grandparents gambling addicts?”
“No.”
“It could be worse, you know. He could have been a drug addict.”
“True, but there’s a certain glamour to that,” I say. I think about Keith Johnson telling me about his addicted brother, and how it didn’t count until you got the call from jail.
“No. Not really. Haven’t you ever seen those meth-addict posters? I mean, have you even looked at those teeth?” He shudders so violently that Cuddles barks, looking alarmed.
“Gambling’s very smoky, and the coins and tokens make your hands stink. My dad used to have this weird lemon-lime smell, like he’d bathed in Sprite, and I couldn’t figure it out, and we found out later it was from the little wet cloths they give you to clean your hands after handling all those metal tokens at the casino. But they didn’t really work. In the end, it was just like my mom finding lipstick on his collar, only it wasn’t another woman. Well, unless you consider Lady Luck a woman, I guess.”
“Again with the long sentences,” he comments.
“Yeah, well.” I take a crumpled bag of Skittles out of my pocket and offer him a handful.
“They’re melting,” he says as he looks at the clump that fell into his palm. “When you run out of Skittles, that’s when we’ll know it’s time to leave.” He reaches for the bag. “Getting close?”
He tries to pull the bag out of my hand, and Skittles clatter on the hot pavement. They start sticking to people’s shoe and sandal soles as they walk past and make a sort of gooey tap-dance sound.
How hot is it? Hot enough to fry a Skittle on the sidewalk.
Later that afternoon, Lenny keeps glancing at his watch. He taps his pen against the clipboard. We’ve all reported to the bus. He’s finished taking roll, and there’s only one person missing: Jenny.
“Well. I guess we’d better go,” he says.
“Do you know how to drive one of these?” asks Grandpa.
“Of course, I’ve got my commercial driver’s license, just like my wife,” he says. “We trade off all the time.”
“Uh-huh,” Mrs. O’Neill says, looking suspicious. “Then why haven’t they traded off before now?” she comments to the rest of us.
We’re trusting—or desperate, take your pick—so we climb back onto the bus. I sit with Grandpa, because so far I’ve sat with every family member but him. After a couple of misfires the engine purrs to life, and Lenny very, very slowly maneuvers out of the parking lot.
“So long, Deadwood,” Grandpa says.
“So long, Jenny,” I add.
“I can’t say I’ll miss her,” Grandpa says to me quietly. “Or her musical selec—”
We look at each other as Oklahoma! booms out of the overhead speakers. Apparently Lenny can’t drive and monitor volume at the same time.
Wild Bill Hickok says, “They don’t call it Deadwood for nothing, now, do they?”
Dear Mars, Incorporated,
You should know that Skittles don’t travel all that well.
On hot days, they will melt on sidewalks.
Also, the price could be lowered for those of us unable to get summer jobs because our mothers insist on dragging us all over the country.
Thank you for sustaining me and for your great product. My home address is below in case you’d like to send me a little something, like a five-pound bag.
Sincerely yours,
Ariel Frances Flack
Not the mermaid
Chapter Sixteen
“The bus has spoken, and the bus is dead,” Andre announces as he steps off the bus and joins me and the crowd standing around the side of the road, looking less than pleased.
There’s a gray-brown burro about ten yards off giving me the evil eye. I’m thinking it’s time to move on. “I don’t have any carrots or whatever,” I tell it. “I really don’t.”
“I’ll push that bus if I have to,” someone behind me mutters.
“You might have to,” says my grandfather. “We all might have to.”
Several backseat drivers are telling Lenny that it’s his fault the bus overheated. Now a tow truck’s going to have to come out from the nearest garage and move the bus, and then it’ll need to be repaired.
“You should have gone around that line of cars,” Grandpa tells Lenny with some authority, as if he’s done it before.
“We could have killed a burro if I went around. No. Absolutely not. God’s creatures,” says Lenny.
We were on our way through Custer State Park after seeing Crazy Horse, which is an amazing mountain carving like Mount Rushmore, only it was started later, didn’t get government funding, and is still in progress. The nose, the profile, is gigantic, and the people walking all over look like little gnats from afar.
We only saw it from afar, because Lenny said that our entrance fee wasn’t covered by our Leisure-Lee fee, so we had a bus vote to decide if we’d see it, and it was narrowly defeated, 23–21. I’m still mad about that, because it looked very c
ool.
So we were driving along the Wildlife Loop Road, where there are burros along the way that stop cars to beg for food, and people feed them, so we ended up sitting and waiting behind a line of cars. Then the bus overheated, blew a gasket or something, and we coasted, again, into the nearest business parking lot, which in this case was Happyland RV Park.
“Well, folks, this wasn’t exactly what we were planning, now, was it?” asks Lenny, rubbing his hands together and looking slightly on edge. “Time to break out that emergency gear. Time for a taste of the outback!”
“There’s an Outback around here? Really?” Andre’s mom asks, her voice thick with hope. “I’d kill for some mashed potatoes.”
“Oh, I just love their Blooming Onion. It’s amazing,” adds another passenger.
“It’s just a blooming onion,” Andre jokes.
“That’s not Outback. That’s Texas Roadhouse,” someone else says.
“Folks! Folks. Pardon the interruption, but I’m sorry. I wasn’t referring to the Outback steakhouse. I was talking about the outback, camping out–wise,” Lenny explains. “We’ll be staying the night here.”
Mrs. O’Neill’s eyes widen. “Camping out? Oh no,” she says. “I’ll sleep on the bus before I lie on the ground.”
“You can’t sleep on the bus.” Lenny shakes his head. “Against safety regulations.”
“Well, so are rattlesnakes. I’ve never slept on the ground and I don’t intend to start now. This was most definitely not in the brochure,” she says, and everyone laughs.
“That disclaimer part about being able to roll with the punches. Didn’t you read that, mate?” Lenny asks her, a twinkle in his eye, as if he’s hilarious.
Mrs. O’Neill doesn’t look amused in the slightest. “I’ll roll and punch you,” she tells him.
“Ma, lighten up. It’s only camping,” Andre says. “You’ve camped before.”
“No, I haven’t, and you haven’t either,” she says, “so quit pretending. We’re not Boy Scouts.” She raises one very nicely plucked eyebrow. “I’m not camping out here. You’re breaking our agreement,” she says to Lenny.
The Summer of Everything Page 29
