by Nancy Rue
Lucy went to the sink and picked up the upside-down bean pot. She wiped off a small blob with her sleeve and said, “You did good. I’ll finish putting them away.” She used her foot to push aside one of the curtains with the big red checks that acted as cabinet doors and slid the pot onto its shelf.
“Check,” Dad said. “Did I get all the laundry folded?”
“Yes, and I put it away.”
“Thank you. I took the trash out and emptied Marmalade’s litter box.”
“I don’t get why he can’t go potty outside like the other cats.” Lucy wrinkled her nose. “He stinks up the place. Even my backpack smells like him.”
Dad put his coffee-free hand to his lap where an orange ball of a cat slept. That was what Marmalade did most of the time. Except when he was eating, which was the other most of the time.
“Is that everything?” Dad said.
Lucy consulted the chart hanging on the side of the refrigerator. Across the top were the chores, written in Lucy letters and also punched out in little braille bubbles so Dad could feel them with his fingers. Along the side were the dates, also in words and braille. Each of the squares they formed was outlined in braid Lucy had glued on. Dad had put fuzzy snowflake stickers in his squares, because it was January, and Lucy now applied her snowmen ones.
“All the boxes are filled,” she said. “I’ll just finish up the dishes.”
As she crossed to the sink, her father lowered his cup carefully to the table. “Do I dare ask how your room looks?”
“That’s not on the chart.” Lucy picked up a handful of silverware from the drainer and let it clatter into its slots in the drawer. Her good mood was flattening.
“I know it’s not on the chart,” he said. “I usually leave that up to you.”
There was a “but” in the air.
“Luce,” Dad said.
He centered his eyes somewhere along the line of happy tiles that bordered the ceiling.
Lucy passed a fake-mouse cat toy across the floor with her toe so he wouldn’t trip over it. “My room looks better than it usually does.”
One side of Dad’s mouth went up. “What’s Aunt Karen going to say?”
“She’s going to say it needs to be more girly.”
He chuckled. “Okay. Go have fun on your bike ride, but be back by three thirty so we can make our famous MexiBurgers for Aunt K. Put your watch on.”
“Man,” Lucy said.
There was another chuckle as Lucy rode the rug to her room and straightened it with her foot when she got there. Her dad had been blind for four years, and she still hadn’t figured out how he knew stuff like that. It would be so easy to be late and say she didn’t know what time it was — as if she couldn’t tell by the shadows on the mountains anyway.
“It seems like you’d get away with so much, having a blind dad,” J.J. said whenever Lucy got in trouble.
“Ha,” she always said to him.
“Zip your coat,” Dad said as she returned with her watch and grabbed her fuzzy-lined jean jacket off the peg by the back door.
She poked her arms into the sleeves and said, “Okay.”
“I don’t hear it.”
“I’m zipping!”
“Love you,” Dad said.
Lucy gave him a wet kiss on the forehead. “Love you more.”
“Loved you first,” he said.
She knew he knew she was grinning as she bounded toward the back door.
“Take care of what I love, champ,” he said.
“Always,” she said.
With the back door shut behind her, Lucy went for her dirt bike, which leaned against the Mexican elder tree in the middle of the backyard.
“Took you long enough,” a low voice said. It pierced upward at the end of the sentence like its owner didn’t know where it might end up. That happened about once every paragraph with J.J.
He poked his head and shoulders up over the fence that surrounded the house like a row of straight gray teeth, and Lucy could tell he was kneeling on the seat of his bike. His thick, almost-blue-black hair was wet and slicked back from his face, which was as much like a rectangle as his sister’s was like a circle. He must have just taken a shower, or some grown-up at the Cluck’s house had stuck his head under a faucet — either of which had probably involved a fight.
He slanted his blue eyes downward. They and his lanky skinniness were the only things on him that hinted he had a white father. The rest sprang straight up from his mama’s Apache roots.
“This cat’s looking at me like he wants to eat my face,” J.J. said.
Lucy laughed as she wheeled her bike through the gate and onto the sidewalk on Second Street. “Mudge won’t eat you if you leave him alone.”
She looked down at her brown tabby — who was actually gray striped, so she could never figure out why he was called a brown tabby — crouched behind a century plant whose thin, sharp leaves were like tongues, lashing up at nothing. Like the plant, Mudge actually did look as if he could eat a person. He glared at J.J. with eyes perfectly marked as if he were wearing eyeliner.
“So what took you so long?” J.J. said as Lucy got astride her bike seat.
“We’re on Aunt Karen alert.”
J.J. made a sound like a car alarm.
“Let’s get out of here before she shows up,” Lucy said. “You want to go up by the high school? I could bring my soccer ball, and we could practice — ”
J.J. jerked his head back. “Not far enough.”
“Gotcha.”
J.J. pulled up the gray hood of his sweatshirt and pedaled into the street, gravel popping from his tires.
That was what she liked about her and J.J. They didn’t ask each other nine thousand questions. He was way more interested in escaping — and right now, that was what she wanted too.
2
Lucy liked it that the main town of Los Suenos was mostly bunched up on Granada Street, a few blocks down from Lucy and J.J.’s houses. That meant it was easy to head in the opposite direction from the town hall and the church and the market and the cantina and Pasco’s Café and not be seen by anybody.
“What are we escaping from today?” she yelled to J.J. as she followed the gray hood down the gravel road between the high school and the middle school.
“Januarie,” he called back over his shoulder. “She’s driving me nuts.”
His bike bounced on a rock, and his bottom rose almost to his handlebars. Lucy laughed and steered around it to catch up to him.
“How did you get away from her?” she said.
“You don’t want to know.”
Lucy sat tall on her seat and felt the cracked plastic scrape at her jeans. “Did you lock her in the garage again?”
“I said you don’t want to know.”
“J.J.!”
“She’ll get out. Then she’ll tell my dad, and I’ll get in trouble.” J.J. shrugged his bony shoulders.
He was escaping from more than just Januarie, but Lucy didn’t ask what. That, she knew, was one of the reasons J.J. liked her too.
They left the schools behind, which helped Lucy forget that Christmas vacation was over in two more days and they’d be returning to sixth-grade world. That was almost as depressing as Aunt Karen coming. As the playground and the sneaker smell and the metal clang of the empty chains against the flagpole fell away, Lucy stood up on her pedals and lowered her head.
“Race ya,” she said.
J.J. shook his head. “You don’t wanna do that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’ll lose.”
“Will not.”
“I’ll run you right into the ground.”
“Will not.”
“Okay — but don’t come cryin’ to me when I totally leave you in the dust.”
Lucy sank back onto her seat and looked glumly at her handlebars.
“You’re giving up that easy?” J.J. said.
“No!” Lucy said — and rising like a cobra, she was off down the t
rail that led across the desert.
“Dude!” J.J. yelled, but Lucy could hear the laugh in his voice as she pumped toward the mountains that watched her like old grandpas and uncles, as if Dad had told them to look after what he loved. She dodged a tumbleweed that had stopped tumbling. Behind her, she heard J.J. run over it, spraying pebbles with his tires.
“Wimp!” he called to her.
“Whatever,” she called back.
Okay, so maybe she could show him who was a wimp just a little bit. The mountains wouldn’t tell Dad. Pumping harder on the pedals, Lucy sped ahead, spewing winter-dry dust from both sides and squinting to keep it out of her eyes. She didn’t actually have to see where she was going anyway. This desert and the Sacramento Mountains that guarded it were as familiar as her own house, where Dad always said if the furniture stayed right where it was, he could get around just fine. As long as nobody moved the cactus trees, Lucy could have woven in and out and around them if she’d had no eyes at all.
She left the trail and tore straight for a tall socorro cactus, the kind that looked as if it had a head and two arms stretched up like a school crossing guard.
“Look out!” she heard J.J. cry, his voice veering off into the stratosphere at the end.
Lucy waited until she could almost feel the spikes on the cactus before she whipped the wheel to the left and slid sideways. With one foot on the ground, she kept from going over and hopped back onto her seat.
“That’s nothin’.” J.J. flew past her while she was still getting her bearings and went for a whole scattering of socorros. Lucy expected them to come to life and give him hand signals as he stitched his way in and out among them.
“Piece of pizza,” she told him, and went into a figure eight that fanned dust across his back.
She wasn’t surprised that didn’t stop him. He hunkered down over his handlebars and came at her, grinning with grit between his teeth. Lucy rode back at him, and her heart leaped the way jackrabbits run. Just as his front tire grazed hers, she pulled up and did a wheelie that matched his. Their bikes were like two horses, raring up and hoofing the air.
When they came down, Lucy put both feet on the ground and spit to the side. She looked at J.J., who pulled down his hood and shook dust out of his hair like ashes from rags. He wasn’t smiling.
“What’s wrong?” Lucy said.
“Bored.”
Lucy watched him. “Bored” for J.J. was usually followed by something Dad would call “outside the box,” which usually meant somebody could get grounded for weeks. Years, even.
But there was always the chance that it could be worth it, as long as no one got bruised up. Dad did hate that.
“What are you thinking?” Lucy said. “You want to try jumping over a barrel cactus?”
“Done that.”
“True.” Lucy had several puncture wounds in her backside to prove it. She didn’t mention that to Dad. He couldn’t see that she made a face every time she sat down — for a week — and the “worth it” factor was way up there. She and her bike had clearly jumped higher than J.J. and his bike.
J.J. turned toward the mountains and shaded his eyes with his hand, not that he needed to. The sky had turned to a gray slab of clouds, with only a small hole for the sun to trickle some weak light through. Lucy pulled up the collar of her jacket and stuck her hands in her pockets to warm them up. New Mexico winter air bit worse than Mudge when anybody but Lucy tried to pick him up.
“We gotta keep moving,” she said.
J.J. punched his feet hard on his pedals, then shoved back on them so his tires burned into the sand.
“What?” Lucy said.
“Little Sierra Blanca,” he said.
Lucy’s mouth went dry immediately. “Aw, man, J.J. — no. There’s too many ATVs.”
“It’s all ATVs.”
“We can’t race them.” She didn’t bother to remind him that all-terrain vehicles had big fat wheels and motors, and the kids who drove them were junior maniacs. Dad said nobody without a driver’s license and clearance from a psychiatrist should be allowed behind the wheel of one.
“Who said we were going to race them?” J.J. said. He was already making a donut in the dirt.
“Then what are we going to do with them?”
J.J. clamped his teeth down so hard Lucy could hear them. “Whatever we want,” he said, and he took off toward the hill where Lucy could already see clouds of dust billowing up from the other side.
She should go home. Tell Dad J.J. was headed for definite decapitation. Bring out Sheriff Navarra.
But there was hurt in J.J. today. She saw it in his teeth. Heard it in his tight voice. Felt it in those daredevil words, “Whatever we want.”
The only thing to do was pretend to go along, and then do everything she could to stop him.
He was way ahead of her by the time she got going. He was good on the sprints, but he’d get tired and she’d catch up again. As she pumped until her calves complained, she just hoped it would happen before he reached the hill.
It wasn’t really known as Little Sierra Blanca. It probably didn’t actually have a name. J.J. and Lucy called it that because it looked like a miniature of Sierra Blanca, the most powerful mountain of any of them. Ski Apache, the ski resort, was there, but Lucy just thought of it as a giant mound of the very best vanilla ice cream. She could always see faces in it. Of course, she could see faces in everything in New Mexico — the clouds, the moutainsides, the gnarly desert ironwood trees. But the only face that mattered right now was J.J.’s. It had so much pain in it, he was likely to do just about anything.
As she’d predicted, he was slowing down some, and his back tire wobbled over a clump of sagebrush. Lucy was almost on him, and they were both almost to Little Sierra Blanca when she heard the first snarl of an engine.
“Sweet!” J.J. said.
“It is SO not,” Lucy said.
She spun the bike out in front of him and stopped. He jammed on his brakes and hit her in the kickstand.
“Dude — you made me run into you.”
“I know. J.J., this is insane.
J.J.’s blue eyes slitted down. “Don’t call me crazy.”
“I didn’t say you were nuts, I said this is — whatever you’re thinking we’re gonna do.”
The engine whined closer, and Lucy knew it was climbing the hill on the other side.
“We’re just gonna make it fun for whoever’s driving,” J.J. said. “He’s probably bored too.”
The motor screamed, and another cloud of dust-smoke billowed above them.
“He doesn’t sound bored.” Lucy put her hand on J.J.’s handlebar. “Come on — I’ll lie down over there and let you jump over me with your bike.”
“Great idea,” J.J. said. But he didn’t move to where Lucy was pointing, away from the approaching growl of the ATV. “We’ll both get down at the bottom of the hill, and when he comes over the top, he’ll either have to go over the side or jump over us.”
Lucy shook her ponytail, hard.
“Either way, it’ll be cool. Come on,” J.J. said.
“What if he misses?”
“No way — he’ll totally see us.”
Lucy didn’t like the hard thing that came into J.J.’s eyes, like a lid slamming down on something. He was going to do this, no matter what. And Lucy wasn’t.
She could hear the ATV making its final snarling-growling-whining push to the top of Little Sierra. She jerked her wheel to the left and shoved off with her foot.
Even as she got her other foot to the pedal, she heard the ATV scream in the air behind her. Someone yelled in a voice that rose into the air with it. When J.J.’s cry joined it, Lucy turned around. She was just in time to see the thick wheels of the ATV land and bounce and head straight for her.
“Get down!” J.J. screamed.
Lucy let go of her bike and dropped to the ground. Her spokes flattened her arm, pushing it down hard. Pain shot all the way up to her neck. Tiny things hit her fac
e and stung and bit and then were gone with the machine that roared past, just inches from the top of her head.
Dust rained on her, but Lucy didn’t care. All she could do was shake.
J.J. said above her, “You’re okay, right?”
“I don’t know.” Lucy tried to sit up, but her right arm was pinned under what used to be her bike wheel. Now, it looked like it belonged on the pile of junk in J.J.’s yard.
Her clothes didn’t look much better. Rips f lapped open in both her jacket and her sweatshirt as if they were eager to show off the gash in her arm.
“Dude, you’re bleeding,” J.J. said.
“Of course I’m bleeding, genius. The spokes cut me. Could you get the bike off?”
J.J. crouched beside her, hands shivering. He managed to use them to pull the twisted wheel from her arm.
“How bad is it?” Lucy asked.
“You got, like, a major cut.”
“No — my bike. How bad is it?”
J.J. got on his knees. “I can totally fix it. We probably got a hundred wheels at my house.”
Before Lucy could tell him he probably had that many in the front yard alone, engine noise ripped the air.
“He better come back,” J.J. said, scrambling to his feet.
Lucy cradled her arm against the front of her jacket. “Why? So he can run over me again?”
“Hey!” J.J. waved his arms above his head and jumped, puffing dirt into Lucy’s face.
“Would you knock it off?” But Lucy could barely hear herself as the ATV roared toward them. She curled up and rolled away, but it stopped, and the motor noise dropped to a mumble, unlike Lucy’s heart, which slammed against the walls of her chest.
“What was up with that?” the driver said. His “that” disappeared up into that range where only dogs can hear, the way J.J.’s often did, and Lucy uncurled herself to look at him. He had to be their age, but his face was so plastered with dirt she couldn’t tell who he was.
“What are you asking me for?” J.J.’s words seemed to want to slide back down his throat. He crossed his arms and hid his hands in his armpits. His “You’re the one who almost ran over somebody” came out only half sure.
Lucy stifled a groan. J.J. was backing down. That could only mean this guy was —
