Turn Left at the Cow

by Lisa Bullard

  What I mean is, I already knew all about life’s little disappointments. So I probably shouldn’t have been feeling like Luke Skywalker when he finds out that Darth Vader is his dad and screams “Nooooooooo!” and jumps down into that void. But somehow I couldn’t help it. The evil fairy’s words kept spinning in my head like one of those pinwheels. And there was this void where the floorboards of the old pickup should have been that was screaming out for me to jump.

  Even if the evil fairy was right, my dad had been just a bank robber, not some asthmatic guy named Darth who wanted to rule the galaxy. But the dark side is the dark side no matter what star system you come from. And bank robber—that’s the dark side. Maybe on the spectrum of evil, it doesn’t beat psycho killer, but it definitely outranks litterbug. And I’m guessing Luke Skywalker and I could agree: you’re never really ready to discover your dad is from the dark side.

  Normally I’m Mr. Cool, so I think it was being all worked up over Pluto that made me suddenly blurt out, “Why didn’t you tell me my dad was a bank robber?”

  Gram’s head whipped around and the truck veered toward a ditch. And a bunch of cows—yeah, real live cows—stopped chewing grass and looked at us over their fence. Gram straightened out the truck and then stared directly ahead, all focused, watching the road like it was about to transform into the Ventura Freeway at rush hour.

  “Where did you hear that?” she finally asked.

  Trust a grownup to stall by answering a question with another question. “I don’t know her name,” I said. “This girl. Straight dark hair. Pointy kind of face. Bad attitude. She was with a big blond kid named Kenny.”

  “Isabella,” said Gram. “Kenny’s cousin. Kenny lives next door. Isabella and her sister are staying there for now too.” She finally glanced back my way. “I sent them down to the cellar to introduce themselves. I never imagined they’d bring up . . .”

  “The deep, dark family secret everybody’s kept hidden from me for thirteen years? I mean, why should I get to know? I’m only the son in this story. It’s a good thing the neighbor’s cousin knows, but let’s make sure we keep old Trav out of the loop, right?”

  I guess she could tell I was a little ticked, because I saw her take a deep breath and then let it out slowly before she answered. Ma used to do that with me, too. Now Ma just goes straight to ticked.

  “You’re right, Travis. When you turned up here so unexpectedly, I knew I would need to talk with you about this soon. I was just hoping to find the right way to do that before someone else . . .” Gram’s lips kind of pulled in and then she said, “Can we please talk about it later? Is that okay? Can we wait until we’re back home?”

  I shrugged and turned to look out the window. No surprise. I was used to getting the brushoff from Ma when it came to the things that mattered to me. I pulled out my music and plugged in the ear buds. The truth was, all the tunes I’d loaded had really been bugging me lately; they were all wrong somehow, like listening to the soundtrack for a chick flick when you were watching a Jackie Chan movie. But I knew Ma hated it when I shut her out that way, and I figured it might work on Gram, too. So I turned up the volume and watched for more cows.

  Suddenly the scenery wasn’t so much Cowpoke Sam as it was that part of LA where you double-check your car locks as you drive through. And the smell—I mean, man, this was like a cross between the time I left half a pizza under my bed for a week and the “mystery meat” in the school cafeteria. I turned off the music and looked at Gram.

  “What is this place?”

  “The dump,” said Gram. Huh. Apparently Minnesota did have a few hidden wonders.

  We drove through a gate in a chainlink fence and pulled up to a stop sign. Somebody had put a second little sign below the regular red one that read TAKE TURNS. I looked around. Other than the cows, I wasn’t sure who we were supposed to take turns with.

  Gram moved forward up a ramp and then jerked to another stop. She got out of the truck and walked over to talk to this guy who had come out of a trailer. They started chatting and pointing, yakking about whatever it is you yak about with the dump guy.

  Meanwhile, I checked out the rest of WALL-E World from the safety of the truck: door-less refrigerators and heaps of garbage mounded high. Gulls were dive-bombing into the piles, screaming like extras in a Hitchcock movie. There was a bulldozer sitting quiet and lonely, way over on the other side of the enclosure, but I didn’t see the point—you would have to bulldoze 24/7 just to keep up.

  The dump guy pointed one final time and Gram climbed back into the truck, bumping along in the direction he had sent us. We curved around a bathtub and stopped right past a mannequin standing up in a rusting-out freezer chest not so different than the one I’d done a header into earlier that morning. Gram motioned me out of the truck and began climbing out herself. A shadow caught my eye and I tipped my head back; low overhead, three big black birds with small red heads circled, their spread wings fanning across the blue sky.

  Gram tipped her head back too. “Buzzards. Turkey vultures. They’re drawn in by the smell of decay.”

  Excellent. Maybe tomorrow we could take a field trip to the funeral home.

  Gram told me to jump up into the truck bed and throw down the trash bags. I was tossing the last one onto a heap when this guy rose up out of the garbage, really mad, yelling and swinging something around his head, like some kind of maniac karate master. I swear, he was about to storm the back of the truck; I scrambled backwards, tripped, and sat down hard in the truck bed. Then I heard Gram’s voice.

  “Carl! Carl, it’s okay—this is my grandson, Travis.”

  The guy pretty much froze midair and then wilted down into himself. He looked like a bag of bones held together by a nasty pair of coveralls. He muttered something, giving me the evil eye from underneath matted hair that hung down into his face. Gram walked over and touched his arm, murmuring something to him. She reached into her purse and took out what looked like cash and handed it over. He gave me one last dirty look, then loped off.

  “What’s with him?” I stood and brushed off the back of my shorts, watching as the guy scrabbled up a pile of garbage bags and slid down the other side, out of sight.

  “I’m sorry, Travis—he’s a very ill old man.” Gram sighed and turned back to the truck. “Let’s go home.”

  Then, despite saying earlier that she wanted to wait to talk, as soon as we were moving again she started in, spacing out her words all careful and slow, like she was reading off a phone number and wanted to make sure I got it down right.

  “I know I should have talked to you about all this before, but your mother didn’t want me to, and I was too—” She stopped and cleared her throat. Gram was probably telling the truth about that; I was sure Ma had told her the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that applied to my old man.

  Gram didn’t look at me, didn’t reach out to me—she just kept talking. “But there’s no excuse for me letting you down. So . . . things weren’t good for your father after he came home from the army. I spent months hoping he’d find his way to the next right thing, but it never seemed to happen. Sometimes he’d be better for a while, like when he met your mother. He was happy then. But things would get worse again.”

  She stopped and took a breath. I was sure I looked like one of those big clown-head garbage cans, my mouth hanging wide open and my eyes bugging out at this sudden release of information after all the years of silence.

  “Overall his life was going downhill. He couldn’t hold on to a job, and your mother eventually left for California without him, a few months before you were born. Then one morning, the old deputy knocked on my door and asked if he could come in. He said, ‘Mrs. Stoiska, I’ve got some difficult news, ma’am.’” Gram finally looked over at me. “It had been a stormy night; your father’s boat had been found washed up onshore over on the other side of the lake, and there was no sign of him.

  “I called your mother. She hadn’t heard from him. I didn’t hear from him
either. A few weeks later, men in dark jackets turned up. The FBI. They said that someone had stolen a lot of money from a bank in this small town up north, just before your father vanished. For some reason they were convinced your father had something to do with it. They searched his house. But they never found the money. And they never found him. I never saw him again.”

  Gram stared out the bug-guts-plastered windshield. She was gripping the steering wheel so hard that her knuckles stuck up like white bones, even though we had been parked in her driveway for the past five minutes.

  Suddenly somebody knocked on the passenger-side window. I jumped and turned my head away from Gram to look. It was Kenny—and Isabella. “Hey, Butter Head,” he said, smiling real big. “Me and Iz are going out fishing in my boat—wanna come?”

  CHAPTER 4

  I stood there, holding a clean T-shirt, seriously thinking about going AWOL out my bedroom window. The invitation to the fishing trip had hardly been out of Kenny’s mouth before Gram was gushing away, saying “doesn’t that sound like fun” and all but carrying me down to the boat herself. She made it pretty clear I was heading out to catch me a big one, like it or not. My guess was she needed some alone time and couldn’t figure out how else to get rid of me.

  And grownups—they always assume that just because you’re the same age as somebody, you’ll be best buds in minutes. But it wasn’t hard to tell that one wrong move on my part, and Isabella—Iz?—might sprinkle me with evil fairy dust.

  The problem was, a whole long list of possible wrong moves on my part seemed inevitable, since my hands-on experience with fish began when they were already in the fish sticks stage. Ma wasn’t exactly the bait-your-hook type. And since my father had disappeared sometime after his close encounter of the biological kind with her, but before I squirted into the world, I never had that Family Channel moment where my daddy taught me how to fish. Looking stupid on a fishing trip with the kids next door just wasn’t at the top of my wish list.

  Besides, the last thing I really wanted to see right now was a fish. After less than a day in Minnesota, I felt like I was drowning in some pretty deep stuff. And the truth was, it was a fish that had given me the dumb idea to run away from home in the first place.

  See, there is this certain kind of catfish that can actually wiggle out of its pond and walk around on land until it finds a better place to rest its little fishy head. It lives in Asia, I think, or maybe it’s Florida. But the point is, it’s a real fish, and it really walks. I swear—you can catch it on Animal Planet if you don’t believe me. Anyway, one night when the rest of California was nestled all snug in their beds, I saw it on cable and decided this fish was onto something.

  Because if its pond dries up, or if it gets tired of it, then this catfish just up and boogies on to the next pond over. So I started thinking about my own pond and how much it didn’t feel like home, and next thing I knew, I was making plans to get out of there—to shimmy my way cross-country to a different pond.

  A pond where I could maybe figure out who my real dad had been instead of dealing with this step-father Ma was so eager to have me adopt. After all, there was a whole other half to my gene pool that I’d never been given the chance to swim in.

  Except somehow I’d thought this would turn out to be some Disney movie, and now it was looking more like something rated R, like I was in over my head.

  But no matter how I felt about fish, right then I just couldn’t deal with sitting at home, trying to figure out what I was supposed to say to Gram. Putting myself into a situation where I was bound to look like a total dork seemed like the better option.

  Kenny and Iz were waiting in this little red old-fashioned fishing boat by the dock next door to Gram’s. Iz pointed me to the bench seat between where she was sitting up front and where Kenny was sitting in back running the motor. We bounced across the waves for a while without saying anything. Kenny steered us close to this island that was a ways offshore, then cut back on the power. The motor started hacking like some three-packs-a-day geezer.

  “We brought food if you’re hungry.” Iz waved toward some white paper bags sitting on the seat next to me. My insides were squeezing together, reminding me that I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. I grabbed the nearest bag; inside was a small Styrofoam container. I pried open the lid. It held a mysterious substance that Minnesotans apparently considered food, but this looked even stranger than the “Tater Tot hotdish” Gram had served at dinner the night before. Actually, it looked like something you’d find Orange County housewives nibbling on: some kind of rain forest granola made of grass shavings and—what were those white balls—maybe some kind of spiral pasta?

  Suddenly one of the spirals moved. It uncurled and stretched itself toward the sun. I shrieked and threw the container up into the air. Small white balls began unwinding all across the bottom of the boat. One tickled my left foot. A seagull wheeled low overhead and screamed like a two-year-old. I was pretty sure that was exactly how I had sounded a few seconds before.

  “Dude?” Kenny grinned. He had gotten the motor under control. “Hey, when you’re done with your snack, hand me that other bag, the one with the cookies, okay?”

  “Coordinated much?” Iz smirked as she pulled one of the spirals out of her hair. But then she hunkered down and started picking up the grubs or whatever they were off the bottom of the boat, tossing them back into the Styrofoam container. “They’ll dry out if we don’t get them back under cover pretty quick,” she said as I joined her. “And then you two won’t have any bait.”

  “You’re not fishing?” I asked, relieved that the conversation had moved so quickly to any topic other than my clearly unbalanced mental state.

  She gave me a sideways look. “I’m fishing for something . . . else.” She dropped the carton onto the bench next to me and returned to her seat.

  Kenny handed me a fishing pole. I let him have first go at the container of bait while I pretended to make a show of examining the pole. Really I was watching to see exactly how he got the squirmy little bugger onto the hook.

  After only a couple of grub-gut squirts onto my shorts, I got my hook baited and my line into the water. Kenny kept the boat crawling along, running parallel to the curve of the island. Iz had taken out some kind of electronic device and was peering into a screen.

  “Wii Fisherperson?” I said. “GPS, in case we lose track of shore?” That was a laugh. There was no place you could go on this lake where you could lose track of shore; it was a kiddie pool compared to the big bad Pacific I was used to.

  Iz jerked her shoulders without looking up.

  “We borrowed Uncle Butch’s underwater camera,” Kenny said. “He uses it as a fish finder. But Iz is looking for”—he paused and reeled his line in a bit—“not fish,” he finally said.

  I had always been good at fill-in-the-blank tests, and I was starting to get a strange idea about what we might be fishing for. I turned to Iz. “You’re using the underwater camera to look for . . . ?”

  She finally lifted her big storm-cloud eyes and stared at me. “Some people think maybe your father—and the stolen money, too—ended up on the bottom of the lake. I’m sorry if you don’t want to think about it. But I have to find that money. And we invited you along because after this morning, Kenny convinced me we need your help.”

  I stared out over the side of the boat. Even as close as we were to the island, you couldn’t see the bottom of the lake; the low-running waves kept washing away the lake’s secrets. Sunbeams ricocheted off the water in all directions like bullets of light. The gulls had settled back onto the waves and were bouncing up and down, looking just like bobble heads.

  Iz thought that the lake might hold part of the answers I needed.

  Finally I looked back at her. “Gram confirmed that there’s a Wanted poster out there with my dad’s picture on it. But I’m guessing there’s a whole lot more to the story than she’s already told me. So maybe you better go ahead and catch me up on everythi
ng you know.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Kenny just kept tossing his line into the water. Iz was the chatty one. “Here’s the way everybody figures it: Your father robbed that bank up north. Then he came back to town to hide the money. Then he drowned. So the money has to still be around here somewhere, right? I mean, the cops never found any of it.”

  I thought her theory had more holes than my old gym socks, but before I could ask any questions, Kenny suddenly clapped a hand to his forehead. “What time is it? I promised Mom we’d be home by two fifteen to babysit the brats.”

  Iz looked at her watch. “So sad. Yet again you’ve messed up. It’s two thirty.”

  “I wouldn’t celebrate so fast. You’re supposed to have been there too, Miss Perfect. This is why I need a cell phone.” Kenny was reeling in his line double time.

  Iz snorted. “Well, if you hadn’t put your first one through the wash and dropped the second one in the lake . . .”

  “You can borrow mine.” I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it over.

  “Whoa, is this sweet or what?” Kenny turned my phone over in his hands. “My friend Cody has one just like it. He says you can practically program it to launch a nuclear missile attack in between texts.”

  I have to admit, I was pretty proud that I had technology to rival Bill Gates, but Iz rolled her eyes and sighed bigtime while I showed Kenny some of the phone’s best features.

  “Uh—two thirty-four?” she said, tapping her watch.

  Kenny hurriedly dialed and had one of those conversations where the other person—his mom, I guessed—doesn’t let you finish a sentence. All he could squeeze in was “But we” and “But I” and a sad little “All right” before he hung up.

  “Hang on.” He looked at us, then revved up the motor and bounced us back over the waves with enough speed that at one point I thought I was going to involuntarily donate a kidney to one of the gulls flying overhead.