24 Hours in Nowhere

by Dusti Bowling

  “You worthless wimp,” I said to myself in the mirror. “Worthless, worthless, worthless.”

  I huffed and cursed under my breath, squeezing anti-itch onto my face. “You better not be cursing in there!” I heard my grandma shout from the other side of the door (there must have been a commercial break).

  I swear, the woman was like a cursing detector. No matter where I was or what I was doing, if I let out any kind of curse, even mumbled it under my breath, she was right there, ready to force-feed me a can of Brussels sprouts—the ultimate cursing punishment and the only vegetable in my diet.

  “I’m not, Grandma!” I called back. “I’m going to the bathroom. I need my privacy.”

  “You got the trots again?”

  I groaned. “No, Grandma. I do not have the trots.” Why was she always so interested in discussing the status of my poop?

  She was quiet, so I assumed she had left to go back to her TV show. I checked my face in the mirror again and hoped the swelling would go down, then I peeked my head out the door. “Whatchya doin’ in there?” she demanded, her face only about one inch from mine.

  I shrieked and dropped the cream. “Nothing.” I bent down to pick it up, hoping she wouldn’t notice the lumps on my face.

  She scratched at her head, her entire poufy red wig moving with the motion. “You getting some kind of rash?”

  “Yes, I’m getting a rash. I think it’s heat rash. It’s hotter than a forest fire in hell today.”

  She stared at me, her wrinkled face all extra wrinkled up in a look of consternation, like she was trying to determine whether I had just cursed or not, her fingers probably itching for the can opener. “You ought to put some of my hemorrhoid cream on there,” she finally said. “That’ll take care of it.”

  “No, thank you. I’m fine,” I said, instead of falling to my knees and screaming “NOOOOOOO!” like I wanted to.

  “You better go to bed then so you’re all rested up and feeling better for the first day of school on Monday.” She tapped her leathery cheek.

  It wasn’t even six o’clock yet.

  “Sure, Grandma.” I stood on tiptoe and gave her a quick kiss on her cheek, then I made my way the two steps to my tiny bedroom. “Goodnight, then.” I closed my door before she could say anything else.

  I threw myself down on my musty bed and wiped the sweat from my forehead. The swamp cooler barely kept the trailer’s temperature below ninety and, true to its name, turned the place into a total swamp.

  I let my mind run. I wished there was some way for me to get Rossi’s bike back, but the wishing wells in Nowhere were all filled to the brim with desert dust.

  I sat up in bed. There was really only one thing I could do to get the bike from Bo—I’d have to buy it back. I hunted around my room for anything that might be of value—all I came up with were some old garage sale action figures that could be considered collector items by some people. But they weren’t in the box. And they were dirty. And some were broken. Okay, they were complete garbage.

  I had a few books: my thesaurus (I doubted I could pay anyone to take it), a sports book called The Great Ones, a book called Our Cool Brain about how cool the brain is (obviously), and an SAT prep book that was about ten years out of date. But most of my books were borrowed from the high school’s library. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to sell them. And who in Nowhere would want to buy a book anyway?

  I had my clothes. But most third-graders didn’t have any money. And, really, even if my clothes could fit someone older than that, I doubted I would be able to squeeze more than a quarter out of each piece.

  The truth was I owned nothing valuable. A thirteen-year-old kid living in his grandma’s trailer in the poorest town in Arizona isn’t exactly rolling in it—unless it is thirty-year-old orange shag trailer carpet crawling with enough dust mites to take over the entire county.

  I reached into my pants pocket. Well, maybe it wasn’t completely true that I owned nothing valuable. I pulled out my pocket watch and ran a finger over the engraved initials: W.D.A. It had belonged to my great-grandfather, Fergus Foley. No one knew what the initials stood for. My grandma had given the watch to my father, and my father had given the watch to me. It was one of the only things he’d ever given me, and now it was the only thing I owned worth anything at all.

  I shoved it back in my pocket. Last resort.

  I’d just have to go to Bo and see if there was anything I could possibly do for him. Maybe I could do his homework for him for the year. Then again, I didn’t think Bo really cared about his grades.

  I could tutor him for the SAT. I picked up the preparation book I borrowed regularly from the high school’s library. The test may have been nearly four years away, but I was already studying for it. Of course Bo probably cared about that as little as he cared about his grades. Kids like Bo didn’t go to college; they dropped out of high school. Nowhere High School’s graduation rate was proof of that—the worst in the whole country.

  I continued thinking about ways to get Loretta back. Maybe I could be, like, some kind of minion for Bo. Lots of villains had minions. I wasn’t completely sure what being a minion entailed, but I was positive I could handle doing it. I thumbed through my thesaurus as I lay back on my lumpy pillow.

  minion: follower; crony; underling; slave

  Yeah, I hated that idea. That idea was the worst. I slammed the thesaurus shut and got up from the bed. I peeked out my door to see what my grandma was doing. As though she could feel me spying on her, she called from the kitchen, “You want some beans?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You sure? I put my special seasoning in there,” she said in her best I’m-trying-to-entice-you tone.

  Grandma’s special seasoning was a spice she always had on hand (that she got from the dollar store in Casa Grande) called Spepper. I looked at the ingredients list on the bottle one day, and it’s literally just salt and pepper mixed together in one container. But Grandma thought it made everything taste better. Really, she was right.

  “That sounds good, but I think I might be getting sick. Must be that rash. I think I have heatstroke. I’m really going to bed now. Definitely going to bed and won’t be coming back out.”

  She stirred the pot of canned beans, her eyes still fixed to the TV in the living room. “Good night,” she said without looking at me. Not even the threat of me dying from heatstroke could tear her away from the sight of one woman dragging another woman across a stage by her hair while an audience cheered her on.

  I shut my door and locked it. I opened my pocket watch and checked the time—6:15. I wound it up and put it back in my pocket. Pulling open my bedside table, I took out the only seven dollars I had and stuffed the money into my pants. Then I opened my bedroom window and climbed through it, dropping down onto the parched desert dirt.

  The day was still blisteringly hot as I made my way to Bo’s trailer, but I hadn’t wanted to risk getting a jar of water from the kitchen and making my grandma suspicious. August was a brutal time of year in Nowhere, when the thermostat dropped to ninety only in the middle of the night. The daytime temperatures were unbelievable, much like the high school graduation rate.

  I gazed up at Hollow Mountain hovering over me as I passed through “town.” The town of Nowhere sat at the base of the mountain and consisted of a gas station with one pump, the Nowhere Market and Ostrich Farm, a scrapyard, Rusty’s Motorcycle Shop (owned by a guy named Bud), a bar called Cal’s, and a second bar called Better Than Cal’s.

  Better Than Cal’s was started by Robert Norton who, obviously, hated Cal Bunker. The feud between the two bar owners was legendary in Nowhere, a town with no movie theater, no mall, no anything else worth doing, but yes, two bars. I kept expecting Cal to change the name of Cal’s to “Better Than Cal’s Serves Rat Poison” or “Better Than Cal’s Can Kiss My Butt,” but he hadn’t yet. Cal’s had the world’s largest collection of rattlesnake skins—the walls were practically papered with them. Better Th
an Cal’s had the world’s largest collection of rattlesnake rattles, all hanging from the ancient wooden-boarded ceiling. So, in addition to the longstanding feud, it seemed the two were also embroiled in some kind of snake-off.

  Of course we also had two schools—Nowhere Elementary and Nowhere High School. At Nowhere Elementary, the middle schoolers were lumped in with the elementary students, as there weren’t enough of us to have our own middle school. This might have been nice for those kids who felt like they ruled the school in seventh and eighth grade, but I didn’t rule over anything or anyone—even the third graders bossed me around. Probably because most of them were capable of beating me up.

  As I passed by the deserted school, tripping every now and then over the crumbling asphalt of Nowhere’s only paved road, I felt sick about school starting again on Monday—endless hours sitting in class listening to boring lessons, decades-old textbooks, brown cafeteria food, hardly anyone to sit with at lunch, and kids who bullied like they were training for the Bully Olympics.

  foreboding: apprehension; anxiety; fear

  My whole life was just one big sense of foreboding.

  I neared Bo’s trailer, the foreboding churning in my stomach like my grandma’s mushy egg salad (made better with Spepper, of course), and my previously brisk steps slowed to a trudge. Who knew what new forms of torture Bo might devise for me?

  I walked up the warped, split wooden steps and knocked on the peeling front door of the dilapidated trailer. I mean, no one in Nowhere had a particularly lovely place to live, but this . . .

  squalor: filthiness; a state of being extremely dirty and unpleasant

  A man’s voice shrieked, “Bo! Get the door!”

  “Geez, Jack!” I heard Bo shout. “I’m coming!”

  The metal door screeched open, and then I was staring into Bo’s face for the second time that day. I must have done gone and lost my mind, as my grandma would say.

  “What do you want, cactus face?” Bo’s scowl contorted into a twisted smile and he laughed. “I sure did a number on you, didn’t I?”

  My mouth was as dry as the splintery wood creaking under my feet. When I spoke, it came out as a pitiful hoarse whisper. “Bo.”

  He leaned down. “Yes?” he whispered, mocking me.

  I cleared my throat and swallowed. “Can I please buy Rossi’s bike back from you?”

  “With what?”

  “I have a little money.”

  “How much?”

  “Seven dollars, but—”

  Bo burst out laughing. “You’re a funny guy, Gus. Hilarious.”

  “I can work off the rest. I can do anything.”

  “Unless you can magically come up with a lot more money, forget about it.”

  I reached into my pocket and felt the watch. Rossi had traded her most valuable possession for me. I held it out to Bo. “How about this? It’s worth a lot of money. It’s really old. It’s an antique, and I know—”

  Before I could finish, Bo smacked my hand from underneath, and the watch went flying onto the porch. I gaped, completely helpless, as it slipped between the wide slats in the dried-up boards and disappeared. “You’re crazy if you think I’d trade a whole motorcycle for a piece of garbage like that, no matter what kind of fancy words you use to describe it.”

  I turned back to him. “Then what? What do I have to do? I’ll do anything.”

  Bo pursed his chapped lips, squinted his eyes, and scratched his chin. Oh my gosh. Was that . . . stubble? “How about you eat that cactus?”

  I tore my eyes away from Bo’s intimidating chin. “If that’s what it takes.”

  “No,” said Bo. “Too easy. Bring me a rattlesnake’s rattle you bit off with your teeth while it’s still alive. I want to see it squirming in your mouth. No! Bring me fourteen live bark scorpions, and let me watch as they crawl all over your body. No! Bring me the hide of a coyote you killed and skinned with your bare hands. Then wear its head on your head like a hat. No!”

  I took a deep breath and resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Actually, I was kind of impressed; with his limited brain power, he had quite the imagination. “What? I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  He grinned and narrowed his eyes at me. “Bring me a piece of gold from Dead Frenchman Mine to buy it.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, right.”

  Bo continued grinning at me. “Yeah. Right.”

  My laughter faded. I took a step back. “That mine is a death trap.”

  “Well, you said you’d do whatever it takes.” Yeah. Yeah, I did say that, but I didn’t think even Bo Taylor would want me to actually, um, die.

  Dead Frenchman Mine was Nowhere’s biggest claim to fame. A few years ago, two guys who had recently left Better Than Cal’s went in it and never came back out. A section of it caved in, killing both of them. Then last year another patron of Better Than Cal’s went in there, hoping to find the Dead Frenchman treasure. He never came back out, either. A rotten beam had fallen on his head.

  Hey, I just thought of a new name for Cal’s: “People Who Drink at Better Than Cal’s End Up Dead.”

  The deaths were all over the news, and for about five minutes everyone in the country was aware of this poor little nothing town in the middle of the desert called Nowhere—the poorest town in Arizona with hidden treasure in a deadly mine. That was when that reporter came here to interview people about all the drunk guys who had died in there. His newspaper then went on to rank Nowhere as the least livable town in the entire United States—whatever that meant. I guess we were all on the verge of death out here in Nowhere. It really wasn’t that bad a place to live, though. When you think about it, Nowhere was the best at a lot of things: number one in poverty, number one in high school dropouts, number one in least livability, number one in drunken mine deaths. We tried not to let it all go to our heads.

  Dead Frenchman Mine originally got its name around seventy years ago when a French guy by the name of William Dufort hid in there after stealing a pile of gold from his partner, a Mexican rancher by the name of José Navarro. I knew all about it because it was also the night my grandma’s father got bitten by a rattlesnake and died in the desert. And that pocket watch that had just disappeared under the floorboards was the only thing he had on him when he died.

  Anyway, the story goes that José shot William for stealing the gold and William shot him back. As José lay on his deathbed, he told the sheriff what happened. The sheriff traced William Dufort back to the mine, where he had hidden. William Dufort set off explosives, causing that section of the mine to cave in, killing both himself and the sheriff. A lot of people had tried to find William Dufort’s body since then, hoping it would have the gold on it, but no one had ever succeeded.

  So basically everyone who had entered the mine in the last seventy years had died an agonizing, suffocating, bone-crushing death. In a nutshell.

  “Besides,” I said, “there’s no gold left in that mine. If there were, it would be swarming with treasure hunters.” People were always willing to risk their lives for money.

  “I guess you’ll have to go check and find out. That is, if you want Rossi’s bike bad enough.” He eyed me up and down. “I think you do. It’s so obvious you have the hots for her.”

  “I do not!” I declared. I resisted the urge to look left. I read in the brain book that a good way to tell if a person was lying was that they tended to look to the left. Then again, how would Bo Taylor possibly know that? I wasn’t sure he was even literate, so I allowed my eyes to slowly wander in that direction.

  Not that I had the hots for Rossi. Please. She constantly had helmet hair. Plus, she was always sweaty and dusty from racing. I mean, that’s just gross.

  “You do, too.” Bo leaned into me and spoke low and slow through his filmy, yellow, brown-flecked teeth. His breath now smelled like Spam, which was possibly a step up from chewing tobacco and pork and beans, but still, I could never eat Spam again—and that cut out about twenty-five percent of my meals. “You love that H
opi Indian.”

  My heart beat violently, increasing in intensity as it moved from my chest into my head. That rushing sound filled my ears. “I told you. She’s Tohono O’odham.”

  “And I told you.” Bo smirked as he glanced down at my clenched fists. “I don’t care.”

  He knew exactly what he was doing—trying to antagonize me into doing something foolish so he would have an excuse to pound on my head until I was about six inches shorter. I resisted the urge to attack. If I took a swing at Bo now, I would never get Loretta back. Because I’d already be dead. Or much shorter. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  “How much gold?” I asked through grinding teeth.

  Bo shrugged. “A big enough piece to pay for the bike.”

  I squinted at him. “That dirt bike is barely worth anything.”

  “I know.” He laughed like this was all some big joke. “It’s such a worthless trash heap.”

  I didn’t point out that Rossi had beaten him several times on that worthless trash heap. “Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll go to the mine, but I want your word that if I succeed, you’ll let me have the bike back.”

  “Shut the door before I beat your head in,” I heard Jack call. I jumped at the threat, but Bo just glared at me.

  Ever since Bo’s mom had died and his dad had gone to prison, he had been living with his brother, Jack, in their trailer. Jack’s toughness was renowned in Nowhere—he once raced (and won) with a broken wrist. He’d also spent a year at the Center, which definitely added to his brutal image. He didn’t get sent there for anything he did here. You could do just about anything in Nowhere and get away with it. Jack had made the mistake of pulling his crimes in Casa Grande. There were a lot of rumors about what he did to get put in the Center for Youth, the massive juvenile detention center between here and Casa Grande. Some kids claimed he beat up the wrong person. Bo frequently had black eyes and bruises, so I knew Jack was capable of it.

  Bo stuck out his bony hand, scarred from punching things (I think), which was at least twice the size of mine. “Deal.” I shook it, doing my best not to grimace as he nearly crushed my fingers to death. Then he slammed the door in my face.