The Middle of Somewhere

by J. B. Cheaney

  But first we had to get past the check-in station. The park supervisor was a nice-looking middle-aged lady with curly blond hair, a sparkly smile, and equally sparkly glasses. Guessing that Pop was going to drag out the registration process, I told Gee to stay put, then got out of the cab and stood near the back of the RV, meaning to block any view the lady might have of a dog huddled on the bike trailer. When Pop said something about “my grandkids,” I smiled and waved but didn't move away.

  Finally, he said, “Well, I guess that's it,” and stepped back from the window. I waited until he had crossed in front of the cab and opened the driver's door before leaving my post. Then I realized that when we rolled by the registration hut, that curly-haired lady was sure to see a big wad of fur on the motorcycle trailer. After which, she might chase us down to demand why Pop didn't mention the dog.

  But a miracle happened: she took off her glasses to wipe her eyes! I jumped in the cab, hollering, “What a great place! Let's hurry and find our campsite.” “Whoopee!” Gee echoed from the back. “Let's go!”

  We almost overdid it; Pop took the time to look me over. “Is ADHD contagious?”

  I just smiled, and he put the RV in gear. The lady was now cleaning her glasses. Almost home free! These challenges were starting to be fun.

  “Supposed to be some good fishing here,” Pop remarked as we followed a winding road around the lake. “Maybe if I have time, I'll teach you and Gee to fish.”

  “Great!” Fishing had always looked to me like the world's most boring sport, but never mind. While he looked for the ideal camping spot, I was scouting ideal hideouts for a large dog: Wastewater dump? Cluster of cottonwood trees? One rather large bush? We rolled past a fifth-wheel trailer covered with pop-outs, past an extended family of Asians with three vehicles and five tents and kids running all over the place, past a retired couple reading magazines under a screened canopy surrounded by potted geraniums—finally pausing by the farthest slot on the loop.

  “A long walk to the shower,” Pop said. “But at least we'll have some peace and quiet.”

  Some of us might, I thought. My busy eyes were casing the place even before the RV stopped, coming to rest on a sign that said HIKING TRAIL. “It's perfect!” I exclaimed. The brushy territory beyond the sign ought to have something stout enough to tie Leo to.

  I winked at Gee, said, “I have to go,” and popped out of the passenger door. While the Coachman paused, then started slowly backing up, I squeezed onto the bike trailer beside Leo. He cringed but stayed put while I slipped the nylon rope through his collar and tied it in a square knot, muttering, “Come on, boy. Think of it as an adventure.”

  When the RV stopped, Gee raised a yell that sounded like he'd been attacked by a giant crawdad: “HELP! I'm STUCK!” Pop yelled back, and I made a note to remind Gee that distractions didn't have to be LOUD.

  “Come on, boy!” I leapt off with the rope in hand, but Leo didn't. His butt hugged the trailer so tight I nearly fell on mine. And he wouldn't budge. “What's wrong with you, you idiot dog!” Another note: make friends with idiot dog or you'll never be able to do anything with him. I looped the end of the rope around the awning strut and popped back inside the RV, where Pop was ordering Gee to pipe down and be reasonable.

  I scurried over to unbuckle Gee's seat belt, whispering, “He's still on the trailer. Take him down the hiking trail and tie him to a bush—quick!” Gee stopped his distraction long enough to give me an enormous wink, then scooted out the back door. I made a lunge to close it before Leo's happy whines could come through, meanwhile babbling, “This is a great park, Pop! Did you see the beach? I can't wait to—”

  “All right, you can stop yelling. What's got into you kids?”

  “And the grass!” I pointed out the left side of the RV while a dog and a boy raced madly off to the right. “Isn't that great grass? This is real Kansas prairie! What do you want for dinner?”

  He just rolled his eyes and said a heaping hot plate of sanity would be nice.

  Always be ready to accept a certain amount of risk.

  —Kent Clark

  (easy for him to say)

  We pulled it off. That is, Pop didn't work up enough curiosity to wonder why Gee loaded his plate with chicken— twice—or why he kept running off into the brush or why he wanted to sleep in the tent again. ADHD kids were unpredictable, right? That's why Pop was okay with setting up the tent for him, so Gee could be unpredictable outside. I knew who'd be sharing that tent, and it wasn't me.

  Pop turned in early: “Vacation's over. Back to work tomorrow.”

  In the morning he gave me a list of things not to do, then roared off on his Yamaha, with the equipment for setting up three temporary weather stations bundled on the back fender. “The first item on my agenda,” I told Gee, “is to give this dog a bath.”

  “Okay,” he said, happy as a clam. “How?”

  We put on our swimsuits and hit the shower, where Gee hung on to Leo's collar while I dumped half a bottle of shampoo on him. Throughout, the dog made a noise like a rusty hinge—a really loud rusty hinge. I'd never heard him bark, which made me wonder if all the bark had been kicked out of him. But even the whine was getting on my nerves by the time I'd hit the shower knob about three dozen times.

  After that, we tried calling Mama from the pay phone but couldn't get a ring. “Did she forget to pay the phone bill again?” I wondered. Leo shook himself and gave me another shower, so we took a nice long walk in the sunshine while the breeze dried our swimsuits and Leo strained on his nylon leash. We walked all the way to the swimming beach and circled the “primitive” campground (where Gee looked for primitive campers in loincloths and fur but didn't see any). We were on our way back when a lady buzzed toward us on a little Italian scooter. It was the park superintendent, her glasses flashing in the sunlight.

  “Hey there,” she said, coasting to a stop. “Where's that good-looking grandfather of yours?”

  Pop as a hottie?! It took me a minute to choke out, “He's working.”

  That led to an explanation of what he worked at, which I could handle pretty well by now. She seemed doubtful about our good-looking grandfather leaving us alone in a strange campground all day. “That's no big deal,” I assured her. “I've been looking after my brother since he was three.”

  She glanced at Gee, who was trying to teach Leo—by example—to catch butterflies with his teeth. I realized too late that I hadn't given myself such a great recommendation, but the lady didn't pursue it. “By the way, dogs are supposed to be on a leash at all times. But that dog looks like he needs to run once in a while. You can let him loose on the trail now and then, as long as you're close by.”

  After she motored away, Gee turned a couple of wobbly cartwheels while Leo looked on, interested but puzzled. “She likes us!”

  “Uh-huh, but I think she really likes Pop. And if she likes him, she'll want to talk to him, and while they're talking she might mention Leo.”

  Gee crashed down, flat-footed. “We've gotta stop them talking!”

  “Yeah, right. Let's go eat lunch.”

  Back at our campsite, I made bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, one each for me and Gee and two for Leo, who wolfed them down and then looked at me as if I could pull sandwiches out of my navel. “Our biggest problem is how to feed this mutt.”

  Gee let him scarf up the last third of his sandwich. “We could just buy a bag of dog food.”

  “With what? And where? Don't you think Pop might notice if we walk out of the grocery store with twenty-five pounds of puppy chow?”

  He giggled. “We'd just say it's kid chow.” I was thinking he wasn't going to be much help, when he spoke up again. “We could learn to fish. Pop said he'd teach us.”

  Not a bad idea. I had to smile: Leo caused some problems but at least they were interesting problems. And he might earn his keep by giving Gee something to do. I couldn't tell yet if the boy wore out the dog, or vice versa.

  Pop returned a little before three
that afternoon with a bag of groceries but was in no hurry to rush to the water with a fishing pole. “Isn't Sunday supposed to be a day of rest? Let me take a nap first.”

  So he napped for an hour, then read for an hour, and then he wanted me to help him set up his laptop for recording data. Old people—well, people his age—always complain about computers, like they spoke a different language. If that's true, the recording program was baby talk—really basic. Pop bragged on me for setting it up, though. He even tossed a Frisbee around with Gee while I started supper—for about fifteen minutes, until Gee's returns got too wild and Pop refused to chase them.

  Meanwhile, I pinched some raw hamburger for Leo, and cooked up the rest of the package. Gee ate less than half of his. By the time dinner and cleanup was over, it was almost dark and Pop wanted to run the numbers—as he put it—before heading for the shed (as he put it again). “Running the numbers” meant me entering that day's readings into the program as he read them out, then clicking a button to save them. We'd run averages later, when he collected more numbers. Nothing to it, and everybody was happy with the day's work.

  But I still had to figure out the care and feeding of an invisible dog.

  Next morning, Gee and I went down to the pay phone again and found an OUT OF ORDER sign on it. “At least the problem's not at the other end,” I said. “Maybe the park lady would let us— Gee! Get out of the garbage!”

  This, as it turned out, was my brother's idea of a snack for Leo, and after some careful rummaging around we laid out a nice little doggie smorgasbord. But I didn't want to make garbage his regular diet. “Somebody could get sick,” I said. “There's probably all kinds of germs making baby germs in that potato salad.”

  After washing our hands in the restroom, we walked down to the lake, where Gee ran up and down the boat ramp as though he were launching himself. When he actually did, I made him stop. Then we walked along the muddy bank looking for shells.

  “Hey, look!” Gee had found a piece of nylon fishing line stamped down in the mud. When he pulled all the way to the end, a hook popped out so suddenly it almost bit Leo, who whimpered and slunk away.

  The hook was a little bent, but plenty sharp. “Maybe we could tie it to a pole,” Gee suggested—his third idea in two days.

  Deciding it was worth a try, I hunted around for another piece of line to tie to the one we already had. When the line was long enough to throw out, I wondered, “What can we use for bait?”

  “Bait?”

  “Fish don't go for hooks because they're so nice and shiny. There has to be something juicy on the hook, like a worm or a grasshopper.”

  The worms all seemed to be on vacation, and the few grasshoppers we found didn't want to be caught, so we settled for a piece of hamburger Gee found in the garbage. Then we walked down the nearest pier and threw out our line as far as it would go.

  After a while, I said, “Maybe we have to keep throwing.” I pulled the line in, only to find the bait gone. Gee thought something ate it, but my guess was it just fell off. “We could try bologna. Or just wait until Pop comes back and ask him to—”

  “Hey, look!” Gee yelled. “It's the windy-farm truck!”

  He was pointing back toward the boat ramp, where a dusty blue-and-white pickup was backing down. An aluminum johnboat stuck out over the tailgate. I recognized the driver's John Deere cap first, then the boy under it.

  He noticed us while sliding out his boat. “Hey.”

  “What are you doing here?” I blurted.

  He was nice enough not to say that he had as much right to be here as we did. “My aunt Melba's the supervisor. I come here to fish. Once or twice a week?”

  Gee and I glanced at each other, then back at him. “You do?” I gave what I hoped was a fluttery sigh. “I always wanted to learn how to fish.”

  His name was Howard Sayles, and his aunt's name was Melba McClintock, and we all agreed she was real nice. He'd be glad to take us out for an hour or so on his boat but didn't think there would be room for the dog. Gee volunteered to stay on shore, which was okay with me. Even though Kent Clark says you should be ready to accept a certain degree of risk, sharing a boat with a hyperactive kid and a paranoid dog is just asking for trouble. Howard loaded up his gear, then helped me aboard, handed me his second-best pole, and pushed away from the ramp. As he hopped in and turned the switch on the trolling motor, I warned Gee, “Be careful—and keep a sharp lookout.”

  “Keep a lookout for what?” Howard asked as we buzzed out to deeper water.

  I decided to level with him. “For our grandfather, in case he comes back early. We're not exactly supposed to have that dog. Pop ran him off a couple of days ago, but Leo came along anyway.” Howard nodded, like he suspected as much. “Is that your truck?”

  “Almost. I'm buying it from my dad. Since he got a new one last summer.”

  “What does your dad do?”

  “Oh, we farm,” he said, like it should have been obvious. We farm—I guess he earned that driver's license. As we swapped our life stories, I started to like the way he talked, even with all the pauses and question marks stuck in. His voice was calm and steady, not tense like my mother's or blustery like Pop's or chattery like Gee's. He was in eighth grade—just a grade ahead of me!

  “How do you like it out here?” I asked.

  “It's home. How do you like it?”

  “Well… it's different.” Our trip so far hadn't made me a big Kansas fan, but I was reserving judgment until the end.

  He grabbed a plastic crayon bucket and set it between his knees. When he pulled the lid off, my stomach lurched a little at the squirmy lump of worms inside. “So. Can you bait your own hook? Or not?”

  Accept challenges, I told myself. “Sure! I mean, show me?”

  He pulled a worm out of the heap and stuck the hook in, kind of parallel to one end. Head end or tail end, what was the difference? Then I tried it, and after the little quiver my worm made when the hook went in, it wasn't bad.

  “They don't feel it,” Howard said. “Not pain, anyway. This is the most fun they'll ever have.” He showed me how to make a cast, by pushing the button thingy on his reel and flicking the rod with his wrist. The line flew out over the water.

  “Looks like fun, all right.” I imagined his worm yelling “Yippee!” as it soared through the air and splashed into the lake.

  It took a few tries for me to get all the steps together: push in, cast, let out, reel in. Meanwhile, Larry (that's what I named my worm) must have been having the time of his life. Trying to look cool and assured, I finally made a perfect cast, except that the line jerked behind me so hard it nearly pulled the rod out of my hand.

  “What happened?” I gasped.

  “You hooked my boat.” When I turned around, Howard was pulling the hook free from the aluminum rim and Larry had disappeared. I felt like taking a dive myself, but he just stuck on another worm and handed it back. “Good thing you didn't hook me.”

  After a few minutes, I was casting out and reeling in like a pro, almost. The little motor on the boat kept us turning in wide, slow circles while Howard cast from one side and me from the other. After a while, he said, “Trade?” and we switched sides. He caught three perch and promised me the innards for Leo, but my line didn't get any action at all. It wasn't as boring as I'd thought, though. A late-afternoon breeze fanned ripples on the water, and every sound turned liquid. Once we'd slowed down to barely moving, it was like time itself thickened up and made the light and land and water as rich as cake batter.

  We stayed within sight of the bank so I could keep an eye on Gee. By now he had stopped throwing sticks for Leo and was trying to ride him instead. “Is he always like that?” Howard asked.

  “Well, let me tell you …”

  Once I got started, it was hard to stop telling: how Gee screamed for the first six months of his life and wouldn't stay still for the rest of it. How giving him a bottle was like trying to pin down an octopus using only one hand.


  “When he started walking, the only way Mama could get anything done outside was to put him in a harness with a long leash and tie it to the clothesline. If she was inside, she tied the leash to an eye hook screwed into the living room floor. One time a social worker from the Division of Family Services came over because somebody reported that we kept Gee tied up. Of course, she didn't have the story straight—there was a lot of area he could reach, including the DFS lady's purse. After he opened it and dropped her car keys down the furnace grate and ate all her Digest-Tabs, she decided to leave us alone.

  “When he was three, he figured out how to unbuckle the harness. When he was four, he climbed every chainlink fence in sight. Plus the water tower, the kiddie roller coaster at Six Flags, and … oh yeah, the rock wall at First National Bank. At five, he started kindergarten—three times with four different teachers. At six, he tripped the fire alarm at school, the smoke alarm at church, and the sprinkler system at my great-grandmother's nursing home.”

  Howard gave a low whistle, duly impressed.

  “Everybody says there's not a streak of meanness in him,” I went on. “He's just all streak, kind of like a Roman candle with no—” Suddenly, the rod jerked in my hand. “What was that?”

  “Well,” Howard said slowly, “maybe it's a fish.”

  “What'll I do?”

  He reached over and gave my line a quick, firm tug. “That'll set the hook. When you feel the line go slack, reel 'er in.”

  That wasn't so easy; whatever was at the other end of the line sure didn't want to be caught. We seesawed back and forth until finally it broke the water, a flash of pure fight. “It's a largemouth bass!” Howard shouted. “Maybe four pounds!”

  To me it looked huge. “You take it!” I thrust the pole at him.

  Four pounds may not sound like a lot, but the fish was almost as long as my arm, and all muscle. It flopped so hard it might have flopped right out of the boat if Howard hadn't got a grip on it and worked the hook out. “He's a beauty. Got a name for him, too?”