“So … based on your answer to my first question, I’m guessing Tammy is either a used-to-be-your-girlfriend or a you-hope-she’ll-be-your-girlfriend-someday. Which one is she?”
Lester took two more bites of the apple before passing it back and answering.
“Both, kinda,” he said.
“Ah. I get it. She broke your heart, left you alone, took off for Boise. I seen it a hundred times.”
“Really.”
“Yup. So, did she leave you for another fella?” I reached out for the apple, but Lester got all stone-faced and finished it to the core in three more monster bites.
Lester sighed. One of those why-is-this-happening-to-me-and-how-can-I-get-out-of-it kind of sighs. He dropped his head and fixed me with a stare.
“You’re not gonna drop this ’til I give you the details, are you?”
“Absolutely not.”
He sighed again, but the second time was more of an okay-fine-let’s-get-this-over-with kind.
Then he filled me in.
Lester Washington played the upright bass in some sort of bluesy-rootsy band called the Strut Kings, which sounded cool as heck in my book. He straight-out lit up when he talked about music and the Strut Kings. It was like how Rodeo gets when he talks about taco trucks, but even more, which is saying something. You could just tell that Lester and music were like me and Ivan, and me and Ivan were like macaroni and cheese, so it was really a meant-to-be-together kind of situation all around.
Now, Tammy in Boise apparently had other thoughts. Lester was a little stingy with the details, but I got the impression she wasn’t super interested in the broke-as-a-joke-musician-living-his-dream-and-trying-to-make-it-work scene. He had some communications degree from college that she thought he should be doing more with, but when he left the full-time job he hated to spend more time on his music, she left him. And then she left the entire state of Florida.
I’m not gonna lie—I wasn’t all that impressed with Tammy. But, I told myself, I hadn’t heard her side of the story.
“She says if I wear a tie, she’ll wear a ring.”
I looked at him blankly.
“If I get a real job, she’ll marry me,” he explained.
“What about the Strut Kings?” I asked.
Lester shrugged.
“Boise’s got bands, I bet. I could probably play on the weekends or something.”
Now, I don’t know about most folks, but I can’t imagine only having cheese on my macaroni on the weekends. But love’s a crazy thing. I know that. And if Tammy was the one for Lester, then I suppose there’s worse things than moving to Boise to get her back. It kinda made me think, actually: What Lester was doing for Tammy was … really something. He loved her, so he was biting the bullet and doing something tough because it mattered to her. It was nice, him doing that for her.
“Okay,” I said, once he’d given me the lowdown. “Well, I wish you luck in winning her back, Lester.”
Lester worked some apple bits out of his teeth with his tongue.
“Thanks. Glad I got your support.”
“Sure thing. So, tell me. Boise is an awful long way to go for somebody that already broke your heart. What’s so great about her?”
“Why should I tell you that?”
“’Cause it’s good practice, man. You’re trying to woo her back, right? You better get this stuff down. Lay it on me. What do you love about Tammy?”
Lester sucked on his teeth for a second, then rolled his eyes and leaned back on the couch and looked me in the eye.
“She’s got this great laugh,” he began. “Sounds like music. She’s just about always in a good mood, and when she’s not, she snaps herself out of it pretty quick.” His eyes drifted away from mine and a little smile started to play on his lips. “And when someone’s feeling down, she’ll do just about anything to cheer ’em up.”
His eyes came back to me.
“That,” he said. “That is what I love about her.”
I shook my head.
“Nope, Lester. If you want me to believe it’s worth taking you all the way across nine states, you gotta do a lot better than that.”
He pulled his head back.
“Excuse me? What’s wrong with that?”
“All you gave me is reasons why anybody might love her—heck why I might love her if I met her. You didn’t say anything about why you love her.”
Lester screwed up his eyes doubtfully at me.
“Okay, look,” I explained, pointing up at the front of the bus. “Look at Rodeo up there. There’s plenty of reasons anyone might love him if they could get past that greasy doormat he calls hair: He’s kind to everyone, he helps strangers, he’s a gold-medal listener. That’s all great stuff, right? But that’s different than why I love him.”
Lester snorted.
“Then why do you love him?”
I thought for a moment.
“I love Rodeo because if tomorrow I spit in his face and threw all his favorite books out the window and called him all the worst words I could think of, he wouldn’t love me one little bit less.” The bus rocked and swayed underneath us. I kept my eyes on Rodeo, on the back of his shaggy head bobbing to the music. “I love Rodeo because on the worst day of my life he held me and held me and held me and held me and didn’t let me go.” I tried to clear my throat but kinda failed, so I went on in a scratchy sort of whisper. “I love Rodeo because if I didn’t love him, he’d fall apart.”
I looked out the window, blinked a few times, filled my lungs with air and then emptied them. I could feel Lester watching me. I counted ten cars whiz past us in the other direction, then looked back at him.
“That’s whatcha gotta do, Lester. Don’t tell me why she’s perfect. Tell me why she’s perfect for you.”
Lester was eyeing me in a thoughtful, intense kind of way. To tell you the truth, it reminded me of Ivan … which was only more points in Lester’s favor.
“That’s a lot of wisdom for a kid to drop,” he said at last.
“I’m almost thirteen. And it ain’t my wisdom, either.”
“No?” Lester smirked. “Whose wisdom is it?”
“It’s … It’s … It was,” I dropped my voice to a whisper and kept an eye on Rodeo. “It was my mom’s.” Talking about her at all was a strict no-go, and doing it on board Yager was like farting in church. But something about Lester’s listening eyes—and something about the secret mission I was on at that very moment—made it easier to walk away from that rule, at least for a minute. “She had me and my sisters write letters to each other one day. We had to say what we loved most about each other. And it couldn’t just be something nice about them—it had to be unique and special to us, what we loved about each other. She had to write the words for my little sister, but we all did it. Me and my sisters sat down and we wrote what we loved about each other.”
Lester looked around the rattling bus.
“Where they at, your mom and sisters?”
I picked at a thread that was trailing out of a seam in my jeans.
“Oh,” I answered, trying to pluck the thread out without unraveling any more, “they’re dead, Lester.” My eyes flashed up quick to Lester. I liked that he wasn’t making some syrupy sympathetic face, liked that he didn’t look away, liked that he didn’t cluck his tongue or bite his lip or anything stupid like that. “But I’m glad we wrote those letters.”
We passed a semitruck and for a few seconds we were lost in the rumbling thunder of the tractor-trailer.
Up at the front, Rodeo stretched dramatically and let out a flamboyant yawn.
“Whoo-hee!” he hooted. “Put a fork in me, y’all. I am done.” He slapped his face a few times and then flicked on the turn signal and steered Yager off onto an exit ramp. The bus shuddered around us as it slowed down from highway speed.
“Looks like it’s your turn to drive,” I said, poking Lester’s knee and standing up, holding myself steady with the arm of the couch.
Lester was still looking
at me.
“What’d your sisters say?” he asked. “What’d they say they loved about you?”
“I don’t know. We never read the letters.”
Lester blinked.
“What did you do with them?”
I stepped past him, heading toward the front of the bus and a badly needed bathroom break.
“We put ’em in a box and buried ’em in a park,” I answered.
* * *
In retrospect, what happened next was at least partly my fault, but I’ll never admit that to Rodeo ’cause I don’t wanna let him off that easy.
It all started with Rodeo and Lester arguing over a map.
We were at a random gas station somewhere outside Gainesville, Florida. The sun had set and it was starting to smell like nighttime. There was still a little purple glow on the western horizon, but it was dim and fading fast; darkness was on the way.
Lester had just been given the briefing on how to handle Yager—though Rodeo was more than a little reluctant to hand over the keys—and was getting ready for his first shift behind the wheel. I came wandering back from the gas station bathroom, snapping my gum and humming a little song, to find those two bickering out in the parking lot, waiting for the pump to finish filling our tank.
“I’m telling you, man, you gotta start using a phone,” Lester was saying in an argument I could’ve told him was a lost cause. “Using a paper map is crazy.”
Rodeo was smiling serenely, the open atlas in his hands.
“Yeah, brother? What can your phone do that my map can’t?”
“Are you kidding?” Lester sputtered. “Everything! Check this out.” Lester stepped shoulder-to-shoulder with Rodeo so Rodeo could see the screen. “I can just type in where I wanna go, and it’ll tell me the whole route. Turns and everything. Shows me how long it’ll take. It even tells me if there’s construction or delays or anything.”
My interest was piqued.
“Lemme see that,” I said, and elbowed my way into their huddle. The candy-bright screen before my eyes was a revelation. I’d always seen folks playing on their phones, but I’d only ever used phones I’d borrowed to make phone calls. On Lester’s phone was a map, all colorful and clear. There was a blue line from where we were to a glowing red pushpin labeled “Boise.” It said right there on the bottom of the screen, “36 hours (2,504 miles).” No dental floss or long division required. It was a miracle.
I did the math real quick. We still had sixty hours until Wednesday morning came along. Plenty of time, I figured. Not a lot of wiggle room for wandering or lollygagging, but we were on schedule.
I beamed up at Lester and Rodeo.
“This is fantastic,” I said.
Lester nodded.
Rodeo scowled.
“Aw, take the knife out of my back, sweetie pie! You gonna abandon me for this heartless piece of technological soul-poison?”
I could tell Rodeo was in a dramatic mood, and my mind was too bubbly with maps and timelines to engage.
“I’m going to bed,” I lied, knowing full well I was gonna lay in my room and strategize a way to get us from Boise to home instead of Boise to Butte. I leveled a finger at Rodeo as I walked away. “And now I want a phone for Christmas.”
Rodeo howled in theatrical horror and I left them to their conversation. I was walking up Yager’s steps when my stomach gave a little rumble. I shrugged and grabbed a few bills from our cash jar and changed direction, back down the stairs and off the bus and toward the gas station. Behind me, I heard Rodeo making some loud point about how he didn’t have to plug in his map, but I shook my head and kept walking.
And it’s that darn stomach rumble that got me in a heap of trouble.
See, ’cause I didn’t look back over my shoulder. So I didn’t see Rodeo taking the gas nozzle out of Yager and putting it back on its cradle. And I didn’t see Rodeo and Lester climbing back into Yager, still talking maps and phones. I didn’t see the door closing behind them.
What I did see, though, when I came back out a few minutes later with a mouthful of CornNuts, was an empty parking lot and not a bus or a hippie in sight.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Some folks might think that a kid like me, living on the road and whatnot, would be unfazed by being left behind like that. Seeing as how gas stations and mini-marts are pretty much my natural habitat, it might seem like I’d just shrug and roll my eyes and sit down to wait for the two idiots to figure it out and come back for me.
Here’s the problem with that theory, though: It ain’t true. The fact of the matter is, as flaky as ol’ Rodeo is, he’d never once come close to doing anything like this before. Up until that moment when he and Lester left me behind in Gainesville, Florida, I hadn’t been more than a couple hundred feet from Rodeo in five years. I hadn’t hardly been out of his sight for longer than a bathroom break since I was seven years old.
So, what I’m saying, basically, is that when I walked out and saw the bus gone, I wasn’t, like, super calm about it.
There were a couple of seconds of confused blinking, and then the freak-out began.
I sputtered and coughed, choking on the CornNuts in my mouth. My stomach somersaulted, and not in a fun, roller-coaster kind of way. My breathing got fast and shallow and I dropped the bag of CornNuts and ran out to the sidewalk and looked both ways desperately. No bus in sight. I spun around and hopelessly scanned the parking lot again, like maybe I’d somehow missed an entire school bus the first time.
I hadn’t.
“Okay,” I said, and my voice sounded so high and scared it actually kind of freaked me out more. “Okay. Okay okay okay. Oh god. Okay. Oh god.” I closed my eyes and made myself take a deep, long breath. I opened my eyes again.
Still no bus.
I went through it all in my head. How they’d seen me climb up into the bus, but then I’d slipped back off. How they’d both been distracted by their maps-versus-phone conversation. The curtain that blocked off my bedroom. They must’ve thought I was back there, reading or sleeping.
“Rodeo’ll figure it out,” I said out loud, trying to make my voice sound calm and in control. “Trying” is the operative word there. I could hear the terrified tremor in my voice. “He’ll realize what happened. He’ll know exactly where I got left behind. They’ll come straight back and Rodeo’ll have that gas pedal pressed all the way to the floor. They’ll come roaring up any minute.” I nodded to myself, but my hands were shaking and I felt like I was one bad swallow away from puking up my CornNuts. Because I knew that maybe it wouldn’t be any minute. Rodeo was bone-tired and probably wanted to lie down, and Lester was most likely focused on driving Yager. Rodeo had just filled up with gas, after all—and, sweet fancy catfish, what if it was, like, twelve hours before they realized they’d left me behind? Then it’d be twenty-four hours before they got back. Rodeo didn’t have a phone. Lester did, but I didn’t know his number.
I was lost. And alone. More lost and more alone than I’d ever been, ever.
And Rodeo, wherever he was up the road, was gonna wake up … and I wasn’t gonna be there.
“Oh, lord,” I breathed. “This is gonna kill him. He is gonna lose his ever-loving mind.” My stomach knotted with worry.
I looked around. No restaurants. No parks. No public libraries or nothing. Just a gas station all by itself next to a highway off-ramp. It wasn’t even a nice gas station. There was one old car parked at the far corner of the parking lot, and it looked like someone was sitting in the driver’s seat; other than that, the whole scene was pretty dang desolate.
The coming darkness that had been no big deal back when I wasn’t completely and totally alone suddenly seemed like kind of a pretty darn big deal, after all. I swear, as I stood there, the last little bit of sunset purple turned to black. I gulped. I wasn’t just alone and forgotten … I was alone and forgotten at night. One of the tears stinging in my eyes got heavy enough to drop, dripping warm onto my cheek.
A pair o
f headlights pulled off the highway onto the exit ramp, coming my way. I was caught for a minute in the headlight glare as the car turned into the gas station and I squinted, rubbing quick at my wet cheek. The car, a red SUV, rolled past me and I saw the woman in the passenger seat look twice at me and crane her neck. Her brow furrowed, and her lips moved like she was saying something to the man driving. I suddenly realized how I looked, standing there sniffling by myself in the dark by the side of a highway. Kids alone at highway rest areas and gas stations attract attention, from both bad dudes and overprotective, oh-my-god-is-that-girl-okay-honey-we-should-call-the-police types.
I didn’t like the look the lady had given me. She looked like the get-involved type. I couldn’t leave, though. This is where Rodeo’d come looking for me, whenever he did. I needed to stay here, but I needed to stick out less, and quick.
What do perfectly normal, happy, and not-at-all-terrified-or-abandoned-or-in-any-danger-whatsoever kids do at gas stations?
“They buy slushies,” I said out loud, trying to work the shakes out of my voice and blink the wetness out of my eyes. I nodded to myself and then spun and marched back into the gas station, keeping my eyes straight ahead and a casual, completely calm smile on my face as I walked past the SUV that was parking in front.
The cashier shot me a curious look when I came back inside, but he was too busy petting his mustache to cause any problems. A kid I hadn’t noticed before was browsing in the chip section, and he glanced at me as I walked past him. I made my way to the slushy machine in the back corner. It whirred loudly, churning one garish bright flavor.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I muttered, reading the label. “Wild Watermelon.”
It was a no-doubt-about-it rotten piece of luck for the universe to toss on top of my current heap of troubles, but I heard the door jangle open as the SUV woman walked in behind me, so I grabbed a cup anyway. I pulled the spigot and filled my cup with the frozen atrocity and turned around and sure enough, there was the lady standing right behind me with a worried look on her face and her phone in her hand.
“Hello, dear,” she said, her brow crinkled in concern and her voice careful, like I was a cornered deer she was trying not to spook.
The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise Page 7
