Scumble

by Ingrid Law

  As Grandpa’s body was lowered into the ground, plumes of earth shot skyward across the basin of the ranch. Rocks shifted and jumped like popcorn. Clefts and canyons formed, then snapped together, and the river shimmied and splashed, its banks heaving and yawing to follow yet another brand-new course . . . all while the final trumpet from Grandma’s jar called Grandpa Bomba home.

  After the funeral, everyone gathered at the house—O’Connells, Beaumonts, Kales, and more—to celebrate Grandpa’s life with every story that could be remembered, and more than a few made up on the spot.

  Marisol and Mesquite kept everyone fed by levitating buttered rolls, lemon bars, and little smoky soy sausages over people’s heads and dropping them onto people’s plates—a potluck falling from the sky, piece by piece. The twins blamed grief for making them accidentally rain a handful of pepper down on Great-aunt Jules. But no one seemed to mind when the old woman sneezed three times and vanished in her typical time-bending conundrum. Still shaking pepper out of her hair, she bumped into Rocket when she reappeared fifteen minutes later, red in the face from rushing to catch back up to the rest of us in the present.

  Rocket was still clean shaven, but something else about him was different now too. He no longer stood with his hands jammed in his pockets or tucked under his arms. He looked confident—grown up at last.

  Rocket and Winona had driven straight through the night to get back to Wyoming from Gold Beach, where the two of them had been sightseeing by motorcycle along the Oregon coast. I’d cheered when I heard about Rocket’s trip. He’d managed to get himself off the ranch at last, and he’d taken a mighty fine traveling companion too.

  Inside the house, Rocket and Winona stood chatting with Fish and Mellie and Mibs and Will and another woman with blond hair and long bangs. She looked just like an older version of the girl in the bubble gum photo that had once been stuck to the dash of Rocket’s truck.

  “Gypsy!” I stopped my cousin as she danced past me with a plate of rainbow-sprinkle cookies. “Is that Bobbi Meeks?” I pointed at the blond woman standing with the others. Gypsy squinted through her sparkly glasses, frowned, then pulled the frames down to the tip of her nose to look over the plastic rims.

  “Oh, yes! Rocket dated her when I was little, but she’s married to someone else now. She wasn’t at Fish’s wedding because her little girl was sick. See! That’s her.” I watched as Bobbi bent down to lift a tiny child who’d been clinging to her leg, hidden in the folds of her skirt. Resting her daughter on her hip, Bobbi rubbed the child’s back. She laughed with Rocket and Winona as the other two couples moved to another group—Mibs blushing as she showed off a new diamond on her ring finger. But even from across the room, I could see the white scar that lined the back of Bobbi’s hand like a firework burst.

  “You said Rocket still had one last thing to learn about scumbling,” I said after seeking out Uncle Autry. “He figured it out.”

  “He did, did he?” Autry squinted at me, then turned to watch Rocket pretend to capture Bobbi’s daughter’s nose inside his fist, making the little girl squeal and giggle. I saw the way Rocket and Bobbi smiled like old friends, and the way Rocket turned to kiss Winona’s hair and laugh.

  “I think he just had to learn to make some choices,” I said.

  Autry looked back at me and raised his eyebrows, encouraging me to continue.

  “Rocket made the choice to stop being scared,” I went on. A knowing smile spread across my uncle’s face as the green beetle on his bolo tie shivered its wings in a little dance. “Rocket made the choice to show himself and go out into the world. And . . .” I hesitated, looking again at the scar on the back of Bobbi’s hand. “And maybe the choice to forgive himself for things he didn’t mean to do.” I nodded then, still watching my oldest cousin. “That’s good.”

  “It is good, Ledge!” Autry thumped me on the back. “And it was about time, too. I needed Rocket’s house! We’ve got researchers coming and going! Entomology students rotating through from all over—Arizona, Illinois, Maryland, New York . . . Our butterflies have everyone buzzing!” Autry thumped me again, then winked.

  As the adults all ate and talked inside, Tucker and Fedora fled outdoors to play with Bitsy. I followed them through the screen door, stopping when I found Samson sitting on the porch next to Grandpa Bomba’s empty armchair, looking like he wished he could turn into a shadow, or blend into the wood of the log house like a moth.

  “Hey,” I said, not accustomed to having Samson there in the flesh to talk to. Samson was still solid, A-to-Z, soup-to-nuts visible for all the world to see.

  “Hey,” he said back.

  “Can you believe there really was gold buried here after all?”

  A small smile played across Samson’s thin face.

  “Er . . . I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but the treasure the girls found was pyrite, Ledge. Fool’s gold.” Samson looked sheepish as he cast around for any sign of Fe or the twins. “Don’t ever tell the girls, but Autry got twelve pounds of the stuff from the five-and-dime. He bought every last piece Willie had. Then he gave it to me to bury someplace where the girls were sure to find it.” He smiled again as if enjoying the memory of having done something unseen.

  My mouth fell open. “But Mr. Cabot took it all! He had to know it wasn’t real treasure—he’s got a whole collection of rocks and minerals. He knows the difference between gold and pyrite, easy. Marisol and Mesquite must, too!”

  Samson shrugged. “Maybe it was treasure enough.”

  I sat with Samson a while longer before I slipped away from the gathering. I was itching to be someplace else. I had to see a girl about a letter.

  I changed out of my good Sunday church pants into sweats and laced up my running shoes. I was up the gravel road and over the south ridge before anyone could call after me, headed toward Sundance. But just before reaching the highway, I heard a sound and turned.

  “Bitsy, no! You can’t—” But I stopped before I could finish telling the dog she couldn’t come. Her eyes were bright, her tongue lolling from a wide doggy grin. With only three legs, Bitsy was keeping up fine. And even Bitsy deserved to get off the ranch now and then. So, this time, I let her tag along, the two of us proudly running our own misfit marathon toward town.

  We didn’t stop at Neary’s Auto Salvage Acres. But I grinned when I saw that the foreclosure notice was gone and that Neary’s sign had been freshly repainted to read: Neary’s Auto Salvage & Sculpture Garden. I grinned even wider when I saw Winona’s scrap-metal bear statue sitting by the sign. The rebuilt Knucklehead hadn’t won the top prize in the motorcycle show in Spearfish, but it had earned a white ribbon. Unlike the twelve pounds of pyrite and the bundle of donor money from Cheyenne that had saved the Flying Cattleheart, a white ribbon wouldn’t have paid off Mr. Cabot. Yet Rocket had sent a postcard telling me that Gus and Winona had somehow managed to pull the place out of foreclosure. He just hadn’t told me how.

  Moving on, I ran past the gas station and the CAD Co. building. Sheriff Brown’s truck was parked in front of the Welcome to Sundance sign. I offered the sheriff a quick salute as he handed a speeding ticket to a tourist. Then Bitsy and I pushed our lazy lope into a quick-getaway sprint, running past the open door of Noble and Willie’s Five & Dime, before heading up the hill.

  Reaching the Cabot house, I stopped short, trying to catch my breath as I picked my jaw up off the ground. Mr. Cabot had decided not to rebuild his fence. But he had added something new to the yard—something big. Suddenly I knew exactly how Gus and Winona had paid off Mr. Cabot. For there, in the middle of the lawn, opposite the protective limbs of the tall white birch tree, stood the greatest of Winona’s sculptures: the mythic jackalope she’d been working on when I met her, its branching antlers gleaming in the sun. I liked the newest addition to Mr. Cabot’s collection.

  I smiled as Bitsy sniffed the crazy sculpture, then looked up as an iridescent blue-green butterfly the size of a dinner plate stopped to rest on the tip of the jack
alope’s right ear. The escaped Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing opened and closed its enormous wings slowly. Making me smile even wider.

  I pulled a handful of small bolts out of the mailboxes across the street in one quick, easy motion and pitched them up to rap against Sarah Jane’s window, hoping that if Hedda the Horrible hadn’t yet left for outer space, she wouldn’t come running. As I waited for SJ to appear, I bent to pick up the car antenna that had shot off Mr. Cabot’s Lincoln months before. It had hidden itself in a crack between the walkway and the grass. Now, quickly and deftly, I reshaped it.

  “What’s your damage, Cowboy?” Sarah Jane demanded as she opened her window and leaned out, her hair hanging down in one long braid, her green eyes sparkling. She pretended to sound tough, but she was grinning.

  “No damage today, SJ,” I called back. “Just this!” I held up my creation—a carefully sculpted antenna-wire flower—trying not to come off looking and sounding like a besotted buffoon. I wondered if this was the part when SJ would come down and kiss me, just as she’d written in her letter. Josh had told me what to do when this moment came. I had to act cool. I couldn’t freak out, geek out, or run screaming.

  Sarah Jane disappeared from the window. My heart began to pound, waiting for her to come down and . . . and . . .

  Maybe I should run, I thought. I could always lie to the guys and say I didn’t.

  Only, Sarah Jane didn’t come down to give me that kiss she’d promised in her letter. Instead, reappearing in her upstairs window, she dropped a single sheet of paper. I watched the paper whip and flutter to the ground, not sure if it was safe to read. It might tell me that Bigfoot was standing behind me . . . or that SJ was going to give me two kisses now, not just one.

  “Oh, go on! Be a man, Ledge! A few alphabet bits don’t scare you, do they?”

  I swallowed, then bent and picked up SJ’s paper. On it she’d written six words:You shouldn’t believe everything you read.

  After that, I didn’t know what to believe, aside from the fact that Sarah Jane and I were friends. The only kiss I got that day was the one in the tall tale I told the guys back at school—and that one would have made one super-duper, humdinger headline.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Lauri Hornik and the dedicated people at Dial Books for Young Readers and Penguin Young Readers Group. Thanks too to Chip Flaherty and my pals at Walden Media, especially Deborah Kovacs and Kellie Celia, who are always ready with a cheer. Additional thanks to the folks at Writers House who keep my stories moving around the world. I’d be lost in the jungle without my fabulous agent, Daniel Lazar, and missing the masterful e-mail haiku of his assistant, Stephen Barr.

  To my family and friends, who all thought I fell in a hole while writing this book, thank you for your patience. Mom, Dad, Michelle, Luca, Phyllis, Christine, Rose—I love you all. Andy, you deserve a medal. Sean, your support and insight were brilliant and invaluable, as always—you and I learned long ago that not everything that comes apart is broken.

  To the many people who took the time to answer my questions about butterflies, motorcycles, and more . . . I’m grateful. A special shout-out to Arthur Plotnik, whose book inspired me to take chances (and gave me the word scumble in the first place), and to the lovely and talented Laura Resau and Sarah Prineas, who have both given me so much. Counting down to lunch, Sarah. Yup, yup, yup!

  Finally, for sticking with me, putting me up, sending brownies, listening to me cry, laughing with me, and helping me find this story, my editor, Alisha Niehaus, deserves big hugs, and even bigger boxes of chocolate—or better yet, more lavender air, black truffle explosions, and smoldering cinnamon sticks.