Chasing AllieCat (3 page)

I leaned my mountain bike against the porch and stood beside Mom to watch.

Both Scout and Thomas are Civil War freaks. They dress up like Union soldiers, do reenactments of the war, and shoot authentic black-powder rifles. Thomas is a colonel in the Civil War enactment regiment, for whatever that’s worth. Sounds like glorified Boy Scouts to me. Right now they were wearing half of their Civil War uniforms. They hadn’t bothered with the official pants, but they had the shirts on, hanging open over their T-shirts and jeans, the jackets on top, and the blue Union hats jammed cockeyed on their heads.

Scout and Thomas pulled the cannon out to the bluff. They faced it out over the Blue Earth River toward the field beyond, which was bright green with baby corn plants, fresh out of the ground after spring planting.

Scout and Thomas were tipsy enough not to be in perfect control of their senses, and they were finding themselves very funny. Scout lit himself a cigar, offered one to Thomas, who waved it away. They put four cannonballs in a little pile, chuckling to themselves. “Just to look authentic,” Uncle Thomas said.

They poured in some gun powder, tamped it down the cannon barrel with a plunger, and loaded one cannon ball from the small stack.

Thomas dabbed at his face with his hanky. All this exertion was making him sweat.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Aunt Janie asked. “That thing did
not
come with instructions.”

“Easy, woman. Do you know anyone who knows his way around firearms as well as we do?” Thomas said.

“That’s what scares me.” Her sigh filled about as much space as Thomas’s body. She forced all of us, the kids and Aunt Susan and Mom and Grandma included, to back up about thirty feet behind the cannon as the guys got ready to shoot.

Scout and Thomas were hopping around like giant little boys with firecrackers on the Fourth of July. “We’re finally ready!” bellowed Thomas. He squatted by one cannon wheel, well out of the line of fire.

Scout took a big drag on his cigar so the end glowed bright red. He held it high for a ceremonial moment, then brought it down to the cannon’s touch-hole. It sparked, he dropped to a crouch, and there was a flash from the touch-hole just like in the movies, and then POP! And the cannon ball popped out of the cannon and blooped into the grass fifteen feet in front of the men. It hadn’t even made it into the river.

We all erupted in howls of laughter, Thomas and Scout, too.

“HAhaHa!” Thomas said, standing, holding the shaking mass of flesh between his Union uniform jacket and his rib cage. Then he pulled out his bandana and mopped his face again. “That was obviously not enough powder!”

“Wait,” Susan begged. “We all survived this once. Don’t you think you should quit while you’re ahead?”

Uncle Scout’s eyes twinkled. “Ahead? That’s not ahead. That was barely going forward. That doesn’t even count as firing the thing.”

Aunt Susan shrugged.

Uncle Scout actually trotted to the house to get more gunpowder from his gun cabinet. It was like an earthquake of flesh. I swear, the ground shook. I had
never
seen Uncle Scout trot before.

Peapod, Scout’s yellow lab, didn’t like the cannon. He whined and scratched at the door and dashed inside the second Scout opened it.

Scout came back lugging a three-gallon powder keg like a pirate’s treasure.

“Let’s see,” Scout said. “If that much powder just gave a tiny
bloop
, then we need at least five times that for a hefty shot, don’t ya think?”

“At least,” Thomas said, turning the keg up to pour some more—a
lot more
—of its contents into the cannon chamber.

Janie gave herself the sign of the cross. Mom saw that and laughed, but together, they backed us up even farther this time.

The men tamped the powder and loaded another cannonball. Susan and Janie put their hands over their ears. “Cover your ears,” Janie said, but none of us kids did.

Finally, Scout held his now-stubbier cigar to the touch-hole again. It sparkled just like before, jumped to a full-fledged flash, and I saw flames shooting out the cannon barrel a split second before the air around me cracked in two with a boom that seemed to break my sternum and rupture my eardrums and suck the oxygen right out of the air.

Now I knew why they use the word “deafening.” When the boom went away, no other sound came back. Everything was dead, deafened silence in our damaged eardrums as we watched that cannonball hurl skyward, sailing up, up, over the river and over the horizon, arcing out of sight in a southerly direction.

I could see Uncle Scout’s mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear a word he said. I could see the giant grin on Thomas’s face and I could see them start to shake with laughter, but there were no sounds getting through my imploded eardrums. Adam, Thomas and Janie’s four-year-old, turned toward me and I could see his face screwed up in an all-out wail, but I couldn’t hear it. I picked him up, but he reached for his mom and Janie took him.

I could see the men’s laughter subsiding as they looked in the direction the cannonball went and then at each other. I could read Uncle Scout’s lips. “Holy shit.”

Thomas said something back, and then they turned sheepishly in the direction of their wives.

Susan’s face was scarlet. I’d never seen her that color in all the years I’ve known her, since I was four and the flower girl at their wedding. Janie’s face was white. She was still holding one ear, with Adam in her other arm, and staring in the direction where the cannonball had disappeared. Mom stood with her mouth hanging open and shaking with laughter.

An answering BOOM resounded out of the south.

“Holy shit!” I heard Uncle Scout say, and I realized my eardrums were moving again.

We wheeled to look, and over the edge of the world, we could see a plume of gray smoke and debris shooting upward. We stood, open-mouthed, until there was another BOOM and flames shot toward the sky, then black smoke, thick as tar, billowed into a column against the deep blue.

“Oh my stars,” Grandma said, holding her chest.

“You’d better get yourselves down there and see what the heck you just blew up,” Aunt Susan said.

Janie’s face had gone from white to ghostly. Adam on her hip, she grabbed six-year-old Alicia’s hand, whirled on her heel, and dragged both kids into the house, slamming the door.

The rest of us stood there gaping. Mom put one hand on my shoulder. “That was loud enough to wake the dead,” she said.

“The dead soldiers?” Timmy asked.

“What?” Mom said.

“All the dead soldiers? For Memorial Day?”

“You dork,” I said.

“Was s’posed to be a joke,” Timmy said.

“It was almost funny.” I gave him a soft little punch in the shoulder. He stuck out his tongue at me and ran over to Stevie.

Thomas swiped his face with his hanky and Scout shook his head, as if the big boys were trying to shake off the beer and sober up on the spot. They walked wordlessly to Scout’s pickup, hoisted their heavy carcasses up and into it (which lowered the pickup on its springs a good four inches), and took off down the road in the direction of the cannonball landing. The last thing I saw was Thomas pulling out his everlasting blue hanky and dabbing at his ever-sweating face one more time.

Aunt Susan, my mom, and Grandma herded the little kids into the house. I ran for my bike. “Sadie, you be careful,” my mom yelled at me as she pulled the screen door shut.

I’d gone about a quarter mile down the blacktop when two police cars blasted past me, sirens wailing, and then a fire truck. Then another.

By the time I got to the corner, the road was filling up with cars and pickups—people coming to see what the explosion was. Rubberneckers, my dad always calls them.

At the corner, I turned toward Norton Roberts’ place, nearly a mile from Scout’s. Behind his house, a thick pillar of black smoke was billowing up to the sky. I felt a whoosh by my shoulder. A pickup truck’s mirror had missed my shoulder by about two inches because the driver was so busy gawking at the fire. I took the ditch.

Another bang sent up a spray of flame and sparks, higher than all the trees on the place. I got to the Roberts’ driveway just as the garage sort of burst like fireworks, shooting flames, smoke, and sparks in all directions. That set off a whole series of little explosions. Giant firecrackers for Memorial Day.

A cop guarding the driveway hustled over to me. “You’d better turn around right here, young lady.”

“But I’m Scout and Thomas Hoelschmeier’s niece. I think they’re in trouble.”

The cop was bald, and the skin around the edges of his cap looked almost crispy from the heat of the fire. “You bet they’re in trouble, little lady. So much trouble, you’d better git yourself home and wait for ’em.”

“But—”

“No buts, little lady.” He lifted his cap and swiped at his face. Beads of sweat stood on his shiny head. The fire was that hot all the way to the road.

I’m
not
a lady,
I wanted to yell at him
.
Quit calling me that.
But he looked so crabby that I didn’t say anything.

“You git on home.”

I just stared at him.

“Git!”

So I got.

Two

Junk Woods

May 28, continued

I rode as slowly as I could, not toward Scout’s. I took the ditches and stayed on the part of the road where I could watch the fire and the black column of smoke over my shoulder. The thick tarry smell hung in the air for almost a mile. Past it, the sky was deep blue, and I rode and rode. When I figured I’d better turn around, I wheeled back and found a path by the river, through the woods, that I thought should lead to Uncle Scout’s.

Leaves flanked the trail with bright spring green. I could see the pillar of dark smoke from here but couldn’t smell it, so I lifted my nose to breathe it all in like a dog: the sky, the leaves, the wildflowers, the scent of damp earth and new things growing. I cranked around a corner. The trees grew thicker, and I was back in the junk woods. Antifreeze jugs, hubcaps, tires, pieces of a snowmobile, a broken motorcycle helmet, a refrigerator door. At least I was on the right path to Scout’s. “Welcome to the junk woods,” I said out loud. I rode even slower, watching for glass and nails.

I climbed the hill out of the river bottom and the trees dissolved into a clearing: the edge of a trailer court. This was in town, because LeHillier was inside the Mankato city limits as far as I knew, but the trailers squatted on squares between
dirt
roads. Dust hung in the air and diluted the blue sky into an orangish-brown haze. Garbage was piled near every—
every
—trailer. Junked cars and four-wheeler ATVs sat in yards.

A woman in a saggy, dingy white T-shirt sat on her steps, her bony knees sticking out from cut-offs, a cigarette between her lips and a can of Pabst in her yellowed, bony fingers. A German Shepherd beside her jumped up and barked. She said something to him, cigarette dangling and bobbing on her lips, and he sat instantly in the dirt beside her steps and they both watched me wheel past.

Farther down the dirt road, a pitbull-looking dog lunged to the end of his chain and growled at me. I pedaled faster.

Past the trailer court, I came to Mankato’s Waste Management Center: a huge recyclables drop-off facility and sleeping quarters for the local fleet of garbage trucks. In back, a Dumpster cemetery sprawled, a Red Sea of rusty decrepit Dumpsters rolling off their broken wheels in the meadow, daisies springing up among them. Creepy. I’d never thought about where Dumpsters go when they’re too busted to be useful. Birds sang, and I could only imagine the rats and mice that figured they’d hit the jackpot for spacious condo living. I pedaled even faster.

But the world got even stranger. First, a semi-truck loomed between the Red Sea and the woods. This parked, deserted semi looked to be in perfect condition, all intact, with bright shiny red paint—except for the fact that vines had grown all over it, covering its sides, swallowing up the hood, the cab, the doors, as if the vines were ravenous, consuming it. As if somebody had driven it all day, parked it, and overnight the vines took over. A Stephen King truck.

Beyond the vine truck, I rode into the trailer home cemetery. Junked trailer homes, one after another, lay like a bunch of dead dinosaurs sprawled through an acre of woods. Except somehow, these homes didn’t seem quite dead.

I stopped, my feet on the ground, and surveyed a trailer that had been rolled on its side. It didn’t have a floor. Bottoms of the bathtub and sink, rusty pipes like giant curling snakes, coils of the stove, and undersides of drawers and cupboards were still intact. I felt as if I was looking up some giant fat lady’s skirt. I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could, but I couldn’t stop staring. It was like peering at some intimate disaster where I had no business looking. Or like watching a horror movie when you want to turn it off, but can’t peel your eyes off the screen.

I clipped my cleat back into my pedal and turned toward Scout’s.

I nearly fell over.

There, sitting on the crossbar of her orange Kona mountain bike, staring at me, was a girl with more hardware on her face than I’d ever seen—an ear studded all the way around in earrings, an eyebrow ring, a nose ring, a lip ring, and shock-white hair sticking up straight around and through her silver cycling helmet. Staring, and not smiling. Her hair made an eerie halo, so I had this panicky feeling that she was a ghost from one of the dead dinosaur trailers. But she was way too tan to be a ghost.

“Oh! Hi,” I said. “You scared the crap out of me.”

She jerked her head toward the dead mobile homes. “Lovely, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “I didn’t know it was legal to dump that much junk anywhere and get away with it.”

“It’s not legal. But it’s private property.”

I stared.

“You haven’t seen nothin’ yet. Even grosser deeper in the woods. Guy who owns it is an ass, if you wondered what I thought about him.”

“Uh—I didn’t really have time to wonder.”

The hard line of the girl’s jaw loosened and amusement crept up her face. I started to smile at her, but then our eyes locked, a sort of duel to see what who would make the next move. I felt like a preppy goody-two-shoes with my clean, smooth face and brown ponytail.

Finally, her eyes twinkled and she cracked into a grin. “Ride much?”

I shrugged. “As much as I can.”

She nodded, taking in my Giant Yukon mountain bike, my legs, my arms. She herself looked rock-hard, from her eyes to her shoulders to her quads and her calves. Even when she was relaxed on her bike, her muscles seemed to bulge. She wore a neon orange tank-top jersey and you could draw a line along the separation of her shoulder, biceps, and triceps. “Race?” she said.

“Huh?” I asked. I couldn’t quite imagine where she wanted to race me in this junkyard woods.

“You race your bike?” she asked.

“Oh. No,” I said. “I want to.” That sounded lame. I shook my head, worked my front brake lever. “Not yet. Keep thinking about it.” I looked back up at her. “Guess I’m chicken.”

“Just gotta do it anyway. Wanna go for a ride? With me, I mean?”

I shrugged again. Scout and Thomas wouldn’t be back for quite a while. The aunts wouldn’t be any happier than they were when I left. A longer ride couldn’t hurt. “Sure.”

And so I followed her. Her thighs were so cut that from the back, you could see the quads bulging above her knee.

The hardware girl was strong. And fast.

Out of the woods, down the hill, past Scout’s Last Chance, across Highway 60, I tailed her. Back into the woods on the other side of the highway. “Been down here?” she asked.

“No.”

“This is the other river. Minnesota. The one back where we just were is the Blue Earth River. They merge in town. That’s why they call Mankato the ‘Bend of the River.’ Did you know that?”

I was breathing so hard from keeping up, all I could answer was, “No.”

“You’re new here.”

“Yeah.”

“Thought so. I thought I knew all the mountain bikers in town.”

She rode down a rutty, bumpy, rocky dirt road. The descent was so sharp I had to feather my back brake constantly. She looked over her shoulder to check on me from time to time. We went under a railroad trestle where the rocks were as big as bread loaves. It was like riding down a stairway. If I were alone, I’d have gotten off and walked down the bumps, but I couldn’t do that with her there. I couldn’t be chicken, but I was sweating bullets. This was scary. I tried to watch where she put her wheel and follow the same line.

It worked most of the way; then, at the bottom, there was a sharp turn into soft sandy dirt, and I oversteered and felt myself flying over the handlebars. The dirt came flying at me, and smack, I was on my back in the weeds. “Oof.” A rock dug into my back, too, but just by my shoulder blade. Nothing vital.

The hardware girl’s brakes squeaked. “You okay?” She clicked one foot out of her clip-in pedal and set it on the ground to look back at me.

“Yeah, fine.” I jumped up, brushed off my butt. “Just stupid.”

She eyed me. “Not stupid. That’s a tricky descent. You’re good.” She wheeled back to me and stuck out her hand. “I’m Allison Baker. Allie.”

“Sadie Lester.”

“Sadie.” Her handshake was so firm it was almost scary. Like a man’s. “Sadie. I never knew anybody named Sadie.” She clipped back into her pedals. “Except my cousin’s Doberman. Let’s go, Sadie Lester.”

We were off. The road disintegrated to four-wheeler tracks that followed the Minnesota River. It was less technical than the downhill we just rode, but tricky and the sand was powdery in places. The river flowed wide and calm and murky. We rode and rode until we ran out of trail.

Then we pedaled up a steep grassy hill, jounced over some railroad tracks, and hit the shoulder of a paved road. I had never ridden harder in my whole life.

When we stopped, I said, “I better get back.”

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“Behind Scout’s Last Chance.”

Her eyebrow ring went up, in a question she didn’t say out loud.

“Scout’s my uncle. I’m staying for the summer. I—just got here. Today.”

She nodded. “Let’s ride again, Sadie Lester. See ya around.”

“Okay—” I started to ask for a phone number or something, but she was gone, pedaling off in the direction away from Scout’s.

When I tooled into the driveway, the cannon was put away in its trailer. Mom and Thomas and Scout were standing in the yard, not with happy faces.

“Where have you been?” Mom’s face was pinched with anger and worry.

“Riding. Why?”

“You’ve been gone almost three hours! When Scout and Tom got back, they said they never saw you. And there are lots of freaks out on the road today. I was scared silly. Besides, I need to get going. My plane leaves at five in the morning, you know.”

“If you’re so worried about me, why are you leaving me for the summer?” That wasn’t fair, but I couldn’t resist. “I’m fine, Mom. I met a girl out riding, and she showed me a bunch of trails.”

I could tell she was torn between being glad I’d met a friend already and being mad. So she said, “Good thing for your sake we have plenty of other stuff to worry about.”

“What?”

Scout explained. The cannon ball had put a hole clear through the back wall of the Roberts’ garage. But if that wasn’t enough, the cannonball landed squarely on Norton Roberts’ four-month-old Audi; the gas tank exploded, and the thing went up like a bomb. That was the first boom we’d heard. Worse yet, parked right beside the impeccable car was Norton’s irreplaceable, restored classic 1974 Norton motorcycle. Norton’s Norton. His pride and joy. While the garage was burning down, of course the Norton’s gas tank blew up in the flames, too. Not good, any way you look at it. Everyone expects a few minor explosions on the Fourth of July. But Memorial Day? Leave it to Uncle Scout and Uncle Thomas.

There would be a hearing on Wednesday.

When we were alone, I said, “Mom, you gonna leave Timmy and me with
them
for the summer? Isn’t that negligence or something?”

“Hush,” she said, and I thought she might cry, so I hushed.

She walked Timmy and me to the edge of the woods, promised she’d call us at least once a week from Egypt. For our sake, she was trying not to act too excited about Egypt. Or too worried about leaving us. I couldn’t muster up any excitement for her.

“Bye, Mom. Have fun. Yeah, love you, too,” was all I could give her with my hug. Then her Subaru disappeared around Scout’s bar and grill and turned up Highway 60.