Dust Devil (10 page)

“
No,
that’s true,” Sarah agreed, sighing. “Daddy always
says you don’t rise higher in life by putting others down. But
I guess there’re a lot of people out there who don’t
understand that, who have to make themselves feel better by looking
down their noses at everybody else. That’s why I come here most
of the time by myself. This meadow’s my favorite place in the
whole wide world. It doesn’t belong to me, of course, or even
to my family. A couple called the Lovells own that beautiful old
white Victorian farmhouse not far from here and all the land around
it, including the meadow. But they’re retired and elderly, and
they don’t have any children of their own, so they said they
didn’t mind if I played here. They even let me have a tree
house here. That’s it up there.” Sarah pointed toward the
branches of the sycamore that formed a canopy above them, where the
tree house nestled snugly, securely, and so secretly amid the leaves
now turned the color of flames with autumn that Renzo hadn’t
noticed it before. “Daddy built it for me last summer, after
the Lovells said he could. It’s my own special hideout. But
you’re welcome to use it whenever you come here, if you want.”

“
Thanks,
but I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

“
No,
it’s all right, really. I’d—I’d like for us
to be friends.” Sarah stammered this last in a rush, her heart
thudding anxiously, for fear the boy would laugh at the very idea,
since, although he had been kind and had taken her part in the
quarrel with Evie, too, he was still some years older than she,
nearly a teenager, while she was still just a little girl. “But
I guess you probably think that’s a silly notion... I mean,
with your being in junior high and all, while I’m only in the
second grade.”

“
No,
I don’t think it’s silly at all. I’m something of a
loner myself, so I don’t have a lot of friends,” Renzo
confessed, touched by her childish offer and thinking of the common
bonds they shared—had shared since the day he had watched the
butterfly come to light in her hands. “Will you show me your
tree house? How do you get up there?”

“
There’re
ladder rungs—nailed into the other side of the tree. Come on!”
Smiling with happiness and excitement, her eyes shining, Sarah rose,
brushing herself off, then holding out her hand. “There’s
a trapdoor, too, so once I’m up there, I either have to open it
or lower the rope for somebody else to join me. Oh, you’ll see
it all for yourself in a minute. It’s grand! It’s just
like sitting on top of the world! You can see forever, it seems, and
the fields look like a great green-and-gold sea surrounding you.
Sometimes I pretend my tree house is a kingdom on an island and I’m
a fairy-tale princess. You can be my knight in shining armor, if you
like. After all, you
did
rescue
me that day at school!”

“
In
that case, I suppose you’d rather I stand down here and wait
while you go up. Then I guess you’ll want me to shout out
something like, ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden
hair!’ so you can lower the rope to admit me into your lofty
kingdom, fairy princess,” Renzo teased, grinning as he spoke
and got to his feet, remembering the fairy tale Madonna had read to
him, along with so many others when he was Sarah’s age.

“
No,
really, you don’t have to do that if you’d rather not.”
Sarah’s beaming face grew crestfallen at the thought that he
was making fun of her and her tree house and her offer of friendship,
after all. “Besides, my hair isn’t golden. It’s
only plain old mud brown.”

To
her surprise, Renzo reached out and gently tugged a thick strand of
her long hair, which Mama had never yet permitted her to cut, so it
hung down her back, past her waist.

“
Now,
where did you ever get a dumb idea like that?” he inquired, not
missing the disappointment on her piquant face and determined now to
join in her game, even if he
did
think
it was girlish nonsense. “That hissing little cat Evie, I’ll
bet. Don’t you believe it—not for one minute! Your hair’s
not the color of mud. It’s the color of a dark old oak tree,
and your eyes are the green of its leaves. You’re a woodland
fairy princess, as anyone with eyes in his head could see. So you go
on up, and I’ll wait here. And when you hear me call out to you
from below, you’ll know it’s me, and that will be our
secret password from now on.”

“
All
right,” Sarah said slowly, half afraid, nevertheless, that
despite his words, Renzo intended to trick her,
that
he
meant to run off, laughing at and taunting her for her foolishness,
once she had reached
the
tree house. Still, she climbed up into the sycamore’s spreading
green branches, anyway, opening the trapdoor to the tree house and
hoisting herself inside. “I’m here,” she called
timidly, now wishing she had never mentioned her tree house, had
never told the boy of her secret daydreams. She waited nervously for
the sound of his mocking laughter.

What
she heard instead was her heart singing in pure joy when, from below,
in response, Renzo shouted in his best knight-in-shining-armor voice,
“Sarah, sweet Sarah, let down your oak-brown hair!”

Those
years of Sarah and Renzo's childhood and early adulthood were
turbulent ones for the world. For they were the years of the ending
of the war in Vietnam; of Watergate and the resignations first of
Vice President Spiro Agnew and then of President Richard Nixon; of
the Grey Panthers and the Black Panthers—‘‘Say it
loud: I’m black, and I’m proud!”—and the
trial of Angela Davis; and of the American Indian revolt at Wounded
Knee. They were the years of ongoing wars between the Israelis and
the Arab nations in the Middle East; of skyjackings and terrorist
attacks and of metal detector being installed at airports; of the oil
embargo and the energy crises; and of the kidnapping of publishing
heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The years of
the continuing troubles in Northern Ireland; of Karen Silkwood and
the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant; of the election of a grocer’s
daughter, Margaret Thatcher, to the British Parliament and then the
prime ministry; and of the Israeli raid on Entebbe. The years of the
birth of the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown; of
Reverend Jim Jones and the mass suicide of his followers at
Jonestown, Guyana; of the deposing of the Shah of Iran and the rise
to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini; and of the Soviets in
Afghanistan. The years of the deaths of many world leaders, among
them America’s Lyndon Baines Johnson, France’s Georges
Pompidou, Argentina’s Juan Per6n, Spain’s Francisco
Franco, Israel’s David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, and
Nationalist China’s Chiang Kai-shek and the People’s
Republic of China’s Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung.

But
of all this, only Watergate touched Sarah and Renzo in the quiet,
small town where they lived—and only because the resulting fame
of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward fueled Renzo’s own dreams of
becoming a journalist. Every day after school, he went to work for
Joe Martinelli at the Tri-State Tribune. At first, Renzo did the very
same chores for which he had ridiculed Bubba Holbrooke that day upon
the commons: sweeping up, emptying wastebaskets and the like. But
gradually, as the years passed, Joe began to let him try his eager
hand at various journalistic endeavors: typesetting, copy-editing and
writing headlines and obituaries to start. By the time Renzo had
turned nineteen and been graduated from Lincoln High School for a
year, he was cranking out real articles—hard news and feature
stories both under the daily deadline pressures of a small town. At
twenty-two, he had nearly completed his degree in journalism at the
local state university.

He
never thought to question how Joe and Madonna, whose financial means
were adequate but ran to only a few luxuries, had afforded to pay for
his tuition and books. Just as he had never thought to ask how they
had got the money for the secondhand but fiercely coveted
Harley-Davidson motorcycle, either, which he had received when he’d
turned sixteen and considered himself too old to ride the bus or his
bicycle to school anymore. Later, he was to wish he had known the
source of all the funds.

Hindsight
is always a bitter teacher.

There
would be other motorcycles—and cars, too—in his life.
Still, that Harley was always Renzo’s first love. It would
someday be a classic, for it was a 1977 FXS Low Rider, a
black-and-silver beauty with mag wheels, drag-style handlebars and
special paint and engine treatment. He labored long and hard into the
wee hours of his nights to repair and restore the motorcycle, until
it was in mint condition and ran like a young man’s dream. When
he was spied wearing his black leather jacket and astride the Harley,
the townspeople observed darkly that he looked and acted more like a
hoodlum every passing day and was bound, sooner or later, like his
rumored small-time, big-city mobster father, to come to a bad end.
But Renzo took a perverse pride and pleasure in the gossip, telling
himself that one day, when he was rich and famous, he would set the
town on its ears.

Despite
the five-year difference in their ages, which caused a temporary gap
between them the older they grew, he and Sarah continued to meet in
the meadow, their friendship growing ever stronger and deeper,
although, by mutual, unspoken consent, they never mentioned it to
anyone. As young as she had been at the start of it, Sarah had sensed
instinctively, as Renzo had known for certain, that the town would
not only not understand their relationship, but would also, in fact,
condemn it. At fourteen, she had begun to grasp the reasons why—that
people not only looked for dirt, but also delighted in finding it.
America might have laughed at Archie Bunker on television for years;
still, that didn’t mean there weren’t many who agreed
with his viewpoints. There were. And rural America was always the
last part of the country to accept change and progress.

In
the small, prejudicial town that was home to her and Renzo, he would,
because of his Italian heritage, his purported mobster father and his
bad-boy reputation, be suspected at the very least of contributing to
the delinquency of a minor where Sarah was concerned, and at the
worst of statutory rape, although he never even so much as kissed her
until her seventeenth birthday.

That
was the day Sarah knew truly and fully, with all her heart, that she
had loved Renzo Cassavettes since that autumn afternoon at her tree
house in the meadow, when he had shouted out to her, “Sarah,
sweet Sarah, let down your oak-brown hair!”

She
had never tired of looking at him, of listening to him when he had
spoken to her of his dreams as the two of them had perched at the
edge of one of the many abandoned quarries in the area, fishing poles
in hand, captured catfish flopping in a nearby pail, bait bucket and
picnic basket sitting alongside. Or when he had read aloud to her
from the books he had over the years carried from the town library to
the tree house, books not just by Steinbeck, but also by Faulkner,
Fitzgerald, Hemingway and others. He had read to her the plays of
Edward Albee, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, too, and
the poetry of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and Wordsworth. In this
way, Renzo had taught Sarah to love words as much as he himself did
and had shown her how her imaginary worlds could be made real.

Sometimes
she had taken her watercolors and brushes and paper to the meadow and
had painted, while Renzo had read aloud or had sat quietly beside
her, writing in the spiral-bound notebooks he had filled with
thoughts and words of his own. Or he had wailed the blues on the
saxophone he had taken up playing when he was thirteen. Or, in the
cast-iron skillet Sarah had brought from home to the tree house, he
had fried up the catfish they had caught that day. At other
times,
the
two
of them had done their homework together, then leafed through Renzo’s
collection of comic books, arguing over the virtues of Batman,
Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman, and which comics were more likely
to escalate in value over the years. There had been long, lazy
afternoons when they had waded in the shallow, pebble-bottomed creeks
of the woods and meadows, too, or had gone swimming in the deep
quarry that was the local swimming hole, or had run through the tall
grass and wildflowers, laughing and chasing butterflies.

Sarah
had flown upon the back of the Harley, too, along dusty country roads
and across sweeping fields, her arms locked tightly around Renzo’s
hard waist, the rough grain of his black leather jacket and its
silver studs pressing against her cheek, her dark brown hair
streaming in the wind. And she had laughed aloud in sheer delight
when they had sailed over hummocks and dashed through the woods,
grass and creeks, shady water spraying coldly against her skin, the
motorcycle engine revving and roaring.