Middle of Nowhere (8 page)

As soon as I was inside our apartment, I switched on the light and started madly stuffing school things in one pillowcase and clothes in another. I went to the bathroom and threw in our toothbrushes and the Economizer Extra-Strength Hand and Body Lotion. In Mom's room, the silk eye mask was lying on the cardboard box. I did that thing Artie always did — I stroked my face with it — but instead of making me feel better, I felt worse. So I left it there. I lifted the cardboard box and grabbed her wallet just to have the I.D. card from the community college with her picture on it.

Then I lifted the box again, because from the corner of my eye I'd noticed something.

The ring box. The ring box that held my tooth. It was under there, too. I picked it up, and right away I knew how I could leave a message that only she could find. I knew because wherever she was, eventually she would come back, even if we weren't here.

She would come for that tooth.

I wrote a note.

Mom, we love you. We are across the street staying with the old lady. We are waiting for you.

I tucked it inside the ring box.

The first place Mom would check would be where the tooth had been in the first place, under her cardboard box bedside table. But Nelson would clear out our stuff and somebody else would move in, so I pushed the box aside and pulled up the carpet. It came up easily. On the foam underpad, over and over so the message would be clear, I wrote:
Look for the tooth
.

Where do you brush your teeth?

In the bathroom
, I wrote.

I taped the ring box in the cupboard under the sink. You had to either reach your hand up and feel around for it, or get on your knees and stick your head right inside the cupboard.

Who would do that? Only a person looking hard for something. Only a person looking for the single valuable thing she owned in all the world.

THAT NIGHT BRANDON
Pennypacker was in my dream. It was supper at the Pennypackers and he was carrying my plate to me at the table. On the way, he stopped and turned his back. When he turned around again, there was a shiny string of spit attaching his lip to the food, like a spider web that stretched and broke as he set the plate in front of me.

It was just a bad dream, but one that had really happened in real life almost every single night.

The next day was the Wednesday of the last week of school. The smell of bacon woke me up.

At first I didn't know where I was. Artie, though, was his old self, and bacon was one of the things his old self liked best. He bounded off to Mrs. Burt's kitchen. I got there last.

Mrs. Burt was at the stove wearing a man's dressing gown and, for the first time, no cap. Her white hair floated around her head like dandelion fuzz. She looked so puffy and clutched the walker so hard that I knew she'd had about as good a sleep as I had.

“Boys,” she said, settling at the table with us to drink her tea. “I have an idea. How about a day off school?” To me she said, “I think we should take turns keeping an eye out. See what happens across the street.”

“How many more sleeps till Mom comes home?” Artie asked between spoonfuls of scrambled eggs.

“Who knows?” Mrs. Burt said. “Today might be the day.” And she shot me a sideways glance to let me know she was stringing him along. “We don't want her walking into that hornet's nest, do we? The police casing the place. She could get into some real trouble over that rent money.”

After breakfast, I washed the dishes while Mrs. Burt got dressed and took her position at the living-room window, the drapes open just a slit. Artie was already dressed because he'd slept in his clothes. While he played with Happy and the figurines on the living-room floor, he kept telling Mrs. Burt, “You should sleep in your clothes, too. Then you don't have to get dressed in the morning!”

I came in and Mrs. Burt said, “Good. My neck's getting stiff.” Then it was my turn for guard duty. She hobbled off to her room to lie down.

They showed up just before lunchtime while Mrs. Burt was in the kitchen making sandwiches. The police car pulled up with two officers in it. After that another car arrived and a man got out. It was Nelson, the landlord. He went over and shook hands with the officers. Then the three of them walked together to the apartment.

Mrs. Burt was suddenly right behind me with a plate in her hand.

“Oh!” she cried and dropped the plate so the sandwiches bounced onto the floor and broke open. Meat and lettuce and bread flew everywhere.

“Did they go in?”

“Yes,” I said.

Mrs. Burt handed me the empty plate and eased herself down on the coffee table. She slapped her chest twice like she was trying to bring up her words.

“Actually, boys? I've been thinking.” She paused to belch into her fist. “See, I have a place. A cabin. It's quite far away and I haven't been there for years. It's a beautiful place on a lake.” She stopped again and I saw that her eyes had teared up behind the glasses. “Would you like to see it? I won't force you or nothing. You can come on a little holiday with me or you can go across the street and let them know what's up.”

“I want to go on a holiday,” Artie piped up.

Mrs. Burt's speckled hand clutched her chest. She turned to me.

“What about you, Curtis?”

I thought about Mom and how she would find us. If we left, the note I'd written her would be useless. No one would answer the door at Mrs. Burt's.

I turned and looked out the window again at the police car, burning white in the sun. When I shut my eyes, I could still see it taking away all our choices.

I turned back to Mrs. Burt and said we'd go with her.

7

THE REST OF
that day we got ready. Artie and I went around closing all the drapes and curtains. We moved most of the food we'd bought down to the basement freezer. Mrs. Burt did other things like cancel the newspaper and write checks.

“It's too bad about the garden,” she said. “But I guess it had already gone to pot. Get it? Gone to
flower
pots?” She laughed.

Gerry used to laugh at his own jokes like that when he was drunk. Now that we were leaving, Mrs. Burt seemed drunk.

Artie and I brought all the houseplants out to the back yard where they would at least get rained on from time to time. I soaked them with the hose. Mrs. Burt said Artie could bring along two of the figurines. He eeny-meeny-miney-moed and ended up choosing a little boy in the branch of an apple tree and a girl in a pink dress holding a white kitten. With newspaper and a shoebox, he made a nest and snuggled them in with Happy.

Then came a big surprise. A good surprise.

Mrs. Burt had a car.

When everything was piled outside by the back gate, Mrs. Burt locked the door behind us. She asked me to open the doors of the old wooden garage out back. They squawked. Daylight streamed inside. You couldn't miss the car, which was under a blue tarp.

“Go ahead, boys,” Mrs. Burt said. “Be my guest.” Artie and I each grabbed a corner of the tarp and started walking backwards until we'd pulled it off.

Blue and white. The blue of a robin's egg, with a chrome bumper that matched the walker. Fins at the back where the lights were set. A big, old-fashioned car.

“What you're looking at here, boys,” Mrs. Burt said, “is the handsomest vehicle ever to drive off an assembly line. A 1957 Chevy Bel Air.”

We piled inside — Artie and me, I mean. Mrs. Burt just stood in the alley laughing and showing her brown teeth while we bounced around and took turns pretending to drive. Then she got serious and said we'd better hustle or we'd be on the highway after dark. Holding onto the car instead of the walker, she went around and opened the hood. With a flashlight from a shelf behind us, she shone a light inside.

“What are you doing?” I asked when she passed me the flashlight to hold.

“I only drive it a couple times a year, so I always disconnect the battery. I hope she runs.”

It started fine. The engine hummed a little song. I loaded everything into the trunk, including the walker, then folded the tarp up and left it on the shelf like Mrs. Burt asked.

The last thing we did before we left town was head for a car wash.

“I can't stand a dirty car,” Mrs. Burt told us. “If you wash and wax a car, it stays pretty. If you look after its working parts, it lasts. Except for these.” She waved a hand at the cars all around us waiting for the light to change. “These cars are made to fall apart. Also, they're ugly and they all look the same.”

Sitting high in the passenger seat, I agreed with her. The other drivers seemed to, too. When the light turned green and she put on the signal to change lanes, cars made way for her. People turned their heads and smiled.

Mrs. Burt said, “Hunker down a little, Curtis. Don't sit up there so proud. We're on the lam, remember?”

I slid down in the seat. “What's on the lam?”

“We're absconding. We're getting away.”

We pulled into a gas station. Mrs. Burt gave me money and told me to fill the tank and pay for a wash as well.

“I want to help!” Artie piped up from the back seat.

“You stay right there,” Mrs. Burt told him. She used the same sweet voice she fooled bank tellers with. “I don't think it's a good idea for you two to be seen together. Not till we're out of town, anyway.”

I'd never gassed up a car before. Luckily, the instructions were right on the pump. Then I wished somebody from school could see me filling the Bel Air. I wished Mr. Bryant could because then he'd ask me about it. Whenever something special happened to somebody, he made sure everybody knew, and because it was him insisting you tell, you didn't have to feel like you were bragging about it.

No one did see me, though, because we were already far from our neighborhood and, anyway, the school year was over for me.

I came back with the receipt, smiling because the attendant had complimented me on the car.

Then Artie asked, “Is this where Mom works?”

It felt like a slap.

“No,” I told Artie. “She worked at Pay-N-Save. This is Shell.”

We drove around the side of the building to the car wash. The man who took the receipt gave her a thumbs up, meaning the car was a beauty. Mrs. Burt shut the engine off and told us to roll up the windows tight.

I felt us jerk forward. Slowly, we were pulled through the big opening in the wall. In the darkness ahead I could just make out the brushes hanging down like seaweed. Artie whimpered at the sound of the machinery, but then jets of water started firing all around us like a thousand water pistols and he laughed. Mrs. Burt caught the giggles next. Then I did. I couldn't help it.

Soap splatted down on us.

“Seagulls!” I yelled and we all screamed as the brushes whirred to life. They closed around us on all sides, scrubbing and whipping up the suds. Soon we were completely covered in foam, which seemed even funnier than the water jets. It was like being trapped inside a huge lemon meringue pie.

A tidal wave of clean water splashed over us.

“Wheee!” Artie shrieked. It splashed us again and again. Then a typhoon of hot air dried us off. The sign by the exit flashed
START YOUR ENGINE NOW
, and before we knew it we were belched out just like Mrs. Burt's gas.

“Let's do it again!” Artie screamed.

Mrs. Burt drove out onto the street. The car gleamed in the afternoon sun and water droplets flew off the hood like sparks. I unrolled the window and let the June air wash my face.

Mrs. Burt did the same, unrolling her window and shouting out for all the world to hear, “We're absconding, boys! We're absconding! Yippee!”

THE NAME OF
the first town that we stopped at was Hope.

“My thingie,” Mrs. Burt said, and I unloaded the walker from the trunk and brought it to her. With a lot of groaning, she got out from behind the wheel. She let me and Artie top up the gas together this time.