On the Run (2 page)

“No,” his parents both said at once.

“But James took Gus when he went on vacation.”

No one said anything.

“Where are we going?”

Rain drummed on the car roof as they charged past a gas station, a funeral home, a fried chicken place.

“Just up the coast,” Mum said, looking at Dad, who looked from road to rearview mirror and back again.

“Where to? Gosford?”

“No.”

“Kings Bay? We're going to the beach in Kings Bay!” Ben said excitedly. He had wanted to go to Kings Bay ever since Nan sent him a postcard from there when he was little.

“No.”

Mum's phone pinged. She picked it up and started typing.

“Turn it off!” Dad said.

“Why?”

Dad gave her a fierce look.

Mum switched off the phone.

Ben and Olive glanced sideways at one another. They had never seen their mother switch her phone off before.

Mum turned and looked through the gap between headrest and seat. “We're going to the cabin.”

“Yessss!” Olive said, raising both arms in the air, then plugging her thumb back into her mouth.

“Boooooo!” Ben said. “I don't want to. I want to go home. I'm in the middle of making my movie.”

He had been hearing about his grandfather's cabin in the hills behind Kings Bay all his life. When Dad was a kid Pop went up there, fishing and hunting rabbits, a couple of times a year. Dad said he was hardly ever allowed to go, even though he'd really wanted to. Ben knew Dad had taken Mum there once before Ben was born.

Nature wasn't Ben's favorite thing—freaky insects, animals, dirt. He preferred being in his room playing games, watching TV, eating. This had never been a problem because the Silvers had not left the suburbs in the twelve years since Ben was born.

“Get out of the way!” Dad yelled at someone.

Dad was skinny and serious. An ex-mechanic, salesman, now car wrecker. He wore an armful of tattoos, black wraparound sunglasses, and a dirty cap with a gas company logo on it. In the rearview mirror, Ben could see Dad's chipped front tooth. He looked ratlike.

Ben sometimes wondered how Dad had ended up with Mum. April Silver: ten years younger than Dad, tall, brown hair. People said she could have been a model years ago, but then Ben was born and that changed everything. So now she worked at the wreckers instead. Dad thought he ran the business, but Mum did. Ben knew.

Ben sat back and looked out the window at the signs going by. AAA Lighting. Craig's Concreting. The Golden Wok. He thought about the police and squeezed his bottom lip. He closed his eyes and saw his stop-motion movie playing on the movie screen at the back of his eyelids. He saw what he had already shot—the crime, the car chase, then the run through the forest. Maybe heading toward a creepy cabin. It wasn't in the script yet but maybe they would find a cabin, the zombie thief's hideout—abandoned, trees hanging low over the roof.

The car jerked and revved hard as Dad flung it back a gear. Ben's eyes snapped open, ending his imaginary movie.

They hurried along the old highway, wipers scraping the windshield. Ben didn't mind his characters going to a creepy cabin but he did not want to go to one himself. He wanted to be back in his room, happy, comfortable. He tried to think of anything that might stall them.

“What about clothes and stuff? I'm still in my school uniform.”

“It's all right,” Mum said. “We'll get new ones.”

“New clothes?”

“Yep. That's what you do on a vacation.”

Ben thought about this for a second. He had never heard of it before.

“I thought you guys hated vacations,” he said.

Dad laughed, which Ben liked. Usually Dad only laughed when he was with his friends at a football game.

“What about school?” Ben said. “We just had a school holiday.”

“Now you've got another,” Mum said.

“Can you please tell Maugrim to slow down,” Olive said quietly, then stuck her thumb back into her mouth.

“You tell him,” Ben said.

Olive shook her head. She had not spoken to Dad in over a week. One night at dinner, during a TV commercial, she had called him Maugrim, the evil wolf from
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Dad was so angry when he found out who Maugrim was, he sent her to her room with no dessert and put Bonzo away for a week. Since then she had only spoken to Dad when necessary and only through an interpreter. Olive did that kind of thing sometimes. She was a tough little kid. Ben would never dare stand up to Dad like that.

Dad checked his rearview and side mirrors and took a sharp right in front of oncoming traffic. Ben was thrown sideways toward Olive, who shoved him away. “Get off me. You stink like poo,” she said.

Ben sat up. Dad swung a fast left, then gunned it up a street lined with brown brick houses. They were a bit nicer than Ben's house. Most had basketball hoops and toys and bikes strewn around the yard. Two kids in yellow raincoats ran off the road as Dad powered toward them. Half a block farther up, he pulled into a driveway where a man stood next to an empty garage. He wore a white, pin-striped business shirt and black pants. He was tall and skinny with ginger-colored hair, thinning on top. Uncle Chris. Even though he lived so close, they had not seen Dad's brother in over a year. Dad drove into the garage, switched off the engine, and got out.

“Does Dad still think Uncle Chris is an idiot?” Olive asked.

“Shhh,” Mum said. “He's arranged for a new car for us to drive on our trip.” She gathered her things.

“What?” Ben asked.

Mum ignored him. “Everyone out.”

Ben looked through the back window to where Dad was shaking his brother's hand. Uncle Chris gave Dad a gray nylon sports bag with black handles and looked over at Ben. Then they walked up the driveway to an old station wagon parked in the street.

 

VACATION HAIRCUTS

Clumps of hair fell to the ugly orange tiles of the motel bathroom.

“Hold still,” Mum said.

“How much are you cutting off?” Ben asked. “I don't wanna have a haircut.”

“Don't be silly. We're all having haircuts.”

“Why?”

“Vacation haircuts,” she said. “That's what you do on a vacation.”

“As if,” Ben said. The only guy he could remember coming back from a vacation with a haircut was Robert Dewar, who lived two doors up from Nan. He'd fallen asleep chewing gum and it went all through his hair and he had to have it shaved. He'd returned to school bald.

“It's looking better already,” Mum said. “I forgot you had eyes.”

“Have you ever cut hair before?” Ben asked, doubtful.

“You know I've always wanted to. I'm going to cut mine in a minute,” she said, snipping carefully away at his bangs. Ben could see her fingernails close up, bitten back to the nail bed. The tips of her fingers looked red and sore.

“I hope you do as bad a job on yours as you're doing on mine,” Ben said. “And why aren't you cutting Olive's?”

“Her hair's too beautiful. She can wear pigtails or a bun. Look down,” Mum said, her tongue poking out as she concentrated on clipping around Ben's ear.

“Why don't we just wait till morning and go to a hairdresser?” Ben asked.

They had been driving for about five hours when the rain became too heavy to see the road. The wipers on the car Uncle Chris had given them did not work well. Ben couldn't work out why they had bothered swapping—the car was even older than the Green Machine. They had pulled off the highway into Rest Haven, a deadbeat motel with a flickering fluorescent sign out front.

“Don't use your whiny voice,” Mum said.

She often accused him of whining, so Ben said in his deepest, most manly voice, “Why don't we just go to a hairdresser?”

“It's more fun this way,” she said.

“What's fun about having your hair hacked off by a maniac with a pair of nail scissors?”

“Mind your tongue,” she said. “Head down.”

Ben watched another handful of thick brown hair drop to the tiles. There was more hair on the floor than Ben remembered having on his head. Another large clump fell. He looked up into the mirror again, and a tiny scream leaped from his mouth. His hair was an inch long.

“I think it looks good,” Mum said. “More like a boy.”

“Good? I look like a toilet brush!”

“Oh, stop complaining, you big boob,” she said.

“Boob?” he said, raising his voice and standing up. “I'm not a ‘boob.' People are going to be cleaning toilets with my head.”

“Sit!” Mum said, like she was speaking to Golden.

“No,” Ben said.

“Oi!” he heard from the next room.

He looked at Mum, thinking for a second. There was no point getting Dad upset. He turned and studied his reflection in the mirror. “This room is where hair comes to die.”

“It's a new look.”

“Vacation haircuts,” he grunted as he flopped back into the chair.

A grin spread over Mum's lips as she tidied up the sides.

“I'm hungry,” Ben said.

“Well, we don't have anything. It won't hurt you to skip a few meals.”

Ben looked at her in the mirror. She knew he was paranoid about his weight because he'd told her the things kids said at school. She gave him an apologetic look and kept cutting.

“Ow!” he said, grabbing his ear. He looked at his hand. Blood.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Let me look at it.”

Ben stormed out of the bathroom, squeezing his ear to stop the blood flow. The room was dimly lit with brick walls, a double bed, and a tired-looking couch. Dad was looking out the window through a gap in the faded pink curtains, speaking to someone on the motel phone. Olive was asleep on the bed with Bonzo, lit by the glow of a greyhound race on TV.

“Ben!” Mum called.

He headed for the front door and yanked it open but the security chain stopped it.

“Hey!” Dad said, putting the phone down.

“What?”

“Has your mother finished with you?”

Ben reached for his ear. He dabbed at it and showed Dad the blood seeping into the shallow channels of his fingerprints. If he was honest there wasn't actually much blood. He would have liked there to be a bit more, but it was still blood. Mum came out of the bathroom.

“Yes,” he said. “She's finished.”

Dad looked at Mum. Mum looked at Ben. Ben looked at Dad. And that is how his hair stayed. Short and spiky with sticky-uppy bits.

Dad was in the butcher's chair next. He swore a lot and Mum threatened to cut his ear off too if he didn't stop complaining. He stopped.

Ben sat on a green vinyl chair that had a dodgy leg, opened the curtains a little wider, and stared into the parking lot through the rain-drizzled window. He grabbed his brown leather notebook from his bag. Ben had found the notebook in the cramped office at the back of Nan's house where she kept candy bars in the middle drawer of a rolltop desk. The notebook had been his grandfather's. When Pop was alive he had jotted some numbers on the front pages. Sums written in smudgy blue ink. Ben could barely read the writing but he kept those pages in the book.

At the back of the notebook, on the last page, there was another bit of Pop's scrawly writing. These words: “An old man tells his grandson one evening that there is a battle raging inside him, inside all of us. A terrible battle between two wolves. One wolf is bad—pride, envy, jealousy, greed. The other wolf is good—kindness, hope, love, truth. The child asks, ‘Which wolf will win?' The grandfather answers simply, ‘The one you feed.'”

Ben liked the words. He liked that they were from Pop, who had died when Ben was two. Nan said that, up until then, the two of them had been inseparable. Pop had taken him everywhere, always repeating a rhyme that Ben had loved: “Ben Silver is no good. Chop him up for firewood. If he is no good for that, feed him to the old tomcat.”

Ben chewed on the rubber end of his pencil for a moment before writing this list:

Police

Vacation

Uncle Chris. Gray nylon bag. Black handles.

The new old car

Haircuts

Vacations were rubbish, Ben decided. And the cabin would be even worse. Nature. Ben wondered how long it would be till they could go home and he could finish making his movie. He was going to miss ordering his lunch at school tomorrow. And soccer at lunchtime. Why couldn't James or Gus have come on vacation with them?

Cars pulled in and out of the parking lot, headlights shining on hundreds of little raindrop jewels racing down the window. Out front, the sign for Rest Haven flickered to an uneven beat. The cranky lady from reception crossed the parking lot holding a red umbrella, a small carton of milk, and some towels. She looked at Ben, quickly looked away, but then glanced back. He wondered if she thought his hair was odd. Or just his family.

When they checked in, Dad had refused to show her his driver's license, saying that he'd lost his wallet. Ben had seen him with his wallet at a gas station on the highway half an hour earlier, so he went out to the car, brought Dad's wallet to him, and said, “Here it is!” But, rather than being thankful, Dad was angry.

“Don't stick your big bib in!” he shouted as they drove across to the parking space in front of their room.

Ben didn't even wear a bib. What did “stick your big bib in” mean?

Soon Dad emerged from the bathroom with close-cropped hair—another unhappy customer. Ben tried not to laugh.

“Go to sleep,” Dad grunted, switching off the TV and lamp and flopping onto the big bed.

Ben lay down on the couch in a rectangle of light from the bathroom. When Mum appeared half an hour later she was hardly recognizable. Her hair, usually halfway down her back, was now boyish and weird-looking.