Runaways (5 page)

The strange couple were still fussing with the broken gate when Linda hurried out wearing her best dress and newest sandals. The three of them talked and shook hands, and when the gate finally opened they all climbed into the car and it crept off up Silver Avenue. Dani watched until it was out of sight before she collapsed on the couch. She lay there for quite a while imagining the embarrassing scene when those slick, sophisticated city folks got a look at Linda’s so-called ranch.

Dani kept telling herself, just like she’d told Stormy the night before, that she didn’t have a hope in the world that they would want to rent the place after they’d seen it. Oh, it was big and roomy, all right, at least compared to most Rattler Springs houses, but it never had been exactly a palace. And she could just imagine what it must look like now that it had been sitting there collecting dust for almost four years. Dani could picture the expressions on the faces of those city people when they checked out the dust, and the beat-up old kitchen with its rusty iron sink, and the outhouse toilet a few yards from the back door.

The big-wheeled black car didn’t come back for a long time. When a couple of hours had gone by Dani began to worry. Who knew, she asked herself, what might happen when an unsuspicious, optimistic type like Linda insisted on going off alone with some strange geologists? But at last the weird black car purred quietly to a stop in front of the cabin, and Linda rushed in looking excited and happy. Just about as happy, it occurred to Dani, as she’d looked the day she heard about the wonderful cattle ranch they’d just inherited.

“Okay,” Dani said in a sarcastic tone of voice. “What happened? Did they make a huge down payment?”

“No, not yet,” Linda said. “They’re seriously thinking about leasing the house for at least six months, but they have to find out a few things first. Like whether they can get a powerful enough generator and how long it would take to wire the house. They didn’t seem to be too worried about anything else, but Mr. Smithson said they’d definitely have to have electricity because they’ll need it for some of their equipment.”

Dani threw up her hands. “Well, that’s that,” she said. “They’ll never go to that much trouble to fix up a place they’re just planning to live in for a few months.”

But optimistic Linda was still hopeful. “I think they just might,” she said, and then added wistfully, “Mrs. Smithson said she really loved the fireplace, and the verandas.”

Dani shrugged and dropped the subject. At the same time she reminded herself not to even hope that they might get all that extra rent money. And that meant no chance of an allowance, which probably meant that there would never be enough money for two sets of bus tickets. So there was definitely going to have to be some other way.

As she waited to go to sleep that night she thought again about the stowaway possibility. She pictured just how it might work. She (or maybe even she and Stormy if he was still insisting on going) could pack some bags and hide them in one of the old junk cars in Gus’s parking lot. And then she (or they) could hang around waiting for the right kind of truck to pull into the lot. Maybe a truckload of furniture, on its way to Reno with just a canvas covering stretched over its load. And then, while the driver was off somewhere, probably in the hotel bar flirting with Gloria, or maybe risking his health by visiting the world’s filthiest public rest room at Greasy Gus’s, they would grab their bags, scramble up under the canvas and hide themselves away in the load.

As she began to get sleepy, Dani could almost see herself curled up on a couch, or chair, snug and secure and safely hidden under the protecting canvas, bouncing along the long road to Reno. And after Reno? Well, maybe another truck, or perhaps, if they’d made it that far for free, there would be enough money to go the rest of the way by bus.

She was still thinking about the stowaway plan on Monday morning when, on her way to school, she decided to make a detour past Gus’s parking lot, to size up the possibilities. Mostly just to pick out a handy junker car close to the parking area where they could hide out while they waited for the right truck to come along. But she had barely turned off the sidewalk when she saw something that made her gasp with excited surprise. Sitting there, only a few yards from the service station, was a truck that looked strangely like the one she’d been imagining only the night before. A slat-sided ranch truck with a huge canvas cover stretched over an uneven, angular load. A load that might very well include such things as tables and dressers—and maybe even a comfortable couch or chair.

Edging closer, she looked around cautiously. No one around in the parking lot, or among the dead cars, or even back in the dim, oily light inside Gus’s garage. She moved closer and looked around again. Still no one in sight.

Another sideways sidle and she was behind the truck and checking out a place where the canvas cover seemed to be loose enough to permit someone to crawl under. But the truck bed was too high. Climbing in, or even peeking in, was not going to be easy. But once Dani made up her mind to do something, she wasn’t easily discouraged, and at that moment she definitely had made up her mind to see what was under the canvas cover.

Backing cautiously away from the truck, she scouted around among Gus’s junk heaps until she found a sturdy wooden crate. After she’d carried the heavy box back to the truck, she climbed up, stood on tiptoe and lifted one end of the cover. Lifted one side of the canvas, ducked her head under it, and suddenly found herself staring at a horrible sight.

Right in front of her face, a bald-headed, weather-beaten man with a wide thin-lipped mouth was lying on a folded mattress with his eyes tightly shut. The horrible possibility that the man was dead flashed through Dani’s mind. And then an even more horrible possibility presented itself. He was alive and staring at her with bulging red-rimmed eyes. Before she could retreat the man’s mouth opened in a snaggletoothed grin and a huge hand reached out to grab her shoulder. She struggled and tried to yell for help but her scream fizzled into a squeak and the grip on her shoulder only tightened. But then as she staggered backward and fell off the box, the hand lost its grip. Jumping to her feet, she ran. Ran frantically across the parking lot, across the street and into the nearest doorway, which happened to be the entrance to the Silver Grill Cafe.

She didn’t stop to look back until she was safely inside the restaurant. With her heart still thumping crazily, she peered out from behind a Coca-Cola poster and watched as a huge bald-headed man crawled out of the back of the truck, looked around, stretched and yawned, climbed into the truck’s cab and slammed the door. She stayed where she was, watching from inside the window until, a few minutes later, the truck pulled out of the parking lot and headed up the highway toward Reno.

It wasn’t until sometime later, when she was again on her way to school, that she began to calm down enough to realize how silly her reaction had been. Pretty funny, really, to get that panicky just because a crabby old truck driver, who happened to look something like a Gila monster, didn’t like her peeking into the back of his truck while he was taking a nap. She shrugged and actually laughed a little and, as she turned the corner, she almost managed to keep from looking back toward the parking lot, to be sure he was really gone. The truck was gone, all right, so that was the end of it. She wasn’t going to let herself even think about it anymore. And she didn’t, at least not much, and not while she was fully awake.

Dreams were harder to control. That very same night she woke up suddenly and sat straight up in bed, while parts of a crazy mixed-up dream tumbled through her mind. A dream about a truck driver who climbed out of the back of his truck and changed into a gigantic Gila monster right before her eyes. But it was only a dumb dream and she’d pretty much forgotten about it by the next day on the way home from school when Stormy brought up the subject in a roundabout way.

“Any rent money yet?” Stormy asked.

Dani laughed sarcastically. “No way,” she said. “I told you to forget about those geologists renting our house. It’s just not ever going to happen.”

Stormy sighed. “I guess we’ll have to stow away then. Huh?”

It wasn’t until then that Dani knew for sure that stowing away on a truck was another thing that wasn’t going to happen. At least not to her.

“No,” she said firmly. “Stowing away is out too. And I don’t want to talk about it.”

S
O THE POSSIBILITY OF
stowing away was gone, and that left only one way out of Rattler Springs. And that was finding some way to add to the bus ticket fund. For the next day or so Dani spent a lot of time thinking about ways to do it. Both she and Stormy did. In fact, for the next day or two reading
White Fang
definitely took a backseat to moneymaking schemes. By Monday evening they’d come up with quite a few ideas, but no money at all unless you counted a silver dollar Stormy found in the slot machine in the bar.

On Wednesday the weather suddenly went from hot to an awful lot hotter. On the way home from school, Dani popped heat bubbles in the melting tar of Silver Avenue and watched mirages turn distant horizons into ghostly gray lakes. As she plodded along, the dry, shriveling heat ached in her lungs and pressed down like a heavy weight on her head and back. And when she kicked open the heat-warped front door of the cabin the air that surged out to meet her felt as if it came from the inside of an oven. Once inside she banged her books down on the coffee table, and an answering thump came from the back of the house.

For just a second she paused, listening and wondering. Linda, she knew, would still be at the bookstore. So who could it be? But of course she should have known. When she shoved open the kitchen door there he was, sitting at the table, clutching a big paper bag with one hand and a glass of water with the other. Dani frowned. “Hey,” she said, “who let you in?”

Stormy’s jack-o’-lantern face was flushed and sweaty. “Nobody,” he said. “I just came on in. The door wasn’t locked.”

Dani threw up her hands. “Yeah, I know.” The lock on the back door, like nearly everything else in the cabin, had stopped working a long time ago. “But that doesn’t mean—”

“Hey. I got another idea,” Stormy interrupted. “And lemons. I got lemons.”

Dani stared, hands on hips. “What on earth are you blabbering about?”

“Lemons. For lemonade.” Stormy rattled on, “You know. To sell, for bus money.”

It took a while, but Dani finally began to get the picture. Stormy’s silver dollar had been spent on lemons and what he had in mind was that he and Dani were going to set up a lemonade stand and make a whole lot of money for the bus tickets fund.

Dani never was wildly enthusiastic about the idea, not even right at first. For one thing it made her nervous that they were going to have to spend so much money buying stuff before they could even start to make any back.

“We’ll have to buy paper cups,” she told Stormy. “And one of those big bags of ice cubes from Gus’s freezer.”

“Naw, I’ll get the ice,” Stormy said. “From the bar.”

Dani nodded, thinking rather reluctantly that maybe a lemonade stand wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Especially if you had a business partner who had a free ice connection. So the ice and the lemons were taken care of, and the O’Donnells just happened to have a new bag of sugar. And Stormy knew where he could find two apple crates and a wide board to make the stand. But that still left deciding where to set it up. After a little thought Dani decided that the best place, in fact almost the only shady place in town, would be under the awning of the Grand Hotel.

So while Stormy set up the stand, Dani found an old cigar box for a cash drawer, and made a sign that said
ICE COLD LEMONADE 10 CENTS A CUP.
Linda came home while they were still in the kitchen, mixing up the first batch of lemonade. She looked hot and tired but after she’d splashed water on her face and arms she only watched without saying much until they were about to leave the house. Then she said she didn’t mind investing some sugar in their enterprise, but she did hope her best pitcher didn’t get broken.

It was after four o’clock by the time they got set up, and for a while business wasn’t exactly brisk. Their first customers were Mrs. Graham and Ellie Blake, who stopped by on their way to the store. The third customer turned out to be none other than old Greasy Gus.

Gus, of Gus’s garage and gas station, was big and bulgy and, according to rumor, just about the strongest man alive. And probably the ugliest too. The top of Gus’s pear-shaped head was completely bald, but he had quite a lot of hair hanging down around the edges, as well as from his chin. He was tall and probably pretty fat, except that it was hard to tell for sure, because of all the overalls he wore. Even in hot weather Gus usually wore several layers of overalls. Greasy, ragged things with so many big holes in them it might have been embarrassing, except that the holes in one pair didn’t match the holes in the others. At least not usually.

Most of the kids in Rattler Springs called Gus names and held their noses whenever they saw him, but Stormy always said Gus was his friend. Dani had wondered how bad your social life would have to be to choose someone like Greasy Gus for a friend, but she’d never said so to Stormy. It was the kind of thing she didn’t like to waste energy fighting about.

It must have been around four-thirty when Gus came by on his way to the hotel bar. When he saw the lemonade stand he stopped and looked for a long time, grinning and muttering into his chin whiskers. Then he dug around in several overalls pockets until he found a dime and slapped it down on the counter. When he got his lemonade he slurped it down so fast that most of it dripped off the ends of his walrus mustache. He disappeared into the bar then, but a little later, when he came back out, he stopped again and was even more enthusiastic.

“This here is what I like to see,” he said. “Couple of whippersnappers setting up to do business instead of running around getting into trouble like some I might mention. Lookee here,” he said to Lefty Morgan, the owner of Lefty’s Bar, who just happened along about then. “Lookee here. Ain’t this something.”