Scumble (28 page)

“Come close children . . .” Grandpa coughed again and we all leaned in, seeing that Grandpa still had the tail end of a tall tale left to tell, and knowing he wouldn't part from this earth allowing a story to go unfinished.

“Where did we leave off?” Grandpa wondered, his words a coarse-graveled whisper.

“I remember! We left off at the part about the treasure!” Fedora called out as she and Gypsy each took hold of one of Grandpa's hands. Leaning closer, Fe whispered, “We found it, Grandpa! We found her treasure. It was here all along, just like you said.”

“Of course it was, my dear Fedora,” Grandpa croaked as he tried to chuckle. “Eva Mae's treasure is
still
here . . . here now . . . sitting all around me.”

F
OR BETTER, WORSE, OR DIFFERENT, SOMETIMES when things go back to normal, normal simply isn't
normal
anymore. Mom and Dad ushered me and Fedora home just as the summer heat peaked and school supplies showed up in every store. I'd scumbled my savvy better than anyone could've expected after such a disastrous, stinking start, and Mom and Dad agreed to let me return to school on savvy trial-probation. Everything should have returned to normal . . . felt normal . . . been normal. Instead, everything was the same, but also completely different, like I was looking at things with all-new eyes.

I'd been back at Theodore Roosevelt for six weeks before I stopped waiting for Mom to put her savvy whammy on me every day before school. She even let me choose to avoid the barber shop, allowing my hair to grow
past
my ears and get good and shaggy instead. Mom let me pick out my own school clothes too. In fact, after coming home from Wyoming, I got to pick a lot more things for myself—like whether or not I wanted to keep running.

I did. And I tied Ryan in the boys' cross-country time trials to boot. But I also chose to take another art class—and signed up for shop.

Sometimes I missed being surrounded by the sensational. I missed it so much, I sent Sarah Jane my address in Indiana, asking for a subscription to her paper. She'd written back right away, saying she was so happy she planned to
kiss
me the very next time we met. My face burned as I read the message and my palms began to sweat. I carried that letter in my pocket every day, even after the folds in the paper began to tear.

After that, a new edition of
The Sundance Scuttlebutt
arrived every week like clockwork. I brought the papers to school to share with the guys, laughing my head off as they believed all of SJ's awesome stories like gospel. But I made a mistake when I showed them SJ's letter. By the end of that day, Big Mouth Brody had told the whole school there was a girl in Wyoming who wanted to pucker up to Ledger Kale. When I found out he'd spread the rumor, every locker door in the eighth-grade hallway flew off its hinges.

I was prepared for the lecture I was bound to get at home when I fessed up. But whatever Mom and Dad had to say got cut off by a rumble in the floorboards and a phone call from Uncle Autry. After Autry's call, no one cared too much about my savvy flub.

 

Grandpa Bomba's death left the ground shaking beneath our feet for days. After the day he moved the river, he'd lived on longer than anyone expected, spending his final days on the ranch, just as he'd always wanted, and slipping away peacefully in his sleep.

We made it to Grandpa's funeral on time and in one piece. This time, when Dad pushed the minivan to its limits along the interstate, there was no parade of problems to slow us down. Though, Dad and I did have to miss the father-son half marathon to get there.

“I know how hard you've been training, Ledge,” Dad said as we packed for our trip back to Wyoming. “Are you disappointed?”

“It's okay, Dad.” I shrugged, remembering my last run from Sundance to the Flying Cattleheart and knowing that I'd already run the race of a lifetime.

“There's always next year.” Dad scrabbled my scruffy hair. Then he added, “If you want—if you're not too busy sculpting bleachers into boats, or transforming time clocks into tyrannosaurs. I never meant to push my dreams on you, son.” He smiled and held up his fist. After a pause, I bumped it with my own, tears welling up when Dad wrapped his other arm around me and pulled me into a tight hug.

 

October had painted the leaves of the birch trees golden, and joined with the autumn wind to carpet the glade at the Flying Cattleheart. Small puffs of clouds crossed the huge Wyoming sky in herds, like ghostly buffalo flying overhead.

I held Fedora's hand tight through the funeral. I even let her wipe her nose once on my sleeve. Fe didn't wear a helmet anymore—not since the day Mr. Cabot tried to destroy the Bug House. She no longer spouted safety quotes, either. My sister's second-grade teacher may have been a stickler for safety, but her
third
-grade teacher was a science nut. Now Fe was building vinegar-and-baking-soda volcanoes, turning potatoes into batteries, and playing with magnets—though the broken jackalope magnet from Willie's Five & Dime was still her favorite.

Standing near us at the funeral, Great-aunt Jules whispered loudly to Aunt Jenny behind a lacy, sodden kerchief.

“I daresay, young Ledger turned out to have some talent after all! Those are fine trees he built to protect Autry's conservatory. Trees like that aren't built every day, you know. The boy's an artist!” Then, issuing two
tisks
and a
tut
as her eyes fell on Gypsy, Aunt Jules added, “Is it true nothing happened on Gypsy's birthday, Jenny dear?”

Aunt Jenny smiled and said nothing, ignoring Great-aunt Jules with perfect poise. I smiled too. From what I'd heard, nothing usual
had
happened on, or since, Gypsy's birthday earlier that month—nothing but a trip to the eye doctor and a brand-new pair of sparkly purple glasses, her vision test coming back a wild blue yonder from clear, crisp twenty-twenty.

Aunt Jules had said I was an artist. But she hadn't been the first to see it. Somehow I suspected there were still surprises around the blurry corners of Gypsy Beaumont's savvy future.

Gypsy stepped forward, barefoot as usual, holding the peanut butter jar that had tormented me all summer. After a nod from Aunt Jenny, she removed the last jar's lid completely. I almost cried out as Gypsy let loose the music that had been trapped for years. Everyone had agreed to let it go . . . for Grandpa.

As Grandpa's body was lowered into the ground, plumes of earth shot skyward across the basin of the ranch. Rocks shifted and jumped like popcorn. Clefts and canyons formed, then snapped together, and the river shimmied and splashed, its banks heaving and yawing to follow yet another brand-new course . . . all while the final trumpet from Grandma's jar called Grandpa Bomba home.

After the funeral, everyone gathered at the house—O'Connells, Beaumonts, Kales, and more—to celebrate Grandpa's life with every story that could be remembered, and more than a few made up on the spot.

Marisol and Mesquite kept everyone fed by levitating buttered rolls, lemon bars, and little smoky soy sausages over people's heads and dropping them onto people's plates—a potluck falling from the sky, piece by piece. The twins blamed grief for making them
accidentally
rain a handful of pepper down on Great-aunt Jules. But no one seemed to mind when the old woman sneezed three times and vanished in her typical time-bending conundrum. Still shaking pepper out of her hair, she bumped into Rocket when she reappeared fifteen minutes later, red in the face from rushing to catch back up to the rest of us in the present.

Rocket was still clean shaven, but something else about him was different now too. He no longer stood with his hands jammed in his pockets or tucked under his arms. He looked confident—grown up at last.

Rocket and Winona had driven straight through the night to get back to Wyoming from Gold Beach, where the two of them had been sightseeing by motorcycle along the Oregon coast. I'd cheered when I heard about Rocket's trip. He'd managed to get himself off the ranch at last, and he'd taken a mighty fine traveling companion too.

Inside the house, Rocket and Winona stood chatting with Fish and Mellie and Mibs and Will and another woman with blond hair and long bangs. She looked just like an older version of the girl in the bubble gum photo that had once been stuck to the dash of Rocket's truck.

“Gypsy!” I stopped my cousin as she danced past me with a plate of rainbow-sprinkle cookies. “Is that Bobbi Meeks?” I pointed at the blond woman standing with the others. Gypsy squinted through her sparkly glasses, frowned, then pulled the frames down to the tip of her nose to look over the plastic rims.

“Oh, yes! Rocket dated her when I was little, but she's married to someone else now. She wasn't at Fish's wedding because her little girl was sick. See! That's her.” I watched as Bobbi bent down to lift a tiny child who'd been clinging to her leg, hidden in the folds of her skirt. Resting her daughter on her hip, Bobbi rubbed the child's back. She laughed with Rocket and Winona as the other two couples moved to another group—Mibs blushing as she showed off a new diamond on her ring finger. But even from across the room, I could see the white scar that lined the back of Bobbi's hand like a firework burst.

“You said Rocket still had one last thing to learn about scumbling,” I said after seeking out Uncle Autry. “He figured it out.”

“He did, did he?” Autry squinted at me, then turned to watch Rocket pretend to capture Bobbi's daughter's nose inside his fist, making the little girl squeal and giggle. I saw the way Rocket and Bobbi smiled like old friends, and the way Rocket turned to kiss Winona's hair and laugh.

“I think he just had to learn to make some choices,” I said.

Autry looked back at me and raised his eyebrows, encouraging me to continue.

“Rocket made the choice to stop being scared,” I went on. A knowing smile spread across my uncle's face as the green beetle on his bolo tie shivered its wings in a little dance. “Rocket made the choice to show himself and go out into the world. And . . .” I hesitated, looking again at the scar on the back of Bobbi's hand. “And maybe the choice to forgive himself for things he didn't mean to do.” I nodded then, still watching my oldest cousin. “That's good.”

“It
is
good, Ledge!” Autry thumped me on the back. “And it was about time, too. I needed Rocket's house! We've got researchers coming and going! Entomology students rotating through from all over—Arizona, Illinois, Maryland, New York . . . Our butterflies have everyone buzzing!” Autry thumped me again, then winked.

As the adults all ate and talked inside, Tucker and Fedora fled outdoors to play with Bitsy. I followed them through the screen door, stopping when I found Samson sitting on the porch next to Grandpa Bomba's empty armchair, looking like he wished he could turn into a shadow, or blend into the wood of the log house like a moth.

“Hey,” I said, not accustomed to having Samson there in the flesh to talk to. Samson was still solid, A-to-Z, soup-to-nuts visible for all the world to see.

“Hey,” he said back.

“Can you believe there really was gold buried here after all?”

A small smile played across Samson's thin face.

“Er . . . I probably shouldn't tell you this, but the treasure the girls found was pyrite, Ledge. Fool's gold.” Samson looked sheepish as he cast around for any sign of Fe or the twins. “Don't ever tell the girls, but Autry got twelve pounds of the stuff from the five-and-dime. He bought every last piece Willie had. Then he gave it to me to bury someplace where the girls were sure to find it.” He smiled again as if enjoying the memory of having done something unseen.

My mouth fell open. “But Mr. Cabot took it all! He had to know it wasn't real treasure—he's got a whole collection of rocks and minerals. He knows the difference between gold and pyrite, easy. Marisol and Mesquite must, too!”

Samson shrugged. “Maybe it was treasure enough.”

I sat with Samson a while longer before I slipped away from the gathering. I was itching to be someplace else. I had to see a girl about a letter.

I changed out of my good Sunday church pants into sweats and laced up my running shoes. I was up the gravel road and over the south ridge before anyone could call after me, headed toward Sundance. But just before reaching the highway, I heard a sound and turned.

“Bitsy, no! You can't—” But I stopped before I could finish telling the dog she couldn't come. Her eyes were bright, her tongue lolling from a wide doggy grin. With only three legs, Bitsy was keeping up fine. And even Bitsy deserved to get off the ranch now and then. So, this time, I let her tag along, the two of us proudly running our own misfit marathon toward town.

We didn't stop at Neary's Auto Salvage Acres. But I grinned when I saw that the foreclosure notice was gone and that Neary's sign had been freshly repainted to read:
Neary's Auto Salvage & Sculpture Garden
. I grinned even wider when I saw Winona's scrap-metal bear statue sitting by the sign. The rebuilt Knucklehead hadn't won the top prize in the motorcycle show in Spearfish, but it had earned a white ribbon. Unlike the twelve pounds of pyrite and the bundle of donor money from Cheyenne that had saved the Flying Cattleheart, a white ribbon wouldn't have paid off Mr. Cabot. Yet Rocket had sent a postcard telling me that Gus and Winona had somehow managed to pull the place out of foreclosure. He just hadn't told me
how
.

Moving on, I ran past the gas station and the CAD Co. building. Sheriff Brown's truck was parked in front of the
Welcome to Sundance
sign. I offered the sheriff a quick salute as he handed a speeding ticket to a tourist. Then Bitsy and I pushed our lazy lope into a quick-getaway sprint, running past the open door of
Noble and Willie's Five & Dime,
before heading up the hill.