The Middle of Somewhere (16 page)

And that was just as well, because as it turned out, we weren't leaving tomorrow. Pop had everything packed up when we got back to our campsite, and the first thing he said was, “Let's go.”

A dozen questions could have exploded out of me right then, mostly variations on “
Huh
?” But after taking a good look at Pop's face, I decided questions could wait. Even Gee decided that. He took his place at the dinette, and Leo hung around the bike trailer, ready to jump on when it started rolling. I was dousing the campfire when Melba rode up on her scooter. She'd brought half of a cheesecake wrapped in foil, and handed it over to Pop along with a few words.

Apparently, she'd given him an earful during their dinner for two; Pop's stony face didn't change even when she stood on tiptoe to peck him on the cheek. Then she gunned the little motor and swung away. Before hitting the road, though, she beckoned me over.

“Well, Ronnie, it's been fun. Good luck—” She stopped just short, I think, of adding, “You'll need it.”

“Thanks.”

She squeezed the handlebars, as though wondering whether to say what she finally said. “By the way, a couple of nights ago … in that third poker round? He had you beat.”

“How's that?”

“He drew a full house, twos and fives. I saw it—maybe because he let me. But he folded instead of calling you.”

I just blinked at her like a dork.

“I thought you should know.” She smiled and kicked the scooter back. “Hope to see you again someday. Who knows? I'll tell Howard you said good-bye.”

At the moment I wasn't saying anything, so she handled both sides of the good-bye for me as she waved and swerved the scooter.

It was a little after six when we left the state park and turned north at the first crossroads. We traveled awhile before I got up the nerve to ask, “Where are we going?”

He drove about a mile farther before answering, “Chalk Pyramids. To set up a met mast.” Then, after a minute, “Please tell your brother to stop kicking the dinette seat. I can feel it from here.”

I went back to communicate the message and stayed to play rock-paper-scissors until Gee got bored and sleepy. Then I returned to my seat and pulled the map from the door pocket. The highway we were on headed north as straight as a needle. I followed it past Scott City, not sure if Chalk Pyramids was a town (black letters) or an attraction (red letters). Then it jumped out at me, on its tiny
red-letter feet: CHALK
PYRAMIDS, next to MONUMENT
ROCK, both represented by red squares surrounded by white, at the end of a double-line track that meant a dirt road. Something about it, stuck at the end of that hollow road, hit my chest with an empty feeling.

But that was nothing compared to the feeling I got when we actually saw the place.

By the time we'd turned off the highway and bumped and shuddered up a long dirt road, the sun was sitting on the horizon like the yolk of a fresh egg right after you break it in the skillet. “Twenty after eight,” Pop read off the dashboard clock. “Should have about half an hour till dark. I'll set up my stuff. Then, with any luck, we'll get to the next campground by ten.”

When the driver's door slammed, Gee woke up. He'd been asleep for the last half hour or so, his head rolling against the back of the dinette seat in a way that made my neck sore just looking at it. “Where are we?” he yawned.

“Chalk Pyramids.”

He unbuckled his seat belt and came forward, squinting through the windshield. “
Those
aren't pyramids.”

What he meant was, they weren't big triangles with camels and palm trees around the base. They were like Egyptian pyramids might look if you held them up to a fun-house mirror—stretched-out, lopsided structures bitten by the wind.

“Awesome!” Gee breathed in my ear. That was a good way to put it—as in Awe. Some. As in, not-quite-part-of-this-world.

Leo was already whining by the door because our grandfather had kicked him off the trailer in order to get at the equipment in the storage garage. I could hear Pop rummaging back there.

“Go ahead and run around,” I told Gee, “but don't go anywhere near
him
.” Usually when I say “run around” that's what he does—or even if I don't. But after hopping out the RV door, he just stood there, hugging Leo, as if he'd slammed into an invisible wall.

If you were a Martian, you might have felt right at home. In the pinkish glow of twilight, it looked like another planet, where they built houses from plans drawn by Dr. Seuss. The colors were all reds, browns, and grays, with some pale green mixed in. When I walked all the way clear of the RV, the west wind hit me with a sandy sting. That's what made the pyramids—years of wind and sand playing around with the rock. Now it was playing around with me—if I stood here long enough, I'd become a pillar of sand myself.

It made me hungry for company, even Pop's. He had found a spot on the other side of a column to set up his met mast. When I reached him, he was running out lines to stabilize it, while the weather vane on top spun like the Tasmanian Devil. “Come over and hold this steady for me,” he commanded. “The ground is hard as a rock.”

I took hold of the mast while he screwed a stake into the stony soil, then attached a stabilizer line to it. “Isn't this, like, public property?”

“Yeah. Got a permit to set up a temporary station.”

“But nobody's going to build a wind farm here, are they?”

“It's for comparison.” He strapped a boxy instrument the size of his hand to the mast.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Anemometer. Measures wind speed.”

Since he was talking, however little, I sprung the question that was bugging me. “What's your hurry, Pop? I mean, why'd you change your plans so you could do this tonight?”

“Well.” He took a paper from his pocket, slipped it into a plastic sleeve, and fastened it to the post. “That is—” He gave the pole a shake to test it. “All of a sudden, tonight seemed better than tomorrow.”

That was a non-answer, but it confirmed what I'd already figured out on the way here. He was going to rush the second half of his assignment in order to get rid of us sooner. The original plan was to spend a few days in southwest Kansas, a few days in northwest Kansas, and a day or two somewhere in between. Then we'd retrace the whole route to get another set of readings before heading back to Missouri. But Pop could come up with a Plan B as well as I could. He was hurrying what he had to do out here, and then Gee and I were homeward bound—I was pretty sure.

“Go round up the herd,” Pop said then. “Time to hit the road.”

To affirmatize my attitude, I tried on the idea of going home sooner than expected. Big hugs from Mama, finishing my closet project, calling up this girl Marie that I'd started to make friends with and asking her if she'd like to go to the pool some afternoon. Sure it was old routine, but after all, routines were important for getting things done.
Gee's counselors were always telling us how he needed to be on a schedule.

But still… going home early was admitting to failure. I mentally ran through my short-term goals for this trip:

Learn to organize better
. Are you kidding? What made me think Gee on wheels was easier to organize around than Gee at home?

Build relationship with Pop
. So maybe he wasn't mentor material, but every time we started to build
something
, Gee would smash it.

See new places
. Okay, but there was a lot we'd missed— what about the Wizard of Oz Museum and the World's Largest Ball of Twine?

Get away from old places
. Exactly—and I wasn't ready to go back.

I started down the slope with an angry snort that Pop didn't appear to notice. Gee had loosened up enough to start a game of hide-and-seek with Leo around the boulders, but when I called, they both trotted over like cooperative little lambs.

Pop climbed into the cab and buckled himself in, then turned the key in the ignition.

The motor kind of burped. Then it didn't do anything.

The ignition clicked as Pop turned it off, then on again. “The battery can't be dead. It's brand-new.”

I didn't know much about internal-combustion engines, but this didn't sound good. “Are we out of gas?”

He didn't answer but popped the hood and yanked open his door. “Did something fall out?” Gee called after him. Pop didn't answer that question, either.

For about ten minutes, he either stared at the motor or trudged back and forth from the storage garage, muttering a little louder with each trip. Then he jerked open the door and hiked himself up on the seat.

His lips looked too tight for talk. Then he said, “I think the alternator's shot.” A few more seconds passed, while I held up a warning finger for Gee to zip his lip. “The warning light must not be working. I'm sure I would've seen it.”

“What's an alternator?” I asked, very quietly.

“Starts the battery. If it goes bad, the whole electrical system is kaput.”

I thought about the sour milk that morning and wondered if the electrical system was already kaputing back then.

“I'll take the bike and go get one,” Pop said. “Y'all can stay here.”

“Wh-what?” My voice didn't come out right at all—it sounded about eight years younger than me. Maybe because I felt like a scared little kid just then.

“You'll be fine. Just make up your beds and go to sleep. I'll be back before you know it.”

“But why can't you wait until tomorrow? There won't even be anything open now!”

“And while you're gone we could be attacked by bears!” Gee protested. “Or lions!”

Pop made an effort to hold on to his temper. “Look. Once I get back on the highway it's only about sixty miles to the interstate. There's a truck plaza right at the exit that's open all the time—I'll be back in two or three hours,
install the alternator, and we're good to go. If I wait until tomorrow, it's a whole day's work gone.”

How does that compare to a boy and girl gone?
I wanted to ask. Not that I really thought we'd be eaten by lions, or anything like that, but still… this place was so big and empty I could almost feel it swallowing me.

“Furthermore, Gee, there aren't any bears or lions out here.” Pop was using an exaggerated let's-be-reasonable tone of voice. “Nothing will get you if you just stay inside.”

All that did, of course, was reinforce Gee's idea that there might be something
outside
to get us. He continued to protest—bringing up tigers in addition to the other wild animals—but of course it didn't do any good. As soon as Pop had unloaded his bike and reminded us about staying inside, he took off in a flurry of dust. We watched the little taillight all the way to the point where the horizon gulped it down. The dark closed around us.

“We're all alone!” Gee wailed.

“No we're not,” I said, desperately looking for positives, even while the aloneness boomed all around us as big as the wind. “Leo's here to protect us, right, Leo?”

At the sound of his name, the dog—who'd been cowering under the rear axle—crept out, whimpering.

Gee clutched him like he'd never let go. “He's scared, too.”

“Then maybe you can protect
him
.”

“We don't like this place.”

That makes three of us
, I could have said. In the sunset it was kind of neat and spooky, but now it was just spooky,
period. The light of a quarter-moon and a slew of stars made the chalky columns rear over us like black ruins—the hideout of mummies and zombies in every scary movie I wished I'd never seen. I shivered, and it wasn't just because the temperature had dropped. “We'd better go inside.”

Gee begged to bring Leo, but I wouldn't allow it. To tell the truth, I was mad at everybody: Pop for leaving us here, Gee for cutting short our trip, and Leo for being a dog—which wasn't fair, I'll admit, but Leo had certainly helped push Pop to the limit.

“Inside” didn't seem much better than out after I switched on the overhead light and got only a weak, eye-straining glow that seemed worse than nothing. “Oh yeah. Our electricity's gone.” That meant no radio to keep us company; even farm reports would have sounded like music just then. I turned off the switch and reached for the flashlight. “Let's find our jammies and go to bed.”

“
No
!” he protested, exactly like he was three years old and afraid of missing something good if he went to bed. Seriously, I wouldn't have minded missing the next few hours. “I won't go to bed without—without a shower!”

This was a new one. “But you already had a shower, back at—”

I was interrupted by Leo, who was crouching just outside the door. He let loose with such an odd noise— between a moan and a yap—we both stopped to listen. Out of the silence came a sound I couldn't describe. It was more like a police siren than anything—a lot of police sirens. Just when I started wondering if the cops were coming to tell us Pop had been wiped out on the highway,
the noise broke up into sharp little yips. Leo scratched at the door, whining.