Dust Devil (8 page)

The
lunch box was bright, colorful and still so shiny that it looked
almost brand-new. Its metal was marred by only a few scratches and
dents, the latter of which Sarah’s father had told her he could
pound out, so Wonder Woman’s face wouldn’t be squashed in
anymore and the wing of her invisible spaceship would be straight
again instead of crooked. Inside was a thin, hinged metal open
triangle for holding a sandwich in place and a short, squat thermos
capped by a cheerful, red plastic cup.

“
You
like it, Sary? I got it from Miz Holbrooke,” Iris Kincaid said
to her daughter, who sat at the kitchen table, gazing at the lunch
box as though it were more precious than gold. “She was getting
some things together for the rummage sale at the church, you know,
and she told me I could look through ’em ’fore I left
that day, see if there was anything I wanted.” Mrs. Holbrooke
was ZoeAnn, J. D. Holbrooke’s wife. Iris worked as their maid.
“I wasn’t sure whether she meant I could take my pick for
free or not, so I left fifty cents there on the table. That was the
price she had marked on the lunch box. That were all right... that
were the right thing to do, weren’t it, Dell?” She
glanced at her husband a trifle anxiously, now worried she might have
done the wrong thing, after all.

“
I
’spect it was.” He spoke gruffly from behind the
crackling pages of his newspaper. Smoke rose and curled from the pipe
he puffed on, so it looked as though the pages had caught fire.
“’Spect if it weren’t, Miz Holbrooke’ll let
you know. She ain’t never been the kinda woman to hold her
tongue when she’s got something to say.”

“
That
she ain’t,” Iris agreed, shaking her head, relieved that
if she had, in fact, done wrong, Mrs. Holbrooke would undoubtedly
tell her so.

Sarah’s
parents went on talking, but she hardly heard them, she was so
excited. A
real
lunch
box! She was going to be able to take her lunch to school in a real
lunch box now instead of just a plain old brown paper sack! Wasn’t
that something? Wasn’t that fine? None of her friends had lunch
boxes. The men who worked at Papa Nick Genovese’s coal mines,
like her daddy, and who lived with their families in what was
commonly referred to in town as “Miners’ Row,”
didn’t have a whole lot of extra money for things as frivolous
as a child’s lunch box when a paper bag from the grocery store
was always handy and the three or four dollars saved would buy a
dress or a pair of shoes at the thrift shop, besides, and even more
at a garage sale. Sarah knew that. Still, whenever she accompanied
her mother to the local discount store, she couldn’t help but
run down the aisle to where the school supplies were displayed, to
look at all the gleaming lunch boxes neatly lined up in a row on the
top shelf, just beyond her reach.

The
following morning when, bright and early, she climbed aboard the
yellow school bus that picked her up and then later brought her home
every day from Washington Elementary, Sarah carried the lunch box
proudly and prominently in her right hand. Inside was a
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich her mother’s worn hands had
carefully fixed earlier that morning, one of Mama’s homemade
dill pickles wrapped up in a scrap of aluminum foil and a shiny green
apple from the Granny Smith tree in the backyard. Cold lemonade from
the refrigerator filled the thermos.

“
Sarah
Beth Kincaid! You got yourself a lunch box!” Krystal Watkins
cried, noticing right off the bat, much to Sarah’s pride and
delight.

The
other elementary-school girls aboard the vehicle crowded around to
look and make a fuss over the lunch box until the bus driver, a
grizzled old black man by the name of Gus, ordered them back to the
worn, rough seats, whose brown vinyl had split open in places over
the years and been haphazardly patched with grey duct tape. On the
beige metal back of one of the seats, amid all the other graffiti,
somebody had scratched the words
The
bus driver is an SOB.
Sarah
didn’t know what that meant. She had never seen Gus shed so
much as a single tear.

“
Y’all
know the rules,” he drawled sternly. “I cain’t
drive if’n y’all ain’t in them seats.”

Boos
and groans greeted Gus’s announcement. Sarah felt sure that
when they reached the sharp turnaround at Junior Barlow’s
house, the kids would all rush to the far side of the bus in an
effort to cause its wheels to slide off into the ditch alongside the
road. Once, last year, they had actually succeeded, making the school
principal, Mr. Dimsdale—whom everybody called “Mr.
Dimwit” behind his back—so hopping mad that he had kept
them all sitting in the vehicle for more than thirty minutes,
lecturing them, when they had finally arrived an hour late at the
grassy commons bounded on three sides by Washington Elementary,
Jefferson Junior High School and Lincoln High School. But that had
been small punishment compared to the time a bunch of the junior-high
boys had, with a cherry bomb, blown up one of the bus’s
backseats. All the boys involved in that unfortunate incident had
been suspended after Cheryl Kay Pendergast—because she had
just
had
to
go to the bathroom and couldn’t wait any longer—had
blabbed their identities to Mr. Dimsdale so he would let everyone off
the vehicle.

In
the end, Sarah was to think later, it was the lunch box that was
ultimately to blame not only for everything that happened that day,
both to the bus and to her, but also, finally, for the course her
entire life was to take. For if not for the envious, excited stir
caused by that lunch box, and Gus’s subsequent admonishment,
the kids might have stayed obediently in their seats instead of
throwing their weight to the far side of the vehicle at the Barlow
turnaround. The bus didn’t actually topple off the road again.
But one big wheel
did
slip
off the soft, sandy edge into the ditch—to be punctured by an
old, nail-ridden board that had fallen from Junior’s tree house
in one of the hedge-apple trees lining the verge.

The
resulting leak was so slow that Gus didn’t notice anything was
wrong until the tire finally went flat. Having to change it was what
caused him to be late in arriving to collect everyone from school
that afternoon. And because Gus wasn’t on time, Sarah was
standing on the tree-shaded commons, a hapless target for Eveline
Holbrooke’s anger when she spotted her former lunch box
clutched in Sarah’s hand. Evie, the youngest child and only
daughter of J. D. Holbrooke, was the most popular girl at Washington
Elementary, so anybody who wanted to
be
anybody
always went along with her, no matter what. Now, cutting sideways
glances at her friends to let them know mischief was afoot and that
they had all better fall in line for the fun, Evie, a martial glint
in her eye and her friends backing her up, marched right over to
Sarah to confront her.

“
Hey,
you. Yeah, you, Coal Lump Kincaid,” Evie sneered, in a voice
overloud and spiteful, causing a burst of appreciative snickers for
the cleverness of her slur—even though the girls had all heard
it before—to erupt from behind her. “Gimme that lunch
box! It’s mine! My daddy brought me that lunch box home from
one of his trips out of town—and I want it back! You got no
right to it. Your mama stole it out of our house.”

“
She
did not!” Sarah cried vehemently, stung despite her abrupt
apprehension into defending her mother loyally. Sarah always tried to
steer clear of Evie Holbrooke, who despised her and teased and
tormented her at every opportunity.

“
She
did so! Your mama’s a thief! She’s always stealing things
from us—and now that I have proof of it, I’m gonna have
my mama fire her. And once she does that,
your
mama
won’t ever be able to get another job anywhere else, because
nobody wants a light-fingered maid working for them!”

Sarah’s
heart thudded with fear at the thought that perhaps Evie really could
and would carry out this threat. The Kincaids needed the money Mama
made by toiling for the Holbrookes, cleaning their house and washing
and ironing their laundry for them. What would her family do, Sarah
wondered, panicked, if Mama lost her job? Maybe Sheriff Laidlaw would
even arrest her, based on Evie’s mean-spirited accusations!

“
My
mama doesn’t steal! Oh, she doesn’t!” Sarah
insisted desperately, tears now blinding her haunted green eyes, her
lower lip quivering pitiably.

“
Yes,
she does. Now, you gimme back my lunch box!” Evie demanded,
tossing her pale blond hair in haughty contempt, her ice-blue eyes
narrowed and hard as, clenching her fists, she deliberately stepped
in closer to Sarah. “Or I’ll make you sorry you didn’t,
Coal Lump!”

Before
Sarah, trembling violently, her tears spilling over now to stream
down her cheeks, could reply, a low voice that came from somewhere
behind her drawled softly, scornfully, to Evie, “Why don’t
you take a hike somewhere? Like off a steep cliff, maybe.”

Shocked
gasps of outrage and incredulity from Evie and the rest greeted this
remark, while Sarah, startled and grateful, spun quickly around to
find out who had come to her defense. As it had when the butterfly
had alighted in her hands this summer in her favorite meadow, her
breath caught in her throat. For although she didn’t know him,
she thought the boy standing there was the most beautiful creature
she had ever seen. He looked as though he had stepped straight out of
a movie, with his tousled black hair, his thick-lashed brown eyes and
his bronzed skin. Dressed in a T-shirt, stonewashed jeans and a black
leather jacket, despite the warmth of the autumn day, he was a rebel
without a cause, with something dangerous and exciting in both his
eyes and stance. He was older than she, but not yet old enough for
high school. In junior high, then, Sarah decided, since she hadn’t
ever seen him around before.

“
And
why don’t you pick on somebody your own size—like me,
Renzo Cassavettes, you no-good, chicken-livered wop?” Bubba
Holbrooke, surrounded by his cronies, jeered as he spied what was
happening and leaped to Evie’s aid. She was a prissy, pouty
little pest—but she was his sister all the same, and Bubba was
damned if he was going to stand idly by while some piece of Italian
trash from the wrong side of the tracks got mouthy with her!

“
I’ll
be more ’n happy to deal with'you, Bubba Holbrooke,”
Renzo rejoined coolly, his eyes wary but hard. “If you want to
go at it one-on-one for a change—like a
real
man—instead
of ganging up on me with all those bully boys behind you to bolster
your courage, you manure-sweeping, garbage-hauling piece of slime!”

Bubba’s
face flushed bright scarlet with fury at that—for everybody in
town knew he had to earn his weekly allowance by doing minor
janitorial chores at his daddy’s fertilizer plant. It was
humiliating! Him—J. D. Holbrooke’s eldest son and
heir—being forced to push a broom, empty wastebaskets and take
orders from shiftless old black Thaddeus, the head janitor at
Field-Yield, Inc. But despite Bubba’s whining protests, his
daddy had remained adamant: Bubba was going to learn the family
business the same way he himself had—inside and out, from the
ground up—not play around until the day he decided he was
finally ready to sit his butt down in the big, cushy president’s
chair at the company’s long, Honduras-mahogany conference
table.

At
Renzo’s gibe, Bubba groaned inwardly, silently cursing Evie.
Everybody from all three schools, it seemed, had flocked to the
commons, and they were all staring at him expectantly, so he knew
there was no way in hell to save face while simultaneously backing
down from the challenge. A flicker of fear licked through him. He
wasn’t nearly so brave without Skeets Grenville, Clayton
Willoughby and the rest of the “Rat Pack,” as he and his
cohorts called themselves, standing alongside, egging him on and
covering his backside.

“
Well,
come on, dago! If you think you’re big enough!” Bubba
finally shouted, abruptly screwing up his courage and throwing his
three-ring binder and school-books down so hard on the ground that
the colorful vinyl notebook broke open, scattering index pages, ruled
paper and a
Playboy
centerfold
Bubba had filched from his daddy’s hidden collection at home
and jammed into one of the binder’s inside pockets. “I’m
not afraid of you! I’ll take you on alone, Renzo Cassavettes!
I’ll kick your sorry wop ass!”