Dust Devil (9 page)

“
Bubba,
no! You know the rules—if you get caught fighting on school
property, it’s an automatic suspension.” Bubba’s
younger brother, Winston “Sonny” Holbrooke III, moved
with quiet determination to stand between him and Renzo. “Daddy’ll
be fit to be tied if you get thrown out of school again—especially
so early in the year.”

“
Not
this time,” Bubba growled, roughly shoving his brother aside,
so Sonny tripped over the three-ring binder and schoolbooks strewn on
the ground and fell, squashing Miss July. “Daddy don’t
hold with dagos not knowing their place—and not sticking to it!
”

With
that, the fight ensued. Both boys were tall, but Bubba was heavier,
so that at first, to Sarah and the rest, it seemed he would easily
prevail as he and Renzo went at it hotly, pummeling each other
unmercifully, a flurry of flying fists and elbows, kicking knees and
feet. But Renzo hadn’t spent the early years of his life in a
tenement in the big city for naught. And now that he wasn’t
grossly outnumbered, had room to maneuver and defend himself, he put
to good use all the hard lessons he had learned from his father,
Uncle Vinnie and all the other brutal men who had paraded through his
mother’s apartment. Amid the shouts and squeals of those
watching, and heedless of his own bloody nose, Renzo blacked Bubba’s
eye, then rammed his head into Bubba’s stomach, knocking him
flat. Before Bubba could recover, Renzo was on him, straddling him,
hands at Bubba’s throat.

What
would have happened next, nobody ever knew. For just then, his voice
ringing out sharply with angry authority, Mr. Dimsdale appeared,
accompanied by a handful of teachers. They forcibly dragged the two
scuffling boys apart, then determinedly marched them away to Mr.
Dimsdale’s office.

By
then, Gus had finally arrived. Deeply relieved, Sarah ran to the
waiting yellow bus and climbed aboard, still clutching the lunch box
tightly to her breast. Although the Holbrookes’ big,
white-columned house wasn’t on the vehicle’s route, so
Evie rode a different bus to and from school, Sarah nevertheless sat
down right behind Gus, coveting his protection. She spoke not a word
all the way home, not even when some of the other girls who lived in
Miners’ Row tried to offer comfort. The boy who had come to her
defense would surely be suspended from school for it, Sarah thought,
and she felt terrible on his behalf for all the trouble she had
inadvertently caused him. She had never even got a chance to thank
him!

That
evening, she told Mama and Daddy what had happened that day at
school. The following morning, Iris Kincaid determinedly carried the
lunch box back to the Holbrookes’ house.

“
I
declare, Iris, I just don’t know what to say,” ZoeAnn
Holbrooke uttered coolly, without the slightest hint of fluster or
embarrassment. “I thought Evie was tired of that old lunch box.
Otherwise, I’d never have dreamed of putting it in that pile
for the church rummage sale. Besides which, she mostly eats the
school lunch, anyway. It’s so important for a growing child to
have a hot lunch at midday, I’ve always believed. But J.D. gave
her that lunch box, and Evie’s always set such a powerful store
by her daddy. You do understand, don’t you, Iris?”

“
Yes,
ma’am, I do,” Sarah’s mother replied tonelessly,
her head held high.

“
And
of course, Iris, it goes without saying that I know you don’t
steal.”

“
No,
ma’am, I surely don’t.”

“
Well,
now that that’s settled, we’ll just forget all about this
unfortunate incident, shall we? After all, there’s no sense in
us becoming embroiled in a silly little children’s quarrel, is
there?” ZoeAnn insisted, her lips curving in a small, superior
smile.

“
No,
ma’am, there isn’t,” Iris agreed, her face
expressionless.

Afterward,
when the lunch box was returned to her by her mother, Evie smugly
shoved it away in the very back of her closet. Everybody who was
anybody knew it wasn’t cool to carry your lunch to school in a
lunch box, that a plain brown paper sack was all the rage.

ZoeAnn
Holbrooke kept the fifty cents.

I
was a child and she was a child,

In
this kingdom by the sea;

But
we loved with a love which was more than love—

Annabel
Lee

—
Edgar
Allan Poe

Although,
after that day of the lunch box and the fight at school, Sarah
watched the commons alertly, ceaselessly, for the boy called Renzo
Cassavettes, she never saw him. For his part in the incident, Bubba
Holbrooke, she knew, had been suspended from school, and she worried
that Renzo, lacking a father as prominent and influential as J. D.
Holbrooke, had been expelled. The thought gnawed at her, for the boy
would never have been in trouble had he not come to her defense.

But
then at last there came an afternoon when she sought her favorite
meadow in the woods beyond Miners’ Row, the meadow that was
like a vast green sea and where her daddy had built her a tree house
in an old, spreading sycamore tree. That tree house was her own
private little kingdom. There, at the meadow’s grassy edge, she
drew up short at the sight of Renzo Cassavettes reclining on the
ground, as though she had wished him there, his back against the
sycamore that was home to her tree house. His dark head was bent over
a book, and he didn’t notice her at first.

“
Hey,”
Sarah called shyly from where she stood.

“
Hey,
yourself,” Renzo replied, smiling as he glanced up and saw her.
He closed the book he had been reading. “No more trouble over
lunch boxes, I hope.”

“
No.”
Sarah shook her head forlornly at the memory. “I had to give it
back. I guess Evie’s mama didn’t know when she put it in
her pile for the church rummage sale that Evie still wanted it. So my
mama returned it, even though she’d bought it and so it was
really mine. My mama works for the Holbrookes, you see. She’s
their maid, and it would’ve gone hard on us if they’d got
mad and fired her I over the lunch box. But I want to thank you for
helping me that day at school. I never did get a chance to say that
before. I hope you didn’t get into too much trouble on my
account.”

“
Not
much. A three-day suspension was all.” Renzo’s careless
tone made it clear this was no big deal to him. “And it was
worth it to have had a shot at big, bad Bubba. He and his buddies are
always ragging me.”

“
I
know what that’s like. Evie and her friends are always picking
on me, too. I try to stay out of their way, mostly. It was just bad
luck that the bus was late getting to school that day and Evie
realized it was her old lunch box I had.” At Renzo’s
friendliness, Sarah edged closer. She possessed an inherent
appreciation for all beauty, and she couldn’t seem to stop
staring at the boy. More than ever, she thought he looked as though
he had stepped from one of the movies that played at the town’s
Imperial Theater, which still boasted its original and now
old-fashioned wedge-shaped marquee and its CinemaScope screen. Seeing
a Saturday matinee there was a rare and thrilling treat for Sarah.
Mostly, she had to wait until films were edited and shown on TV
before she saw them.

She
cast about for something else to say, her eyes lighting on the book
in his hands. “That’s an awfully thick book you’re
reading. What’s it called?”

“
East
of Eden.
It
was written by a man named John Steinbeck and made into a movie that
starred James Dean. He’s one of my idols.”

“
Who?
The writer or the actor?”

“
Well,
both, actually,” Renzo declared. “I’d like to be a
writer someday, when I grow up. I’d like to write a book that
somebody might make into a film starring an actor like James Dean.
There’s no telling what roles he might have gone on to
immortalize on screen if he hadn’t been killed in a car crash.”

Sarah
didn’t know who John Steinbeck and James Dean were. She knew
only that she could have listened to the boy for hours. Even his
voice was beautiful, she thought. Soft and low, with a melodic
rhythm. She hadn’t known, at first, that he was Italian. She’d
had to ask Mama and Daddy what the words
wop
and
dago,
which
Bubba had so derisively called Renzo that day on the commons, meant.

“
You’re
Renzo Cassavettes, I know. I heard Bubba say your name right before
the fight broke out. Your daddy owns the newspaper, the
Tri-State
Tribune,
doesn’t
he?” she asked. “Is that why you want to be a writer when
you grow up?”

“
Joe’s
not really my dad. My real dad’s dead. He died a long time ago,
in the big city. That’s why I live with the Martinellis. Joe’s
my real dad’s second cousin or something like that. But, yeah,
that’s why I want to be a writer. I like the newspaper. I’m
going to be a famous reporter one day—like Carl Bernstein and
Bob Woodward. Maybe I’ll even win a Pulitzer Prize. And then,
after that, I’ll write my book.”

“
It
must be nice to know already what you want to be when you grow up,
what you want to do with your life.” Sarah finally grew bold
enough to sit down beside the boy on the grass. “I like to make
up stories myself, like fairy tales...and to paint pictures. I’m
Sarah, by the way, Sarah Beth Kincaid, in case you didn’t
know.”

“
I
do know. I asked somebody at school. And Joe told me your dad works
at Papa Nick Genovese’s coal mines. But I kind of figured that,
anyway, seeing as how Evie called you ‘Coal Lump’ and
all. That wasn’t very nice of her.”

“
No,
but I try not to mind. Evie’s just a spiteful cat, that’s
all. My daddy’s a good man—the best! —even if
he
does
dig
coal for a living. He says there’s nothing wrong with good,
honest, hard labor with your own two hands. Still, I know people in
town call us ‘mining trash’ and look down on us, the same
as they do Italians. It’s not right. Daddy said those names
Bubba called you were ugly and prejudiced, and Mama said she’d
scrub my mouth out good with Lava soap if she ever heard me using
words like that. Even so, it’s awful hard sometimes, always
being on the outside, looking in.” Sarah’s voice was
wistful, her small face pensive.

“
Yeah,
I know what you mean. That was one of the reasons why I took up for
you that day at school. I was just sick and tired of the Holbrookes
acting as though they own the town.”

“
Well,
they do—a lot of it, anyway.”

“
Maybe
so. But that still doesn’t give them the right to go around
browbeating everybody else, treating us as though we’re dirt
beneath their feet!” A muscle flexed in Renzo’s jaw,
which was taut with anger.