Hit the Road, Manny: A Manny Files Novel (10 page)

When we crossed the Wyoming border, the manny rolled down the window and yelped, “Woo-hoo, smell that fresh, clean Wyoming air!” Then he put his head outside the window like a dog and smiled really big. Dad was driving and rolled down his window too. The air was blowing so hard through the RV that Mom and India screamed and started gathering coloring books and empty paper coffee cups that were flying around like an indoor tornado. One of the cups hit Lulu in the head, and she pretended it knocked her unconscious. It made Belly laugh, so Lulu kept doing it. Lulu’s more fun when she’s playing than she is when she’s trying to be in charge of everything.

Just as I started to put my head out the window, I heard a big
whap!
The manny groaned, “Ewww!” and pulled his head back into the RV and grabbed his forehead with his hand.

“I forgot to tell you that Wyoming has a lot of grasshoppers,” he said as he moved his hand away from his head. There was a red welt right above his left eye.

“You could lose an eye that way, you know. You should never stick your head out of a moving vehicle,” Lulu said, and then she made “
tsk, tsk
” noises like mothers make when they’re talking to kids who should know better than to do the things they are doing.

The manny rolled up the window, rubbed his forehead, and said, “Let’s turn on the air-conditioning. Freon smells good too.”

“Put your shoes on, kids,” said Mom. “We’re going to stop at Devils Tower before we drive to Cody.” Cody is the town where the manny grew up and where his parents still live. We’re staying three nights with his parents on their ranch. I can’t wait to see where the manny came from. I bet that his dad wears fancy cowboy boots and does lariat tricks, and his mom is always baking pies and starting food fights.

“WHAT’S DEVILS TOWER?” Belly said, hiding under her jacket like we were getting ready to go into a haunted mansion. I shivered thinking how cool it would be if the RV were the Mystery Machine and we were going across America solving mysteries like Scooby-Doo. I’d be Fred. He’s the smart one who gets to wear a kerchief around his neck.

“It’s the name of a rock formation that reaches straight up out of the earth,” said the manny. “It’s not scary. We used to come here for long weekends with my parents.”

“Whew,” Belly said as she lowered the jacket off her head. Belly hates to be scared. On her last birthday we took her to a pizza place that had games, puppets, and clowns. When one of the clowns came over to our table to bring us balloons, Belly screamed, threw her 7-Up at the clown, and ran and locked herself in the bathroom. Mom tried to get her to come out, but Belly said she wouldn’t until all of the clowns were gone. The manager had to come let Mom in the bathroom with the master key. We got our pizzas to go, and Dad apologized to the clown, who had a big 7-Up spot on the front of his pants. The clown said he understood and that he used to be terrified of Shriners on their little motorcycles in parades.

We finished celebrating Belly’s birthday at a park down the street from the pizza place. From then on when I didn’t want Belly to go into my room, I’d close the door and say, “Don’t go in my room, you’ll wake up the clown.” Then I’d look at her without blinking my eyes.

At Devils Tower we watched people climbing all the way up to the top. The manny explained to me that they were roped in, and if one fell, the other one would lock the rope so nobody would get hurt. It looked crazy to me. I get dizzy on top of the jungle gym at school. I always make Sarah go first when we climb back down so that there is someone underneath me.

Sarah says, “You know I won’t be able to catch you.”

And I say, “Yeah, but you’ll cushion my fall,” and she laughs.

I bought two postcards at Devils Tower, one for Sarah and one for Uncle Max.

Dad said, “We still have quite a drive. We better get a move on.” He lifted Belly up onto his shoulders. She tickled his ears all the way back to the RV, and he pretended to be hysterical with tickles.

“He sure is a good dad,” I heard the manny say to Mom. I ran up and held Dad’s hand and rubbed his calluses with my pointer finger. His hand was warm.

India climbed into the RV first, but the manny stopped. He yelled to India, “On belay?” just like we had heard the climbers yelling to each other for permission to climb.

India answered back, “Belay on!” and the manny climbed into the RV.

I strapped my seat belt and started to write my postcards.

I wrote on a postcard that had the Wyoming state flag on it.

The postcard that I picked out for Sarah had a picture of Devils Tower on it with a climber. You could also see the snack shop in the photo. I drew an arrow pointing to the climber and wrote “You” and then an arrow pointing into the door of the snack shop and wrote “Me.”

Then I wrote:

Belly and the manny slept most of the drive through Wyoming. Mom drove while Dad navigated the map for her. He kept saying, “Slow down! There’s a cop.” I guess Mom hadn’t learned her lesson.

Lulu and India listened to their music. Lulu was listening to “I Will Survive” over and over again. She said that it was her theme song for the family road trip.

The manny said that his theme song for the trip was “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge.

India was listening to Queen. She sang along, “‘Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin’ world go round,’” while she pointed at Lulu.

Lulu saw India pointing at her but couldn’t hear her because of her earbuds. She took them out and asked, “Why are you singing and pointing at me?”

India answered, “I was just singing along to “‘You’re My Best Friend.’”

Lulu’s eyes smiled, and she put her earbuds back in. India and I looked at each other and laughed silently with our eyes the same way Lulu had smiled with hers.

With nobody to talk to and the battery dead in my iPod, I pulled out a sketch pad and crayons and began drawing a picture for the manny’s parents. The manny says that you should never arrive empty-handed as a guest in someone’s home. One time when he came to our house for a dinner party, he brought whoopee cushions for everyone. The kids lost interest in them after a little while, but the adults kept putting them on one another’s seats and laughing hysterically when somebody would sit down with a big
phhhhh!
Later that night I even heard one go off in Mom and Dad’s bedroom and then Mom start laughing. She had put it under Dad’s pillow.

I drew a picture of the manny and me on horses right next to each other with cowboy hats on our heads. Behind us I drew big, snow-covered mountains dotted with bighorn sheep. I drew them extra-long, curly horns. India said that it made them look “regal.” I think “regal” must mean “ram tough,” like in the Dodge truck commercials.

At the bottom of the picture I wrote, “You did a darned good job of raising your little cowboy!!!” I put three exclamation points at the end and imagined the manny’s father reading it with such enthusiasm that he’d slap his knee when he said the word “darned.” That’s the way cowboys talk in the movies. They slap their knees and say things like “Doggone it” and “Dang me!”

I was just about finished with the drawing when I heard Belly scream, “CANTALOUPE!” She was pounding on the window and watching something run through a sagebrush field by the highway. It wasn’t a cantaloupe. It was an
antelope
and two babies. Belly’s scream had woken everybody up. The antelope sped through the sagebrush field until they were out of sight.

The manny yelled, “Hay!” and pointed out the window at a field stacked high with bales of hay. Nobody laughed.

He said, “Country humor is an acquired taste, like coffee or beets.”

“Or tube tops!” added India, looking up from her
Glamour
Do/
Glamour
Don’t book.

“Or nose rings!” added Lulu.

“Or Howard Stern!” I yelled.

Mom and Dad both turned around to look at me.

“How do you know about Howard Stern?” Mom asked.

“I read about him in
People
magazine,” I lied. I had really heard about him from Craig at school. He told me that Howard Stern has a radio talk show that his dad listens to that has naked ladies and midgets as guests. I’ve never heard Howard Stern’s radio show.

“Your mother’s driving is an acquired taste,” said Dad, changing the subject before Mom could question me any further. He winked at me.

Mom punched him so hard in the arm that he yelped and rubbed his shoulder. We also swerved a little, and the manny put his hands up in the air and screamed like we were driving off of a cliff.

The road was very curvy, and we even saw a waterfall in a canyon. There were two high-school-age boys jumping from the top of the falls and into the water. People do crazy things in Wyoming. The manny said it’s because there’s not very much crime, so people have to create their own danger. He said those boys were “brave” and liked to live life on the edge.

“WHAT’S BRAVE?” asked Belly.

Lulu answered, “Brave is when you face your fears. Like the time when I skied down a black-diamond run when I was scared, or the time when I went on the roller coaster with the double loop and was the youngest person to ever ride on it. That’s what brave is.”

Mom added, “Brave isn’t just doing dangerous and scary things. You are brave when you stand up for what you believe in or when you stick up for other people who might not be able to stick up for themselves. Brave is when you are true to yourself and live your life the way you want to, even though other people might not approve or might be mean about it.”

When Mom said that last one, she grabbed the manny’s knee and gave it a love squeeze. Belly grabbed my knee and imitated Mom’s squeeze, and then she smiled at me.

As we drove away from the waterfall, I stood on my seat and pretended like I was surfing.

“Put your seat belt on, Keats,” Dad demanded.

“But I’m brave,” I whined, and then tried to deepen my voice so that I actually did sound brave.

Just then Mom swerved to miss hitting a ground squirrel, and I flew off the seat and landed on a big bag of chips, which exploded and flew all over the RV. India and Lulu were trying to cover their laughs until they knew I was okay, and then they didn’t try to cover them at all. Belly just ate a chip that had landed on her lap. Embarrassed, I got up, gathered the chips the best that I could, and buckled myself into my seat. I guess not everybody is meant to be the tough kind of brave. Maybe I’m another kind of brave.

Lulu gave me a conduct mark for making a mess.

The manny looked at me and tightened his seat belt. He pointed at Mom and quietly mouthed, “Crazy driver.” She didn’t see him do it.

I sat quietly the rest of the way and finished my picture for the manny’s parents. I drew an arrow that pointed in between two of the words and added the word “brave” in all capitals, so that it said, “You did a darned good job of raising your BRAVE little cowboy!!!”

We were almost to the manny’s parents’ house when a man on a horse came galloping out of the woods and rode alongside the RV like he was robbing a stagecoach. We all ran to the left side of the RV to see. Mom rolled down her window, and I could hear the clomping of the horse’s hooves against the dirt and gravel. It sounded more powerful than the clomping that I’ve heard during parades.

“That’s my dad!” yelled the manny as he started to wave. The manny’s dad waved back. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat, dark blue jeans, and beat-up cowboy boots. He looked like the manny, only older and with a black-and-gray mustache that covered the top part of his mouth. When he smiled, I could see a gap between his two front teeth, like Lauren Hutton. Lauren Hutton is a model and actress that is famous for a gap between her teeth. Dad thinks she’s beautiful, and whenever she’s on television, he makes a “grrrrrr” sound like a purring cat. Mom makes the same sound whenever she sees Matthew McConaughey without a shirt in an
Us
magazine. The manny makes the same sound when a Lucky Charms commercial comes on.

“And that’s Cochise!” the manny yelled again, pointing at the black-and-brown-spotted horse. Cochise was running so fast that you could see the muscles in his legs flexing. I thought to myself that the manny’s father really should have a helmet on if he was going to ride that fast.

The manny’s dad rode Cochise alongside us all the way to the house. Belly hung her head out the window and waved to him the whole way. She kept yelling, “HI, MANNY’S DAD!” and “HI, GOAT CHEESE!” until India explained to Belly that the horse was named after an Apache Indian chief named Cochise, and not after an easily digested dairy product.

“OH, COLD CHEESE! HI, COLD CHEESE!” yelled Belly. India looked at me, shrugged, and gave up.

The manny’s parents’ house was two stories tall and white, with a big screened-in front porch. There were pots of red geraniums up the steps, and two dogs wrestling and playing at the bottom of them. One of the dogs was sniffing the other dog’s backside. Lulu hates it when dogs do that. Once when her friend Margo’s dog did that to Housman, Lulu screeched and told Margo that her dog was “ill behaved.” Lulu then had to apologize after Housman peed on Margo’s leg. She was wearing shorts, and he just lifted his leg on her like she was a tree.

The manny’s mother was standing on the front porch waving both arms in the air like the girl gymnasts do at the end of their floor routines. The manny’s father rode his horse up to the barn while the manny jumped out of the RV and ran to hug his mother. Lulu, India, Belly, and I followed closely behind him.

The manny’s mother had on jeans and a light blue button-up shirt that was open a little bit so you could see a silver necklace with a pendant hanging from it.

“Now,
she
is a
GLAMOUR
DO in all capitals,” India announced with approval.

“Mom, these are the Dalinger kids. Lulu, India, Keats, and the one with the Popsicle stick stuck to her bottom is Belly.”

Belly did have a Popsicle stick stuck to her bottom. When the manny pointed it out, she looked and laughed but didn’t remove it. She left it there like it was part of her outfit.

“And this is my mother, Clarissa.”

“Like in
Mrs. Dalloway
?” Lulu asked, trying to impress Clarissa.
Mrs. Dalloway
is a book by Virginia Woolf. Lulu didn’t read it. She read the Spark Notes online. She reads the Spark Notes to classic books and then brings them up in conversation like she’s read them.

“That’s right,” answered the manny’s mother as she shook Lulu’s hand.

When Clarissa looked at me, I held out my hand to shake just like Lulu had done. Clarissa grabbed it and pulled me close to her and hugged me. She smelled like lemons and salt. When I saw her necklace closely, I noticed that her pendant was a glass bead with a swirl of green running through it.

I said, “You have a lovely décolletage.” I had heard a man say it once to a blond woman with a low, swooping neckline and a big emerald green necklace on a late-night movie. In the movie the woman pushed her chest and necklace out toward the man and whispered, “You think so?”

The manny’s mother didn’t whisper, “You think so?” She said, “Why, thank you,” while she laughed and buttoned up her shirt almost to the top. The manny laughed too and then looked at Mom. Mom scowl-smiled at him like she was sending him telepathic messages that he shouldn’t be letting me stay up so late.

Lulu told me later that a décolletage is a woman’s shoulders, neck, and cleavage area and that it might have been inappropriate for a boy my age to point it out. Then she told me that cleavage is the line that ladies have between their boobs. I thought “décolletage” meant “necklace.”

I handed Clarissa the picture that I had drawn. She held it up to the light and examined it like it was counterfeit money.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “I’m going to frame it and find a special place for it to hang.”

I kicked the dirt around, trying to look humble and embarrassed by Clarissa’s compliment. Lulu’s not the only one who practices reactions and faces in the mirror. I wasn’t embarrassed or humble. I thought the picture was good enough to frame too.

“Maybe I’ll be an artist like my uncle Max someday,” I told Clarissa.

Clarissa said, “That would be lovely,” but she looked away and started talking about all the rain that they’d been getting. I glanced at the manny. He had looked away too and was scrunching his lips together.

Clarissa hugged Mom and Dad and told them how happy she was that her son was getting to spend time with such a nice family. Mom and Dad said how much they enjoyed having the manny spend time with their children and that he was such a good influence on us. Just then a garter snake slithered across the walkway. Lulu screamed. The manny grabbed it and started chasing us around with it. Lulu is terrified of snakes. Belly isn’t. Instead of being chased
by
the manny, Belly was chasing
after
the manny. She was yelling, “HER WANTS TO PET IT!”

Mom and Dad kept talking with Clarissa while we ran around the yard. Every time we ran by them, Lulu screamed, “Why isn’t anyone helping us? Call 911!” They just laughed and kept talking, probably about the weather and Mom’s bunions. That’s what Mom and Dad usually talk about with older people.

The manny stopped to let Belly pet the snake. She named it Lola.

“LOLA’S HER BESTEST SNAKE EVER,” Belly said as if she had a pet snake collection at home.

I petted Lola too. I wasn’t scared. I was just pretending so I didn’t miss out on any of the chasing fun. Lulu and India collapsed on top of each other in the grass with exhaustion. They quickly got up when the manny set Lola on the ground and she started to slither away.

Belly yelled after Lola, “GOOD-BYE, LOLA! GROW UP! SOMEBODY GO TO SCHOOL!” She got the manny’s wake-up words mixed up.

Lulu ran ahead of us back to Mom and Dad and Clarissa.

To Clarissa she said, “You need to punish your son, or he’ll never learn that his behavior is not acceptable or appreciated. He’s a menace to society!”

Clarissa laughed. “Well, when he was little and we had to punish him, we used to make him wear itchy polyester.”

“I looked like I was from
The Brady Bunch
,” said the manny. “But I
was
flame resistant.”

When the manny’s father walked down from the barn, Clarissa introduced us to him. His name is Roger, but Clarissa calls him Rog. When I shook Roger’s hand, he said, “Hi, guy!” and winked with the whole right side of his face. His hand was rough and calloused, and his fingernails looked like he had been biting them. I used to bite my fingernails too, until Lulu told me that I could get worms that way. She said it while we were eating spaghetti and meatballs, which Mom said was “tacky.” Tacky is what Sarah calls it when Craig asks other kids if they’ll invite him to their birthday parties. India said that it’s not really tacky, just desperate. I invited Craig to my birthday party without him having to ask. He gave me a BB gun, but Mom took it away because guns aren’t allowed in our house, except water guns.

“My friend Sarah has a cousin named Roger,” I said. “He’s one of my favorite people. I’ve never met a Roger I didn’t like.”

I’ve only met two Rogers, but it was still a true statement. I wanted Roger to like me. He squeezed my shoulder and started to help Mom and Dad unpack the RV.

India and Lulu went inside the house to help Clarissa make chocolate chip cookies. The manny took Belly and me up to the barn to see Cochise, who was in a pen with a big, fat cow. The cow was lying down and looked like her legs were too small to support her enormous body. The barn smelled like hay and cow poop. There were cats running around all over the place. The manny kept saying, “Hi, Griddlebone!” or “Hi, Macavity!” or “Hi, Jennyanydots!” Clarissa had named all the cats after the characters in the Broadway musical
Cats
. The manny said it was because his mother loved Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. Except he didn’t say “love,” he said she was “obsessed” with them. The same way Lulu is obsessed with the school handbook. She reads it all the time to make sure that she isn’t breaking the dress code or having too many sick days.

“Why are there so many kitties?” I asked.

“BECAUSE HER LOVES THEM,” Belly said, giving a cat named Bustopher Jones a choke-hold hug around the neck.

Roger answered my question, “They just find us! They come to visit one day and never leave because they love the barn. We take them to get fixed so we won’t have any more, and then another stray shows up.”

The manny explained that fixing a cat or a dog means it has surgery so it can’t have kittens or puppies anymore. He says it’s the responsible thing to do so they don’t add to the problem of homeless pets.

“Oh, you mean spay and neuter your pets,” I said, remembering that the white-haired host of
The Price Is Right
always ended the show by saying, “Help control the pet population—have your pet spayed or neutered.” I was watching it once and a woman from Kansas won a sailboat. She jumped up and down even though she probably wouldn’t be able to use it for anything except a lawn ornament. That’s what the manny said. He also said that the woman should have worn a better bra. He said it quietly to Mom, but I still heard him.

Cochise is a paint, which means he’s white with big brown and black splotches. The manny says that Cochise is twenty-two years old and that’s why he’s so gentle. He’s really pretty, and he snorts a lot and whips his tail around to get rid of the flies on his backside. Roger had left the saddle on Cochise so that the manny could give us rides. He lifted me up first and then Belly right in front of me. Then the manny took the reins and led Cochise around the yard. A cat named Rumpleteazer followed us the whole way. Dad waved to us, and Mom took our picture. We even went right up to the kitchen window to wave at Lulu and India, who both had aprons on and were practicing cracking eggs into a mixing bowl. Belly made the manny lift her off of Cochise so she could go inside and practice cracking eggs. I got to ride Cochise all by myself. I hugged him around his neck. His mane smelled like itchy, worn wool socks. I didn’t want it to end.

When we got back to the barn, Roger was making sure that there was enough water in the trough for Cochise to drink. The manny lifted me off. I rubbed Cochise’s nose while the manny removed the saddle and bridle and hung them up on hooks. The big, fat cow was lying down in the shade. She had dried mud all over the sides of her. Roger said he’d meet us in the house; he was going to hose the cow off because she looked hot. I laughed because at school when things are hot, it means they’re sexy or beautiful. Roger meant that the cow looked sweaty and uncomfortable. He didn’t mean that she had a spray-on tan and was dressed for a girls’ night out.

The house smelled like the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies that were cooling on a metal rack. When the manny grabbed three, his mother pointed her finger at him and reminded him about gluttony. It was the same gluttony talk that he had once given to me when I took too much food at Thanksgiving. The manny told his mother that he didn’t need to be reminded, and he took a fourth cookie and shoved the whole thing into his mouth.

“You really are a menace to society,” Clarissa said, using Lulu’s words. She was whipping all of the eggs that Lulu and India had cracked in a big metal mixing bowl. Mom was giving Belly a bath. All of the eggs she had cracked had ended up in her hair. The manny called her egghead.

I walked around the living room, looking at all of the framed photographs. There was a picture of the manny’s nephew wearing only a diaper and cowboy boots. There was a picture of the manny at the county fair when he was little, with no front teeth, wearing a Western shirt. There was a picture of the manny and Uncle Max from their vacation to Palm Springs. They stayed at a hotel called the Parker Palm Springs. Uncle Max told me that a guy named Jonathan Adler designed it. The staff all wore bright pink blazers, and there were chairs that hung from the ceiling like tree swings. Uncle Max has a book by Jonathan Adler that has him on the cover in bright flip-flops sitting in a lime green room. I love looking at it because it gives tips on how to live fabulously.