Savvy (7 page)

“That’s too long!” I cried.

“Well, there’s nothing I can d-do about that,” said Lester, trying hard to end the conversation. “I can’t afford to lose my job. If I go b-back now, I’ll be fired for sure. Then it will be no Bibles, no b-bus, and no future for poor old Lester.”

I swallowed hard, caught between that rock and that hard place I’d heard mentioned so often, and understanding fully now what a bad spot that truly was. How could I ask a man I didn’t even know to risk his livelihood on my account? But, how could I possibly wait another day to get to Poppa?

“Tomorrow. That’s just great.” Bobbi turned and looked at me, her eyes bulging in disbelieving voodoo vibes. “
Tomorrow,
” she repeated once more, nodding her head and leaning back against her seat. “That’s
wonderful
.”

Fish and Will Junior were looking my way too. I cringed and sank down in my seat, feeling wretched and troubled over our new situation. To my surprise, Will winked my way with a crooked smile, making me feel a bit better. Out of everybody on that bus, Will was the only one who looked like he might be having fun.

The itty-bitty town of Bee, Nebraska, was just about the size of a yellow striped bumbler; it could buzz right by you if you blinked too slow. As though the situation wasn’t bad enough for us already, things went even more catawampus and cockeyed once we got to that teeny-tiny town.

There was only one church in Bee. It was built boxy and angled like an accordion, but the windows of the church were dark, and the doors were locked up tight.

Lester Swan looked from his watch toward the sun—now barely visible on the horizon—all the while tugging the door handles and pacing the bright green Astroturf leading up to the side door. He sat down on the cement step of the church and scratched his head. I wandered away to avoid listening to Carlene and Rhonda blister and bellyache over Lester’s latest blunder. Those two gals pickled me, they were so sour. Thinking about my own momma, I felt sorry for Lester. Rhonda’s voice was nothing like what a momma’s ought to be. Of course, my momma was extra-special, I reminded myself. My momma was perfect.

“It took months for me to figure out my savvy when I was your age,” I remembered Momma telling me one day. We had been in the kitchen, me and Momma and Gypsy, and Momma had been trying to teach me how to make a perfect pie crust. But my crust was far from perfect. Gypsy had been more interested in squishing her fingers deep inside her own small lump of soft dough, pulling out pinches and eating them when Momma’s head was turned.

My crust had kept on crumbling and breaking, or sticking and tearing; I’d smash it back together and try rolling it out again and again, while Momma’s crust lifted up clean and easy, spreading out across the bottom of the pan as soft and smooth as silk—perfect as perfect.

“How
did
you know, Momma?” I’d asked, flour tickling my nose and falling like snow from the edge of the table where I stood with my own large rolling pin. “How did you figure out your savvy? When did you first know that you were perfect?”

Momma looked down at the mess on the table and laughed; the sound was like the church bells in Hebron on a clear morning. At first I thought Momma might be laughing at my wounded and weary blob of dough, then I remembered that my momma would never do such a thing. She pulled one of the kitchen chairs up close and sat down, setting aside my rolling pin and taking my floured and dusty hands in her own. She smiled up at me with a sweet smile.

“I’m not perfect, Mibs. Nobody’s perfect. I just have a knack for getting things right. Maybe that looks a lot like perfect sometimes. Besides,” she continued, her smile faltering a bit as she squeezed my hands, “you’d be surprised at how many people dislike spending time with someone who constantly gets things right. It’s not always an easy way to be.”

I nodded at Momma as she hugged me. I was hardly able to imagine anyone not wanting to spend time with her.

“In most ways, Mibs, we Beaumonts are just like other people,” Momma said, letting go of me and adding a bit more flour to my dough as she recited the words I’d heard so many times before. “We get born, and sometime later we die. And in between, we’re happy and sad, we feel love and we feel fear, we eat and we sleep and we hurt like everyone else.”

I thought about Momma as I walked around the side of the church and up the rutted dirt road a short way, listening with relief as the voices faded and an ensemble of crickets began warming up their evening act—maybe I’d woken them up, I mused to myself. Kicking at rocks, I crossed the road and headed toward an old boarded-up and falling-down house that looked as though a truckload of white paint had dropped on it from top to bottom once upon a time ago. Fish had stayed on the bus with Samson; he was still stewing and grouchy and was now almost as quiet and broody as our little brother. Bobbi was outside the bus chewing on a new length of Bubble Tape and cursing under her breath, so we all gave her plenty of distance.

I stepped up onto the porch of the old house cautiously, thinking that a porch swing would have made it a perfect place, once upon a time. Since we didn’t have our own in Kansaska-Nebransas, Poppa would take us to the World’s Largest Porch Swing in the park in Hebron. That swing could hold fifteen people at one time. Poppa would load the whole family into the station wagon and let Rocket’s spark drive us up there on Sunday afternoons to sit all together on that long, crazy swing that had no porch attached.

“Just use your imagination, Mibs,” Poppa would say when I complained that a swing couldn’t be a porch swing without a porch. “Close your eyes and imagine what kind of a grand house might have a porch swing this size.” I’d do as he said, but the only place I ever pictured was our own home.

“Every good country home needs a place to sit and think and watch the clouds roll by,” Poppa had said to me. Poppa wanted to build us our very own swing, it was always near the top on his list of important things to do. I knew I had to get to Poppa soon. I couldn’t let anything happen to him, not with that list left unfinished—he wouldn’t want to abandon our dreams. He’d want to build that swing so that we could all sit there together.

The porch creaked and groaned. I turned around to find Will Junior standing on the porch behind me. He didn’t come close, like he’d done before. Now he had his hands in his pockets and was looking at me as though he’d never seen a girl before.

“What’s going on, Mibs?”

“What do you mean?” I said, not looking at him straight on.

“I mean, maybe you should start telling me what happened back there on the bus with Fish and that storm of wind,” Will Junior said, still studying me.

I ran my hand across the porch rail, absently brushing at the peeling paint that covered the old gray wood like lacy splinters, still not able to stare Will Junior in the eye.

“I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” I said, feeling false and fickle, knowing exactly what he wanted to hear and knowing that I could never tell him. When I braved a glance at his face, I could see that Will’s eyes were bright and eager with curiosity, like a small child waiting for a parade to come around a corner.

“I’ve always known there was something different about you, Mibs Beaumont, and your brothers too,” Will Junior said. I shrugged my shoulders, not agreeing, but not saying anything either.

“Don’t get me wrong—I like that about you,” Will added awkwardly, stepping a bit closer.

Surprised and embarrassed, I stood speechless on that porch until the silence grew itchy and uncomfortable. Searching desperately for some way to change the subject, I rounded fully on Will Junior and demanded in a fluster, “So, just why are you called Will
Junior,
anyway? I know your daddy’s not Will
Senior
. His name’s not even
William,
for heaven’s sake.”

He smiled back at me with a devilish grin. “Maybe you’re not the only one with a secret, Mibs.”

I looked up and down at that boy, and for some reason I couldn’t help but smile back at him, even if it did make my cheeks burn red.

“I suppose I can live with that,” I said finally, like he and I had come to some kind of arrangement. Our secrets would stay secrets.

Will Junior pulled one hand out of his pocket. He was holding the wrapped-up happy birthday pen set. He’d retrieved it from the floor of the bus, and now he held it out to me. The bright wrapping was ripped on one side and a bit worse for the wear.

“It’s still your birthday, you know.”

I took the present from Will and smiled even wider. He was right. It was still my birthday and I hadn’t yet opened a single present. I stuck one finger into the tear on the side and ripped the paper away from a thin hinged box. A gust of wind I hoped did not belong to Fish swept the wrapping paper out of my hands and sent it up and across the road and away from us. Opening the box, I found two fine and fancy ballpoint pens with shiny silver finger grips and rounded caps. I set the box down on top of the porch rail and pulled out one of the pens.

“I could have tried writing something if that paper hadn’t blown away,” I said. Will Junior swept his arm out in front of him with a gallant gesture before kneeling down on the cracked and flaking boards at my feet, like he was a grown-up man proposing. He held one hand out to me, palm up, offering it as a writing surface.

Nervously, I took his hand in mine. The blue ink flowed out smooth and easy against Will Junior’s skin, and in a moment I’d drawn a smiling sun. The next moment, I jolted backward, tripping over a jutting porch plank and falling onto my tail end, as that smiling sun blinked its eyes and cleared its throat like it had just woken up.

Like it had just woken up, and now it had something to say.

B
efore the blue inked sun could utter a word, I picked myself up and ran away from Will Junior and the falling-down house. I ran past Lester Swan where he sat with his feet on the Astroturf, and past Bobbi and her gum bubble. Up the steps and into the bus, I ran straight past Fish, where he sat hunkered and grumpy in the front seat. I didn’t stop until I’d pressed myself underneath the cot in the back of the bus, pushing in next to Samson, who moved over without a question or a word as though he’d been expecting me. I plugged up my ears with my fingers. I squeezed my eyes shut and began to hum, hum, hum, hum, hum.

It was no good. I could still hear them all. As Lester and Bobbi climbed back onto the bus wondering what was wrong with me, I could hear Carlene and Rhonda and the little angel with the pointed devil’s tail all there inside my head. But now I could hear a new voice too, the voice of the smiling blue sun, gaining volume like a deep-toned bell as Will Junior climbed up into the bus.

“A secret for a secret for a secret … Will has a secret. Want to know the secret?”

Not knowing what else to do, I shouted, “You have to wash your hand, Will Junior!” though it sounded stupid, even to me, as my voice echoed through the quiet bus over the din of voices in my head. I didn’t want to know Will’s secret. I didn’t want to know things I wasn’t supposed to know.

“Mibs? Are you okay?” Will called out to me as he made his way down the aisle of the bus, the voice of that noisy blue sunshine growing louder and louder as he got closer.

“Will’s got a secret …”

“Don’t come near me!” I shouted back at him.

Fish, seeing me upset and not bothering to find out what might have happened, closed in on Will Junior and spun him around, clocking him hard and fast in the eye with his fist. Will took the blow, stumbling backward along the aisle of the bus, and Bobbi joined the scuffle, climbing over the seats and throwing herself at Fish, scratching his cheek with her fingernails.

Ignoring Bobbi and scrambling after Will Junior, Fish demanded, “What did you do to my sister? What did you do to her?”

“Will’s got a secret … Want to know the secret?”

“
WASH
YOUR
HAND
,
WILL
JUNIOR!” I screamed again, raising my voice to be heard over the brawl and over the sound of breaking glass. As my brother’s pressure system grew, the windows closest to Fish began to fracture, spreading splintering cracks outward like spiderwebs zipping and pinging through the glass as Fish’s gusts and gales swelled in speed and strength. Bobbi screamed and Lester cried out as first one and then another window shattered outward. Ducking and dancing and wincing and flinching with every new explosion of glass, Lester grabbed both boys by their collars and pushed and pulled and dragged them off his bus with Bobbi following after.

“… a secret for a secret for a secret …”
Quieter now, but still that ink doodle sun yammered in my brain. I scrambled from beneath the cot and peered out of the nearest broken window.

“Please, Will, just go wash that ink off your hand!” I shouted, knowing he couldn’t understand. Now outside the bus, Fish’s wind blew out across the parking lot and through the trees around the church. A dark storm cloud was forming overhead and a smattering of rain began to pelt the ground. It was a good thing we weren’t too close to any large bodies of water, or that storm over Bee could have been one to rival Fish’s worst.

Crunching on the broken glass that lay scattered across the parking lot, Fish suddenly stopped struggling against Lester Swan and looked up at my face in the window. He looked at me screaming and plugging my ears and at the tears dripping like the kitchen tap down my cheeks; my words finally hit him, and he listened. Fish twisted sharply from me to Will Junior as though suddenly adding two and two and getting twenty-seven, even though most people could only ever get four. Storm subsiding, he grabbed Will by the wrist to behold the drawing of the sun inked in blue on his palm. My brother took one last look up from that simple doodle to my sorry, sorry self framed inside the broken window. Then, understanding that my upset must have something to do with the unexpected things that happen when a Beaumont turns thirteen, Fish did what he had to do.