The Great Good Summer (9 page)

Chapter Thirteen

I
sit, stone silent, for a while, my eyes kind of burning from looking out the window at everything flying by.

Hallelujah Dave's in jail. I cannot believe that this is what's become of my mama's life, or mine. We are good stock, or at least that's what she always says. If one of us isn't feeling right about something, like when Daddy's roofing business suffered and we had to “tighten our belts,” she'd say, “Don't you worry, honey. We are good stock. This is a bump in the road, but we are good stock and we'll be fine. You can have faith in that.” And we always did.

But at some point I guess Mama stopped believing it herself. It's like the cross around my neck. The shine wore right off, and suddenly Mama was hurling herself onto the floor of a strange church at a strip mall and crawling all the way to Florida with a guy who goes and gets himself thrown into jail.

I rub the cross. I like it. It's familiar. But my mama? I don't even know who my mama is anymore.

“Ivy. You're shivering,” says Paul. “And you haven't said a word in miles. You're making me kind of nervous. Seriously. C'mon. What's up?”

I pull my knees up under my T-shirt and squeeze my arms around them, making myself warmer and warmer and tighter and tighter and littler and littler. I squeeze and squeeze, like I might make myself disappear. But no matter how little I get, I'm still here, and so is this truth:

“Hallelujah Dave is in jail,” I say.

“Wow,” says Paul. “Okay, wow. Yeah. Well, that's a heck of a clue,” he says, kind of shocked. But from the looks of the little twitch in the left corner of his mouth, he still thinks this is kind of an adventure. Maybe that should make me mad, but honestly? I can't help but thank God for that little twitch.

A Greyhound bus does not, it turns out, go straight from Houston to Tallahassee. It stops bunches of times, in places that are all at least half as creepy as Houston. Sometimes you just want to get to the place you're going.

We mostly stay on the bus at the stops, though Paul gets off once because there's a food stand right outside and he is starving. I keep thinking that the less I do—the less I eat, the fewer times I weave down the bus aisle to the bathroom—the quicker we'll get to where we're going. Plus, I lost my starving-ness somewhere between home and here.

But it's then, when Paul gets off the bus to buy a po'boy sandwich in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that Skinny Man decides to lean across the aisle and talk to me. I am telling you, if this had happened this morning, I would've screamed or fainted or, God forbid, thrown up again. But this morning was a long time ago. So I look straight at him and say, “Can I help you?”

“I doubt it,” he says, “but I might be able to help you.” He stops and coughs and chokes on whatever's in his lungs. He really doesn't seem like the helping sort. “I heardja talking, and it seems like someone you know is in some trouble. And I just happen to know a thing or two about jail.”

Mmm-hmm. I'll bet he does. Oh, mercy me. Why am I not surprised?

“Yeah?” I say.

“You kids aren't gonna get anywhere, nosing around a cop shop,” he says. “They're gonna be more interested in getting the lowdown on
you
than giving you the lowdown on the guy you're looking for. I can guaran-dang-tee you that.”

It's hard to look straight into his eyes because the bus is dark and he makes me nervous, but I can feel in my bones that he's right. We are just a couple of kids with T-shirts and backpacks. Even when we're trying to be all mature, we look like we should be in school, not in jail. We just plain do, and thank goodness for that, I guess, but it's a fact that is not gonna be helpful at all in these circumstances.

So by the time Paul gets back onto the bus, I've arranged to go with Ricky, which is Skinny Man's name, to the Leon County Jail. It turns out he knows exactly where it is—again, not a big surprise—and that he's got to head to that part of town when he hits Tallahassee anyway.

“I owe a lot of folks some kindnesses,” is how he put it, “but most of 'em won't have none of it, and I can't blame 'em. Giving you guys a hand, it's just something I can do.”

Here's the thing. I don't want to trust him, I promise you that. A smoky, scary, skinny-looking guy who knows way too much about jail than anyone ought to? No, thank you. But honest to goodness, what choice do I have? So I arranged it. I arranged it for me, and I guess I went ahead and arranged it for Paul, too.

“He'll be like our guide or our chaperone or some
thing,” I say, and Paul looks at me like the crazy that my mama has might be catching. But he doesn't
say
anything like that. He just reaches across the aisle to shake Ricky's hand.

“Nice to meet you, man,” Paul says, which proves once and for all that he might be the nicest and most flexible guy on earth.

Paul really
would've
made the perfect astronaut, what with how he adjusts to unexpected surprises.

He doesn't even jump or panic when my phone—well, Mama's phone, actually—starts to ring. It's not technically even a “ring,” I guess. It's a birdsong. Mama's birdsong, the tone she chose because it made her feel like it was a new morning every time it rang. The birdsong she left at home with us when she took off on her adventure.

And I guess that's when it first occurs to me—what if Mama left because she needed an adventure? Like Paul? Or even like me?

Here's the thing I like best about cell phones: caller ID. When I pull Mama's ringing phone out of my backpack to see who's calling, the screen says
HOME
. Which means Daddy's figured out that I'm gone and that I have Mama's phone. I picture him standing in the kitchen with his
work boots on, both me and Mama missing now. It's a sorry thought. But even as much as I love my daddy, I don't answer.

By eleven at night Daddy's left four voice mails, and they all kind of say the same thing. “Ivy. Baby. I love you. And I'm not mad but I am worried. I'd like to come and get you, so could you just let me know where you are?”

And then there's always a little something about Mama, something like, “I'm sorry I didn't talk to you more about your mama leaving. I was trying to stay strong, baby. I was trying to keep you safe.”

Or “Your mama's a grown-up, Ivy Green, so she has to look after herself. But it's
my
job to look after you!”

Or “Gosh darn it, Ivy. I'm holding your mother responsible for this.” His voice cracks during that last one, which about splits me open and makes me want to dial him back, I feel so bad. But I don't. I can't.

“We are not traveling a zillion miles in a smelly, dirty, tin can of a bus just to get hauled home by our parents before we even hit Florida,” I say when Paul asks what I'm going to do about the messages.

“Hey! That's the way! Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd like to introduce Ivy Green with Spunk,” says Paul, sounding like a sports announcer on TV. “Ivy Green with Spunk.”
And I know it sounds silly, but I feel kind of proud when he says it. Maybe “Spunk” could be my middle name. Ha! Can you imagine what Mama'd say about that? Ivy Spunk Green. Talk about kooky!

I turn off the phone and stow it deep in my backpack, wad my sweatshirt into a sort of pillow, curl up against the window, and go to sleep for another bit. When I wake next, it's pitch dark both inside and outside, and really cold from the A/C. And, news flash, now I
am
starving.

“I figured you'd get hungry sometime.” Paul pulls a foil-wrapped fried-oyster sandwich out of his sweatshirt pocket and hands it to me. It is somehow still a little warm, the bun soft, the oysters crispy and spicy. I eat the whole thing in a few bites.

“So I guess your God didn't do too good a job looking after old Hallelujah Dave, did he?” Paul says as I finish eating, just as I was starting to like him again. As a friend, I mean. But still, he has to go and ruin it.

“He's not ‘my God,' Paul Dobbs. He's all of ours—even mean boys like you. So there. God works in mysterious ways. You know that as well as I do. Don't pretend you've never spent a day in church. How do you know God wasn't protecting Mama? If Hallelujah Dave is in jail, maybe he belongs there. Maybe it's safer for everyone.” I
pause to take a big breath and shake off my sleep a little. “Sheesh,” I say. “You are what Pastor Lou would call a tribulation, you know that?”

And then I add, “But thank you for the po'boy.” Because I was raised right.

“Oh, Ivy! Hang on a second. I was kidding around. Y'know, joking? It's something normal kids do when they've run away from home and are on their way to a jailhouse in Florida. It helps pass the time and clear the air and all that.” Paul sighs, like
I'm
the one who's saying wrongheaded things, not him. And here's a crazy thing: for a split second Paul looks just like my daddy looks when he's disappointed in me.

I go back to staring out my window even though I can't see much, thanks to the night and the speed and the fact that my eyes are bleary and tired and sore. Even the stars in the black, black sky are a blur. Paul would probably like looking out at them, but of course he gave me the window seat, just to be sweet.

So here I am—Miss Thoughtless Runaway Girl with No Mama, No Middle Name, and No Sense of Humor, the Girl Who's Disappointed Everybody—sitting spoiled in the window seat as we cross the state line and drive smack into the great-good panhandle of Florida.

“The Big Dipper,” I say, sort of lurching back into myself as the familiar constellations suddenly appear right above us.

“Huh?” says Paul. His voice is croaky and tired.

“I just saw the Big Dipper. It was kind of nice to see something I recognized,” I say into the quiet bubble of the bus. “I thought maybe you'd want to see it too.”

I know that kind of sounds like I'm trying to make up with him, but really, it's so dark that I think I'm sort of pretending that it's not even Paul I'm talking to. Maybe it's Daddy, Abby, Mama, or God.

“Oh, yeah, Ursa Major. You know that the Big Dipper is just a little part of a bigger constellation, right? Ursa Major, the mama bear?”

Nope. It's definitely Paul after all. The expert.

“Um, okay,” I say. “How do you know that?”

Paul leans into me a little so he's got a better view out the bus window.

“Well, I was really kind of into star stories for a while. Y'know, the myths?”

“Yeah,” I say, “that figures.”

If you stare long enough, Ursa Major and all the other stars in the sky become a fast bright blur—a fast bright quiet lonely blur.

After a minute or two I say, “I guess you know star stories better than you know Bible stories, probably.”

“They're not all that different, really,” Paul answers. “I mean, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor are a mother and a child. They've been through all sorts of terrible stuff, including getting turned into bears, but they end up right next to each other forever in the sky. Doesn't that sound like the sort of ending you'd get in the Bible?”