Mr. Buthrop sat on the white leather sofa to watch football. Mrs. Buthrop came into the living room, pulling a little boy by his hand.
"And here's your little brother!" she said.
The boy looked terrified. I could tell just by looking at him that he was Native American, but probably not Shoshone. Shoshone eyes tend to have dramatic epicanthic folds. His didn't. Actually, the longer I looked at him, the more I was convinced that I had seen him before. His hair was cut close to his head. His eyes were an olive green, almost gold. And out of nowhere it hit me--
No way, I thought.
It was Danny, Marilu's friend.
I dropped my duffel bag and tried to call his name. I checked myself. It was one of those incredibly rare moments when I'd forgotten I couldn't speak.
"Would you like some cookies, boys?" Mrs. Buthrop asked. She went through the kitchen archway and opened a pantry door.
Danny eyed me uncertainly. I picked up my duffel bag and started toward him.
He darted up the staircase. I heard a door slap shut with finality.
"Here we are!" Mrs. Buthrop sang. She emerged from the kitchen with a package of sugar-free cookies. "I guess Danny isn't hungry..."
I turned my back on her and climbed up the carpeted staircase. I threw open the doors on my left and right until I found Danny on his bed, his mouth open in a soundless yelp.
I closed the door behind me. I searched the contents of my duffel bag for my pen and notepad. Danny backed away from me, his back against the wall.
I scribbled a hasty note and showed it to him.
I'm Marilu's cousin.
He was still, at first, and silent; I wasn't sure whether he had read what I'd written. But he had. He jumped off the bed. His eyes were was big and as wide as saucers.
"You came to take me home," he said. His tone was eager, but his voice was hoarse with neglect.
I couldn't possibly leave without him. I penned a second note.
Yes. But not right now. I need to plan it so we don't get caught.
"Why aren't you talking?"
I hesitated. I didn't want to scare him; but I pulled aside the leather cords hanging around my neck, the plains flute dangling at the end, and showed him the big red scars on my throat. His eyes rounded with understanding.
"Wovoka sent you."
I looked at him, confused.
Danny reached under his bed. His room, I realized, was austere for a little boy. Probably the Buthrops had decorated it themselves. A small TV stood in one corner. The bedspread and carpet were a matching blue. Nothing personal hung on the walls. No God's Eyes or pendleton blankets or spiderweb charms. Nothing to suggest that this room belonged to a Paiute boy. It didn't really belong to him.
Danny pressed a sheet of yellow paper into my hands.
The quality of the drawing was about what you would expect from a ten-year-old. The drawing depicted a snub-nosed man in a Panama hat and flowing trench coat. His muscles were exaggerated in great detail.
"He healed people with his hands and made ice and snow and rain fall from the sky. He turned sunlight into fire. He could talk to people without words. The white men shot him with a shotgun but he didn't bleed."
Oh--the shaman who had started the ghost dance. We called him Wood Cutter back home.
Danny held his drawing to his chest. He peered at me timidly.
I ran my fingers over the back of his head. He shook his head free and scrunched up his face.
I spent the night in the room across the hall from Danny's--just as austere, but decorated in red rather than blue. All that bright red concentrated in one place sort of made me feel jumpy. I didn't really sleep, focused instead on how we were going to escape.
First I needed to figure out where the heck we were. I could have asked Danny, but he was asleep, and the thought hadn't occurred to me while he was awake. I eased open the bedroom door and crept out into the hall. I stole my way down the staircase, blindly groping the banister in the dark. A cordless phone hung on the kitchen wall. I slid it out of its cradle and dialed 411.
"Four-one-one for Heavenly Hills, Arizona," the operator said.
I hung up. It's not like I could have stayed on the line for a chat.
I retreated into the red room and drew maps in my schoolbooks. I thought if I could retrace the route from Angel Falls to Heavenly Hills, only backwards, I could get Danny and me to Nettlebush. The problem with that plan was that I was really bad with directions. An actual road map would have been a lot more helpful. Mr. Buthrop's study didn't have one. I checked while he and his wife were sleeping.
Breakfast the following morning was an uncomfortable affair. The Buthrops had an outlandish dining room with one of those hanging crystal chandeliers. Mrs. Buthrop insisted that we all eat together at least once a day, and it looked like her specialty meal was stale cereal. The happy family pretense irritated me more than anything. Danny kept shooting furtive looks my way. I hoped we weren't too obvious.
"Your wardrobe is horrible," Mrs. Buthrop told me. "I'll take you clothes shopping tomorrow!"
She pinned a note to my shirt--like I was five--and sent Danny and me to the street corner for the schoolbus. I watched Danny get on the bus; I watched the bus pull away from the curb. I ripped the note off of my shirt without reading it and walked into town.
First things first: I found the transit bus stop and copied down the timetable in my notebook. The only route on the timetable I was familiar with was Route 60. My next step was to find a convenience store and buy a road map. Unbelievably, I couldn't find a single convenience store in the entire neighborhood. What did these people do when they wanted to buy gum? I guessed Danny and I would have to fly blind. Alright, I thought. If I could figure out how to get to Route 89, I could still bring us back to Nettlebush. I remembered seeing the 89 road sign on the return trips from the pauwaus.
I spent a couple of hours scoping out Heavenly Hills. Trial and error brought me to a train station to the north. A girl in a fedora and sunglasses stood playing the saxophone between platforms. I wasted time reading the train schedules and made sure one of the ticket tellers saw me.
I walked back to the Buthrops' house around three o'clock. I marched inside and straight up the staircase, pretending I had homework. I searched the bathrooms until I found a bottle of peroxide. I stowed the peroxide away in my duffel bag.
"Dinner!" Mrs. Buthrop sang a few hours later.
Mrs. Buthrop prattled about her yoga class at the dinner table and Mr. Buthrop craned his neck at an awkward angle, trying to catch a glimpse of the television screen in the living room. The canned tomatoes were soggy, the canned peas like mush. Danny didn't eat much. I worried at that, but Mrs. Buthrop never noticed.
At night I listened to the radio in the red bedroom. I turned on the Nettlebush radio station; and the pre-recorded sounds of elderberry clapsticks and the double-skin drum very nearly broke my heart in half. Danny came into the room while I was comparing timetables in one of my notebooks. He climbed up on the red bedspread and folded his legs.
"Do you know my dad?" Danny asked.
I smiled apologetically. I shook my head.
"But you're going to take me to him," Danny said suspiciously. "Right?"
I gave him a solemn nod.
"He's the best dad," Danny said. And then he regaled me with tales of their last summer together, how they'd gone crab fishing up north and worn matching baseball caps, how they'd eaten lunch everyday at a restaurant called Old Country Joe's where the waitresses wore pigtails and if you could finish a jumbo banana split, you got it for free. I listened to his stories with an encouraging smile. I knew what it was like to have a good father. I didn't doubt for a second how much Danny missed his.
Danny fell asleep on my bed that night, his mouth halfway open and his legs dangling over the side. I turned off the radio and righted him on the mattress. I tucked the pillow beneath his head, the blanket over his body. I turned off the lamp and curled up at his side.
I waited until Saturday night to make my move. I stole quietly into Danny's bedroom and shook him awake. He rubbed his eyes and pulled the drawstring on his lamp, light flooding the room.
"Are we leaving?" he whispered wondrously.
I showed him my hand, a sticky note stuck to my palm.
Pack some clothes.
Danny crawled out of bed and inched around the room. I left him to his own devices and treaded quietly down the staircase. I took a little money from the Buthrops' cookie jar, the one on top of the refrigerator, and the vase underneath the server. I felt badly about it; but I didn't know how much money Danny and I were going to need on the run.
"I'm here," Danny whispered hoarsely, plucking my elbow. He had changed out of his pajamas and into a bright orange shirt. His backpack hung from his shoulders, weighted and zipped.
My pulse throbbed loudly in my ears. I grabbed Danny's hand and led him across the foyer. I kept thinking: Any minute now, one of them will wake up and catch us.
The front door clicked softly when I unlocked it; the doorknob hissed when I turned it; the door opened and we crossed the threshold and we were outside, the cold air on our faces, the couple upstairs none the wiser.
I pushed the door shut and we ran.
We were breathless when we arrived at the train station. Danny leaned against the column between platforms and I wrote a quick note on my post-it pad. I was already running out of sticky notes.
"Now what?" Danny asked, his voice scratchy.
I gestured for him to follow me. I got in line at the teller's station and waited, scanning the concourse for cameras.
"Next?" the teller said.
We stepped up to the booth. I smiled at the teller and showed her my note.
Two tickets for Newcastle, Wyoming, please.
She gave me a long, weird look. She glanced at Danny and frowned.
"Here you are," she said at last, and slid the tickets across the counter to me. I paid her for the tickets, picked up Danny's hand, and started through the concourse.
"We're riding a train?" Danny whispered to me.
I shook my head.
There were small black cameras mounted above the platform arches. Cameras like those always have blind spots. In this case, the cameras were poised to catch anyone walking up the concourse; walk against the wall and you were invisible.
I pulled Danny aside, and we walked the wall to the men's restroom.
"I don't have to go," Danny said.
I checked and made sure the stalls were all vacant. I wedged my plains flute in the hinges of the restroom door to jam it shut. I fished the bottle of peroxide from the bottom of my duffel bag and turned on the tap in the sink.
Poor Danny. He yelped when I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and shoved his head under the cold water.
Danny straightened up and shot me an angry look in the mirror. I pressed my finger to my lips and jiggled the peroxide bottle. I don't think he really knew what I was trying to tell him; but the second time I bent his head over the sink, he showed me less resistance. I uncapped the peroxide bottle and poured its contents over his scalp. I wasn't as careful as I ought to have been; peroxide splashed all over the backs of my hands and stained them stark white.
I shut off the faucet and Danny sat on the cement floor with his head underneath the air dryer. The restroom door rattled, but held strong. "Goddamn door's locked," I heard a man say on the other side.
Danny studied his reflection in the mirror when his hair had finished drying. "Why am I
blond
?" he cried.
I clapped my hand over his mouth, eyes on the door. The door didn't budge. The man must have left. Good, I thought.
I unzipped Danny's backpack and stuffed a new shirt, a blue one, into his arms. I pointed at a bathroom stall and freed my plains flute from the door. Danny grumbled and locked himself in the stall to change clothes. I tugged off my turtleneck and replaced it with a button-down.
It was after midnight when we made our way to the bus stop. We huddled in the shadows of the arching, grated roof until the night bus pulled up to the curb. The bus' doors gushed open and outward, reminding me of a pop-up book. We climbed on board and I left change in the driver's receptacle.
"Cool," Danny said. He charged to the very back of the bus and sat on his knees. I sat next to him and opened my notebook, double-checking the timetable.
So this was it, I thought. I didn't know what would happen once we made our way to Nettlebush. But I knew this: We belonged in our homes. It had taken sixteen years for me to find my home. I didn't care how many times the cops came and dragged me off; I'd run away every time. As for Danny...I only hoped his father knew a lawyer. Maybe Mrs. Red Clay could help them out.
"You can tell Wovoka he sent a good one," Danny said.