Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous (17 page)

He's getting mad. The old man could have hung on just a little longer, couldn't he? He's held on for eighty-two years; what's four or five more? Didn't he have a lot to live for?
He had me
. “He—had—me!” Jay gasps out. All those years of disappointment—Dad a nerd, Uncle Troy a mental case—waiting for a son who could run. Jay's the one. He's the one who puts that spark in his grandpa's eye, everybody says so. “Thinks you hung the moon,” Geemaw tells him.

But that spark is gone—disappeared—like Poppy scattered it and stamped it and even peed on it to make sure it was totally, completely, 100 percent gone. And never, ever, ever to light again. Nothing left. It looked like Poppy, a little, but Poppy was gone. Ran off and left him when he could have held on for just a few more years. Jay hates it. Hates it, hates it, hates—

“I hate you, Poppy!”

Somehow, he finds himself on his hands and knees. The ground is still hard-packed and cold from winter. His fingers curl, gripping the earth, and next minute, he's sobbing like a girl. The earth tilts sideways, taking Jay with it.

Who
are
you?

Who am I? You knew me best of all—I need you to tell
me
!

Minutes pass, or maybe hours, while he's curled up like a grub worm, and the wind mutters
who
are
you
who
are
you
who…you…
.

After a while, he sits up, dry as paper, recognizing that he's lost.

Should he go back, or forward?

The sun is slipping, and a cold breeze rattles the leaves on the oak trees. Rattles his teeth too—he's been shivering for a while now. The path has gradually become narrower and bushier, but it's still a path. He figures he's covered at least four miles from town, over halfway home. Forward it is. He pulls himself up and starts out at a trot, trying to guess his direction by the position of the sun. If this is the old railroad bed, it can't get too far from the highway, can it? A faint, occasional hum of tires on his right seems to bear out that guess.

But as he jogs on, and a half-mile slowly stretches to a whole mile and even more slowly becomes two, he's beginning to wonder. Especially now that the sun is gone and the air has turned cold and he has only a hoodie over his T-shirt and maybe ten minutes of twilight left. The days have been pretty warm but the nights are cold, especially clear nights that crumple the grass with frost. Like this. Listening hard, he can no longer hear the highway.

They'll be looking for him. Should he stop? That's what you're supposed to do when lost in the woods—hole up somewhere and wait to be found. But his legs feel so heavy. If he stopped, he might never get started again. He'd freeze. As long as he's moving, he can't freeze…

The wind shifts, carrying a scent of wood smoke to his nose. Smoke = fire = warmth = house! There must be a house nearby, and they'd probably have a phone, and he could make a call and bring this little story to an end.
Sorry, Mom, sorry, Dad, I'll never do it again; okay if you ground me since I don't really want to go anywhere.

He follows his nose along some kind of path…opening up to some kind of…

Camp: a pile of coals raked in a pile to hold their warmth, a shack or else just a lean-to knocked together with scrap lumber, a rolled-up sleeping bag, a knife in a scabbard resting on a sawed-off tree stump—

Something touches his shoulder.

He jerks to one side and barely sees the claw of a skinned animal hanging in a tree. The animal, in spite of being very dead, growls at him.

He jumps back, and another claw rakes his cheek, knocking off his glasses. He doesn't stick around.

A burst of adrenaline propels him down the old roadbed. He forgets about pacing himself or in-through-the-nose-out-through-the-mouth; he just flat-out runs and very shortly runs smack into the very thing he'd been looking for all this time: a real road.

A gravel road, anyway. It's not the highway, but the hum of asphalt is coming to him a little clearer now. Maybe he's close. His legs keep moving, even though his lungs are begging them to stop and every breath seems to rip a new one in his chest.

Then he comes to a crossroads, and there it is.

It looks familiar yet strange. That's because he's never seen it from this angle, in near-darkness.

It's the bus shed on Farm Road 152. So now he knows where he is.

The sight of one familiar object crowds out all his other senses; it's not only all he sees but all he hears, smells, touches, and tastes as he crosses the narrow road and collapses on the bench. Then he pulls his feet up and leans against the wall and does nothing but breathe. Blood is drying on his cheek where something scratched him—a tree branch, he knows now, not an animal. It snatched off his glasses, and maybe he should be glad it didn't poke out an eye.

The voices come to him slowly. It's a still night, so clear he can feel the stars. Sounds carry like taps on a crystal glass. He remembers there's a house nearby; it sounds as though the people might be standing outside on the porch or in the driveway. Both are women's voices, one louder than the other. “…can't go on like this forever” are the first words he hears.

It sounds angry. It also sounds familiar.

Then shouting, back and forth.

“How long has he been here?”

“He's not here!”

“Who do you think you're kidding?”

“He's
not
here
! Now leave us alone!”

“If I leave now, I'm not coming back!”

“Fine!” A door slams, a motor roars, an old pickup truck zooms past in a spray of gravel. His brain is quivering from exhaustion or else he'd know who it was. He's sure he would know, but for now…

It would have been simple to knock on the door and ask to use the phone. But he doesn't. A haze of strong feeling seems to hover around the house, and he's too tired to deal with it. So before his knees freeze in place, he hauls himself to his feet and trudges uphill toward the highway.

They're looking for him. Maybe the first car that passes will be driven by somebody who's keeping an eye out. And sure enough, he's been walking the shoulder for only a couple of minutes when a vehicle slows down, stops, backs up.

It's his sister Julie, who was supposed to pick him up at Sunset Hills hours ago. Better her, he thinks, than his mother, who would probably have burst into hysterical tears at the sight of him. Even though it wouldn't be long before she tore into him for losing another pair of glasses and those things don't grow on trees.

But what does Julie do—Julie, who's chased him, tripped him, yelled at him, and sat on him? Burst into hysterical tears.

Igor doesn't want to be famous. He just wants to be noticed. And that's not as simple as it seems, because he has a lot to hide.

Fame means your picture on the cover of a magazine or showing up on
Hollywood
Nights
more than once. Or being the subject of a manhunt on one of those twenty-four-hour news channels his mother is always watching, which doesn't help her peace of mind.

Igor just wants to be able to go anywhere and have people notice him:
Who's that new guy? That's Igor. Started hanging out here a couple of weeks ago. Funny guy. Everybody likes him. Hey, Igor! Somebody wants to meet you.

He'd been to four different schools by the time he got through first grade—which isn't quite as bad as it sounds because it took him two years to finish first grade. That's one of his secrets: nobody knows he is really twelve years old instead of eleven. His mother changed his birth year at the second kindergarten he went to and never changed it back. She had her reasons—still does. And Igor can get away with it because he looks younger than his real age. But another advantage is he would have seemed even dumber in sixth grade than he does in fifth.

His grades still suck, though. “There're a lot more important things than getting good grades,” his mother says in between report cards. “Like you being a good person. If you turn out to be good, Jamie, I don't care if you're smart.”

That didn't come out quite right, but he thinks he knows what she means.

She calls him Jamie, not Igor, because Robert James Price Sanderson is his real name. That's the second thing about him that most people don't know or soon forget. When he was in his first kindergarten, one of the teacher assistants thought he looked like he belonged in an old vampire movie because of his pale skin and dark hair that comes to a point in the middle of his forehead. So she called him Igor—who is actually a character in
Frankenstein
, not
Dracula
—and soon everybody else did too. And somehow the name traveled with him. At the beginning of every school year, all his teachers know his real name. By the end, they've forgotten it. When he graduates from high school, if he ever does, they'll probably announce him as Igor Sanderson, and there it would be on his diploma, in fancy letters.

But to graduate from high school, he'll have to get through fifth grade, and it isn't looking too good right now. Achievement tests are coming up in April, and just the thought of it makes his bones feel like Jell-O. “It doesn't mean you're stupid, Jamie,” his mother said after he brought home his last report card. “It just means you don't take tests so good. And I never did either. There's nothing wrong with your brain.”

“Are you sure?” All those Cs and Ds (and one B, for P.E.) stacked up like kids' blocks in a tower he couldn't knock down.

“Sure I'm sure. Your brain's better than mine.”

“Better than Dad's?”

“I don't know about that. There's nothing your dad can't do.”

“I mean my real dad.”

Her hand shot out and slapped him—
whack
!

One second, that hand was holding up the bottom of his baby sister Jade, and the next it was stinging his cheek. Then it snaked around his neck and pulled him against her soft trembling shoulder. “I'm sorry, honey. But listen, you've got to stop saying those things, you hear? I can't tolerate it.”

He knows that, and he also knows he'll say one of those things again sometime. Something about his dad, that is. It's like he can't help it, and that thought bothers him even more than the thought of three days of achievement tests.

That's the third thing people don't know about him: his father is nuts.

Not his stepdad, Al Sanderson. But his real father, Bobby Price. Igor doesn't remember Bobby Price, or maybe he does. Thousands of people do, because for a little while, nine years ago, Bobby Price was very famous. And so was Igor.

His mom, Vickie Price, had split up with Bobby because he was abusive and unpredictable. They had one little boy, two and a half years old. All three lived in Fresno, California. One day, when Vickie was at work, Bobby Price walked into Wee Treasures Day Care Center with a handgun, pointed it at the day care ladies and kids, threatened to shoot anybody who stopped him, grabbed his little boy, dashed out, and took off in a stolen car.

The little boy was Igor, of course. He sort of wishes he could remember it. But then, maybe it's a good thing he can't.

Is Igor dumber than his dad? Bobby Price had done something very stupid but was pretty smart in how he went about it. He drove the stolen car four blocks, allowing bystanders to get a good look at it, before darting into an abandoned garage where his own car, a 2004 Chevy Cavalier, was parked. Then he transferred Igor to the Cavalier, made him curl up on the floor, threw a blanket over him, and motored north for several miles before doubling back and taking a series of county roads headed toward Mexico. In this way, stopping only to dye Igor's hair blond and his own hair brown, he managed to elude the cops for two and a half days.

It was during that time he got famous—and Igor too, because those twenty-four-hour news channels were showing pictures of them several times a day, along with fuzzy footage from the Little Treasures Day Care security camera and tearful messages from his mother pleading with Bobby Price and anyone who might know their whereabouts to please please
please
return her little boy.

Tips poured in, and most of them weren't any good, but the police were finally able to track down the Cavalier, which Bobby had purchased from a private individual the day before the kidnapping. The cops stopped him in Arizona, at a roadblock only sixty miles from the Mexican border.

Igor, aside from a bad dye job, appeared to be just fine. He was properly buckled into his car seat, with a very wet diaper, a dirty face, and a full tummy. There were no marks on him except for a bad case of diaper rash. Bobby Price had been driving day and night, getting by on short naps and pills, stopping frequently for Chinese fire drills. Igor was probably ready to stop—he still doesn't like road trips.

What Bobby planned to do in Mexico with a little boy to support remained a mystery. He never said, not even during his trial. The trial and conviction and sentencing took several months, during which Vickie Price met Al Sanderson: a veteran, ten years older, steady and boring. Once Bobby was safely locked up in Tanglewood Medium Security Prison, they got married, started having babies, and moved a lot.

Hidden Acres is the longest Igor has lived anywhere—almost eighteen months. He likes it, and so does his mom. She likes her big backyard with the garden and her one-and-a-half-story house surrounded by shade trees that make it hard to see from the road, maybe even from the air. She has met her nearest neighbors and likes the fact that they mind their own business. She loves her family: Big Al and Little Al (now almost six), Samantha (three and a half), baby Jade, and Igor. Staying home most of the time with the door locked and the curtains drawn suits her fine, because she's nervous by nature, and the kidnapping made her much worse.

This has been a rough year, with Big Al's construction business taking him away for weeks at a time. Vickie has locked Igor out of the house twice since school began. The week after Thanksgiving, she set up the Christmas tree and tore it right down again when Big Al called to say he was taking that job in Louisiana. Igor was sent to the principal's office twice during December, and Little Al once, which made their mom grab a handful of receipts out of the kitchen drawer and threaten to take their Christmas presents back. They pretty much lived on macaroni and cheese until Big Al returned the day before Christmas Eve (when they got their tree back, with presents underneath). Since work dried up after the holidays, the rest of winter was okay except for less money, meaning more macaroni and cheese.

Big Al started getting long-distance jobs again in the spring, but lately Vickie's mood has improved with the weather. At least Igor thinks so. So he's not expecting anything amiss on a lovely spring day, buzzing with bees and popping with apple blossoms, when he walks home from the bus and lets himself in to find the living room rearranged. Two armchairs are turned over on their sides to make a fort, and the couch cushions are piled up on top of them. The drapes are on the floor, and a trail of chocolate syrup leads to the kitchen, where Little Al perches on the countertop, shoveling dry beans down the garbage disposal. None of this, Igor knows from experience, is a good sign.

After pulling his brother out of the sink, he goes looking for their mom. She seems to be passed out in her bedroom with the heavy drapes closed. She looks like Sleeping Beauty in a nest of white pillows, her dark hair spread out and coming to a peak over a face that's still pretty when she's not yelling. “Just a migraine,” she whispers to Igor, barely opening her eyes. “Are the girls still asleep? Can you see what Little Al's up to?”

Jade is awake, with a stinky diaper that Igor changes before returning to the kitchen, just in time to stop his brother from turning the disposal on with all those beans still in it. “You're not my boss!” Little Al cries when pulled off the counter for the second time. But he settles down with a Popsicle on the kitchen floor (Jade gets one too, but not red, because the food coloring makes her hyper), and Igor starts scooping beans out of the disposal with a spoon. Also slimy old celery tops and potato peels—and a wad of paper.

It's an envelope, mashed up as though a fist had clenched it and thrust it in the disposal with all its might. One end looks a little chewed, but the other is intact enough to read the return address: Tanglewood Medium Security Prison.

Igor stops breathing for a moment. Here, in his hand, right now, is a letter from his dad.

It's the first one he's ever held or even seen up close. He's heard of them, though. At least three times before. In fact, the only time his mother mentions Bobby Price, it's because of a letter: “Your father found us. We're moving to—” Nevada, Kansas, Oklahoma, here.

His father found him.

It's like an itch, the memory he can't quite remember: himself tucked like a football under an arm while a huge man yells and waves a gun around a room full of little kids all peeing their pants. Followed by a fifty-hour road trip reported by all the major news networks. Sometimes Igor will hear a piece of a song that sounds very familiar, though he can't name it, and he wonders if his dad was playing it over and over on their cross-country run. Or he wonders why the smell of gasoline always hypes him up. Or why he often dreams about skidding sideways in a car.

Something different about this time, though. He's not dreaming, remembering, or guessing—he's got the actual letter in his actual hand.

The envelope looks like it was still sealed when his mom crammed it down the drain and turned the disposal on. He wonders why she stopped before it got all the way chewed up. Maybe because she had second thoughts, or maybe because Little Al put the cat in the dryer and pushed the “on” button, like he had once before.

Whatever—she's down for the count and Igor's holding some kind of communication from Tanglewood Prison, and nobody can stop him from opening it. His thumb hooks under the envelope flap…

And a scream breaks from the family room, where Samantha, just up from her nap, has swiped Jade's Popsicle. Sighing, Igor stuffs the envelope in his pocket and grabs the Popsicle, now crusted with dirt and cat hair picked up while Jade crawled from the kitchen with it. He dashes to the nearest bathroom to wash it off while both girls bawl. Meanwhile, Little Al turns the dishwasher on.

“Jamie!
Please
do something!” his mother calls forlornly from her bedroom.

Igor runs back to the kitchen and separates his brother from the dishwasher (after checking to make sure there's no cat inside). Then he collects Samantha and Jade and sits all three of them at the table for a snack of raisins and graham crackers. He'll probably be responsible for dinner too. That happens every time his mother gets an afternoon migraine. Little Al demands a drink, which makes Samantha want a drink, and after Igor has poured strawberry milk for them and is looking for Jade's sippy cup, Samantha knocks her cup over and freaks out when her graham crackers get soaked.

“Jamie! Please…” moans his mom.

He slams a dishrag on the table, picks up Jade, grabs Little Al by the hand, and dribbling Samantha between his feet like a soccer ball, herds all three of them outside. He puts the baby in her swing and runs for the back door before Little Al catches on. He reaches the door a second before his brother, latches it behind him, and lets Al holler and kick to his heart's content. Then he calls Miranda, whose number is stuck on the refrigerator door with a magnet.

She picks up on the second ring. “Are you busy?” he asks without saying hello.

“No…” She sounds uncertain. He's never called before.

“Could you come over and help me watch the kids? My mom's down with a headache and I've got…a lot of homework. Just for an hour?”

“Oh. Sure!” She sounds so eager he wonders why he never thought of calling her before.

He manages to stop Little Al from kicking all the sand out of Samantha's sandbox just about the time that Miranda arrives with a nylon rope. “Good idea,” he says. “We can tie him to that tree.”

She laughs. “Silly Igor! I want to try something with the rope. But that tree is perfect.” She loops the rope over a low branch of the birch tree in the backyard. Then she dares Little Al to climb up the trunk and rappel down.

“That's cool,” Igor says with real admiration. He kind of wants to try it himself.

Miranda smiles. “I saw it on TV. You know
Treehouse
Family
, that reality show on cable?”