“Too bad,” I breathed. My mind was full of trains racing across great expanses under the sky, how exciting that would be compared to meandering and doubling back along this slow road west.
Dad rolled his pencil around in his fingers in silence, but Mom suddenly chimed in, turning to us with the wrench in her hands. “I wouldn’t say that. You never know which way things turn out is for the best.” She sounded a little like Grandma. “Maybe it’s nicer that the world moves at a slower pace than it would have with all those fast trains. Maybe it’s nicer that the west stayed the way it was.”
Dad raised his eyebrows, pleased. “Your mom is an optimist.”
“There’s nothing foolish about optimism,” Mom said, tucking her ponytail into the back of her sweater to get it out of the way, then turning back to her work.
It made me think of something Mr. Morrigan back at Upper Maine Academy said about the industrial revolution. He said that if it weren’t for the monsters tearing everything apart and slowing down the rise of all the machinery, we’d live in a totally different world. He said that the industrial revolution, which promised so much change and order in the world, got sort of cut in half—in the cities it thrived, but in most places it didn’t. “Take Mitsubishi for example,” he said.
Mitsubishi is a Japanese company, founded in the late 1800s to build ships. As the company grew, they started making steel and glass, too. Factories cropped up in Tokyo and London and New York, but it wasn’t long before these were invaded by poltergeists, and most of the plants had to be shut down in the end. Now there’s only the factory in Tokyo, and it takes forever for them to ship their products all over the world.
Actually I’m surprised I even remember Mr. Morrigan talking about it since I spent most of that class nibbling on paper to see what it would do to me, and making a list of people who annoy me. (Teachers always write on my report card that I’m very verbal and smart, but lazy, and that I spend too much time goofing off. Maybe I am a bit smart, but since I can’t see into anyone else’s brain for a comparison, I really can’t say for sure.)
* * *
Anyway, back to sitting on the tracks, watching my mom work. My dad was smiling at her back—one of his rare smiles, which are so nice because they look like glaciers melting.
When I asked my mom why she fell in love with my dad (when she joked that he just got really lucky), she also said something I didn’t understand at the time: “His smiles were so rare. He reminded me of Mr. Darcy.” Apparently Mr. Darcy is a book character who’s rich but always in a bad mood, which Millie says is appealing to adult women.
Finally, Dad brushed the road dust from his jeans and stood up, heading over to help Mom finish up.
Oliver was still standing beside the trailer, and I walked up to him. I realized now why he was holding the box of doughnuts: He was gingerly, carefully feeding them to Daisy through the window, and also humming to her. She had her face pressed up against the opening, tilting her head this way and that as he hummed. Her sharp teeth flashed as she chewed, and her black eyes still gave me the creeps, but for the moment she was surprisingly calm and docile.
Oliver looked up at me as I approached, his hair sticking straight up. I wonder in what alternative universe Oliver’s hair ever lies down flat. “I’ve been teaching her ‘Hotel California,’ ” he said. “It was my dad’s favorite. She can almost hum it, but it sounds pretty bad.”
We’ve noticed a few things about Daisy over the past few days. She likes music, sugar, and meat. She is especially curious about Oliver and always gets quiet and watchful when he’s near, staring at him through the window. Most of the time she’s either completely silent, or whimpering forlornly, but every once in a while we’ll just be sitting calmly, almost forgetting about her, and she’ll let out an ear shattering roar that almost knocks us out of our seats and reminds us of what she really is, and how she’d eat any one of us if she ever got out. The other day at a gas station a dog wandered past, and she nearly knocked the trailer over trying to get out and grab it, thrusting her arm out the window and ripping off what was left of the screen.
“I feel bad for taking her away from her babies,” Oliver said as I stood next to him and took one of the doughnuts for myself. I didn’t point out the obvious, that sasquatches had taken his parents away from him.
But Oliver seemed to read my mind. “I’m not trying to pretend Daisy isn’t a vicious creature. It’s not that I’m not angry. It’s just . . .” He touched the faded scar on his cheek gently. “I don’t want everything my mom taught me to disappear. Remember I told you what she said about blaming animals for their natures? She used to say there’s no place in the wilderness for holding a grudge. She said you have to make peace with the danger in the world . . . that it’s the circle of life and all that.”
I glanced up at the Cloud, pretty far behind us today, the most vicious creature I could think of (even though it isn’t really a creature at all), and then said, “I couldn’t do that. I’m not very peaceful.”
Oliver laughed, his green eyes getting all squinty. “No. You’re kind of fiery.” He pushed the last doughnut into the window, and then backed up and looked at me, turning serious again. “I just want to be able to accept the bad things, and see the good things too. Daisy isn’t all bad.”
We both looked up at the window. Daisy gazed out at us with her head tilted sideways and a doughnut sticking halfway out of her mouth, making little grunts of pleasure. Her eyes were penetratingly dark, like big black marbles.
“Anyway,” Oliver went on, “I think we’re all doing our best. Even the monsters.”
I don’t think, upon further reflection, that Oliver wants to forget his parents as much as he thinks he does.
Once all the doughnuts were gone, Daisy ducked back out of sight and started whimpering softly. It’s as if even when she’s content, she’s sad, too. I know this is a weird thing to write, but I can’t help thinking that in a way, she and Oliver are a little alike—both sad, both missing their families, both a little wild inside, and faraway even though they’re right here. I think Daisy is like Oliver’s heart in animal form.
* * *
The Trinidad has roared to life and we’ve all climbed in. I’m at the table by the window, and we want to make it another twenty miles on this dirt road before we stop for the night, even though it’s already dark.
It’s helpful that the land has gotten flat. I wish there were a McDonald’s or shops along the way, but instead the night’s growing inky around us and you can go hours without seeing any lights. So many stars are popping out above us it seems you could almost dip your fingers up there and come out with a handful of diamonds.
November 11th
Mom says we’re in “the heart of the plains.”
The miles seem endless these days. The crickets are so loud—even during the day—and the grasshoppers twirl up and down out of the fields and all over the place as we pass. The smell of dry grass has filled the Winnebago. We’ve all been reading from Mom’s library, and I’ve been keeping myself occupied by expanding my good-luck-charm wall from my bunk to all over the camper: taping up feathers and stones (and even one tiny bird’s nest) I’ve found at stops along the side of the road.
We’re a happy group this afternoon, believe it or not. Even Millie has abandoned her fortress for our company. I think we’ve all discovered that it’s actually kind of nice to just be quiet and watch the scenery go by.
Every hour it seems there are more rocks littering our path. It’s getting harder and harder to determine which way is the actual road and which is just flat land or dry riverbeds, and yesterday we had to swerve around a tree growing right in the middle of our path. The Trinidad is covered in a thick layer of dust, and we’re missing three hubcaps because at night when we sleep, animals come out of the fields and sparse woods and steal whatever’s not tightly bolted down.
Still, it’s hard to ignore the beauty outside our windows. It feels like the landscape in my br
ain has grown, like I am bigger inside. There used to be only blank space in my mind beyond Cliffden . . . some ideas of other places I’d heard of . . . but now there’s the Crow’s Nest and the Smokies and Arkansas and the fields around us right now that seem to go on forever.
It helps that I’ve been trusting my dad more than I used to. I’ve started to feel like he’s really looking out for us. Maybe he’s even like that father dragon who broke my arm, who was looking after his baby.
Other than that there isn’t much to say these days. I think I’m running out of material, and I don’t think that’s supposed to happen with writers. So I wonder if I’ll ever be a real writer at all.
November 16th
BIG TEX’S CIRCUS AND MONSTER BAZAAR.
We sat parked in a dusty lot, looking at the ramshackle, torn circus tent that stood at the side of the dirt road. We’d been seeing signs for Big Tex’s for the past several miles, but now that we were here it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. The billboards had shown a gleaming red-and-white big top surrounded by crowds and full of smiling animals peeking out through the front flaps. This place looked more like a flea market on its last legs.
“I have some business advice for Big Tex,” Mom said. “He needs to go where there’s some actual business.”
“This place is a dump,” Millie put in.
Sam pressed his hands against the window and peered out for a moment, then crawled back into Millie’s bunk, and Oliver—sitting at the dining table and looking up from one of my dad’s books on meteorology—somehow managed to get quieter, if that’s possible.
A sign at the entrance of the tent said CLOSED, but Mom and Dad unhooked their seat belts and got out of the RV. Curiosity overcoming our disappointment, Oliver, Millie, and I followed (Sam went back to sleep). We crossed the parking lot in a scraggly line, and Mom lifted one dirty, frayed corner of the tent entrance and walked inside. Before he went in behind her, Oliver threw a look back in the direction of Daisy’s trailer, which was silent. I don’t know if it was because she was sleeping, or because she sensed what we had in store for her.
The first thing that struck me was the stench: It smelled as if hundreds of animals had all been pooping in one place—and then I realized, that was exactly what it was. A man in a cowboy hat was shoveling manure at the far side of the tent and raking it over with dirt. We all covered our noses except Mom and Dad. I guess they were trying to be polite.
“Hello?” Mom called. “We’re looking for Big . . . Tex?” The cowboy didn’t even look in our direction, he just laid his shovel against a post and disappeared under a flap of the tent.
Peering around, we walked along a row of cages that lined the outer ring. There were lions, monkeys, a gorilla, several sasquatches crouched in low metal pens staring at us with dull black eyes, a tiny aquarium of goldfish, and one small, very sad-looking pygmy unicorn lying with her legs curled underneath her on some dirty hay. I’d never seen a unicorn in person, and I’d always wanted to, but this one only made me feel heavy and sad: Her white fur was matted and covered in dirt, and she only glanced at us listlessly for a second before going back to sleep.
“Is she sick?” I asked. But no one answered me. Oliver held to the edge of the cage for a moment as if he didn’t want to let it go.
“This isn’t right,” he said.
There was a collection of dinosaur bones lying on a table near the center of the tent. A sign said you could pay two extra dollars to touch them, then went on to say that dinosaurs lived sixty-five million years ago and that they were distant cousins of dragons, and that the pterodactyl was basically a half-dinosaur, half-dragon hybrid. Millie reached out to touch a pterodactyl femur, and I reached forward too, but Mom pulled us back—scared, no doubt, of having to shell out four dollars.
“Big Tex?” she called out.
We’d made the complete circle and come to a standstill next to one of the pillars that held up the tent. “Hello?” Millie called from behind the shirt hem she was holding up to her nose to block the smell.
Suddenly, the pillar moved. We all leaped at the same moment. The whole tent fluttered and deflated slightly as the pillar bent and lowered, and we realized that it wasn’t a pillar at all, but a leg wearing brown pants.
An enormous figure was, in less than a moment, kneeling beside us, staring at us with eyes as big as our TV set back home.
“Giant,” I whispered.
“Thanks, that’s helpful,” Millie replied.
* * *
A note on giants from fifth-grade social studies: The first giant was confirmed to exist by a gold dynamiter in California in 1853, who captured it with one of the early cameras. (People had been spotting them for hundreds of years, but there’d never been any proof until then.) They live mostly in the west, and aren’t particularly fond of regular-size people, though occasionally they come to towns and cities looking for work (usually in construction, for obvious reasons). Several giants have gotten rich by owning the rights to some gold mines in California and Nevada, and the really rich ones live in gigantic and remote mansions they’ve built for themselves.
* * *
As you can imagine, we were surprised to see a giant running a circus in Arizona.
“Excuse me, sir?” Mom said. “Big Tex?”
The giant glared at us, frowning. Blond scraggly hair fell to either side of its ears, though it was bald on top. Its lips were like two big pink rafts. Its breath smelled like the rest of the circus.
“Or, um, I mean,” Mom fumbled, “miss? We have a . . . sasquatch . . . we’d like to sell.”
Suddenly there was a shuffling noise behind us, and loud, hearty laughter.
“I’m over here.”
A man emerged through a slit in the tent walls, smiling as he approached us. He had a brown beard and a red-and-white vest stained with dirt. “I’m Big Tex. This is just one of my exhibits. Did she scare you?”
We all nodded. We hadn’t noticed until then that the giant was chained to a post in the ground.
“We have a sasquatch to sell. . . .” My mom faltered. “We saw you were closed but . . .”
Big Tex looked as if he were sizing us up, his big friendly smile not reaching his eyes. “We travel a fair amount. But this is our home base. We’re just making some repairs at the moment.” He glanced over at his collection of sasquatches—still staring out of their cages at us. “Well, I’m pretty full up, but let’s see him.”
We all walked outside into the sun and to the trailer. Big Tex peered in at Daisy, then pulled back and squinted at us, still wearing the same broad, fake smile.
“I don’t really need another sasquatch, and I can’t pay much. But it looks like he’s in good condition. People like to be a little frightened, and so many of mine have lost their spark. I’ll take him off your hands for, say . . . two hundred dollars.”
Millie let out a small whimper of delight. And I have to admit, the idea of two hundred dollars sounded like enough money to save us from having to sell our hair (since we’re not allowed to touch Grandma’s money), which excited me more than I would have thought. But it also made me feel a little sick, like someone had dropped pebbles down my throat. I was consciously avoiding glancing at Oliver, but suddenly he spoke and we all turned to look at him.
“It’s a she,” he said. He was clutching his fists together and staring at his feet.
Big Tex shrugged carelessly. “Makes no difference to me. People will pay to see either.”
We all stood quietly in awkward silence.
“Make it two twenty-five,” my mom finally said. She was tugging at her ponytail, which she only does when she’s agitated.
Big Tex made a slight bow, and he and Mom shook on it. “I’ll be right back with cash.”
We watched his figure retreat into the tent. Behind us, as if she knew what was happening—even though that was impossible—Daisy began to whimper.
“She’s a dangerous beast,” my dad said to no one in particular. “We can?
??t keep her with us. And we need the money.” But his eyes, behind his glasses, were guilty.
Meanwhile Mom clasped and unclasped her hands, tugging at her turquoise earrings.
“Big Tex is the beast,” Oliver said.
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Mom said.
We all stood looking at each other—or rather, barely looking at each other. The silence stretched around us and changed into something embarrassing.
“Let’s go before he comes back,” Dad suddenly said.
“Yes!” Mom gasped in relief.
We must have all been thinking it, because without another word we were all hurrying toward the Trinidad as if our lives depended on it, and Mom threw open the side door for us to pile inside.
Big Tex was just emerging from the tent as Dad climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. The Trinidad rattled to life. He slammed on the gas and we launched forward.
* * *
I don’t know why it felt like such an escape—Big Tex didn’t chase us; he just stood there waving a wad of bills in the air behind us. Maybe it was something inside ourselves we were escaping. All I know is that I felt giddy as we picked up speed on the craggy, bumpy road, the circus tent shrinking in the distance behind us. Everyone was beaming in relief, even Millie. And in the passenger seat, Dad let out a triumphant laugh.
“Did you see his face?” Mom said happily.
“Dad,” Millie said, punching Dad on the shoulder and making him wince, “I didn’t know you had it in you.” She raised her eyebrows at me, as if to say some things could still surprise her. It was like, for a moment, we were all a team.
Oliver sat on the couch, looking out the window. I knew without a doubt he was thinking of all the animals we’d left behind.
“If I ever make it back this way, I’m setting them all free,” he said.