CHAPTER 18
I Am a Yo-yo
I took the apron. A dark red streak near the pocket glistened. I sniffed it. It was definitely blood.
“The moment I saw you hide in the grain bin, I figured we were all right,” Frankie whispered. “Mr. Ganto and I got out of the barn and did a quick look around. There’s no sign of Tom. Somebody or something may have gotten him; he may have been chased by an animal; maybe he had an accident. The thing is, we can’t call out for him; otherwise, those goons will hear us. If he’s someplace close, but injured, he knows he can’t call out, either.”
“We have to find him!”
“Mr. Ganto wants me to use the Shagbolt and take us back to our own time. He’s got it up in the tree with him. If Tom is close enough to hear it, he’ll come back with us.”
“And if he’s not?”
“He must still be in range. Not much time has passed.”
“What if he’s unconscious?”
Frankie blinked. “I honestly don’t know. For the Shagbolt to work, I think the conscious mind has to hear the notes and somehow process them. Being unconscious may be a deal breaker.”
“I’m not leaving without Tom,” I informed her. “He’s my best friend.” I looked up into the tree, where I could see Mr. Ganto’s face gazing down at us. “And I’m not leaving until I’ve checked out a riverboat called the Buckeye Beauty. Dwina’s and Seth’s lives may depend on it. Mine, too.”
“Excuses,” said Mr. Ganto.
“I’ll give you one more excuse,” I replied, thinking clearly for the first time since butting heads with Zack. “If we play the Shagbolt now, there are three kids tied up in that barn who will hear it and go back to the future with us. Wouldn’t that complicate things?”
Ganto gave me a sour look, then nodded.
“I had forgotten all about them,” Frankie admitted. “Taking ourselves back to the future with us would mess things up royally.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’d hate to have to share my toothbrush. Even with myself.”
Gunshots resounded from inside the barn, announcing the death of an innocent flashlight.
“So what do we do?” asked Mr. Ganto.
I shook Tom’s apron and caught the quarter as it fell from the pocket.
“We can ask the I-Ching where Tom is,” I said, tossing the coin in the air. It came down tails. I picked up a twig and drew a broken line in the dirt.
“I got the impression you didn’t believe in the I-Ching,” said Frankie.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. After a moment I added, “About a lot of things.”
Five more coin flips and we had a hexagram that looked like this:
I dug the I-Ching book out of the apron, slipped it from the Ziploc bag, and looked it up. It turned out to be the forty-eighth hexagram.
HEXAGRAM 48
THE WELL.
RESOURCES. SUSTENANCE. A HOLE IN THE GROUND CAN EITHER TAKE LIFE OR SUSTAIN IT. WATCH YOUR STEP. STAY GROUNDED. YOU CAN SEE STARS FROM THE BOTTOM OF A WELL IN BROAD DAYLIGHT, BUT ONLY IF YOU REMEMBER TO LOOK UP.
“Is there a well around here?” I asked.
“Haven’t seen one,” rumbled Ganto. “Odd.”
“Where would an old-time farm have its well?” I asked Frankie, as if it were the kind of information she might have.
She shook her head and guessed. “Near the house?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But probably nowhere near the outhouse, right?”
I pointed. South of the farmhouse was a tiny building with a missing door; a bench with butt-sized holes in it was just visible inside. I remembered Tom once telling me that before the invention of toilet paper, one of the things people used was corncobs. It was the kind of useless but interesting fact he was always coming out with. I suddenly missed him a lot.
“So maybe on the north side?” said Frankie.
“But not too far from the barn,” I reasoned. “Cows and horses need water, too. So somewhere there?” I pointed to what I thought was the most likely area, glanced to make sure neither Bert nor Zack was in our line of sight, and headed for it.
The area was overgrown with weeds. Thistles scratched at my bare legs. Frankie and I fanned out, looking for some trace of a well. Mr. Ganto crouched low behind Frankie, trying to be inconspicuous.
I stubbed my toe on a low rock wall and almost fell headfirst into a hole in the ground. At one time the wall had circled the hole, but most of the wall had fallen in, leaving an unprotected pit that some safety-minded person had placed wooden planks across. The planks had rotted, and it looked as though someone had recently fallen through.
“Tom?” I said his name softly, not wanting the slave catchers to hear me. I moved an unbroken plank to one side, allowing more light into the hole. A big hand reached around me and cleared the well’s mouth completely. Mr. Ganto sidled past me to get a better look.
“Bro?” said the well.
Tom was at the bottom, knee-deep in water, looking forlornly upward.
“Are you all right?”
“I lost my book!”
“We have it,” I assured him. He didn’t appear to be broken.
“I can’t climb out—the walls are too slick!”
“I’ll come down for you,” I said, looking around, trying to figure out how I might do that without getting trapped myself.
“It’s a good thing you’re dressed as a yo-yo,” said Mr. Ganto.
“Dressed as a what?” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly.
He picked me up, held me above the well, and dropped me.
“Yo-yo,” he repeated.
I fell, spinning, as the rope around my waist uncoiled. Mr. Ganto was gripping the rope’s end, and as I realized what was happening, I hoped he had it tightly. The wall of the well flashed by around me, and I caught the rope before it ran out, lurching, straightening, and dropping the final few feet at a speed that was a little less stomach churning. I wound up dangling about a foot above Tom’s head.
“I was running, looking behind me to see if they had seen me—” he began.
“And you fell through the boards,” I finished for him. “I get it. Grab my hands.”
“I cut myself on the edge of one of the pots I was banging.”
“Bad?”
“It took a while to stop bleeding.”
The rope jiggled impatiently.
“Give me the hand that didn’t get cut.”
I used both hands to clutch the arm he extended, grabbing him above the elbow with one and tightly by the wrist with the other. The place on my arm that Dwina had bandaged throbbed painfully.
“Ready?” I asked him, but before he could answer we were ascending, Mr. Ganto rapidly hauling up the rope. We were over the edge of the well in moments.
“We are too exposed here,” said Ganto, setting us down on our feet. He turned and loped away, heading for the cover of a grove of trees. Frankie flapped her apron at us, as if we were barnyard geese, and we stumbled after him.
“You were in a well,” muttered Frankie a few minutes later as she bandaged Tom’s hand with a strip of cloth she had ripped from the bottom of my dress, “but you couldn’t take a moment to wash your cut?”
“I didn’t know how clean the water was,” answered Tom. Quite reasonably, I thought.
We were safely away from the barn and Killbreath’s gang, concealed amid pines with low-hanging branches. Mr. Ganto sat cross-legged on a bed of pine needles, the Shagbolt case open on his lap, as though he fully expected the Time Trombone to be used at any moment.
“Yo-yo?” I said to him. “Was that supposed to be a joke?”
“Yes.” He grinned at me with teeth the size of tombstones.
“Mr. Ganto,” explained Frankie, “being from the Pleistocene, has a primitive sense of humor. He likes slapstick. Clever wordplay doesn’t amuse him, and he always looks grave at a pun.”
“I felt my apron fall off as I ran,” said Tom. “I was so afraid I had lost the I-Ching book. But you found it! And my quarter!”
“We used the I-Ching to find you,” Frankie informed him, tying off her bandage and letting his arm drop.
“You did? Which hexagram?”
“The Well,” I said. “Apparently, there isn’t a hexagram called Clumsy Idiot.”
“The Well,” Tom repeated, thumbing through his book. “Did you do the Morse?”
“I don’t know Morse,” I reminded him. “And hiding from slave catchers seemed more important.”
“Here it is,” said Tom, finding the page and studying it, moving his lips silently as he worked to decode it. Then he went, “Ha!”
“‘Ha’? What, ‘ha’?”
“This time it’s a message for you.”
“Me? Like, me, personally? What?”
“Two dots, followed by a dash and a dot, then a dot and a dash, followed by another dash and dot, ending with a single dot.”
“Spelling?”
“Inane.”
“Inane?”
“That’s one of the two words you asked for, isn’t it? I can’t remember what the other one was.”
“It was stupid.”
“That’s probably why I can’t remember it.”
“How is that possible?” My voice went up an octave. “How could this three-thousand-year-old I-Ching thing contain, in Morse code, a word I specifically asked for?”
“Apparently it takes requests.”
“Are you saying it’s watching us?”
“What’re you, crazy?”
“Then how—”
“It’s listening to us.” Tom gave me a look as if that explained everything.
“Are you going to spend the rest of the day in your underwear?” Frankie asked. She handed my clothes back to me. I gave Tom an exasperated look, then wiggled into my jeans and sweatshirt.
“And the dress,” Frankie reminded me.
“You ripped it,” I said accusingly, showing her the ragged place where she had gotten Tom’s bandage.
“So?”
“I don’t want to go around in tatters. What will people think?”
“You have changed.” Frankie nodded approval, as if she thought I was serious. But I put on the dress and jammed the bonnet back on my head.
“Time to go,” said Mr. Ganto, lifting the Shagbolt from its case and extending it toward Frankie. “It would be best if we arrived at the carnival shortly after you borrowed the golf cart.”
“We can’t go back yet,” responded Frankie, putting one hand gently on the trombone but not taking it. “We have to go to the town docks and check out a boat called the Buckeye Beauty. There’s a chance it may explode, killing one of Rose’s ancestors, meaning Rose would cease to exist.”
I got a sudden warm feeling, realizing Frankie was concerned about me.
“But he is standing right there,” murmured Mr. Ganto. “Obviously, whatever you fear did not happen.”
“It may not have happened because we are about to prevent it,” Frankie explained, and I felt the start of a headache. I had trouble following the ins and outs of time travel. “If we leave now, it won’t be prevented, and Rose may silently vanish away. Or maybe pop like a soap bubble.”
“Excuse me?” The idea was scary.
“If Dwina dies before her time,” Frankie continued, “it could cause other changes to the future, even more serious than the loss of Rose. We might return to a future just as bleak as the one in which the Killbreaths are in control. Rose had a powerful premonition. Romani don’t ignore premonitions! We might have to save Dwina to make sure there’s still a future for us to go back to.”
“Your father sent me after you,” Mr. Ganto reminded Frankie. “I am supposed to return you to him as soon as possible. He is my boss, and my friend. We should go.”
“You didn’t, by any chance, talk to my mother about it?”
“She was unavailable.”
“Of course she was. But you’re my friend, too, you know. That should count for something!”
Mr. Ganto scowled a scowl the size of a punch bowl. “All right, then. Let the book decide,” he said.
“What book?” I asked, even though I knew full well. The I-Ching was beginning to creep me out big-time.
Mr. Ganto waved his hand at If You Have an I-Ching—Scratch!, which was still open in Tom’s hands. “Toss your coin. Ask if we should continue here or go home. I will abide by the answer.”
Tom nodded agreement. Six tosses later we were looking at yet another hexagram. I recognized it as the one Tom had on his sweatshirt.
HEXAGRAM 32
PERSEVERANCE.
STAY THE COURSE. RIDE IT OUT.
ENDURE. CONSTANCY IS A VIRTUE.
PRAYERS ARE ANSWERED IN THE ORDER IN WHICH THEY ARE RECEIVED (YOU CAN IMAGINE THE BACKLOG).
“Sounds to me like we stay,” said Frankie.
“It’s three dots, followed by a dot and a dash,” said Tom, “followed by two dashes and a dot, ending in a final dot. That would be an S, and an A… it spells the word sage.”
“What?” I asked. “Those smelly green flakes my mother sprinkles in her turkey stuffing?”
“It also means ‘wise,’” said Frankie, “as in ‘sage advice.’ The I-Ching is saying we would be wise to persevere.”
We all looked to Mr. Ganto. He slipped the trombone back in its case, snapped the latches, and stood.
“Let’s go find your riverboat,” he said.