Storm Runners, Page 2

  “What do you mean?”

  “Midget, dwarf,” the man said. “I don’t mind any of them, but dwarf is the appropriate word since I have dwarfism. But the acceptable term if you want to be politically correct is little person.” He patted his head. “L.P. for short.”

  He laughed at his own joke. Chase and his father smiled. Tomás smiled too, but Chase doubted he had gotten the pun.

  “My name’s Marco Rossi,” the man said. “I’m pleased to meet all of you.” He looked at Tomás. “I’m afraid your brother, Arturo, isn’t here. He and the others took off yesterday with a load of animals, but you’re still welcome. In fact, I’m glad to have you. We’re a little shorthanded.”

  “Actually, Tomás and I won’t be around much,” Chase’s father explained. “We need to head to Saint Pete and help prepare for the storm, but Chase will be staying here, and he’s pretty handy.”

  “That’ll increase our manpower by a third, so I’m grateful. Do you like animals, Chase?”

  “Sure, but I don’t know much about cows and horses.”

  Chase didn’t know much about cats and dogs, either. His mother had been allergic to them, so they’d never had any at the house.

  Marco laughed. “You don’t need to know much about cows and horses on this farm.” He looked at the rigs. “What happened to the fifth-wheel?”

  “Hailstorm in Oklahoma.”

  “Hope that doesn’t happen here.”

  “Hurricanes are too warm to produce hail,” Chase’s father pointed out. “Tornadoes are a different story. Twisters and hail go together. The problems with hurricanes are wind, rain, and storm surge.” He looked at Chase. “Ten to three?”

  Chase nodded, though his father was three seconds fast.

  “We better get moving. I want to be in Saint Pete before it shuts down for the night.”

  Tomás jogged over to the semi and fired it up.

  03:10PM

  Within twenty minutes, Tomás and Chase’s father had parked the rigs in one of the buildings, loaded their 4x4s with supplies, and were on their way to Saint Petersburg.

  Chase spent the next hour setting up the Shack & Shop.

  The building was perfect. Concrete floor. Steel struts covered by heavy-gauge aluminum panels. Plenty of electrical receptacles to plug in to. Water. Septic system. The only problem was the heat. It was like the inside of a barbeque. Chase turned up the AC in the fifth-wheel and left. It wasn’t much better outside, but the light breeze dried the sweat on his face and T-shirt.

  After they parked, Marco had needed to hurry off and take care of something. He told Chase to find him somewhere on the grounds when he finished. Chase walked over to the nearest building and opened the door, expecting to see a little person. What he found instead was a girl about his age, his height, feeding a giraffe.

  She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Her long black hair was wet and combed straight back as if she’d just stepped out of the shower.

  “Hi. Dad said you’d be by. I’m Nicole Rossi.”

  She looked at Chase for a moment, then started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “The look on your face. Are you surprised to see a giraffe, or are you surprised that I’m Marco Rossi’s daughter?”

  Chase smiled sheepishly. “Both, I guess.”

  “Little people can have regular-size children. My older sister is little. My older brother is big. Huge, in fact. He’s a defensive tackle for the Georgia Bulldogs. And if you’re wondering why my hair is wet, I just finished swimming laps.”

  “You have a pool?”

  “Almost everyone in Florida has a pool, or a neighbor who has a pool you can use. If we didn’t have free access to pools, we would melt in the summer.”

  The giraffe bent its knobby head down and wrapped a purplish tongue around the carrot Nicole was holding.

  At that exact same moment, there was a terrifying roar that shook the metal building and reverberated inside Chase’s chest and all the way down to his toes. He’d never heard — or felt — anything like that in his life.

  “Nothing to be afraid of. That’s just Simba, one of our lions. He’s in a cage.”

  “You have lions in here?”

  “A bunch of them.”

  “What is this place?”

  “Winter quarters for the Rossi Brothers’ Circus. My dad didn’t tell you?”

  “Winter quarters?”

  “You don’t know much about circuses.”

  “I don’t know anything about circuses.”

  “Circuses are seasonal, especially for tent shows like ours. We can’t put up the big top or get where we’re going if it’s snowing. We need a place to keep the animals during the winter. The whole show should be back here by now, but we picked up a couple extra months in Mexico. It’s just as well because of the storm. Arturo and our winter quarters crew are hauling animals south of the border.”

  “Not the giraffe.”

  “Gertrude,” Nicole said. “She’d stand over twenty feet on a lowboy semitrailer. Too tall to fit under overpasses. She was only on the show for a couple of years when she was a baby. Now she’s a full-time resident here.”

  “Like you and your dad?”

  “That’s right. Someone has to be here to take care of the surplus animals and run the farm. And I have school. My mother and sister are on the road with the show, along with my two uncles. Sometimes we catch up with the show for a few days during the summer if I have a swim meet close by.”

  “So, you compete.”

  Nicole shrugged. “I can tread water.”

  Chase was going to ask if her mother was a little person too, but the question was blown out of his thoughts by another chest-rattling roar.

  “Come on. I’ll take you over to meet the pride.”

  04:12PM

  Simba was as big as his roar. He rubbed his thick black mane back and forth along the chain-link holding area with such force Chase was afraid the wire was going to snap. Nicole didn’t seem the least bit concerned. She put her fingers through the links and scratched Simba under the chin.

  “Simba’s thirteen. He was born the same year I was.”

  Which means we’re the same age, Chase thought. “Why isn’t Simba with the show?”

  “He mauled our trainer a couple of years ago.”

  Chase took a small step backward, which he hoped Nicole hadn’t noticed. “How badly?”

  “It could have been worse.” Nicole continued scratching Simba’s chin. “The trainer could have been killed and Simba might have been shot. The trainer was in the hospital for two weeks. We decided it was time for Simba to retire. But I think he misses the road.”

  “What about the trainer?”

  “He’s back with the show. Getting mauled is no big deal.”

  “Unless you’re the one getting mauled.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Nicole agreed. “But most cat trainers will tell you that getting mauled is not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when and how bad the mauling is going to be.”

  Nicole led him outside the building to an attached enclosure with four more lions. “Three lionesses and one lion.” She pointed. “You can see the male’s just starting to get his mane.”

  He was about half the size of Simba. “Will he be in the show someday?”

  “Maybe. He was someone’s idea of a wonderful pet. The state confiscated him. He was starving when they brought him in. We take in a lot of animals like that. I think there are as many exotic animals in private hands in Florida as there are pools. We get the animals back on their feet and give them to rehabilitation facilities or zoos. Sometimes we put them in the show, but not very often. Not all animals are cut out for the circus … not all people are either.”

  “How about you?”

  Nicole laughed. “Oh, I think it’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll be in the circus when I grow up. That is, if there are circuses. They aren’t as popular as they used to be. A lot of them have folded. One
way or the other, I’ll be working with animals. If the circus dies, I’m going to be a marine mammal veterinarian. What about you, Chase Masters?” She turned her beautiful brown eyes on him. “What are you going to be when you grow up?”

  Chase had spent a lot of time thinking about this. Like his father, he was good with his hands. He enjoyed building and fixing things, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to become a contractor or a builder.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe I’ll become a lion tamer.” “Funny.”

  “Why isn’t Simba out here with the other lions?”

  “He doesn’t get along with them. We alternate him outside by himself every other day.”

  Nicole led Chase over to another building. Inside was a leopard named Hector.

  “Odd name,” Chase said.

  “Odd cat. We didn’t name him. He was confiscated from a drug runner.”

  Hector was a third of Simba’s size, but for some reason he looked a lot more lethal. He paced back and forth restlessly.

  “You don’t want to get too close to Hector,” Nicole said. “He’s very aggressive and fast as lightning. I’m surprised the drug runner who owned him lived long enough to get arrested.”

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  “He’s not going on the show, that’s for sure. Dad has a couple of zoos that are interested. He’ll be leaving the farm soon, but that won’t be soon enough for me. Old Hector is as bright as he is fast. Getting him into the holding area so we can clean his cage is a major ordeal. About half the time, he gets in and out of the holding area with the meat we bait him in with before we can even close the door. He figured out that he could get a double portion that way on his first day here.”

  “He doesn’t look fat,” Chase said.

  “He’s not. He burns calories pacing and lunging at us when we get within range of his claws.”

  In the cage next to Hector’s, an ancient brown bear slept curled in a corner. Across from the cages were two large stalls. Three zebras stood together in one, and the other held four ostriches. At the far end of the building was an indoor/outdoor aviary filled with colorful parrots.

  As strange and wonderful as the animals were, the thing that was beginning to interest Chase the most was his tour guide. He was looking forward to staying on the farm, learning about circuses … and Nicole.

  “Do you let people come up here to see the animals?” he asked.

  “Friends,” she said. “We try to keep a low profile. We’re not really set up for visitors. But that might change with the baby elephant.”

  “You have a baby elephant?”

  “Almost.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Instead of answering, Nicole led him to the only building they hadn’t been in, which was by far the largest. The three other buildings would have all easily fit inside.

  “This is where we rehearse the acts and train the animals during the winter. And that’s the bunkhouse for the roughnecks.” She pointed to a smaller attached building to the right.

  “What’s a roughneck?”

  “They drive the trucks; put up the big top; set up the rings, cages, apparatus; assist the animal trainers and performers. Without them, there wouldn’t be a show. Arturo is a roughneck, but he doesn’t live in the bunkhouse. He’s been with the circus for nearly thirty years and pretty much runs the farm now. He has a house on the property. The bunkhouse is empty at the moment, except for my dad. He’s been sleeping down here for a couple of weeks.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Nicole opened the door.

  The building was lit with bright spotlights hanging from the ceiling, shining down on three large circus rings. The ring closest to them had a steel cage in the center, which Chase assumed was for the big cats. The middle ring had a huge safety net stretched across it. Hanging above the net was a tightwire and an array of trapeze equipment. Marco Rossi was in the third ring, hosing down an elephant and scrubbing her wrinkled gray skin with a long-handled deck brush.

  “How’s it going, Dad?” Nicole said.

  “I should have gotten AC in here years ago,” he said. “It’s like a furnace!”

  “We could open the doors on either end.”

  “Right, and Pet will pull her leg off trying to get outside.”

  Chase noticed the elephant had chains around her left front foot and right rear foot. “Why’s she chained?”

  “So she doesn’t float to the ceiling,” Nicole and Marco said in unison, then started laughing.

  “Sorry, Chase,” Marco said. “Old circus joke. Can’t help ourselves. On the show, people ask that question a thousand times a day. Elephants are chained to a picket line so they don’t run off — or whack somebody.” He handed the hose and brush to Nicole and stepped out of the ring.

  “In the case of Pet here, we have her chained up so she doesn’t dismantle the building. We don’t have an elephant-proof building on the farm. The elephants we use on our show winter in Texas. Our elephant guy has a good setup down there. And Pet would be there right now, but she’s twenty-two months pregnant and we didn’t want to risk trucking her that far so close to term. Elephant births in captivity are rare. We’ve never had one in the hundred years our circus has been on the road. So, as you might imagine, we’re pretty excited….”

  “And nervous,” Nicole added, shooting a stream of water into Pet’s open mouth.

  “I’ll admit it,” Marco said. “I am nervous. What if something goes wrong? Our vet doesn’t know anything about elephant births.”

  “Not many vets do,” Nicole said.

  “There’s a doc on the West Coast who’s seen dozens of elephants born. I’ve been on the phone with him every day, offered him a fortune to fly out here and supervise the birth, but he said it would be a waste of money. He told me that Pet will have her calf when she has it. She’ll take care of it or she won’t. It’ll be healthy or unhealthy. He’ll come out after it’s born if there’s a problem.”

  “When’s the baby due?”

  “Anytime now. We’re not exactly sure when she was bred. As elephants go, Pet’s pretty steady, but the past few days she’s been acting up. She can’t seem to get comfortable when she lies down, she’s off her feed, and yesterday she took a poke at me with her trunk for no good reason, which is really out of character for her. Normally she’s the most easygoing elephant I’ve ever been around.”

  Nicole turned the hose off, wound it up out of Pet’s reach, then joined them.

  “Your grandmother is looking for you,” Marco said. “She said something about you not finishing your laps.”

  “I finished most of them,” Nicole said. “I came down to help. You can’t take care of everything here, especially with an elephant calf on its way.”

  “I managed to take care of the farm long before you were born,” Marco reminded her. “Your grandmother also said that she needs help with her boxes, and mentioned something about sweet potato pie.”

  Nicole smiled. “I’ll go.”

  “Take Chase with you. She’s probably already mad at you for not taking him to the house to introduce him.”

  “You didn’t take him up there either,” Nicole teased.

  “I have pachyderm problems. What’s your excuse?”

  “We better go,” Nicole said.

  They left Marco and Pet, and started up a long, twisting driveway to a farmhouse overlooking the enclosures and buildings.

  “Are there any other animals on the farm?” Chase asked. “Aside from Momma Rossi’s squirrel monkey, Poco, no.” “Who’s Momma Rossi?”

  “My grandmother. She’s up at the house, packing.”

  “Where’s she going?”

  “She thinks the hurricane is going to hit the house.”

  “My dad’s pretty good at predicting the weather. He says it’s going to make landfall south of here. Probably around Saint Pete.”

  “Momma Rossi is rarely wrong,” Nicole said. “
She can see the future … and sometimes even the past.”

  05:02PM

  Chase followed Nicole onto the screened porch of the Rossis’ old farmhouse. He looked at the sofas and chairs scattered about and wondered what it would be like to sit there in the evening, listening to lion tamers, clowns, acrobats, and little people talking about their day.

  To get through the front door, they had to move several boxes of framed newspaper articles, photos, and other circus memorabilia to the side.

  “Where’s she moving this stuff?”

  “We have a waterproof storage container out back by the pool.”

  Nicole led the way into a large kitchen, where the counters, cupboards, and appliances were at least two feet lower than they’d normally be. Momma Rossi, gray-haired and a bit shorter than her son, stood at the sink peeling sweet potatoes. Sitting next to the sink was a small green monkey wearing a diaper. He was holding a potato peel in one hand and scratching his leg with the other. Momma Rossi turned around and gave them a bright smile.

  She put her hand out. “You must be Chase Masters. Welcome to our home.”

  “Thank you.” Chase took her hand.

  Momma Rossi stared at him with dark eyes and her smile faded.

  “I’m so sorry about your mother and sister.” Chase froze.

  “What are you talking about?” Nicole asked.

  Momma Rossi gripped Chase’s hand more tightly. “A car accident on a mountain. I’m sure it hasn’t been easy for you or your father.”

  Tomás must have told Arturo, Chase thought. But looking into Momma Rossi’s dark eyes, he had an eerie feeling that wasn’t how she knew….

  TWO YEARS EARLIER …

  It had rained every day Chase had been at Boy Scout camp, and it was still raining. He was standing in the parking lot with his troop leader, Mr. Murphy. All morning, one by one, parents had been picking up their drenched Scouts. Now it was just Chase and Mr. Murphy.

  Mr. Murphy looked at his watch for the hundredth time. “Are you sure your parents were clear on when and where to pick you up?”