Free Dust Devil by Rebecca Brandewyne Page A

passed, Joe began to let him try his eager
hand at various journalistic endeavors: typesetting, copy-editing and
writing headlines and obituaries to start. By the time Renzo had
turned nineteen and been graduated from Lincoln High School for a
year, he was cranking out real articles—hard news and feature
stories both under the daily deadline pressures of a small town. At
twenty-two, he had nearly completed his degree in journalism at the
local state university.
    He
never thought to question how Joe and Madonna, whose financial means
were adequate but ran to only a few luxuries, had afforded to pay for
his tuition and books. Just as he had never thought to ask how they
had got the money for the secondhand but fiercely coveted
Harley-Davidson motorcycle, either, which he had received when he’d
turned sixteen and considered himself too old to ride the bus or his
bicycle to school anymore. Later, he was to wish he had known the
source of all the funds.
    Hindsight
is always a bitter teacher.
    There
would be other motorcycles—and cars, too—in his life.
Still, that Harley was always Renzo’s first love. It would
someday be a classic, for it was a 1977 FXS Low Rider, a
black-and-silver beauty with mag wheels, drag-style handlebars and
special paint and engine treatment. He labored long and hard into the
wee hours of his nights to repair and restore the motorcycle, until
it was in mint condition and ran like a young man’s dream. When
he was spied wearing his black leather jacket and astride the Harley,
the townspeople observed darkly that he looked and acted more like a
hoodlum every passing day and was bound, sooner or later, like his
rumored small-time, big-city mobster father, to come to a bad end.
But Renzo took a perverse pride and pleasure in the gossip, telling
himself that one day, when he was rich and famous, he would set the
town on its ears.
    Despite
the five-year difference in their ages, which caused a temporary gap
between them the older they grew, he and Sarah continued to meet in
the meadow, their friendship growing ever stronger and deeper,
although, by mutual, unspoken consent, they never mentioned it to
anyone. As young as she had been at the start of it, Sarah had sensed
instinctively, as Renzo had known for certain, that the town would
not only not understand their relationship, but would also, in fact,
condemn it. At fourteen, she had begun to grasp the reasons why—that
people not only looked for dirt, but also delighted in finding it.
America might have laughed at Archie Bunker on television for years;
still, that didn’t mean there weren’t many who agreed
with his viewpoints. There were. And rural America was always the
last part of the country to accept change and progress.
    In
the small, prejudicial town that was home to her and Renzo, he would,
because of his Italian heritage, his purported mobster father and his
bad-boy reputation, be suspected at the very least of contributing to
the delinquency of a minor where Sarah was concerned, and at the
worst of statutory rape, although he never even so much as kissed her
until her seventeenth birthday.
    That
was the day Sarah knew truly and fully, with all her heart, that she
had loved Renzo Cassavettes since that autumn afternoon at her tree
house in the meadow, when he had shouted out to her, “Sarah,
sweet Sarah, let down your oak-brown hair!”
    She
had never tired of looking at him, of listening to him when he had
spoken to her of his dreams as the two of them had perched at the
edge of one of the many abandoned quarries in the area, fishing poles
in hand, captured catfish flopping in a nearby pail, bait bucket and
picnic basket sitting alongside. Or when he had read aloud to her
from the books he had over the years carried from the town library to
the tree house, books not just by Steinbeck, but also by Faulkner,
Fitzgerald, Hemingway and others. He had read to her the plays of
Edward Albee, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, too,