Last Summer Boys(45)

My rage boils over. “Doggone it, I don’t wanna race Caleb Madliner!”

“Shh!” Will hisses. “Too bad. We already are. Nothing to do now but win it.”

He looks at Pete. “Think we can sneak past?”

“We can try,” Pete says. “Go cross-country and try to get out ahead of him. We’ll lose time. It won’t be easy.”

“Let’s do it,” Frankie says then.

Pete’s thin smile breaks into a grin. Without a word, he turns and heads into the trees.

The pack on my shoulders feels full of bricks. But there’s a new fire burning in my chest and legs now. Caleb Madliner is hunting our treasure, the thing that can save Pete. And there’s no way in the world I’ll let him beat us to it.





Pete sets a faster pace now, and nobody talks as Apple Creek falls farther and farther behind us.

There is no trail, no path. We crash through a patch of skunk cabbage, fat, rubbery leaves slapping at our legs and a horrible scent hanging over us. Will cusses and Frankie covers his nose at the stench, but I’m too fired up to care about their stink.

After the skunk cabbage come the stinging nettles. I can’t ignore those. Fiery pinpricks stab our legs like needles. Tiny white splotches appear on our skin where we’ve brushed up against the poison plants. When we come out of it at last, our legs are on fire.

Frankie collapses against a tree, wincing back tears and rubbing his calves. Will finds a stand of jewelweed and, quick as we can, we cut ourselves stalks of it and rub the clear liquid juice down our throbbing legs. The pain lessens, the fire dying down to coals.

“I ever mention how much I hate Caleb Madliner?” Will says.

You’re not supposed to hate anyone, and in his heart I doubt Will really means it. But truth be told, in that moment I feel the same way. When we start again, Pete takes us at a slower pace.

An hour. Two hours.

We go until that ball of white sun overhead begins burning orange and sinks a little lower in the sky. Pete calls a halt then, and he and Will look over the map once more.

“How you holding up?” I whisper to Frankie.

He takes a long draw at his canteen, swishes it around some. “I’ll be all right. You?”

I tell him the same, but he narrows his dark eyes at me.

“You don’t look good, Jack.”

“You ain’t so pretty yourself.”

“No, I mean your face is pale.”

He reaches out a hand and lays it against my forehead—and snaps it back fast. A look of alarm crosses his thin face.

“Jack, you’ve got a fever!”

“Hush your mouth,” I whisper quickly. “I’ve got no such thing.” I look over my shoulder to where my brothers are murmuring over the map. “I’m just hot from the heat and all this walking, that’s all.”

“I can’t believe with all we packed, we forgot medicine! Maybe Pete brought—”

Before he can get up I’ve got him by the arm.

“Don’t you dare, Frankie! I’m feeling just fine. Maybe a low fever, but that ain’t nothing to get upset about. We’re this close to finding that wrecked fighter jet. Fever or no, I can deal ’til then.”

He looks at me hard. I can tell he don’t like it, but just then Pete comes over.

“Some good news, fellas,” he says. “Give me one more mile, and we’re done for the day. We’ll make camp and have us some dinner over an open fire; what do you say?”

I look at Frankie as I answer for us both. “Sounds dandy.”

We rise and hoist our packs upon our backs once again. Maybe I do feel a little fuzzy behind my eyes then, but I give a big smile to Frankie to show how fine I really am.

Pete turns us back to old Apple Creek, and it feels like we’re coming home. That fuzzy feeling inside my brain lets up a little.

It’s only by chance I look back down the way we came and spy a flash of cottony white against dusty greens. I squint but it’s gone, and now I start to wonder if maybe I’m seeing things and Frankie is right after all about me being sick.

I push that thought away. Plenty of time for fevers later.





Pete has us pitch camp on the dry pebbly creek sand beside a calm stretch of Apple Creek. The four of us are washing off the day’s sweat and dust, the stench of the skunk cabbage, and the smoldering burn of the nettles when Frankie finds it: a twisted piece of scorched metal, half buried in the silt in the shallows, a dial of the kind you’d turn on a radio. Gray and speckled with rust. Wires stick out the back.

No one speaks for a moment, as we pass it back and forth to each other.

“Is it . . . part of it?” Frankie asks.

“Yes,” Pete answers. He scrapes mud with a fingernail, revealing what looks like the face of a clock. He reads out a series of numbers in the gathering dark.

He looks up. “This is an altimeter.”

Will whistles, soft and low. “So our city boy found the first piece.”

Frankie’s dark eyes flash. “How close do you think we are?”

“Close. I imagine this washed down from upstream,” Pete answers.

We stare up Apple Creek, flat and black in the coming night.

I can feel it. That great gray hulk of twisted metal and magic, lying hidden somewhere upstream. Bone-tired as I am, suddenly I am filled with a fierce urge to start right away, just go crawling through the mud in the dark to find it.