Last Summer Boys(51)
We gather as many sticks and twigs as we can find in the cave. When the fire is a tiny pyramid of twisting flames we sit close around it, and for a long time we do not talk.
“Too dangerous to travel now,” Pete says at last. “Sleep if you can. We will try in the morning.”
We stretch out best we can in the cramped cave. Pete is so exhausted he drifts off almost at once, and it ain’t long before Will joins him. I curl up on my side against the wall, but I know there won’t be any sleep for me tonight.
A thought gnaws at me, terrible as it is true: I’ve killed my brother. Oh sure, Pete is still breathing just across from me in the cave, but he might as well be six feet under. My plan has failed. We came out here to find that fighter jet, to make Pete famous enough that he wouldn’t get drafted, that he could stay safe. But my fever has ruined our expedition. Pete’s run himself half to death, and we all almost got carried off by a twister.
My brother is as good as drafted, and I know what that means. I listen to the dull roaring of a flooded creek below us and I think of that other riverbank, the one from my dreams, where boys line up and wait for the machine guns to rattle.
Hot tears run down my face. It’s all my fault. And since I am not even trying to sleep, I just lie there and watch our little fire slowly burn down.
But I’m not the only one.
Caleb Madliner sits against the far wall, staring into the flames. The fire’s taken him somewhere else in his mind, and in that place he don’t feel the rough stone or the cold air blowing in from outside. He’s in a trance.
I’ve always been frightened of people in trances. You never know what they’ll do while they’re visiting that faraway place—or worse yet, when they return and find you lying across from them in a narrow cave in the middle of nowhere.
I watch him from under my eyelids as I pretend to sleep, watch him watch the fire burn. Don’t know how much later it is when he finally draws a deep breath—like he’s coming up from being underwater a long time—sits up, and looks about himself. That red firelight reflects in his dark eyes, which sweep over us and then to a place in the back of the cave where the light don’t reach, to a shadowy place beneath those old roots.
Funny how your mind puts things together sometimes. Watching him, I suddenly remember that his burlap sack was nowhere to be seen the whole time we sat around the fire. All at once I figure out that he’s hidden it back there among those roots. He must have done it as soon as he came into the cave, just before Pete and me.
But what’s he hiding? Has Caleb found pieces of that old fighter jet after all?
As I watch him flatten himself against the wall and pull his black hat low over his eyes, I know what it is I’m going to do.
The fire has died down to just a few embers by the time I move, crawling on my hands and knees right past him, to the back of the cave, where I feel coarse burlap under my hands.
I’d like to blame it on the fever. I know I can’t. I know full well that what I’m doing is stupid, that I’m taking an awful chance messing with someone crazy as Caleb Madliner. But I know more than that too. I know it’s wrong to be snooping on people—even people like him. I do it just the same.
The sack’s heavy and I find I need both hands to draw it forth from its hiding place. Quiet as I can, I work that drawstring loose, the threads rustling softly as they come free, and it’s a tiny little sound but one so loud in that stony dark that I suck in my breath and wait for Caleb to spring up.
He don’t move a muscle.
Caleb’s sack lies open before me on the cave floor, but there’s just one last problem: it’s too dark to see.
Getting down to my last good idea, I tiptoe back to the fire and, with a few hushed breaths, heat up those coals. I find a twig with a few dry leaves clinging to it, light them, and creep once again to the back of the cave. Sweat pours down my face now. My heart is slamming against the inside of my ribs.
A wild and terrible idea rises in my mind as I reach for that sack a second time, the thought that I could steal one of those pieces. My heart skips a beat. Oh, it’s a sin to steal, but if it saved Pete’s life, wouldn’t it be worth it? A way to save the whole expedition. A way to save my brother.
The whole weight of that mountain bears down on me as with trembling hands I lift that flap and—
Two round, black eyes stare into my soul.
All the breath leaves my body in a rush of fear.
Staring back at me is a great-granddaddy of a snapping turtle, the biggest I have ever seen, with folds of pale skin and an enormous triangle head and a beak mouth that’s opening wider and wider, showing a vast satiny-white cavern within.
The creature rises on knock-kneed dinosaur legs and hisses, and then a cold voice from behind me says:
“Does he look hungry to you, Jack?”
Dad told me stories of a man he knew as a boy, Dutch Billy, who used to hunt snappers in the slow-moving parts of Apple Creek. He only had seven fingers.
He’d catch the snappers alive and bring them back and turn them loose in his cellar. And whenever he wanted one, he’d just go down and grab it by the short, fat tail and take it out back, where he’d waggle a piece of rebar in front of it until the turtle chomped down. Since snappers never let go once they bite, Dutch Billy would just pull its head out from under the shell and hack it off with an ax. Even then he’d have to toss the rebar, with the bloody stump of a head clamped down on it. Never could get those jaws open once it was dead.