Connect the Stars (10 page)

“The walls won't actually close in on us, right?” he asked.

“No way,” I said. “Never. This crack in the rock has been here for a million years.”

When we got to the narrowest part, he stopped and leaned against the rock wall. His face was pale and beaded with sweat. “I can't. I can't, I can't, I can't.”

“We know you can do it, Louis,” I said. “Right, Kate?”

Kate nodded, and then she did something I'll never forget. In a soft, steady voice, she began to sing.

“‘My bonnie lies over the ocean. My bonnie lies over the sea. My bonnie lies over the ocean. Oh, bring back my bonnie to me.'”

I joined in. “‘Bring back, bring back, oh, bring back my bonnie to me, to me. Bring back, bring back, oh, bring back my bonnie to me.'”

It was all we knew of the song, but it didn't matter. At the beginning of the third round of it, in a small, quivering voice, Louis started to sing too. By the chorus, he had picked up the bandanna rope again, and we were walking, singing in time with our steps. Kate was amazing. I would never have thought of singing, but it was exactly the right thing. Her parents knew what they were talking about when they told her she was good at walking around in other people's shoes. But about five paces into the narrowest section, I heard Kate's voice falter, and she stopped walking.

“Hey,” she said quietly, without turning around. “Louis, why don't you close your eyes for this part.”

“Oh,” he said. He seemed to be about to ask why, but then he didn't. “Okay.”

When I got to the place Kate had stopped, I saw why she'd done it, and my heart took off like a racehorse. On
the rocks, about two feet above my head—which would have made it about one foot above Louis's—was a tarantula as big as my hand and looking exactly as hairy and terrifying and magnificent as tarantulas always look in pictures. I had to swallow a screech at the sight, but Louis's singing hadn't missed a beat. With his eyes closed, he'd walked right by the tarantula like it wasn't even there.

With a loud, collective sigh of relief, the three of us spilled out the end of the slot where Aaron was waiting. We all just stood there for a while, feeling the huge space around us and the sun on our faces. Louis was still pale, but he seemed to be breathing normally. When we'd caught our breaths, Aaron said, “Hey, follow me. I need to show you something!”

He led us over a small round hill like a swell in the ocean of desert and pointed.

“What?” I asked.

And then I saw it: a cardinal-red flicker against the sky. The flag!

“What's that?” asked Louis nervously.

“It's the flag!” said Aaron. “We've won! Or almost.”

“No,” said Louis, cupping his ears with his hands and scanning the sky. “I mean, what's that noise?”

It took the rest of us a few more seconds, but then we heard it too. It sounded like a faraway waterfall: a high,
fragile singing and a splashing, splashing, splashing. Even though I couldn't see anything yet, I knew what I was hearing: hundreds of voices, echolocating; hundreds of wings, flapping. Then a black boiling cloud poured over the hill in front of us.

“A flock,” I said through clenched teeth.

“A colony,” said Aaron, correcting me.

“Oh, no!” cried Louis.

Kate just stared with her big, bottomless eyes.

Bats. And they were headed straight for us.

El Viaje a la Confianza

WE FROZE. THE TORRENT OF bats narrowed like the tail of a twister as they swarmed into their cave in the base of the cliff. They flocked from every direction, so there was no escape. In half a second, Louis went—I hate to say it—bats. He screamed. He clawed at the air. He ran in place so fast I couldn't see his feet, but he got nowhere. “Get them off me, get them off me, get them off me, get them off me, help me, help me, help me, get them off me . . . ,” he wailed.

“Louis!” called Kate, like he was half a mile away. But he couldn't hear. Because in a way, I guess he
was
half a mile away. At least.

“Get them away, get them off, help me, help me, help me . . .”

“Bats,” I yelled into his ear, “are equipped with onboard
sonar capable of locating objects in complete darkness, enabling them to avoid collisions. Their brains construct detailed three-D acoustical images of nearby hazards or prey—”

“You mean they know what we look like?” shrieked Audrey, grabbing wildly at one of Louis's windmilling arms. “Gaaaah.”

“Bats almost never collide with stationary items,” I shouted.

“If you're telling Louis to stand still, it's not gonna happen,” cried Kate, lunging for the other arm.

“Aaaah, baghabaaaa, horrrghggggfffff,” gasped Louis weakly.

“The average brown bat poses far less danger to a human being than a mosquito,” I added.

“Aaron!” shouted Audrey. “Do you really think this is the time for a science lesson?”

“I just mean,” I said, “if a bat can locate a gnat in the dark, don't you think it can tell where we are?”

Louis's flailing hands whacked a bat, which veered off course and smacked into his forehead. It fell to the ground and staggered away like a leather crab on its little claws before wobbling back into the air.

“Get behind this boulder!” Kate shouted to Louis. “The swarm is splitting apart to fly around it.” She managed to
catch one of his hands so she could drag him behind a big rock. Audrey and I followed. Bat wings fluttered so close to my face, it felt like they were vacuuming my breath out.

Louis's too. He gasped for air like he was suffocating. Then he collapsed.

“Louis! Louis!” screamed Kate. “Louis!”

Audrey hollered something about increasing carbon dioxide levels. And reducing oxygen. If I remembered anything about this, I didn't remember that I remembered. My brain went staticky.

“Please, please, please,” sobbed Kate. Audrey held her hands over Louis's face and clamped his nose shut. “Louis! Wake up!”

But Louis didn't look asleep. He didn't look like he'd fainted. He didn't even look knocked out. In fourth grade, Hardy Gillooly had cold-cocked himself on the edge of Mrs. Mattson's door in the school hallway, but even lying on the tile floor, he'd seemed alive. His face still had “Hardy” written on it, and I could tell by looking that any second he'd roll over and stand up. But Louis looked—dead. While I watched, his hands and feet twitched, and then his body went slack.

Time stopped.

All at once, I realized how many things could go
wrong out here, and I realized that if we really needed help, we didn't have a prayer.

“Louis! Louis!” screamed Kate.

“He'll be okay,” said Audrey. But she didn't sound convinced. She kept her hands covering his mouth and nose.

“Let him breathe,” cried Kate.

“Breathing is the
problem
,” said Audrey.

“What?” sobbed Kate. “What does that mean?”

The bats had all flown into their cave and latched onto the ceiling like a squirming, breathing, squeaking, furry drape. A roadrunner streaked across the trail ahead of us. The woody arms of an ocotillo clattered together in the wind.

Kate collapsed into tears.

“Hyperventilation,” I finally remembered. “He doesn't have enough carbon dioxide in his blood. And he has too much oxygen. The blood vessels in his brain are constricting.”

“Wake up, Louis,” whispered Kate. “Please just wake up.”

“Ohhhh,” groaned Louis, his eyes blinking open. “Did I overbreathe?”

“If that's what you call it,” gasped Kate.

“That's what I call it,” said Louis, struggling to sit up.

“Then that's what you did,” said Kate, laughing through her tears.

Gravel skittered down the rock face and spattered in the dust around us. We glanced up to see where it'd come from, and I caught a flash of orange hair disappearing along the cliff above us.

“Randolph!” said Kate.

“And Daphne and the rest,” added Audrey. “They really did go the wrong way! They're stuck at the top of the cliff!”

“Did they see us?” I asked.

With a massive effort, Louis tried to pull himself together. “I'm pretty sure Randolph did,” he said, squinting upward.

“So now they know where we are,” said Kate, who had wiped her eyes and shouldered her pack.

“But they still have to double back to the beginning of the canyon and hike down it to get here,” Audrey said.

“How much of a head start do we have?” wondered Louis.

“Maybe an hour?” I said. “Maybe a little less.”

“And the flag is right there,” said Louis, pointing up the next hill.

“Come on,” said Audrey. “Let's go!”

We heaved on our packs.

But Louis took one step, and his feet walked off in two different directions. He sat down hard. His arms dangled by his sides. His head lolled like Pinocchio's before the
magic spell, when he's still a marionette and nobody is holding his strings.

“You guys go on,” Louis mumbled, staring at the ground. “I'll be okay.”

“We can't leave you by yourself!” Audrey protested.

“I'll stay,” said Kate.

“No. You guys go. Hurry,” said Louis. “I'll be fine. Get the flag. And you can come back for me once you've got it.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” said Audrey. “We're not leaving you here. You're still shaking.”

“No, I'm not,” Louis replied. He shivered. “Okay. I am. But you still have to go. It's our only shot.”

“Actually,” I said, “studies have shown that in situations like this, teamwork is key. Statistically, our chances are better if we stay together.”

Audrey looked at me quizzically.

“It's true!” I said. “Overall! According to many experts!”

Audrey shrugged and turned back to Louis.

Ten minutes later, we had him on his feet. He tottered like an eighty-year-old man, but he was walking, and the good news was, there was no sign of Daphne, Randolph, Edie, or Cyrus. The sun was still less than a quarter of the way up the sky, and what was left of the morning breeze cooled our faces. I stayed in front, but now Louis came second and Kate walked behind him, because she wanted
to keep an eye on him. Audrey took up the rear.

We walked for an hour, but the flag refused to get any nearer, although the day sure got hotter. Louis kept getting wobblier, and Kate started to drag her feet like they were too heavy for her to lift. But we could see the flag, and nobody felt like giving up or slowing down. I tried to think of something to tell everybody about. Something that would help us get to the flag sooner. I wondered if there
was
anything like that to tell everybody about. The Robert Scott expedition to the South Pole? No. Not quite right. They'd gotten there second, and then all died. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbing Mount Everest? Didn't seem to fit.

“Aaron,” said Louis while I was still thinking, “should get the air mattress the first night. Because without him, we'd never have figured out all those clues.”

“No way,” Kate replied. “You should get it. You need it most.”

“Sure, Louis,” I pitched in. “You get it first.”

“That's the whole point,” said Audrey. “So you can get a good night's sleep.”

“But I don't
want
it first,” said Louis as we dropped into a crease in the desert floor and the flag disappeared from sight. “I want it last, so I can dream about it longer. If I know I'll get to sleep on the air mattress soon, just looking
forward to it will make me feel so good, I might get some sleep.”

“Louis,” said Kate, “you always get
some
sleep. I mean, you don't stay awake all night.”

Louis didn't say anything.

“Do you?” asked Audrey.

I thought about how he'd looked the first morning.

“Do you?” I chimed in. Louis just kept walking. Slowly. It was about all any of us could manage. “All night long? Without any sleep?” I remembered the two times in my life I hadn't been able to sleep. Just for a few hours. Until one a.m. In my own bed, at home. I remembered how the darkness swirled and formed itself into a tunnel, and how the tunnel led through hours and hours that seemed endless, deserted, pitch black, and sinister. I remembered feeling like the only person in the world, and feeling afraid I would always feel this way. I remembered wishing that dawn would hurry, and knowing that it wouldn't, and couldn't, and didn't want to, because it was huge and slow and, like night, didn't care about me.

“When it's daylight,” said Louis quietly, “I'd rather not talk about the dark.”

So then I did what Kate did when she listened to Louis talk about his life, and I thought about what night must be like for him, on the ground, rocks grinding into his bones
no matter which way he turned, with the hours stretching into the darkness. And I realized that if he'd been to sleep since we'd begun el Viaje a la Confianza, it hadn't been for very long.

“But,” said Louis brightly, “things are about to change.”

I glanced up at the hillside. For some reason, that flag didn't seem to be getting any closer. It must've been farther away than we'd thought.

“You can have my night,” I said. “That's two out of every four.”

“You can have my night,” said Audrey. “Three out of four.”

“You can definitely have my night!” said Kate. “And sleep every night!”

“Not fair,” said Louis. “No way I'm taking your awesome air mattress nights.”

“If you don't take mine,” said Kate, “I'm filling your bag with fire ants while you sleep.”

“I don't sleep,” pointed out Louis.

“Then I'll do it while you're awake!” said Kate. “Take the air mattress!”

“Okay,” said Louis. “Sheesh. Bullies. Now what will I worry about? Warthogs?”

“They're javelinas, not warthogs,” I pointed out.

“Then I guess I have to scratch them off the list too,”
joked Louis, shaking his head. “How about . . . foot-long millipedes!”

“Those you can worry about.” Audrey shuddered.

Kate giggled.

Louis laughed. He'd stopped chewing on his fingernails. He wasn't cringing like he thought a safe was about to fall on him from the sky. In fact, he was grinning. Louis was actually a funny guy when he wasn't freaking out.

The desert quiet fell over us again. A rhythm set in. Our footsteps. Our breathing. Our rattling cookware. It was nice. Soothing. Like a lullaby. One you enjoy while walking under a burning sun wearing a fifty-pound pack while the temperature rises ten degrees every hour.

But I didn't mind the heat, because I felt strong. We all did. I could tell just by the sound of everybody's boots on the trail. I saw why it was taking so long to get to the flag. Our trail had taken a wide swing to go around a boulder field as big as a small town. But we didn't care. We dropped into a dry creek bed, which was a long, smooth, undulating sheet of rock slithering between two cliffs made of laminated red-stone outcroppings. We came to a bowl as big as a hot tub. The creek, when it ran, had scoured out the bowl with sand and gravel, and its side curved and bulged and swelled and heaved like billows of cloud set in stone. Layers of color swirled through it all, red, yellow, blue, green, and
black. At the bottom lay three feet of crystal-clear water.

We scrambled around, because this water was for wild animals, not for boots, although I did jot down its location on my mental map in case we needed it later, when we had the flag and weren't in such a hurry.

And now we were so close, we could hear the flag flapping on the other side of the streambank. The trail led up and over.

The climb was steep, and hard, and a lot longer than I'd have thought. Carrying a fifty-pound pack didn't help. But after I took a few sharp steps upward, my heart stopped pounding and settled into a steady beat, and I filled my lungs with clean air, and my thigh muscles quit burning, and it felt great! We made it nearly to the top of the bank and paused in its shadow to gaze back down at the green pool sparkling like an emerald amid the red rocks.

Louis was the first to talk. “That's the prettiest thing I've ever seen,” he said. His words echoed faintly, the last bits bouncing off everything like the final chime of a tiny handbell.

—een —een —een

He stood up straight. Louis was nearly six feet tall.

“Louis,” I said, looking around us, “maybe this is your red wheelbarrow. Maybe it's your white chickens.”

“Chickens?” repeated Louis.

“I mean,” I said, “you know, how so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens?”

“I, um,” said Louis. “What?”

“I mean—I mean—” I stammered. And for a second, in the quiet, while the colored rocks from millions of years ago shimmered in the rising heat, I thought I knew what William Carlos Williams wanted to say, and I thought I knew what I wanted to say, and I thought maybe I could tell Louis and Audrey and Kate before they concluded I was a complete lunatic. “I just think . . . ,” I said, motioning toward all the beauty and peace. But I had to stop. Because I didn't know what I thought.