Penpal (15 page)

Before too long, we had to push back in the other direction. The woods were simply too thick, and the nearly two foot rise of earth over the tributary that exposed the twisting and damp roots of the trees above meant that there was no place to dock our vessel. Disappointed, we left the raft at the same thick of trees that prompted us to build it in the first place.

Over the course of the next week, we formulated a plan. The phone at my house had been disconnected again that week for missed payments, so the scheming was done piecemeal while waiting for the bus to pull up after school. By the time Josh got to my house the following weekend, I had already completed my part of the mission; I looked at him and attempted to discern if he had come prepared as well. My mother told us that if we were going to go outside, we needed to hurry up; she was cooking dinner, and by the time we got done eating, it would be too late to go back out. We left straight away.

“Did you do it?” he asked.

“Yeah, are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

We disappeared into the trees.

Just two days before, I had gone outside to play. Rather than running into the woods, I grabbed the shark float and stealthily carried it to the side of the house. As quickly as I could, I deflated it and rolled it up. Having not considered what I would actually do with it once it had been transformed, I snuck my way to the crawlspace and pried the gateway open just enough to push the now tubular float inside. A little while later, I retrieved it, and as fast as I could, ran into the woods and to the blockade. I tried to inflate the float as I moved, but after tripping over it twice, I abandoned the multitasking and waited until I had reached my destination to finish the job.

When Josh and I reached the site, however, our plan seemed to unravel.

“I thought you said you brought the float!”

“I did … I—”

“Then where is it?!” Josh roared. He was already disrobing, revealing the bathing suit that he had put on under his shorts.

“I wedged it between the raft and the tree! I even tied it to the tree with a triple-knot.”

“Well it must have blown away!”

That didn’t make sense. I had kicked the float hard just before I ran back to my house, because I wanted to make sure it was secure; it hadn’t budged even an inch. As I looked around the area hoping to see the float, a strange feeling began to grow inside me. Something was off, but I wasn’t immediately sure what it was. The realization struck me hard and fast.

“What about the towel though?”

“What towel?” Josh returned.

“I brought a towel for you, just like we planned. I set it right under the corner of the raft … do you think it blew away too?”

“It doesn’t matter now anyway. Let’s just go back.”

And so we did. We had planned for Josh to use the float to help him swim out past the blockade. It was getting too cold for us to leave the house in our swimsuits with my mother’s approval, so he had to sneak the suit, just as I had snuck the float. He wouldn’t have been able to chart his journey on the map, but if he made it to the end, then at least we would have had some idea of how far it extended. This was our trump card, so to speak; it was our last way of making any real progress, and it had been ruined. It started to seem as if we would never finish the map.

But then, finally, we caught a break.

On a Saturday evening, around seven o’clock, Josh and I were eating microwave dinners when one of my mom’s coworkers knocked on our door. Her name was Samantha, and I remember her vividly now because, employing what I had learned from watching movies, I would propose to her a couple of years later when my mother brought me to work with her to pick up her paycheck; Samantha would tell me that I was sweet, but maybe we should wait until I was a bit older.

Samantha began talking to my mother, and as she did, her gaze became fixed upon Josh and me. She paused for a moment, laughed, and said, “Wow! They really do look alike! You weren’t kidding.” I had heard my mother say this about us before, but I didn’t see it.

My mother corralled her coworker’s attention and listened to the rest of what Samantha had to say. After a moment, my mom told Josh and me that we had to go to work with her so she could fix a problem that had arisen. She said that it would take about two hours, and I gathered that the problem was Samantha’s fault and discussing it in the car was why it wouldn’t take more time.

We all walked out of the house. My mom seemed apprehensive about bringing us to where she worked; once, when she couldn’t find a babysitter, her boss had formally reprimanded her for bringing me in with her for the day. I opened the rear door of my mother’s car and was just about to climb in when I heard her yell.

“Shit!”

I flinched and stepped down onto the
concrete driveway. My mom was leaning over, looking at the deflated front
passenger-side
tire. The sunlight was fading, and she struggled to survey the damage.

“What’s wrong?” Samantha called, as she stood behind her opened car door.

“There’s a fucking nail in my tire.”

She muttered some other profanities and cursed the construction workers that had left their mess in the road, as she ushered us to Samantha’s car. She paused when she opened the back door. There were no backseats.

“Are you fucking kidding, Samantha?”

“I’m having the cushions replaced and reupholstered …”

After fuming for a moment, she took Josh and me back up to the house and walked us inside. She seemed flustered, but she was still stern as she leaned down in front of us and alternated locking her eyes onto me and then Josh. She said that under no circumstances were we to leave the house or open the door for anyone. There would be a call every half-hour from her when she got to work in order to check in on us. She asked if we understood, and we nodded. She looked me dead in the eye as she was closing the door and said, “Stay put.”

As soon as she closed the door, I walked to the kitchen, took the phone off the base, and held it to my ear.

Nothing.

Our phone was still disconnected from having not paid the bill, and Josh and I knew this because we had asked my mom to order us a pizza only a couple hours before. She had snapped at me about the phone and told us we could have frozen dinners.
She must have forgotten in all the confusion, and I realize now that must have been why Samantha had come by unannounced. Of course, we had no way of knowing whether the phone might be turned back on at any moment, but that thought didn’t even cross our minds.

This was our chance.

We watched my mother and Samantha drive down the serpentine road toward the exit, and as soon as the car rounded the last visible bend, we ran to my room. I dumped my backpack out while Josh grabbed the map.

“Hey, do you have a flashlight?” Josh asked.

“No, but we’ll be back way before dark.”

“I was thinking that we should have one, just in case.”

“Well, I don’t know where one is … Wait!”

I ran into my closet and pulled a box down from the
top shelf.

“You have a flashlight in there?” Josh asked.

“Just hold on!”

I opened the box and revealed three Roman candles that I had taken from the pile amassed for July Fourth that past summer, along with a lighter that I had managed to take from my mother some months before. These things would ensure that we at least had
some
light if we needed it. Neither of us was afraid of the dark, and this was a little bit before I had been given an opportunity to be truly afraid of these woods at night, so it wasn’t fear that motivated our search for a light source – only practicality. We threw it all in my backpack and bolted out the backdoor, making sure to close it so that Boxes wouldn’t
get out.
We had one hour and fifty minutes.

We ran through the woods as fast as we could and made it to the raft in about fifteen minutes. We had our bathing suits on under our clothes, so we stripped off our shirts and shorts and left them in two separate piles about four feet from the edge of the water. We untied the raft from the tree, grabbed our branch-oars, and cast off.

This was it.

We tried to move rapidly to reach a point beyond the contents of our ever-expanding map, as we didn’t have time to waste seeing old sights. We knew that we were slower in the raft than on land, and that we would be in the raft for quite a while after the cutoff since the woods were too thick to walk through. This meant that we’d have to ride the raft back to the original docking site, even if we found a new place to dock it further ahead.

After we passed the last charted part of our map, the water began to get so deep that we found that we could no longer touch the bottom with our tree branches, so we lay on our stomachs with the branches under our chests from left to right and paddled with our hands. The sun was dropping below the canopy, and as a result, it was becoming harder to distinguish the trees from one another. I think we were both too excited to notice how quickly the light was fading.

As the sun retreated more, we paddled faster with our arms; the noise of our hands repeatedly confronting and breaking through the water’s surface tension was loud, but not loud enough to completely overpower the sound of the crunching of dead leaves and the snapping of fallen sticks in the woods to our right. As we would slow our pace and quiet our actions, the rustling in the woods would seem to cease, and I began to wonder if it was really ever there at all. We didn’t know what kinds of animals resided this far into the woods, but I was confident that we didn’t wish to find out.

As I amended the map that Josh was illuminating with the lighter, we were suddenly confronted with the fact that the sounds were not imagined. Rapidly and rhythmically, we heard the woods speak out.

crunch

snap

crunch

It seemed to be moving slightly away from us, pushing through the woods just beyond our map. It had become too dark to see. We had misjudged how long the sun would linger.

Nervously, I called out.

“Hello?”

There was a brief moment of breathless tension as we lay static in the water; the only sound was that of the water gently rolling against the side of our raft. This silence was suddenly broken by laughter.

“‘
Hello
?’” Josh cackled.

“So what?”

“Hello, Mr. Monster-in-the-woods. I know you’re sneaking around, but maybe you’ll answer to my ‘hello’? Hellooooooo!”

I realized how stupid it was. Whatever animal it was, it wouldn’t respond. I hadn’t even realized I’d said it until afterwards, but if anything was actually there, I obviously wouldn’t get a reply.

Josh continued. “Helloooooo,” in a high falsetto.

“Helloooo,” I countered with as deep a baritone as I could manage.

“’Ello there, mate!”

“Hel-lo. Beep boop. We are robots.”

“hhheeeEEELLLLOOOoooo”

We continued mocking each other with increasingly elaborate salutations, while we dug our arms into the water and moved them in a counterclockwise direction so we could turn the raft back the way we had come. When the front of our raft had pivoted enough that it faced the seemingly impenetrable woods, a sound floated out from them that chilled my blood so much that the winter water just below might have felt temperate.

hello

It was a breathy and airy whisper, the kind you might hear as someone read to himself – broadcasting his voice but not realizing it. It had come from a spot just off the map, which now sat behind us as we slowly drifted away back toward charted territory. Josh and I looked at one another; I could read the fear on my friend’s face, and any hope that I had been fooled by my imagination disappeared. All options seemed equal in their futility; we were too slow on the raft to outpace anything. We would be so much faster on land, but we had no feasible way to get onto it, though that was the last place we wanted to be at that moment. I shifted on the raft and faced the direction of the sound as I fumbled with the Roman candle. I wanted to see.

“What’re you doing?!” Josh hissed.

But I had already lit it. As the sparking fuse sank into the wrapper, I held it toward the sky. I had never actually shot one of these myself; I thought to just use it like a flare in the movies. A glowing green orb rocketed out toward the stars and then quickly extinguished. I lowered my arm more toward the horizon; I could remember that there were several colors, but I couldn’t remember how many times one of these fired before being depleted. A second ball of red light burst out and fizzled above the trees, but I still saw nothing.

“Let’s just go!” Josh pressed, as he turned back toward the direction from which we had come and began paddling desperately.

“Just one more …”

Lowering my arm directly at the woods in front of me, another red ball of fire was launched from my paper cannon. It traveled straight ahead until it collided with a tree, briefly exploding the light in a much greater diameter.

Still nothing.

I dropped the firework in the water and watched as one more struggling fireball burst free, only to die quickly, drowned by the water. Doubt had already started to sink into my mind as we began paddling in the direction of my house. Suddenly, a loud and unconcealed rustling in the woods restored my certainty. The breaking of branches and the trampling of fallen leaves overpowered the sound of our splashing.