We Are All Crew (24 page)

“She’s lying,” Fang says. “She just hates the band.”

“They send subliminal messages to the general public,” Esmerelda says.

“But . . .” I search for something scathing to say to her. I can’t find anything. I slump my shoulders. “But their music . . . it . . . always kind of . . . spoke to me.”

“It’s designed to. Think about it.
When the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls, I will not yield. I will stand fast and resolute
. As in, stand still. Do nothing. Take whatever they dish out.”

Fang snorts so hard his mustache flops. “Who are you going to believe, Winthrop: your own ears, or some crazy chick with awful taste in music?”

Fang has a point. “What are they trying to distract me from?”

“Think about it, stubby!”

So I think about it. That little projector plays again in my head. Images flash of monster trees and dead fish and furry things floating in rainbow-tinged water, fallen-in buildings and water moccasins and birds laying eggs that will never hatch. And pipes, pipes everywhere—running down hillsides, shooting up walls, turning on linked fittings at right angles, and burrowing deep into the earth, all trickling, oozing, and pouring black sludge.

Staying away means . . . God, I don’t know what it means. Monster trees and crazy homeless people and big neon oranges and crazy squirrels and buffalo and struggling just to find a decent shower.

But going back means living like I did with the TV in Blysse. Spoon-fed, clothed and, yes, entertained.

But none of it real.

It’s not fair. It’s another choice. Fourteen is too young to make it.

I just wanted to go see a rock concert.

But I make my choice.

And then Seabrook tackles Fang from behind.

They scuffle. Seabrook’s ring of hair flares wildly, and his bald pate and face go crimson. For a rock and roller, Fang fights like a badass. I guess that’s the Green Police training.

But Seabrook has the element of surprise on his side, and soon puts the guy in the bear suit into a bear hug. Sputtering and hollering at both Seabrook and me, my idol is dragged to the edge of the boat and tossed—ears over big red feet—overboard.

When he lands I hear not a burst of water, but a pop.

Looking over the gunwales, I see that his claws have punctured a small blue raft, the raft I guess he meant to take me away in. Now it’s little more than a sheet of rubber he’s tangled himself in as he turns over and over and sputters curse words at us.

From here, even in the dim light, I can tell there is black print on the side of the raft.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

the trees

The object, the floating thing all the plants and animals in the forest believed was so important, floated away. The trees watched it go.

Before that, it dropped a red bear.

The red bear was not a bear at all, but a man dressed as a bear. He climbed from the river and clambered into the trees, making whimpering noises and shivering.

The trees wanted to kill the man in the red bear suit.

They didn’t know why, exactly. It was another thought that circulated through the webwork of root systems, old oak to Methuselah pine.

Intruder among us
.

But the trees knew that they had less of a chance of killing the man in the bear costume than others. A new creature that lived among them would do the deed. It was a squirrel that had sharp teeth and lived on flesh instead of seeds. Many squirrels such as these had come west recently, sweeping into the woods and mating with the local squirrels so that now their numbers had grown.

The squirrels tracked the man who had left the boat. The man could see their eyes shining in the darkness. The trees could tell because he shivered and looked all around at the chattering noises and made whimpering sounds.

The floating thing reached the middle of the river and made its way west. The trees wished it well, but they knew the floating thing had been less important than the thought had made it seem.

There had been so many others before it.

There had been a car years ago that ran without gasoline. Men had destroyed it. Its maker had been murdered.

There was an airplane that flew using only water that turned to steam. A man had shot the woman who had invented the steam airplane and dumped her into the river. Her body decomposed, turned to nutrients that became a bed of river grass. That, too, had died when men drove past on their dirty boats.

So many others. Balloons and boats and cars and homes that did less to hurt the trees and the things of the forest. All failures, death at the end of each attempt.

But the trees knew. The floating thing was of little consequence. There would be more after its time had passed.

It was as it would always continue to be.

Men were born. Through the course of their lives, they killed animals, murdered plants, blackened their soil, poisoned their air, and befouled their water. And then they died.

So the trees did not mourn when the squirrels swarmed around the man and ate him as he shrieked in his bear costume.

The trees sang.

They sang the only way trees can sing: silently but for the wind through their branches.

What did the trees sing? A human song, oddly. One they had heard in recent weeks, one that spoke to them because it spoke to the treedom of trees.

When the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls, I will not yield. I will stand fast and resolute.

1.
From the Kansas Homeland Security Department website. Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, US citizens were advised to prepare for potential terrorist attacks by keeping a full tank of gas at all times.
www.bucoks.com/index.aspx?NID=209

2.
Jerry Falwell, from his March 4, 2006, “Listen America” column on
WorldNetDaily.
,
www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49101

3.
President George W. Bush, Sept. 23, 2002, Trenton, New Jersey.

4.
Interior Department Assistant Secretary Craig Manson, appointed by President Bush to a position overseeing the Endangered Species Act, as quoted in the
Los Angeles Times
, Nov. 12, 2003.

5.
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, April 2011, on fracking, as quoted in
Popular Mechanics.
www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/coal-oil-gas/top-10-myths-about-natural-gas-drilling-6386593#slide-4

6.
Frank Keating, Gov10DJ9D" class="t

ernor of Oklahoma, on the ANWR oil exploration, as quoted on ANWR.org, a grassroots, nonprofit organization founded to expedite congressional and presidential approval of oil exploration and production within the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

7.
Jerry Falwell in a soundbyte on CNN, Nov. 20, 2002. For a transcript, see
transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0211/20/ip.00.html

8.
Former Interior Secretary James Watt in a

Acknowledgments

More people than I can thank have played at least a small role in the production of this book. I’ve been blessed with great friends, family, coworkers, and editors, all of whom were there at least to inspire or offer a kind word. But at the risk of insulting any of them, I’ll name a few.

Aside from the aforementioned Kaylie Jones and Anne and Lance Landauer: Dr. Bonnie Culver, J. Michael Lennon, and the rest of the peerless Wilkes University crew who gave me a chance to learn and improve my craft; Marlon James and Dan MacArthur, two talented writer friends whose advice is to be found all through this volume; Justin Kassab, who looked at two messy drafts and had the stroke of genius to combine them; P. Casey Telesk, who gave great marketing ideas and art; Michelle Glass, who read the manuscript and provided encouragement, and her husband, Christopher Glass, my best friend, who was there for many of the inane road trips that inspired the book; John Opilo, who told me about mountain lions, and his wonderful, beautiful, and talented daughter, Emily Opilo, who understood, put up with my incessant tinkering, reading out loud (including this acknowledgment page, right now), and still talks of this ridiculous book with pride; Johnny Temple and all the great people at Kaylie Jones Books and Akashic Books; Dan Sheehan, a great writer, colleague, and friend who read the book and advised; Sean Snell, my best friend when I was twelve, with whom I became separated from a religious downriver canoe camp in Pennsylvania, spent twenty-five hours in the woods in the rain with nothing to eat, and no hemp-powered boat arrived to save us; and author Christopher Moore, whom I’ve never met but, when I was at my lowest, provided a simple response to an e-mail that gave me what I needed to keep going.

As veteran journalist of nearly two decades, BILL LANDAUER has covered the upper echelons of the federal government in Washington, DC, and towns of less than 200 people. He’s flown in military helicopters and rubbed elbows with murderers, lawyers, and Christian Scientists. Once, at the White House, a reporter from the
Christian Science Monitor
told him to get out of her chair. He’s even written about cat-shaving. He lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.