We Are All Crew (3 page)

I don’t know how long I’m out, but it’s pitch-black and raining when I wake up. Arthur is snoring. I listen to the forest noises and the pattering of the rain on the boughs overhead. The moss, the tree bark, the leaves, the animals, and the junk people leave behind combine to form a powerful odor that feels like somebody is poking my sinuses with a dirty stick. Then the rain really opens up and turns into a roar overhead, and lightning pops. The breeze blowing off the river makes me shake like a mofo.

I think about my mother. Not my father. The second I allow His Eminence to materialize as an image in the old temporal lobe is when I come down with another case of Wimp Winthrop real quick. When His Eminence says anything, it’s like somebody ripping off my Halloween mask and spoiling the whole show.

But the Moms . . . well, frankly what bothers me is the fact that I can’t quite picture her. I mean, I see her every day. She’s always nagging, pestering, and slobbering all over me like I’m three years old or something, and yet I can’t quite remember the exact color of her hair, the precise shade of her eyes, or the strict layout of her face.

What I can remember, for some reason is her forearms: the squashy, pale, hairless part of them that the sun doesn’t reach, with red pucker marks smack in the middle of this part—two rectangular reddish boxes, one on each drumstick, like she’s been leaning on them and her weight left a welt behind. I mostly noticed them when she tucked me into bed at night, which she just a year ago gave up on insisting.

Thoughts like this make the woods seem extra cold and dark, so I shake them off. After all, this whole thing is going to slap her pretty hard.
Good
, I tell myself. They blindsided me with this summer camp trip. They gave it to me as a birthday present during a party where they’d refused to invite my friends—His Eminence saddled my clique with the name “Paste Eaters” because we all looked like righteous psychos: pale white and always wearing black—and instead invited only His Eminence’s clan: bronze men in various stages of gray flanked by women in various stages of plastic surgery regimens.

Godspeed Summer Camp
, the flier said.
Come and share His Life and His Word with Us
. They told me it was a canoe trip with a bunch of other kids down the Allwyn River for ten days. His Eminence, they explained, had worked very hard to secure me a place in the camp, which is run by some of his government cronies.

I was expecting concert tickets.

The Red Grizzlies were coming that same week.
Music Freak
magazine had just given them a cover story about how their show in Germany sent shockwaves echoing down the Rhine, and all of Europe was in an uproar for this “must-see-do-not-miss-under-penalty-of-lameness show.”
Do not miss!
I’d explained to them my need to go to the show, that I’d missed them when they played at the Spectrum the year before, that my grades were up at school, and that they’d promised—especially if I stopped asking them repeatedly. Burton Trotsky’s folks had gotten him tickets, after all, and his dad was only a minor undersecretary for the Defense Department—not even one of the Primrose School’s most elite.

But this camp, the Moms explained, was for my own good. They didn’t need another summer of their first and only mooning about desolately inside the compound watching George Lucas movies on the plasma screen.

Trotsky had chided me mercilessly. So I told him he’d see me there. Front row center. “Count on it,” I’d said.

I look at Arthur’s ankle in the dark. I was hoping the swelling might have gone down a little and that he’d be able to try the tree again. But it’s more swollen than ever.

What if he broke something? I definitely can’t fix that. Maybe the ankle is even getting worse just lying here. In sports, when somebody breaks something, they stop everything and send out the doctors, strap on a cast, and haul the player off in an ambulance. Maybe Arthur needs a doctor right away. Maybe if I wait until morning, he’ll never walk again.

Then I’d
really
get it.

It’ll be all over the news:
Mortimer Brubaker’s son ran away, crippled an already disabled boy, and left him for dead in the woods
. His Eminence has a whole staff of interns whose only job it is to scour the headlines, surf the Web, and watch TV to find any mention of his name in the media. When it’s good news, he’s on top of the world, marching through the house humming “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” chatting with the help or instructing them on some sort of housekeeping business in his authoritarian, leader-of-men voice. But when the media gives him a black eye, he sulks, insists upon my joining one Young Republicans organization or another, or worse yet, tries talking to me.

And this time, when his personal e-mail floods with incoming bad news that can’t wait, the bad news will include
my
name, his son’s name, listed as the culprit . . .

I peer into the blue-black crisscrossing lines of branches and weeds. Maybe I can find a house somewhere with a phone, call an ambulance anonymously, tell them roughly where Arthur is, and then run away into the night before anybody knows my identity. But I’m only like 75 percent sure I’ll be able to find Arthur again or be able to tell an ambulance crew how to locate him, so I’ll probably have to wait with him. Then they’ll summon our parents, and I’ll have to answer to His Eminence anyway.

I wander back in what I thought was the direction we’d come from. I don’t get far before I’m wishing I’d waited until morning.

Walking through a black, rain-soaked woods blows. It’s not just a football field with trees sticking up; it’s hills, boulders, rocks, roots, and broken tree limbs. It’s old radial tires full of water, rusted metal, old boxes, and sheets of cardboard. Branches loaded with briars rip you open, and you slip and tear the hell out of your elbows and knees.

I stumble around for about an hour before I realize I’ve twisted and turned around so much I no longer know where I am. I thought I’d eventually reach the river and the canoe because I figured Arthur and I had walked in a straight line, but maybe we’ve been going in circles. I don’t know where the river is, and I don’t know how to get back to Arthur.

I sit on a rock, soaked and bleeding and scared worse than anything. I made things worse. Trotsky’ll tease me.
Yeah, front row center
, he’ll say.
You couldn’t even make it out of the woods
. We’ll spend a night in the rain and then find help in the daylight.

But what if we don’t?

Mortimer Brubaker today mourns the loss of his son, who was eaten by wolves after getting lost in the woods during a camping expedition in central PA . . .

The whole thing, I realize, is my fault. If not for me, Arthur and I would be back at camp, and maybe the Moms would have been right: it would have been for my own, stupid good.

The retaining walls of my pain and fear reservoir fail. The rain sounds like footsteps everywhere: cracks and moans and pops all over the place, and each one makes me bug out worse.

the mountain lion

Trees weren’t the only things following the boy.

Hunger had driven the mountain lion from the hills. It was summer, and she had been surviving on mice, which were easy prey.

But she wanted to kill the boy for revenge. She had lost mates and companions to starvation, homelessness, and bullets. She had long wanted to kill one of the creatures responsible, one of the hairless dogs that walk like birds. And now, here was a young one, sitting alone and defenseless.

She waited in the dark, tail swishing back and forth. She waited to see if the boy would stay or move on.

Now she was sure. He’d been sitting on the rock not moving for a long time.

She lifted her haunches and prepared for what she’d been made for: the great rush forward at blinding speeds, every muscle in perfect harmony, every tooth and claw synchronized perfectly to knock her prey over and sever his spinal cord.

Then she saw the light.

Out away from the boy, a man was walking—and glowing. Light meant men. Men meant weapons.

She held her ground.

the blue light

Ahead of me, swaying slowly back and forth, is this pale light. It’s dim, but it’s moving right to left, pausing, and then left to right.

I go toward it, careful not to lose it when a stump or a ridge throws me to the ground. As I get closer, it becomes a bluish flicker, which is mad spooky—maybe it’s a ghost, or worse. In
Zombie Cannibals
, the decaying orbit of the satellite that caused the dead to rise from the grave produced this blue light that glowed out of the graves right before the zombies poked their heads up. So I try stealth: I hide behind trees. I crawl on hand and knee. Now I can see this dude pacing with the blue light, and I hear a voice muttering through the rain.

The light snaps off, but I can still barely make out the dude. His long hair is silver and white. It pokes straight up like an afro and then cascades down the back.

It isn’t hair—it’s a headdress.

An Indian headdress.

He turns toward me, arms at his sides, legs spread slightly. His lips form a hard, stoic line. His eyes glow in the dark.

I stare into them.

They stare back at me.

CHAPTER TWO

we hitch

My video game training says the situation calls for a little left trigger, with the A and X buttons tapped twice in unison.

I ninjitsu out of the trees, helicoptering, no feeling but drizzle and wind until his jawbone turns to crumbling Cheetos beneath the toe of my Timberlands.

Then: X, Y, X, Y, twice in succession. Fist punches bloody the midsection, sending baddy back into the brush.

Select button.

Arsenal menu.

Chainsaw.

The Activision sound card blasts a killer bee storm as I lower it and Cuisinart baddy into monster tree food.

He is an Indian—blinged up like one, anyhow. He wears a leather headband with white and silver feathers that crest down his back. He has finger-painted a circle with lines poking out of it on his chest the way a kid would draw the sun. Old school yellow leather pants with fringe cover his bottom half, and he wears what looks like His Eminence’s bedroom slippers. His tats are badass, people. Swoops and swirls swish around his arms rockstarlike.

When he doesn’t make a move to John Wayne Gacey me, I tell him about Arthur’s ankle, and he follows me into the woods. Afterward, while we hoof it around the brush looking for Arthur, I figure I’m stupid asking him for help. Maybe trusting some crazy guy fronting squaw isn’t my Mensa moment, but I’m too scared of the trees and the rain and the creeping things to care.

TV and movie Indians superman it through fields and forests, flashing through trees and tall grass like stampeding wolves, but remain ghost quiet while the cowboys they sneak up on make a racket around their campfires.

Not this guy. He’s a dork, stubbing his toes on the same roots where I stub mine, slipping and making a racket even though he doesn’t talk.

The two of us dick around in the brush for a while, crashing into rocks and trees and sliding like goons. I yell, “Arthur!” the whole time and begin to get the worryshakes that I seriously lost the kid for good. But after a half hour, I hear a low, “Winthrop,” blip out from somewhere. We follow his voice and there he is, lying where I left him, little blue eyes gaping over what I harpooned in the way of help.

Crazy Indian Guy keeps mute, and before Arthur has time to flinch, he stoops and swings him over a tatted shoulder like a sack of dog food, and we make for the exit, or whatever destination Crazy Indian Guy has in mind.

Tapping the escape key is crossing my mind, people, truth be told. Arthur has his help. I’ve been lucky to find anybody, and now Arthur has his ambulance ride without me having to nursemaid him and give up the San Fran show. But it’s not like I’m leaving Arthur with a nuclear family in a house with a white picket fence, am I? What if he’s a serial killer? I can’t just leave him here to get Dahmered by Crazy Horse. So I keep on behind them, barking my shins on the slippery stuff and praying to the gods of civilization to show me a road.

a change of orders

The world had changed.

Moments before, vengeance had been so sure. The two young ones had been alone. One had already been felled by the old oak. That a man had arrived meant little; one man was of almost no consequence to trees that had stood by the river long before any two-footed beast.

It began as a shivering through the interconnecting webwork of root systems, where earlier the message had been of intruders and hostility, which the trees felt the way trees feel all things, as heat and bluster.

This was a message of stillness.

Pull back your branches. Let this one pass.

It puzzled some of the yearlings, who wondered what blood tasted like. But even they followed the example of the older trees, who knew better than to ask.

i meet the
tamzene