Unstoppable Moses

by Author Tyler James Smith

  Test reached behind the log he was sitting on and pulled out a white plastic bottle with a red tip and squirted a stream of lighter fluid into the fire. The flames swelled with a fwoomp! noise, and for a second you could see everyone. Some of the kids were nervous and some of them were homesick, but Test was wrong—they weren’t all terrified. You could hear them giggling and you could feel the nervous excitement in the air.

  “But what happens next?” one of the little girls asked. She had on an oversized aviator-style winter hat—the kind with big earflaps that made it so her face was all bangs and mouth. “Did he gut him with his hook hand?”

  She was smaller than the other kids, and while the other campers sat tightly packed together, she had a small vacant perimeter. She didn’t seem to notice or care about the wide berth the other kids were giving her.

  Faisal was sweating while Matty and Michael were trying not to laugh themselves apart and I was lost, staring into the incinerator-heart of the fire. Not into the flames or even the embers that kept climbing up and away, but far into the center of the fire where the sparks hissed to life and crackled and glowed a deep orange.9 Beneath the thick teepee of flaming logs, all of the original wood and newspapers had burned down to coals.

  What’s your life story, Moses? Matty asked, deep in my head. Her voice sounded like flames.

  What’s your life story, Moses? Do you pray to the Holy Molten Blob that no one asks who you really are? They know you aren’t like them; they can tell you don’t feel things like they do. You’re all knobs and dials, Robo-Boy. Tell them what happens to friends of yours. Tell them that you shouldn’t be allowed here. Tell them what happened to Charlie. Tell them what Charlie’s family went through because of you.

  Go ahead and tell them.

  The coals burned; they hissed. The more I looked at them the harder they seemed to glow, feeding on oxygen and burning brighter with every question asked and avoided.

  I moved my eyes from the coals to the fire to the kids to the coals and it all melted together. I lost myself in the dense and immeasurable blur.

  The fire was stories high. It smelled like Charlie’s side of the story because it turns out that flaming pallets on the roof of a bowling alley smell almost identical to campfires made of sticks and dropped marshmallows.

  “Mr. Hill?”

  A thousand degrees of complexity. A million different interpretations of noise and memory.

  “Are you listening, Mr. Hill?”

  My attention jerked from the fire to Test, who, along with everyone else, was staring at me.

  “Sorry,” I said, with a mouth made of burlap. “What?”

  Five seconds of silence, in which I was positive everyone could smell the cheap weed and panic-sweat coating my back. I opened my eyes extra wide to counter any marijuana-induced squinting.

  “I said it’s your turn, Mr. Hill.” When my face showed no trace of understanding, Test gestured grandly while saying, “A campfire story, Mr. Hill. It’s your turn. Preferably one without gratuitous violence or terror.” He looked at Jeffrey. “Maybe something lighthearted. Something with a moral. Or elves.”

  At the mention of morals and elves, the girl in the aviator hat rolled her eyes so hard that my drug-addled mind legitimately worried she would sever her optical nerves.

  But the night was determined to have a story from me and, at best, my mind was blank. At worst it was a fog-covered precipice that looked over an ocean of autobiography threatening to overflow and drown the world around me.

  “Okay. Okay, a story. Once … upon a time … there were pigs. There were three pigs—”

  “Are you about to tell us about the Three Little Pigs?” Test said, not at all trying to hide the frustrated boredom in his voice.

  “No?”

  “If you don’t have a story, we can move on to someone more prepared, Mr. Hill.” He twitched his mustache a little, and I hated that I had a story locked inside of me that didn’t involve pigs or elves but one hell of a fucking moral about family and friends, and my lungs threatened to unleash my life story without flinching or blinking or holding anything back. To tell the true story. The one that happened. The one about Charlie Baltimore.

  I cleared my throat, but Faisal spoke up, loud.

  “Once upon a time!” he said, adjusting his volume, stifling the laughter threatening to churn out of his mouth. “Once upon a time there was a house…” He spoke slowly and deliberately, not completely succeeding at keeping the smile from his face.

  “It was an old house nestled deep, deep, deep in a dead forest where nothing ever grew and blackbirds always filled the sky—blackbirds that would rest their tired feet and large wings on the naked branches and warm chimneys of all the dead houses in the forest.”

  The children’s voices tapered off and even Test’s attention was caught in the strange authority of Faisal’s voice.

  “But the birds never landed on the old, creaky house—for the old, creaky house had old, weathered shutters that always caught the smallest wind and would whine and slap against the siding, loud enough to send the forest animals scattering away every time.”

  Someone tossed a log onto the slowly dwindling fire, sending sparks crashing up and swirling into the night. The smoke from the smoldering wood hit us in waves; there was a kid who effectively looked like a banana since his hair was dark and his coat and pants were yellow, and when the smoke hit him he squinted his eyes and started waving the smoke away, saying, “I hate rabbits, I hate rabbits, I hate rabbits” to ward the cloud off. Banana Kid fending off the smoke was something Sober Moses wouldn’t think was that funny but something that Incredibly High Moses found to be hilarious. Incredibly Paranoid Moses immediately worried he was laughing too loudly. The incantation sent the smoke swimming around the fire, tangling itself deep into our hair and jackets. Matty squeezed her smiling eyes shut and didn’t take Michael’s hand but rubbed her shoulder against his, just enough of a gesture to let him know she was there and he was there, but not enough to let Test know they were there together.

  “It was a house older than the dead trees, and the other houses knew it. They would say to it, ‘Old House, your crooked tin chimney is no good,’ and ‘Old House, your raggedy old picket fence isn’t pretty enough, not one bit.’” Faisal punctuated the night with his story. “And the old house heard every hurtful word they said. It would hear them and look at its cracked windows and it couldn’t help but feel all wrong. The old house would look at the tiny fire it had flickering in its belly and wonder what the other houses burned to make so much heat and smoke. It would look at its dusty stairs and creaky chairs. At its paint that peeled in teardrops. At its rusty nails, too bent and hammered to hold any paintings.”

  I blinked and in the coals, I could see Charlie and me, years and years ago watching TV, the news telling us over and over how terrible the world was and how broken we all were. Some newscast about a disaster’s death toll and its mile-long vigil. When they cut to the footage of the aftermath—since there were no villains to show, no blame to place—they showed the people of this rural town working together to pull rubble away from the heaps, looking for survivors. One image they kept coming back to was of a kid about our age, wearing an Iron Man mask and carrying jugs of clean water. Everyone went crazy for Iron Kid, and Charlie and I weren’t any different.

  “But sometimes the house didn’t listen,” Faisal said, bringing me back.

  “Sometimes the house’s attention was somewhere else altogether, because inside, through the house’s dusty living room and past the old mismatched trinkets, through the kitchen with warped floors, and down the crooked stairs to the cellar, there was a door.” Faisal stopped and waved in front of his face to clear the smoke away.

  “What was behind the door?” one of the boys asked.

  Faisal looked at him and smiled a storyteller’s smile. He couldn’t hear me asking the same question. Aviator Girl shushed us, loudly, while keeping her eyes on Faisal.

  “Be
hind the door, deep under the house, safely away from where the other houses could see, there was a lush and living forest that ran for miles upon innumerable miles.” The way he hit the vivid points in the story, you knew it was one he’d known for lifetimes. “The old house would tend to its hidden forest, singing to its trees that were as green as its hidden nights were black and full of stars, and it would watch its secret birds fly spirals in its clearings. And if the old house listened real close, so close and quiet that even its creaking weathervane above couldn’t be heard, it could hear drums somewhere deep inside its forest—”

  The can of beans exploded with a shattering and metallic THUNGH noise.

  Unbelievably Stoned Moses almost shit his Unbelievably Stoned Pants.

  The can sent sparks and steam and maple-flavored syrup geysering up with fist-sized wads of beans blasting in every direction. The bean bomb was loud enough to jar a couple of the kids off their logs and powerful enough to send the can’s lid slicing through the air.

  The girl in the aviator hat yelped and fell back as Test shot to his feet, hands out and eyes wide, managing to yell “Jesus!” before the last of the beans rained down.

  I reeled back, suddenly mostly sober and on my feet.

  “Is everyone okay?” Test asked. “Is anyone hurt?” He was looking everywhere at once.

  Matty and Michael poked their heads up from behind a log, Michael’s shoulder covered in beans but the rest of them clean. They looked at Faisal, who was still standing with his hands out, covered in soot and food.

  Faisal gave himself a once-over before saying, “What the fu—”

  “Faisal! Language!” Test said, cutting him off while still checking on the kids.

  “Excuse me?” the little girl in the aviator hat said. Nobody heard her but me. She raised her hand up in the air and said it again, but still nobody paid her any attention: Test was muttering and checking all of the wrong kids, Buddies were checking on other campers, Faisal was helping Matty and Michael, covered in beans, get up, but the little girl raised her bloody hand; she was surrounded by people and light and she was invisible. I saw her ask the world to see her, one more time.

  And nobody did. And my THC-racked brain thought that that was fucking terrible. And that it sucks when the world doesn’t see you. And how we’re all functionally invisible to the majority of the world because we’re so small. And how blood looks weird in firelight.

  And then I was the furthest thing from stoned. Then I was just me.

  I climbed through whatever high was left in my head and moved on legs made of wet rope toward the small, bloody hand flagging anyone down. I ignored the voice nestled in the fuming heart of the fire that told me I could try to help all I wanted, but it wouldn’t amount to shit. That my scales were tipped permanently, that I could do no right.

  Her eyes were wide and her face was pale.

  “Hey. Hey. Let me see,” I said. I moved her head to the side and lifted the earflap of her hat. The exploded lid had sliced up and under, leaving a diagonal cut across her cheek and along her ear. “Test!”

  “Is she okay?” Faisal asked, already next to me and kneeling down.

  “The lid got her.”

  Test was helping one of the students who had fallen backward off their log.

  “Is my ear still there?” the girl asked as Faisal tilted her head back to check.

  “Nope. Ear’s gone. See?” He spoke on her undamaged left side before sidestepping and going silent mid-sentence, mouthing words on her right. He snapped his fingers on the left side of her head before moving his hand over and pantomiming a snapping motion on her right. He moved back to her left. “—ically you’ll have to forget about a career in air traffic control. Or being a bat. Can’t be a bat with only one good ear.”

  She smiled, and some of the color came back to her face.

  “Faisal, we have to get her some bandages. Hey,” I said, making myself smile at her. “What’s your name?”

  “Lump.”

  “Lump?” Faisal asked.

  “Everyone calls me Lump.”

  “Your mother named you Lump?” he asked.

  “No, but she calls me Lump too. She says we’re repurposing it. I looked up what repurpose—”

  “Jesus!” Test said again. “How bad is it? Is she okay?” He shouldered his way between us.

  “She’s fine,” I said, “but she needs to get pat—”

  “Then take her to the lodge and get her taken care of. Both of you.” He stopped and smelled the air in front of us, staring us down. “Why do you smell so fresh?”

  “What?” I said.

  “It smells like you took a bath in Listerine.”

  “I’m still bleeding. My head is still bleeding,” Lump said.

  We turned to leave but Test grabbed my arm and said, “I’ll be there in a few minutes to make sure everything is all right. I’m looking at you, Mr. Hill.”

  Faisal went to respond before he realized that he wasn’t the one bring grilled.

  Test craned his attention away from me and looked at her. “It’s okay, kiddo. They’re going to take care of you.”

  He didn’t trust us, but he needed us to save the day.

  We broke for the cabins like we were incapable of fucking things up.

  ELEVEN: TREASURE HUNTERS

  CHARLIE HAS THE PICKAXE and I have a backpack full of rocks.

  The plan, which makes perfect sense in our ten-year-old brains, is to dig until we find Underground.

  Underground is exactly what it sounds like and everything else we can imagine: somewhere, right beneath our feet, is Underground, and if it’s a place then surely it has tunnels and lights and danger and adventure. Treasure, in Underground, surely abounds.

  So we strap my dad’s pickaxe to Charlie’s back with red bungee cords, load my backpack with stones small enough to throw but big enough to fend off any Underground monsters, and carry shovels deep into my parents’ backyard. Our dig site—our entry point—is already littered with provisions: unopened Gatorade bottles, a kiddie pool where the things we find will go, a souped-up metal detector, and a wheelbarrow, full of tools we pulled off the garage wall.

  “What are you going to do with your booty?” I ask, half out of breath from the homemade anchor on my back but still wrecked by how funny the word “booty” is.

  Charlie’s face is red from lugging tools back and forth and he keeps reaching back to adjust the pickaxe that’s digging into his hip. “With my booty, first thing I’m going to do is buy a pool to put all my booty in.”

  Charlie is equally infected by booty.

  “A booty pool!”

  “Booty pool!” Charlie yells.

  We dump our tools to the side as we get to the site. The location isn’t arbitrary, on account of the military-grade metal detector I’ve cobbled together.

  Forty minutes later there’s a minor canyon dug in my parents’ lawn. It’s Charlie’s turn to tear up the ground to make digging easier.

  He brings the pick down and we hear exactly what we’ve been waiting for: the metallic pang of iron hitting fame and/or fortune.

  “The shit was that?” he says, the tool still sunk into the ground, his eyes locked on mine.

  “Keep digging keep digging keep digging!” He tears the pickaxe out of the ground, heaves it above his head, and brings it down. Again and again, trying to loosen the earth. “Wait!” I say, throwing my hands out. “Wait, stop!”

  “What, why?” he asks, pickaxe hovering above his head for a minute before falling backward. “What is it?” The energy in his voice has a heroic edge to it, like he’s expecting me to say that I hear someone coming, or see one of the monsters we’re prepared for.

  “What if the treasure isn’t in a trunk?”

  “What?” The heroic edge is gone.

  “What if the treasure isn’t in a big metal box?”

  “I don—”

  “We need to stop hitting it with a pickaxe.”

  The realizati
on that he is potentially littering our priceless heirloom with puncture wounds sweeps across his face. “Aw shit, you’re right. We’ve gotta dig. Gotta dig dig dig dig!”

  We trade out and I dig.

  Four feet in the ground, I work the best I can to uncover the shape that is becoming less and less boxlike with each shovel-ful of dirt I pull out.

  The thing in the dirt starts to take shape and it definitely doesn’t seem big enough to be worth a booty pool. But it’s solid; no matter how hard we hit it, no matter how much we dig around it, it remains where it was planted.

  Eventually we have a length of it uncovered, however caked in black earth it may be.

  We’ve dug enough of a crater that we can sit with our backs against the cool earth. Charlie wipes at the dirt coating his arm and says, “You think it’s, like, part of a ship? Or like a whole ship?”

  Then I say a word I’ve only ever heard in movies and have never yet said myself:

  “Fuck.”

  I scramble to my knees, grab the Gatorade that’s sitting next to me, and dump some on the hopefully-a-treasure still trapped in the earth.

  “What are you doing!” he yells, mostly in disbelief that I’d pour Gatorade on our artifact.

  The dirt cascades off in black ribbons and even before the yellow sports drink is done dripping off we see the words Guthrie Gas and Power written on a very damaged pipe.

  First there’s confusion on his face, then surprise. “I think we almost blew up the neighborhood,” he says, smiling.

  TWELVE: THE NATURE OF THIN ICE, PART ONE

  HER HAND WAS CLAMPED AGAINST the side of her head because, she said, in the movies they always said to keep pressure on it. The bleeding had mostly stopped on its own but her hand, caked with splashes of red, kept the rest of the blood at bay in case it decided to come pouring out.

  “I got blood on my dad’s hat. I was supposed to take care of it,” Lump said.

  “It’s okay. We can clean it,” I said as we worked our way down the dark path toward the main campgrounds.

  “Why do you guys smell like my neighbor?” she asked.