The Last Notebook of Leonardo

by B. B. Wurge

  “What if he got captured by Indians?” I said.

  “He might have,” my dad said, thoughtfully. “He might have fallen in with a local tribe. That’s very smart, Jem. We’ll have to research Native American lore.” But then he stopped and smiled at me. “Jem. Listen. Do you hear anything?”

  We were quiet a moment. “Nope. What is it, Dad?”

  He grinned again. “The wind is gone. And look at the light.”

  I realized suddenly that the tent was glowing from sunlight that filtered in through the nylon material. Our candle had gone out a long time ago, but I hadn’t noticed. The ship’s log had been too absorbing. And the package of celery was empty. I had eaten it all. I hoped it wouldn’t give me a stomachache. “What time is it?” I said.

  Dad checked his watch, pushing aside the matted hair on his wrist that covered up the dial. “It’s five in the afternoon. We’ve been here all day, and the storm is over. Jem, you better duck outside and see what’s happened to the world.”

  His head looked like a pumpkin, but he was friendly.

  7

  The Earth had turned a sparkly white. The sky was clear blue and the sun was bright near the horizon. The bushes were no longer visible; they were bulges of whiteness glittering in the sunlight. They had funny irregular shapes, and reminded me of bears and dinosaurs that had crouched down and gotten covered up. The trees were also covered with snow, but I could still see their dark prickly branches sticking out here and there. The road was a shallow white trench and the wooden telephone poles standing along the road were crusted with white on one side where the wind had blown the hardest. Even the wires that connected the telephone poles had snow on them, and they stood out against the sky as lines of icy white. Everything was absolutely still. The wind had stopped entirely. The air was clear and cold, but not so cold that it hurt my nose or stung my throat. I could put down my hood and look around and enjoy the sight. You can’t enjoy the world as much if you are wearing a hood, because it puts a frame around the world and makes you feel like you are watching a television screen; and also it blocks the sound from your ears and makes everything seem unreal. But once I put my hood down, the whole snowy countryside came rushing up around me.

  I walked knee deep to the roadside and looked up and down and all directions, but I couldn’t see a house or a barn anywhere. All I saw was open fields and snow-covered woods. I saw a few bird tracks in the snow, and some other tracks that I couldn’t recognize; but nothing very big, and nothing that wore a boot or a shoe. After a while I started to hear a rumbling sound to my left, and I peered down the road as far as I could. The road bent out of sight about half a mile away, and something came scraping and grinding around the bend into view. It was a snowplow. I thought I would watch it go by and wave at it. It came grinding up slowly, pushing the snow to one side in a huge stack. When it got closer I could see it was not a very high-end snowplow. It was somebody’s old rusty pickup truck with a plow blade fixed to the front. I didn’t want it to accidentally plow me under, so I stood pretty far back from the roadside and waved as it drove past.

  The truck stopped and the window opened. A head stuck out of the window and looked at me. It was a very large, round head, wider than it was tall because the cheeks were so fat, with smile lines around the eyes and the mouth, and with a lot of shaggy blonde hair on top. The face was red, like a giant round pumpkin that somebody had put a wig on. I couldn’t tell at first if it was a man or a woman, but when it started to talk I realized it was a man.

  “My goodness you sure gave me a fright!” he said. He opened his mouth and his eyes very wide, and laughed very loud, as if he had said something funny. He didn’t wait for me to reply, but kept on talking. “I says to myself, ‘what is that, is that a bear?’ I says, ‘Goodness,’ I says, ‘I’m’a go back and tell Gladys I saw a bear standing on the side of the road,’ except if it was a stump or I don’t know what, then I thought it was a person. What are you doing here all alone on the side of the road? I saw a raccoon about six miles back, poor thing was so froze up and hungry it just sat there and didn’t budge, I says, ‘If I had a sandwich,’ I says to myself, ‘I’d toss it out the window for the poor thing,’ that’s how hungry it looked. Only I wouldn’t tell nobody else about it. People like to hunt them. But I didn’t expect a bear. I tell you. Then I says to myself, ‘Well, Bill, since when is a bear bright blue with red trim?’ Because that’s the color of your coat you know. I says, ‘That can’t be a bear.’ I says—”

  “Um,” I said; I didn’t like to interrupt, but I wasn’t sure if I’d get the chance otherwise. “Is it very far to the next town?”

  “The next town!” the person said. “Depends on what you call a town. There’s Sutton, but it’s hardly a town at all. And there’s Collingwood, which has a nice store which is called Collingwood’s and has garden gnomes and things like that which are very nice, you know, made out of stone, and there’s . . . say, how long have you been out here, Sonny? You all alone? Did I tell you, you sure give me a fright? I thought you was a bear! You want a ride anywhere?”

  “Um,” I said, trying to decide which question to answer first, “I’m with my dad.”

  Bill turned his round head one way and the other, looking everywhere, and said, “I don’t see your dad. What is he, froze under the snow?”

  “He’s in our tent, back there,” I said. “We’re looking for Indian relics,” I added.

  He looked surprised and scratched at his nose with a pudgy red hand. “Tell you the truth, it’s not such a great time to look for Indian relics. I heard of arrowheads and things like that scattered here and there, but with the snow and all, it’s a little hard to spot them. Say, what did you say your name was? Anyways there’s Blackwood too. Did I mention Blackwood? That’s a town that’s got an auction house I got me a radio for six dollars and a broken pair of pliers. Didn’t know the darn thing was broke. Well I says to Stan who was next to me, ‘Stan,’ I says, ‘that whole box that’s going for fifty cents is got a pair of pliers worth five dollars in it so I’m’a bid on it.’ And Stan he says—”

  “Um,” I said, getting an idea, “is there a town with an Indian museum?”

  “Shore!” he said. “There shore is. It’s about thirty, thirty-five miles up the road, it’s called Stockton and that museum has a lot of books and old pictures and arrows and things like that, very pretty, I took my son there once, he’s more interested in other things, he says, ‘Dad,’ he says, ‘they got a museum for Power Rangers?’ Can you beat that? That’s what he says!” The man opened his eyes and his mouth again and laughed hard at me. I thought he was a very jolly person, but a little hard to talk to.

  Then his face changed and his hair seemed to stand up on his head. He stared over my shoulder and said, “By God, kid, you better jump in the truck as fast as you can, there’s a bear behind you. It et your dad, I’m afraid. Hop in quick, before it eats you too!”

  “That is my dad,” I said. I looked over my shoulder just to make sure, because I didn’t want to get eaten by a bear. Sure enough, my dad was climbing out of the tent hole, and a load of snow had fallen in his eyes and he was staggering around trying to brush it out.

  I had a clever idea. I stepped up to the truck and said in a low voice, “My dad’s an Indian. I mean, a Native American. He’s an elder in the, um, Otchig tribe. That’s his ceremonial outfit. He’s real nice, you’ll like him. But don’t mention to him that I told you about his tribe, because he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  “Ah ha!” Bill said, and put his finger over his lips and winked as if he was telling me that he could keep a secret. “The things you do see! All in one day. I’m’a go home and tell Gladys I saw a coon and a bear and an Indian all on the side of the road. Amazing things a snowstorm does bring out. That is one amazing suit! Get me one of them, I’d stay warm in the deep freeze! How’d he get it on? It seems to sort of fit real snug all around. I don’t see no zipper or nothing. Say, Mister, you want a ride anywhere?�
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  My dad had shambled up through the snow and reached us.

  “Dad,” I said, “this man says there’s an Indian museum nearby.”

  “Shore is,” Bill said. “About thirty, thirty-five miles up the road.” Bill looked my father up and down. “That shore is some suit. You want a ride? I can give you a ride. Take me a while cause the plowing goes slow, but you’ll get there quicker than if you went on foot. If those are feet. What are those? Darn if it don’t look like you have hands down there instead of feet. What’d you say your name was? You just pack up your tent there and sling it in the back, and we can all three squeeze in the truck easy. I don’t mind. You go ahead.”

  So Dad and I went back to our tent and took it down and packed it up, although mostly Dad did it. The snow was so deep that he couldn’t drag the wagon to the road. He picked it up and carried it over his head, hopping through the snow, and put the wagon down in the open back of the pickup truck. We had so much stuff that the truck settled down very deep on its springs. Dad tied the wagon down so that it wouldn’t roll around on the truck bed. Then we climbed in the front seat with Bill, me in the middle because I was the smallest, and Dad next to the window, all squished up, his head bent down and his stomach bulging out over the dashboard.

  “I never,” Bill said, starting up the engine and moving slowly along the road, plowing as he went. “You must be one strong Indian. I never did see anyone that could lift up a thing like that and sling it around so easy. You aught to be more careful so you don’t rip your suit. That is some suit. I wish I had me one of those suits. I only got one suit and the cat’s been all over it so much it looks like about as hairy as yours. Ha ha! Well, I’m always trying to get that cat outside, but Gladys, that’s my wife, she’s always putting it back in the house. I puts her out, Gladys puts her in, till the cat she don’t show up no more and I figure she’s outside finally getting some healthy air and chasing a bird or something, and you know what? That darn cat’s got into my closet and is sleeping on my clothes! That’s where she’s got to. That is the laziest cat I ever did see. Well, unless it’s my cousin Danny’s cat. Let me tell you about that cat. One day we were. . . .”

  Dad and I sat quietly and let him talk on and on. He never took a break, and he never seemed to mind that we didn’t contribute anything to the conversation. After a while I didn’t even hear what he was saying. We got to Stockton after sundown, too late to visit the Indian museum. Bill pulled to the side of the road and Dad squeezed himself out of the front seat. He had been scrunched up inside for so long, about an hour and a half, that he could hardly stand up straight, and he was only about six and a half feet tall. He was so stiff that I had to help him untie our wagon. Then he was limbered up enough to lift it out of the truck and put it on the roadside. We said goodbye to Bill and thanked him for the ride, and he wished us luck and drove away.

  “See, Jem,” my dad said. “There’s a nice man, even if he does talk a lot. He didn’t mind that I’m an orangutan.”

  “Maybe he didn’t realize you were one,” I said.

  “How could he not realize?” Dad said. “Jem, your brain has frozen up in the cold.”

  Dad dragged our wagon just out of town, which wasn’t very far, because the town was only one or two streets. Then we set up our tent hidden in some trees and crawled inside to wait for the morning.

  8

  The museum didn’t open until eleven in the morning. Dad stayed home in our tent working on the ship’s log. I thought I had deciphered everything useful in it, but he was systematic and wanted to write out a complete document in English. I decided to spend the morning looking around the town. I had lived my whole life in the city and had never seen anything like Stockton New York.

  The whole town was only one crossroads. One of the roads, the one we had come along, had only two lanes with hardly anybody driving on it. The other one was a gravel road with no street sign. One corner had a gas station and a store that went with the station. The store was called “UPERMARKET ” because the S had fallen off a while ago. Another corner of the crossroads had a diner with a striped canvass awning hanging over the front door. The awning was mostly covered with snow and the diner was closed. I saw a dog walking through the town and sniffing everywhere. It looked at me suspiciously. I’m sure it knew I was a stranger. It probably knew every person in the town. It must have decided I was okay, because it wagged its tail at me and went on with its busy schedule of sniffing.

  All together about twenty houses marched back from the crossroads. They were miscellaneous, some of them very big with old-fashioned porches and wooden columns at the corners of the porch, and some of them more like shacks that had been put up with scrap wood. They all looked a little paint-peeled, but maybe the snow did that to them after a few years. A good half of the houses had Christmas lights out, and plastic reindeer and plastic Santas in their front yards, and I thought it must look fantastic in the dark when all the lights were turned on. I was sorry we hadn’t had time to look at it properly the night before.

  The snow was already melting, and the air was warm and the sun was hot, and I had to un-zipper my arctic coat and leave it open at the front or I would have sweated to death. I tucked my hat and mittens in my pockets and tried to avoid the mud puddles where the snow was turning to slush. Now and then I would hear a rushing sound like an avalanche and see a great big sheet of snow slide off of somebody’s roof. One time such a large amount fell off, and made such a racket on a row of tin garbage cans lined up beside the house, that the town dog leaped in the air about three feet and ran off up the gravel road, looking back over his shoulder as if he thought it was my fault.

  A lot of people were outside shoveling off their front steps or shoveling out around their cars, which had gotten blocked in quite a bit from the snow-plows. It must have been a pleasure to shovel snow on a sunny day like that, with the warm air taking care of most of your work for you. A lot of people said hi to me, or waved, or smiled as I went past, and I said hi back to them, although I was surprised and had never heard of anything like it before. In the city, nobody says hello to you unless they know you. Strangers never say anything except, maybe, “Hey Kid, get out of there,” if they think you’re snooping around with no good reason. So there was some advantage to a small town.

  I went to the Upermarket and bought a breakfast bagel, the kind with buttery scrambled eggs and a nice greasy disk of sausage. I took it outside and sat on one of the cement blocks at the head of a parking space.

  While I was sitting and eating, I had a long think, and decided that our way of camping out was just about right. It couldn’t be improved. We had plenty of tasty food; plenty of warmth in the tent, because it turns out that an orangutan is a furnace and generates a lot of heat; plenty of towns and people to meet. It was better than being a mountain climber. My dad had been telling me about the people who climb Mount Everest, and I was glad to be here in Stockton New York eating a delicious breakfast bagel instead of up on top of that mountain. Apparently they eat dried beans that have been soaked in snow water and heated up, if they can eat anything at all, especially since their fingers keep falling off and so I imagine it is hard to hold a spoon. They don’t have a lot of warmth to go around among them. And as to meeting people, my dad said that you meet a lot of people along the way up there, but they’re not very talkative, being dead and frozen up like mummies all along the main path. I think maybe they were so sick of eating dried beans in snow water that they just stopped eating all together and keeled over of starvation.

  When I was done with my bagel I walked to the Indian museum, even though it wasn’t open for another half hour, just to see what it looked like on the outside. It was right near the crossroads. It was an old wooden house, with gabled windows on the second floor and curly wooden carvings under the eves and no paint on it anywhere. It must have been one of the first houses built here, it had such an old fashioned look to it, and was so different from all the modern ones put up around it.
It had a sign outside that said, “Amazing Indian History Museum!” I shaded the front window with my hands and peered inside, but it was so dim I couldn’t see much except a lot of shelves.

  “Hey Kid!” someone shouted, and I turned around and looked everywhere, but I couldn’t see who was talking.

  “Up here,” the voice said. I looked up and saw a man standing on the roof of the next house over. It wasn’t really a house; it was a trailer set up on cinderblocks. The man was using a broom to clean the snow off of his satellite dish. “Hey Kid,” he said, looking over the edge of the roof at me, “you want to see the museum?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But it’s not open yet.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. He tilted up his head, opened his mouth, and bellowed, “Hey Shirley! Some kid wants to see the museum!”

  An upper window on the museum house banged opened and a voice said, “He got money? It’s five dollars.”

  “Hey Kid,” the roof guy said, “you got money? It’s five dollars.”

  “Um, yeah,” I said, feeling in my pocket just to make sure.

  I waited for Shirley to come downstairs and open the front door. I didn’t think Shirley sounded like an Indian name. When she unlocked the door and opened it for me, I didn’t think she looked very Indian at all. She looked more like an English grammar teacher. She was thin and had short iron-gray hair and glasses. She turned on the light in the museum and looked at me severely, as if I had done something wrong. “ Well?” she said.

  I handed her a five-dollar bill, and she took it and put it in her cash register. “You have half an hour,” she said. “Don’t make me wait any longer. Don’t touch anything if it has a sign on it that says don’t touch. And don’t take anything. I can smell a thief. I have a special nose.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” I said.