by Andrew Smith
Matching him, I wrapped a towel around my waist and stood next to Robby at the sink.
I was fascinated by shaving, watching my fathers do it as often as I had. With each stroke Robby made with the razor, I mirrored the same sweeping movements on my own face, using my first two fingers as my pretend razor.
“How long were you sad for?” I asked.
Robby stopped shaving and looked at me. Robby was always so good at looking at people when he talked to them.
He said, “Forever, Arek.”
“Oh.”
“At first, nobody knew he was not going to come back. But when it became obvious, I almost couldn’t deal with it. I thought it was about me. I think all kids have a tendency to do that, to believe that whatever happens is always directed at us personally, no matter what. I thought my father left us because he didn’t like me.”
“But that wasn’t true, right? Who would ever not like you?” I said.
Robby tilted his chin up and shaved his neck.
I did the same thing with my fingers.
Robby said, “There were a lot of people in the world then. It was natural, and practical, to be picky.”
“But not with your own son.”
I could not believe such things ever happened, despite the enormity of the before-the-hole population above, and Robby, sensing this, was kind enough to offer, “You’re right. Nobody would ever do such a thing to their sons. But it was hard for me not to blame myself. It was hard for me to blame him.”
Robby rinsed off his razor in the sink.
I rinsed off my first two fingers.
Robby wiped his face with his towel.
I did the same thing.
“Well, if you and Dad ever went away and did not come back, I’d come look for you,” I said.
“It’s a really big world out there.”
“Then why are there so many more books and stories about people finding each other than there are about people losing each other?”
Robby said, “Eden has an optimist for a librarian.”
“Just don’t ever go away, okay?”
Robby hugged me and told me that he loved me, and that he would never go away.
Jumping on the Bed While the Ship Goes Down
When Breakfast asked me if I’d seen the man in the sky, at first I thought he was talking about God.
I thought this was going to end up being some kind of conversation like those I’d had while sitting in my underwear beside Wendy on a cold pew, staring at a plain Danish Modern crucifix, even though I’d quite obviously already ruled out the possibility the wild boy would throw in Wendy’s admonitions regarding circumcision and cutting off your right hand.
“I seen him three times now, all in different places, flying by, overhead, in that noisy airplane of his,” Breakfast said. “I’m not sure if he’s ever seen me and Olive or not.”
“We saw the plane . . . I don’t know, maybe a couple days ago. I think the people flying it are my fathers,” I said.
Breakfast frowned, and his little eyebrows came together. “How many fathers do you have?”
“Two,” I said.
“Damn. I don’t even have one. How many mothers do you have?”
“One. And one grandmother. That’s my entire family. My grandmother makes me go to church. It’s scary.”
“Damn. Well, you have a lot of people, that’s for sure. All I got’s Olive. But I did live in a church at one time. I used to pee on its colored glass window.”
Olive, completely understanding Breakfast, bounced and clapped, perched above us on the edge of the upper deck.
And Breakfast said, “Why’d you run away from ’em?”
I had to consciously stop myself from saying I don’t know.
I said, “I need to find my fathers. I need to let them know that it’s okay for me to be out here on my own now, even if I don’t live long, because I am not going back to live in a hole for the rest of my life.”
The wild boy shook his head. “Nothing’s worse than being in a cage.”
In the dark trees rising like canyon walls on either side of the river, insects buzzed and sang.
Breakfast chewed his lip thoughtfully and picked wax from his ear. He stood up on the back rail of the boat and peed over the side into the river.
Breakfast said, “Well. If we don’t find the place where you parked your vehicle soon, we’re probably going to have to tie the boat up for the night. It’s soon going to be too dark to see where we’re going.”
“Let me see if I can get some lights on. There’s got to be lights on this boat somewhere,” I said.
Olive followed me inside the cabin. The place smelled like the inside of the boys’ locker room at Henry A. Wallace Middle School, like the little hole Mel and I had found in Rome. There’s something about air that has not been breathed by any living thing for decades that gives it a kind of dry and peculiar staleness. I went along both sides of the cabin and opened every window I could. Olive, fascinated, stayed right beside me.
At the bow end of the cabin, just on the other side of the woodstove’s chimney pipe, I found a bank of smudged plastic light switches. I began flicking them up, and soon lights came on everywhere inside the cabin, as well as out on top of the deck, where floodlights aimed down at the river to the front and rear of the Little Grace.
Olive jumped on the bed.
I used to jump on the beds in the hole. Sometimes I did it with Mel, and sometimes my dads would do it too. I never saw Wendy or my mom jump on beds, but I can’t believe they never did it. Maybe jumping on beds was a secret thing for Wendy and Mom. I think human beings are inescapably driven to jump on beds. Because there is something about jumping on beds that acts as an eraser to everything else on a canvas. Unfortunately for me, when I got up on the bed with Olive, if I stood, my head hit the cabin’s ceiling, so I had to jump on the bed on my knees, which were scuffed up from falling down in the dirt outside the van on the night of Mel’s birthday.
When I started jumping on the bed with her, Olive clapped and wriggled.
Breakfast yelled through the cabin’s door, “What are you doing in there?”
I said, “Jumping on the bed with Olive.”
“Not without me, you ain’t!” Breakfast said.
Then Breakfast released the tiller, set the boat in neutral, and came into the cabin and started jumping on the bed with me and Olive.
Olive was very happy.
There was a terrible grating crash, and then the boat pitched forward and tipped sideways.
The Little Grace ran into a rock before Breakfast got four jumps in, and we all spilled off the bed and onto the floor of the cabin.
And for just an instant inside the cabin of the Little Grace it was 1912, and I was being tossed on the wild frozen sea. And I thought, given human nature and the size of the Titanic, there had to have been at least one or two people jumping on their beds when the ship hit the iceberg. Maybe even the captain himself was.
“Motherfucker!” Breakfast said. “Ha-ha! I hope you can learn how to swim real fast!”
Unlike the Titanic, the Little Grace did not sink, however.
Olive and I followed Breakfast out to the boat’s stern deck. The Little Grace had come around in the current and was drifting downstream again. Once Breakfast engaged the engine and corrected the boat’s course, I could see from the lights cast ahead of us that we had come back to Davy Crockett Campground. The dock where the Little Grace had been tied up when Sergeant Stuart pushed me into the river lay on the left bank just ahead of us.
A Shot in the Dark
I had never been away from home to the degree that I would know what a homecoming might feel like.
In all my years growing up in the hole, I never thought about what finding myself disconnected from what the others called Eden would really feel like, despite the fact that there were very few things I wished for more than leaving the hole.
I think the feeling of coming back home is somethi
ng beyond our conscious control—as though each individual cell in our bodies gets a kind of magnetic programming about returning to a place of sanctuary and stability. That was the incomprehensible feeling I had that night when I came up the river’s bank and saw our black Mercedes van parked exactly where I’d left it at Davy Crockett Campground.
There was no sign of anyone there.
The Mercedes was dark. Either someone had turned off the lights after I left, or the van’s batteries had died.
We stood back at the crest of the bank and watched the quiet vehicle for several minutes.
Olive held Breakfast’s hand.
The wild boy said, “Dang. You live in that?”
“Yes,” I said.
Satisfied that there was nobody awake and moving around inside the van, I walked across a narrow strip of grass, past the sign promising all the fun imaginable at Davy Crockett Campground, up to the Mercedes’s door.
When the door opened for me and I realized Mel—or whoever—had left it unlocked, I knew it was a bad sign. I stuck my head inside, unable to see in the darkness, listening, even trying to smell, to find out if anyone was still here.
I stepped up into the van and felt for the interior light switch.
The lights came on. The first thing I noticed was the open bottle of whiskey on the table and the chairs where Sergeant Stuart and I had been sitting, still pulled out as we’d left them. Everything was exactly as it had been the night I went away from this place. The paintball gun was propped untouched in the corner; even my .22 was still under the covers on my bed.
Mel and Sergeant Stuart were both gone.
As far as I could tell, neither one of them had stayed in the van at all after I went into the river. I checked the bathroom.
“Mel?”
Nobody.
“Are they gone?” Breakfast stood at the van’s open door.
“Yeah.”
For the first time since opening my eyes on the sunburned deck of the Little Grace, I felt overwhelmed by fear, and I began imagining all the worst, most terrible things that might have happened to Mel.
I pushed my way past Breakfast and Olive and ran out to the little rise above the dock, screaming and screaming Mel’s name, over and over, out into the darkness of the night.
“Mel! Mel!”
Breakfast and Olive stayed beside me. Then the wild boy told me, “You may want to plug up your ears, because I’m about to give a whistle, and it’s pretty loud at times.”
I had no idea.
Breakfast’s whistle was so painfully loud it nearly knocked the teeth out of my mouth.
Olive apparently liked it. She jumped and clapped and hugged Breakfast.
In the dark surrounding us, I could hear sounds like thrashing in the trees and along the river’s edge as animals ran from the noise of Breakfast’s whistle or dropped dead in their tracks from fear.
I was stricken deaf. My ears rang so badly it felt like my head would split down the middle.
And despite not hearing him, I could tell by the grin on his face that the wild boy had said something to me like, “That was a good one, wasn’t it?”
Olive jumped up and down and patted Breakfast’s bony shoulders.
I rubbed my ears. I never wanted to hear that sound again.
But through the audible mud of the horns blaring in my head, seconds later we heard two gunshots coming from somewhere in the woods to the south of us.
“Motherfucker!” Breakfast said. “There’s someone out there. Wild!”
I froze, unable to decide what to do. Gunfire is probably not something you’d want to run toward through dark woods in the middle of the night. On the other hand, the only person around here who’d likely have a gun was Mel. Sergeant Stuart had lost his somehow; I was certain of that.
Breakfast was watching me, waiting to see what I’d do.
He said, “Well? Don’t you think we should go see if that’s your girlfriend out there?”
What was he doing? Nobody had ever called Mel my girlfriend before. Where did Breakfast get that idea? I was confused, I could barely hear, but I also needed to find Mel.
“I—uh—”
“Well, come on, Olive! Let’s get our rifle and see for ourselves who heard us.”
Breakfast padded across the dock, back toward the Little Grace, with Olive right behind.
I shook my head in an attempt to clear it, but it didn’t work too well.
“Okay,” I said. “Wait. Just give me a second.”
I went back to the van and grabbed some shoes and the paintball rifle from its resting place beside my bed.
We stumbled through the twisted undergrowth along the riverbank for at least half an hour, trying to find whoever it was who’d fired the gunshots we’d heard. Olive, who was patient with the lack of agility on the part of Breakfast and me, led the way. She occasionally stopped to sniff at the air or some brush, and as we looked, I’d call out for Mel every few minutes. Eventually, we came to the edge of an opening in the woods at the base of a rocky escarpment of hills that rose up toward the west. Breakfast and I stopped right behind Olive, who tensed up when she heard movement—a sort of scraping noise—coming from the other side of the clearing.
“Mel?” I called.
“Arek? Arek?” Mel’s voice was muddled, like she was underneath something.
“Are you okay?”
“Well, I’m kind of stuck.”
Just Like a Scene from a Love Story
It turned out that it was Amelie Sing Brees who’d fired the shots we’d heard.
There was no sign of Sergeant Stuart anywhere, and Mel was, as she pointed out, kind of stuck.
She was pinned down inside a low, narrow tunnel at the base of a hill. The opening of the shaft looked as though it may at one time have led to a mine, or possibly an ancient storage place of some kind. And Mel wasn’t alone in being stuck inside the tunnel. A large mottled Unstoppable Soldier was halfway buried in the opening, stuck up to the middle of its abdomen and unable to move forward or back as it continued to dig and struggle in an attempt to get to Mel.
So I said the stupidest thing that anyone could possibly say at that moment—I told Mel not to move, and to stay where she was.
Breakfast turned his face toward me. His knotted dreadlocks twirled like tassels.
He said, “She probably figured that out on her own, don’t you think?”
But the creature was hopelessly stuck and had obviously weakened. It was impossible to say how long Mel had been pinned down as she was—it may have been a couple of days, for all I knew.
Cautiously, Breakfast, Olive, and I moved into the clearing to get a better look at how the monster had trapped itself. The creature’s four hind legs kicked and scraped against the rocky ground. The footpads on them had all been damaged—toes were broken, and the legs were oozing the foul-smelling goop that circulated within the Unstoppable Soldiers’ bodies.
After all this time out of the hole, I realized that Unstoppable Soldiers were not very smart at all. It must have been sheer numbers and little else that had allowed them to overrun all the before-the-hole humans and that drove the handful of us to condemn ourselves willingly to Eden.
Breakfast, fearless, stepped right up to the thrashing monster. He scratched his balls. Then Breakfast raised his hand and slapped the thing—whack!—right in the center of its back.
“Ha-ha!” The wild boy laughed. “I never touched a living one before!”
“What the fuck are you doing?” I said.
Breakfast smiled and raised his hand in preparation to slap it again.
Olive jumped and clapped.
The Unstoppable Soldier flailed with rage. It raised its bruised carapace and fluttered its shredded wings wildly as Breakfast laughed and hopped from foot to foot. The wild boy slapped it again, and, infuriated, the creature thrashed and kicked while Breakfast peed on it.
I repeated my very non-rhetorical question: “What the fuck are you doing?”
Then Breakfast caught hold of one of the monster’s back legs and began pulling on it.
“I’m wild! Come on, little peckerhead. Come out and play! I’m wild!”
He was fucking insane, is what he was, I thought.
Breakfast spit and cheered. “Hoo-wee! Lookit this, wouldja? Ha-ha! I’m wild! Wild and rich! That’s how come I can live like this! Hoo-wee!”
I screamed at him, “Let go of it!”
Breakfast waved me off. “You watch, britch-wearing boy. If this thing comes around and gets a look at Olive, it’ll kill itself just trying to get away from us! And you want to know why? Because it knows we’re wild!”
Olive knew why.
The Unstoppable Soldier thrashed, buzzed its useless wings, and kicked its wounded legs, angrily curling its pillowed abdomen, shitting and pissing in rage.
Olive clapped. She scooted past the wild boy, climbed up the face of the hill, and perched herself above the blocked doorway.
Mel called out from the tunnel, “Arek? Is that you? What are you doing?”
Breakfast pulled fiercely on the monster’s leg, laughing and whooping.
Watching Breakfast play with the creature was frustrating. I was sure I was about to see this little wild punk, who I liked for unexplainable reasons, get shredded by the thing’s spikes and barbs.
I said, “Fuckbucket.”
Then I raised the paintball rifle, unhitched the safety mechanism, aimed, and fired two shots that struck the monster’s quivering abdomen just beneath its damaged, pulsating wings.
The Unstoppable Soldier exploded in an eruption of unfertilized eggs, steaming ropes of white goo, and wriggling maggotlike parasites that were as big as cucumbers. The hot fountain of slime sprayed all over the little wild naked boy who’d been jerking the monster’s leg to torment it.
“Aah! Motherfucker!” Breakfast screamed. “It’s full of shit!”
The wild boy was very, very mad. He’d never expected to be hopelessly covered with incomprehensible shit and slime for a second time in his life, not to mention the gigantic maggots.