Breakdown

by Joseph Monninger

  “How are we going to sleep tonight?” he asked, to change the subject. “We’re going to need some sort of shelter.”

  “We’ll make a debris hut,” Tock said. “No worries.”

  “What’s a debris hut?” Olivia asked.

  “You’ll see,” Tock said. “I’ve got skills.”

  “It’s going to be buggy,” Preston said.

  “We’ll be okay,” Olivia said. “I want to see this debris hut. Where’d you learn about it?”

  Tock shrugged.

  “Come on, Tock, tell us,” Olivia said. “Be normal for a second.”

  “My uncle,” he said. “He’s a big survival guy. You know. That kind of guy.”

  “You mean like he could go into the woods and live off the land?” Preston asked.

  Tock nodded. And he blushed. Preston couldn’t believe Tock had revealed a human emotion. For the first time, Preston realized that maybe Tock was a little embarrassed by his background. Maybe it wasn’t all gung ho Marine. It was hard to know about Tock. Preston had never met anyone like him.

  “Sometimes he took me out and showed me stuff,” Tock said. “He lived for a year in a national park in Tennessee, and no one knew about it. He fished and hunted and sometimes he ate food out of the Dumpsters. I know that sounds gross, but people throw away a ton of food. That’s what he said, anyway.”

  “That is so disgusting,” Olivia said.

  Preston saw the remark hit a soft spot in Tock. He closed down. Preston could see it happen. Suddenly, Preston realized that maybe Tock got hit by peoples’ comments more than he might have guessed. It was a vicious cycle. Tock said something stupid, then people responded, then Tock pulled further into his shell. It was strange to realize Tock was human.

  “Anyway, Tock,” Preston said, covering for Tock, “we’re lucky to have you.”

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” Tock said, veering off to the side of the road.

  Olivia hoisted her pack higher on her back. Preston tried to keep his mind off his feet. He was still thinking about his toes and about the weight on his shoulders when Olivia stopped. When he looked up, he realized she had stopped because they had come to a fork in the road.

  Veer left or veer right? Both roads looked about the same. Maybe the road that went to the left looked a little less traveled, but even that was hard to say for certain.

  “Uh-oh,” Olivia said.

  “Now it gets interesting,” Tock said.

  “There’s probably a sign somewhere along here,” Preston said.

  “Maybe,” Olivia said. “And maybe not.”

  “What’s the plan?” Preston asked.

  “I’ll go down this road a little and look for signs,” Olivia said, pointing to the left. “You guys go down the other road. Yell if you see anything. Don’t go too far. We’ll meet back here in five minutes.”

  “Whatever you say, boss,” Tock said.

  “Five minutes,” Olivia repeated. “Shout if you see anything.”

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” Preston said.

  Tock laughed. Then he walked off on the road that veered right. Preston followed him.

  Bess lit the seventh match and held it to the birch bark. Seven matches, she thought as she carefully moved the fire onto the birch. The birch crumpled and began shivering with light. She brought another piece of birch bark into the tiny flame and waited for it to catch. The birch bark flared suddenly, and she dropped it before she had it properly positioned. It lay on its side, burning but not contributing its heat to the pile of twigs she had built next to it.

  “I hate this,” she said under her breath.

  Quincy didn’t say anything. Neither did Simon. They both squatted next to the fire pit like two frozen gargoyles. She didn’t know how it had become her problem to start a fire, but it had. It was getting late in the afternoon, and they needed a fire for security and for the pleasure it brought.

  But they had gone through seven matches. She had gone through seven matches, she amended. That wasn’t good. They could not continue to use so many matches to get a fire started.

  “That’s better,” she whispered when the twigs finally caught and the fire began burning more brightly. She fed tiny twigs into the yellow wedge of flame. The smoke smelled like pine and something damp, something like basements. But it was still a good scent. She rocked back a little on her knees and watched the flame continue to grow.

  “That should do it,” Quincy said.

  “Just feed it carefully,” Bess said. “You can’t rush a fire.”

  “Birch bark works.”

  “Yes, but it flashes up and has to go to something. That’s the trick. You have to transfer it to a pile of tinder.”

  Quincy held out his hands to the flames. The air above the road became foggy and dense. You could see a dull reflection of the fire in the muggy haze.

  Still, it was better outside than it was inside the van. Maggie was inside the van. And Maggie was drifting away. It was harder and harder to be near her.

  “I’m starving,” Quincy said.

  “We’re all starving,” Bess said. “We can eat a little in a while.”

  “They took almost all of it,” Quincy said.

  “They’re going to need it. They’re burning more calories than we are.”

  Quincy shrugged. He leaned forward and put more wood on the fire. It was a little too much wood, Bess noted, but she didn’t say anything. She knew she could be bossy at times. She felt she had been bossy a lot with Quincy.

  “How are you doing, Simon?” she asked her brother.

  She didn’t expect an answer, and he didn’t give her one. It still made sense to check in with him. Sometimes she felt like he was a balloon dangling way above her on a string. Sometimes you had to look up and make sure it was still there.

  “So they’ve walked a day,” Quincy said. “Two more days and they should be out.”

  “If everything goes okay.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?” he asked.

  “You want a million reasons or just one or two?”

  “They’ll do okay.”

  “Maybe they will, maybe they won’t,” she said. “They should have gone back toward Camp Summertime. That way they would have known where they were going. They would have had a destination.”

  “I guess they thought Flash went that direction. Isn’t that what Olivia said? Plus, the moose is that way.”

  “We can’t spend the rest of our lives being frightened of a moose.”

  “It did a pretty good job on Maggie. You have to admit that,” he said, making the obvious point.

  Quincy put more wood on the fire. It was too much. Bess reached in quickly and pulled out a few of the stoutest branches. The fire needed air more than fuel at this stage.

  “Easy,” she said.

  “It would have caught.”

  “Maybe. And maybe it would have gone out. Just take it slow. There’s no rush. We have all night.”

  “We could head back toward camp,” Quincy said. “We don’t have to stay here. We can make our own decision about what to do.”

  “We have Maggie.”

  Quincy shrugged. Bess knew what the shrug meant. It wasn’t good.

  “We have to do what we can for her,” Bess said.

  “I know.”

  “That moose is long gone by now.”

  “Probably,” he agreed.

  “I couldn’t believe it. Could you? Could you actually believe what was happening?”

  “Not really.”

  “It all happened like a movie,” Bess said, closing her eyes and remembering. “It seemed like we were going to stand up, dust the popcorn off our laps, then go to bed or something. I never expected it to be real.”

  “It was real, but I know what you mean.”

  “And Maggie … she looked fake somehow. Like it couldn’t really be happening to her. It was like a nightmare, only it was more real than a nightmare could ever be. It was just so vivid or something.”r />
  Quincy nodded. She glanced at Simon. Whatever he thought about the moose attack, he wasn’t saying. At times she wondered what it would be like to have a brother who talked and laughed and did what brothers usually did. Sometimes it made her jealous to know other girls had nice brothers, easy brothers, brothers who could help their sisters out. Not Simon. It was always a one-way street with Simon, though it was mean to think it.

  She was glad when Quincy spoke again and got her out of her thoughts.

  “So we just wait?” Quincy asked after a little while, shifting down into a cross-legged position. “We just make fires and wait?”

  “What else do you want to do?”

  Quincy shrugged. But Bess knew what he was feeling. She felt restless, too. She wanted to do something, anything, but they couldn’t. Not yet. If Maggie went away for good, then yes, yes they could do something. But not now. Maybe not for a while. Maggie still had rights.

  “I bet there’s stuff to eat around here that we don’t even know about it. Natural foods or something,” Quincy said, looking around. “There’s probably tons to eat right near here, but we just don’t have that knowledge.”

  “Probably so.”

  “We’re smart, but we’re dumb.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “What are you going to eat first thing?” he asked.

  “I’m going to take a shower first thing.”

  “Okay, but afterward.”

  “Something good. I don’t know.”

  “I want a hamburger,” he said, his voice filled with longing. “Or maybe a club sandwich. I love club sandwiches. With an ice-cold Coke. I want the slushy kind of ice. And fries on the side.”

  “But first a shower.”

  “I want a shower, but I want to eat first.”

  “Mashed potatoes,” Simon said.

  Bess looked at her brother. So did Quincy. Then their eyes came together, and they started to laugh. Bess had seen her brother enter a conversation before in a similar way, but never with such perfect timing. It made her laugh harder to think about mashed potatoes. Who wanted mashed potatoes more than any other food? Only her brother would want that.

  “Mashed potatoes,” Quincy said, still laughing. “That’s what you want, Simon? Out of all the food in the world, you want potatoes smashed up.”

  “They do sound good,” Bess said.

  “You like mashed potatoes?” Quincy asked her brother. “I like them, too, but only when they’re good and fluffy.”

  “They’re the best when they’re a little hard,” Bess said.

  “Okay, so a shower for Bess, a club sandwich for me, and mashed potatoes for Simon. We should be able to do that.”

  Bess put more wood on the fire. Then she stood and said she was going to go in and check on Maggie.

  “Okay,” Quincy said.

  “I’ll be right back,” she told Simon.

  He didn’t move. He liked the fires, she knew. They mesmerized him.

  Later, she would say she knew the minute she stepped in the van. She knew. Whether that was true or not, by the time she made it three-quarters of the way down the aisle, she knew Maggie was gone. To her surprise, she didn’t panic. She didn’t call out to Quincy or Simon or do very much of anything. She simply walked forward, took Maggie’s wrist to check for a pulse, then bent over and put her ear next to Maggie’s mouth. No air. No breath. Her pulse did not exist.

  Bess dropped Maggie’s hand, then thought better of it and folded Maggie’s hand on her chest. She pulled the sweatshirt that had covered her up over her face. Then she took a deep breath, felt it shudder in her chest, and slowly turned and walked back to the fire.

  It looked like a haunted house, Olivia thought.

  She stood in the middle of the path and studied the structure that had slowly emerged from the woods. A greasy, muggy fog covered it. And vines or moss or something green and foul smothered it. Her backpack felt like it wanted to yank her away, and she actually took a step back but then stopped, fascinated, unable to resist the temptation.

  Like a haunted house, she thought again.

  Or worse. Like a zombie hotel. Like the kind of place where kids go to camp on the weekend, then some sort of evil creature, man or beast, begins skulking around and picking them off one by one. And the entire time, the kids are unaware of what’s happening until it becomes ridiculously apparent that something totally bad is creeping around, but by then it’s too late. Then they start kicking off in all sorts of unusual places, and eventually the girl or guy opens a closet door and the audience sees that someone is hanging from the back of the door and is in all kinds of trouble, but the character in the haunted house doesn’t see it, and the audience watches with dread while the body begins slowly movinggggggg. The audience begins edging forward and letting a scream slowly work its way up from the belly, and then the body on the back of the door begins reaching out and …

  That kind of place, Olivia thought. She shook herself. Her eyes traveled carefully over the building. The house was what her cousin Donna — who was in real estate in Duluth — would have called a Painted Lady. A Victorian. A wedding cake of a house.

  Big wraparound porch. Dormers and turrets. Once upon a time it was white, but now it simply appeared moss-colored. Broken windows. Broken balusters on the porch so that the whole thing resembled a face with shattered teeth.

  And it smiled.

  Come on in, it invited. Come on in and stay awhile.

  I should yell for the guys, she thought. I should yell right now.

  But she didn’t. She couldn’t really say why she didn’t, but she didn’t. That was that.

  At the same time, she became aware of how alone she felt. How isolated. The house had a sucking feeling, as though you couldn’t resist it even though you knew you should. A chain on what looked to be an old post for a dog clinked a little in the late-afternoon breeze. For a blink of her eyes or two, she had a sense of what this house must have looked like back in the day. It wasn’t a cheap house, she didn’t think. It was a decent house in its time, maybe even a great house. She wondered why she had never heard of it before. She wondered why no one had ever mentioned it at the camp. It should have been a landmark.

  She was still looking at the house when Tock snuck up behind her, jabbed his thumbs into her ribs, and nearly stopped her heart.

  “Jeez! Tock, you could have frightened me to death! Don’t ever do that to me again!” she yelled.

  She stamped around in a small circle as if she wanted to be rid of a swarm of spiders crawling over her legs.

  Tock laughed. So did Preston.

  Eventually, she gained control of herself. She was pretty sure she must have looked ridiculous stamping around like that. She hated Tock in that moment; she hated them both.

  “Wow, that is a creepy place,” Preston said. “Seriously creepy.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Tock said. “That place is awesome!”

  “I am not going inside that house! That house wants you to come inside,” Olivia said, slowly shaking off the residue of her earlier feeling. “Can’t you feel that?”

  “Ghost hotel,” Tock said, obviously enjoying himself. “There might be some food in there.”

  “There’s no food in there!” Olivia said. “Are you insane? Why would there be food in there?”

  “Could be canned stuff. You don’t know for sure.”

  “We could spend the night there,” Preston said. “At least it would be inside.”

  “You are completely insane now,” Olivia said. “Am I the only one who thinks that place is seriously haunted?”

  She looked at them, but they were being boys. They were daring each other; she could tell. It’s what boys did. And Tock, being Tock, ratcheted everything up whenever he could. Preston had to go along with it. That’s just the way it was.

  “I’m in,” Tock said. “I am so in.”

  “Me, too,” Preston said. “Besides, there could be a phone. There could be something.”
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  It was so absurd that Olivia didn’t bother to respond. She looked long and hard at the balusters, the grin the house had along the front porch. It was too weird.

  “You have to promise me that you’ll evaluate it honestly,” she said. “Objectively. Okay? Do you promise?”

  Tock nodded. So did Preston. Then Tock pulled the tire iron out of his belt and started toward the house. They were going in, she realized. It was the stupidest idea on earth, but at that moment, it hardly mattered. She was outvoted.

  And besides, she wanted to see inside the house, too. It was weird, but she did.

  “Now what?” Quincy asked.

  He looked at the van. They had both been looking at the van for a long time. First, they would look at the fire, then at Simon, then at the van. It was as if they expected something to change when they knew perfectly well nothing was going to change. Maggie was finished changing. They knew it in their heads, he realized, but they didn’t know it in their hearts yet.

  “We start walking tomorrow,” Bess said. “We go back to Camp Summertime.”

  “Someone is bound to show up. Maybe we should wait.”

  “We can’t wait forever. Olivia was right about that. So was Tock.”

  “It’s weird, though,” Quincy couldn’t help saying. “The whole thing.”

  “I’m not sleeping in the van,” Bess said. “I’m going to keep the fire going and sleep out here.”

  “It will be too hot when the sun starts to rise.”

  “I don’t care,” Bess said. “You didn’t see her.”

  “It’s just Maggie.”

  Bess nodded. But she didn’t say anything.

  “The moose is back that way,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  Quincy stood and put some more wood on the fire. They had a fair supply of fuel. They had enough water temporarily, but they had to find some the next day. As soon as they had discovered Maggie’s condition, her final condition, they had collected wood like crazy people. Now it was getting dark and foggy. The fog rolled in over the road like a creature slowly sniffing its way into a clearing. Quincy had never been so aware of the fog. The flames from the fire looked especially yellow against it. It was almost pretty if you could step back and forget why you were sitting beside the fire in the first place.