It’s cold and dark, there are weird rustling noises in the woods, and I’m so lonely I feel like the last person left on earth. I’m shivering so hard my teeth rattle in my head and I would give just about anything, including my left nut, for a blanket. This sucks. At least the train station in New York was warm. I hate Thoreau for luring me here and making me think that by coming here, I might actually figure out who I am. Dozing off and waking up, suffering through surreal dreams of being chased and eaten by coyotes and rabid foxes, somehow I survive the night.
Just before dawn, the woods grow dead quiet and there’s something electric in the air. Somebody—or something—is here, watching me. A presence. My eyes fly open in a panic, and I see him. Henry David Thoreau. He looks exactly like the picture on the back cover of Walden, his hair dark and curly, one hand gripping the lapel of an old-fashioned gray overcoat. Standing at the side of the stone pillars, he looks down and watches me shiver.
“What are you doing, boy?”
Did he really just speak or did I imagine it?
“I’m, uh, you know.” My mouth is so dry I can hardly talk. “Trying to simplify, like you wrote about. Live in nature.” Jesus. I sound like an idiot. But it’s a little nerve wracking to talk to a ghost. Or the dream of a ghost. Or whatever this is.
Thoreau squints down at me doubtfully. “You read my book?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “Every word.” Well, every word except the ones on the pages Frankie ate, but I don’t want to get into that.
He smiles at me, and nods his head toward the sign by the rock pile. Thoreau’s smile turns into a dry, raspy chuckle. The sound gets louder, then suddenly he’s bent over at the waist, hands on his knees, laughing his ass off. At me.
What’s so damn funny? I look over at the sign, at the quote printed there in the dim morning light, even though I remember perfectly what it says:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
No wonder Thoreau is laughing at me. There’s such a thing as simplifying too much. Leave out the “essential facts of life” like food, warm clothes, and shelter, and obviously you won’t be able to keep your stupid self alive.
I turn back to where Thoreau stood to say, point taken. But I don’t have to cut back on too much stuff or food or money or a big house. I’m here, starting from absolutely nowhere with absolutely nothing. What better student could there be than me?
But Thoreau is gone and I’m alone, staring through the trees as a pale yellow haze begins to light the sky at the edge of Walden Pond. The wind rattles some dry leaves in the oak tree above my head, and it sounds a whole lot like laughing.
6
Past the chill, beyond the smell of decaying leaves and pine and the fresh mist of morning on Walden Pond, a man’s deep voice reaches into my sleep. I’m outside under the sky and I hear his voice. It’s not the ghost of Thoreau this time. The voice is more familiar.
Wake up, the voice says. It’s time to gather wood for the fire and make breakfast. We’ve got a long hike ahead of us today.
I smile. So happy to be here with him. He calls me by the name I can’t remember, and I can almost hear it, the shape and lilt of my forgotten name.
“Dad?”
A man clears his throat awkwardly. “Uh. Excuse me. I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.”
My head jerks toward the man’s voice, and I pull a stiff muscle in my neck with a twang. Some big guy with a black goatee stands looking down at me, clutching a crooked walking stick.
“The park isn’t open yet,” he tells me.
“What? Oh, sorry.” My voice is thick with sleep, and my mouth feels full of marshmallows. Just the sight of his leather jacket and black wool hat makes me shiver, jealous of the warmth. I sit up, fighting grogginess, and rub the stiff place in my neck.
As he stares at me, I imagine my wild hair with leaves poking out of it, my wrinkled clothes and sleep-creased face. Surely he can see I’m merely pathetic and not a threat.
Leaning on his stick with one hand hitched up on his hip, he asks, “Did you sleep here all night?”
I scratch my head and pull an oak leaf out of my hair. “I wouldn’t call it sleeping, exactly.”
He smiles, which makes friendly creases around his eyes. “Well, just so you know, Walden Pond doesn’t officially open until seven a.m.” He pulls back a coat sleeve to consult his watch. “And it’s about six forty-five at the moment.”
My forehead crunches into a frown. What? Can they actually close the pond? Close the woods? I wonder if he’s going to arrest me. With his bulky build and shrewd, guarded expression, he could be a cop. Or maybe an ex-con. I want to ask what he’s doing here if the pond is closed, but I don’t want to sound like a smartass.
“I work for the park commission, and I come here for my morning walks,” he explains, as if reading my thoughts. “I’m a Thoreau interpreter,” he adds, like he’s expecting me to be impressed.
I stand up and brush pine needles off the sleeve of my sweater. “You…translate his writing into other languages?”
He stares at me, then a chuckle erupts from somewhere deep in his wide chest. “No, not that kind of interpreter. I’m a historic interpreter. I pose as Thoreau, wear the kind of clothes he would have worn, make appearances and give talks. That kind of thing. People ask questions and I answer as Thoreau. It’s fun.”
I narrow my eyes at his tall, muscular body, trying to imagine him in an outfit like Thoreau’s. He doesn’t look anything like the short, thin version of Thoreau I saw—dreamed, hallucinated, whatever—but he seems like a nice guy so I don’t want to hurt his feelings.
He takes a deep breath of morning air, and looks out at the misty lake reflecting the sun. “A morning walk is a blessing for the whole day,” he says. I recognize the quote. Thoreau, of course.
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake,” I quote back automatically, stifling a yawn.
The man laughs. “Clever,” he says. “Very clever. By the way, my name’s Thomas.” He extends a hand. I try to muster a decent grip inside his paw of a hand.
“I’m Hank.”
As soon as he takes my hand, Thomas yanks his back in surprise. “Christ, Hank. Your hands are like ice.” For the first time, he notices that I’m shivering my ass off.
He stares at me, trying to figure me out.
“You need a ride home, Hank?” he asks.
Home. “Uh, no thanks.” I stuff my hands into my pockets and stare at the ground. When I glance up again at Thomas’s face, I see kindness.
“Well at least let me help you get warmed up. I have hot coffee in a thermos and a couple bagels back at my vehicle. I’d be happy to share them with you.”
I squint into the morning sun behind his head and say, “Sure,” trying to sound casual. But I’m suddenly feeling so grateful that I have to swallow the lump in my throat.
After crossing the street with Thomas, I spot Thoreau’s cabin. The cabin isn’t on the hill by Walden Pond where it belongs, but all the way over here, practically in the parking lot.
“Why is the cabin here? It doesn’t belong here,” I say, pissed. If I’d only known last night that it was here all along, so close.
Thomas stands with his keys in one hand. “It’s a replica,” he tells me. “The actual cabin was moved and collapsed years ago. So they built this one from old photos and descriptions in Henry’s book.”
A replica. I walk closer, peer in the window.
“Do you want to go in?” Thomas smiles at me. “I have the key. It’s time to open for the tourists anyway. ”
“Yeah, I would.”
“First let me grab breakfast.” He jabs a thumb toward a motorcycle parked about twenty feet in front of us, black and chrome, reflecting the morning sun. A historian with a Harley. If that historian was anybody else, it might seem strange.
But somehow, it fits Thomas. I watch as he saunters over to the bike in his black boots, opens a compartment in the back, and takes out a backpack.
Inside the cabin, it’s just the way I imagined it when I read the book, almost exactly the way it looked in my dream. A bed. A desk and table, painted green.
“Three chairs,” I say, unconsciously quoting Henry again. “One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
Thomas lifts his eyebrows. “That’s exactly right.” He sets his walking stick in a corner and sits in the chair closest to the fireplace. He takes a thermos out of the backpack and pours steaming coffee into a plastic mug, which he offers to me. I cup my hands around its warmth.
“So, they lock this place up at night?” I ask casually and sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress crackles under me, like it’s filled with straw. The coffee is black and tastes bitter but warms me from the inside out, so I don’t mind.
“Of course. Concord’s a nice town, but they can’t leave it open.” Thomas takes off his leather jacket and drapes it over the back of the chair. “Some vagrant might show up and try to sleep here.”
I nod sympathetically. “Yeah.” Some vagrant. Like me. I examine the windows, wondering how hard it might be to jimmy one open.
Thomas hands me a buttered bagel in a plastic bag.
I rip the bag open and eat too fast, realizing I haven’t had food since yesterday afternoon on the train from New York.
“Hungry?” Thomas takes a civilized bite into his own bagel and smiles.
“Growing boy,” I say with my mouth full, but try to take smaller bites so I won’t look like a total pig.
Thomas pours me more coffee. “Well, you look better now than you did when I first saw you this morning.” He reaches over and picks up my copy of Walden from where I’d set it next to me on the bed and flips it to the back, to the photograph of Thoreau with his pale-eyed, serious expression. “You looked like you fell out of the sky or something.”
Wiping my buttery fingers off on my jeans, I hope I don’t look like too much of a slob. When I glance up at Thomas, he’s not looking at the book anymore, but intently at me.
“So where did you come from, Hank?”
I shrug, feeling slightly buzzed from too much caffeine and too little sleep. “I guess I fell out of the sky or something.”
Why not? It’s as good an explanation as any. And even though Thomas has been kind to me, I decide not to tell him the truth. There are still so many questions I need to answer for myself first.
“I see you value your privacy, and I respect that,” Thomas says, looking down at his hands. “But come on, I have to ask. Why were you sleeping outside at the cabin site? Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. I’m just curious.”
“Well,” I say reasonably. “I wouldn’t have been sleeping outside if the cabin had been there like it was supposed to be.”
Thomas smirks. “Fair enough.”
I stand and nonchalantly try to open one of the windows, like I just want some air, and all I manage to do is disturb a spider, who scuttles to a corner of his web. The window is nailed shut. Figures. Outside, instead of a view of trees and bushes that should be there, there’s a view of the parking lot and the road, where rush hour cars are whizzing by. Not the best location for a hideout.
“It’s not right,” I say, half to myself. “It doesn’t belong here.”
“I’m sure Henry would agree with you,” says Thomas. He reaches up to scratch the back of his head. That’s when I notice a design in black ink on his upper arm, showing under the left sleeve of his navy blue T-shirt.
“What’s the tat?” I ask.
He pulls up his sleeve to show me the tattoo of a man’s face in profile, a man with an old fashioned black beard. Under it is written in fancy script lettering like a signature: “Henry D. Thoreau.”
“You know.” I pause, uncertain how to say what I’m thinking. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but—”
“But I don’t act like a stodgy Thoreau-loving historian-slash-scholar who works for the park commission?”
“Something like that.”
“Yeah, I know. I get that all the time.” He gets up, screws the top on his thermos and gathers the remains of our breakfast. “I’m heading into town. Want a ride?”
A ride on the Harley? Hell, yeah. We head out to the parking lot and walk to the motorcycle. “For a kid who worships Thoreau enough to stay all night at his cabin site, you have a lot to learn,” Thomas says, handing me a spare helmet from the back of his bike. “Thoreau was a rabble-rouser in his time. A free spirit. A rebel.” He pulls on his own helmet, straddles his bike, and flashes straight white teeth. “Why do you think I like him so much?”
After Thomas drops me off in town, I aimlessly walk the streets of Concord with my hands stuffed deep into my pockets. I can’t stop thinking about seeing Thoreau last night. Sure, it was probably just some freaky dream. But what if it wasn’t a dream? What if Thoreau’s ghost knows stuff about me and is watching over me like a guardian angel or something? Maybe that’s why I woke up with the book next to me at the train station. Maybe it was a sign, a gift from Thoreau himself.
Now that I’ve had some food to start my day (Essential Fact of Life Number One), I decide to address Number Two—clothing—at a sporting goods store on Main Street. I buy a warm coat (on sale, half off), plus black sweatpants and a thick gray sweatshirt. I put the sweatpants and sweatshirt on in the dressing room, and stuff the clothes Magpie gave me into the plastic bag. Now I’ve got two sets of clothes. Nothing fancy, Thoreau wouldn’t approve of fancy, but enough to keep me warm.
Next up: shelter.
There is one hotel in town, the Colonial Inn, with a sign outside that says it was built in 1716, but I ask the price at the front desk, and it’s way too expensive. My money, Simon’s money—don’t think about that—is dwindling. My shelter has to be safe and it has to be free, someplace where I can stay long enough to get my thoughts together. Just until I remember more about my life and figure out what to do next.
Somehow, I wind up back at the Concord train station, and being there reminds me of meeting Hailey. I think of her smiling green eyes and I get this feeling like, hey, I’d really like to see her again. So I retrace the steps we walked yesterday to the high school. But as soon as I start up the long driveway to the school, I realize something is different. To start with, there are only a few cars in the parking lot. Plus, I don’t see any kids outside, playing sports in the fields or sitting on the stone wall. It’s a weekend or holiday or something. No school today.
At first I’m disappointed. But then it occurs to me that I need shelter, and here is an entire building comprised of shelter and nobody around. If I can just get inside, there has to be someplace in that big building where a guy could curl up and get some sleep.
I try the front door, but it’s locked, so I circle around to the back. Along the side of the building, a red minivan pulls up, and two girls, both with brown hair and pretty faces, pile out of the back seat. Do all the girls in Concord look like perfect little cheerleaders? One of them cuts a glance in my direction with interest but no recognition. They head to a side door, open it, and go inside. I wait a beat or two, and follow them.
Inside, it smells like floor cleaner, sneakers, and pencils. I pass rows of lockers and follow the sounds of the girls talking and giggling, their voices echoing in the empty hallways. When they pass through some double doors, I peek through a small window in one of the doors into the high school auditorium. Rows of red seats face a stage where a group of people are working. Some are standing on ladders with electric drills and hammers, a couple of guys carry in boxes and set them on the side of the stage, and a few girls are painting sets off to one side with black paint. A tall guy with gray dreadlocks, probably the school janitor, pushes a humming vacuum cleaner up the side aisle. He’s wearing jeans and a faded tie-dyed T-shirt.
Then I see her. Hailey, sitting on the edge of the
stage, swinging her legs back and forth and talking to some guy. She’s here. Now, instead of wearing her loose lacrosse uniform, she’s wearing a tight red sweater and jeans. Her hair is down instead of up in a ponytail, and it’s long, curling around her shoulders. Yeah, she looks hot.
The guy she’s talking to is really into her, gesturing his hands around a lot and talking. I can’t tell if she’s interested back. He’s shorter than me and kind of scrawny, with shaggy brown hair and black jeans. His cap is on sideways and there’s a chain attached to his belt, like he thinks he’s some suburban punk gangster. Trying to decide whether I should go up and talk to Hailey or just sit in the back of the auditorium, I open the door slowly and slip inside. The heavy door swings shut behind me.
BOOM!
There is a loud cracking sound, and before I can even register what happened, a flash of scrambled images bursts inside my head, metal reflecting twilight. Colors, blue and red, fireworks bursting, a cry like an ice pick in my brain.
I fall to the floor, curl up in a ball, hands over my ears.
“Whoa, buddy. What happened? Did you trip?”
I open my eyes, and a big guy with gray deadlocks and intense blue eyes is staring down at me. After blinking hard for a few seconds, I can finally talk.
“Yeah, I guess so.” Foggy, confused. “There was this really loud noise.”
“It’s that damn door,” he says, shaking his head. “I keep trying to fix it, but it needs to be replaced. Every time it slams shut, it’s like a bomb went off.”
“A crash. Or something,” I say.
He looks at me, all curious, but then just nods. “You okay, then?”
“Oh yeah, definitely,” I say lightly, though my head is throbbing. He offers a hand to help me to my feet.
Nervously, I glance at the stage, imagining every face turned toward me, staring. But nobody other than the janitor seems to have noticed that I just fell to the floor like I’d been shot in the head.
The janitor nods slowly, as if he’s reassuring himself I’m not a lawsuit about to happen. “Okay then. Take it easy.” He lifts up the vacuum cleaner with one hand and walks out of the auditorium, keys jangling on his belt.
Being Henry David Page 6