Steve laughed and shook his head.
“It means, if we do it right we can alter our fates forever. Think about it!”
Steve did think about it, and suddenly he felt his heart drop like a rock into the pit of his stomach. “Max, I have a test in third hour!”
“In what? Math? Big deal. You stink at math. You don’t need a test to tell you that. Come on, let’s go.”
Steve never thought of it that way before. The logic appealed to him.
“Where to?”
Max pointed towards the woods that rose up beyond the playing field. “That-a-way.”
The boys broke into a trot, but before they got ten yards they heard a loud, stern shout.
“Stormer! Hanson! Get back here! Now!”
“Oh, crap,” Steve said, stopping dead in his tracks. “Kohl. We’re screwed now…”
18
Fingered
Mason Kohl, the principal of Pinecrest High, looked younger than his fifty-five years. Always well-dressed and never seen without a tie or jacket, he had chiseled good looks and thick dark hair with debonair graying about the temples. Blunt, austere, and solitary, Kohl was also an ex-marine and a one-time Baptist minister: a lethal combination. An imposing figure, the principal exuded six-feet three-inches of puritanical will.
Since taking over as principal of Pinecrest High, there was no denying the quick and exacting changes Mason Kohl had brought about, both disciplinary and scholastic. In five short years his school jumped from an educational embarrassment to producing some of the best SAT scores in the state. The man possessed an uncanny ability to appear in a hallway, student bathroom or classroom at the deadliest of moments; instantly shutting down any extravagances on the part of student or teacher by exorcising their mischief or folly with razor-like, surgical precision. His Mephistophelean, icy squint, thundering voice, and the mesmerizing way he wielded his fearsome index finger, had a way of cutting to the core of any person who caught his baleful eye.
“Don’t stop!” Max said, grabbing Steve by the elbow, urging him to keep moving. “Don’t look back.”
It was too late. Steve had turned around, and when he saw Kohl standing across the field—one arm akimbo, the other outstretched with his index finger pointing towards him, flexing slowly and deliberately, summoning him back—he felt as if he had been lassoed.
Max tugged harder on Steve’s elbow, shouting at him to move, but Steve’s massive frame felt rooted to the ground. Max took a step back to give his buddy a shove and saw the glassy-eyed, almost zombie-like look on Steve’s face.
“It’s too late,” Steve said, his eyes hypnotized by Kohl’s bobbing finger. “It’ll just mean more trouble.”
He took a step, but Max planted both feet on the ground and put his shoulder into Steve’s broad chest to hold him back. “Come on, man,” Max commanded. “This is our day, remember? And no one is going to take it away from us, all right? You got that?”
“Another time,” Steve said. “It’s not the same now.” He pressed forward, and again Max braced against him, his feet sliding backwards under his friend’s Herculean strength. “Don’t, Max, okay? It’s not that big of a deal.”
“It is!” Max declared. “It is a big deal. If we go back now, there will never be another time. I know it!”
Steve wasn’t listening any more, and with his next step, Max, unable to constrain the titan, stumbled and tripped to the ground.
“Don’t, Steve,” Max pleaded. “It’s ours. Don’t give it to him!” Kneeling on the ground, Max shot an angry, willful glance across the playing field to see what they were up against.
There stood Mason Kohl—cool and reserved, expressionless but for a crinkling about his eyes caused by a squint of concentration. And there flexed Kohl’s terrible finger, drawing Steve closer, his head slumped in resignation.
Abandoned by his friend, and transfixed by the principal’s dreadful finger, Max too began to slip into dismal submission. Surrender seemed inevitable. Then, he saw the fleeting image of a face; familiar but too brief to make out. In its wake it left what felt like a trail of tender grace. He inhaled deeply through his nose, as if tracking it back down by smell.
The image returned, this time unmistakably clear: Aidos and her dog sitting side by side on a grassy hilltop. The girl’s hands were clasped about her knees, which were tucked up against her chest. The tips of her index fingers and thumbs were pressed together in tee-pee fashion, and upon them she rested her chin.
The picture lasted only a moment or two, but Max saw it as if it were projected right before his eyes. When the image vanished, he felt his determination revive, and an almost giddy sense of invincibility. He felt as if he had broken free from an evil spell.
“I got a finger too!” Max hollered. He smacked his right hand under his left—middle finger extended. “Pull on this, Kohl!”
Caught off guard by the boy’s audacity, the principal’s arms dropped to his sides. Steve spun and saw his friend on one knee, middle finger cocked and throbbing, looking like a gunslinger. Max grinned and stood up. He blew at his finger as if it were a smoking pistol.
“Jeezus, Max,” Steve said, stupefied by his friend’s recklessness. “Are you insane?”
Max shrugged, uncertain. “Come on,” he said.
Steve glanced back at the principal who was staring at Max Stormer like someone contemplating an abstract question. Kohl smirked, turned, and walked away.
19
Invisible Boundaries
The boys headed for the hill where Max first spotted the girl. As they climbed the rocky, shrub-covered knoll, Steve asked Max what he thought was going to happen to them.
“If we’re lucky,” Max said, a twinkle in his eye, “suspension.”
“Why did he let us go, you think?”
“What else could he do? Chase us? He knows we’ll be back in school tomorrow. He’ll get us at his leisure.”
“He’s a spooky guy,” Steve said. “Gives me the creeps, you know?”
“Yeah,” Max said, coming to a halt. “I know.”
Steve pulled up next to him and sat down on a boulder to rest. After a few seconds of staring down at his feet he looked up at Max. Max was leaning against a tree, a twig in his mouth, gazing pensively at the school below. “How come you’re not scared of anyone?” he asked.
“How do you know?”
“I’ve never seen anyone intimidate you. Not once. And I’ve known you a long time.”
“Maybe I just hide it well.”
“Maybe…” Steve studied Max’s profile: handsome nose, long lashes, jostled, thick dark brown hair that hung down the nape of his neck, clean-shaven face, sturdy jaw, and that all too familiar reflective look. “Nah,” he said. “It’s no show.”
Max turned to his friend and grinned. “How can you be so sure?”
“I just don’t think so, that’s all.”
Max took the twig from his mouth and flicked it away like the butt of a cigarette. Although he was touched by his friend’s praise of him, he thought Steve’s adulation undeserved and a little naive.
“Well,” he said, “I won’t say one way or the other, but I’ll tell you what my old man told me just before he flaked off. He said, ‘Max, you’ll never meet anyone more frightening than yourself.’”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what does that mean?”
“It means what it means.”
Steve shrugged. “I don’t get it.”
“Look, man,” Max said. “Haven’t you ever done something really stupid where afterwards you smack yourself on the head and say, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’ And you realize that you weren’t thinking at all. That it was as if someone else did it. Haven’t you noticed how you can go the entire day without actually having lived any of it? As if you were some kind of robot or something? That’s what I call scary. We think we’re in charge but half the time we’re not even there.”
Steve did not unders
tand, and nothing Max could say would make him understand, reasons for which Max himself was just beginning to realize.
In recent months, gradually and inexplicably, Max had crossed an invisible boundary that set him apart from his pals. To his friends he was still the same old Max, but to himself he had become a stranger. He had no words to describe his growing sense of alienation, the word ‘alienation’ itself a concept unfamiliar to him. He was experiencing flashes of a new objectivity to his life, like the other day at the cafe after the girl had left. He felt as if he was awakening from a strange dream.
Exasperated with his inability to formulate his thoughts, more than Steve’s to decipher them, Max suggested they move on.
Both boys fell into a private silence as they hiked the remainder of the way to the top of the hill. It was a luscious spring morning. The air was cool and sweet, scented with the musky dampness of the forest floor. As they climbed, the morning’s excitement fell away from their thoughts like leaves from a tree, drifting lazily back down to the meadow below. Their thoughts became as fleeting as the butterflies that fluttered and dived before their way, appearing and disappearing within the same moment.
Max led Steve to the tree where he first spotted the girl. Steve leaned his head way back to peer up through its branches and then gave it a sturdy slap. “Big fella,” he pronounced, and sat down with his back against its immense trunk. “Nice view too. How long do you think she has been spying on us?”
“For awhile, I think.”
“Weird…”
“She knows all our names.”
“Really?” Steve ran his hands through the mat of pine needles. “Hey, look,” he said, brushing away at a clump of needles and pulling up a plastic bag. He opened it and grabbed a fistful of crayons, charcoal, pens and pencils. The boys exchanged curious looks, and then began ferreting through more of the soft, springy mound around them.
Max crawled around to the other side of the tree to explore some more. He felt a little guilty, but hey, if she could spy on them, then… “Hey,” he said, “check this out.”
Steve hustled over and saw where Max had cleared a space at the base of the trunk.
“What is it?”
Max rapped on the ground with his knuckles. They heard a dull, hollow sound.
“Well, let’s see,” Steve said.
Max tapped across the ground until he came to the edge of the board. He dug his fingers into the duff and pried it open.
“Cool,” Steve said, impressed by the girl’s ingenuity.
Underneath the board they saw a watermelon-sized burrow, partly a cavity in the tree itself, and more plastic bags. The hollow was encased in a lining of rocks, twigs, pine needles, and hardened mud that made for a sturdy, brick-like enclosure.
The boys hauled out the bags and examined their contents. One bag contained a stock of different nuts; another held dog biscuits; and inside a third bag was assorted dried fruits: raisins, apricots, dates, and apples. The boys exchanged greedy looks.
“Just a few,” Max said with a plunge of his hand.
Snacking as they went, they opened more bags.
“This one feels like books,” Steve said, weighing the bag in his hand like someone guessing a present. Inside was four paperback volumes of selected poetry. Steve read aloud the names of the authors: “Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, and Robert Frost.”
“Ever hear of them?” Max asked.
“Poets, right?” He flipped through the pages of one of the books, reading short snippets to himself as he went. “Here you go, Max. This is for us.” He read:
“Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.”
“That’s us, all right,” Max said. “I like that—‘I myself am good-fortune … whimper no more, postpone no more … strong and content.’ Good stuff. Which guy was that?”
Steve flipped to the cover. “Whitman.”
“Check this out,” Max said. In his hand was a short tube containing some twenty rolled-up drawings held together by a rubber band. He pushed the band up along the tube until it sprang off the end, hitting Steve in the side of the head. “Oops. Don’t lose that.”
Steve picked up the band and put it around his wrist. Gathering together the books, he placed them back into the bag and set them by his side out of Max’s view.
One by one Max unrolled the drawings. “Hey,” he said, “these are good.”
Most of the drawings were of landscapes and done in charcoal. Some were panoramic, the others of a particular flower or tree or forest grouping.
“Hah,” Max chuckled. “That’s you and me during football practice… And here’s one of some of the girls sitting behind the bleachers—Katie, Regina, Dawn. Hah! She even caught April and Patty sneaking a smoke!” Max unrolled the next drawing and quickly stashed it behind his back.
“What is it? Let me see.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Then let me see.”
Max handed the drawing to Steve and looked away cupping his hand around his mouth and chin in contemplation.
Steve laughed. “She doesn’t miss a thing, does she?”
The drawing was of Max and his girlfriend, Katie Austin, kissing behind a tree. The girl’s back was against the tree, her hands around Max’s waist and stuffed into the back pockets of his jeans.
“I guess not,” Max said.
“Did you ask Katie to the prom yet?”
“She asked me two months ago. Who are you going to ask?”
“I’d like to ask Regina.”
“So ask her,” Max said.
“I think Brandon is going to ask her.”
“Not if you ask her first.”
“I know, I know. Hey, did you hear? Cheeks asked April!”
“Oh yeah?” Max chuckled. “What did she say?”
“She said she’d rather go with the plague.”
Max laughed. “Poor Cheeks.”
“What’s the next picture?” Steve asked, handing back the other.
Max unrolled it. His eyes widened in surprise and then narrowed into concentration.
Steve said, “Who is that?”
“It’s her.”
“Who?”
“The girl,” Max said, studying the drawing closely. “Aidos.”
“Oh, yeah… It is her. She sure is pretty.”
“Yep,” Max said.
“A little young, though, don’t you think?”
“You wouldn’t know by talking to her.”
Max carefully unrolled the next sketch. “Holy crap.”
“What? Let me see.”
Max absently handed Steve the drawing. The sketch was in every detail the same as the vision he had had of Aidos and her dog only an hour before. She wore the same expression, one that connoted solemnity, contemplation, and single-mindedness of purpose.
“I’ve seen this before,” Max said, taking a closer look. He hesitated to confide. “Down there. In my mind. While that business with Kohl was going on.”
“No way.”
“I know it’s weird. It was weird then too. I would have forgotten about it if I didn’t see this.”
“Sounds like déjà vu to me,” Steve said.
“No, it’s different. See, when it happened down there I felt something, kinda like…like she was with me.”
The boys looked one another in the eye. Max looked for understanding; Steve for something to say. He believed Max. Why would he make it up? But why should such a thing even happen?
“Hey, Max?”
“Yeah.”
“You were right.”
“A
bout what?”
“About today. About anything being possible.” He nodded his head as if to say, ‘and that’s that.’
Max smiled and began gathering together the various bags, tossing them back into the burrow.
“That’s right, Stevie-boy. When you’re free, weird things are bound to happen.” He gave his friend an enthusiastic slap on the back. “Here,” he said, reaching into the bag with the dried fruit, “put these in your pack for later. I don’t think she’ll mind. We’ll sneak back up another day and leave something in exchange. Put out your shirt.”
Steve lifted the front of his shirt and held it out while Max loaded it up with a few handfuls of the sumptuous fruit, ending by popping a date into his friend’s mouth and an apricot into his own.
“Put them in your pack,” Max said. “I’ll clean up here.”
Steve grabbed up the bag with the books and stood. He peeked furtively at Max who was busy replacing the hatch, and then snuck the treasure around to the other side of the tree and stashed it into his daypack. As soon as Steve was gone, Max reached behind his back and pulled out the drawing of Aidos and her dog. He folded it carefully and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans. He covered up the board with a mat of needles and dirt, slapped the dirt from his hands, and met Steve on the other side of the tree.
20
The Poet and the Philosopher
The boys continued on their hike, entertaining themselves with pinecone wars, a half-dozen, half-remembered songs, a series of bad jokes, a stone-throwing exhibition, a tree-climbing race, and intermittent spans of weightless silence. They did not know where they were going. They didn’t much care. They were hoping that they might run across the girl, Aidos, but they had no way of knowing that she was far away on her camping trip.
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