At this pace it would be noon before we got there, but you know what? I could not have cared less.
Just looking at the back of Mary’s head, I felt a surge from years’ worth of aggravating situations. Like the way she never gives me the answers to our homework assignments because she tells me I need to understand it for myself. I understand everything; it just takes me too long to do it. And when we go to the SuperTarget with Mom, Mary pulls on my shirtsleeve when I start to wander down the wrong aisle. Maybe I want to look at something. Besides, isn’t getting lost the whole reason for cell phones?
Oh, and here’s the big one. When we’re sitting on our beanbag chairs in front of the TV, she always turns to look at me during the funny parts. I used to think it was because she wanted to make sure I was having a good time. But now I get why she does it.
“Hey, Mary!” I yelled from the backseat. “I know why you look at me during the funny scenes on TV.” She turned around. Her face was small and pinched up underneath her teal-blue hat. “It’s because you want to make sure I’m not too stupid to get the jokes.”
“If you get SpongeBob’s jokes, then why do I always have to explain them?” she yelled back.
Low blow.
“Boys and girls,” the driver said. He shook his head and wagged his finger over his shoulder at us. “This is a happy bus.”
“I’m not talking to you!” Mary shouted at me, and jerked herself around so fast, the bobble on her hat got twisted up.
“Me neither!” I shouted back, which didn’t really make sense.
Oh, who cares? The bus chug-chugged on, and we rode in silence. I leaned my head against the window and felt the vibrations rattling my brain. And then I tried to remember why I was doing all this to begin with.
Oh yeah, because of redemption.
Redemption is for suckers.
Chapter Seventeen
WHEN THE BUS STOPPED AT the top of the mountain, I heard Mary ask the driver, “Which way is Specter Slope?”
He pointed. “Just follow that ridge. But whatcha going to Specter Slope for? Nobody skis or sleds there. Even young adventurers like Survivor Boy back there know better than to go to Specter Slope.”
“Why? Avalanches?” Mary asked.
“No, man. Worse then avalanches. Trees.”
Well, then, I had all the information I needed now to go back home and enjoy a Saturday of cartoons. But just then Mary looked at me and said, “You can cope with a few trees.”
“Arghh,” I said to myself. I grabbed my sled and dragged it up the bus’s aisle, bumping it against all the seats as I passed.
When Mary and I finally reached the top of Specter Slope, Bruce was reading a book.
“Sorry we’re late,” I mumbled.
“An hour and a half late,” Littledood said. He closed his book, Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. “I wasn’t worried. I know you both have a lot riding on that sled, no pun intended.” Then he chuckled. “Okay, the pun was totally intended.”
I looked down the steep slope and heard Mary’s snarly voice in my head saying, You can cope with a few trees. The mountain was so dense with pines that there wasn’t even a trail to follow!
“How are we supposed to get around the eight hundred trees between here and the bottom?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know how you’re going to get around them, but I’m going to steer my way. Like this.” And he showed Mary and me how the steering bar on the front of his sled moved with barely any effort from his feet.
Show-off.
“Surely you didn’t forget to build a steering device into your sled,” Littledood said.
I didn’t answer. I set the Pollypry next to the Titanium Blade Runner and comforted myself with the thought that this would all be over soon. I played with the duct tape repair job to show Mary I knew what I was doing this time. Strong and solid. Phew. I sat down, adjusted my legs, and prepared to push off.
“Are you ready?” Littledood asked.
“Yep,” I said.
“On your marks,” he began, “get set—”
“Hey! Ferrell, you are not ready!” Mary screamed from behind us.
“GO!” Littledood shouted. But neither of us moved. Littledood looked at me, and Mary ran to my side.
“You can’t stop me now!” I protested.
“What are you thinking?” she shouted into my face. “Am I just going to walk down the slope?”
“I don’t know! I guess I figured you would take the bus back. You’re responsible for your own self, Miss I’m-So-Independent-I-Don’t-Need-to-Go-to-Your-House-Anymore.”
“No! I’m going down the slope with you, on the Pollypry.”
Littledood stood up from his sled. Mary and I stopped fighting.
“You’re quitting? We can go home now?” I asked.
“No. Carry on with your bickering. I seem to have dropped my bottle of oil for the steering bar. You go whenever you’re ready.”
“You mean I can begin without you?” I asked.
“He did already say ‘go,’ ” Mary pointed out. But she stood in front of me and put her foot on the Pollypry to keep me from sliding.
“Yes, that’s right. I said ‘go.’ Consider the head start a little gift from me to you.” Littledood smirked.
“I don’t need your little gift,” I fumed. But Littledood ignored me and walked along the path back toward the road.
“Take it, Ferrell. We need all the help we can get.” She took her foot off the sled and stood to the side.
“What’s this ‘we’? You’re not coming,” I insisted.
“Yes, I am. I have to. Who else is going to make sure you don’t kill yourself like you almost did last time?”
“But you’re the one who’s making me do this in the first place,” I said. No, wait, I was doing this to redeem myself.
“I already thought you were dead once. We all did. How much can we continue to rely on miracles?” She slid onto the back of the Pollypry and continued to talk. “Thank you for doing this race in order to preserve my integrity and to maintain my reputation as an intelligent human being. It really is the least you can do, given that it was your great-great-great-uncle who ate my great-great-grandfather. Now, as my own act of goodwill in support of this situation, I will not let you die.” She looked behind us toward the path along the ridge. “Oh, and one more thing.” She pulled the real Polly Pry’s quill feather out of a side pocket in her ski pants and stuck it in a grommet behind her at the back of the sled. “I stopped by your house this morning.”
“What for?” I asked.
“I guess I must have known you’d forget something. Now let’s go before Littledood gets back.” Then she wrapped her arms around me. “This is not a hug, by the way,” she said.
Maybe not, but I still felt my insides kerplam into a gazillion shards of giggling kissy-faced yellow marble pieces.
I pushed off down the hill, and away we went, gliding across the snow, the wind in our faces, our scarves blowing behind us, and the world belonging to Mary and me. I could hear The Ride of the Valkyries in my head as we sailed along.
Then slam! We jolted to a stop.
“One tree down, seven hundred and ninety-nine to go,” I said. I didn’t even try to hide the big, goofy grin on my face.
Chapter Eighteen
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY TREE slams later, Mary and I started to get the hang of turning.
She called out instructions from behind. “You lean hard to the left, and I’ll go only lightly to the left. Now lean forward! Lean forward! Farther!” I felt her lean way back. Crrunch. Instead of hitting the tree head-on, we skimmed the side of it, hard enough to spin us around and come to a stop. Near success!
“Yahoo!” we both shouted.
“We need more weight in the back,” Mary ordered. “Let’s switch places.”
As we stood up and brushed snow off ourselves, I looked up the hill. No sign of Littledood. Without thinking, I reached into my pocket, searching for
a sugar-glazed fruit pie.
“Hurry. Get back on,” Mary commanded.
“Do you think he could have passed us somehow?” I asked.
“Maybe he got lost,” Mary said. “Come on! We could have a real shot at winning this thing if you’d just hurry it up!”
“But I’m hungry and . . . Oh no . . . Aw, crud! When you stopped by my house this morning, you didn’t happen to grab my bag of fruit pies and Skittles, did you? I must’ve left it on the kitchen counter.”
“No, I didn’t. You’re better off not consuming anything than putting that junk into your body. Eat some snow and let’s go!” Mary said.
I grabbed a handful of smooth, stomped-on snow and bit into it. After a few mouthfuls, my tongue went numb and my teeth hurt. But at least it helped me forget the emptiness of my stomach. I sat down behind Mary and wrapped my arms around her. Something small and happy inside me said, “Woo-hoo, you’re hugging Mary,” but something bigger and monstery said, “It could be hours before you get something to eat.”
After about an hour had passed, and somewhere between thirty and thirty thousand more trees had been bonked, I was done. I was sick of eating snow, sick of cold toes, and sick of sledding. Now it was beginning to snow. We had reached a level place on the hill and had to walk the Pollypry. I tied my scarf around one end and pulled the sled behind me. We were getting close to the bottom, I knew, because I could see the Specter Slope skating pond off to our right. A few summers ago I had hiked up the slope with my dad and we’d fished at the pond. We had eaten macaroni salad and corn chips with spicy bean dip. Now a strong wind was picking up, and flakes were falling, but I hardly noticed. Mary and I walked without talking, and I kept my focus on putting one foot in front of the other.
“Do I hear your cell phone ringing?” Mary asked.
“No. It’s my stomach. It’s growling.”
“That’s crazy loud!”
“Now you see why I have to eat every two hours.” I caught a faint whiff of smoke, and through the snow, which was falling harder now, I could barely make out a small shack.
“That must be the shelter for the skating pond,” I said. I could imagine a family inside, taking a break from skating, drinking hot cider and eating toasted marshmallows. “Maybe we could head over there and rest for just a minute?”
“No. It would take us four or five minutes just to get there. We can’t spare the time,” Mary said. She trudged on. “We’re close to the bottom.”
“If we’re so close, then why should we hurry? Don’t you think the little dude’s just tapping his fingers waiting for us?”
“Look, if we have to be losers, let’s at least make it as close as we can,” Mary said.
I stopped walking, and the scarf slipped from my hand and fell to the ground. My body didn’t care about making Mary mad.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake. Rest. Just for a minute, though, and right here,” Mary said. “We’re not hiking all the way to the shelter.” I sat down on the Pollypry. Was Mary glaring at me or squinting into the falling snow? I was too tired to guess. “You know, people can go days without eating,” she said.
And with that, she pulled out a chunk of beef jerky and chomped down on it. My mouth watered, and I felt slightly dizzy. I wanted to push her face-first into the snow. Hunger will do that to a guy. I lay down on the sled, closing my eyes and trying to find a picture in my head that didn’t have food in it.
That’s when the flakes really started to fall. Hard. I sat up, but I couldn’t even see the skating shelter anymore.
“Hey, the Weather Channel said it was going to be clear all day,” Mary said.
“They were wrong,” I grumbled into the wind. I wasn’t sure if Mary could even hear me, so I said more loudly, almost yelling at her, “Since when does anyone put that much faith in the Colorado weather report?” The wind whipped around us, and snow was coming down harder with each word I spoke. I stood up, and Mary moved closer to me, as if there were something I could do to stop the snow.
“Ferrell! I can’t see in front of us . . . or behind us!”
It was as if someone had dropped white buckets over our heads. I grabbed the Pollypry off the ground and shouted to Mary, “Hold on to my jacket! We can’t just stand here. We’ve got to keep heading toward the bottom of the slope.”
“But how do you know we’re going the right way?” Mary asked.
“I don’t!”
She hung on to the back of my jacket, and I took a few steps forward and hit a tree. We could get really lost if we kept walking, so I came up with an idea that could at least help Mary.
“Face the tree and crouch down,” I told her. I felt her let go of my jacket. “Are you as close to the tree as you can get?”
“Yes!”
I turned the Pollypry lengthwise. The black of Mary’s jacket and her teal-blue hat were just visible, and I could tell she was pressed up tight against the tree. I shoved one end of the lounge securely into the snow and pushed the other end against the tree and over her head. I took off my coat to fill in the gaps in the webbing. It wouldn’t keep her snow free, but it would help.
I curled up low, facing the tree, and pressed as close to it as I could get. As long as I kept contact with Mary, I knew I wouldn’t lose her. One step away, and I might never see her again.
“Ferrell! Where are you?” Mary’s voice was frantic.
“I’m right here!” I shouted. I tried to reach for her, so she could feel how close I was, but I decided to keep my face covered with my arms instead.
“We’re going to die, Ferrell!”
“No, we’re not. We’re just going to be scared for a while, but we won’t die.”
“How can you know that?” she screamed at me.
“Because I’m the Survivor Boy, remember? And you’re with me,” I said.
Chapter Nineteen
THE NEXT THING I KNEW Mary was hitting me. Smacking me all over.
My head was tucked tightly under my arms, so at least she wouldn’t be able to give me a concussion. I tried to uncurl my body from under the tree, but I couldn’t move. I was barely able to lift my head to see that the snow and wind had died down. I could see a little farther ahead of us than before. Mary hadn’t been hitting me. She was knocking the snowballs off my hat, my shoulders, and my arms.
“You look like the Abominable Snowman. And your lips are purple.” Mary wasn’t making fun; she sounded scared. “Where’s your jacket?”
I looked up and pointed with my ice-coated eyeballs to the top of the Pollypry. Mary turned and grabbed my jacket from its makeshift roof position and shook off the snow with all her might. The feather, still stuck in the grommet, was bent in half and frayed, like it belonged to a swan that had been half eaten by an alligator.
“Look what you’ve done to yourself! Are you crazy? I would have been fine.” She continued brushing the snow off me, brushing and smacking a little harder than she needed to.
She pulled me slowly to my feet and forced my stiff arms into my jacket sleeves. “Are you all right?” she asked.
I wanted to say, I’m fine, so fine that I can’t even feel anything at all, which is kind of cool, but it makes it hard to move, but I didn’t quite have the lip action to get out those words. Then when I tried to nod, I realized my neck and shoulders were shaking too hard. So from the only warm and properly functioning spot in my whole body, probably near that spot where the marble was lodged, I managed to muster up enough strength to say, “Uh-huh.” I hoped it was loud enough to be heard.
“You’ve got to move around, Ferrell. It’s the best thing for you. Get your blood going. Come on, let’s start walking.”
My arms had now wrapped themselves tightly around me, and all I wanted to do was curl up into a ball.
“Come on! Pump those arms.” She grabbed my left arm and lifted it up and down, up and down. She was going to break me!
“Now walk. Let’s go.” She pulled the Pollypry a few steps ahead of me, but I couldn’t get my legs
to work.
As soon as she noticed I wasn’t following, she stumbled back to me. She slid the sled up behind me. “Lie down,” she ordered. “I’ll pull you to the shelter. We’ll get there faster.”
My brain argued and said I didn’t need to lie down, but the rest of me didn’t agree. Mary put her arms around me and sort of tipped me over onto the sled. I closed my eyes and lay there, feeling myself being pulled.
I heard a door unlatch and felt the skis scrape across something rough and hard: the concrete floor. The shelter. We had made it. The air was warm, and as soon as the door clanked shut, all I could hear was Mary’s breathing. I opened my eyes, and her worried face hovered over mine. I tried to smile to show I was okay.
“I’ll help you up,” she said. “The hearth is still warm from a fire here earlier.”
She put her arms around me, pulled me to my feet, and half carried me to the fireplace. I wanted to make a joke and say, Is this a hug or are we dancing? But I still couldn’t get the words out. Before she lay me down on the hearth, she took my jacket off me, then put it over me as a blanket. She rolled up her own jacket for me to use as a pillow. The coals, which were barely smoldering, had a sleepy campfire smell, and the warm bricks heated my back the way a hot concrete pool deck bakes you after you’ve jumped out of a freezing swimming pool. I finally stopped shaking so hard, and my world felt a little less like an earthquake.
The shelter was made of logs and was about the size of a one-car garage. Some light came in through two windows. Mary pulled a wooden bench up next to me and sat down.
“I almost killed you. You almost died—again!—because of me,” she whispered.
But after my first so-called near-death accident, a lot of people told me about what happens when you come to the edge of death. And, once again, none of those things had happened. I hadn’t seen a white light, my dead relatives hadn’t called out to me, the hands of Elvis hadn’t reached for me. I didn’t have the energy to say all that, though, so I went with “Nuh-uh.”
“Are you comfortable?” she asked, tucking my jacket underneath me, like a blanket around a mattress. “There must be more I can do for you. Oh! I know! Water! You must need water. I saw a bucket outside. I’ll fill it with snow, and you’ll have water to drink in no time.” She bolted out the door, leaving a cold flurry of air behind her, and quickly returned with what looked like an oversized white snow cone.
The Secret of Ferrell Savage Page 7