Klickitat

by Peter Rock

  I left that note in the box, buried the box again, then put on my shoes and began to circle, spiraling out from the blind, moving slowly. I found animal holes, even one small enough for a snake, but the tunnel I’d seen Henry go into was not so easy to find. I pulled branches aside. I waited for the sounds I made to settle.

  It was in one of those moments, those pauses, that I heard the voices. Not too close, and no words that I could understand, but a sound that was more than two people, more than three. I took off my shoes and crept closer, using the Fox Walk that I’d learned from Audra, that she’d learned from the books.

  When I got close, I could see into a clearing where four men sat next to a fire, passing a loaf of sliced white bread, each holding a piece in each hand. A rope was tied around a dog’s neck, who sniffed at the ground, close to two skinny men and a woman who were sorting out scraps of shredded paper. There were tents made from blue tarps, and a bicycle resting on its handlebars and seat, its wheels in the air. Two shopping carts, piled high, covered with blue tarps. And near them I saw her, a girl I recognized, her ragged black hair and black makeup around her eyes that made them look huge, from where I was, like holes instead of eyes.

  I eased backward, went all around the edge of the clearing, keeping my distance and then coming up close behind her. What she was sitting on was like a bench, a seat taken out of a truck and dragged into the forest. She was eating an apple and not really looking at anything. It’s hard to hear when you’re eating, and I got close, ten feet away, watching her, trying to see if she seemed worried or scared, if this was an unsafe place for a girl to be.

  I slipped out of the bushes and sat down next to her. She looked at me like she really wasn’t that surprised.

  “There you are,” she said. “People are all looking for you.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Officer,” she said. “Asking all the kids if you’re around.”

  “You didn’t say anything?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “And I haven’t seen you for a while, anyway. You want a bite of apple?”

  I did.

  “It’s a little sour,” she said, watching me chew. “How’d you find me?”

  “By accident,” I said.

  “You’re barefoot.”

  I put my shoes on. The men at the fire looked over, but they didn’t come closer or say anything. The other people, sorting the paper scraps, looked familiar. I think they were the ones who sold Henry my new Social Security number, my new name and age.

  “Your name’s Taffy,” I said. “Right?”

  She wore the same rubber sandals, now with no socks. Leaning forward, she scratched at a scab on her ankle.

  “I know your name,” she said. “It’s Vivian.”

  “I don’t care if you know my name. That doesn’t matter.”

  “These people aren’t anyone.” She pointed into the clearing. “I’m not with them. I’m looking for someone to go with, but I’m doing all right by myself, right now.”

  “In the forest?”

  “I wouldn’t stay here at night,” she said. “I have to be careful, in case someone’s looking for me.”

  “Who’s looking for you?” I said.

  “I just have to be careful.” She looked away, into the trees. “Last night, I slept in a parked car, in the back, and when I woke up it was driving. The lady never noticed me, but I had to walk all the way here from Lake Oswego.”

  When she leaned back, our shoulders were close together. She smelled like a fire, smoke, and some sweet deodorant. Her fingernails had red polish on them that was mostly scratched away.

  “What about you?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Where’s your sister? Where’s Henry?”

  “They’re meeting me around here,” I said. “Soon.”

  A gust of wind shook the branches, all around the clearing. The spotted dog barked, looking in every direction, then settled down again, tried to eat a hamburger wrapper. Taffy took back the apple and ate it all, the whole core, the stem, and the seeds.

  “Have you seen her?” I said. “Have you seen Henry?”

  “Not lately,” she said. “I heard a lot about him, and then I saw him around. He talked to me, that one time.” She leaned forward, back again, her shoulder against mine, then inches away. “I remember when I first saw your sister with him, so tall and beautiful with that hair and those clothes. They hardly looked like they could know each other.”

  “Well, they do,” I said.

  “A lot of people didn’t like your sister,” she said. “Just because of Henry and all his attention going to her and none to anyone else. People said she’d take him away.”

  She turned, so close, and stared at me like she was remembering my face. Her eyes, circled by that eyeliner and mascara, were pale blue, bloodshot. A pimple on the side of her nose. Her teeth were crooked, yellowish. She smiled all at once when she could tell I was looking at her.

  “Sisters,” she said, after a minute. “My sister Valerie, I only knew her about a year, and now I can hardly remember what her face looked like, you know?”

  “I remember Audra’s face,” I said. “And she was my real sister. We had the same mom and dad, and we grew up in the same house. We were a real family. So I would never forget her face.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I was only saying.”

  “I need to go.” I stood up, swung my pack up over my shoulders. “I know what to do in the woods because I’ve been practicing. I’ve read a lot of books. There’s a lot of things about how things work that we’ve just forgotten, living the way we do.”

  “I’ll come along with you, then,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then why’d you come and sit next to me?” she said.

  “I wanted to see if you were all right,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Good-bye,” I said, and slipped back into the bushes, back the way I’d come.

  After a short time I doubled back, in case she’d tried to follow, but she was still sitting there in just the same way. Still, I was careful. Barefoot again, I walked only on stones and roots, leaving no footprints as I went deeper into the forest.

  I practiced Fox-Walking under the trees, trying to be aware of everything, all the sounds and movements around me.

  I leapt a stream. I climbed a tree, moved from its branches to another’s. It was then I saw something in the branches of a farther tree. A platform of old boards and branches, a kind of tree house high in the air. It even had old vines and brush attached to its bottom, to make it harder to see. At first I thought the tree house might be Audra’s, but when I climbed closer I saw it was different than one she would make, more broken-down.

  I climbed up there, onto the platform. I took off my pack, and rested. It felt so much closer to the sky, and through the trees I could see the river, the bridge, the boats. I didn’t sing the barges song. Instead, I opened my pack and took out my water bottle.

  I noticed the words, then. Words were carved into the boards I was sitting on.

  friend

  friend

  friend

  For some reason, reading that, I knew all at once that this tree house had belonged to the lost girl, the girl who lived in this forest with her father. I knew that she had carved those words, that word. Caroline. Caroline. Caroline.

  I unzipped my pack’s front pocket and took out the knife Audra had given me. It was sharp, because I sharpened its blade every morning. In the tree house I lay flat on my stomach and held that knife like a pen as I slowly carved my word.

  KLICKITAT

  NINETEEN

  I kept thinking over what had happened, why Audra and Henry had gone, and where, all the possibilities. It was possible that they had been found out, caught, and taken somewhere. With all the planning and precautions, that seemed almost impossible, but it was still a possibility. If they were caught somewhere, they would get out, and then they would come for me. They c
ould not leave me. But I knew that, at the same time, they had no clothes hidden in the blind for themselves, they had left nothing of their own behind. That was hard to understand.

  I imagined what I would say to Audra if she were next to me, swinging in the hammock. I don’t think I would have told her about sneaking into our house, about her bedroom painted blue. I would have just reminded her how we are sisters, how she could help me calm down and settle, how when she got hurt she didn’t want anyone else around her. I thought about the sunny corral at my grandparents’ ranch in Colorado, the round metal water trough with a dent in one side. Two thick orange fish always swam in it. The trough was dented because Audra once climbed onto Duke, the old blind horse, and he’d bucked and kicked the trough as he threw her off. She didn’t break her leg, but she hurt it. She didn’t have stitches in her forehead, where they thought she might. She had a concussion, though, and headaches, and I was the only person she wanted around. She wanted to sleep with me in one of the twin beds in my dad’s old room from when he was a boy. We stayed in there and my grandma brought us burnt toast and chicken noodle soup. This little dog they had—he ran away, later, but when Audra was hurt he’d sit on the other twin bed, watching us, wagging his tail if we said his name.

  It also seemed possible to me, swinging in the hammock in the tree’s branches, that Audra was still angry, that she and Henry had a disagreement about me. Was she jealous of me? Did she not want to share Henry, or to share me? Had he told her about the messages, my notebook, and she was jealous of that?

  If she was angry with me, that anger would pass. When she’d left me before, she’d returned; she couldn’t really leave me behind. Still, I worried. If I was left behind, alone, what did I have? Maps, my yellow notebook, iodine, books of survival skills.

  Nothing was as easy as the books made it seem. I couldn’t find the plants I read about, or the berries to eat. I dug up roots and washed them in the stream and then I wasn’t sure if I should boil them, or what I should do. Mostly I was eating the dried ramen noodles and jerky, the bars and nuts, left in the plastic box. I didn’t know how long it would all last.

  It was harder not to think of Mom and Dad and my bed, of all the food in the refrigerator, when I was alone. I knew that a good attitude was important in a survival situation. I knew not to panic. I knew it was best to keep myself busy, to believe that Audra and Henry would return very soon. I set out on long walks. I practiced my stalking and my other skills, climbed from tree to tree, tried to find plant fibers to braid into cords and ropes.

  The first tunnel I found, I heard it before I saw it. A low kind of whistle coming out of the ground. I crawled closer, to a spot beneath a bush, deep in a thicket, and felt the cool wind on the skin of my face. It was gentle. It smelled like dirt and stone.

  This was on the second day.

  The mouth of the tunnel was just a jagged black opening, big enough to fit my hands inside, to pull rocks away, to push them until I heard them rattle below. It took a little while—I set my pack to one side to dig, and I didn’t have any tools to dig with—but at last it was wide enough to stick my head inside, to shine the headlamp down. I stretched one hand deeper, too, and felt that it wasn’t only a hole, or an animal’s den. It opened, on one side, and that’s where the wind was coming from. A tunnel.

  I lowered myself inside, feet first. Only my head was above the ground, and I pulled my pack in after me, ducked my head, and started into the tunnel, deeper.

  It slanted down, and soon I could stand up, the ceiling still close, cold water dripping on my head, puddles beneath my feet. The walls were close, too. I couldn’t stretch my arms all the way out.

  How far did I go? I thought of the story we read in school, about the man in the labyrinth and the ball of string that kept him from getting lost. I had no string, but in this cave, this tunnel, there was only one passage, no others forking away in the darkness. I checked. I kept turning my head from side to side, the headlamp’s beam sliding across roots and stone, crumbling black walls of dirt.

  The floor sloped up or the ceiling sloped down. I hit my head. Bending lower, I had to crawl again, had to switch my pack around to the front, on my chest, since it kept snagging on the ceiling. The stones were sharp against my hands and knees. I didn’t care. And the wind, I was still heading into it, started to blow a little harder, to smell different. Not so thick with dirt and rocks, but cleaner, like trees and sky.

  I switched off the headlamp and squinted ahead. After a little while I saw light, a jagged greenish opening, and I kept crawling toward it.

  I had to dig my way out, a little, and when I stuck my head into the light it was too bright at first and I couldn’t see at all. I coughed, breathed in as much air as I could, just sitting there in the tunnel’s other mouth.

  Slowly, I checked around myself. A bird, just at the side of where I could see, fluttered away through the green trees. I recognized where I was, which part of Forest Park. Far from where I’d gone into the tunnel, near where I’d been searching, earlier in the day, where I’d sprung one of Audra’s old snares—a snap, a whistling sound, a loop of rope suddenly jerking empty through the air.

  I quietly made my way toward the blind. I kept my eyes to the ground, checked the branches of the trees. Blackberry vines scratched the skin of my arms, my hands, and all at once there were voices, close by. I crouched in a bush, slowed my breathing. I waited until the air was silent again.

  Sitting in the blind, I ate a dry square of ramen, drank from my water bottle. And then I began to cry. First only tears, and then more, all curled up on my side in the leaves and dirt. Even if I knew they’d be back, that Audra and Henry would come for me, I was lonely, and being left behind this time was worse—the first time, Audra was also getting away from our parents. This time, she was only getting away from me. I tried not to make noise, to stop crying or to teach myself to cry silently.

  I found the yellow notebook, opened it; I paged in from the back, through the blank pages, into new words:

  It will be a bad winter if the crows gather

  and squirrels build their nests low in the

  trees. Hello hello hello. Nothing stands

  still, weather guides us. If worms are

  bending up and going into people’s houses

  and abandoned buildings in October, the

  winter will be hard. Don’t forget me, sister,

  believe I’m with you always. The number of

  days old the moon is at the first snow tells

  how many snows there will be that winter.

  A blanket of deep snow can keep you

  warm. Depths can be sounded by bouncing

  signals along the ocean floor.

  These words didn’t help, they only frustrated me. I put the notebook away and rubbed my eyes to get the tears out, so I could see. I couldn’t let myself get sad like that. I had to believe that Henry would come back and take me to his people, so I could understand the words in the notebook better, and then I’d be helpful to everyone. But now the sky was turning dark.

  While I climbed to the hammock, I realized that I had hardly said a word all day. If the days went on like that, would I lose my voice, be unable to talk to Audra? How many days would it be before they came? I thought of how I used to sing, how I liked to sing. At school, singing all together where I could hear my voice small and close to me and then blending into the noise that was everyone’s voice, pushing back on me in a comforting way.

  The hammock, it held me tight, it calmed me. There was a way to double the rope that was knotted to the tree, to double it back and lace it through the braided strings, to pull it tighter around me, to hold me.

  Here I was, high in the trees, swinging gently against the black sky.

  Radio waves travel farther at night, without so much interference—Dad told me that, one time down in the basement. I was folding laundry and he was sitting at his radio, turning dials and knobs. I didn’t want to think about him, didn’t want
to start crying again.

  I rested there, not quite asleep, listening to the trees all around me. I twisted to look down at the ground, almost expecting the darker shadows of Henry and Audra, sliding along, coming back. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear them coming.

  TWENTY

  Crawling in the tunnel, I pushed my pack ahead until I had to turn back. I could not find a way out, not as quickly as I liked, but I didn’t feel like I’d be trapped. I’d left a note behind, too, buried in the blind, in case Audra and Henry returned for me. And even if I was underground when they came back, Henry would be able to find me.

  The tunnel slanted down, then up. Smaller tunnels opened in the walls—animal tunnels. I heard the squeak of mice; I thought I put my hand on a snake, slipping away in the darkness. I imagined how soft a fox might be, sliding around me, racing toward the light. I heard scratching and imagined possums, moles, badgers as surprised to find me there as I would be to be so close to them, in that tight space. I remembered a lot of things from Journey to the Center of the Earth: the trilobites and the giant gray plants, the mastodon. The dark tunnel floors that felt covered in bones, and the winds, and the way the underground air could suddenly be full of electricity.

  The underground winds picked up, they died down. They switched directions, went from warm to cold and from cold to hot. I listened, I thought I heard voices. My dad’s voice, just counting numbers. Children singing. Chimes. Audra, crying or laughing. Static. I thought I heard footsteps on the ground above my head. I heard dogs barking, outside, the sound funneled through the tunnel’s mouth, echoing around me. The dogs’ feet sounded like rain or hail as they ran in a pack across my ceiling.

  I felt comfortable, safe down there. When I surfaced, I raised my head very gradually, slowly, into the air, the world. I reached out and pulled vines and brush toward me, to cover the tunnel’s mouth.

  The third day in Forest Park, I lay in the tunnel, beneath the surface where the air was good, underground where no one knew where I was. It was afternoon; I could smell and taste the dirt beneath the leaves where I rested my head. I must have fallen asleep—I woke up and I couldn’t tell what time it was because of the way the light filtered down, and the sound of birds singing. I sat up, put on my shoes, shook the dirt from my hair. Slowly, carefully I raised my head up inside the tree branch I’d dragged across the tunnel’s mouth. That way I was still hidden, and I could look in every direction. Trees and snags and bushes, all overgrown.