Tom and Huck's Howling Adventure

by Tim Champlin

“Guess you call it a zipper ’cause o’ the noise it makes,” Tom said. “Wish that’d been my invention. I woulda slapped a patent on it and had a bunch of factories boomin’ like thunder, and scads o’money a’rollin in.”

  “You’s already rich, Mars Tom,” Jim reminded him.

  “That’s right. We do have plenty o’ money,” Tom nodded at Huck. “Coming over the river, you said you was dead set against lighting out for the territory with us for a few weeks of wild adventures amongst the Injuns. What if I told you me and Huck was discussin’ helpin’ you buy your family out of bondage if you come along with us?”

  Jim opened and closed his mouth a time or two like a fish out of water. Then tears began to well up in the man’s dark eyes. He blinked them away and looked down. “Dat’s mighty kind of you, Mars Tom, and you too, Huck. But I can’t take yo money. I gots to do dis myself. I gots to take care of my own.”

  Zane started to speak up and tell them they could save their money, that everything would work out for the best because Lincoln would free the slaves. But then he realized the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery was still sixteen years in the future. Anything might happen between now and then. They couldn’t wait. So Zane swallowed back this piece of information. He marveled that he was beginning to feel like he was part of a nineteenth-century world.

  They talked on for a time and swore they would keep mum about this traveler from another time.

  “But you and Jim need to say if you wanta go over to the territory with me and Huck,” Tom said.

  Zane and Jim looked at each other.

  “I don’t have any choice,” Zane said with a shrug. “As long as I’m here I need somebody to look out for me. If I’m left on my own and start talking and acting like an alien, the law will throw me in jail or a mental hospital or insane asylum.” He nodded. “Yeah, sign me up for the trip. I’m sure it beats summer camp in New Jersey.”

  “What about you, Jim?” Tom asked. “Can’t nothin’ convince you to come along? It’d be just like old times. We need a grown man to rely on—in case o’ trouble.”

  Jim was silent for a few moments. “I do wants to go, but mebbe I be temptin’ de Almighty by taking mo chances. Providence done delivered me from some mighty scary ’ventures awready. And I needs to be workin’ and earnin’ my pay . . .”

  “Tell you what, Jim,” Tom interjected, “since you won’t let us buy your family, me and Huck’ll furnish your outfit and pay you double what you’d make in wages while you’re away, to make up for the dangersome part of the trip.”

  “Dat’s mighty considerate, Mars Tom.” He removed his floppy hat and ran a callused hand over his curly mat. “If dat be de way of it, I reckon I’ll go. The widow, she just have to do widout me, like she done befoe.”

  “Then it’s all settled,” Tom said.

  “As a stranger here, I’ll need some coaching,” Zane remarked.

  “I think while we’re collectin’ our traps, you’d best stay here on the island,” Tom said. “We’ll bring over food and water—and an old blanket to keep off the damps at night. It’ll take a day or so to pry enough money outa the judge and to buy our outfits. I hope you can ride a horse.”

  Zane had never been on a horse, but this wasn’t the time to say so.

  “What about Aunt Polly and the widow?” Huck asked.

  “I’ll have to think on that,” Tom said. “We’ll come up with a good story for them, or else we can sneak off in the night and leave ’em a note.”

  “I hates to do dat, Mars Tom. De widow, she been mighty square wid me,” Jim said.

  “Yeah, me, too,” Huck added. “And the widow can spot a lie faster ’an she can spot a gravy stain on a white tablecloth.”

  “Hmm . . . Lemme think on it awhile,” Tom said. “I’ll come up with a plan.”

  The four of them shuffled through the sand to the boat.

  “Here’s the canteen,” Tom said, tossing it to Zane. “We’ll row back over this evenin’ and fetch food and a blanket. We’ll catch some catfish for supper, build a fire, fry ’em up, and have a high old time. Maybe I can even lift a jug o’ cider from Auntie’s root cellar.” He pushed the skiff back off the sandbar and stepped in. “I’ll find you a straw hat and some old clothes so you won’t look like you’re from Jubiter.” He took his place with the oars as the current began to drift the boat.

  Gripping the canteen, Zane watched them go. He felt more relaxed now that he had a few friends in this alien world. But at the same time, part of his brain was thinking there was a good chance he’d wake up from this dream very soon. If he did, he wouldn’t have to explain baseball or bicycles or computers to them.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  Zane stared after the receding boat—he’d have to become accustomed to calling it a “skiff.” Apparently, there were different kinds of rowing boats of which he had no knowledge. He admired the deft way Tom handled his oars, angling the vessel upstream and across the pull of the current.

  When the boat was halfway to the far shore, Zane shouldered the canteen strap and started toward the woods. For now, he’d have to be the stranger here and try to learn the details of living in this world. Current time here had seemed like only vague, historic time before.

  He broke off a stick the size of a small baseball bat from a driftwood log half buried in the sand. It was good to have a weapon against snakes while he spent the afternoon exploring.

  The vegetation under the canopy of trees was surprisingly sparse, due to lack of sunlight and periodic flooding that scoured the island. A hundred paces into the green twilight, he discovered a shallow pool ten yards long and about five wide. The muddy margin of the pool was crisscrossed with delicate prints of deer hooves.

  He continued on, seeing no sign of snakes, but avoiding wading through deep grass or weeds where he couldn’t see his feet. In his world he’d not spent as much time in the woods as he had on the soccer or baseball fields, or playing video games. He was sure the boys here spent most of their waking hours outdoors in good weather, inventing their own games, since there were no team sports organized by adults. And the absence of air-conditioning would have kept them outside all summer anyway.

  He continued south along the narrow island, swinging the stick, enjoying the smell of late-blooming honeysuckle vines. Now and then he paused to inhale their fragrance, disturbing honey bees at work. Were all bees attracted to sweet-smelling flowers and rotten-smelling ones? Or, were different kinds of bees drawn to each? Did the type of flower affect the way the honey tasted? He gazed off toward the wooded bluffs on the Missouri shore, thinking how little he knew of the natural world.

  After a mile or more, he was in the thickest part of the woods in a pale-green twilight. The afternoon sun penetrated through the heavy overhead canopy only in the shifting, scattered freckles of light on the forest floor. He was amazed at the silence. No roaring motorcycles or diesel trucks, no jet planes, no ripping lawn mowers or weed eaters, no wailing sirens or blaring horns, no rock bands with earth-shattering amps. The sighing of the wind in the boughs far overhead reached his ears as a soothing hum, softer than an electric fan.

  Had there ever been a documented case of time travel before now? He recalled a recent TV show that explored mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda triangle. The pilot of a small plane had been interviewed. He stated that when flying west across the Caribbean, he’d experienced a sensation of entering a long tunnel in the clouds. His clock had malfunctioned. When he came out of the cloud again and made contact with a Florida control tower to find his position, he discovered he’d traveled at least 400 miles in only a few minutes, even though the maximum speed of his small plane was a shade over 150 miles per hour. Time and distance had somehow been compressed. Time apparently was not an absolute, immovable barrier.

  Zane shook his head to clear the mental gyrations of trying to imagine such a thing.

  The swinging canteen brushed against his leg and he felt a lump in the side pocket of his p
ants. A pack of sunflower seeds! He’d forgotten he had them. A good snack to stave off hunger for several hours until supper. He poured out a small handful and popped them into his mouth. Holding them in one cheek, he cracked and ate the seeds, spitting shells as he walked along

  Directly he came abreast of a narrow, rocky ridge on his left, layers of gray limestone covered in vines and small bushes growing out of the crevices. A good place for rattlesnakes, he thought, and gave it wide berth as he continued on.

  He eventually reached the foot of the island, nearly three miles from where he’d started, and came out of the forest to a muddy shore that dropped off into the dark current swirling past. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was nearly three o’clock. By the time he reached the upstream sandbar again his new friends might be returning.

  As he turned to re-enter the woods, he heard a strange coughing noise and looked out to see a stern-wheel steamboat toward the far shore churning upstream out of the main channel. No pounding diesel towboats here; no strings of steel barges.

  He plunged into the woods again, heading back. He felt himself becoming more and more relaxed. There was no ball practice, no school or exams to worry about, no allergist appointments, no TV shows to watch, no urgent meetings that required his parents to drive him here and there, no way to email or text his friends. His former hectic schedule did not exist. And so far, he’d had no time to become bored. He hadn’t even thought about his non-working cell phone in more than two hours. He thought of his little sister, Miranda, who was three years younger. Was she wondering where he was? If Tom Sawyer was right, she hadn’t been born yet. Neither had he, come to think of it.

  He’d timed his hike exactly. When he again emerged on the open sandbar at the head of the island, he saw a skiff approaching from upstream and it was late afternoon.

  His new friends debarked with a sack of food, a jug of cider and one of buttermilk, fishing lines, a skillet, tin plates and cups, and a striped blanket. They dumped it all on the hard sand near the tree line.

  In no time, Jim started a driftwood fire and Tom was laying out the plates with cornbread and turnip greens on the blanket, while Huck was setting some lines for fish.

  “We told Aunt Polly and the widow we was camping out over here tonight.” Tom said, slicing some bacon with his Barlow knife. “They was agreeable.”

  “They don’t worry about you drowning in this river without life jackets, or anything?” Zane said—then wished he’d kept quiet. It made him sound like a sissy.

  “Naw. After what we been through, they figure we can take care of ourselves without no help,” Tom grinned. “We give ’em plenty to worry about these past two years, so our campin’ here sure ain’t gonna bother ’em none. We’re prob’ly safe as if we was sleepin’ in our own beds.”

  “What’s a life jacket?” Huck asked, expertly skinning a small mudcat he’d taken off his line a few minutes before.

  “It’s like a regular vest, except that it has cork sewn into it so it floats and holds you up if you can’t swim or are hurt or something.” No sense trying to explain foam flotation. He’d have to quit using terms they didn’t understand. “In most states it’s a law you have to wear them in small boats.”

  “Why do folks who make de laws care if you drowns?” Jim asked.

  “I don’t know. Guess it causes a lot of trouble to haul your body out of the river. I suppose it pollutes the water.” Zane made up his mind to give whatever answer seemed plausible without trying to analyze these questions. “Speaking of pollution, do you think that catfish is safe to eat?” he asked, thinking of the mercury its flesh might have absorbed.

  “Ain’t no reason it shouldn’t be safe,” Tom said, eyeing him as if he were paranoid. “Why? You reckon it’s gonna poison you or sumpthin’? Nothin’ better’an fresh fried catfish—if you don’t drink sweet milk with it. You have to drink the buttermilk we fetched over.”

  “I . . . uh . . . I’m sure it’s fine.” This was 1849. No need to eat only farm-raised grain-fed catfish. There were no chemical pesticides sprayed from crop-dusting planes to be washed into the river from adjoining farmlands. His father had told him he’d been on the river and seen it covered for a quarter-mile with a layer of what looked like soap suds more than two feet thick.

  Tom dished up some limp turnip greens, which Zane didn’t recall eating before. “Now, poke salet,” Tom continued, “that’s a whole different kettle o’ fish.”

  “Das right,” Jim added. “If you picks a mess o’ dem greens, you’d best boil ’em up right smart.”

  “If you don’t,” Tom said, “poke salet’ll do more than tickle your gizzard—it’ll knock a body stiff and cold as river ice. But Aunt Polly, she don’t fix that no more since we have plenty other stuff to eat.”

  Talk of food poisoning was just the thing he needed to stimulate his appetite, Zane thought, ruefully—at a time when he was trying to gain weight.

  The sun had slid below the bluffs when they finished their meal. It was nearing the longest day of the year when twilight seemed to stretch out long past bedtime.

  Zane had eaten two helpings of everything and was feeling much better. “Wow! That was good. I was empty.” Content, he sipped the tangy cider from a tin cup. He leaned back on his elbow, eyeing the dying fire. The sparse meal was even better than the picnic his family had hosted at his last birthday with homemade potato salad, barbecue, and baked beans. It would take time for him to quit comparing everything in this new world to things in his old.

  Huck and Jim pulled out their pipes and lit up. But Tom abstained. No one asked Zane if he wanted to smoke.

  “Wish I had my harmonica,” Zane said.

  “What’s that?” Tom asked.

  I’ve done it again, Zane thought. “It’s . . . uh . . . sometimes called a mouth harp.”

  “Like a Jew’s harp?”

  “No, nothing like that. It’s a little metal instrument with holes in it. You blow into it and suck on it to make different notes. Very smooth music—kind of like a little pipe organ. I think it was invented in Germany at some time or other.” He didn’t want to go into the fact that it came to the states decades after 1849. He found himself wishing he had paid more attention to his classes in American history.

  They chatted until dusk began to sidle up from the west, drawing its gray mantle silently over the island and the small party around the glowing coals. Jim added two small logs to the fire to forestall the mosquitoes and mayflies. But it was still so warm they had to sit well back from the blaze for comfort.

  No one brought up the topic of traveling back from the future or it’s unsolvable mysteries. Instead, Tom was all for talking up their forthcoming adventures in the territory. Huck and Jim caught some of his enthusiasm when he described from his imagination the tribes of Indians they’d meet, the gold-seekers they’d pass on the trail, the meals of roasted buffalo hump dripping succulent juices into the fire.

  Zane listened mostly in silence. He’d seen western movies and documentaries of the plains and western states, and had his own ideas of what they would look like. It was difficult to picture the wide-open spaces as they would be now without highways, small towns, and gas stations. He’d never been there, but had flown over the plains at 30,000 feet on his way to visit relatives in California. However, now was not the time to bring up that subject.

  “Reckon those clothes will fit ya?” Tom asked during a lull in the conversation, indicating the pants and shirt he’d tossed onto the blanket.

  Zane stood up and shucked off his trousers and pulled on the ones Tom had brought. The brown canvas pants were of a heavy material, and a bit short, but they would suffice. They had only one suspender and no belt loops. The four pockets would hold his billfold, cell phone, handkerchief, change, and comb. The shirt, with widely spaced vertical red stripes, had no collar, and fuller sleeves than he was used to, but it was a decent fit and felt good against his skin.

  “Yeah, this is fine,” he said.

&
nbsp; “Unless you go barefoot like us, I reckon you’ll have to wear those white shoes,” Tom said. “Maybe we can dirty ’em up some so nobody’ll notice.”

  Zane looked down at his low-cut sneakers. They were almost new and felt good on his feet with the padded sweat socks. “I’m not used to running around barefoot,” he said. “Too much chance of cutting my feet on sharp rocks or broken glass. Besides, I could pick up hookworms . . .” He paused and saw Tom and Huck look at each other and shake their heads. He’d have to quit saying things like that. “I’ll wear my own shoes,” he stated. He reached for the straw hat with the ragged brim on one side. It fit well enough.

  “De sun be mighty fearsome ’round dees parts in de summertime,” Jim said. “You needs dat hat.”

  “Yeah. And now you can pass for a boy who lives along the river,” Tom said. “I reckon we can say you’re up from a village near St. Louis or somers, visiting kin over in Palmyra for the summer.”

  Zane slid his belt out of his old pants and buckled it around his new pants. “In case this suspender breaks,” he explained. He was so lean he often couldn’t keep his pants up unless his belt was snugged up to the last notch. Tomorrow he’d use his knife to punch three or four slits in the pants around the waist to thread the belt through.

  The night wore on and directly the conversation lagged. The fire burned down and the small logs fell in on themselves, leaving only glowing red coals. The starlit blackness arched over them, and one by one each stretched out to sleep.

  Long after the other three were snoring, Zane lay awake, his old fears and uncertainties returning. His mind played out in detail all the events of the day. A cool dampness crept up from the river. He listened for sounds of the night. Crickets chirping. Bullfrogs croaking in the shallows. Occasionally a fish splashed somewhere. But he didn’t hear the heavy splashing caused by Asian carp that had invaded the river in his own time. A few lightning bugs blinked silently on and off. For now, there was nothing he could do about where he was or what was happening. As Shakespeare or somebody once said, “Time was out of joint.” He would work toward figuring out a way home. Then he thought, If I go to sleep I’ll wake up in my own bed and realize this was only a dream.