“Later,” Esmerelda says.
“What is it?”
“Agency for Internal Covert Operations. Kind of, like, an internal police organization.”
The Tamzene picks up steam. We barely make it past the blazing docks and the Green Police boats when another explosion rifles through Locksley Ponds, throwing mammoth chunks of sandstone into an orange sky. A great red claw of fire springs from the mansion’s foundations.
Silhouetted against the flash are thousands of buffalo, birds, monkeys, and lions moving around the mansion. As Kang pilots the boat downriver and the burning remains of Locksley Ponds shrink in the Tamzene’s wake, the forest and animals disappear into the dark.
A voice blares over the static on the radio: “Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement. We want to be able to exploit the environment for private gain, absolutely.”12
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
secret agent girl
The Tamzene takes to the big water of the Missouri, rounds the bend onto the Mississippi, and plows north.
The Mississippi isn’t as big as I imagined. In school they spend a lot of time talking about how important it is, but it looks like a brown trough with a shallow trickle running through it. Most of the river has dried at the edges, so Seabrook has to keep to the center.
At first, when I narc on Esmerelda for being a government stooge, I figure Seabrook is going to chuck her off the boat. And I’m not so sure that wouldn’t be a bad move. I know enough now to realize I don’t understand exactly what His Eminence is, but I’m guessing I’m in more trouble than getting carted off to military school now. If Esmerelda is five-oh, she’s dangerous—I don’t care how hot she is.
But then the news on the radio changes everything.
It isn’t the radio Seabrook uses to listen in on the Green Police, the one that sputters all that noise. It’s the little one he turned on the night he learned I was a senator’s kid.
We have only been out a day when through the rush of static we hear about the fire at the secret government resort in Missouri: “Federal sources say the resort had been under investigation when a fire destroyed it. A release from the Justice Department, unprecedented in its lack of specificity, said to expect ‘major arrests within days.’”
Esmerelda squeals. “They got it!” she shouts. “It went through!”
She picks up the radio and holds it to her ear, but that’s all there is about the mansion. She fiddles with the knob, running through bursts of songs and ads and fuzz, but there’s nothing more. Then she holds the radio over her head like it’s a Grammy and dances, twerking her hips. She grabs Arthur and plants a big kiss on him.
“I have to, like, get to a TV,” she says. “Kang! Seabrook! I have to get to a TV.”
Seabrook looks confused. “It’s too dangerous to stop right now.”
“You don’t understand,” she says. “If what I think just happened really happened, there’s nobody following you.”
Kang takes the boat under some trees. Seabrook, Esmerelda, and I march through a thin copse and reach a ribbon of blacktop parted by a double yellow line.
After a moment or two, the roar of an engine comes up behind us. Seabrook and I scamper into the forest, but Esmerelda stands her ground.
“Don’t be silly,” she shouts back at us. “Get back here.”
It’s a pickup truck. The driver seems to consider how mad filthy we are. He tells us to sit in the bed of the truck.
Moments later we’re bouncing along through the woods, past little houses. If you and Arthur could have gotten this ride days ago, none of this would have happened, Wimp Winthrop says.
Esmerelda peers over the side at the trees flying past. All we can get out of her is that just before the mansion exploded, she’d broken in and managed to find the evidence she needed. “I used their computer—their own fucking computer—to copy files to my HQ and a contact I know in Justice. The damn file was still uploading when the power went out.” She closes her eyes and lets the wind rush through her hair. “But they got it,” she says. “We did it.”
“Got what?” Seabrook asks.
“Evidence,” Esmerelda says.
The truck drops us at a Walmart, which I have naturally heard of but never set foot in. As we wander through the weird fluorescent lights, past school supplies and heads of lettuce, women in pajama bottoms pushing shopping carts either stare at us or pick up their children and hug them.
We stop at a bank of flat-screen TVs with price tags attached to them. All of them are showing baseball highlights.
“Give me a remote,” Esmerelda barks at a man behind the counter.
She flips to CNN. “. . . a very large and clandestine organization, paid for by misappropriated funds,” the anchor is saying. “The group’s leader, we’ve been informed, was a woman named Maude Sweetwater, believed to have perished in the blaze at this government resort. Again, we’re covering a major breaking story here and we’ll continue to provide details as they come in. What we know now is that the Justice Department arrested forty-seven federal agents this morning . . . ’
Esmerelda whoops.
“And, this just in, a warrant has been issued for Pennsylvania Republican Senator Mortimer Brubaker.”
My stomach jumps from a high dive platform. It’s falling . . .
“. . . the high-powered Republican lawmaker has barricaded himself within his home in the Philadelphia suburbs . . .”
. . . falling . . .
“. . . charges include misappropriation of funds, conspiracy, malfeasance and, shocking as it sounds, murder . . .”
. . . and I slump to my knees.
“Jesus,” Esmerelda says, eyeing me. “That’s, like, your dad.”
I manage to grunt. My head is pounding beneath the weird fluorescent lights and glowing TVs. Boarding school? I’ll be lucky if boarding school is all I get. I’ll be grounded until I’m in my thirties.
“Senator Brubaker has issued the following statement: ‘I categorically deny any culpability and wrongdoing. I will cooperate fully with the investigation, which will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the charges levied against me are the lies and desperate machinations of a socialist administration bent on destroying the last vestiges of freedom in this land.’ We now take you to Suzanne, who is outside the Brubaker compound . . .”
The screen flashes. I see a quick burst of the outside of the Compound’s brick wall, and suddenly the image goes dark. Another image appears.
It’s the Red Grizzlies. A live concert. “Hold on to hope baby . . .”
“What is this shit?” Esmerelda says. Then she shakes her head. “It’s APE.”
“What?” I ask. She turns the channel to another news show. “Hey, I was watching that!”
It’s Fox News now. A roundtable of men and women in suits are discussing the administration’s inability to look tough in front of the visiting Argentinean ambassador.
“APE is the Agency for Public Education,” Esmerelda says. “They’re in charge of promoting religious and interracial violence and subliminal indoctrination. They’ll only allow news like what happened to be broadcast for a short amount of time.”
“. . . and we are aware of the situation going on at Senator Brubaker’s home in Philadelphia. And we’re monitoring the—forgive me for editorializing—patently ridiculous charges that have been brought against him. Fortunately, we as a news organization will give no credence to vicious lies and rumors propagated by charlatans . . .”
“Let’s get out of here,” Esmerelda mutters.
But I don’t want to go. I just sit cross-legged as Esmerelda keeps flipping channels between brief flashes of news. Seabrook and Esmerelda both sit down on either side of me.
Empty is the only word I can think of to describe how I feel, people. Not empty like when I just watched the mega high-def TV.
Just empty.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
big finish
Well, I guess th
at sums it up.
I bet you’re expecting a big finish after all that action. We blew up the baddies’ place, I found out my dad is, like, Darth Vader, and there’s some weird force everywhere. Here’s an ending—we have this big celebration, and I look off in the distance and see some ghosts and Muppets grinning at me encouragingly.
Does that work for you?
Well, get this: life is not a movie.
Maybe you should stop watching so much TV and get outside for a change, people.
I’d like to say that we got to California. That Kang found his lost tribe, and Seabrook was elected president of the whole world. That Arthur started talking again. That Esmerelda let me get to second base with her. That I scored all kinds of hot chicks at the Grizzlies’ concert.
None of that has happened. I am still floating down the river on this crazy-ass boat looking for the Pacific Ocean.
A couple of days ago, Arthur came the closest to one of those endings where the good guy rides off into the sunset with the big-boobed blonde on his lap.
On the radio that evening, we heard this: “The Justice Department appears poised to drop all charges against Senator Mortimer Brubaker, citing a lack of evidence.”
I hadn’t yet decided what I was going to do. I just figured His Eminence was off to jail. But when that happened, I figured I’d find the Moms and we’d come up with some kind of plan. Collecting food stamps, maybe? Moving to a trailer somewhere?
Esmerelda slumped her shoulders, shaking her head. “What do you expect?” she said. “You can’t fight the Society of Man.”
“The what?”
Esmerelda arched her eyebrows. “You never heard of it? The whole thing goes way back to, like, colonial times. When the settlers first came to this country, they faced a lot of hardships—you know, animal attacks, Indian attacks, horrible storms, droughts, rough winters. The people sort of thought of nature as the Beast, you know?”
“Of course,” Seabrook said. “You’ll find it all throughout the literature. ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ for example. Or Moby Dick.”
“Well, way back then, a group of these Puritans from Massachusetts got together and formed a sort of secret club. They called it the Society of Man. Basically, the club believes that nature, the trees and the animals and everything, are a kind of organized force. Like, an army. The legions of the Devil. And it’s man’s duty to destroy it. To be the master of the beasts of the field . . . there’s some sort of Bible verse that goes with that or something.”
Seabrook closed his eyes. He fumbled in his pocket for the crucifix key chain, but came up with nothing. They must have taken it when he was captured.
“Genesis, chapter one, verse twenty-six,” he said. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
“Right,” Esmerelda said.
“The early colonists were horrified by nature. It stands to reason,” Seabrook says.
“Well, this society grew and prospered throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Most of the members of the first continental congress were members.”
“And?”
“Supposedly the Society of Man still exists. That’s the theory, anyway. They’re the ones really running the show. The Cougar Scouts, the Green Police, APE—the heads of all those agencies are card-carrying members of the Society of Man. So they say.”
On the radio they were interviewing someone who only described himself as a government official. His voice was modulated.
“What happened was not solely the result of a federal investigation,” the voice said. “An important arm of our government is in disarray because of the actions of a handful of nefarious persons. And my message to them is, beware. There will be retribution. You can run, but you can’t hide. That goes for you . . . and your families.”
That chilled me, and I didn’t even have to worry. My family, after all, are among the ones responsible.
But it wigged out Arthur something chronic. In the wee hours that night, I found him staring into the forest.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He was startled, but he shrugged and looked back out at the trees.
“I’ve been wondering,” I said. “What happens now, man?”
He shrugged.
Going back to the Compound now scares the hell out of me. But I’m just a kid. Arthur’s just a kid. What choice do we have but to go home?
Arthur seemed to read all of this. He wrote on his pad, I’m not going back.
“Okay,” I said. “Say we hang with these guys until San Francisco? There’s going to be cops and army guys and crazy shit all over the place. And if we survive, they’ll just take us back anyway.”
Arthur drew a line under his previous sentence.
“But we’re just kids, Arthur,” I said.
Shrugging, he walked away.
The next day, Kang and Arthur huddled with Seabrook in the cabin. I watched them talking through the glass. Seabrook shook his head. When I walked into the cabin they all stopped talking.
“What?” I asked.
Nobody answered.
Arthur and Kang went below to the hold.
So, it was Seabrook who broke the news. Arthur and Kang were both going home to warn their families. Arthur’s dad works for the NSA, but Esmerelda said that, compared to the Green Police or the Society of Man types, that wouldn’t mean much. They probably had no idea what Godspeed Summer Camp was really all about.
“Oh,” I said. Hot tears flowed down my cheeks, to my great embarrassment. “Doc, Arthur’s going to get back there, they’re going to put another one of those PA system thingies on him, and he’s going to be right back where he was.”
Seabrook sighed and looked at me over his shoulder. “I’m altering the route. I’m hoping to hit the Pacific Ocean by way of Canada now. Kang and Arthur are going to try to catch up to us, once they get word to their parents. Then they’re going off to Montana to look for more of their lost tribe.”
“Their lost tribe?”
Seabrook nodded solemnly. “Kang has adopted Arthur as a Milliconquit.”
This whole thing was completely unfair. Arthur was my friend. I helped the kid along when he was too afraid to do anything for himself. Now he was going to ditch me. Arthur wouldn’t survive five seconds in the wild without me.
“He’ll never make it, Doctor,” I said.
“Oh, yes he will,” Seabrook said. “He has you to thank for that, Mr. . . . Winthrop. He’s not the same kid.”
Just then, Arthur and Kang came up from the hold. Arthur had stripped off his shirt, ripped it, and tied it around his head like somebody out of an ’80s metal group. Wedged into the back of his shirt was a lone silver-and-white feather that looked as though it had been plucked from Kang’s headdress.
Arthur crossed the deck toward me. A week under the hot sun and wind had baked his skin to bronze, flecked with great patches of freckles. How did I miss this? Without the PA system, Arthur didn’t look like such a goon any more. He looked badass. His head didn’t flop anymore; he held it straight and walked tall, like a man.
“So,” I said. “I guess you think you’re hot shit now or something, is that it?”
He hugged me. At first I wanted to tell him off. He’d still be paddling driftwood down a creek in Pennsylvania with a pack of choir boys if it wasn’t for Winthrop Brubaker. No chicks. No status. No friends at all.
But a shaky feeling crested over me, and then I was the one who couldn’t talk
“I’m so sorry,” I managed. “I’m so sorry I dragged you out here, man. I didn’t . . .”
Arthur pushed himself back and held me by the shoulders. He seemed so much taller, and his eyes were clear. He looked me right in the face, and get this, people: I understood him. I couldn’t make him out more clearly if he had a hundred PA sy
stems.
Don’t be sorry, he seemed to say. You are my friend.
I couldn’t talk. My chest ached.
“Don’t leave me,” I whispered.
You’ll be fine, Arthur’s eyes said.
At last, I realized the kid really was going to be okay. I did that, people. What did I tell you? A kick-ass friend! I picked him, brought him right along, and look at him now.
He went to Esmerelda. Her Xbox-colored eyes looked moist. It occurred to me that he’s a few years younger than this chick, and I’ll bet he’s made it to second base at least. Arthur is a legend.
“It’s okay,” she said.
They embraced. She whispered something. I think it was, “You’re a great kid. You saved my life. Go save your family.”
He kissed her. No tongue, as far as I could tell, but it definitely lasted longer than a peck.
He turned to me with eyebrows raised.
“Go,” I said. “And be careful.” Then to Kang: “Remember that scene in A Man Called Horse, where they hang Richard Harris up with the antlers through the nips to prove he’s a man, and there’s these really bad ’70s special effects, but it looks like it hurts like a bitch anyway? Don’t be doing that to my boy here just because he’s a white dude.”
Kang picked me up and squeezed me to his chest. Then he and Arthur scrambled over the side of the Tamzene and disappeared into the woods. The last things I saw were two silver wisps in the trees.
After they were gone, I turned to Seabrook and saw him standing there with his eyes squeezed shut.
“What was that?” I asked when he opened them.
He patted me on the shoulder.
He didn’t need to say. He was praying.
We’ve seen a lot of shit in these woods, people, that aren’t just cells and chemicals and periodic tables. Church stuff and science stuff aren’t mutually exclusive.
The way I see it, Seabrook might have lost his crucifix in those woods, but he found something else.
He’s the Reverend Doctor Seabrook, after all.
So not such a bad ending for Arthur, right? It’s been a couple days now, and we haven’t heard a peep. But if anybody is capable of making it through the wilderness to their families, it’s Arthur and Kang.
We Are All Crew Page 26