The Trail

by Meika Hashimoto

  The truck slows to a crawl, then stops on a familiar piece of road.

  “Hey. This is where you picked me up,” I yell through the back window.

  Jim rolls down the window and sticks out his head. “That’s right. You get going now. There ain’t nothing you can do for that dog.”

  I wait for a wave of helplessness to wash over me, like it has so many times before. The feeling of defeat and despair, of bad luck hammering down to remind me that I’m cursed and I can’t do anything about it.

  But those feelings don’t come. Instead, for the first time, I feel something else. It fills me, thick and fast and powerful.

  Rage.

  “You don’t know that!” I scream. I pound my fist on the back of the window. “I don’t care if Lewis is twice my size, I’ve got to save Moose. Turn around. Take me back!”

  “Son.” Jim is calm. “I feel for you. But I’m not sending you to a crazy man’s house so you can steal his dog.”

  “He’s my dog!” I shriek. I slam my hands against the roof. “Take me back!”

  Jim doesn’t say anything. The truck idles as I bang the roof over and over and over again. I am so viciously angry I feel like I could punch a hole right into the truck.

  Finally I toss my pack over the side and jump out of the cab. If Jim isn’t going to drive me, I’ll go and find Moose myself. I sling my pack on my shoulder and start marching back to town.

  The truck pulls alongside me. “Kid,” Jim says.

  I don’t look at him. I focus my eyes on the road.

  “Kid, turn back. Or I’m gonna turn you into the police station. You gonna get yourself killed if you go after that dog, and I ain’t gonna be responsible for that.”

  I stop. If I get turned in, I lose everything. Moose. The Trail. My promise to Lucas.

  Everything.

  My hands rise to my face and my fingernails bury themselves in my temples. I scream so loudly that a flock of birds rise from the trees and fly off in a panic.

  I turn around. Away from town and from Moose and from any chance of saving him.

  “Good luck with your hike, kid,” Jim says.

  Sadie doesn’t look at me. She’s busy scribbling away at a piece of notebook paper.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I say sarcastically.

  As the Toyota drives away, a crumpled scrap of paper falls out of the passenger-side window.

  I go over to pick it up. I tuck it into the Ziploc bag with my matches and the List and stuff it into the side of my pack. It’ll be good starter for the next time I have a fire. Or feel like burning down the forest.

  I HAD PROMISED Moose I would take care of him. That he could depend on me. That he would be safe.

  But instead I led him straight to a man who had starved and abused him. A man with big knuckles and a big belt buckle. Who threw Moose into his truck. Actually threw him.

  I stop on the trail and lean against a tree, breathing in short gasps, trying so hard not to cry. I feel almost like I did when Lucas died. That heavy sick feeling is back, as though a gallon of slime has been poured down my throat. My stomach lurches.

  I’ve failed another friend.

  I’m not just bad luck; I put my friends in bad situations.

  I don’t remember how long I am there, grinding my forehead into the bark of the tree trunk, trying to erase the memory of Lewis throwing Moose into his truck. But no amount of physical pain is going to take back the past.

  Finally I step away. I stare blankly in front of me. And then I begin to hike. Because I don’t know what else to do.

  The trail leaves the road and climbs through thick spruce forests. The steepness should slow me down, but instead I speed up until I’m nearly running. I have to get away from Moose and what I did to him. I race up a giant mountain, willing myself to go faster and faster.

  The trail is muddy and full of roots and rocks. It’s not fun at all to hike. I’m nearly at the top of a mountain when a guy comes toward me, his long arms and legs a blur of motion. He is tall and lanky and smells exactly like a thru-hiker—unwashed pits, dark-brown hair matted with sweat and grease, boots and calves stained with a thick layer of mud.

  I huddle off to the side of the trail to let him through. Just like his pace, his eyes are manic. They stare straight ahead, calculating the dips and dives of the tricky footing of the trail in nanoseconds. He doesn’t even see me. It’s as if I’m no one.

  It is dark by the time I reach a shelter. I set up and go to sleep, alone in my despair.

  I deserve to be alone.

  The next day I summit four peaks. The sky is blue and the views are clear, but I don’t care. I’ve lost Moose, and no amount of fine weather is going to make me feel better. As evening falls I descend a long, rocky hill and break out of the trees onto a real road. There is a car parked on the side of the trail. A Subaru Outback with the hatch flipped up. Sitting in the back, their feet swinging, are a man and a woman. A beat-up red Coleman cooler rests between them.

  The man has bright blue eyes and a grizzly beard. The woman is plump and deeply suntanned, with kind brown eyes.

  As I get closer, I see a piece of paper duct taped to the cooler. On it are two words handwritten in permanent marker. Two simple words: “Trail Magic.”

  When the man sees me, he waves me over. When he opens the cooler, I peer in and see soda cans scattered in ice. I reach straight for a Coke. The dark fizzy liquid hits my tongue and I want to weep. The instant sugar is making my head light, so I drink slowly, burping with appreciation.

  The woman hands me a sandwich. “Here you go, dear,” she says. Turkey and mayo, tomato, and lettuce between two slices of homemade bread studded with sesame seeds and oats. I blink and chew.

  The man watches me eat. “Marsha, get the fellow another one,” he says when I am done.

  The woman hands me another sandwich. It is gone in a few hurried mouthfuls.

  After I finish the Coke, the man pulls out a gallon jug of water and hands it to me. “You’re lookin’ a little parched.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The man nods. “Name’s Clyde,” he says.

  “Tony.” I am grateful for Clyde and Marsha, but it doesn’t stop me from being wary about my name again. “Thanks for all this.”

  “Least we can do. Our son, Alex, started thru-hiking two months ago. You must be his age, or a little younger. What are you, fifteen?”

  I realize that after only a few weeks on the trail, I already seem a lot older than I am.

  I nod, not wanting to tell Clyde my real age.

  “Alex is seventeen. We made him a promise that we’d set up some Trail Magic every Sunday until he finished. Figured it’d be good luck for him.” Clyde points to the water. “Have the whole thing—we’ve got five more gallons and’ll be packin’ up in about an hour. Don’t think we’re in any danger of runnin’ out.”

  I slug back a quarter of it before refilling my empty water bottles.

  “Oh, honey.” Marsha touches my arm gently and I wince. She frowns. “You’ve got a wicked sunburn, too. I’ve got something for that.” She reaches behind into the magical backseat and brings out a bottle of aloe vera gel.

  I pump some of the gooey green liquid into my hand. As I spread it across my reddened skin, soothing coolness travels across me.

  “Keep the bottle. And take as much food as you want,” says Clyde.

  “Hon, do you need a night off the trail?” Marsha asks me. I can feel her eyes on me. They are warm. Motherly. She points to a white clapboard house with green shutters and a screened porch just down the road. “We live right there. You could spend the night with us, if you’d like.”

  I am tired. I am sore. The next shelter is five miles away, and I have only another hour before dark. All I want to do is curl up in a real bed and cry.

  But I also don’t want to accept any help. After losing Moose, I don’t deserve help. I’m just about to tell Clyde and Marsha no when my eyes fall on my pack. If I don’t take some ti
me off the trail to fix my gear, I’m going to be in trouble. I have to repair the tent in case I can’t make it to shelters on the remote stretches of trail through the Maine woods. Seal up the gash in my sleeping pad. Get more iodine pills. Maybe some more food. I need to be smart.

  I decide to compromise. “That’s awful kind of you. I don’t want to be too much of a bother, though. Could I just sleep on your porch tonight?”

  “Of course.” Marsha smiles. “You go on right ahead. Clyde and I will be there in an hour. Door’s open if you want to use the bathroom or anything.”

  I thank them and head over to the house. As twilight falls, I set my pack on the porch, and I switch on the porch light and settle cross-legged on wooden decking with my belongings. There is a patch kit in a small pocket in the sack of my air pad. I take out a circular patch and a thin tube of glue. I cover the gash in my pad with the patch and set it aside to dry.

  Next, I take a look at the tent poles. They really are badly mangled—I can’t save them. I think about how they were pieces of the shelter that was going to keep Lucas and me safe and dry on the trail.

  I can’t give up Lucas’s tent. I need to have something of his with me when I reach Katahdin. I take the broken tent poles and roll them up in the tent fabric. I open the tent bag and place everything inside. I’ll find a way to make it shelter me, somehow.

  As I’m cinching the tent bag closed, I notice the Ziploc with my matches and Sadie’s tossed-away crumple of paper. I open the bag and check the matches. They are still dry. Good.

  The paper is dry as well. I smooth it out to refold it into a neat square to tuck into my hood pocket. And that’s when I see it.

  Sadie hadn’t thrown away a piece of scrap paper. She had drawn me a map to Moose.

  IT IS A detailed map, with the Rangeley grocery store as a central marker. Past the grocery store, Route 4 heads east for several miles before a side road branches off into a cluster of back roads.

  It is at one of these back roads that Sadie has made a stick house with the word “BUSTER” hastily scribbled over it. There is also a phone number.

  I stare at the rumpled paper and realize that I have been given a choice. I can continue on the trail and finish what Lucas and I started. I can tick off number ten on the List and keep my promise to my dead best friend.

  Or I can go back to save a dog.

  It’s the hardest decision that I’ve had to make. I don’t want to give up on either Lucas or Moose.

  For a second, I wonder if Lucas’s voice will come back into my head to tell me what to do. To lead me to the right choice. Instead, I hear nothing.

  Then, in the stillness of the night, I see a flicker of light. And another. And another.

  Fireflies. They appear in the field, magical little blinks that light up the field like it’s Christmas.

  I remember the last time I saw them. Lucas and I had set up camp in his backyard and had watched them come out as we talked about hiking the trail together. It had been just a few days before the quarry accident.

  I had been so worried that something would go wrong, that we wouldn’t finish, that it would all end in disaster. Finally Lucas had said, “You know what, Toe? It doesn’t matter if we get to Katahdin. What matters is that it’s going to be you and me, two friends having the adventure of a lifetime.”

  I gaze out at the fireflies. They are like little flashes of hope in the night.

  That was it. I didn’t have to finish the trail to prove to Lucas that he meant so much to me. Just being out here, being on this adventure was enough.

  I had started the trail to get over the guilt that had weighed down my every step since last summer. But then I met Sean and Denver. They had taught me that, just like how Denver wasn’t responsible for Harry’s accident, I wasn’t responsible for Lucas’s death. Lucas made a choice, and so did I. I will always miss him, but he was the one who dove into the water.

  Then I think about Wingin’ It and his story. How his friend came back for him. Because that’s what friends do.

  I know what I have to do next.

  I fold up the paper and tuck it in my pocket. There’s a wooden shed housing a few metal trash cans next to the driveway. I pick up Lucas’s broken tent and walk off the porch and to the shed. I open a can and carefully lay the tent inside.

  As I walk back to the house, Clyde and Marsha pull into the driveway. I ask Marsha if I can use her phone. I dial ten numbers. After the fifth ring, a girl’s voice answers. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Sadie. This is Toby. I found your map. I’m coming to get Moose.”

  “Hold on a sec.” There is silence on the other end, and then Sadie’s voice comes back on. “When can you get here?”

  “I think I’m about twenty-five miles away from Rangeley. I can get there tomorrow.”

  I hear some yelling in the background. Sadie’s voice comes over, hushed and urgent. “Toby, I’ve got to go. If you can, give me a call when you’re close tomorrow.”

  “I’ll try.” I hang up the phone and return it to Marsha. By the end of the evening, all my things are packed away, I’ve taken a good hot shower, and I have a promise from Clyde to drive me to Rangeley the next morning. I crawl into my sleeping bag and fall asleep to the sounds of crickets.

  That night I dream that Moose has become a snarling wolverine, and Lewis a twelve-foot troll. They hunt me through a dark forest with trees oozing sticky black blood, down a trail scattered with broken tent poles as white as bone. They corner me against the rotting roots of a dead tree. Lewis aims a pitchfork at my heart. “My dog,” he screams. I wake covered in sweat. It takes me a long time to settle back down to sleep.

  The next morning I wake to the smell of bacon and eggs. Clyde opens the door and looks down at me. “You’re coming in to have breakfast,” he tells me. It is an order. I go in.

  “How did you sleep, honey?” Marsha is in the kitchen in front of the stove. She fills a plate of crispy warm bacon and scrambled eggs glistening with butter and gives it me with a fork.

  “Okay.” I don’t tell her about the nightmare as I sit down at the table.

  Marsha fills a tall glass with orange juice and sets it in front of me. “Well, once you finish up here, Clyde can take you into town. He’s aiming to leave around nine.”

  An hour later Clyde and I are rumbling into Rangeley. It is a fine, warm day. Clyde rolls down the windows and I stick my hand out, letting the wind stream through my fingers.

  When we get into town, I ask to borrow Clyde’s phone, and with it I dial Sadie’s number.

  “Where are you?” Sadie asks when she hears my voice.

  “The grocery store in Rangeley,” I tell her.

  “I’ll meet you at Keep’s Corner Café. It’s about a mile west of you on Route Sixteen.”

  Five minutes later we pull into the café. I hop out of the truck and go over to the driver’s side. Clyde shakes my hand. “Good luck, Tony,” he says to me.

  I lean over and give him a hug through the window. “Thanks for everything, Clyde.”

  “You take care, young man,” he tells me. He puts the truck in gear and rumbles away.

  I am alone again. But not for long. I am going to get Moose back. It’s the only promise that matters now.

  AN HOUR LATER, Sadie comes into the café. She gets a coffee and I get hot chocolate. We order two cinnamon rolls and pull up two chairs around a table to talk.

  I have to ask the question. It has been bugging me ever since finding that map of Lewis’s place. “Why are you helping me?”

  Sadie bites into a roll. “This is the north country. Up here you’re taught to leave your neighbors alone. Not to butt in, even if you see something that’s wrong. We respect one another’s privacy and right to do whatever we want. But Lewis has been abusing that dog ever since he got him.

  “I remember the first time I was riding my bike past his place when he came raging out of his house holding Buster by the scruff of his neck.” Sadie’s eyes darken. “He threw B
uster. He threw him off the front porch, and Buster hit the dirt.

  “I’ve never forgotten the way he yelped, and the way he whined when Lewis came off the porch to get him. I stopped and yelled at Lewis. I told him that was no way to treat a dog. Lewis told me oh yes it was if the dog pissed on your floor. I told him that’s what puppies do, they don’t know any better, and Lewis said he was gonna make sure that Buster would know better next time. And he told me to mind my business or I was gonna get it.”

  Sadie takes a swig of coffee. “You’ve seen Lewis. He’s a big guy. I was afraid. I pedaled away and left him with Buster lying in the dirt. That was two years ago. Since then I haven’t seen Lewis say one kind word to that dog, or give him more than curses and kicks. If there’s someone who’s willing to take Buster away, I’m gonna help ’em. And that someone looks to be you.”

  I nod. “What do you know about Lewis?” I ask. “Do you think he’s home right now?”

  Sadie asks me for the map she drew. When I show it to her, she points to the stick drawing of the house. “Lewis grows corn across the road from his house. Usually he’s out on his tractor during the day.

  “If we can get there soon, the farmhouse should be empty. We can find Buster and get him out of there before Lewis returns home.” Sadie nods toward the door. “I’ve got my four-wheeler outside. You ready?”

  I pick up my pack and heft it onto my shoulders. “Ready.”

  We put our dirty plates in a brown plastic tub and head out. Sadie’s four-wheeler is parked across the street.

  Sadie has brought a few bungee cords and she swings them in the air. “Take your bag off and relax for a second.” I hand her my pack and she lashes it to the black metal bars on the back of the four-wheeler. As I roll my neck, she asks, “What are you going to do when you get Buster back?”