Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire

by John August

  Just then, the lights flickered before going out completely. The room was dark except for the dim moonlight streaming through the sliding glass door.

  “It’s just the wind,” said Uncle Wade. “Power will be back on in a sec.”

  Arlo started silently counting. He could hear his uncle’s fork twirling spaghetti on his plate. He could hear Jaycee breathing, and the squeak of his mother’s chair. And under all that, he heard the wind rattling the windows.

  Arlo got to fifty before he stopped. The lights weren’t coming back on.

  “Hold on,” said Uncle Wade, pushing his chair back from the table. “I got flashlights.”

  * * *

  Jaycee and Arlo washed the dishes by the light of a battery-powered lantern.

  “Mom is losing it,” said Jaycee as she rinsed off the bubbles.

  “No she’s not,” said Arlo. Their mother couldn’t be losing it, because Jaycee said she’d lost it back in Chicago, and that was eight days ago. Once you’ve lost something, you can’t keep losing it again.

  Arlo wasn’t even sure what “it” was, but it had something to do with their mom throwing a chair through a window. Or at a window. He knew the incident involved a chair, a window and a preposition, and that it was bad enough that his mom needed to stop working at the insurance company. Within a few days, they had sold their furniture through online ads and rented the U-Haul trailer to carry what was left to Colorado.

  “Listen, Arlo,” said Jaycee, with a low voice that meant it was important. “We’re going to have to help out a lot more now. Mom’s under a lot of stress, and we can’t be adding to it. So if anything comes up, we’re just going to have to deal with it ourselves and not bother her.”

  Arlo was shocked to hear his sister speaking this way, especially after her freak-out over the internet. This was the same girl who shouted at Mom at least twice a week, usually about rules and responsibilities. Why was she suddenly lecturing Arlo on cooperation?

  “Mom doesn’t want to be here, obviously,” said Jaycee. “We would have come here years ago if this place wasn’t the absolute last resort. It was this or be homeless.”

  “It’s not that bad,” said Arlo. “Dad sends as much money as he can.”

  “It’s not enough. That’s why I’m going to get a job after school.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. At a store or something.”

  “But you hate people.”

  Jaycee wasn’t offended. “We’re all going to have to adjust. You can’t be pestering Mom with every little thing. If kids at school are mean, just tough it out. If you start hearing voices again, just ignore them.”

  “I haven’t heard the voices in a long time.”

  “Good,” said Jaycee. “Because Mom can’t handle anything more.”

  * * *

  Arlo was too old and mature to need tucking in, but he didn’t object when his mother went upstairs with him to see how he had unpacked.

  By flashlight, he showed her how he had sorted his clothes from head to toe, with shirts and hats going in the top drawer, pants in the middle, socks and underwear in the bottom drawer. Logically, underwear belonged in the middle drawer, but there was more room in the sock drawer. Besides, he often put his socks and underwear on at the same time, so it saved opening another drawer.

  His mom agreed it just made sense.

  “I was thinking, Arlo,” she said. “The diner in town has really good pancakes, and I bet they have wifi, too. Maybe on Sundays we could go there with the computer to call your dad. It would be like he’s having breakfast with us.”

  Arlo thought it was a great idea. More than that, it sounded like the kind of suggestion his mother used to make, combining something fun (pancakes) with something important (calling Dad).

  Whatever the “it” was that his mother had lost, maybe she was getting it back.

  He wanted to tell her about the dog he had seen—the one Uncle Wade said was dead—but he didn’t want to say anything that might worry her. So, as he climbed into the almost-too-soft bed, he decided to ask it as a question: “Mom, did you ever have a dog?”

  His mom sat on the edge of the bed. She was lit only by the glow of moonlight from the window. “When I was in college, my roommates and I had a dog. Her name was Rosie. She was a stray we’d found. She ended up being sort of our house mascot. Whenever we’d have a party, she’d be in every picture. I graduated and moved away, but she stayed at the house with the new batch of roommates. That’s where she belonged.”

  “How about when you were a kid? Did you have a dog here?” asked Arlo.

  “Sort of. He was mostly an outdoor dog. He only came in if it was a huge snowstorm. Even then he sort of hid.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Cooper,” she answered.

  Arlo’s heart skipped. His uncle was telling the truth. There really was a dog named Cooper. That was the dog he’d seen.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Arlo was not sure how to answer without saying too much. Luckily, his mom kept talking. “Were you thinking we should get a dog? Because we could, I guess. There’s plenty of room. But we should probably get settled in here first, don’t you think? Buy some forks and wash our clothes?”

  Arlo agreed.

  His mother neatened his hair. “I know it’s scary being in a new town. New school. New friends. But we’re kind of experts at this now, right?” Arlo smiled. “And I have a feeling this is going to be good. I know this house looks kind of rickety, but it’s solid. It’s safe. We’re going to be fine.”

  She offered him the flashlight. He was happy she had; he’d been too embarrassed to ask for it. She kissed him on the forehead and made her way to the door. He lit her path. Just before she shut the door, he asked, “Is the forest safe?”

  She paused for a moment. “Of course it is,” she answered. “Just stay where you can see the house. Don’t want you getting lost.”

  Blowing a kiss, she quietly shut the door.

  After a few moments, Arlo slid out of bed and opened the window.

  The moon was nearly full. As bright as it was, the light died at the edge of the forest. It was a wall of darkness, stirred only by the breeze.

  Under the wind, he could hear strange birds calling, and an engine on a distant road.

  The beam from his flashlight lit the area right beneath the window, but couldn’t reach the spot where he’d seen the dog. He suddenly imagined what it looked like from the other side, what a creature watching from the forest would see: a bright light in the second-story window, slowly moving back and forth.

  It might look like an invitation.

  Arlo switched off the flashlight and shut his window, drawing the drapes closed. He climbed back in bed and slept all night without dreaming.

  3

  SCHOOL

  THE TOWN OF PINE MOUNTAIN was so small you had to keep zooming and zooming in on the map in order to find it. Once you did, all you saw was a tiny dot inside a giant forest, accessible only by a two-lane mountain road that twisted back and forth like a lazy crayon scribble.

  Pine Mountain wasn’t even in the right place. Originally a mining supply camp in the 1850s, the town was destroyed in a flash flood and rebuilt further up the canyon, beyond the reach of the Big Stevens River. The gift shop, which doubled as the post office and ice cream parlor, was the only genuinely historic building in town. The rest were a haphazard collection of tiny stores, tin-roofed cabins and A-frame houses.

  Pine Mountain had one bus stop, one traffic light and one school—all at the same intersection.

  The school was a low brick building with a giant anchor out front. Arlo thought it was strange that a school way up in the mountains would have an anchor as its symbol. His mom said it was in honor of a famous admiral who had grown up in town and fought in World War II. Arlo’s mother attended Pine Mountain when she was a girl, and actually met the admiral at a special ceremony when they dedicated the anchor.

 
; Arlo tried to imagine his mother as a kid, but he just couldn’t. The anchor had rust. His mother was even older than that rusty anchor.

  The school went from kindergarten to eighth grade. Ninth graders like Jaycee had to ride a bus to Havlick, fifteen miles away. Arlo was happy to be at a different school than his sister, but disappointed to still be in elementary. Back in Chicago, sixth grade was middle school, in a completely separate building.

  Arlo sat in the school office while his mom filled out paperwork. His feet hurt. His good sneakers were a little too small, but he didn’t want to complain.

  To his left, he could see into the nurse’s office. That was where he first spotted Henry Wu, who was covered in bright purple goo.

  Arlo would soon learn that Henry Wu was simply called Wu, because there were three other Henrys in his grade. And it was easy to remember Wu, because of the goo.

  The goo was in Wu’s hair and eyes and ears and mouth. It bubbled out of his nose when he breathed.

  Even stranger than the sticky purple fluid was the sound. Every time Wu moved, it set off a torrent of tinkling bells. It reminded Arlo of Christmas and wind chimes and pinball machines. Except that it was coming from Wu, or more precisely from the goo that was covering him.

  Arlo tried to think of any other liquids that made noise like this. The ocean was loud when waves crashed against the rocks. Oil sizzled when you heated it in a frying pan.

  But nothing jingled like bells—except bells. And this goo.

  The school nurse, an older woman with dangly turquoise earrings, began spraying Wu with a squirt bottle, trying to rub off the purple gunk with coarse brown paper towels.

  Arlo knew it was rude to stare, but he couldn’t stop. He was fascinated.

  “Close your eyes tight, honey,” the nurse said before spraying Wu straight in the face. Whatever the goo was, it took aggressive scrubbing to get it off. And with every stroke, more bells were ringing.

  At one point, Wu opened his eyes and spotted Arlo watching his de-purpling. The nurse followed his gaze, sighed, then pushed the office door shut for privacy.

  Arlo looked up as his mom returned with the principal, a man with a beard and suspenders. “So, Arlo Finch. Let’s get you into class.”

  * * *

  The sixth-grade teacher was Mrs. Mayes. She wore a necklace made of thick wooden beads and a dress with what looked to be one hundred buttons down the front.

  Arlo was relieved he hadn’t been asked to introduce himself to the class like at other schools. Instead, Mrs. Mayes just told him to pick an empty seat while she finished the math lesson. It was about multiplying fractions, which Arlo already knew how to do.

  About ten minutes later, the classroom door opened and Henry Wu walked in. Most of the purple goo had been scrubbed away, but there were still traces around his ears. The kids reacted with hoots and laughter.

  But not shock, Arlo noted. The kids thought it was funny rather than remarkable, which was odd.

  In any of Arlo’s other schools, if a kid walked in with purple on his face, the natural question would have been, “What happened?” But at Pine Mountain, all the students seemed to understand exactly what had happened. Many of them thought it was hilarious.

  Mrs. Mayes scolded the class. “That’s enough. Take your seat, Henry.” But the murmuring continued.

  Wu’s desk was on the far side of the room. As he walked, he made faint jingling sounds, like the belled collars some cats wear. The kids tried to restrain their laughter, but holding it in just made it all funnier.

  When he finally got to his desk, Wu sat as still as possible.

  Arlo was one row behind him, close enough to hear when a dark-haired girl with freckles leaned over to Wu and whispered, “Did you seriously not read the Field Book?”

  “I read it,” Wu whispered back. “I just wanted to get one in a jar.”

  “The patch is Watching, not Collecting.” The way she said the words, Arlo was pretty sure they were capitalized. “Next time just make a sketch.”

  “Indra!” said the teacher, annoyed.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Mayes.” Indra seemed accustomed to saying that.

  As the class returned to fractions, Arlo’s mind was racing. What had Wu tried to put in a jar? What was the purple goo? And how soon was recess?

  * * *

  The last answer came first. When the class spilled out for morning recess, Arlo stood off to the side, watching as several of the boys made passing gibes at Wu, calling him Jingle Smurf or Grapey. It didn’t feel particularly mean-spirited—more like goofing around—and Wu seemed to shrug it off.

  At one point, Wu shook his head like a dog after a bath to demonstrate how much jingle he had left in him.

  Arlo was relieved that someone else was the center of attention. As the new kid, there was usually a spotlight on him. But because of the mysterious purple incident, no one paid him any—

  “Why did you move here?” asked Indra, suddenly beside him. “Nobody moves to Pine Mountain. My family was the last, and that was three years ago, and only because the town needed a new doctor after the old one died.”

  “How did he die?” asked Arlo.

  “He was collecting wild mushrooms—you have to be careful, because the poisonous ones look just like the good ones—when a mountain lion attacked him. He ran away, then fell off a cliff and into an icy river. Plus he was eighty-five. So, a combination of things.” As she spoke, she pulled her thick hair back into an elastic. “So why did you move here?”

  “My mom grew up here,” said Arlo. “We have a house on Green Pass Road.”

  “You should watch out,” said Merilee Myers, a tall girl with long curls. Her voice had a strange singsong lilt, as if everything she said was supposed to be poetry. “There’s a madman who lives on Green Pass Road. He stuffs dead animals and sells them.”

  She was no doubt talking about Uncle Wade. Arlo just said, “Okay.”

  As Wu joined them, Indra pointed to Arlo. “We warned him about wild mushrooms.”

  “And the madman on Green Pass Road,” said Merilee.

  “He’s got this workshop in back,” said Wu. “One time, Russell Stokes snuck up to look inside, and he saw him stuffing a golden jackalope.”

  “What’s a jackalope?” asked Arlo.

  Indra, Wu and Merilee looked at him strangely, as if he’d just asked, “What’s a mailbox?” or “How does a toothbrush work?” Arlo was embarrassed. In moving from school to school, had he missed some important subject? Did every kid know what a jackalope was except Arlo Finch?

  “It’s a rabbit with antlers,” said Wu.

  Arlo could picture it, mostly. But he had a harder time imagining how such a creature would hop around with antlers on its head. How would it fit into its burrow, if it had a burrow? Did rabbits even have burrows? Arlo realized he didn’t know much about normal rabbits, much less rabbits with antlers.

  “It’s super bad luck to kill a golden jackalope,” explained Wu. “Like breaking a thousand mirrors.”

  “Or walking under a hundred ladders,” said Indra.

  “Or playing with matches,” said Merilee.

  Arlo wondered if that last one wasn’t more a bad idea than bad luck. Regardless—“He doesn’t kill them,” he explained. “He doesn’t kill any animals. He just finds ones that are already dead and makes them look like they’re alive.”

  Indra’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

  “I read a book about it,” said Arlo. (This was a lie.) “It’s called taxidermy.” (This part was true.) Arlo’s answer seemed to satisfy them, but he thought it smart to change the topic completely. He pointed to the remaining purple goo under Wu’s ear. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I’ll take a shower when I get home,” said Wu.

  “Normal soap is useless,” said Indra. “You’ll need to use rainwater, or better yet, deer urine. Page ninety-six of the Field Book has a whole paragraph about faerie beetles.”

  Arlo stopped himself from asking
what faerie beetles were. But then Wu turned to him. “Do they have those where you’re from?”

  “Of course they do,” said Indra before Arlo could answer. “Faerie beetles come from the Long Woods, and the Long Woods go everywhere.”

  “Not space,” said Wu.

  “Obviously not space. But everywhere else.”

  With every answer he got, Arlo Finch had three more questions. What was this Field Book? What were the Long Woods? Where does one get deer urine?

  But then the bell rang, and recess was over. He would have to wait until lunch.

  * * *

  That morning, Arlo had packed a turkey sandwich, an apple and a box of juice—the same sack lunch he’d eaten every day at school in Chicago. But by the time he sat down at the long cafeteria table, he was starving. He finished his entire sandwich before even stabbing the straw into his drink.

  Looking right and left, he noticed how much more food his classmates were eating. Their lunch bags were easily twice the size of his. Many kids had two sandwiches. Others had giant plastic bowls with noodles or rice. Merilee had a whole head of lettuce and a bottle of salad dressing to pour on it.

  There was very little talking or horsing around. All he heard were the sounds of chewing and unwrapping.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” asked Wu, ripping into a whole rotisserie chicken from the supermarket.

  “Yes,” admitted Arlo. “Why am I so hungry?”

  “It’s the altitude,” said Indra, spreading yellow paste on dark brown bread with seeds in it. “We’re two miles up, so your body uses more calories. It’s like you’re a campfire, and you need to keep adding wood to keep it burning.”

  She offered him a chunk of her weird bread, but Arlo passed.

  Gesturing with a greasy drumstick, Wu asked, “Were you in a patrol in Chicago?”

  “You mean, like a gang? I wasn’t in a gang. I was in the Recycling Club. We mostly just sorted through the blue trash cans and threw out paper with gum on it.”

  Indra clarified: “He means Rangers. Were you in Rangers?”

  “I don’t know what that is.” Arlo took a bite of his apple, awaiting their disbelief at his ignorance.