Quentin and the Cave Boy - Funny books for boys and adventurous girls

by Susan Gabriel

  Once Moss is up the ladder and in the tree house, I relax. Branches almost hide it. “Stay here until I get back,” I instruct him.

  “Stay here,” he repeats. He holds up his arm like he’s a school crossing guard again.

  “Look at this while I’m gone,” I say. I hand him a National Geographic Magazine from the pile that used to be my dad’s. I open it to a full page picture of a Bengal tiger somewhere in Africa. As soon as he sees it, Moss tosses the magazine to the floor and stomps on top of it like the tiger on the page is dangerous.

  “Hey, that tiger’s not real,” I say. But his eyes are wide like he doesn’t believe me.

  “See?” I show him a waterfall on the next page.

  “Shower?” he asks.

  “No, that’s not a shower. That’s a waterfall.”

  “Tiger in shower?” His grunt goes up at the end like a question.

  “Tiger not real,” I say.

  “Stay here,” I repeat. My mom is going to come looking for me at any minute, I’m sure of it. “Do you understand, Moss? Stay here.”

  “Stay here,” he repeats, not looking up. He flips through the magazine, holding pictures sideways and upside down sniffing and licking the page. He makes a face from the taste. It’s the most I’ve seen anyone ever get out of a National Geographic.

  Coltrane at my heels, I walk back to the house, passing Mom’s azalea bushes on the way, the sun reflecting off the glistening pee. I have to resist adding more to the mix, and I think about how civilized humans have become. In Moss’ world, he goes to the bathroom outside all the time. The closest I’ve ever gotten to that was the one time Mom and Dad took us camping and Dad and I peed out in the woods.

  Before going inside I turn around and glance at the hidden tree house that I haven’t used in years. Little did I know that it might someday be a hiding place for a prehistoric guest. Dad would be proud of how I’ve put it to good use again.

  On the way inside, it occurs to me that there’s something about Moss that I like. Even though he’s been transported into a different eon, he’s making the best of it. Moss grunts in the distance, and I hear papers being ripped. I can’t believe how weird my day has been already, and I haven’t even had breakfast yet.

  THE STRANGER

  “How’s it going, Mom?” I ask, coming in the kitchen door with Coltrane. I realize I sound almost cheerful. Most often, I’m irritable in the morning, especially on school days and especially since Dad left.

  The Voice asks what I was doing outside.

  “Nothing,” I say, hoping she can’t hear the racket in the tree house. I sit at the table and pour my cereal, as if everything is normal.

  My mom sniffs the air, then opens the refrigerator door and sniffs inside, like she’s looking for rotten food. I get The Look and she asks if I’m wearing Dad’s aftershave again. I say, yes, and The Voice has nothing to say back.

  Coltrane chomps down on the rest of his breakfast and then walks over to the kitchen table and sniffs in the direction of my face. He sneezes three times in a row and then wipes his snout on my pants.

  “Traitor,” I say, since it looks like this time he’s sided with Mom.

  Coltrane whimpers, and I forgive him right away. Just to prove it I let him smell my crotch, which is one of his favorite things to do.

  “You’re in a good mood this morning,” The Voice says. She walks over and tries to tame my hair while I eat my Wheaties. I duck away from her touch.

  “Can’t a guy just be in a good mood?” I ask. I grunt into my cereal.

  Mom looks at me like I’ve turned into a total stranger right in front of her.

  A head appears at the kitchen door. At first I panic, thinking Moss has come looking for me, but instead it’s Dex, my best bud.

  “Hey,” he says. He comes in and drops his book bag with a loud thud on the kitchen chair. Dex carries all his school books home with him every night; he’s notorious for being over-prepared. He’s getting muscles in his arms, though, from lugging all that knowledge around.

  “Hey, Dex,” I say, pretending to act normal.

  Mom hands him the cereal box like he’s another one of her kids.

  “What’s up?” I say. I bite my lip closed, so my excitement about Moss won’t blurt out, like diarrhea of the mouth.

  “Nothing much,” he says. “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing much,” I answer. It’s the biggest lie I’ve ever told him. What’s up is that there’s a guy in my tree house who may have seen dinosaurs firsthand. For all I know, he may have one as a pet.

  Dex’s real name is a huge secret. Hint: It’s not Dexter. If I ever tell anyone, Dex says that I will live to regret it and I’m not willing to find out what that actually means. All I can say is his parents must have had it out for him from the very beginning. The name Quentin isn’t all that great, either. But at least I can use it without kids taking pot shots at me.

  If you saw Dex you’d think he was recovering from a freak accident. His hair looks like his finger got stuck in a light socket when he was young. But after seeing Moss, I wonder if it isn’t part of his cave boy past. Maybe one of his ancient ancestors saw one saber-toothed tiger too many and his hair stood straight up out of fright and it’s lasted all these generations later.

  Dex leans across the table and whispers a reminder. This is the morning we’re asking Mom about going to the concert this weekend. Since Dex’s parents are never around, we need her to drive. Dex’s parents work all the time. The good part is that they let Dex do anything he wants, as long as they don’t have to take him or pick him up. At times this is a pretty sweet deal. At other times it’s total pressure to have that much freedom. I think Dex misses having parents. I know I miss my dad all the time. But being guys, we don’t talk about it much.

  The one person in my life I never get the chance to miss is my mom. Her office is at home so she’s always around, looking out for Katie and me—and Dex. I think my mom sleeps with one eye open since Dad left, just to make sure nothing’s happening that she doesn’t know about. This is irritating if you’re trying to keep something hidden from her––like prehistoric Homo sapiens.

  Since I can’t tell Dex about Moss with my mom here, the concert is a good diversion. I wonder if Moss can go with us. If a shower head and a zipper excite him, he’ll probably flip to see a music concert with all the special lighting, sound equipment, and instruments. Then I wonder if there’s somebody in Atlanta who knows how to get Moss back to where he came from. Maybe some scientist or dream expert. But it’s hard to imagine anybody believing such a crazy story.

  Dex nudges me out of my fantasy.

  “Can Dex and I go to a concert this weekend?” I ask my mom.

  She pauses, like she’s already come up with twenty reasons why it won’t work. The Voice asks what kind of concert.

  “It’s a jazz band from New Orleans,” Dex answers. “They’re almost famous.”

  My dad has a huge collection of jazz records that he left behind by jazz greats like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Dex and I play them on an old turntable in my basement.

  “Where is this concert?” The Voice asks me. Since Dex isn’t her flesh and blood it’s harder for her to say no to him.

  “Well, that’s the thing, Mom. It’s this great group, so they’re playing at a club in Underground Atlanta.”

  The Voice and The Look join forces to tell us what a horrible idea this is. It’s not safe for kids our age.

  “But, Mom . . .”

  “I don’t think it will work out this time, Quentin.”

  Dex tugs at his left ear, my signal to shift into phase two of our plans. This stage involves begging and pleading. I also throw in the secret weapon that every kid who wants to manipulate their parents knows—The Whine.

  The Whine, when used with the correct levels of begging and pleading, is our best chance to get what we want. Whining, of course, is a high-level skill and must be used with caution. Too much and y
ou’re irritating. Too little and the target misses. Both will get a negative response.

  “Oh, come on, Mom,” I say. I insert The Whine in millisecond proportions. I imagine Moss using this strategy with his mom in order to visit a distant cave and getting clobbered with a club.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” The Voice says. Her tone is about as far away from a whine as you can get.

  “Don’t you remember what it’s like to be my age?” I ask. I look her straight in the eyes. Eye contact is another strategy to getting what you want. If anything can get through to my mom it’s the big brown eyes that she told me once looked like my dad’s. Of course, this might count against me because of the blueberry pancake lady, which is what I call Heather in front of my mom.

  “Please, Mom?” I insert The Whine again. “Dad would let me.”

  Dex’s eyes widen, like I’ve pulled the pin out of a hand grenade and the whole thing may blow up in my face. We wait for an explosion, but The Voice goes silent and The Look drops. Mom pours Dex a second glass of orange juice.

  “We could stay for just the first set and you could wait in the car,” I say.

  The Voice sighs.

  “What if Moss goes with us?” I say. “He could be our own personal body guard.” Within seconds I realize that I have just let an enormous Stone Age cat out of the bag.

  “Moss?” The Voice asks.

  “Moss?” Dex says.

  They both look at me like I’ve admitted I have an imaginary friend.

  I stutter around searching for a response. “I was just saying that if a Moss man can’t do it who can?”

  Dex drops his head to his chest, like all hope is lost. But I have one more thing to try: our final, final resort, minus The Whine.

  I begin again, using my most grown up voice. “Mom, you need to remember that in only a few years I’ll be twenty. I can handle more responsibility, now.”

  The plan is to project myself into the future, and have my mom imagine me not as her little son, Quentin, but as a mature, twenty-year-old, already in college or off on my own; a person capable of going to a concert in Underground Atlanta without placing my life in any danger.

  Dex lifts his head, a glimmer of expectation in his eyes. We wait for The Voice.

  My mom’s face softens. She pours herself another cup of coffee. Then a brief smile comes and goes. The longer she waits to respond, the more hopeful I get. I hear music from the concert play faintly in the background. But then The Voice wagers a brilliant counter-attack. “That’s a good point, Quentin, but you’re also only a few years away from being a five-year-old.”

  Our hopes deflate in an instant. Good one, Voice. TKO.

  Both things are true. Some days I am very mature: a twelve, going on thirteen-year-old Dalai Lama in training, ready to scale the Himalayas. Other days I trip over my shoe laces and squirt apple juice out of my nose.

  I can’t imagine Moss having problems like this. When you’re one of the original boys, I think life must come down to basics: surviving a cold winter, getting through your childhood without getting eaten by a bear or falling off a cliff, or avoiding a disease that today that can be cured with an aspirin.

  As for me, life has changed pretty fast. One minute I’m bored to death, and the next minute I’ve got a visitor from the Stone Age in my tree house. Before this morning it seemed like all the interesting things happen to somebody else. But now I’m that somebody. The only downside is that now that something this amazing has happened, I can’t tell anyone. Except Dex. If I can trust anyone, it’s the friend that I’ve had since we both wore Huggies.

  THE SCHOOL BUS

  Dex and I finish breakfast and grab our book bags. Before we leave, Mom leans in to kiss me. I dodge away from her and she kisses the air instead. The Voice calls after us to have a good day. Dex and I go out the back door toward the bus stop. As soon as we get around the corner of the house, I pull him near the bushes so I can tell him about Moss. Since Dex isn’t used to being jerked around he looks surprised.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Dex says.

  “I’d be careful where I step if I were you,” I say, looking around at where Moss had been.

  He looks at me like I’ve morphed into a hobbit and I’m lost somewhere between here and Middle Earth. “You’re acting strange this morning,” Dex says. “Did you get a call from your dad or something?”

  “Even better,” I say. For the first time this morning I let out my excitement and it’s like my legs have springs. I can’t stay still.

  “Quentin, what’s going on?” Dex asks.

  “The strangest thing happened this morning, Dex, I mean really strange.”

  “Tell me,” he says. He puts his book bag on the ground like this may take a while. “But you’d better hurry or we’ll miss the bus.”

  “You know the bus is always late,” I say.

  “What is it?” he asks again.

  “I was sleeping, you know, and then I was dreaming, and then the dream kind of became real.”

  “Yeah, right,” Dex says, like this is the millionth time I’ve pulled his leg and he’s not going to fall for it again.

  “I’m telling you the dream became real.” I look at him like I’m the most serious I’ve ever been in all the years he’s known me.

  “How can a dream become real? I don’t get it,” he says, once he realizes I’m not playing a joke on him. Dex isn’t the most excitable human being on the planet. It’s like he owns the patent to staying calm.

  “I was having this dream about this kid in a cave. He was our age, but he was a cave kid, and there was this cave mom trying to get him up, like my mom was trying to get me up. And then both moms said ‘get up’ at the same time and suddenly this kid in the dream was on my bed. Like some kind of spell clicked in and transported him from there to here.”

  “Are you sure that part wasn’t a dream, too?” Dex asks.

  He isn’t getting it. “No, I mean he’s actually here.”

  “Where?” he says, looking around.

  “In the tree house,” I say back.

  “The tree house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s a cave boy in the tree house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, right.” He shakes his head like this is the wildest story he’s ever heard.

  “I kind of wish I was kidding,” I say, “because now I don’t know what to do with him. I don’t know how to get him back to where he came from.”

  “Unreal,” Dex says.

  “You aren’t kidding,” I say back.

  “This is a real weird problem to have.”

  “Tell me about it,” I say.

  “How do you know you’re not dreaming now?” Dex says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe I am.”

  I pinch Dex and he pinches me. We punch each other in the shoulders and the pain feels very real.

  “Grandma Betty says I have vivid dreams because we have Hungarian gypsy blood in our lineage.”

  “But isn’t this the same woman who dresses up her terriers in Zorro costumes?”

  Dex has a point. “That’s only for Halloween,” I say.

  Dex pauses like I’ve outdone my usual crazy. “I need to see this guy,” he says finally.

  “Okay, but after that we’ve got to decide what to do with him while we’re at school. I was thinking about taking him along. Maybe he could be my cousin or something. A shy cousin who doesn’t talk much.”

  “That could work,” says Mister Calm.

  What I like about Dex is that if I tell him that aliens have landed in his back yard and I need help greeting them, he’ll show up.

  When we go into the tree house Moss sits behind a tall stack of torn out pages that are crumpled and wet like he’s been licking them.

  “Dex, this is Moss. Moss, this is Dex,” I say by way of introduction.

  Moss does a double take when he sees Dex. I guess Dex isn’t the most normal looking human of the 21st
century. Meanwhile, Dex is doing a double take, too. He looks kind of pale.

  Moss smiles, showing a mouthful of teeth that could use some industrial strength dental floss.

  “What do you think?” I ask Dex.

  “About what?” Dex stares at Moss like he's trying to decipher a complex math problem.

  “What do you think about Moss?”

  “His name is Moss?”

  “Yeah, but what should I do with him? Do you think he could pass for a kid like us?”

  Dex closes his mouth. He circles Moss, as if studying the problem from every angle.

  Moss circles, too, as if studying Dex’s hair from every angle.

  They look like two wrestlers circling each other before they go at each other’s throats, but then they both stop.

  “He could probably pass,” Dex says. “Just tell everybody he’s from L.A.”

  “That might work,” I say. California is about as far away and weird as people living in Georgia can imagine. I look at my watch. “We’ve got to go. If we miss the bus, Mom will have to take us.”

  We usher Moss down the ladder of the tree house and walk toward the bus stop. Moss walks in the middle, like he’s an FBI informant and we’re two federal agents escorting him to a courtroom to give expert testimony about what’s it’s like to come from another epoch.

  “Does he talk?” Dex asks, keeping his eyes straight ahead.

  “Yeah, a little bit,” I say. “But mostly he grunts and growls.”

  Moss grunts, like he understands every word.

  “Amazing,” Dex says again.

  “Amazing,” Moss repeats.

  Dex and I look over at each other like this is our best adventure yet. Better than the massive roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia that Dex and I rode fifteen times in one day, setting a personal record. We were going for twenty but the attendant asked us to leave because Dex’s hair was scaring younger kids.

  As we come around the corner to the bus stop, a car beeps its horn and speeds by. Before we know it Moss climbs Mr. Hyatt’s maple tree in breakneck speed. All I can see are Moss’ eyes peering out between the leaves and they look a little wild, like he’s Ebenezer Scrooge and he’s seen the ghost of Christmas future.