The Starlight Claim

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “We’re not supposed to,” says Nate.

  “Oh, my dear old wussy Numbster. ‘Not supposed to’ — right there’s the difference between the exhilaration of discovery and total boredom.” It makes Nate think of those inspirational posters they have up in the guidance counselor’s office, usually involving cats. Meanwhile, Dodge has found an aluminum ladder and is manhandling it into position to get up to the second floor in the absence of any stairs.

  “What don’t you understand about the words ‘strictly forbidden’?” says Nate.

  Dodge pulls the rope to raise the ladder a few more notches until it leans against the header of the landing. He stops, looks thoughtful for a moment, as if it’s a question worth considering. “Well,” he says. “‘Strictly’ speaking, ‘forbidden’ is one of those past . . . whatchamacallits?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, in grammar — a past particle.”

  “Participle?” says Nate. “And stop pretending to be a dumbass.”

  “That’s it, a past participle. ‘Forbidden’ is a past participle. Right?”

  Nate frowns, not sure if it is or isn’t. “What are you talking about?”

  “If my mom said, ‘I strictly forbid you to go on the construction site,’ I’d have to obey her. But by saying it was ‘strictly forbidden,’ she actually only meant it was something she used to think I shouldn’t do.”

  Nate stares at Dodge in wonder. “You know what you’re full of, right?”

  Dodge starts up the ladder. He nods. “Hey, my dad taught me everything I know.”

  They find themselves in the room directly across from the landing — the one that’s going to be his. The hole for the attic gapes at them, too inviting to pass up. It’s hot, and when they maneuver a couple of sawhorses and two-by-fours into place so they can poke their heads through the attic opening, it’s like a sauna.

  “Like putting your head into a pot of soup,” says Nate.

  But Dodge isn’t listening. “We can hide stuff here, man.”

  “Like what?”

  “Contraband. Booze. Girls!”

  Nate makes a face. Girls have only just come onto his radar and he’s keeping a wide berth. To hear Dodge talk, he’s a lot further ahead in his explorations, with someone named Ashley; someone named Skylar; someone named Brynn.

  “They’d melt,” says Nate, wiping the sweat out of his eyes.

  “Melting’s good,” says Dodge, nodding, lost in some dreamy reflection. Nate huffs and climbs down to the floor, which is where he is when he hears Fern Hoebeek bellowing from below, clearly back way earlier than expected.

  “There better not be any foolhardy boys in this house or there’s going to be hell to pay!”

  Nate stood on the top bunk, head and shoulders through the opening. Which made it pretty easy to hoist yourself in, if need be. It sure wasn’t hot up there now. It would only be way colder and way darker come nightfall. And although heat rises, he doubted it would be too comfortable if he ended up hiding there for any length of time. A last resort, maybe. He decided to store a couple of blankets and a pillow, just in case. He was about to climb back down when he saw something shadowy in the corner. He pulled himself through the hole and slithered in far enough to grab what he knew by then to be a book. It was one of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid sequels. Trick loved them. There was a bookmark in it about ten pages from the end. For a moment Nate wondered if Trick had discovered the attic. But Trick was not allowed in his big brother’s room under penalty of death. Then he remembered something else, a whole other day, years after the construction-site incident. Just last summer, in fact. He swallowed. It was the first time he’d thought about the new meaning of “last summer.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “My book.”

  Trick stands on the Hoebeeks’ deck with his hands on his hips: he’s a toothpick in a ball cap and swimsuit. Dodge is lounging on a deck chair playing Angry Birds 2 on his iPad.

  “What book?” says Nate.

  “The new Wimpy Kid. He stole it!”

  “For your own good, Patrick. You’re already too much of a wimp.”

  “Am not.”

  “‘Am not,’” says Dodge, making his voice all high and squeaky.

  Trick grabs at the iPad and Dodge cuffs his hand away.

  “Ow!”

  “See what I mean? Wimp.”

  “Give him the book,” says Nate.

  “Nuh-uh. He reads way too much. And when he reads those books, he goes, ‘Oh, goody, goody, there are other wimpy kids out there just like me so it’s okay to be one, too.’”

  “That is so much horse manure,” says Nate, laughing.

  “Next he’ll be reading about how it’s okay to be gay,” says Dodge.

  Nate throws himself back in his chair, groaning. “Are you really as big a bigot as you pretend to be?”

  “The totally biggest.”

  Trick is about to speak and then can’t. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his inhaler. Takes a couple of puffs.

  “Wimp,” says Dodge.

  “I’m telling Mom,” says Trick.

  “Wimp, wimp, wimp,” says Dodge.

  Then suddenly Trick darts forward and smacks the iPad right out of his brother’s hands. It clatters to the deck.

  Trick backs away. Nate sits up, ready for anything. Dodge doesn’t move. He stares straight ahead, out at the lake. His hands tighten on the arms of the chair.

  “I’m sorry,” says Trick in his wimpiest voice.

  “Not as sorry as you’re going to be,” says Dodge.

  Then Trick disappears. Vanishes. Goes up in smoke. Nate doesn’t know which; he’s too busy watching Dodge, who sits perfectly still. Then, after a moment, his grip on the chair slackens. The muscles in his face relax. He reaches down lazily and picks up the iPad.

  “Do you believe that?” he says, starting up the game again.

  “No,” says Nate. “I don’t.”

  The second-floor landing was small, but there was room enough under the north-facing window for the big old steamer trunk, where the family kept their extra bedding. Taking it out, Nate lifted the trunk on end and jostled it over to the stairwell. He found that it fit nicely between the wall and the rail, with a narrow space beside that he could squeeze through as need be. If push came to shove — literally — he could heave the trunk down on top of someone charging up the stairs. It was heavy even without its contents. Nate planned to put it in place before he went to bed.

  Downstairs, he rigged up something to make a lot of noise if someone came barging in. That was easy: he found the cowbell Fern Hoebeek used to call her brood home for dinner. It usually hung on a hook outside the door; now it was on a shelf just inside. Nate attached it to a string, then to a chair, looped the string over a nail in the beam above, and connected the string to the door. He tried it, opened the door.

  Clang.

  Worked just fine. He also laid a couple of chairs on their side in the path of the door as well. A little clatter could only help.

  There had to be other deterrents. He came up with one or two. It was the best he could do.

  Was he really preparing for an attack?

  He made his way to the master bedroom, on the first floor just off the living room. In the closet, he found the last thing he needed — the very last thing. It was standing in a corner, safe in its tough polyester case with the thick foam padding: Art Hoebeek’s Remington Wingmaster, a 12-gauge pump action. The case was locked, and the key for it was not with the other keys but on the highest shelf of the pantry, in the back corner in a tin marked baking soda, out of reach of little fingers. Nobody wanted Patrick, let alone baby Hilton, playing with guns, after all. The shotgun also had a trigger lock, opened with a combination of numbers — Art Hoebeek’s idea of maximum security. Like everything else about this place, Nate knew what that combination was.

  Nate stood in the darkening master bedroom caught in anothe
r memory — they were thick on the ground here. Well, that wasn’t really surprising.

  It was three or four summers back: Mr. H. teaching him and Dodge how to use the Remington. Burl Crow was the woodsman of the north end, but he wasn’t into guns. He’d done his share of hunting — had nothing against it. He just didn’t want firearms around the camp. Art didn’t share Burl’s view, so the two fathers agreed to disagree. Which is why the training session happened on one of those rare summer weeks when Burl was back in the city. Nate remembered feeling a bit like a traitor. But he also remembered the satisfaction of blasting a target right off its post.

  He woke into the dark to the sound of the wind, howling now. He sat up, listening hard, trying to pick out a sound inside of it. God, it was so loud he wondered if he’d even hear the cowbell. He kicked off his covers and climbed down from the top bunk. He approached the starry window, thick on the inside with frost. He cleared a patch of glass with his hand and looked out into the night. Shivered. Somewhere up in the cloud cover a moon was shining, though there was no sense of its shape or actual whereabouts, only a diffuse glimmer. He would need to go down and fuel the fire, but he was too tired, his body too heavy with sleep. Gradually his eyes accustomed themselves to the expanse before him, and there, down on the shoreline, stood Dodge.

  He was bathed in blue light. He was carrying the shotgun.

  By the time Nate beat it down to him by the slapping tide, it was a hot, still summer afternoon. Time had blown away the north wind and they were thirteen.

  “What are you doing with that?”

  Dodge holds the Remington to his shoulder like a Revolutionary minuteman and peers along the stock. “We’re about to rid Picnic Island of the menace that has afflicted our summer vacation.”

  “You’re crazy. What are you talking about? And point that thing someplace else!” Nate steers the muzzle away from him.

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Nate sighs. He has an idea, but that isn’t the point. “Dodge. You’re not supposed to be playing with that thing.”

  “It’s a gun, Nate, not a thing.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Dodge gives him a sour expression and lowers the weapon. “Listen, our moms have taken my little bros down to Sanctuary Cove. They won’t be back until supper. Your dad won’t be back until tomorrow, and my dad is back in sweet home Indiana selling shit. This is our chance to do something for Our People — make Picnic Island great again!”

  Nate sighs. There is no defeating Dodge, no matter how harebrained the scheme. And Nate figures it’s probably better if he’s along for the ride. He looks out at the lake. It’s dead calm — a perfect green mirror. He shields his eyes. If you look far enough, and have an eye for it, there is a line maybe two or three hundred yards out where the turbulence begins, but it doesn’t look too rough today.

  “Okay, I’ll get the life jackets.” Nate glares at Dodge to make his point. The thing is, neither motorboat is there, so they are going to have to paddle. And the rippled water farther out is just that, nothing they haven’t handled a million times before, but more worrying this time with the cargo they have onboard. Nate, who is lighter than Dodge, sits in the bow. Dodge sits in the stern, singing some stupid song, oblivious to the bumping of the waves against the prow, while Nate imagines them going over with every seventh slap. Not a big deal, normally. There’d been loads of times when they’d deliberately rocked the canoe over for the fun of it and then practiced clambering back onboard. But that was the kind of horsing around you did nearer shore, not out here. He glanced behind him at the black polyester bag.

  “I’m worried about the rifle.”

  “It’s not a rifle, Numbster.”

  “The gun.”

  “Just paddle, we’re almost there.”

  For the rest of the journey, all Nate can think about is capsizing and the gun falling slowly, end over end, down, down, down in its polyester casket, disappearing at last into the deeper greenness of the trench where the biggest lake trout lurk.

  They make it.

  “Of course we made it!” says Dodge, leaving Nate to pull the canoe up onto the sloping ledge of the island. “Now let’s go kill us some hive!”

  There is a huge wasp nest hanging from a branch high above the picnic table. The table has been there forever. It looks as if it could fall apart any moment just from the number of names etched into its mold-mottled surface by who-knew-how-many pocketknives. It’s a communal place, a lunchtime stop-off for fishing parties. There’s even an improvised filleting table suspended between two trees, to clean fish for a fry-up. The Northenders have had to avoid the picnic spot all summer.

  “Be ready to run,” says Nate, looking up into the tree and the wasps circling their monstrous gray home. It’s grown bigger, like some huge evil piñata.

  “We’ve got the lake twenty yards away, man. We’re good.” Dodge is aiming the shotgun.

  “Yeah, well just don’t miss,” says Nate.

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” says Dodge, and fires.

  The noise is huge and he doesn’t miss. The hive explodes into the kind of confetti you’d only see at a ghoul’s wedding. Nate runs like a scalded cat, only turning as he reaches the water’s edge to see Dodge still standing by the picnic table, watching the hive-dust fall like filthy snow and the whirling tornado of angry wasps.

  “DODGE! RUN!”

  And finally he does, stooping to drop the Remington onto a bed of mossy ground, laughing his fool head off, diving into the lake and going way under, Nate by his side, two dolphins. When they surface fifty yards out, they tread water, watching the scene on the beach.

  “It’s going to be fall by the time we can get the gun,” says Nate.

  “Maybe,” says Dodge, “but it was fun, wasn’t it?”

  And Nate, recovering now, safe and distant from the buzzing chaos of those angry vespids, has to nod. Yeah, it’s fun in a heart-stopping way. Dodge kind of fun.

  He woke shivering on the lower bunk. When he’d gone back to bed, the idea of climbing to the top had seemed beyond him. Light as weak as skim milk sifted through the window. There was no sky, only snow now. Snow falling sideways, churned by the relentless wind.

  On the landing, he shouldered the on-end trunk aside, like it was the mighty door of a castle keep, to make his way downstairs. He dressed quickly by the fire in the same clothes he’d put on in his bedroom back home two days ago: thick socks — now dry again, but getting stiff — long johns, snow pants, turtleneck, and a down vest. It was Saturday. No train south today. He stoked the fire and stood by it, letting the heat dig out the shivers. He looked out at the day, and through the swirling white blizzard he saw someone on the ice. It was one of the guys — Shades, he figured, but he couldn’t tell because he had his back turned and his hood up. He was out way beyond the water hole, which Nate couldn’t see from this angle. He was just standing there, looking down, his hands in his jacket pockets. Nate went cold all over. It was around there somewhere that the quad had crashed. But how . . .

  The man stepped aside, as if he somehow knew Nate was watching and he was moving to let him see.

  The wind had partially dug out the drone.

  One black rotor on the otherwise white copter had been revealed. The thing was so light it would have blown away across the frozen lake if its bottom half hadn’t been trapped in the snow. This one telltale corner. Now the man squatted and started digging with his hands to liberate it.

  He stood, uncoiling himself, and he turned. Shades, all right, in his wraparound sunglasses, staring toward the Hoebeeks’ camp, a big grin on his face, the toy in one hand, the other held out as if to say, “Now what have we here?”

  “Oh crap.”

  Nate stepped away from the window, staring at nothing, his mind as frozen as the landscape outside. This was not going to go well.

  It was difficult to tell at first that the thumping on the back door was made by the flat of a human hand and not
just the wind. The wind had wanted in the whole time Nate had been holed up at the Hoebeeks’, first from the front and now from the back. Like a living thing, it was circling the house, looking for any weakness. The noise down there now was not the weather come a-calling; it was a living thing — an angry living thing.

  Nate stood at the top of the stairs with the “gate closed.” The heavy trunk sat ready, slightly over the lip of the top step. He was prepared to tip it at a moment’s notice. Too bad he didn’t have a cauldron of hot tar.

  Smash!

  The locked door crashed open and set the cowbell clanging and the chairs clattering. Nate couldn’t see the entranceway from where he stood, but he heard first one chair, then another skitter across the floor as if they had been kicked, and then . . . wait for it . . .

  Thump!

  The sound of a body meeting the floor — a body that had stepped into a freshly poured pool of very old, slightly rancid, recently melted vegetable oil. He couldn’t see the man, but he did see a pair of silver sunglasses skitter across the oily floor.

  “My goodness,” said the man. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

  The tone of his voice was light, bantering and terrifying. Nate wondered whether the oil had been a good idea.

  He heard Shades clamber to his feet and then appear below, picking up his glasses. He rubbed the lenses across his sleeve and, taking a look, wagged his head in dismay. “These are Guccis,” he said to the open space. “Cost me an arm and leg. Not my arm, mind you. Not my leg. The guy I took them from. He wasn’t going to need them anymore.”

  He unzipped his coat and shoved the glasses in the chest pocket of his shirt. Nate watched through the crack between the trunk and the banister. The man looked straight ahead, then walked farther into the camp. He took off his grease-stained jacket and hung it over the back of one of the dining room chairs. He was wearing Astrid’s scarf, the one he’d been wearing when Nate first saw him. Now he unwound it, slowly, coil by coil, as if he were planning on a long stay. In profile, Nate could see an impressive multicolored tattoo on the guy’s neck: an eagle in a dive, a raptor’s glint in its eye, its wing tips curling up behind the man’s ear and its talons poised for prey. Shades rounded the corner into the living room and disappeared from Nate’s view. He heard the master bedroom door open and shut with a click a moment later. Soon enough, Shades was back and standing at the bottom of the stairs. Nate had ducked out of sight just as he came into view.