And then on Mother’s Day, as a kind of a joke, Father had that piece of brown paper framed in a
beautiful wood frame with glass and everything. It was hung on die wall above Mother’s desk where the pictures of the kids were. And Sloane, if he ever thought about the adventure, never mentioned it again.
SLOANE GREW up. When he was seven, another brother came into his life, Todd. So by the time Sloane was twelve, Todd was five.
Sloane found being twelve difficult. Especially school. He was lost at school. He liked lunch and music and geography. He liked maps, liked filling in the sea around continents with a blue pencil crayon. He spent a lot of time at it.
He was upset easily. One morning, waiting for the school bus, Sloane found a dead chipmunk on the front drive and got so broke up about it that he stayed home from school. His older brother, Lawren, teased him about it.
Then one evening, when he was watching television, Sloane saw a lion killing a litter, of lion cubs. He wanted to turn off the TV but he wanted to watch it, too. The lion had already driven off the father of the cubs and was taking over the pride, which is what they call a lion family. This new lion didn’t want any of the other lion’s cubs around. The program didn’t actually show the new lion killing anything, but there was a picture of two of the cubs crouching together looking very scared. It was worse than a horror movie. Sloane hated it. And he hated himself for having wanted to watch it.
After that, he didn’t watch TV for a week. He wrote a letter to the TV station about the show. He wrote about it in his journal; he talked about it with his parents and with his friend Trevor! He even brought it up in class. Everyone agreed it was pretty terrible, but no one seemed to understand just how deeply Sloane felt about it. He couldn’t shake it off. It made him ache in a place inside him he hadn’t known was there. He wished he had never found that place.
SOMETIMES WHEN things go bad, they get deeply rotten before they get better. That’s what happened to Sloane. The new place inside him that ached so much for dead chipmunks and lion cubs got a real workout.
In his class, there was this girl, Cynthia, who had something wrong with her. Everyone liked her well enough but nobody really got to know her. She couldn’t keep up with the class but the teacher didn’t seem to worry too much about it. Cynthia was going to be having some operation; that was all any of the lads knew.
One Thursday Sloane’s mother was going to be in town on an errand and so Sloane didn’t take the school bus home that afternoon. He hung out at the park instead. He met a guy on the basketball court and they got talking and playing some one-on-one. The guy’s name was Billy. It turned out that Billy was Cynthia’s brother. When Sloane found out, he stopped right in the middle of dribbling towards the net. It was like the lion on TV all over again. He didn’t want to ask but he couldn’t stop himself.
“What’s wrong with her?” he said. Billy told him. The operation was on her brain. It was pretty major. So Cynthia’s family was trying to keep everything as ordinary as possible. That’s why Cynthia was staying with her own age of kids in school even though she couldn’t really keep up.
Billy bounced the ball a few times, watching the way the ball and its shadow met each time the ball hit the ground.
“Like last night,” he said, “Mom made spaghetti and meatballs and when she gave Cyn her plate, Cyn said, ‘Umm, this looks delicious. What is it?’”
Sloane wasn’t sure he had heard right, wasn’t sure he understood. “She never saw spaghetti and meatballs before?”
“Sure,” said Billy. He bounced the ball a few times, never looking up. “We have it all the time.”
Going home that night, Todd was whining a lot and Sloane was supposed to keep him entertained. Mother had a headache. Todd got more and more crotchety and Sloane grew angrier and angrier. He was thinking about Cynthia. How could such a thing happen? he kept thinking.
At home he got into a big argument with Lawren over whose turn it was to clean their room.
Rachel, his older sister, was making dinner that night. She made pumpkin lasagna. Everybody found other things to talk about. And then, suddenly, Sloane said, “It just isn’t fair!”
Lawren thought he was talking about their room. Rachel thought he was talking about her pumpkin lasagna.
“Just ‘cause the edges are a bit burnt,” she said, and stamped out of the dining room.
Little Todd laughed. He liked the burnt edges.
Father excused himself and went to talk to Rachel.
“I meant something that happened in town,” said Sloane.
“What?” said Lawren. “Did you see some more dead stuff?”
“Yeah, your brain,” said Sloane.
“Boys!” said Mother.
But it was too late. Sloane couldn’t hold back. He didn’t want to talk about what Billy had told him. What good would talking do? He wished he had never heard of Cynthia. He wanted it all to go away.
He was sent to his room. Lawren slept somewhere else that night.
THE NEXT morning, when Sloane came down for breakfast, the family was excited. Father had seen an elk at the bottom of the garden while everyone was still asleep.
Although they lived in the country, on the edge of a forest, they had never heard of an elk being seen in the area. Sloane joined his brothers and sister looking out the window. But the elk was long gone.
“I was letting the cat in and the elk spooked when he heard the door open, took off into the brush,” Father said. The family kidded him about it over breakfast, but they all knew he didn’t make up stories.
“It was huge,” he said. “Ten points on its rack.”
“What?” Todd asked. Sloane explained to him that the elk had ten points on its antlers. It must have been a big one.
Little Todd wanted to see the elk. He asked Sloane to walk down to the bottom of the garden with him to look for it. Sloane was still depressed about Cynthia and the fight with Lawren. He hadn’t slept well and he was grouchy, but he went anyway.
They went down and Sloane looked out at the forest, but he saw nothing more lively than the wind turning the leaves bellyside-up and a few noisy bluejays playing tag.
“I found his house!” Todd cried.
Sloane went to look. Todd was crouching beside a groundhog hole in the dirt bank where the lawn slipped off into bramble and prickly ash woodland.
“Whose house?” Sloane asked.
“The elk’s,” said Todd.
Sloane laughed. “An elk’s huge,” he said.
Todd poked at the hole with a stick. “Well, some of the dirt fell in so it doesn’t look so big anymore.”
Sloane laughed again. “No, I mean huge like a horse.” He could see Todd staring at the hole and wondering how something as big as a horse could get into a hole so small.
“Come on,” said Sloane, and he led his little brother back to the house. In an encyclopedia he showed him a picture of an elk.
Todd beamed and grabbed the book from his brother’s hands. He tore out of the house and down to the groundhog hole. When Sloane arrived, Todd was comparing the size of the picture to the hole. He looked up triumphantly.
“See! It would so fit!”
Sloane shook his head. “You goof.” He grabbed the encyclopedia. “Don’t be so stupid!” he said, more angrily than he meant to. Then he headed back to the house to get his stuff for school.
He spent the day being sore and trying not to look at Cynthia or think about spaghetti. He got in trouble twice for not paying attention, once more for not having done his homework. He got a detention and had to take the late bus home from school.
As the bus neared his house, Sloane saw some of his neighbours walking along the sideroad. They had megaphones. He saw two police cars pulled over to the shoulder. There was another one in his driveway.
He rushed up to the house.
That’s when he found that Todd was missing.
“He was talking all morning about finding the elk’s house,” said Mother. Sloane went cold all over. There were search parties everywhere. Sloane could hear them down the old logging path, in the woods. “He’s never wandered away before,” said Mother. “He knows better than that!”
Sloane joined the search. The coldness that gripped him was like a black belt around his chest. As he tramped through the woods behind the house, moving deeper into the forest, the strap seemed to get tighter and tighter.
He didn’t usually spend much time in the woods; he hardly ever had. City cousins who visited seemed to think he was lucky to live on the edge of a forest. They always wanted to play out there, to explore. They wanted to look for arrowheads and build forts. That was about the only time Sloane went into the woods anymore. He cursed it now for its rotten wildness, its thousand sharp edges, the pointlessness of it all.
And then suddenly he came to a place in the woods that he seemed to know. Maybe it was on one of those visits from city cousins that he had explored this particular part. He couldn’t recall the time. Maybe, he thought later, he had known he was heading this way from the moment he left the house. The cries of the other searchers had fallen far behind, barely distinguishable now from the twittering and screeching of the birds.
An opening. There were several paths leading to it or from it depending on how you looked at things; where you had come from or where you were going.
Sloane stopped. It was as if he was in a dream. He felt he knew which path to take. He didn’t know why, but the certainty of his decision seemed to loosen the belt around his chest a notch or two.
The path he chose led him through the dappled late afternoon into the shadow-making sunshine at
the edge of a small meadow. Memory worked in him now. He had been here! When or how, he couldn’t recall. The familiarity of the meadow was not a knowing thing so much as a feeling thing. As he walked, however, he was quite sure that he had been here alone.
Memory, loosed in him like this, seemed to unbuckle the fear and pain a few more notches. He stopped, looked around.
“This way,” he told himself. “There will be an old fence. An abandoned road. A swamp. A junkyard.”
He almost forgot Todd. It was as if he wasn’t looking for him anymore. Almost.
Finally, Sloane saw what he had been looking for, though he could never have given it a name. In the junkyard, resting on no wheels, rusted and overgrown with thistles and harsh grasses, stood an old blue-grey panel truck. On the side of it in faded letters were the words: “The HOPE Bakery.”
The words “The” and “Bakery” were in a swirly kind of script, but the word “HOPE” was printed in tall letters. There had once been a little hand painted picture under this sign: some buns and loaves and a pie, maybe. It was hard to tell now. The paint was all peeled and crumbly.
Sloane looked at the panel truck, letting the shape of it drift into a waiting puzzle hole in his memory. And as he looked, the back door of the truck opened with a loud squeaking and out stepped Todd. Todd seemed almost to have been expecting him.
“You should see this, Sloaney,” he called out, waving his hand. “I think this is where that elk lives.”
Sloane made himself walk very slowly to his brother, as if to run might shatter the terrifying beauty of the moment. When he got there, he resisted hugging Todd, who was too busy anyway picking up rusted bits of engine parts, a stained hat, scraps of paper. If he hugged him, he was afraid he would burst into tears himself.
“There’s plenty of room here,” said the five-year-old. Sloane looked around, nodded.
Yes, he thought. Plenty of room.
Tashkent
ONE DAY, for no particular reason, Fletcher pasted the names of a lot of exotic places on his chest arid stomach. His mother and father were chatting in the kitchen when he went to show them.
“Oh, no,” said his mother. “Fletcher’s got the dreaded little bits-of-paper-with-writing-on-it disease.”
“There’s been quite an outbreak of it,” said his father, leaning close to inspect Fletcher’s remarkably decorated torso. “Zagreb?”
“They’re all places I’d like to go some day,” said Fletcher, looking down at his chest. “When I’m older.”
His mother joined in the examination. “Ibadan. Where’s that?”
“It’s the second largest city in Nigeria,” said Fletcher, pressing down on that piece of paper. It
was peeling already. He didn’t want the names to fall off just yet, though they felt funny on his skin now that the glue had dried.
Dad went to refill his coffee cup. “How long is this malady going to last?”
Mom, always more matter-of-fact, said, “What about gym?”
“Gym’s not until Thursday,” said Fletcher. “They should have all fallen off by then.”
Even as he spoke, Ibadan fluttered to the floor. They all watched. Mom picked it up but wasn’t sure what you did when the second biggest city in Nigeria fell on your kitchen floor. She handed it to Fletcher, who crumpled it up and put it in his pants pocket.
“The last place left is the first place I’m going to travel to when I’m old enough,” said Fletcher.
Dad stopped pouring his coffee for a moment. “So it’s sort of a contest?” he said.
Mom frowned. “Does this contest stretch all the way down into your shorts?”
“Nope,” said Fletcher. He turned and carefully headed out of the kitchen, walking like a robot so as not to disturb the possibilities stuck all over him. “That wouldn’t be fair.”
“Not fair?”
Fletcher turned at the door, twisting slowly from the waist. “I mean, if I put—let’s say—Bilbao on my heel, it would come off the first time I pulled on my sock, right?” His mother and father nodded. “And if I put Uppsala on my bum —”
“We get the idea,” said Mom.
“Yes,” said Dad. “Now it all makes perfect sense.”
Fletcher smiled. He had a winning smile.
When he was nine, Fletcher almost died. He got sick, and it wasn’t the little-bits-of-paper-with-writing-on-it disease. Nobody was able to figure out what it was. He just got weaker and weaker.
The medical people did x-rays and found nothing. They did “blood-work,” as they called it, and found nothing. They did ultrasound; they squilched goop all over his abdomen, and a technician pushed something like a computer mouse through the goop. Somehow or other Fletcher’s insides appeared on a TV monitor. The technician watched the monitor closely. So did Fletcher.
“That ugly thing must be it,” he said at one point.
“That’s your kidney,” the technician said. “It looks fine to me.”
Fletcher asked the technician if he could tune in the Cosby Show. The technician laughed. The ultrasound found nothing.
Fletcher had to be very brave because, as far as he knew, he was dying. He seemed to have no immunities to anything. They tested for AIDS, but it wasn’t AIDS. They wanted to open him up and see what was going on, but by then Fletcher had become too weak, and the doctors were afraid that the operation would kill him. That’s when Fletcher learned the expression “between a rock and a hard place.”
As the months of his mysterious illness dragged on and he sank lower and lower, he talked to his mother a lot about death. Death became a place. Like Death Valley in California. Or Death Valley Junction, the last place before Death Valley. It
didn’t hurt so much to think about death if it was somewhere to visit, even if it was quite for away from anywhere else. That’s when Fletcher started looking at atlases and travel books a lot and thinking about exotic places that weren’t quite so hard to take.
“WHY ARE you clutching your gut?” said Shlomo when they were walking to school the next day. Shlomo was Fletcher’s best friend. H
e looked worried.
Fletcher explained about the exotic places stuck all over his body. Shlomo looked relieved.
“I thought I saw a little piece of paper drop off you a while back.”
“Did you happen to notice what it said?” Fletcher asked. Even though he had slept on his back with only his sheet over him, he had lost both Singapore and Tunapuna during the night
Shlomo hadn’t noticed what city it was. Fletcher hoped it wasn’t somewhere warm. The warm places were dropping like flies. Not that he really cared which city won. He’d get to them all anyway. It was just a matter of where to start.
Fletcher gave Shlomo a winning smile. Shlomo frowned.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this stupid smiling thing,” he said.
AFTER A YEAR of his mysterious illness, they put Fletcher in a hospital for a few weeks. But he seemed to get worse, so they sent him home again. They tried some medicines—some real ones and some pretend ones, just in case he was faking it. None of them made the slightest difference.
Then, after two years, when he could do little more than He in bed, think of faraway places and imagine packing his bags, suddenly Fletcher started to get better. It took most of a year. His appetite came back. His colour came back. The only thing he didn’t get back was the three years his mysterious illness had stolen from him.
By the time Fletcher returned to school, he was twelve, although he looked nine. But he was smart and he’d studied at home while he was sick, so they put him in the sixth grade.
But before he went back to school, the medical people decided that, since he was fine now, it might be good to do that exploratory operation they hadn’t been able to do earlier when he had been too weak. So they opened him up.
And what they found was a battlefield.
That’s how the head-surgeon described it. The inside of Fletcher’s abdomen was like a scarred battlefield. Fletcher thought of his guts now as a place covered with empty helmets and wrecked swords and shields, all the size of Playmobil stuff but not in primary colours. Rusty. Stained. Whatever had been in him was gone, driven away by the soldiers of Fletcher’s own inner power. That’s how the head-surgeon put it.
Some of the Kinder Planets Page 3
