Gray Wolf Island

by Tracey Neithercott

  “I thought it’d be bigger,” Gabe says.

  Elliot rolls his eyes. “When have you ever seen such a fucking huge hole in the ground?”

  “This could legitimately lead to hell,” Charlie says, peering over the edge. Rusted steel hugs the walls, and a thin ladder bolted to the shaft descends into the depths of the pit.

  “The first platform was there,” Elliot says, pointing to a spot about fifteen feet down the hole. He’s told us this story before: how fat logs spanned the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-wide hole, how excavators knocked them down only to find another platform at the thirty-foot mark, then another at sixty feet, and again at one hundred and twenty.

  “What’s the point?” Gabe asks. “Are they a trick?”

  “Some people think they’re false bottoms—make treasure hunters think they’re close to gold when really there’s just more cold dirt below.” Elliot’s voice is faraway, as if it’s coming from wherever his mind has wandered. “Or maybe whoever buried the treasure needed the platforms to climb out of the hole.”

  Elliot digs through his pack, flicks on his flashlight. We gather around to watch the dark swallow the light. I kick dirt down the shaft. “Maybe there’s nothing below and the pit’s a giant ruse.”

  “Maybe,” he says. The word’s as flimsy as tissue paper. I can see hope in his face, the way his eyes glitter in the warm evening sunlight, how hungry he is for the truth of Gray Wolf Island. But more than anything, Elliot believes. He might even believe enough for both of us.

  “This was exciting for about ten seconds. Now it’s boring,” Charlie says. “Are we going down the hole or what?”

  “We’re going down the hole.” Elliot holds up a hand to pause Charlie’s body, which is already two feet closer to the ladder. “But we’re going tomorrow. We’ll need as much daylight as possible.”

  “Oh, good,” Anne says, dropping her pack on a mound of dirt. “I could use a brief repose.”

  “Is she serious?” Gabe turns to Elliot, eyebrow raised. “A repose?”

  “A state of relaxation,” Elliot says.

  “I know what a repose is. I studied for the same SATs as you.” Gabe turns to me. “If you don’t feel like lying in the dirt, we could find another way to relax.”

  I release a groan. “Do these lines fall out of your mouth when you open it or is there some brainpower involved?”

  “I’m hurt that you think they’re lines. I thought we had a deep and meaningful connection.” He grins, then busies himself with dinner prep. I help Elliot and Charlie set up camp in the shack, a reminder of Gray Wolf Island’s heyday that has me imagining a dig site crowded with workmen in overalls, machines meant to dig through dirt, and pumps intent on siphoning water. The small space is large enough for five sleeping bags, but it’s a tight fit.

  I leave the boys as they begin searching the dig site for the slashed square. There’s a small island of thirsty grass in this sea of dirt, and I settle onto it to call home.

  “How’s the hole?” my mom says when she’s done making sure I haven’t lost an appendage or anything.

  “Deep.” I trace a design into the dirt. It looks like a maze. “Hey, what’d Sadie mean all those times she told me that if I got really lost, I should ask you?”

  I don’t tell her I’m feeling pretty lost right now.

  “She knew you wouldn’t need to ask. The day her tests came back—” My mom clears her throat. “That day, she told me about the book she’d found in Bishop Rollins’s library. She said, ‘Ma, it’s a hunt. She has to discover it herself. I’m telling you just in case.’ ”

  “What book?” I whisper.

  “Treasure Island. The one with the poem in it. Your sister was convinced it was the map. You know how she got about the treasure.” She laughs. “Our true believer.”

  “Sadie found the map? But…”

  And the words won’t come, stuck in a sticky pit of why why why. Why didn’t she set off to search for it before she got too sick? Why didn’t she tell me?

  “But she lived for the treasure.”

  And I truly believe that. That treasure gave her purpose, and that purpose gave her months of life no one thought she’d have.

  “She lived for you.” My mom sighs. “Oh, sweetie. Your sister wanted you to have a life when she was gone, a full life. Even fuller than the one you had when she was alive, always stuck to her like a shadow. She may have been mooning over that treasure, but in those daydreams she saw you there.”

  We hang up after that, after both of our throats are too clogged with sadness to speak. I clutch the phone to my chest, thinking about Sadie’s secret. An adventure for her nonadventurous sister. It’s the best and worst gift anyone has ever given me.

  Elliot’s about ready to breathe fire.

  We’re sitting on a group of stones set in a circle—another holdover from island excavations—while Gabe cooks up personal-sized pepperoni pizzas using pancake mix, a can of crushed tomatoes, and freeze-dried cheese.

  “It says to navigate with the stars trapped in a sign—the slashed square,” Elliot says, taking a violent bite of pizza. “Well, where the hell’s the symbol?”

  “Maybe it’s down the hole,” Charlie says. “We should still go down the hole.”

  Elliot considers. “Excavators added the metal walls down to the twenty-foot mark sometime in the eighties. If the map was created after that, there could be a slashed square etched into the metal.”

  “I’ll check!”

  “Tomorrow,” I say before Charlie can hurl himself down the bottomless pit.

  Gabe hands us each a golden cookie. “Brown-butter oatmeal cookies filled with peanut butter and caramel.” He takes a giant bite. “Got the recipe off this lady’s blog.”

  Charlie catches a string of caramel with his tongue. “It’s like you took everything good in life and baked it into a cookie,” he says. The compliment so invigorates Gabe he nearly floats. He’s like a balloon in that, always needing someone else to fill him up so he doesn’t deflate.

  I use an extra bottle of water to wipe down the dishes and pan while Gabe stashes the bear-proof food canister a hundred feet from where we’ll spend the night. Elliot disappears into the shack, but the rest of us goof off until the moon knocks the sun from the sky. I play a boy band song on the harmonica, and Anne sings along in a voice that’s like a shot of summer to the veins. Charlie and Gabe are cracking up, and the whole world feels impossibly bright.

  Until Elliot returns.

  He drops to the ground beside the fire. It casts him in shadow, a black slash with stooped shoulders. He doesn’t say a thing. Just sucks up all our joy like an emotional black hole.

  “Hey, Elliot,” I say. “Mind toning down the excitement? Some of us are trying to have a miserable time here.”

  He meets my gaze. Opens his mouth like he’s ready to share. Like he hasn’t kept us in suspense for an entire eternity.

  But he says silent.

  “He gets like this.” Charlie glances from me to Anne. “Don’t worry—he’s mostly harmless. Unless you’re allergic to brooding looks or clenched jaws.”

  “You really never know,” Anne says.

  “Well, I know, and I’m deathly allergic,” Charlie says. “Get me out of here, Anna Banana, before I go into anaphylactic shock.”

  They zoom toward the shack, Gabe tripping after them. Charlie’s laughter catches on the night breeze, and I know I’ll never forget the sound, not even after he’s gone.

  I peek across the fire at the Elliot-shaped shade. “Are you just going to sit there?”

  “No. I was going to come over.” And he does. “I was always going to come over. Sometimes it takes my body a long time to catch up to my brain.”

  He tosses a handful of pine needles into the fire. The air smells sweet like Christmas. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Oh God, Elliot. Is there even such a thing?”

  He rolls his eyes. Nudges my foot with his. “Tell me a story ab
out you and Sadie.”

  He might as well ask for my entire heart. “When I was fourteen,” I say, “I snuck down to the beach in the middle of the night to see the sky.”

  “To see the Perseid meteor shower.” He delivers a hesitant smile. “I heard Sadie telling someone about it that Monday. It’s just…I was out there, too.”

  “See? There’s not a single thing you don’t know.”

  “I don’t know your version.”

  “I guarantee it’s not nearly as exciting as Sadie’s,” I say. “I walked a ways down the beach, and when it was time to come home, I was lost. I didn’t know what to do, so I walked toward a light.”

  I toss handfuls and handfuls of needles into the fire. Take a deep breath of pine-scented night. “Sadie had woken up and seen my empty bed. And she flicked our bedroom light on and off to help me find my way home.”

  “She was your North Star,” Elliot says.

  “No, not even. She was like the entire night sky, everything from stardust to galaxies.” I turn to find him already looking at me. “Imagine the universe winking out in a day.”

  He hands me a fistful of pine needles. I toss them into the fire.

  For a while we don’t talk, and then I say, “I discovered a really great word one day when Sadie was sick: Ya’aburnee. In Arabic, it’s hoping you die before someone you love because you can’t bear to live without them. There’s no English word for it.”

  Elliot watches the fire like it might escape and set the whole world to flames. He’s still staring at it when his hand lands on mine. It’s soft and sticky with sap. A firm squeeze, and then it’s gone.

  If Sadie were here, she could translate that touch. But she’s not, so I stare straight ahead and say, “Go on. I know you’re dying to give me a vocab lesson, too.”

  He watches me, doesn’t even blink. I’m trapped somewhere between Talk to me and Let’s never say a thing.

  “Fuck,” he says.

  A whole language full of words, and that’s the one he chooses.

  He runs both hands through his hair. “The way I treated you today…I feel like such a tool.”

  “You are a tool, Elliot.” I mean it, but I also don’t. “You’re one of those big ones that are like a cross between a shovel and a rake.”

  “A hoe?”

  I grin. “That’s the one.”

  “If I were Gabe, I’d use this as an opportunity for some serious innuendo.”

  “Let’s be thankful you’re Elliot.”

  “Here’s the thing,” he says, eyes so wide I can see the fire dancing in his pupils. He tosses me Sadie’s bookmark, the bookmark that should be inside Treasure Island, and says, “We’re not alone.”

  “Who did you tell?”

  We’re sardine-squeezed into the shack, lit by the light of the almost-full moon and swallows of dark rum. Thick air curls the ends of my hair and slicks my skin. I’m sitting on my sleeping bag, back against the wood wall. Gabe’s sprawled out to my right, eyes raking over Anne’s bare legs.

  “The map.” Elliot chucks a tennis ball at Gabe’s head. “Who did you tell?”

  Gabe rubs his forehead. “Why do you automatically assume it was me?”

  Elliot releases a long, deep breath. If anyone could give life to a sigh, it’d be Elliot. His are constantly crossing their arms and rolling their eyes and raising disapproving eyebrows. “You have the most friends. And you’re always trying to impress them.”

  Gabe scowls. “I don’t need to lure girls to me with a treasure map, Elliot. Unlike you.”

  Charlie grins, and his teeth make a blinding smile in the near-dark. “You think Elliot would tell girls and risk someone else discovering the treasure?”

  The boys are having a glaring contest, and I get the sense this fight could go on indefinitely. I flick my flashlight in each of their faces to break the spell. “That’s not even the biggest mystery.”

  “It’s the how,” Elliot says. Deep lines crease his forehead when he looks at me. His teeth worry at his lip ring. “Gray Wolf Island is all rocks on the west coast. There’s a small beach in the northwest, but it’s hemmed in by rocks, and the water’s too rough to bring a boat to shore. The southern beach is the only place to dock. And ours was the only boat there the night the book—with that bookmark—was stolen.”

  Charlie unearths the tennis ball from beside Gabe’s sleeping bag. He pitches it at the ceiling. “I bet it’s not someone from Wildewell. Bet the thief’s been living alone on this island since Rollins Corp. left a decade ago. Like, he has no way back so he has to kill animals with spears he whittled himself.”

  But that’s not the suspicion gnawing at my brain. “It’s not someone trying to survive on Gray Wolf Island. It’s a treasure hunter.”

  Elliot bangs his head against the wall. The longer hair on the top of his head flops over his eyes. “Ruby’s right,” he says. “An island hermit living off the land would steal food, water, or clothing, not a book. We have to assume the thief is looking for the treasure—and now has the map.”

  “We should put Anne on guard duty overnight.” Charlie’s body is a skinny slash of pale in dark shorts as he dives for the ball. A whump, whump, whump, and then he says, “If only she had a sword. Why don’t we ever have swords when we need them?”

  “There’s not a single time in my life I’ve needed a sword,” Elliot says.

  “Well, that’s because you have no imagination.”

  Charlie tosses the ball at Anne’s feet, and her head jerks up. For a moment she looks as lost as I felt today in the woods, face blanched in the moonlight. She blinks once, twice. “Oh. Right.” She thuds her heels against the cabin wall, walks her feet up the wood as far as they’ll go. Her toe taps the solitary window. “That’s why you asked me here, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Elliot says, skipping the part where our real motivation was just as self-serving. “But it’d be nice if the person who doesn’t sleep made sure wild animals didn’t try to eat us or treasure hunters didn’t steal our map.”

  “This is my fault.” Her voice is two sizes too small. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t listen to Elliot,” Gabe says with a soft smile. He squeezes her hand. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She nods and says, “So what now?”

  “Now we look for the wolves,” I say, but my words taste all wrong. Sour like mistakes. My mind plays the poem again and again, and it finally clicks: I realize what’s been bothering me about the pit. I cast an apologetic look at Charlie and say, “I don’t think we’re supposed to go down the hole.”

  Elliot groans. The silver light sculpts his bare chest into granite, makes his skin look paler and his tattoos even darker. My eyes trace the lines of the intricate wolf on his right side. “It says, ‘Go down to go up, pay no heed to the dead.’ That’s the hole and the grave marker out there,” he says, pointing in the direction of the once-white cross.

  “The poem also says, ‘Into the depths is your eventual demise.’ What if that is the hole?” I thunk my head against the wall of the shack.

  Elliot pinches the bridge of his nose. “Then we missed whatever it was we were supposed to go down.”

  “There is a bottomless pit thirty feet from here,” Charlie says. “I’m going down it.”

  “It’s like you’re trying to die,” Elliot says.

  “I’m trying to live.” Charlie takes a swig of rum. “And I’m going down that hole.”

  Gabe and Elliot have a wordless conversation. A couple of hard stares, a raised eyebrow, a shake of the head. Not for the first time, the boys leave Charlie to be Charlie.

  “It seems to me,” Anne says, laying a hand on Charlie’s forearm, “that the best way to live is to not die.”

  “Living and not dying aren’t the same thing.” Charlie wipes his forehead, fist around the neck of the bottle. Rum sloshes against its sides. “I used to not die all the time.”

  It’s difficult to remember the weird boy who wore his fear like bod
y armor. As still as he sat, always on the sidelines, he was constantly in motion: deep brown eyes scanning the room for sharp objects, structural problems, the random light fixture that might fall during third-grade reading lessons.

  “Someone once told me I had a lot of living to do before I died.” Charlie watches Elliot with raised eyebrows.

  Elliot scowls. “Not by climbing down a pit that might still be hungry for another death, I’m sure.”

  “But—”

  “But it’s easier to chase death than let it chase you. Yes, we understand,” Anne says with a stern expression. “But I’d still like a little more time with you before you drop yourself down an endless hole.”

  Charlie is made of fire and fun, but not much fight, so he drops his shoulders and nods. “Sure thing, Anna Banana.”

  Gabe swallows a gulp of rum. Shakes his head. “Of course he gives in to you.”

  “Because I’m nice.”

  Elliot sends her a teasing smile. “Nice. First used in the late thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. From Old French: foolish, stupid. From Latin, nescius: ignorant.”

  “You’re studying words with your mom again?”

  Gabe’s remark seems to beat every bit of happy from Elliot’s body. He stares at Gabe for a minute, twisting the hoop in his lip. “I’m done with that,” Elliot says, but it sounds a lot like “I’m done with her.”

  If the air itself weren’t sweating in this heat, I’d burrow in my sleeping bag to avoid this conversation. It feels wrong to sit in this small shack as Gabe and Elliot talk around a secret meant for friends.

  Gabe leans forward, shoulders rounded. He’s the distorted-mirror image of Elliot, all soft edges against Elliot’s sharp points. “Good God, Elliot. It’s been two years. So she badmouthed your dad. You can’t ignore her forever.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” Elliot says. “I didn’t tell you the whole story. My dad’s dead and she—”

  “You’re taking the easy way out, and you know it.” Gabe shakes his head. “Stop holding a grudge and be a man.”

  “How could you possibly understand?”