Dunc Breaks the Record

by Gary Paulsen

  Milt studied them a moment longer, then held his finger against his cheek and laughed. “Oh, man—like, this is so far-out, I can’t believe it. You guys are like, honest, really honest.”

  .11

  “You can talk!” Amos was so surprised, he dropped the gold bar—though he caught it before it hit the ground.

  Milt nodded. “Been doing it since I was like, three, four years old. It’s a far-out way to communicate, although not as karma oriented as some. You know, like beams or harmonies or with music. Oh, man, I really dig music. Like, you can say so many beautiful things with music that won’t come out with words. Don’t you like, you know, like music?”

  The boys stood speechless. Having started to talk, Milt seemed not to be able to stop.

  “Like, it’s so, so groovy that you didn’t think it was fair to take the gold. I mean, you’re probably going to have like, maybe ten or twelve good incarnations because of, you know, like, your generosity. It’s so beautiful, so beautiful, man.…”

  He paused to take a breath, and Dunc cut in. “How long have you been here?”

  Milt held up his hands and counted his fingers, then went down to his toes, counted them, then started over on his fingers, and finally shrugged. “Time is like, relative—how old are the Mamas and the Papas?”

  “Who?” Dunc frowned.

  “Like, the rock group—you know, the Mamas and the Papas. How old are they?”

  “I never heard of them.”

  “How about Donovan?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “The Monkees, the Byrds, the Groundhogs?” Milt’s face looked worried.

  Dunc looked at Amos. Both boys shook their heads.

  “The Animals?” Milt was desperate now. “You’ve heard of them, right?”

  “No.” Dunc sighed. “All of those are from before our time.”

  “How about bugs,” Amos offered. “You’ve talked about birds and animals.”

  “The Crickets?” Milt brightened. “They were like, solid, man!”

  More head shakes.

  “The Roaches?” Milt asked. “Oh, man, wait—the Beatles?”

  Both boys nodded.

  “Uncle Alfred told me about them. They were from England.” Amos gestured with the gold bar. “Everybody said they were cool.”

  “Right,” Milt said. “Weird hair—like bowl cuts. Far-out. So how old are the Beatles?”

  Dunc sighed. “They don’t exist any longer. They broke up before we were born.”

  Milt nodded, satisfied. “That’s how long I’ve been here. Since back then. I took my vow of silence and headed into the wilderness then.”

  Dunc rubbed his head, thinking. He felt the bat guano and took his hand down. “I remember reading something about them. That was maybe 1965 or 1966. You’ve been here twenty-seven years?”

  Milt shrugged. “Time, you know—it stretches. Seasons come and, you know—go.”

  “And you’ve been alone all that time, with no outside contact?”

  Milt nodded. “Rafting trips come through and, you know, I sneak in and get food from them, but my karma is so strong, they never see me.”

  “That’s where all this stuff comes from,” Dunc said. “From rafting trips?”

  Milt nodded.

  “And the boat?”

  Milt shook his head. “I only take food, surplus food. The boat came by on its own one day early this summer. I guess somebody lost it.”

  Amos shook his head. “How come if you took a vow of silence and wanted to be alone, you took us, and now you’re talking to us?”

  “Oh, wow, man—like, if I’d left you out there, the mosquitoes would have killed you both. I brought you in here to get you away from them. I took him first, but when I went back for you, I couldn’t find you until daylight.”

  “I was in the water.”

  Dunc interrupted. “How come you talked—broke your vow of silence?”

  “Like, you’re honest. I swore there were no honest people left—just people who wanted to ruin, you know, like, the earth. I did some demonstrating and saved a rare kind of stickleback minnow, but I was never going to come out, and I’d never talk again because people were like, you know, dishonest. And then you didn’t take the gold.” He smiled and sighed. “I had to, like, speak, man, and tell you how I felt.”

  Dunc stared. “Is your last name Davis?”

  Milt nodded. “Cool—you know it.”

  “This wilderness area is named for you, to honor you.”

  “Oh, wow, groovy!”

  “So now it’s all over, and you can come out and be with the world again.”

  Milt shook his head. “Oh, no, man—I’d like, miss the tournament.”

  The boys looked at each other, then at Milt.

  “What tournament?”

  “Every summer there’s a checkers tournament. I don’t want to miss it.”

  Amos coughed and looked at Dunc. “Milt, you’re alone here.”

  Milt nodded.

  “And you have this tournament yourself? You just play against yourself?”

  Another nod. “Oh, man, like, last year it was really close. I almost won.”

  Slowly Amos set the bar of gold, which he’d been holding all this time, gently on the ground. He stood. “Well, Milt, we’d like to stay, but our parents and everybody will be looking for us and worrying.”

  Dunc nodded. “We really have to be going.”

  Milt moved, or seemed to move, and was standing between them and the water. Liquid movement. “Are you sure?”

  They nodded.

  “Well, if you, like, really have to go—take the boat and the bar of gold. A rafting group went through this morning. I saw them when I went back to check for any gear you might have lost. Maybe you can catch them.”

  He turned and dragged the rubber boat and the paddles to the water. “Over on the right, if you scrunch the boat a bit, it will slide under the rock and out into the river.” He picked up the bar of gold and handed it to Amos.

  “Are you sure of this?” Dunc asked.

  “Yes,” Amos said. “He is. Aren’t you, Milt?”

  Milt nodded. “It’s the best checkers I’ve ever had—except for the tournament, of course.”

  “Of course.” Amos took the bar and held it close to his chest.

  “The gold is the least I can do.”

  “Of course.”

  “And the raft,” Milt added. “You take the raft and paddles—you won them anyway, fair and square. If you stay with the river, you’ll be out of the wilderness in three days, maybe less. I’ll throw in some Spam and hash browns and a pan, too, and you can make it all, like, a picnic.”

  Dunc nodded to Amos. “All right, then—–just this once.”

  Milt helped them load gear and punch the three-man raft down beneath the lip of rock leading to the outside. The boys held their breath and ducked under and came up next to the boat, and as Milt had said, they were in the river.

  More important, the boat was in the edge of the current, and the swirling water caught it and started to tear it away. Amos threw the bar of gold into the boat, and the boys clawed their way up and over the side, and the river grabbed the boat and they were gone.

  They looked back just in time to see Milt smile and wave at them and yell: “Watch out for the—”

  And they rounded a bend and heard no more.

  .12

  “It’s like something out of a Mark Twain book,” Dunc said.

  The boys were lying against the sides of the boat. It was midday and the sun was hot, and the river scooted peacefully along, pushing the boat over riffles and occasional small rapids.

  “Floating down the river on a warm day, a bar of gold—it could be a dream,” Dunc finished. If the truth were known, he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. The sun warmed the rubber of the raft and made it feel like a warm bed.

  “No—it’s not like a dream.” Amos dozed on the other side of the raft, one hand on the bar of g
old. “If this was a dream, I’d be slamming my head through a wall or getting ripped to pieces by phones with teeth.”

  “Trappers,” Dunc said.

  “What?”

  “The gold—it was for trappers. That’s been bugging me since I saw the date. Then I remembered—all this country was first explored by fur trappers. The buyers used to carry gold and silver up the rivers to buy furs from the trappers. They probably hid it in the cave, then drowned in the river or got lost in a storm or something. Trappers—that’s who owned the gold.”

  “It’s ours now—at least, this bar.”

  Dunc nodded. “There it is—our college education.”

  “Right.” Amos snorted. “You know how many Twinkies this will buy? Or phones? I could have phones lined on every wall of the house, stuck to the ceilings. I could buy a cellular phone and take it with me.”

  “They’ll make us save it for college,” Dunc interrupted. “Our parents.”

  Amos sighed. “Yeah.”

  There was a moment of silence, which led to another moment, then a full minute, and then five minutes. The raft bobbed down the river, the sun warmed the boys until their eyes were closed, and the past three days caught up with the sun and the gentle rolling of the raft, and they were asleep.

  Dunc heard it first—a kind of muted hissing roar that cut into his sleep.

  His eyes opened.

  He looked around the raft. Nothing was changed. It was later in the afternoon, but they were still bobbing along, the sun beating down on them.

  He closed his eyes and tried to get back to sleep.

  A new sound cut in, and this time Amos opened his eyes as well as Dunc.

  It was human voices.

  The muted roar was a little louder now, and the current seemed to be traveling a bit faster, and mixed in were voices.

  Yelling. They were yelling something.

  Dunc raised his head to look at the shore. Amos sat up. There, not thirty yards away, stood Melissa Hansen.

  “Melissa?” he said, and ducked immediately because he thought he was dreaming. He was pretty sure that if he saw Melissa in a dream, something bad would happen to him. Except that he wasn’t dreaming. “Look, Dunc, it’s Melissa. It’s the raft trip—we caught up with them. I forgot that she was going on that raft trip. Oh, man, look—she’s waving at me.”

  Dunc frowned. The background noise was louder now and made it hard to hear. “They’re yelling something—what are they saying?”

  Melissa stood in front of the group, and all of them, eight or ten including the guide, were jumping up and down yelling something, pointing down the river.

  “Maybe they want us to paddle in to shore and join them,” Amos said, nodding. “Sure. Melissa knows it’s me and wants us to join their group.”

  “No.” Dunc’s voice grew cold and flat. “They’re trying to warn us. Grab a paddle. We’ve got to get to shore—I just figured out what they’re yelling.” Dunc snatched up a paddle and started paddling. “It’s falls—they’re warning us about a falls. That’s the sound, that roar.”

  Amos knew then, knew Melissa would not be waving, knew that even though it wasn’t a dream, something bad was going to happen to him.

  Something very bad.

  He picked up the second paddle and started pulling at the water, matching strokes with Dunc, who was by now frantic. But he knew. He knew they weren’t going to make shore.

  The roar was close to deafening now, and the raft seemed to be gripped by a huge, angry fist. It shot down the middle of the river, around a sharp bend, and headed for the edge of what appeared to be a water cliff.

  “We’re going over!” Dunc screamed.

  Amos nodded. Of course. He had known it all along. He looked back, caught one glimpse of Melissa and the rest of the rafting trip waving and screaming, and turned to the front just in time to see the world, the entire world, seem to disappear in front of and below them.

  Of course, he thought—of course we’re going over. How could it be any other way?

  The bottom dropped out. He saw Dunc grab a plastic handle on the side of the raft, and he had a fleeting instant to clutch at one next to his hand. He missed, tried to grab the bar of gold, and missed that as well. He came up with a can of Spam and looked down over the tipping raft, down and down into a yawning, boiling, seething caldron of water as he fell away from the raft and Dunc, fell down and down and away to plummet at terminal velocity head down, still holding the can of Spam, into a world of thundering madness.

  .13

  The dream seemed real. Amos was upside down, right side up, dragged and pushed and pulled and ripped and flattened. Somebody had him, grabbed him, held him down, and Melissa was leaning over him, leaning over him and down to—what? To kiss him? No. Not even in a dream—and then he heard a phone ringing.

  One ring. Dimly, almost not there, a faint ring. But it was enough. Everything in him tensed, and he went for it. Classic form, rolling and to his feet, one leg down, the other up …

  “Amos!”

  … second leg down. Still well before the second ring, feet starting to pump, one hand out to get the phone, but something, something holding him back …

  “Amos—wake up!”

  … something had him, pulling him back and down, some enemy—he fought …

  “Amos—”

  His eyes opened. He was jammed into the corner of a hospital room, a sheet from the bed wrapped around his shoulders and legs, his head down, one hand up trying to reach a phone on a small table by the door.

  “Amos, wake up.”

  He looked back, upside down through his armpit, to see Dunc lying in a bed nearby.

  The phone rang again, and Dunc jumped from his bed. He answered it, then shook his head. “You’ve got the wrong room.” He hung up and knelt next to Amos and helped him to his feet.

  “Dunc?” Amos shook his head. “Are we in a hospital?”

  Dunc nodded. “Just for observation. Everything is all right. Or will be.”

  “But what about the river, the falls, Milt—all that?”

  “Good, you remember, then—I was worried. You took a crack on your head under water, and I wasn’t sure. The doctors said it would be fine, but you know me.”

  Amos closed his eyes and frowned, working at memory. “Gold—what happened to the gold bar?”

  Dunc almost didn’t have to answer. It was in his eyes. “You dropped it. Or missed it. When Melissa dragged you out of the water, you were holding a can of Spam.”

  “Melissa?” Amos stopped him. “She dragged me out?”

  Dunc nodded. “Both of us. She climbed down next to the falls, and she was the first one to get to us. I was still conscious, but she had to work on you to bring you around.”

  “Work on me? How do you mean?”

  “She did mouth-to-mouth on you.”

  “Melissa?”

  Dunc nodded. “Of course, you didn’t know it because you were unconscious from the head blow. They had a radio and called in a chopper—which wasn’t very far away because they were still looking for us. They rushed us to the hospital—we were here within an hour.”

  “She kissed me?” Amos had stopped listening. “Melissa kissed me?”

  “No. She gave you the breath of life. It’s not the same. And you didn’t know it. You didn’t know anything until just now. The doctor said you have to keep a grip on the real world because of the blow on your head.”

  “Oh, man—I thought it was all a dream. Melissa kissed me, and I missed it!”

  “You’ve got to control this, Amos—she doesn’t even know your name. She just happened to rescue you. You’ve got to concentrate on real things, more positive things.”

  “Like losing the gold?” Amos asked.

  “Well, no.”

  “Like crashing in a hang glider and getting kidnapped and covered with bat poop and nearly drowned and having you talk me out of playing checkers for more gold than there is in the whole world?”

 
“Well, not exactly.” Dunc smiled. “I was thinking more of the two world records we set—no, three.”

  Amos was back on his bed, and he sat on the edge and looked at Dunc. “Longest flight for two boys our age.”

  Dunc nodded.

  “What were the other two?”

  “Highest flight for two boys, and …”

  “And what?”

  Dunc looked out the window, then back at Amos. “The only people ever to ride a rubber raft over Doom Falls.”

  “Doom Falls?”

  “That’s the name of the waterfall we went over. We’re the only ones ever to go over Doom Falls and live.”

  Amos sighed and lay back on the bed. “She kissed me.”

  “Not really.” Dunc shook his head. “Think of the records, Amos.”

  “Kissed me …”

  “Amos.”

  “Melissa …”

  “Amos.”

  Be sure to join Dunc and Amos in these other Culpepper Adventures:

  The Case of the Dirty Bird

  When Dunc Culpepper and his best friend, Amos Binder, first see the parrot in a pet store, they’re not impressed—it’s smelly, scruffy, and missing half its feathers. They’re only slightly impressed when they learn that the parrot speaks four languages, has outlived ten of its owners, and is probably 150 years old. But when the bird starts mouthing off about buried treasure, Dunc and Amos get pretty excited—let the amateur sleuthing begin!

  Dunc’s Doll

  Dunc and his accident-prone friend Amos are up to their old sleuthing habits once again. This time they’re after a band of doll thieves! When a doll that once belonged to Charles Dickens’s daughter is stolen from an exhibition at the local mall, the boys put on their detective gear and do some serious snooping. Will a vicious watchdog keep them from retrieving the valuable missing doll?

  Culpepper’s Cannon

  Dunc and Amos are researching the Civil War cannon that stands in the town square when they find a note inside telling them about a time portal. Entering it through the dressing room of La Petite, a women’s clothing store, the boys find themselves in downtown Chatham on March 8, 1862—the day before the historic clash between the Monitor and the Merrimac. But the Confederate soldiers they meet mistake them for Yankee spies. Will they make it back to the future in one piece?