Memory Boy

by Will Weaver

  “Of course,” my mother said, barely keeping her sarcasm in check.

  The guard hoisted the gate to one side. “Head over to the far right. Temporary camping. And keep that goat close or else the wild dogs will get her.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened. We pedaled forward.

  “Another mouth to feed,” Nat muttered after we cleared the gate.

  “Hey, nice work again, Mom,” I said to her.

  She turned to Sarah. “If I’m six months along, that means I’m carrying this for three more months. After that, you’re going to start wearing the vest.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened. “No way!” she said. “I’m too young.”

  “Don’t ever say that,” my mother said.

  An audience of raggedy kids quickly gathered to stare at us and the Ali Princess. They watched as we set up tents close alongside the Princess. None of them said anything. I leaned my shotgun where everyone passing could see it.

  “It’s like we’re in a Charles Dickens novel,” my mother said.

  “Or Lord of the Flies,” Sarah replied.

  When the world got back to normal, I really did plan to read more.

  Two boys, carrying sharp little sticks in their belts, pointed at Emily and grinned at each other. They eased forward, almost within touching distance of the family goat—until Sarah saw them.

  “She bites!” Sarah said loudly. The boys jumped back; the other kids laughed at them, and then all of them raced off shouting and chasing.

  “I guess they’re just kids,” my mother said.

  I hoped so. What worried me was their parents. Eyes peeped from other sagging tents and dusty vehicles. The other campers were well settled under tarps and ropes and layers of dust; some had crude swing sets; most of the vehicles had flat tires, and makeshift curtains inside. One big, dusty Chevy Suburban had a hole cut in the top where a small chimney poked through.

  “The long-term camping section,” my father observed.

  “No kidding,” I replied.

  My father, too, kept his gun nearby.

  As I worked, I saw Sarah, carrying a plastic bucket, leading Emily behind the Ali Princess. The gang of little kids was back; they went with Sarah.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Shut up, Miles,” Sarah said. She ignored the little kids.

  “Finish the tent and mind your own business, Miles,” my mother said.

  “Sure,” I said, grinning at Sarah. My sister, milking a goat: Someday I would get a picture of this and make sure it got into her high school yearbook.

  A few minutes later the tents were done, and so was Emily. Sarah came back carrying a nearly full pail, and Emily, on a short rope, grazed and nibbled at the dusty grass.

  “So what do I do with this?” Sarah said; she held up the bucket.

  “Warm goat’s milk—great!” I said.

  My father scratched his beard stubble. “Miles, do we have any extra containers? Something with a lid?” He looked at me.

  For an instant I thought he knew—but that was stupid. “One of the water jugs is empty,” I said.

  “That will work. Let’s pour the milk in there, make sure it’s sealed tight, and then we’ll put it in the lake.”

  “It’ll drift away,” my mother said.

  “We’ll find a stone and string and keep it submerged.”

  While Mother watched the campsite, the three of us went down to the lake. We made sure we could see the Ali Princess from the shore.

  Sarah splashed in first, then dove under. “It’s really cold just a few feet down!” Sarah said, gasping as she surfaced. She was a good swimmer. I also noticed that her body actually had some curves. Amazing! Disgusting, kind of. The thought of my little sister someday having a woman’s body simply did not add up in my head.

  I put a toe in the water. “Yikes!” No way I was going in. I watched, shivering, as Sarah and my father then secured the goat’s milk about six feet down, and out of reach of the little kids. They were both good swimmers, and I was impressed: my father and sister actually figuring out how to do something. Maybe there was hope for us after all.

  “Aren’t you coming in, Miles?” Sarah teased.

  “It’s too cold!” I called.

  “You could use a bath,” she said.

  I shrugged. “No. I’m fine.”

  “I hate to say this, Miles, but she’s right,” my father said. “You are getting a little rank.” He tossed me a bar of soap.

  When I took the plunge, I think I shouted underwater. I never believed water could get this cold without becoming ice. Within a minute I was washed, dried, and back shivering by the tents.

  “Well, look at you!” my mother said. “You look like a drowned rat—but a clean drowned rat.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You should go for a swim, Mother. Really—the water’s very nice.”

  “And what do I do with the baby?” she said, hefting her vest.

  “Sorry. I forgot.” I really had.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll slip down later and wash up a bit.”

  That night Emily kept us up late crying just outside our tent—I swear she sounded like a real baby.

  “She’s not used to a short rope,” Sarah said.

  “Whatever you say, Goat Girl,” I mumbled, and finally drifted off to sleep.

  I slept lightly until, much later, I heard a stick snap.

  Then silence; someone had paused outside the tent. Sarah snoozed on. Slowly I rolled over and touched the shotgun. It was empty. Then I heard boots—more than two of them—come closer.

  I jacked the bolt open and shut on my shotgun. Sticks crackled as boots thudded away.

  “What!” Sarah said, waking up confused.

  “Nothing,” I said, lowering the shotgun so she didn’t see it. “It’s okay.”

  “Emily?”

  “She’s fine. Go to sleep.” Sarah collapsed back onto her pillow and was breathing softly again within thirty seconds. I lay where I could look out the tent flap. For good measure I poked the gun barrel a few inches into the night. Moonlight glinted on its steel. I imagined the single dark eye of its muzzle staring out from our tent. With it on guard, gradually I let my eyes close.

  In the morning birds chirped. For once there was no radio muttering the usual bad news. I also realized I was alone in the tent. As I crawled out into sunlight, Sarah handed me a large, steaming mug of hot chocolate. I blinked and rubbed my face. I had slept late. And Sarah, up before me? Handing me hot chocolate? There was a good chance I was dreaming.

  The hot chocolate tasted a little odd—kind of thick and woody.

  “See—I knew he’d try it!” Sarah began to laugh wildly, and Emily went “Baaack!”

  I looked at the mug.

  I looked at Emily.

  “Goat’s milk cocoa.” Sarah grinned.

  My parents and Sarah—how nice of them—were waiting for my verdict before they filled their mugs.

  “Mmmm, tasty,” I said, holding back a slight gagging sensation as I took another long sip. As Sarah and Mother made breakfast, I inspected the footprints in the ash. The close-together tracks; the sudden running strides. And the little dry sticks on the ground all around our tent. I didn’t remember these sticks from the night before.

  My father joined me. “We had visitors last night,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I heard them. One of them stepped on the sticks.” The sticks that had me puzzled.

  My father looked back at Mother and Sarah at the campfire. They were talking to some little raggedy kids and giving them some of the leftover hot chocolate.

  “Do you remember the Godfather movie, the first one?”

  “Sure,” I said. He and I used to have Godfather movie sessions; once we stayed up all night and watched all five in a row.

  “There’s a line when Don Corleone says, ‘Women and children can afford to be careless, but men can’t,’” he said.

  I nodded.

  “It’s sort of a lame sp
eech. But I thought of it last night. So after dark I got up and put those twigs around our tents.”

  I looked at him. I swear he was a foot taller than when we left the city.

  At that moment a couple of gaunt, dusty guys in caps wandered over as if to check on the children. “You folks have a good night’s sleep?” the taller man asked.

  “Just fine. You?” my father asked.

  “Sure thing,” he said.

  There was silence.

  “So you folks moving on today?”

  “That’s right,” my father said.

  “Whereabouts you headed?” the taller one said pleasantly. He smiled as if passing the time of day.

  “North,” I said suddenly. “Heading up to Canada.”

  My father looked at me suddenly, then regained a poker face.

  The two men glanced at the Ali Princess, then back at us. “Well, have a nice trip,” they said.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  When they had gone, my father said quickly, “Why did you tell them we’re heading north?”

  “Because they’re no fools,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  When we pedaled—thankfully—away from the campground from hell, we first turned south onto the dusty highway. Our tires left narrow lines in the pale ash. But a hundred yards or so down the road, we pulled the Ali Princess off the highway and into the trees. With a pine branch I fluffed away our tracks on the shoulder and in the ditch. Then we hid ourselves out of sight but with a view of the road. My father and I kept our shotguns handy.

  Barely ten minutes passed before a group of six men, all on mountain bikes and all carrying guns strapped across their backs, came up the campground driveway.

  They paused at the highway and looked down to the dust.

  “South,” one of them called. “I told you they’d lie. You can’t be that dumb and make it this far.”

  “Let’s get after them,” another said.

  The posse of bikers sped south after our faded, disappearing tracks.

  We pedaled into Bemidji at noon, happy to be out of the forest and off lonely Highway 2. In Bemidji we once again crossed the Mississippi River. Its waters slid under a low bridge no wider than a tennis court, then entered the south end of Lake Bemidji. The big lake stretched northward almost out of sight. My map showed the river leaving the far end of the lake.

  Across the bridge, at lakeside, was a dusty, silent amusement park complete with big statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Like normal tourists, we pulled in for a look at the statues. There was a tourist information building just beyond, with a sign that read OPEN. We went inside.

  A young woman at the counter lowered her Teen magazine; she looked at us like we were ghosts. Or aliens. Or the first tourists she had seen all summer. She cleared her throat. “May I help you?”

  “Got any brochures and local maps?” I said.

  “Sure, sure, all kinds of them,” she said, and started to lay some out on the counter.

  I looked through them. “Any that show state land?”

  “You mean like public land? If you want to hunt or something?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  Behind her, from deeper in the office, an older, unsmiling woman appeared.

  “You’re looking for?” the older woman asked.

  “We’re not sure. We’re on vacation,” my mother said easily. Outside, Emily went “Baaack!”

  “The resorts here are full, sorry,” the older woman said, “and so are all other accommodations.” She didn’t look at all sorry.

  “Then why are you open for tourists?” Nat asked with her cheerful but steady gaze.

  The young woman at the counter looked away with embarrassment; I seized the opportunity to stuff my shirt with maps of all kinds, particularly the one showing public land.

  “I’m just following the mayor’s orders,” the older woman said, her face flushing. “We’re not to encourage people to stay here.”

  “Well, congratulations, you’ve done your job,” Nat said.

  I shrugged apologetically at the young woman and then followed my family out the door.

  “Now what?” Sarah said. We looked up at giant Paul Bunyan and his towering blue ox. They stared blankly west.

  “The maps,” I said dramatically, holding up a whole sheaf.

  We sat along the shore. They ate lunch as I pored over the maps. “Did you notice that the Mississippi flows north here?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Sarah said sarcastically.

  “There’s a continental divide not far from here,” I observed. “I mean, like, what if the Mississippi didn’t turn south but instead kept going north into Canada?”

  “Well, we wouldn’t have Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn,” my mother said, always the literary person.

  “There you have it,” I said.

  I love those kinds of questions. I especially liked to bring them up in history class. “Like, what if Germany instead of America had developed the first atomic bomb?” “Like, what if Kennedy had not been assassinated?”

  Like, what if the Cascade Mountain range had not vaporized itself?…

  I glanced at my road-warrior family. Already we were looking shabby and dusty again. It would be nice to find “home” soon. I leaned closer and began to trace the Mississippi River as it flowed through state-forest land.

  Downstream from the Iron Bridge. That’s all I’ll say.

  “There!” I said.

  My father leaned in to look.

  “There’s a triangle of state land cut off from the road,” I said. “That has to be it.”

  My father nodded.

  “We follow Fifth Street west, then take County Road 11 down to 7,” I said. I liked the lucky numbers. “That will take us mostly along the Mississippi, though we probably won’t be able to see it because it’s a ways back in the forest.”

  My father leaned in to look. “And Kurz’s cabin?”

  “I remember him mentioning the Iron Bridge west of town, which must be here.” I moved my finger on the map.

  “And from there?” my father asked.

  “Downstream. That I know for sure.”

  “Come on, Memory Boy, you’ll have to do better than that,” Sarah said.

  “I’ll find it. We’re not far, just a few miles,” I said. Nothing could bring down my mood; I felt like a real explorer, like Lewis and Clark combined.

  “Well, I’m just glad that we aren’t heading into the mountains and our name isn’t Donner,” Sarah said.

  We passed through Bemidji, a nice-enough-looking small town that even had a state university stretched out on the lakeshore. (I could see going to college in a location like that; maybe that’s where brown-eyed Dairy Queen girls went to college.) Then we headed west and south on a narrow tar road. No sign of the Mississippi. But I could tell from the curving road that it was not far beyond the trees. We passed a ramshackle place that advertised RIVER TUBEING. Not only was their sign misspelled, it was falling down.

  A few miles south and west of town, the Princess began to roll more freely, then coast without being pedaled; we headed into a long, downhill curve.

  “The Iron Bridge,” I called, and pointed. “That has to be it.”

  “Aren’t all bridges made out of iron?” Sarah said.

  We rolled to a stop. The river here was less than a tennis court wide, and its flow lazy and shallow and clear. Underwater grass waved slowly downstream, where the river disappeared into marshland.

  “Well, Memory Boy, where do we go from here?” Sarah said.

  “Shut up, Goat Girl,” I said as I spread out the maps.

  “That’s enough,” Mother said. My father leaned in to study the maps. “We’re just inside the Mississippi Headwaters State Forest,” he said.

  “So?” Sarah said.

  I looked up. South and east, beyond the marshland, low hills and forest rose up. “So Mr. Kurz’s cabin is just down there,” I said.

  “Great,” Sarah
said. “So how do we get there?”

  I looked down at the water; it was waist deep, clear and steady in its flow.

  The river was my road....

  “Easy. We just need a boat,” I said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  QUARTER TWAIN

  AFTER THE ALI PRINCESS, THE Princess River Queen was my next-most-impressive invention. She had required only four hours to make, half of which was taken up by transporting three large truck-tire inner tubes down the highway to the Iron Bridge. The river-rafting guy (“Tubeing”) was a loser and happy to sell some rubber. He hadn’t had a tourist stop for over two years.

  “How are we going to keep the Princess on the tubes?” my father asked.

  We. I liked it when he said we.

  “I’ve been sketching,” I said. “First, let’s get her unloaded.”

  Sarah helped without being asked. Emily balked at leaving her perch, but soon enough we wheeled the empty Princess down to the landing.

  I did some more measuring, then went down the shore a ways with a saw. My father helped me cut six small trees—alders, I think; there were hundreds of them along the bank. Each was about wrist thick in diameter, and we cut them eight feet long. After some final measuring, we lashed all six of them to the inner tubes to make a large triangle: the bottom of a raft. Afterward we struggled to lift the empty Princess onto the raft frame.

  “Sits too high,” I said.

  “Yes. It’ll be tippy and unstable,” my father agreed. “We have to take off the wheels.”

  Sarah groaned as she once again helped us lift the Princess back to shore. There I removed the axle nuts and pulled off the wheels. Now we were ready again for final placement. This time the Princess fit snugly onto the wooden frame. Using two full rolls of tape and several yards of cord, I made sure she was firmly secured to the raft. As I worked, my father cut two more, longer poles.

  “Are you sure about this?” Nat asked as we loaded the River Queen. She did not much like sailing, or the water in general.

  “The river’s only three feet deep here,” I said as my father handed me one of the long poles.