Breakdown

by Joseph Monninger

“It isn’t that far.”

  “Flash said thirty miles each way. We’re dead center from nowhere.”

  “Are you having second thoughts?”

  “No, not really,” Bess said. “I’m realizing that when we leave, we leave. The van gives us some shelter.”

  Quincy didn’t bring up the obvious obstacle of Maggie. Maggie had the van. They didn’t.

  “Sooner we leave, sooner we get there,” Bess said. “We need plenty of paper, and we can’t forget the matches. The sleeping bags, too. And bring a change of clothes. Mostly we need water.”

  Quincy stood. He felt better with a plan. He told himself to quit worrying whether it was the right thing or not. Just do what was ahead of him. That was his plan. Do the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing. Just keep doing things and pretty soon you’ll be back at camp. That’s what he told himself.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Flash came along with a car this morning,” Bess said, stuffing her sleeping gear into its sack. “That moose freaked us out, and I’m not saying it shouldn’t have, but we’re not in as much trouble as we might think. Thirty miles won’t be easy, but it’s flat road and well marked. It could be a lot worse.”

  Quincy didn’t say anything, but he wondered if she was simply talking to psych herself up. If you took a step back, things couldn’t be much worse. He didn’t see the point in trying to jolly things up. Still, he understood what she was saying and why, and he made a decision to stay positive no matter what, no matter how hard it became.

  “Simon, time to wake up!” Bess said. “We have some walking to do.”

  Simon slowly rolled over. He stared at the fire.

  “Up and at ’em, lazybones,” Bess said, finishing with her sleeping bag and looking around for more items to jam in her pack. “Help us pack up. You’re going to have to carry a pack, too.”

  Bit by bit, Simon sat up. He held his hands out to the fire. Quincy took a couple more hunks of wood and threw them on the center coals. It didn’t make any sense to conserve fuel at this point. He looked toward the east and saw it had become slightly lighter. Time to go, he thought. Time to walk.

  “I don’t think your leg is broken,” Olivia said. “I know you heard something, but I can’t feel any break. Maybe it was something else that made the sound you heard.”

  “I’m telling you, I heard it break,” Tock said. “And it’s killing me.”

  Olivia shrugged. She felt worn out. Preston had felt the leg, too, and he couldn’t find anything. Not that any of them were doctors, obviously, but she was fairly certain if something had been broken there would probably be a bunch of swelling. Her entire body of knowledge came from a three-hour first-aid class she had taken at camp. So be it, she thought. So far, she couldn’t detect any inflammation, although she would have been the first to admit the light wasn’t any good. There was no light, in fact, just starlight and whatever illumination they could get from the fire.

  They had camped at the V where the two roads separated. Preston had insisted on it in case a vehicle came by. They had lugged Tock between them, one of his arms around each of their shoulders, and they had made him as comfortable as possible. He remained in a ton of pain. Olivia could not do a thing for him, she knew, other than make him generally comfortable. He lay against his backpack, his leg on a second backpack — hers — to elevate it.

  “We have some decisions to make,” Preston said. “We need to decide whether we should go back to the bus or keep going.”

  “I can’t walk,” Tock said.

  “We’ll test it in the morning,” Olivia said.

  “I’m getting really peeved no one believes my leg is broken when I say that it is.”

  “No one is saying it isn’t,” Olivia said. “We’re saying we don’t know. We’re saying the break isn’t obvious.”

  Tock didn’t say anything else. Olivia went to get wood. Light had started to appear in the east. She heard thunder, too. It was far off, just a remote rumble, and she hoped it wasn’t headed their way.

  She grabbed a bunch of dry pine. That, at least, was not a problem. They had more wood than they could burn in a lifetime. She had broken off three lengths of crackle pine, stamping on each one with a satisfying crunch, when suddenly she stopped and let a brainstorm hit her.

  It was a brainstorm, too. A true brainstorm.

  It went like this: Why did the house exist at the end of the road?

  The answer was so easy it almost struck her as too obvious.

  A house like this would probably be near a lake.

  Land of ten thousand lakes, she told herself.

  Right? she asked herself. Isn’t that right?

  They had built the house on a body of water! Of course. Why else would you build a house way out in the woods? And how did the kids who had spray-painted their names on the dining room walls make it to the house? Didn’t Flash say the road was gated on both ends? For kids to get in, they had to come over land.

  Or across water.

  “Guys!” she called, and snatched up the wood and started back. “I just had a brainstorm!”

  “Terrific,” Tock said.

  “Why is that old house built where it is?”

  Preston looked at her.

  Tock shook his head.

  “I’m not going back to that house and the rabid raccoon,” Tock said.

  “They build houses like that on the water!” she said, dropping the wood beside the fire. “Why else would that house exist where it does? Think about it! We took the road down from camp, then across … we’re going around a lake, don’t you see? I remember seeing little flashes of it when we were driving.”

  “Our lake? The camp lake?” Preston asked.

  “Probably not. It’s probably another lake. But the kids who spray-painted the house had to get here somehow, and you can bet they didn’t drive down the road. The camp keeps everything gated, right?”

  Olivia watched the logic sink in. It became more solid in her own mind as she explained it to them. She wondered why they hadn’t thought of it earlier. You didn’t build a big old summer place like that just to be in the woods. A lake — or at least some body of water — had to be on the other side of the house.

  “If there’s a boat,” she said, figuring things as she spoke, “we can lift Tock in and row across and that’s that. There must be a landing on the other side somewhere.”

  “I see what you’re saying,” Preston said. “No matter what, we’ll have water if the lake is there.”

  “But why would anyone leave a boat out here?” Tock asked. “You don’t just leave a boat around.”

  “Actually,” Preston said, “my grandfather leaves an old boat at Hudson Pond up where we live. He leaves it unchained, too. He figures anyone can use it and no one bothers it. A lot of people do that. The boat’s no big shakes, so no one will steal it.”

  “It’s worth looking, anyway,” Olivia said. “We’ve got nothing to lose. Tock, you can stay here in case a vehicle comes along. Preston, are you up to do battle with the raccoon again?”

  “I’m not going near the house,” he said again.

  “We’ll go right around it. Maybe I’m wrong, but I have a pretty strong hunch about it.”

  “Still doubt there will be a boat,” Tock said, “but if you want to go look, it’s your business. Have at it.”

  “Let’s wait a little for more light,” Olivia said, “Then we’ll go look.”

  Preston nodded. Tock shifted his leg on the backpack and let out a small, pitiful groan.

  SURVIVAL TIP #3

  * * *

  One of the most essential survival tips to comprehend, and one of the hardest to embrace, is the need to move calmly. Be deliberate in your actions. Because working toward survival is, necessarily, a high-anxiety situation, the natural inclination is to hurry, rush, try to get away from the immediate threat. Whenever that feeling builds, halt, if safe, and collect yourself. If you are with a second person, demand a moment to center you
both. Rushing opens up a survivalist to mistakes, and mistakes can be deadly. Accept the peril. Accept the danger. Master it by calmness.

  At Camp Summertime, it took Devon O’Neal a twenty-count to realize the phone was ringing inside the main office. The ring started almost in his subconscious, then slowly, slowly worked its way up into his active brain. He had been in the boat shed, absorbed in fixing the motor on an ice auger, a tool he would need for ice fishing later in the season. It wasn’t a job he really needed to do, not right then, but he liked keeping his hands busy, and he found when he worked on a piece of machinery he didn’t have to remember how poorly his novel was going.

  Besides, it was cooler in the boat shed next to the water.

  But then the phone rang.

  It jingled and jangled, and he realized, gradually, that he hadn’t heard a phone or a bell or anything else for at least a day. That was the way he liked it, but at the sound of the phone he felt himself returning to the everyday world. He usually fielded a number of phone calls immediately after camp closed for the summer, some from kids who had left something behind, some from parents asking him to search around under a bed in cabin six or twelve for a retainer. It was only now, with the sound of the phone calling him, that he realized the phone had been silent since he had seen the owners off.

  Strange, he thought as he threw down the screwdriver he had just managed to fit to a nut in the deepest recesses of the motor. Strange that no one had called, he reflected, until now.

  He jogged across the camp common and stepped into the main office. The phone still rang. He picked up mid-ring and answered the way he had been instructed to answer.

  “Thank you for calling Camp Summertime. Devon O’Neal speaking; how may I help you?”

  “Devon? I can’t believe I made it through to you. I’ve tried to call you a hundred times.”

  It was the camp owner, Mr. David Wilmont.

  “Hello, Mr. Wilmont. This is the first the phone has rung.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Dave Wilmont said, his voice agitated. “We’ve got a little problem. Did you know the electricity was out over most of Minnesota?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t. The generator kicked on, so I didn’t know —” Devon began, but Mr. Wilmont cut him off.

  “Yes, there’s been a blackout of historical proportions over most of Minnesota. Historical proportions,” he repeated solemnly. “Don’t you have a radio?”

  “Not really, Mr. Wilmont …”

  “Well, you should have one. Crazy to be up at camp without some way to stay connected. It’s been big news, I tell you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Devon felt his blood pumping up into his neck and face. He never liked confrontation, and he especially didn’t like people telling him what to do. The entire point of being a winter caretaker at a camp way back in the woolywogs was so he didn’t have to listen to people tell him what to do. Of course, he couldn’t say that to Mr. Wilmont.

  “Anyway,” Mr. Wilmont said, “we’ve got a problem. People didn’t know what connections had been missed…. Planes were grounded; trains weren’t running. You can probably picture it. You can imagine what kind of chaos ensued during the blackout. It wasn’t fun, I can tell you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The reason I’m calling is that we’re missing a vanload of kids. The kids Flash took out on One Hundred Mile Road. We’re wondering if you’ve heard from them?”

  “The Milk Truck? That van?”

  “Yes, that van,” Mr. Wilmont nearly yelled. “What other van would I be talking about?”

  Devon felt his blood start to go into his ear tips. That was a warning sign. That had always been a warning sign. He had lost a good many jobs in the moments when blood went into his ear tips. When the blood reached a certain level, it didn’t matter if the pope or the king of England wanted to yell at him, Devon refused to take it. Refused, and usually said something insulting to whatever authority wanted to tell him what he had done wrong.

  He swung down into the office chair where Mrs. Wilmont usually sat.

  “Now just hold on, Mr. Wilmont,” Devon managed to say. “Just hold on.”

  “I’m sorry, Devon,” Mr. Wilmont said, his voice rattled with irritation. “Sorry, it’s been a frustrating time. The parents have been frantic. No one can locate anything because of the blackout, and the police have their hands full helping patients in the hospitals…. Well, you know how it can be.”

  “Yes, sir. I can see, sir.”

  Devon heard Mr. Wilmont take a long breath. Someone spoke behind him in a low voice. Mrs. Wilmont, probably. Mrs. Wilmont had a much better feel for the day-to-day running of the camp and the kids.

  “Okay, so Mrs. Wilmont is here with me. Here’s the problem. We don’t know if the van ever got off One Hundred Mile Road, or if it’s somewhere up north, waiting near the airport. We just don’t know. Can you take a ride down One Hundred Mile Road and make sure they’re not there?”

  “I don’t have a car, sir. I’ve tried that old gray van back in the horse barn, but it won’t turn over. There’s a note saying its dead.”

  Mr. Wilmont didn’t say anything for a moment. Devon could imagine Mr. Wilmont’s line of thinking. Deep down, Devon knew Mr. Wilmont didn’t think much of him. He was just winter help, just an oddball who wanted to live like a recluse through most of the winter. In fact, the only leverage Devon possessed in their relationship was the simple fact that not many people wanted to live in a place like Camp Summertime through a Minnesota winter. Like him or not, Devon understood he would be hard to replace.

  “I use a snowmobile, Mr. Wilmont,” Devon explained, looking down at the grease spots on his forearm. “It’s more useful up here through the winter. I’m sure you can see that. I get my friend Morris to drop me off and don’t travel until the snow falls. I think you’ve met him.”

  Suddenly, Mrs. Wilmont took over the phone.

  “Hi, Devon,” she said, her voice braided with quiet and calmness. “Sorry about all this. You can see we’re in a bit of a spot here. Seven kids haven’t made their connections. At first, everyone assumed they weren’t in touch because of the blackout, but now, you see …”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Devon said.

  “Would it be possible to take one of the golf carts? I don’t know how long they run, but you could take a couple of batteries.”

  “Down One Hundred Mile Road?” Devon asked, amused at the idea.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not. Tell you what. We’ll get back to you, but meantime, please keep an eye out. If you hear anything, let us know, please.”

  “I will, Mrs. Wilmont.”

  “Everything else okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Devon said.

  “Good. Talk to you soon, Devon.”

  Mrs. Wilmont hung up. Devon pushed back from the desk and got his breathing and blood under control. One Hundred Mile Road by golf cart. Sometimes it amazed him how stupid people could be.

  Simon thought walking was not a particularly good use of his time. Not at all. He didn’t like the weight of the pack, and he didn’t like the mosquitoes that buzzed in his ears. He preferred to stay next to the fire. The fire was an excellent use of his time. He liked the way the fire smelled and how it was always in motion. Most people didn’t think of fires as being in motion, but he did.

  He liked watching the light build in the sky and slowly spread to the road. It reminded him of caramel syrup, a food he liked a great deal. Caramel syrup moved slowly and gently, not unlike the growing light. Now and then, he heard thunder, but it was far away and calm, almost like someone walking upstairs in a house while you were downstairs listening. Bess heard the thunder, he knew. So did Quincy, but they didn’t talk about it.

  “It’s lighter,” Bess said, her eyes up at the sky. “It’s pretty cool the way it’s getting lighter.”

  “This pack isn’t getting any lighter,” Quincy said.

  “Just keep going. We can rest i
n a while. Let’s make a good start on things.”

  “I’m hungry. I can’t believe how hungry I am.”

  “We’re all hungry,” Bess said. “We all need some mashed potatoes, right, Simon?”

  Simon didn’t say anything. It felt too hot to talk. It felt like if you opened your mouth, the heat might go down your throat and live like a coal in your belly.

  They walked for a while longer. Simon tried to understand why the remark about mashed potatoes struck them as funny. It didn’t make sense. They had been talking about food, and he had named a food, and it was no more or less ridiculous than the foods they had mentioned. At least he didn’t think so. Food was fuel, that was all, and what did it matter if you liked mashed potatoes or a club sandwich or caramel syrup?

  After a while, Bess said they could stop. The light was strange now. Simon tasted the storm coming across the treetops. He tasted it on his tongue. And the wind changed. It turned the leaves upside down on the trees, so that you could see the underside of the leaves. They fluttered white and danced around. Some of the leaves, he saw, had already begun to turn colors for fall. He liked the fall. Autumn was an excellent use of time.

  “How many miles do you think we’ve walked?” Quincy asked.

  He lay in the middle of the road, his head propped up on his backpack. Simon knelt down. Bess told him he could sit, but he didn’t want to sit. He wanted to kneel.

  “Probably a couple miles,” Bess said. “It’s hard to say.”

  “Did you like that kid Tommy Elbow-Macaroni?” Quincy asked, completely changing the subject. “That was the rumor going around the boys’ tents.”

  “No,” Bess said, blushing. “And what if I did? Why would it be anyone’s business?”

  “I was just asking. Tommy Elbow-Macaroni told people that you liked him.”

  “His name is Tommy Elaconia,” Bess said. “Not Elbow-Macaroni.”

  “That’s what everyone called him.”

  “We were friends, that’s all.”

  Simon glanced at his sister. He had heard the same rumor. He liked all kinds of people. Why did it matter if someone liked someone else out loud?