Breakdown

by Joseph Monninger

  “Holy pepperoni, are you kidding me? You the kids from Camp Summertime?” he asked, pulling an earbud out and letting it dangle. He turned off the cart or it stopped making noise. Quincy couldn’t be sure. “You must be, right?”

  “Yes, we’re from Camp Summertime,” Quincy said.

  “On the Milk Truck?”

  “What’s that?” Bess asked, her voice dazed. She knew the name of the van, Quincy realized, but maybe she was in a little bit of shock.

  “The old van?”

  “Yeah, it broke down, and the driver … the driver didn’t make it,” Bess said. “And a moose attacked us.”

  “Do you have anything to eat?” Quincy asked.

  “No, nothing on me. So let me get this straight, you guys left when the camp closed and you’ve been sitting out on One Hundred Mile Road all this time?”

  “That’s about it,” Quincy said. “And there’s another group, a group of three, they went the other direction. They’re trying to walk out that way.”

  The guy whistled softly under his breath.

  “Wow,” he said. “This is off-the-charts screwed up.”

  “The driver died,” Bess said, her voice wavering. “And so did the girl who got attacked by the moose.”

  Bess suddenly started to cry. It surprised Quincy. Not that he thought she couldn’t cry, or never did, but she simply seemed too strong to cry. Not that crying was a sign of weakness, he quickly amended his thinking. Strong people could cry, and he couldn’t really blame her. But she broke down, going onto her knees and putting her face in her hands. She had a lot stored up, he reflected. More than he knew. For at least half a minute, no one said anything. The three others stood and watched her. Then Simon, of all people, put his hand on her shoulder, and she slowly got control of herself again.

  “Sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Just tired and hungry.”

  She looked up and smiled. It was a smile that barely broke through her tears. Quincy thought she might start crying again at any moment.

  “I don’t think I can take all of you at once,” the guy said. “I’m Devon, by the way. I’m the winter caretaker for the camp. I can run one person up, then come back for the other two. It won’t take long.”

  “How far is it to camp?”

  “About seven miles. I’d try to take you all at once, but I don’t want to overload this cart. It’s built for two people and some golf bags.”

  “You can fit these two on,” Quincy said. “I’ve seen three people in a cart before. One rides in the back. I’ll stay here with the bags.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Bess said.

  “I don’t mind. It’s no big deal, honestly. You guys can get some food cooking. Get me some mashed potatoes, Simon.”

  That became the plan. Quincy helped them arrange themselves in the cart. It wasn’t difficult. He piled all the bags together on the side of the road. Before they left, Bess hugged him.

  “We were a pretty good team,” she said.

  “Listen,” the guy, Devon, said as he climbed behind the wheel. “I’m going to have to make some phone calls before I come back for you. I’ll make them as fast as I can, but just chill here and don’t wander off. Stay right here, okay?”

  “You got it,” Quincy said.

  Bess took the back of the cart. The caddie spot, Quincy had always called it. When he played golf with his mom, the caddie sometimes rode back there, standing up where the bag rested. It was a way to make short hops and to hustle the play along. Devon turned the cart in a small circle, then floored it. The cart bumped along the rough road, and Quincy watched it until it hummed out of sight.

  Olivia admitted that Tock had a decent plan when it came to building a shelter. And like most good plans, it was all pretty simple. First, you found a tree with a V. That’s what he kept saying: A tree with a V, rhyming it and repeating it over and over. Once they found a tree with a V, they searched for a long center pole and propped it from the ground to the notch of the V. That made a diagonal ridgepole, Olivia comprehended. Simple. If you thought of it as a backbone, all you had to do afterward was add ribs. The ribs formed the sidewalls. And when you finished with all of that, then you added debris. Leaves, branches, anything to block out the cold and moisture. That last part, adding debris, reminded Olivia of making mud pies when she was a little girl. You added and patted. Another rhyme.

  When she stood back from the debris hut, she felt a swell of pride at what they had accomplished.

  “Not bad,” she said to Preston, who still knelt beside the hut, adding more debris.

  “We need to get in and get dry,” Preston said, not looking up. “We need to be out of the rain for a while.”

  “I’m not sure how dry it will be inside,” Olivia said. “Better than out here, but not great.”

  Tock limped back from using the bushes. He announced his approval of the hut.

  “That’s a good hut,” he said, going down on his backside and sliding in. It took him a long time because of his injury. “You could live through the winter in that hut.”

  “Is everything inside?” Olivia called to him.

  “Looks like it,” he said. “Come on in. It’s okay. Try it out.”

  Olivia didn’t quite trust the new, more cooperative Tock, but she had to admit he had improved. His injury seemed to make him more levelheaded, or considerate, though she couldn’t say why. She went down on her hands and knees and crawled inside. It was drier inside, and a little warmer, although maybe, she thought, that was her imagination. Tock had moved the backpacks against the walls as an added windbreak. The pine boughs they had ripped off the trees and placed as a floor kept the cold and moisture from wicking up into the shelter. It wasn’t too bad inside the hut, Olivia conceded. Given they had nothing else for a shelter, it wasn’t horrible.

  “Thanks, Tock,” Olivia said. “Thanks for helping build this. You saved our bacon.”

  “No problem,” Tock said, fussing a little with the sidewalls. “I used to make these things in my backyard with my buddy Blue Jean.”

  “He was called Blue Jean?”

  “He always wore blue jeans is why. Blue jean shorts in the summer, blue jean long pants in the winter. He had a blue jean jacket, too. He always wore blue jeans.”

  Preston squeezed in before she could ask any more questions. He appeared tired and cold. He shivered now and then, Olivia saw. Despite the heat, if they couldn’t get dry, it could become a problem.

  “You okay?” she asked him.

  “Maybe,” Preston said, his voice chattering a little. “But that still doesn’t mean we’re not in bad shape here. We went from being on a road where we had a chance of being found, to being in a wet debris hut in the middle of the woods where no one can find us.”

  “You don’t know no one can find us,” Olivia said, trying to be calm and reasonable. “You can’t say that for certain. And the house is right up there.”

  “Why would anyone be coming along this lake in a rainstorm? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  It was a fair question, Olivia agreed. But it did no good to be more gloomy than necessary. Maybe they should have walked out to the main road before building the debris hut, but it had felt like the right thing to do at the moment. Meanwhile, the rain continued to splatter on the top of the debris hut and drip down on all of them. Olivia grabbed her backpack and propped it up so she could use it as a pillow. She pushed back against it and closed her eyes. She tried to send her thoughts to her home in International Falls. Her house wasn’t grand by any measure, but it had a nice back porch, screened in, with an old-fashioned glider that was just long enough to accommodate her. Her mother kept an old quilt out there, and Olivia liked to lie on the glider, letting her movement rock her a little, the quilt tucked around her, a good novel on her belly for reading. Sometimes she thought the screened porch contained magic because she slept more soundly there than she did anyplace else on earth. Her naps on the porch, with the sound of rain, the coolness c
oming from the moisture, somehow pushed her deeper into sleep.

  She felt that drowsiness entering her now. The one thing she wanted, truly desired, turned out to be a piece of hard candy. Lemon flavored, maybe. She missed cracking candy with her teeth, the bright, solid explosion as the candy shattered and lined her jaws and gums. It was a funny thing to think about, she admitted. She smiled and felt sleep settling over her, and she sensed the boys settling down, too. No place to go. Nothing to do for the moment. It almost feels luxurious, she thought. Almost.

  And she would have fallen asleep, except that Preston started crying.

  It happened slowly, just on the edge of her hearing. At first, she thought he merely had the shivers again — which were bad enough, true — but then, bit by bit, she understood he was crying. He lay with his head facing away from her, and his shoulders sometimes moved and shook. She heard him trying to be quiet, but he couldn’t contain himself. She felt horrible for him. She waited, expecting Tock to make some sort of mocking joke about Preston being a wimp, but to her surprise, he didn’t say anything. She reached out a hand and patted Preston’s shoulder. He moved his shoulder out from under her hand.

  Then she fell asleep. She tried to stay awake, thinking that she might comfort Preston, but sleep clamped down on her, and her last thought was of the porch and the old quilt that sometimes tickled if you tucked it too close to your chin.

  SURVIVAL TIP #4

  * * *

  Many survival manuals talk a great deal about equipment, shelter building, navigation, and so on, but they overlook the most important survival tool of all: survival mentality. People under duress can be tearful, depressed, uncomfortable, lonely, or despairing. The first job of all survivalists is to manage a clear mental approach to their circumstances. Stay positive. Look for hopeful signs. Believe that a better hour is on its way. Do not allow yourself to give in to low feelings.

  Bess twisted the shower water hotter and slowly turned in the steady stream. It felt like heaven. The heat, the warmth, the soapy cleanliness nearly made her giddy. In a few minutes, she knew, she could climb out and go to the supper that the caretaker guy, Devon, was cooking for them all. It was over. The entire ordeal was over even if it was a little hard to believe it had happened in the first place.

  After one last minute of letting the heat soak into her bones, she turned off the water. Almost immediately, someone knocked on the door. She grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her and called to see who it was.

  “It’s Mom,” Simon said.

  Meaning, she knew, Mom on the phone.

  “Okay,” she said, and opened the door to the bathroom a crack so that she could take the phone. Simon stood and waited. He didn’t like to talk on the phone, and seldom did, but he didn’t mind listening to phone conversations. She shook her head no and closed the door.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said, drying and dressing herself as she kept the phone tucked next to her ear.

  Fortunately, she didn’t need to talk. Her mother talked for a full three minutes, asking and answering her own questions, angry one moment, joyous the next. It was classic Mom talk.

  “Everything is fine, Mom,” Bess said when she managed to dress. She wore a pair of jeans that had somehow managed not to get too wet and an Old Navy sweatshirt. “We did the best we could. It was crazy. There’s still another group out there.”

  “That’s what that man said. I’ve got a call in to the camp directors. The owners,” her mother said, emphasizing the owners portion of the statement. Bess knew her mother wouldn’t rest until she received some sort of compensation, financial or otherwise, to balance out the scales.

  “It wasn’t really anyone’s fault, Mom. It was just a lot of unhappy coincidences.”

  Bess brushed her hair as she talked. She wished she had used cream rinse on it, but it felt good just to have it clean. The brush snagged and made her nearly drop the phone a couple of times.

  “The van was ancient,” her mother said, her voice tight with anger. “Ancient, Bess. I’m not letting them off the hook.”

  “Okay, whatever,” Bess said. “Listen, Mom, I have to go eat. I’m starving. I’ll call you later. Simon did great by the way. He really did.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “He did his best. He’ll tell you about the moose someday.”

  “I heard a little about the moose. Did he get charged by the moose?”

  “We all got charged, Mom.”

  After a few more back-and-forth pieces of conversation, she hung up. Simon waited outside the bathroom door. She handed him the phone.

  “Let’s go eat. Then you need to shower afterward, okay? It will feel good.”

  He nodded.

  Devon had cooked macaroni and peas, garlic bread, and he included hearts of iceberg lettuce. The meal looked and smelled great. Bess felt saliva start in her mouth. It gave her a weird feeling to be so hungry with food just a reach away. It was strange, too, to sit in the large cafeteria at one small table usually reserved for the camp owners or visiting family members. During the summer the place was a zoo, but now it was calm and pleasant. She saw Lake Monte out of the side window, quiet and calm in the late-afternoon sun.

  “I am so destroying this food,” Quincy said, dragging a chair out and sitting down. “I could do this meal three times and not be filled up.”

  “You maybe shouldn’t eat too much too fast,” Devon said, carrying the last bowl out from the kitchen. The bowl contained a quart or so of applesauce. Bess wasn’t sure how that went with the other food, but she didn’t particularly care. Let it be random as long as it was food. She took the bowl from Devon and put a big ladleful on her plate.

  “Maybe we should have a moment of silence for Maggie,” Bess said as Quincy grabbed his fork and stabbed some of the macaroni. “Just a moment, okay? Simon, can you put down your fork, please?”

  Everyone went silent. Devon slid into the seat at the front of the table. Simon did as he was asked. It started to feel both sad and silly to be silent, Bess reflected. Both important and trivial. She let out her breath in a long sigh.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s eat.”

  Then it was all just glorious food. She had never previously taken such pleasure in eating. At the same time, the food felt heavy and dulling. It chunked down her throat and seemed to ball up in her stomach. She wasn’t sure why. It was as if her mouth wanted food, but her body resisted it. Quincy, she saw, ate avidly, but Simon wasn’t shoveling it as rapidly as she had anticipated. She realized, watching them both, that they had been through something. It was easy to pretend it was all over, all tied up in a bow, but it wasn’t. She felt a knot in her belly.

  “So who’s coming out, anyway?” Quincy asked while pausing to drink some iced tea–lemonade combo Devon had served. “Sounded like everyone but the National Guard.”

  “Search-and-rescue teams,” Devon said. “And the police. Fish and Game. A bunch of people.”

  “Good,” Quincy said. “You should be able to track them down.”

  “The owners are coming back, too,” Devon said, pushing his plate beneath the lip of the mac-and-peas bowl and loading it with a second helping. “The Wilmonts. They’re flying in first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Are they in trouble?” Quincy asked.

  “Not trouble, exactly. It’s just that they’re responsible. The blackout didn’t help, but they should have provided better transportation, I guess.”

  “They should have better vans and buses,” Bess said. “They think they can get away with old vans because we’re kids.”

  “I won’t say if I agree or disagree,” Devon said, pulling his plate back. “I’m going to try to stay out of this as much as possible. It’s probably going to get a little messy.”

  Suddenly, Bess felt herself nearly doze off. Sleep settled on her so quickly and so stealthily that it wouldn’t have surprised her to have her head fall face-first into her plate. Her stomach felt stuffed, too, though she hadn’t eate
n very much. She slid back from the table a little.

  “I need to lie down,” she said. “I suddenly feel incredibly sleepy.”

  “It’s the heat, probably,” Devon said. “And the food. I put out sheets and blankets. You can grab any of the bunks just back there.”

  “Okay,” Bess said.

  She started to ask Simon if he would be all right, but even that felt like too much. She couldn’t care any longer. She stood and apologized for not helping with the dishes, but she didn’t really believe her apology, either. She shuffled across the floor and found the cot and fell on top of it. For a moment, and only a moment, she watched the light glance off the windows and a fly, high up against the glass, strike itself over and over against the pane, trying to get out.

  “Are they wolves?” Preston asked.

  “No, coyotes,” Olivia said. “They’re too small for wolves.”

  “Are you sure? Because we have wolves in Minnesota. A ton of them.”

  “They’re coyotes,” Tock agreed with Olivia. “We call them coydogs where I’m from. You can shoot them anytime you like. It’s always open season on them. They eat cats.”

  Preston nodded, as if that tidbit of information helped in any way. The coyotes moved like spirit animals just out of sight. No, that wasn’t true, he chided himself. If they were out of sight, then they could not be seen. These coyotes could be glimpsed, but only in instants when they trotted between trees or slunk through gaps of the underbrush. Then they flashed past, blending with the evening light. They could have been ghost dogs for all Preston knew.

  “They won’t attack,” Olivia said, her eyes at the side of the debris hut in order to look out. “They don’t know what to make of us, that’s all.”

  She looked out and then turned back to look at them both. Preston tried to read her expression, but it was hard to do.

  “A woman was killed by coyotes in Nova Scotia,” Tock said from his own spy hole in the debris hut. “My uncle said the local coyotes are breeding with eastern wolves and making bigger animals. Canines. It’s getting to be a problem.”