The Last Stand of Daronwy

by Clint Talbert

  At lunch, he asked Mira and Daniel, “Hey, have you seen Travis around?”

  Mira shook her head.

  Daniel leaned close over the table. “I heard that he got sick from swimming in the pond in Twin Hills ‘cause it’s polluted.”

  Jeremy shrugged. “It’s no dirtier than the canal.”

  “As if that’s an improvement,” Mira laughed. “I don’t see you swimming in the canal either. Oh, I didn’t tell y’all. Mom says we might get a swimming pool this summer. If we do, you have to come over and swim.”

  Somehow, he miraculously had no homework. He dropped his backpack on the floor of his room and turned to head out to the woods. His mom stopped him in the hallway.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the woods.”

  “Do you swim in that pond out there?”

  “No, ma’am. Never. It’s gross.”

  “Don’t you ever touch it.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you remember Travis?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “He has leukemia.” His mom, forever the nurse, shifted into technical descriptions when talking about things she didn’t like.

  “Leu… what?”

  “It’s a type of cancer affecting bone marrow.”

  “Oh.” Jeremy remembered his Granny Jean. She had died from cancer on a day when it snowed in southeast Texas. He was convinced the snow was God’s way of saying He was sorry. “Will he die?”

  She swallowed. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. They are fighting it. I just got a call from his step-mom today. She wants everyone to know. Don’t go swimming in that pond. You stay away from it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Jeremy walked to the pond, staring at the rainbow-slicked black water covered in fluorescent green algae. What was in the pond that caused leukemia? How did they know that the pond had caused it? Both his mom and Daniel had said it. How did people fight cancer? How did they fight something they couldn’t see or touch?

  He found his feet at the base of the old Tree and climbed up into the oak’s branches. Sitting on the tilted trunk, he pulled his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and stared into the green space of the other trees’ branches and the smaller tallows that grew in their shadows. Jeremy didn’t know how to feel. Travis hadn’t been a good person to him. Of course, he hadn’t been a good person to Travis either. Had that caused the cancer? If cancer was in the pond, how could he be sure no one else caught it?

  The questions settled into a calm quiescence, like a pool smoothing its ripples to more accurately reflect the sky. Warmth exuded from the Tree, tickling the back of his neck as it enveloped him. His breathing slowed and then stopped, and he exchanged air through his skin, through his hair—the way a tree breathes. Golden stalks of light like ephemeral reeds grew up the trunks of the trees, along their branches, until the forest was clothed in a translucent, dancing light. He absorbed the air, then pushed it out, as though a giant hand were squeezing him like a sponge. There was no pain; only a calm, perfect peace.

  A black tarry mass appeared in the center of the clearing, sucking away all the tendrils of light that it touched. The heavy stuff rolled toward him; it oozed up the bark of the tree, pushing a terrified, icy wind before it. Jeremy’s toes curled inside his shoes and he pressed against the branch at his back. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that he didn’t want to touch it.

  This is what kills the brethren, said an ancient voice in his mind. This is what your kind have inflicted upon us. If you look for a way to begin, stop this. The stuff flowed around his ankles, capturing his legs with an icy grip, freezing his muscles in place. He fought for air and pulled at his feet. In a moment, he was falling. He caught the branch behind him with a white-knuckled grip as air flooded back into his lungs. He coughed, shaking his head. It felt as if one of the shadows of Helter Skelter walked behind him, but there was nothing there. The black ooze had vanished. The stalks of light had vanished. The same old clearing stared back at him, empty, as he steadied himself on the tree.

  Jeremy looked around, but there was definitely no one else in the clearing. What had that been? He summoned his courage and asked, voice cracking, “What am I supposed to do? I’m just a kid.”

  A savage wind swirled through the clearing. He scrambled behind the branch at his back, holding on with both arms. The Tree bowed in the wind as the harsh, God-like voice pummeled words into his mind. This is what your kind have inflicted on us. Stop this. The heavy residue of black goo clogged his veins, rolling in its amoebic flow toward his heart. Stop this.

  Ice crept through his convulsing muscles and his hands slipped on the branch. “Okay! Stop it! Stop it! I’ll do it!” The wind disappeared, the frigid weight vaporized, and he clambered down the Tree in a mad rush of limbs, only to crumble onto the pine needles at the base of the upended roots. The clearing spun around him, dizzying shifts of color from green to brown to green. He vomited on the needles and collapsed.

  The sapling lay at Daronwy’s roots, prone and unmoving in the fallen leaves. Was it too much, too heavy a touch? Had Daronwy misjudged the boy’s abilities when he forced his energy onto him? He lay there, not unlike the tree, staring at the blue sky above, taking refuge in that great expanse that neither of them would ever be equal to, breathing in panicked gasps. Daronwy could feel the boy’s minuscule mind racing with questions; Daronwy was alternately God and the Devil, then, even more terrifying, something else entirely. The brethren around Daronwy had awakened when he touched Jeremiah, aware of the new member in their midst; aware of a new party in the eternal conversation of the wind; aware of the tiny voice and the troubling uncertainty that it brought. On the warm wind they pondered what Daronwy had done, touching this inconsequential being.

  Daronwy answered, “I do not believe this boy to be an inconsequential being. I believe he has ability, great ability even, to change his kind’s destructive ways, if only his thicketed mind would open enough to accept that fact.”

  “Pollution: The contamination of soil, water, or the atmosphere by the discharge of noxious substances.” Pictures of pipes vomiting brown sludge into surly red rivers vied with spewing smokestacks for space on the page. In the last weeks of school, encyclopedias replaced the Fellowship of the Ring. How bad was pollution? The canal and Twin Hills overflowed with ancient tires, barrels, washing machines, and dishwashers, all in varying states of decay. The marshes and bayous oozed black, rainbow-slicked water. Refineries billowed steam and hydrogen sulfide. So, if everything was already polluted, it became a question of time. How fast was it happening? How long would it be until there was no turning back? Jeremy needed to know if he had enough time to grow up or if he had to act now.

  He dedicated a new section of his spiral notebook to the figures he would need. The number of tons of sulfur dioxide released in a year, the number of gallons of sewage leached into waterways, the estimated pesticide runoff in the rivers. But staring at the numbers, he couldn’t put it together. Regardless of how he added, subtracted, multiplied, or divided, the numbers would not tell him the number of years he had to stop pollution. The encyclopedias taught him about types of pollution, about remedies like recycling, but did not have any information on how fast things were happening. Jeremy scoured the school’s library, but there was even less there than in the encyclopedia. He would have to go to the Port Arthur Library. They had more books there than he had ever seen. The answer would be there, if anywhere.

  When Mrs. Rochard forced him to close the encyclopedia and pay attention to her science lesson on convection—how a spoon left in soup gets hot because heat travels through the metal of the spoon—Jeremy started doodling. He drew a flag and wrote a motto for a pollution club. That would be a start at least, until he could figure out what else to do. He wondered if he could convince Daniel and Mira to join.

&nb
sp; Chapter Thirteen

  Jeremy stood at the door to Mira’s house. Her dad’s pipe tobacco wafted out over him. “Hey, Mira,” he called through the screen.

  “Hey, Jeremy.” She stepped out and half-closed the door behind her. Mira’s eyes glittered, reflecting her smile. “You wanna go find the Old Man?”

  “Yeah!”

  She spun on her toe with ballerina grace and stuck her head back inside. “Mom, I’m going in the woods with Jeremy!” She slammed the door before any response came. “Let’s get our bikes.”

  They pedaled into Twin Hills. She rode behind him on a fluorescent pink and green bike with plastic tassels on the handlebars. Jeremy stopped at the rotting couch just outside of the bike trails. “You know, I was wondering if maybe this couch was his. Maybe we’ll find some clues around here.”

  Mira picked her way after Jeremy into the thicket and they peered at the ancient couch. Its stuffing billowed out like foamy innards. Whatever color it had once been had faded into a drab gray, dotted with black mold. Its mildewy stench kept them at a distance. Scattered about the couch were other things: cans, bottles, foil, plastic bowls. None of the items looked recently used.

  Holding their noses, Mira and Jeremy left the couch and pedaled past the pond to the Trash Clearing. Jeremy showed her a discarded refrigerator that had turned up since the last time they’d investigated the area. He also pointed out the remnants of a dryer.

  “I already told you, none of this is a clue. We have to find clues somewhere else.” She crossed her arms.

  “What if he took the metal from these things and made it into a house?”

  She looked at him out of the top of her eyes. “Where were you when that pinecone hit you? Let’s go there.”

  Jeremy snapped his fingers. “Club Tree!”

  “What?”

  “Follow me!” Jeremy was back on his bike, powering through the wheel-sucking sand in the Mini Desert. Mira needed no introduction to the Club Tree. She slid off her bike and ran to the rough-hewn ladder and moss-covered, sagging plywood platforms that spiraled skyward through the tree’s branches. “Come on, Jeremy!” She swung up on the first rungs.

  Her feet were on the first platform by the time Jeremy started up. “Mira, wait! Some of those platforms are rotten. Be careful.” She started climbing higher. “Wait!” He climbed after her, ensuring he balanced his weight on each rung of the ladder. She kept climbing, up and up, to the highest plywood ledge. Jeremy focused on where his hands and feet had to go. He did not look down.

  “This is amazing! Hurry, Jeremy, hurry!”

  One foot, then the other, Jeremy shifted his weight onto the platform, careful to stand over the line of nails that showed where the supporting branch was below. Mira stood in the center of the sagging plywood, hands on her hips, and stared into the green, arboreal ocean with the wild-eyed glee of a pirate captain espying a treasure-laden galleon. Jeremy stayed next to the trunk of the tree. Hopefully there weren’t any more rungs. With one eye, then the other, he looked up. The next branch towered fifteen feet above him and his knees went soft as he looked up at it. He squeezed the tree trunk, trying to catch his breath. Mira was talking. “What?” Jeremy asked.

  She spun on her toe. “This is beautiful! This is certainly where he lives.”

  “You… you think so?”

  “Of course, who wouldn’t want to live up here, silly?” She punched his arm softly. His knees wobbled, but he tried to keep her from noticing.

  “Why are you way back here? You can’t see anything. Come on.”

  She took his hand and dragged him to the center of the platform. Jeremy held his breath and tried to keep his feet over the line of nails.

  “Ow, you’re hurting my hand.”

  “Sorry.” Jeremy relaxed his grip. Below, he could see the pond and the tar pit through the gaps in branches. Everywhere else, the dense canopy of Helter Skelter stared back in a confusing riot of evergreen. Jeremy shuddered.

  “You okay?”

  “Just a chill.” The far western sky caught his eye. Beyond the canopy of trees, just to the right of the towering power plant smokestacks, the sun set in a rapture of purple and gold and orange and baby blue.

  She followed his gaze. “Pretty sunset, huh?”

  Jeremy nodded, then realized the darkness of night was approaching. “Do you think he still lives up here?”

  Mira dropped his hand and crossed her arms. “I dunno… maybe. Kelly swears she saw him.”

  Jeremy tried to keep his balance, but his knees made little circles and his hips felt like a wobbling stack of mismatched dinner plates. He wanted to go back to the trunk, where he could hold on, but he forced himself to stand still. If he didn’t move, his knees wouldn’t buckle, right? “What if he comes back?”

  Her eyes rounded. Her voice dropped. “We’d better not be up here when he comes! Hurry!”

  She crossed the platform in a quick stride that made the entire tree move. Jeremy crumbled to all fours, fingernails clutching the mossy plywood. The tree kept moving. It took a few moments for him to start breathing again. Mira swung down the rungs like a chimpanzee. “Come on, Jeremy!”

  He willed himself to stand up. Stand up and walk to the trunk. His knees refused to straighten. He crawled to the trunk and lowered himself with painstaking care onto the top rung of the ladder. When he dropped into the piney duff two minutes later, she stood in the center of the clearing, among twilit shadows beneath the boughs. Her voice was louder than it needed to be. “Let’s hide and see if he comes.”

  Trees snarled and branches strained arthritic fingers toward him in the half-light. The moist, hungry breath of Twin Hills’ spirits whispered words of warning across the back of his neck, evaporating the last of his confidence. This was the last thing on Earth he wanted to do, but at least they were on the ground. He followed her to the north side of the small clearing, where a bush concealed them and their bikes. From their hiding place, they could see the clearing and the trail, and they could hop on their bikes for a quick escape. They waited. The sky faded from dark blue to purple.

  Shadows spread across the clearing, starting from under the trees and flowing out like black mud. No birds called, no squirrels chattered, no twigs snapped. The wind stilled. Pins prickled along Jeremy’s legs from kneeling. Holding his breath, he shifted his position without making any sound. Why were there no noises? Why hadn’t his dad called him home yet? Was this the moment he’d been waiting for? Were he and Mira going to be dropped through some portal to another time, like the children in Narnia or that ship in Final Countdown? Electricity crackled beneath his skin. Could it have already happened? No, he could still smell the acrid reek of the tar pit. But it would. There would be a sign; there was always a sign in the stories.

  The sky grew darker. Nothing else happened. “Hey, Mira,” he whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think a pollution club’s a good idea?”

  “What?”

  “A pollution club, you know—”

  She waved a hand. “Shhhhh.” She glanced up at the dark sky. “When do you think he’ll come back? It’s getting late.”

  “I don’t know. He may not come at all.”

  She frowned, pushing her eyebrows together, but said nothing.

  They waited. The sky faded to midnight blue, the even tone broken only near the south where the orange Texaco flares reflected off the clouds. Yet, the sneering trees and clawed-hand branches fought the light back, leaving them in near-perfect shadow. Jeremy wanted to suggest they go home but he couldn’t think of how to say it and not sound terrified. Besides, what if the magic was just about to happen? He drew a design he couldn’t see in the loose sand between his knees.

  Something snatched his left wrist. He flinched. Mira’s pleading fingers rattled his arm, demanding attention. It
was too dark to see her eyes, so his gaze followed the direction of her nod. Jeremy’s heart jackhammered against his ribs, catching the gasp in his throat.

  A black shape stood against the grayness of the pond. Not one branch had cracked, not one pine needle had shifted. The form had just appeared. It was not exactly person-shaped, but it was too big to be any of the animals that lived in Twin Hills. Jeremy squeezed her fingers back; cold sweat trickled down his spine and he tried to keep his aching knees from clanging together.

  “Is it him?” Mira’s voice was only a whisper of accented air.

  “I don’t—” Did it just move? Had it heard?

  Mira’s fingers squeezed tighter. “Wh… What is it?”

  “We should go.”

  Mira leaned forward, squinting into the darkness.

  “Mira!”

  She tried to steady herself against his arm, but tipped them both forward into a pile of dead leaves. Breaking twigs and crumpling leaves shattered the silence like a gunshot. The thing whirled toward them. Now it looked person-shaped. And it was looking right at them. A second stretched into a breathless silence. Time suspended, slowing; his lungs held no air, his heart hung in mid-beat. It took one ponderous step, lumbering toward them. Then it took another.

  Jeremy and Mira bolted to their bikes, crushing branches in a raucous escape. The thing’s feet were close behind, splashing through water and slogging through mud. Mira vaulted onto her bike first, back wheel spitting up a ghostly plume of dust in the faint starlight. Jeremy careened onto his bike at a full run, pedaling to catch her. Its heavy feet thumped against the hard pack of the trail with the tempo of a predator’s heart: thok thunk. Thok thunk. Rough, wet breaths tickled Jeremy’s ears. He pedaled faster.