“I think it would have been better if I’d kept my mouth shut all those times. It didn’t help anything. And we wouldn’t be here now. You’d have a real shot at going to Breaker Bradley’s. Everything would be different.”
The coyotes’ cries grew louder, like they were heading in our direction. “There are worse things than losing a dirt bike,” she said. “People . . . People are more important than metal and rubber.”
“But I thought you said people always disappoint you.”
She tilted her head a little. “It’s possible to believe both, Gus.”
“Still . . .”
“Still . . .” She leaned over and bumped me with her shoulder. “It wouldn’t have been better.” Then she pushed herself back away from the ledge. “I’m so tired.” She laid her head against the rocky side of the mountain and closed her eyes. “Can’t we just rest for a minute?”
I leaned back beside her, and she let her head fall onto my shoulder. Her hair tickled my cheek and smelled like the cave—cool, clean, fresh earth, and rock. “Rossi?” My eyes felt heavier than they ever had in my life.
“Hm?” she said faintly.
“Why do you love riding so much?”
“Because. . .” Her voice trailed off. I nudged her a little to keep her awake. “It feels like flying.” Her raspy voice was slow from sleepiness. “Like I’m flying along. And I can forget this town . . . this life . . . this everything.” She breathed in slowly. “That’s the best feeling . . . in the world. Even if it only lasts . . . for a minute. Before I have to come back.”
And then it was quiet except for the cries of the coyotes slowly fading. I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, so I allowed myself to close them. But only for a minute. Before I had to come back.
repose: the state of being at rest; sleep
“Gus!” Rossi was shaking me. “Gus! Wake up!”
I opened my eyes. “What? What’s going on?”
“We fell asleep! The sun is up!”
I felt disoriented as I shielded my eyes from the sunlight. For a moment, I couldn’t remember where I was. Then I looked down and saw the desert ground far below us. I stood up carefully and took out my pocket watch. “It’s after six already.”
“Now we can see what this paper is,” Rossi said as she quickly pulled it out and unfolded it. She shook her head as she looked down at it. Then she held it up to the sun.
“What is it?”
She studied it awhile. Finally she said. “It is a map.”
I laughed. “Jessie will be so excited. What’s it a map of?”
She looked at me. “It’s a map of the cave.” She pointed at a spot on the map. “This is where we were, where Matthew went into the ground. You can see there’s another huge cavern below it.” She pointed at another spot on the map. “I think this is where the bats were and where the mine collapsed.”
I pointed at one side of the map. “What do you think this big shaded area is?”
Rossi shook her head. “I don’t know, but maybe we should try to avoid it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of facing the unknown, especially a big, dark, shaded unknown.
Rossi pointed at another spot on the map. “This is marked as an exit, but I think that’s where another big section of the mine caved in.” She looked at me excitedly. “Do you think William Dufort knew about the cave and made this map?”
“Maybe.”
Her mouth opened and shut. Opened and shut. “Maybe he didn’t die in the mine collapse at all. Maybe he went into the mountain.”
I smiled. “You have a lot of interesting theories.” I looked down at the map. “It’s cool and all,” I said. “But it doesn’t seem to really tell us anything very important.”
“See this?” Rossi said. “Over here: A.L. What do you think that means? I think it’s close to where we came in.”
I thought for a moment. “Angry ladies. We should probably avoid that area, too.”
Rossi ignored my joke, too focused on the map. “This other area right here is circled, but it’s not labeled. I wonder what’s there.” Shaking her head, she folded the map back up and put it in her pocket. “Too bad there wasn’t another exit marked.”
I gazed at the distant city of Casa Grande, which had been so bright and shining in the moonlight. It was barely visible in the glaring sunlight now, just a brown mirage in the distance. I wished there were some way for me to fly off this mountain, but I knew I had to go back in the horrible hole.
“It won’t be as bad going back,” I assured Rossi.
She shook her head. “No. It will be worse because this time we’re going toward dark instead of light.”
I shuddered at Rossi’s words before crouching down and squeezing into the hole.
It didn’t take long for the panic to set in as I stared ahead at the darkness. “Now’s your turn to tell me something,” I said.
Rossi breathed heavily behind me. “I’m not a thief,” she finally said.
I stopped to catch my breath. “What?” I asked her.
“I don’t care what Matthew or anyone thinks. But I want you to know—I’m not a thief.”
I continued inching forward. “I never thought for a moment you were.”
Rossi wheezed in and out a few times. “It’s scrap metal.”
“What?” I asked again.
“I get money by selling scrap metal to the scrapyard. You know, people treat this area of the desert like their own personal garbage can—car parts and bed frames and pipes and even old trailer parts and everything you can imagine. They just toss it out in the desert. I haul it in on my bike and sell it. I don’t think people realize that metal is valuable. Copper is the most valuable, but I almost never find any of that. Aluminum and steel are worth something, though, and there’s quite a bit of that out there. Plus, it cleans up the desert. Sometimes I haul in material I know isn’t worth anything just because I can’t stand to look at it.”
Now that I thought about it, I had seen her pulling stuff behind her bike and had wondered more than once what the heck she was doing dragging garbage around.
industrious: diligent and hard-working
“That’s smart, Rossi. You’re smart.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.” She took a deep, wheezing breath behind me. “I just know about metal.”
I was already at the end. I pushed myself out back into the dark of the cave. I reached for Rossi in the blackness. She grabbed my hands, and I helped her crawl back onto the ledge. Once she was out, the light from the opening lit up the cave around us. We stood and stared at each other, still grasping hands, our breath gradually evening out. “You know about a lot of things,” I told her.
I let go of Rossi’s hands and searched for Matthew and Jessie. All I found was my backpack lying on the rock. They were gone.
“Man,” I cried. “They had one job. One job—sit here and wait.” I looked below us. “Lion’s gone.”
“Maybe it ate them,” Rossi said, and even though it wouldn’t really be funny if Matthew and Jessie had been eaten alive by the mountain lion, I laughed a little. “Lantern and flashlight are gone, too. But there’s your shoe.”
“And your helmet.” I scanned the ground below us. “They must be somewhere around here. I guess we better get down.”
I slipped my backpack over my shoulders, even though there wasn’t anything useful left in it. A new backpack wasn’t an option in my life, and I didn’t want to be one of the kids who had to bring their stuff to school in a garbage bag. We jumped from boulder to boulder until we got to the lowest one. I helped ease Rossi down then turned around and slid off the large rock. I fell back and Rossi tried to catch me, but we both tumbled to the cave floor, rocks digging into every part of me.
Rossi grunted. “I think I landed on your shoe.” She reached under herself and pulled it out.
I took my shoe from her and slipped it back on. Thank goodness it got saved, even if it now had toot
h marks in it. Actually, the tooth marks made the cheap shoes feel cooler somehow, like a tough scar.
I got up and brushed the dirt from my ripped clothing. I looked down at my AT LEAST IT’S A DRY HEAT T-shirt. It was so ripped and stained the words were no longer readable. So basically, the shirt had been improved.
“I don’t think I’ll be wearing this again,” I said.
Rossi fingered her own ripped T-shirt. “No.”
The area we were standing in was lit up by the daylight coming in through the hole—a little island of light. Rossi sighed. “We’re stuck.”
“So stupid leaving the boulder,” I mumbled. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Then I heard distant footsteps. Quick ones. And lots of them. Then Jessie’s voice. “Run!” he cried.
Then Matthew: “Pigs!”
Rossi and I stood frozen. Matthew and Jessie were running straight for us, the light of the tiny flashlight moving around spastically in Jessie’s hand, followed by the largest herd of javelina I’d ever seen in my life.
Rossi grabbed my arm and pulled me in the other direction. We ran into the dark, but the javelina were soon under our feet. One even butted me in the butt, a feat only possible for the stubby pig because of my short legs. I stumbled to the ground and covered my head with my arms as they stampeded around me.
When it was finally quiet, and I had moved each of my limbs around to make sure they weren’t broken, I jumped up. “Rossi,” I said. I felt on the verge of panic, being in the dark, not knowing where anyone was.
“Technically, javelina are peccaries,” Rossi said in the dark, breathing hard. “Not pigs.”
“Thanks for the science lesson, Ms. Rossi . . . teacher . . . lady,” I heard Matthew say from somewhere.
A light flipped on not far from us, and we turned to find Jessie and Matthew clinging to a wall behind us. “Are the peckers gone?” Jessie asked.
“They’re gone,” Rossi said. “It’s safe to come down now.”
Matthew and Jessie slowly got down from the wall. “Why’d you guys leave?” I said.
They looked at each other. “We fell asleep for a while,” Matthew said. “Don’t know how long. Then we heard this snorting. It was totally freaking us out—” Jessie elbowed him. “I mean, we were curious to find out what it was, and then we saw this cute little baby javelina below us. It started running away, so we followed it, thinking, you know, it might be a way out. But then a bunch of big javelina came out of nowhere and chased us. And that’s when we ran back into you. We were only gone for like two minutes. How long were you gone? What time is it?”
“It’s after six,” I said. “We were gone for a couple of hours.”
“Did you get out?” Jessie asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But the hole just led to a ledge on the side of the mountain. There was no way for us to get down.”
Jessie’s shoulders slumped. “You think someone could hear you if you yelled?”
“I think we’re still at least a mile from town based on where we were on the mountain. I don’t think anyone could hear us from there. But the good news is we seem to be moving closer to town instead of farther away.”
“What does that matter if we never get out?” Matthew said.
“We’re going to get out,” I assured him. “All these animals get in and out. So will we.” I looked from Matthew to Jessie. “Where’s the lantern?”
Jessie shook his head. “Burned out, man. It’s gone. I dropped it when the javelina came at us because it was useless anyway.”
I breathed in. “You mean all we have for light is that little flashlight?”
“Until it burns out, too,” said Matthew.
“We’ll be stuck in here in the dark,” said Jessie. “We need to get out of here.”
I opened the pocket watch and checked the time. “You’re probably right. Maybe we should go in the direction the pigs came from. They probably left a trail.”
“Did you guys see what was on that paper?” Matthew asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s kind of cool. It’s a map of the cave.”
Jessie’s face lit up. I knew he would be thrilled about guessing right. “I told you it was a map!”
“Then we can get out,” Matthew said.
I shook my head. “No. The only exit marked leads to a collapsed area of the mine. It’s probably blocked.”
“Let me see that pocket watch.” Jessie snatched it out of my hand. He shined the flashlight on it while we continued debating what to do.
“I vote for the pigs,” I said.
“Me, too,” said Rossi.
“Okay,” Matthew said. “The pig way.”
We all looked at Jessie. “Hey, do you think the person who made that map scratched this stuff onto the watch?” he said.
“Scratched what stuff?” I looked at the watch in Jessie’s hand. “I’ve never seen any stuff scratched.”
“Here,” Jessie said. “Inside the secret compartment. It says ‘A.L.’s nose.’ Whatever that means.”
I looked at Rossi. “A.L.?”
Rossi opened the paper again and we shined the flashlight on it. “Here,” she said. “Not far from where we first came in, which is here,” she said softly to herself. “And here are the petroglyphs. There’s an arrow here.” She stopped and looked up at me.
“What?” I asked her.
“That arrow,” she said. “The one on the rock. It was pointing in the direction of A.L. It’s this one here.” She looked at Jessie. “Maybe it is a treasure map.”
Matthew eyed me. “But who made the map? Gus’s great-grandfather or mine?”
“Does it really matter?” Rossi said. “Something is here, at A.L.’s nose. Something important enough to leave clues on how to get there.” Rossi looked at me, her eyes huge and glowing in the flashlight.
“Gold,” I said.
She nodded excitedly. “I think so, too.”
Jessie shuffled from foot to foot, shaking his head. “I don’t know about going back where we were, man. If this flashlight burns out we’ll never get out.”
“It’s worth a try, isn’t it?” I said.
Jessie was now hopping from foot to foot. “We don’t even know what A. L. means.”
“Maybe we’ll know when we get there,” I said.
“And maybe we’ll all die in the dark!” Jessie cried.
So dramatic.
“I tell you what,” I said, “if it even flickers once, we’ll get out of here. The last thing I want is to be stuck here in the dark.” I shivered at the thought.
“What about the race?” said Matthew.
“We can’t get Rossi’s bike back without any gold, so that doesn’t even matter,” I said.
“It does matter,” Matthew said. “I can still race.”
Jessie snorted. “Yeah, race and lose.”
Matthew stared at the ground and mumbled, “That’s not . . . totally . . . not true.” He looked at Jessie. “But at least I’m not such a bad racer that I destroyed my bike.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” Jessie whined. “I hit a rut in the silt.”
Matthew gaped at Jessie. “And how is that not your fault?”
“Enough,” I said. “Let’s vote on it. Raise your hand if you want to go find a bag of gold, potentially enough to buy whatever we want, including new dirt bikes for everyone.”
Rossi and I raised our hands.
Jessie and Matthew looked at each other. I hoped I had brainwashed them well enough with the promise of new dirt bikes.
They slowly raised their hands.
“Ape lollipops,” said Jessie.
“Astronaut legs,” said Matthew.
“Anteater lice,” said Jessie.
“Apple lemons,” said Matthew.
Jessie stopped and stared at Matthew. “Apple lemons? That’s not even a thing.”
“Oh, and ape lollipops are?” Matthew said. “How about annoying Latinos?”
Jessie glared at Matthew. “How a
bout agitated Latinos?”
agitated: feeling or appearing troubled or nervous
I smiled at Jessie. “Nice, man. But it’s none of those things. Obviously. And it has a nose.”
“Annoying Latinos have noses,” said Matthew.
“This annoying Latino is about to punch your nose,” said Jessie. “I mean agitated Latino.” Then Jessie jumped up and down, raising his hand like we were in school. “Oh, I know, I know! Andy Letterman.”
We all snickered. Andy Letterman was one of the richest kids in Nowhere—he lived in a double-wide trailer and wore clothes from Target. He was a total snob about it, too, like he was so much better than everyone else because his shirts cost two for ten dollars instead of ten for two dollars.
“I bet we’ll find him just standing there in one of his fancy T-shirts looking down his nose at us,” Jessie said. Then he frowned. “That would be really disappointing.”
Rossi studied the map and turned around in a circle. “This map is hard to read. And it’s so dark in here.”
I stood beside her and stared at the map. I nodded and squinted my eyes like I was working something out, when really I was working nothing out. It looked mostly like a bunch of squiggly lines to me.
“Why don’t you just use your Indian sense, Rossi?” Matthew asked.
Rossi dropped the map and narrowed her eyes at him. “My Indian sense?”
“Yeah, you know,” Matthew said. “Like how you guys are all one with nature and the spirit world and all that. You know things that regular people don’t.”
“Regular people?” Rossi asked.
“Yeah,” said Matthew. “It’s like how animals can sense things. Or babies.”
“It’s like how animals can sense babies?” said Rossi.
“No. It’s like how animals and babies can sense things. Like ghosts and stuff. Indians are like that, too.”
“Oh, yes.” Rossi nodded her head. “My Indian sense. Wait a moment. I think my Indian sense is telling me something right now.” She closed her eyes and pointed both fingers at her temples, the map in one hand. “Yes. Yes, thank you, wise Indian sense.” She opened her eyes and looked at Matthew. “My Indian sense has just informed me that you still wet the bed.”
24 Hours in Nowhere Page 10
