It was bad enough when Sibley ignored Preston, Julian thought, but to be caught in his laser gaze was even worse.
“That’s quite a coincidence. I’ve been doing a little studying about redwoods myself. For a project at work.”
Julian nearly dropped his chopsticks.
“Do you know, for example,” Sibley continued, “that an acre of old-growth redwood can hold more than two hundred thousand board feet of wood. And that old-growth redwood is currently selling at more than two dollars a board foot. That means that one acre of redwood is worth what, Preston?”
Preston swallowed and scrunched up his eyes. “Two thousand dollars?”
“Not two thousand dollars.” Sibley’s smile failed to mask his impatience. “Think before you answer. What are you calculating? It’s basically two times two.”
Preston hunched his shoulders miserably.
Julian couldn’t stand it anymore. “Four hundred thousand dollars an acre.”
Sibley turned his gaze to Julian. “Correct. And if you were to acquire fifty acres of timberland with even half of this density, its gross worth would be approximately?...”
“Ten million dollars,” Julian said. Now, at last, he had something to tell Robin.
“Correct. Perhaps we should have you tutor Preston in arithmetic. Although, I suppose we should have thought of that two months ago. In any case,” Sibley went on, “there’s something concrete to put in your report, Preston. Do you think you can remember that?”
Preston nodded, relieved that the cross-examination was over.
“So, Uncle Sibley, what kind of project is this?” Julian asked.
Sibley gave him a look of pleased surprise. “Oh, small potatoes, really. The property ended up in our portfolio after a number of unrelated transactions. Still, it’s good to diversify your assets.”
“Enough business!” exclaimed Daphne. “It’s time for dessert!”
Daphne retreated to the kitchen and returned a moment later, humming “Auld Lang Syne” and carrying a pink ice-cream cake with SO LONG JULIEN in white letters across the top. Did his aunt not know how to spell his name, Julian wondered, or had the cake decorator made a mistake? Julian was still hoping to get more information out of his uncle, but Sibley waved away dessert and went off to his study. Daphne took a single bite before pushing away her plate.
The cake was too sweet for Julian, but he tried to finish most of his piece so he wouldn’t seem ungrateful. Ten million dollars. That was a lot of money for a bunch of trees.
Preston alone seemed to truly enjoy his cake, and when he had scraped up every drop of goo with his fork, he looked sorrowfully at the remainder, slowly melting on a cardboard sheet. Seconds were not allowed at Sibley’s house and neither was plate licking.
“Well, Julian, I hope you enjoyed our little party,” Daphne said, smiling her glacial smile. “Since you’re sleeping over at Tommy’s tomorrow, this is our last night together for some time.”
“Danny’s,” Julian said. “And his mom’s going to pick me up after camp too. Remember? It’s his birthday?”
Daphne checked her BlackBerry. “Back on July 10th. Saturday.” She smiled again. Discussing his imminent departure had improved her mood. “Now, off to bed, you two,” she said. And she rose from the table, took the remainder of the ice-cream cake into the kitchen, and dumped it in the garbage.
Julian followed Preston up the stairs, then watched him as he brushed his teeth and washed his face. “I wish you weren’t leaving.” Preston pulled his dinosaur pajama top over his pale chest. “Will you stay with me while I fall asleep?”
Preston’s room was painted sky blue. His sheets and bedspread were covered with rocket ships and the ceiling was decorated with stars and planets and comets. Preston climbed into bed and Julian turned out the light. A rocket night-light glowed and the stars on the ceiling shone with a faint fluorescence.
“Will you tell me the story of the Little Astronaut? Please? It’s your last night.”
“OK. But only a short one tonight.” Julian sat down at the foot of Preston’s bed and thought for a moment, staring at the night-light.
“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a little astronaut. He had a wonderful rocket ship. It was red, white, and blue and it could travel the speed of light. Every night he would travel around the solar system with his pet monkey, who was also a highly trained astronaut. They’d go to Jupiter. Saturn. Pluto. Because they were traveling so fast, a trip that seemed to take them just a few hours would be hundreds of years on Earth. They would come back and there would be all new people, even new cities.”
“Did they meet any aliens?” Preston asked.
“Of course. Outer space is filled with aliens. In fact, one day the Little Astronaut got a message from another space explorer named Gizmo saying that Gizmo’s home planet was under attack. The Little Astronaut was across the galaxy in a flash. He used his special force field to repel the alien attackers while the monkey launched high-speed banana missiles. From then on, Gizmo and the Little Astronaut were best friends.”
Preston lay on his back with his eyes wide.
“When the Little Astronaut and his monkey came back to Earth, they built a tree house with a special receiver to send messages to and from Gizmo. They visited each other every Christmas and lived happily ever after. The end.”
They watched the light from the fluorescent stars grow dim. After a few moments, Preston turned over onto his stomach and closed his eyes. Julian sat still for a long time, listening, until the sound of Preston’s breath grew heavy and even, like the sea, and the luminescent stars faded into darkness. Then he walked silently out of the room and pulled the door behind him, leaving it open just a crack.
As soon as he got to Danny’s the next morning, Julian felt his spirits rise. The boys shut themselves inside Danny’s room and immediately got out Julian’s to-do list.
“We’ve already done everything,” Danny said. “We wrote Robin. The sleepovers are set. Robin’s taking care of the exchange student thing. We’ve got the Greyhound schedule. All we have left to do is cancel math camp.” He shook his head. “We should have picked something more challenging—like robbing a bank or stopping a terrorist plot. This is child’s play.”
“So far, I’ve only escaped from my uncle’s for an hour. I haven’t made it to Robin’s. Oh, and I forgot to tell you the worst part. I think those trees are worth ten million dollars. At least all together.”
Danny whistled.“Ten million dollars. That’s a lot. I don’t think we’re going to be able to put our hands on that kind of money.” He furrowed his brow like a cartoon character. “Unless we rob a bank! On to plan B!”
“Well, there’s no way that I’m going to convince my uncle not to cut down the trees, not for that kind of money. I don’t know. I think I’m giving Robin the wrong impression by going up there. She thinks I can actually help her.”
“False hope’s better than no hope,” Danny said cheerfully. “Besides, it’s better than math camp. Speaking of which …” He turned to the computer and pulled up the website for High Sights Academy. “Ze time has come!” he said in a Dracula voice. Then, “Give me the phone.”
“What are you going to say? Maybe I should do it.”
“Are you kidding me? You’ll end up confessing the whole plan and next thing you know you’ll be on a road trip to Fresno.” Danny pushed the button for the speaker phone and started punching in the phone number. There was a tinny ring and then a tired female voice said, “High Sights Academy.”
“Hello,” Danny said in a British accent. “This is Daphne Carter’s personal assistant. I’m calling to cancel the registration for Ms. Carter’s nephew, Julian Carter-Li.”
“May I ask the reason for the cancellation?”
“Oh …” Danny grinned at Julian. “They’ve decided to go on a safari instead. You know, lions … elephants … wildebeests.”
“One moment, please.” There was a long pause and then the voice sa
id defensively, “Julian’s session begins tomorrow and is paid in full. There is no tuition refund for cancellations within thirty days of the start of the session.”
“Entirely understandable,” Danny said magnanimously.
“Well, thank you!” There was a sudden friendliness to the tone. “You have no idea how difficult some people can be about refunds. Even though our policy is stated very clearly in our materials.”
“People!” Danny said. “They want to have their cake and eat it too!”
Julian made an exasperated face—what was that supposed to mean?—but the woman laughed and said, “Exactly! But I appreciate your understanding. I’ll just e-mail you a confirmation and—”
“No!” Danny shouted.
“Excuse me?”
Danny regained his composure and said quickly, “I’m afraid Ms. Carter is no longer doing e-mail. Spam!”
“Ooooh—that spam can be awful. No problem. I’ll just mail the confirmation to her home address.”
“I’m afraid she’s already in Mombasa. No idea when she’ll return to the States. Really, we don’t need any confirmation. Julian’s on safari. Tuition’s paid in full. What’s to confirm?”
“I suppose so,” the woman said dubiously.
“Trust me. Ms. Carter would not want to be bothered. She’s extremely focused on the safari right now.”
“In that case, we’ll just keep the receipt in our files. Thanks for calling and I hope Julian isn’t eaten by a lion or anything,” the woman said cheerfully.
“Oh, that wouldn’t be the worst thing,” Danny said in a confidential tone. “In fact, I rather hope he is. He’s quite a holy terror. Well, toodle-loo!”
“Toodle-loo to you too!”
The woman was still laughing giddily when Danny put down the phone. “Am I good or what?” he said with a broad smile.
“You have a real talent for lying. And you’ve ruined my reputation too. Congratulations!”
“We all have our gifts,” Danny said humbly.
After lunch the boys walked down Clement Street to the bank. Julian removed $160 from his college savings account, which left him with $877.32. His grandmother, Popo, always gave him a red envelope with a $100 bill on Chinese New Year. And she sent him $50 on his birthday every year, with careful instructions to deposit it in the account she’d opened for him.
Julian had never withdrawn any money before. He enjoyed thinking of his bank account growing continually fatter with interest and deposits. It had taken him a lifetime to break a thousand, and he was sorry to see the total fall back into the hundreds again. But, he figured, this was an emergency.
By 7:45 the next morning, the boys had said good-bye to Eduardo, finished their breakfast, and finally convinced Luciana—for the third time—that Julian could get himself to the High Sights Academy bus pick-up. They waited for a safe interval after Luciana left for work, then stepped out into the fog and walked toward Geary Boulevard. Julian had his duffel bag, snacks for the trip, the application forms for the exchange program, and $160 in his wallet.
“Don’t forget to get off at the Greyhound station,” Danny said when they reached the city bus stop. “And e-mail me when you get there. We should have a code, in case there’s an emergency and I need to get hold of you.”
“How about ‘Please call. It’s an emergency.’”
Danny looked at him with scorn. “The code will be ‘The river is rising.’ If you get that message, you have to contact me immediately.”
“There aren’t even any rivers in San Francisco.”
Danny considered. “OK. How about ‘The tide is rising’?”
The bus pulled up and the wings of the door flapped open.
“How about ‘Call Danny’?” Julian hoisted his duffel bag up the steps and flashed his bus pass at the driver.
“It’s ‘The tide is rising’!” Danny shouted. “Be strong! Have a good trip.”
Julian waved, the doors folded behind him, and the bus lurched forward into the rush-hour traffic.
The long ride downtown was hot and stuffy. Crammed among the rush-hour passengers, Julian could barely see out the window. Still, he got off at the right stop and navigated the Greyhound station without a problem. The ticket agent barely glanced at him, giving him a round-trip ticket to Willits without even a suspicious look. After a few minutes of confusion, he found the correct bus and boarded.
As the bus wound its way through the city streets, Julian pulled out a bag of potato chips and a chocolate bar. His breakfast at Danny’s house felt like a distant memory. He made the chocolate last until the bus crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. At the next station, a handful of new people climbed aboard, all looking slightly demented or sinister or both. Luckily, the bus was not full and Julian was able to ward off fellow passengers by placing his duffel bag on the seat next to his.
The chips, eaten methodically, one by one, lasted nearly half an hour. The bus passed an endless sprawl of malls and car dealerships and housing developments. Slowly, the houses grew farther apart, and soon he was looking out at oak trees and fields of grass, already turning brown. Although the day outside looked fresh and breezy, the air inside the bus reeked of disinfectant and old cigarettes and diesel fuel, and the mix of smells—and the constant hum of the engine and the lurching motion of the bus as it went up and down hills and around bends—made Julian feel a little sick.
He had nothing to do but look out the window. He wondered what people did in the towns that were passing by so quickly. There were only a few jobs that made sense to him. Farming, for example, and even logging. Farmers sold their food and loggers sold the trees they cut down. That he could understand.
But nobody in San Francisco was a farmer or a logger and neither, Julian guessed, were most of the people in these towns. They were doctors or truck drivers or librarians or maybe they worked in the gas stations and fast food restaurants he passed along the road. Where did the money for all these people come from? Most people, it seemed to him, had jobs that did not produce anything or create anything useful, yet somehow they lived. And some, like his uncle, produced nothing at all, and yet lived extremely well.
He didn’t understand money, Julian decided. His mother, for example, sometimes said—jokingly? he wasn’t sure—that money was the root of all evil. She preferred to barter: photographs for babysitting or yoga classes or even teeth cleaning. Yet somehow, she ended up with enough money for food and clothes and camera equipment.
Julian grew bored with thinking about money. Instead, he played a game his fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Felicity, had taught the class: He tried to imagine how the land might have looked five hundred years earlier, when the Miwok Indians lived there.
It was harder than it seemed at first. The telephone poles and buildings and fences and cows were the easiest to erase. But it was almost impossible to imagine away the highway. The road, with cars and trucks and buses racing along it at seventy miles per hour, seemed like something permanent, an eternal passageway.
In class, they’d built roads over model landscapes, weighing how much dirt had to be cut out of the hillsides and filled into the low spots. It was not easy to build a wide, flat road over land that curved and rose and fell. If the highway went between two hills, Julian knew that the hills must once have come together, perhaps with a little creek running between them. In his mind, he had to unearth the creek lying hidden beneath the road.
Even the trees and plants might have changed. That was the trickiest part, his teacher had said. San Francisco, for example, was covered with eucalyptus trees. But those trees came from Australia! They wouldn’t have been there five hundred years ago.
Five hundred years wasn’t so long. But everything had changed so that a Miwok boy zoomed into the present might not even recognize this land. What would surprise him the most? Television? Computer games? Airplanes? Or just the city of San Francisco—miles and miles of concrete and asphalt, crowded with people. He would be amazed and impressed. Or maybe not. Maybe
he would shake his head sadly and ask to be taken home.
The bus wound its way north. Julian lay his head against the window and closed his eyes. His legs ached to be stretched. At the rest stop, he used the filthy bathroom and bought a cold root beer.
Julian had never been so far from San Francisco. They passed vineyards and piles of logs as tall as a two-story house. Then the hills on either side of the road grew higher and more desolate. It was not so hard to imagine away the people now. The landscape seemed barely touched by human hands, a wilderness, with only the highway winding on and on.
Finally, he began to see signs for Willits, and then they were in the town, although it was not like any town he’d ever seen, just a strip of low buildings and stores and an occasional house. There was not even a bus station, just a fast-food restaurant where everybody climbed off the bus for the half-hour lunch stop, blinking in the sunshine. Julian grabbed his duffel bag and stepped into the fresh air.
He stood awkwardly for a moment, scanning the unfamiliar parking lot. There was no girl looking expectantly toward the bus.
Not knowing what else to do, Julian sat down on the curb at the edge of the parking lot, and tried to look inconspicuous. On the main road, cars and trucks sped by indifferently, and Julian waited with a growing sense of despair as his fellow passengers smoked their cigarettes and ate their hamburgers and french fries. He waited while they filed back onto the bus. Then he watched the bus pull away in a cloud of diesel fumes, leaving him alone in the abandoned parking lot.
t first, Julian had eagerly scanned every car that pulled into the parking lot. But after nearly an hour, he gave up. His situation, he figured, was fairly dire. According to the Greyhound schedule posted on the kiosk, there would be no bus returning to San Francisco until the next morning. And even if he somehow survived the night in Willits—a daunting prospect—and was able to make it back to San Francisco, where would he go? He could hardly return to his uncle’s. And math camp was no longer an option.
Operation Redwood Page 5
