Starfish

by James Crowley

  In the days that followed Grandpa’s departure, the group continued their long walks into the Great wood, but now walked in silence. The days of pirate adventure were traded for thoughts of what had transpired and apprehension at what still lay ahead.

  It was during one of these somber forays through the trees that they became reacquainted with Tom Gunn of the Heart Butte renegades.

  Chapter Thirty

  A BLODDIED TOM GUNN • JENKINS & LUMPKIN • “THEY’RE IN THE WOODS”

  THEY WERE out hunting one day when they were startled by the sound of a large animal crashing through the undergrowth. Junebug heard it first, but Beatrice and Mr. Hawkins must have then seen it, because they both immediately broke from the group in pursuit.

  Lionel, Corn Poe, and Junebug tried to follow, but soon lost Beatrice and Mr. Hawkins somewhere among the trees. They paused to catch their breath, and Junebug crouched, turning his head in owl-like fashion with every creak and groan from the big trees that surrounded them.

  “What in God’s creation was that?” Corn Poe gasped.

  Junebug ignored him, continuing instead to rotate his head, eventually facing north, then abruptly standing and looking at Lionel. Lionel understood, and followed when Junebug suddenly broke away without making a sound.

  “What—ya hear something?” Lionel heard Corn Poe call.

  Lionel ran at Junebug’s heels, easily weaving between the massive tree trunks that descended from the great canopy above, and jumping over the crumbling decay of logs that lay in their path.

  “Come on, what did ya hear?” Corn Poe yelled from behind, struggling to catch them. “What is it?”

  They ran for a long time, but did not tire. Lionel noted that with every step, the distance between them and Corn Poe’s fading cries became more evident.

  They ran as fast as they could until they reached a slight ridge that hung over a low depression. They paused at the lip, and below them they saw Beatrice closing in on what now appeared to be some sort of man, a thin man. The thin man ran recklessly, bouncing off trees and falling over their broken limbs. Mr. Hawkins, carrying his rifle, was right behind Beatrice.

  Junebug and Lionel slid down the embankment on a heavy blanket of leaves and scrambled to their feet in time to see Beatrice tackle the runner and disappear behind the base of a large tree. They followed as fast as they could, and in no time, rounded the tree to find Beatrice sitting on Tom Gunn, holding him facedown on the forest floor. Mr. Hawkins stood over them, collecting his breath.

  “You’ve got to let me go, you’ve got to, or they’re gonna catch me!” Tom Gunn spat dirt and wet rotting leaves from his mouth. “It won’t take long for them to figure I’m gone!”

  Beatrice stood, allowing Tom to roll over; and that’s when they all saw his bruised and battered face. Tom’s right eye was swollen shut, and there was a cut on his upper lip. He also wore a two-inch gash smack dab in the middle of his forehead, and his tattered turkey feathers were missing.

  “I’m tellin’ ya, you’re best to let me go!” Tom yelled.

  “Son, just take a minute to catch your breath,” Mr. Hawkins said, frantically scanning the low depression where they stood.

  “I just don’t want ’em to catch me,” Tom said, his words turning into low and heavy sobs. “I just wanna go back to school. I just wanna go home.”

  Lionel looked at Beatrice, who watched Tom without emotion.

  “Hey, where are y’all?” suddenly boomed across the wash. “I can hear ya, but I sure the hell can’t see ya.”

  Mr. Hawkins’s head snapped in the direction of Corn Poe’s voice. “That boy is just about a hair away from bein’ a full-blown idiot, ain’t he?”

  “Come on, y’all,” Corn Poe’s cries continued, “where are ya?”

  Mr. Hawkins shot a look at Junebug, and in a silent flash the boy was gone, running back in the direction of Corn Poe’s pleading cries. Mr. Hawkins kneeled down next to Tom and helped him to sit.

  “Son, you’re all right now.”

  Lionel noticed that there was something different in Mr. Hawkins’s voice and that his face had wrinkled into a concerned frown.

  “Now, listen. I ain’t gonna hurt ya, but I do need you to answer me this right away. How far back are these folks that did this to ya?”

  Tom looked up at Mr. Hawkins with a curious expression. “They’re a ways back. I’ve been running through the night, but they’ll catch me. I know they will.” Tom looked wildly around, resting his gaze on Beatrice and Lionel. “They’re looking for you!”

  “Me?” Corn Poe retorted, appearing from behind the big tree with Junebug at his side. “Go figure.”

  “Corn Poe, make yourself useful and get this boy something to drink,” Mr. Hawkins instructed. Tom, although battered, bruised, and bleeding, looked to have calmed down a bit. “Now, who’s after who, son? who ya running from?” Hawkins persisted.

  “The men, the government men from the outpost. They’re here. They’re here somewhere in the woods.”

  Mr. Hawkins’s face tightened. Lionel watched, but Beatrice’s expression remained unchanged.

  “Barney decided he’d try to collect the hundred dollars for the return of the horse, but these men…Lumpkin and Jenkins…they’ve gone crazy. went to hittin’ me and Barney after we left the captain.”

  “The captain?”

  “Yeah, when he heard that his horse was up in the mountains, he formed his own party to set out to retrieve ’im. Jenkins convinced the captain to let him and Lumpkin go ahead to scout. Made me and Barney go with ’em.”

  Corn Poe reappeared with a small flask of water and handed it to Tom, who drank it all in a single gulp.

  “We were supposed to go back to where the captain is camped to report, but Jenkins, the one with the scar, he said that we’re close enough and that he don’t need the captain to apprehend renegade children, so he made us keep going.”

  “How many men’s he got?” Hawkins shot, in a tone that Lionel wouldn’t have recognized as his voice before today.

  “Well, back at the captain’s camp, they got about ten, maybe twelve, but Jenkins got about five with him, five not including Mr. Lumpkin. I left in the night ’cause Jenkins hit the bottle and went to beatin’ on me and Barney, claiming we knew more than we let on and that we was leading him on what he called ‘a wild goose chase.’”

  Tom paused and tilted the empty flask back toward the sky, draining it of its few remaining drops.

  “Barney got the worst of it. I don’t think he cares for the one hundred dollars no more.”

  Mr. Hawkins sat back on his haunches and looked up at Junebug, who stood at the base of the tree next to Corn Poe.

  “What?” Corn Poe asked.

  But Mr. Hawkins stayed quiet.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  BACK ON THE RUN • ELK AT THE STREAM • SWIMMING • A FIRELESS CAMP • THE TRUTH ABOUT AVERY JOHN & JUNEBUG HAWKINS

  THEY RAN as a group back to the meadow in silence, Mr. Hawkins prodding Corn Poe and Tom Gunn to keep up for the majority of the journey. when they got back to the meadow Mr. Hawkins told the boys to take Tom to clean up down at the stream.

  They left Mr. Hawkins and Beatrice standing in front of the lodge with the horses, and Lionel felt a heaviness that he had not experienced since they had run away from the boarding school, the same haunted presence that had left him that first night at their grandfather’s house on the Milk River.

  Lionel walked ahead, leaving Corn Poe rambling on to Junebug about his various theories as to the true motivations of the government’s pursuit. Junebug was a good listener and therefore Corn Poe’s preferred audience.

  When Lionel got to the stream, from the corner of his eye he saw something move. He turned, hoping for a moment that his grandfather, having heard that there was trouble, had come back. Instead, he found that he had interrupted a family of elk drinking from the swirling stream.

  Lionel watched as the elk casually drank their fill and moved f
rom the water to the woods. Lionel locked eyes with the bull elk as he paused to show his wide antlers before fading into the trees. Lionel was still thinking about the elk’s dark black eyes as Corn Poe, Tom, and Junebug reached the stream.

  “My vote is that we head to Canada. They already looked for us up there, and therefore, now that they’re back here, it’s the last place they’ll think we’ll be,” Corn Poe was saying as Tom lay on his belly to drink from the creek.

  Lionel wondered what Beatrice would think about Corn Poe continuing to include himself in all of their plans, and now that he thought about it, he noticed that Corn Poe almost seemed to be enjoying this. He watched the other three boys and thought about Beatrice and Mr. Hawkins back at the lodge and how fast they had been able to move through the woods that very morning. How fast they had been able to move without all of them.

  Lionel decided to go for a swim to clear his head and pulled off his clothes, starting with the bear claws. He hung the string of claws from a low branch of a quaking aspen, stripped off his clothes, and jumped into the stream’s deepest pool. The cold water surged over Lionel’s body, reviving his legs, tired from the morning’s run. Lionel was happy that the tumbling waters from the stream drowned out Corn Poe, who continued to hypothesize his different plans of escape.

  Lionel’s head hurt, so he swam under a small waterfall and leaned forward to drink, letting the water beat onto the back of his neck and shoulders. He heard what he thought to be a distant whistle, but as he swam toward the muddy bank, realized from Junebug’s reaction that it was one of Mr. Hawkins’s birdcalls. He followed Corn Poe, Junebug, and Tom, gathering his piled clothes and pulling them on as he ran back to the lodge.

  Mr. Hawkins stood before the lodge, cinching the saddles on his already loaded horses. He worked quickly, barely acknowledging the boys as they ran across the meadow to join him. Lionel looked around for Beatrice and Ulysses.

  “I must be outta my head. I should just be takin’ my boy and leavin’ the rest of ya,” Mr. Hawkins said, more to himself than to the rest of them. “Me and old Junebug got ourselves organized and know how to move. I can’t say the same about the rest of you.”

  Mr. Hawkins lifted a heavy sack of flour onto the back of one of the packhorses and tied the thick canvas over it.

  “And you,” Hawkins said, turning to Corn Poe, “I don’t want no more foolishness. No more of this idle chatter. You’re to keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told! I want you to think before ya speak.”

  Beatrice appeared from behind the lodge, riding high on Ulysses’s back. Their few supplies were already tied in small bundles to the great horse’s neck.

  “Do ya hear me, boy?” Mr. Hawkins demanded. “’Cause I’ll leave ya here, if not. I’ll leave ya right here!”

  Corn Poe stood, surprisingly speechless.

  “Now, gather your things. You do the same, Lionel. Check to see if your sister got everything.”

  Lionel and Corn Poe ran into the lodge, fueled by the urgency in Mr. Hawkins’s voice. Avery John Hawkins seemed like a different person, the anger making his voice almost unrecognizable.

  They crossed the crooked doorframe and Lionel paused, impatiently letting his eyes adjust to the dim light. As the cavernous fireplace slowly came into view, Lionel wondered if this was the last time he would ever see the lodge. Corn Poe scrambled about, blindly throwing his only other shirt, his spare pair of woolen socks, and a blue tin cup into his heavy jacket.

  “That’s my kit,” he said, and shot back out the door.

  Lionel surveyed the room once more. His sister had, while he was swimming, taken care of everything.

  They rode for the rest of the day and into the night. They rode higher and higher up into the mountains, Beatrice and Lionel on the back of Ulysses, Junebug and Mr. Hawkins on their horses, and Corn Poe and Tom Gunn riding on the pack horses that Mr. Hawkins led up the winding, narrow trail. Lionel could see the meadow and the lodge spiraling farther and farther below them as they climbed higher and higher. He wondered—if their grandfather did return, how would he find them? He wondered where Mr. Hawkins was taking them.

  That night they made a small camp, but Mr. Hawkins warned them not to get comfortable, as they would be moving out long before the first light of morning. He wouldn’t let them start a fire as it could give away their position, but instead stood over them, unpacking a portion of their load, continuing to go on about Corn Poe and his particular ability to create mischief.

  “We should never have stopped,” Mr. Hawkins went on, mumbling to himself. “As much as I love that little lodge in the summers, we should’a kept going the second we saw the smoke rising from that crumbled and crooked ol’ chimney. Nine times outta ten, these days, where there’s smoke, there’s people; and where there’s people, there’s problems. And now, oh now, we got the lion’s share in all of ’em.”

  Mr. Hawkins threw his saddle to the ground and flung himself into an unhappy heap against it. The children gathered in a small circle around a fire that wasn’t there and sat, eating the stringy smoked meat.

  The moon rose, accompanied by the ever present sounds of the night. Lionel knew that the steady creak and moan of the trees, the swelling cacophony of crickets, and the intermittent calls from the night owls had been there all along; but now as they sat without speaking, the nocturnal cries took the forefront, and lay over the already heavy weight of this particular evening.

  Lionel was looking up at the stars when Corn Poe spoke.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Hawkins. I don’t mean to intrude or wake ya if you’re sleepin’,” he said, just a notch above a whisper.

  “I ain’t sleepin’,” Hawkins responded, lying on his side with his head turned to the night.

  “If you don’t mind me askin’ ya some-thin’. Somethin’ of a personal nature?” Corn Poe continued.

  Mr. Hawkins rolled over, looking more curious than disturbed. “I suppose it would depend on the nature of the question, and if I was you, I’d think long and hard about what you’re askin’.”

  Corn Poe sat quietly for a moment and then continued, “well, I suppose in one sense it ain’t none of my business. But, on the other, it truly is. Ya see, I figure that now that we’re travelin’ with each other, I got a right to know on account it may have some influence on me and my well-being and that of my friends.”

  “Well, this ought to be one helluva question,” Mr. Hawkins said, sitting up and gazing across the patch of moonlight toward the children. “Well, then, go ahead. I’ll do my best to answer if I choose to.”

  Lionel studied Corn Poe’s expression. He always looked a little uneasy, so it was hard to tell if there was any sort of change in his demeanor. Tom Gunn sat next to him, staring at his feet.

  Corn Poe continued, “well, what it is I’m wonderin’ is how come you and Junebug here are on the run? I mean, Lionel and Beatrice is runnin’ on account of bein’ horse thieves. I suppose I fell in with ’em, so that puts me as an accessory to the crime. But what about you? what about the Junebug? why y’all out here? why y’all so hell bent on runnin’?”

  Lionel looked at Junebug, and then at Beatrice and Tom Gunn. Lionel had never thought to ask and doubted if he had ever wondered why Mr. Hawkins and Junebug chose to live in the mountains. Lionel just assumed that this is where they lived. He wondered if Beatrice knew. He wondered if she cared.

  “I suppose I can tell ya, as it may have a bearing on how this all unfolds. Hell, maybe it’ll sway ya to decide it’s time to part company, and we can move on guilt-free,” Hawkins said with a distant look in his eye. He leaned forward and stared at Corn Poe with a blank expression on his face.

  “I killed a man—two men—with my bare hands. I’d killed men before, but then it was all right. It’s all right to a kill a man as long as the government tells ya to kill ’im. But in this case, I did it on my own; and now they’re dead, the both of ’em, dead.”

  Corn Poe’s face lit up, but he fought to control himself and s
poke again in the same hushed tone with which he had started the conversation. “Well, if ’n you did, you must’a had your reasons.”

  Mr. Hawkins looked over at Junebug and then to the harvest moon that hung like a rotting pumpkin over the treetops. “They came after my missus and the boy there. She was dead when I found them and now, so are they. That’s all ya need to know. Ya understand me? That’s all ya need to know.”

  “Yes, sir. I understand,” Corn Poe said, looking both satisfied with the answer and relieved that he had asked the question that had been on his mind.

  “I suggest ya put that outta your head. It’s in the past,” Mr. Hawkins said, lying back into his saddle. “Now, you get some sleep.”

  Lionel lay back on the buffalo robe. His legs were tired, and his head still hurt. He tried to put it out of his mind, but he couldn’t help but think about Mr. Hawkins killing the men, and wondered if he felt bad about what had happened. He remembered that Beatrice had told their grandfather that she hadn’t felt bad when she drove the sheep shears into Jenkins’s hand, but Lionel wondered if this was different. Lionel knew that Sergeant Jenkins had deserved it, but those men, the men that Mr. Hawkins was talking about, weren’t stabbed in the hand, they were dead. But they were dead because they killed Mr. Hawkins’s wife, Junebug’s mother. Lionel closed his eyes, hoping that tomorrow would be a better day for all of them.

  Soon, Lionel fell into a deep sleep and dreamed once again of the Frozen Man. He stood in a grove of quaking aspen with the Frozen Man, staring out across the grass sea. He saw Beatrice and his grandfather on their raft, sailing east away from the shore, away from him. He also saw a small ship, and on this ship he saw Mr. Hawkins, Junebug, and all their horses. Lionel turned away from the lake toward the woods. Corn Poe was riding through the trees on Ulysses. Lionel looked back to the Frozen Man and noticed for the first time that the Frozen Man, not Lionel, was wearing the string of bear claws around his frosted neck.