Unstoppable Moses

by Tyler James Smith

  Detail after detail of their personal lives, and they didn’t seem to hide them from me for even a second.

  “I never said they weren’t super cute,” Michael struggled to say, just before coughing up a half-eaten chunk of grape.

  “Okay, well,” Faisal said with finality. “This cutesy shit is getting old. And I have to pee. Also, you swallowed your grapes before you beat my record. Is it dark in here, or is that just my immense shadow that you’ll always live in?” He and Matty fist-bumped.

  They gave each other shit and they were weird to each other, but they did it without explosions or a blast radius.

  Faisal stood up and took a bite of his sandwich. “Don’t let Goblin Joe touch my food.”

  As he walked by his cabin’s table, Goblin Joe looked up from spitting into his own hands and went for a weird two-handed high five and Faisal twisted out of the way. Goblin Joe scuttled after him and jumped on him, so Faisal put him in a headlock. He let him go and, even though the room was loud enough to destroy their conversation before it reached our table, you could see he was explaining to Joe how to put someone into a full nelson.

  “Oh. Hey. You,” Matty said, poking Michael in the forehead. “My dad wants to know about Thanksgiving.”

  “It’s not even Halloween yet. That’s the next holiday.”

  “Yeah, exactly. He needs to know how intensely he should be hunting this weekend.”

  Which was where I expected the exasperated deep breath from one or both of them. The sigh before the argument.

  “I don’t think your dad operates on an intensity level of less than one hundred percent.”

  “That’s not tr—”

  “Remember what he does to home invaders?”

  “We never had a home invader.”

  “Exactly. They all know about your dad.”

  I watched the conversation bounce back and forth from behind my sandwich. Matty rolled her eyes and looked at me. This had to be where she’d ask me to give them a minute because she needed to talk to Michael in private.

  “Last year, around Christmas, there were a bunch of home invasions in my neighborhood,” she said, “and Mike and I thought it was a good idea to play Santa and set the gifts up for Christmas morning.” She looked at him, asking him silently if, so far, this wasn’t all true; he gestured with a “by all means, please go on” motion. “And we were up at like three or four in the morning wrapping gifts and putting up stockings, making everything all Christmassy—”

  “And he didn’t know about any of this?” I asked.

  “That’s debatable,” Michael said, throwing little jabs at the story that she knew were coming. They told the story together like it’d been done a hundred times before.

  “No, it’s not debatable: he had no idea. We came back late after Mike’s family’s dinner, way after Dad went to bed, so it was just the two of us. Mom’d died a couple years before so Christmas mornings weren’t as traditional as they’d been growing up, so I was trying to make things, you know…” she waved her hand slowly, filling in the gaps. Michael didn’t add jabs or licks to the story when she said it either. He stayed quiet, completely solemn for the two and a half seconds it took her to talk about her mom.

  “Anyway, Mike and I, we pooled some of our money to buy him one of those punching bags that’s shaped like a guy with no arms.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah, uh-oh,” Michael said, right back in the mix. She shot him a look that was half smile, half “I’ll kill you.”

  “Well, Dad heard us farting around downstairs so we killed the lights and hid when we heard him moving around. And he comes tearing down the stairs and he sees the outline of a weird motionless guy standing in his living room leering out the window and all I remember is us hiding behind the couch and hearing my dad go, ‘Hey! Hey! Hey motherfucker!’ And then the sound of him attacking White Tyson. We named the dummy White Tyson.”

  “That’s terrible—he wasn’t even … armed…” I said, and slowly raised my hand for a high five. Matty high-fived me back but when our hands clapped together it was a thunderclap.16

  When I pulled my hand back it automatically snapped back to rub the spot where Charlie’s brother had choked me until I blacked out. That place on my neck had had a bruise shaped like a spider—a dark middle with lines extending out to points.

  “No. No high fives,” Michael said. “He didn’t attack White Tyson—he butchered White Tyson. We turned the lights on and there was a fucking ax sticking out of the small of White Tyson’s back.”

  “An ax? Like an ax-ax? Like a lumberjack ax?” I said, forcing my hand to do something completely and utterly normal like fidgeting around on the table and tapping my fork against my plate.

  “In the small of his back!” Michael said. “Not only does he sleep with an ax but he tried to chop the dude’s spine out. That’s some serial killer shit.”

  “So, Thanksgiving…?” Matty said to Michael.

  His phone went off in his pocket and he dug it out. “I just don’t understand why he always asks me how much I weigh every time he gets back from hunting. It’s terrifying,” he said as he clicked his phone on to check the text. His forehead wrinkled. “It’s Faisal. Trevor’s eating lunch in the bathroom.”

  “They’re still picking on him?” Matty asked.

  “Yeah. They painted his nails last night. We got them to shake hands eventually but you know neither one of them meant it.”

  “Bryce?” Matty asked. It was barely a question. Even after hearing all of their stories about Bryce, it was different seeing his aftermath in real time.

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on. Got a plan,” she said, standing up. “Think, life-size Mouse Trap, but instead of dropping a cage on a mouse we’re going to drop a bag full of scorpions on a ten-year-old.”

  Michael slapped a hand against the table in an “About time, here we go” motion, then stood up to follow Matty. Before either of them could go anywhere, though, Faisal came out of the double doors that led to the bathrooms. Trevor was right behind him.

  Michael and Matty sat back down, joined by Faisal and Trevor. Trevor’s fingertips were pinkish red with raw spots here and there, like he’d been scrubbing at his fingers for hours. He was exactly the kind of person Charlie would have heard about and insisted we do something for. Knowing Charlie, it would have involved a corkboard with pinned-up pictures, psychological warfare, and classic rock.

  Like “Locomotive Breath” by Jethro Tull.

  Like “Dirty Deeds” by AC/DC.

  Like any badass, burn-a-motherfucker-down song that Charlie would have suggested we throw on before deciding on how to bring the world crashing so righteously down. Each song I thought of brought my heart rate up, matching the mad drums of the classic rock ballads, turning my hands into fists.

  Even though I knew that the feeling was overblown and completely about getting premeditated revenge on a child, it was a familiar and maybe even exciting poison.

  A small fist punched me between the shoulder blades. I looked up at Michael to see if his face said, “Swing low” and in which direction, but it didn’t.

  Instead, it was Lump. She was out of breath and had a fresh stack of papers with her. She held one out, shutting us down before we could converge on Bryce. Like a levee that wouldn’t break.

  “It’s updated! I have the description you gave me and everything. They said they don’t have security cameras so I couldn’t find a real picture of her. And Mr. Test said that I could announce it during lunch. Do you have any announcements you want to make?”

  I read the flyer over. The description of the deer was the description of every baby deer. She’d printed off a photo of a deer using a standard printer, so the ink was still wet and there were lines running through the picture. She’d written, “This Is Just An Example” above the printer photo. It took me out at the knees.

  “I think you’ve got it all, Lump.”

  “Are you sure?”

  �
��Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, my righteous anger at Bryce fading to the background.

  “Okay. Good. Pass that one around,” she said, pointing at the flyer in my hand. “I’m going to the other tables, then I’m going to give a speech.”

  “You wouldn’t know it, but she makes a fantastic Cabin Defender,” Matty said. “She keeps everybody in line. Really, you guys should invest in Lumps. Last night she told me about the time her dog threw up,” she said, nodding in an “Enough said” kind of way.

  “Must be nice,” Michael said. “We have to worry about Goblin Joe chewing through electrical wires. But we’ve been teaching them a new game called ‘hold your breath until you get sleepy’ which is also not a bad investment.”

  Lump was a tiny and chatty rocket-powered force, only stopping at the tables long enough to explain that there would be more information shortly. Eventually she wound her way to the stage, where she fumbled around for a full minute adjusting the microphone stand. No one was watching her except us, and every time one of us got her attention to see if she needed help, she shook her head back and forth and said, even though we couldn’t hear her over the crowd, “I can do it.”

  “She’s doing better this year,” Matty said as we watched Lump try to get the microphone into place.

  “Test told me she had a hard time making friends last year,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that. It was more like she didn’t really even try. But this year she’s talking to people. Coming out of her shell a little. I’m proud of her.”

  “Hello, everyone,” she eventually said into the mic. There were a few cursory glances. “As many of you know, there is a baby deer missing. You may have seen my flyers. After sexing the deer—” A few tables started laughing. Bryce’s table the loudest. Lump steeled herself. “I said sexing, not sexting.” She explained that sexting with a T is different than sexing without a T, but the tables laughed even louder this time. “She is missing and we need to find her,” Lump said, more loudly. The murmur of the crowd returned to normal levels. “She went missing the day we got here. We still have time. She escaped from behind the barn. There are more flyers there, but they aren’t updated. The updated ones are in front of you.”

  Next to the entrance, Jeffrey the Travel Guide Buddy raised a battered old brass bell up and started ringing it. He had a look on his face that said, “I know, right? An old-timey bell! I am such a card.” Mostly, everybody ignored his smug, shit-eating grin and headed toward the door, knowing the bell meant the end of lunch. The tables began to clear.

  “There’s a reward!” she said. A couple of kids craned their heads back as they walked out, but they still walked out. She stepped down from the small stage, almost proud until she saw the tables littered with her flyers. Most had just been left behind, but a lot of them were folded into airplanes or hats, and some of them looked like the kids had tried to see how many times they could tear the paper in half. She looked like a flock of blackbirds that had scattered out of formation. I hated it. The Trevors and the Lumps of the world didn’t need asshole kids tearing them down any more than life already did.

  “That was good, Lump!” Matty said. We were the only Buddies left in the cafeteria. Trevor was sitting at our table finishing off his bagel sandwich.

  She didn’t answer.

  She started piling up the flyers that hadn’t been destroyed, and after a minute, Trevor and Matty joined her.

  “Do you know who Harriet Tubman is?” I heard Matty ask her. “And, follow-up question, do you know what a hero’s journey is?” Lump shook her head and kept picking up scraps of paper; Matty smiled. “All right, girlfriend, let me tell you what a woman can do when she puts her mind to it.”

  “Is she an inventor?”

  “Kind of. She invented being the biggest badass of all time.”

  Lump smiled a little under her giant hat. “That’s not an invention. And plus also it’s not true because Amelia Earhart already invented that. Not that it’s an invention.”

  Trevor had found a trash bag and was raking the piles of multicolored paper scraps off the tables with the crook of his arm. Lump walked over with an armful of paper.

  “Amelia Earhart didn’t invent it—she refined it. Made it modern. Harriet Tubman was a black woman in slave times who escaped slavery, on foot, and then came back for other slaves. Not once or twice but nineteen times. And she saved three hundred slaves doing that.” The more she talked about Harriet Tubman, the faster the words came out: the exact and polar opposite of someone reciting facts that they couldn’t care less about.

  “The Underground Railroad?” Lump asked suspiciously, like a grown-up was trying to trick her into learning something.

  “That’s right. But that was just her doing her own thing. Eventually she became a spy for the good guys and was the first woman to lead an armed expedition where seven hundred more slaves got rescued. Lump: are you wrapping your magnificent little head around how awesome Harriet Tubman was?”

  Lump kept avoiding eye contact and still hadn’t dumped the damaged flyers into the bag that Trevor was hovering below her hands. The pile of paper precariously balanced over the open bag inflicted a look of stress across Trevor’s wide face.

  “She was a spy?” Lump yelled, throwing her arms up, the erupting Paper Vesuvius going everywhere but the trash bag. “Like with secret codes?”

  For the next ten minutes she grilled Matty about Harriet Tubman while the rest of us cleaned up paper plates and leftover food. Matty told her that it sounded like she was on her own hero’s journey. That the deer was both her call to action and her magical protective figure. And that yes, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad used tons of secret codes.

  “Moses!” Lump said from across the room.

  “Yeah, Lump?”

  “I know the deer’s name! Me and Trevor figured out the deer’s name!”

  “Come talk to me, Lump!” I yelled from across the room while scraping pale macaroni into an already-fetid trash bin. She was making friends, and if I was on Lump Detail then, goddammit, I was doing something right.

  She sprinted over like maybe her birds were flying in formation again. “Moses! The deer’s name!”

  “Is it Harriet Tubman?”

  “Of course it’s Harriet Tubman! So don’t feel bad.”

  “What?” I stopped scraping the camp food, but a huge glob of it lurched off the plate with a splattery sound.

  “Harriet Tubman came back to rescue the slaves before she became an Underground Railroad conductor who never lost anyone. You just didn’t know what she was planning.”17

  I couldn’t answer as fast as I wanted to because everything inside of me suddenly felt tight. But then I said, “I like that name. That’s a good name for the deer, Lump.”

  “And did you know that people also called Harriet Tubman ‘Moses’? Like you and the deer mixed together!” She shifted gears at the speed of Lump: “We have too much garbage,” she said, shaking the half-full bag of trash. I breathed out, one more full breath of air away from the subject of the deer’s name and who’d left who behind.

  “The bag’s half empty. We can still fit more.”

  “No, I mean in the world. There is too much garbage. Look at Trevor over there,” she said and pointed. “I don’t mean that Trevor is garbage. I like Trevor. I mean, look at what he’s doing.”

  Matty was supporting him by his armpits as he stood in the trash can full of paper, stomping up and down.

  “Why don’t we send all the garbage to the sun?” Lump asked.

  “Because we have a dumpster.”

  “But the sun would burn it all up forever.”

  “Really want to know?” I asked. She nodded, and I had no doubt that if I used words she didn’t understand, she’d look them up on her own or insist I repeat myself. “Because it’s not just paper we’re getting rid of. That kind of stuff is biodegradable and will eventually go away on its own. Money aside—which, daily, would be more than the US�
��s annual GDP of any year ever—the big problem is the nuclear waste. That’s the stuff that has a half-life of forever.”

  “So?”

  “So we’re just not good enough at rockets. We can’t even reliably get a rocket full of people to space. Even if we were ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent sure the rocket would get there without a problem, it’s still way too risky.”

  “But it would be all of our trash. Gone. Away forever. Trevor wouldn’t have to stand in the trash can.” She said it so plainly and truthfully that you had to think that maybe it was right. Like risking total annihilation just to keep Trevor from stamping down trash was absolutely the best move.

  “If it didn’t work, though, we’d be looking at the single biggest disaster the world has ever seen. Like ever, this side of the dinosaurs getting wiped out. There would be no way of telling how far the nuclear waste would go, and for how long it would ruin everything. Basically it would be real bad.”

  “I think the risk is worth it.”

  “You’re probably not the only one, Lump,” I said, listening for the thunderous drums deep below my surface, beating out music I hadn’t heard since Charlie. But it didn’t look like she heard me; her attention was on something else, deep inside and out of sight.

  TWENTY-FOUR: BUDDY BEHAVIOR

  THAT EVENING, WE CARVED pumpkins in the rec hall without Lump. She’d told Test that her stomach hurt and that she needed to rest up in the infirmary.

  Just as I got to the big double doors, I heard a pair of voices, one male and one female, come up from behind me. I turned and nodded at the pair of Buddies walking over. Both appeared to be dressed for an Arctic tundra and a sleepover—big coats, boots, and pajama pants.

  “Coach sent us. You’re Moses,” the guy said plainly. When he wasn’t talking his mouth hung open a little, so you could see his braces.

  “Who sent you?” I said.

  “Mr. Test?” the girl said.

  “Oh. Okay. Great.”

  “He said to make sure you guys stayed in line,” the mouth-breathing Buddy said, looking at his friend like he was the hottest shit in the world. His tone was everything I’d spent almost a year dealing with. Condescending, pitying, self-righteous bullshit. “It’s all right, this is a tough job. Takes a lot of responsibility—”