TWENTY-TWO

Of course we didn’t know it then, but the next morning Chase Rutledge set out through our apple orchard, following our trail.

We slept late. The sun was already up and the day was warming fast when I got out of bed. Tommy and Gabe were still asleep as I dug through my bag and pulled out the coffeepot and some coffee.

I saw that blood-blackened arrow in there, too.

I started a fire with the coals in the stove and filled the pot from the drip pipe outside. I sat down on the bed and waited for the sound of the boil. I opened up that Dawson folder of mine and chipped away at a log in the back wall. By the time the first trace of steam started from the spout, I had carved a neat TS into the wall of the cabin.

The coffee was boiling. I kicked Gabe on the shoulder and Tom on the back. Tommy moaned. Gabe turtled his head down into his sleeping bag.

“Those fish aren’t gonna walk out of that pond and just jump on the stove for you,” I said.

“Just pour that coffee on my head,” Tom said.

“I might have to. I only brought one cup.”

“I got one,” he said, and got up and crawled to his pack.

“I want some, too,” Gabe said, muffled from inside his sleeping bag. “Tommy, get a cup from my bag, will you?”

Slowly, Gabriel emerged from the sleeping bag, hair wild and electrified. We all sat on the edge of that plank bed, holding our coffee with both hands to warm them.

“I heard you doing that,” Tommy said, nodding toward my initials in the wall.

Gabe saw my knife sitting there on the bed and picked it up. “I want up there, too,” he said as he opened the blade. Tommy flinched away in exaggerated terror as if he thought Gabe would accidentally cut him.

“Shut up,” Gabe said.

“Didn’t say nothing.”

When the coffeepot was emptied, they were all three up there in a straight line: TS GB TB.

“That makes it as much ours as if we peed on it,” Tommy said.

“That reminds me,” Gabe said, and slipped his shoes on and went outside, followed by me and Tommy.

I only had one fishing pole and some smelly cheese bait, so we all took turns using it. Gabe had seven trout well before lunchtime and left them tied on a line at the shore with the others that Tom and I caught, to keep them for dinner. We still had some jerky and candy bars, which we ate for lunch, and all three of us spent some time stacking wood for the stove and grooming our horses. After lunch, Tommy said, “Well, are you gonna take us up to see that wrecked plane?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” Gabe asked. “We wanna see it.”

I looked at them both, so they could see I was serious.

“Look, it was a really weird time. I thought I was crazy or something.” I sighed. “Mostly I kept thinking it was all a dream, or maybe I didn’t see it at all.”

“I know how to find out,” Tommy said, then spit.

We rode north, past the pond on that rock-strewn gap in the peaks where the trees grew sparser and sparser, under the guard of those towering granite fingers. Gabe was drinking from his canteen, Tommy looking intently forward and up to where that plane would be, still obstructed by a stand of low, twisted trees and a mound of rock shards.

And I felt less and less easy as we went along.

“That’s it!” Gabe said.

I wasn’t even looking. Gabe was pointing up at a V between the peak of the fingers and a lower peak to the west, a slash of white snow, peppered with the dark rocks that rolled by themselves with each freezing and melting, and there we saw that plane. It was much cooler here, we could feel the chill on the breeze as the air brushed over that ice and barren rock.

“Well, it’s real, Stotts,” Tommy said. “It’s a pretty big one.”

The fuselage was torn open on the top, a big black slash cutting across it, and the one wing we could see from our side was bent back, nearly shorn completely free of the rest of the wreckage. It looked like death, like a big, sad, dead animal left to decay slowly.

“Someone had to’ve died there,” Gabe said. “You can see a propeller down the slope from it, in the snow. See?”

I followed Gabe’s finger down that swath of peppered white and saw, starring out like a flower, three blades of a propeller, black and straight.

“Is that a propeller, or a body?” Tommy said.

“It’s been there for years. No way it’s a body,” I said.

I hadn’t been to my mother’s grave yet, not even once; had never seen the headstone, never left flowers.

Tell me about Will, Mom.

She always remembered things, carried them with her. One time, when I was brushing Reno, she was standing behind me, watching, and she said, “You brought Reno home a year ago today.”

And I didn’t know that. She loved Reno, but never rode him, told me he would never want anyone but me to ride him, she could see it in the way he carried his head when I was on him.

I knew it was Will’s birthday. I saw her holding his photograph against her lap, rubbing the edge of the yellowing glossy paper with her thumb, how she touched her finger to her lips and, then, placed it softly down on the picture. And she never blinked.

I sat beside her, on the couch in our front room. My father was still at school.

I held her hand that folded carefully on the picture’s border.

He loved to draw, Troy.

I know. I seen the pictures you keep.

And he loved to sing.

I can’t remember that, Mom.

I can still hear it in my head.

Was he a good boy?

He never did anything mean to anyone.

Did he like me?

You were his best friend.

I can’t remember it, Mom.

“We should go up there,” Tommy said. “I bet there’s dead guys in it.”

“We can’t,” I said. “It’d take too long. And the horses wouldn’t make it anyway. I showed it to you, now I kind of want to go back.”

“I’m hungry,” Gabe said. “Let’s go eat those fish.”

“We’ll come back, then,” Tommy said.

“Good.” I turned Reno around to head back down to the cabin.

“Hey, Stotts?”

I held Reno up and turned back. Tommy held his fist out and I punched it.

“We’ll come back sometime,” he said, holding out his tobacco. “Want some?”

“Sure.”

Tommy threw the can across to me and said, “You don’t have to say nothing.”

It was a fine dinner. We cooked more fish than we could eat, and heated beans right in the cans sitting on the stovetop. Afterwards, Gabriel said he wanted to put a line in the water before sundown for some fish for breakfast, so we all sat out at the pond’s edge as the sky darkened through all its colors before night. This time, he wasn’t so intent on keeping the fish, though, and he let the small ones go, keeping only the largest three on his string. We all had our shoes and socks off, cooling our pale feet in the icy water.

“I brought that arrow with me, you know?” I said.

“Go get it. I want to see it,” Gabe said.

I hobbled over the rocks and dirt and brush back to the cabin and brought out the arrow, the grooved triangular head scabbed over with that little colt’s blood. I also found the bottle of whiskey Tommy had brought, half-drained.

A full moon was rising behind us.

“Here,” I said, and handed the arrow, point up, to Gabe. Then I opened the bottle and took a swallow of whiskey and it just about knocked the wind and my fish dinner out of me. “And here,” I gasped and handed the bottle to Tom.

“Damn, Stotts,” Tom said. “I better stand up for this.”

I pulled Tommy to his feet and watched him tip that bottle up and arch his shoulders back as he took a long swallow.

Then we saw Gabriel Benavidez do something I never would have thought he could do. He held that arrow tight in his left hand, like he was holding a pencil, and he jabbed the point of it right into his right wrist, not deep enough to really injure, but plenty deep enough to draw his blood. And we watched, amazed, as he held his right forearm up in front of his face and a bead of blood painted a thick slow line toward his elbow.

“Tell me about horse medicine, Troy,” he said.

I took the bottle from Tommy; didn’t hesitate. This time I drank from it twice before handing it back.

“I’ll be damned, Gabey,” Tommy said.

“Give me that,” I said, and held out my wrist in front of Gabriel.

Gabriel watched me, his pale eyes looking right into mine, without any expression on his face. And then he put the point of the arrow down onto the soft flesh of my wrist. I clenched my fist. He pushed.

I felt the pain as the point broke through me, watched the blood pool in the recess at the wound. Blood ran off my wrist and spilled down on Gabe’s knee.

“You’re tough, Gabey,” I said. “You stuck me better than you stuck yourself.”

Tommy took two big gulps of whiskey. The bottle was nearly empty. We both looked at him, knew what he’d do. He held his wrist out in front of Gabriel.

“Do it, Gabey.”

He winced as the arrowhead cut down on his wrist, making a popping sound before Gabe pulled it away to reveal a separation of the flesh and the bright red blood that ran across Tommy’s arm, dripping from both sides of it.

“Tell me, too,” Tommy said.

I sat down next to Gabriel and grabbed his right arm. Then I took my own and pressed our bloodied wrists together. And then I held my arm out for Tom and it stung as he pressed his own blood into mine, and then he made it final by matching his arm with Gabe’s.

Tom sat and we finished that bottle.

“There’s nothing I can tell you about horse medicine that you don’t already know. And especially you, Tommy. Horse is endurance; it is never giving up. It’s will over the physical, ‘cause a horse can run until he runs himself to death if he’s running for a good reason. And everything you ask a horse, the answer is yes. Horse is forgiving. And ‘cause every day is a new start to him, and he’ll forget every horrible mistake you’ve made even if you keep dragging the past along with you. People think horses are stupid because of that, but you know the horse is asking, ‘Who’s the stupid one?’ “

Gabe rubbed the blood from his wrist between two fingers, then smelled it, and licked at it. “I don’t think they’re stupid.”

“Better not. It’s in you now,” Tommy said.

“I like the way you talk, Troy,” Gabe said. “No wonder she’s fallen for you.”

“That black mare, or your sister?”

Gabe didn’t answer. I said, “Let me have that arrow, bud.”

Gabe handed it over and I launched it like a javelin into the pond. It was dark now, and as our eyes followed the course of the arrow into the blackness of night meeting water, we saw, beyond the opposite shore, set back within the tall trees of the forest, the orange glow of a campfire.

We all saw it at the same time; we all tensed. Then Gabriel whispered, “Who do you think that is?”

“Fishermen, maybe,” Tommy said.

“Maybe,” I said. “But they’d be up closer to the water then.”

I shook out my socks and pulled on my shoes.

“What’re you gonna do, Stotts?”

“I don’t think we should wait for morning to see who’s out there or what they want. There’s enough moonlight, so I say we sneak around and see who it is.”

Gabe’s eyes in the moonlight were wide and unblinking. Tommy pulled on his boots.

“I’ll be right back,” he whispered and then went off toward the cabin. I knew what he was getting. Gabe put on his socks.

“I guess we got no choice.”

“It’s probly nothing to worry about, but if it is, we want to know now.”

Tommy was coming back from the cabin. I heard him stumble and fall, then laugh. He got up and spit. “Aw hell!”

“Okay, Surefoot. Just don’t do that on the other side.”

We started following the shore around to the south, toward that spot in the trees lit up by a fire. The moon was so bright it cast our shadows down, blacker than anything, on the ground before us. Tommy led the way, and I guessed that fire was about a mile away, so we didn’t have to worry too much about keeping quiet yet; but still we whispered when we talked. Neither Tom nor I could walk a decent straight line after that whiskey. I grabbed Gabe by the shoulder and leaned down on him. I could smell my own whiskey breath, hot and sour, as I talked.

“Gabey, you’re in charge, okay?” I said. “Don’t let me and Tom do anything stupid.”

“Too late for that,” Gabe said. “We’re going toward that fire. That’s pretty damn stupid right there.”

Tom spun around on his heels. “And how are you gonna stop me from being stupid?” Then he fell over backward and his feet ended up straight at the sky, and Gabe and I laughed, struggling not to be loud.

Then Gabe pounced on Tommy’s chest and pinned his arms down with his knees.

“Let’s throw him in the water!”

I scooped up both of Tom’s kicking feet while Gabe fought against his trying to turn him over and pin him. Gabe rolled around and got Tom under the armpits and we had him up off the ground. Three steps over to my right, and we tossed Tommy out into the icy pond.

Tommy came right up, huffing and shaking the water from his hair.

“Like that, that’s how,” Gabe said.

Tommy sloshed his way out of the water and picked his hat up where it had fallen, then put it on his dripping head. He held out a fist and he and Gabe punched knuckles.

“That was good, Gabey. That was good. But you’re gonna get wet.”

And then Tommy just scooped up Gabe like he didn’t weigh anything at all and he easily threw him a good seven feet out into the water. And Tommy started laughing and I couldn’t help myself because it was so funny seeing Gabe flying like that. I threw off my hat and sat down and began taking off my shoes and socks.

“What are you doing?” Tommy said.

“Not giving you and Gabe a chance.”

And then I jumped into the pond, too, clothes and all. It was so cold I couldn’t inhale at first, but it was what I needed to straighten out my head. As I wiped my eyes and started walking back to shore, I saw Gabe and Tommy throwing my shoes and socks in after me.

“Thanks a lot.”

“You deserve it, Stottsy, for putting this guy in charge. Now we’ll probly all get killed.”

“Or pneumonia,” I said.

I managed to get my shoes and socks back on, but not straight, and we all set out, dripping and shivering a little, but smiling at each other, in the direction of that mysterious camp-fire.

When we got to the southern shore of the pond, we entered the woods. We were silent now, almost close enough by this time to hear, or be heard, by whoever was at that fire, which grew brighter as we approached.

“Make sure and keep enough trees between us and that fire,” Tom whispered.

We crept along behind Gabe, watching the ground so as not to trip and, at the same time, looking over toward the fire. Soon we could see the glowing shape of a little dome tent and the white-hot blast of a propane lantern. A shadow moved across the lantern.

“There’s at least one there,” Gabe whispered.

We followed him up closer, behind another redwood.

“There’s two of ‘em,” I said.

One of the two was big and thick, with a belly on him, overfed. The other emerged from the tent, thinner and tall. Then we saw the thin one put on that unmistakable baseball cap, moving with a stiff walk around the fire. It was Chase Rutledge and the bigger one was his friend, Jack Crutchfield.