Trouble

  The day had gotten hotter while he and Black Dog had been touring Thaddeus Baxter's collection, the kind of hot that droops all the leaves on the maple trees and starts to make the air above any asphalt road wavery. Here and there Henry saw a few people walking back from the parade with folding chairs under their arms. Some were sitting on porches, rocking, holding fans. Charcoal fires starting up for grilling. Sprinklers on. Flags drooping like the maple leaves. A radio turned to golden oldies. A bicycle riding by, still with its red, white, and blue streamers woven through the spokes.

  Henry walked five or six blocks, then turned back toward the main road—which he approached very slowly, looking both ways. There were no marching band members that he could see, so he turned and began walking up the street. The sun covered everything with the white sheen of her breath. Henry had to shield his eyes from the glare off the street and the shops. So it was Black Dog who saw Sanborn and Chay first—which Henry figured out when she started pulling hard at his belt.

  "I think in the trade they call that 'running away,'" said Sanborn.

  "I wasn't running away. I had to get Black Dog."

  "Did you see that the engine was overheating?"

  "What was I supposed to do?"

  "Did you see that we had to stop?"

  "I figured that you had to stop, since the whole parade behind you had to stop."

  "Yes, Henry. We stopped the whole parade. You can't drive on an overheated engine."

  "And that's why nobody was moving."

  "And that's why there aren't many people in Millinocket who are happy with us."

  "I know the feeling. Where's the pickup?"

  "Let's see. Where did we leave the pickup? Well, after we got out and had to push, I think we only had to go four blocks. Or maybe it was five blocks. And then we took that right to get out of the parade, and we had to push it another block before we could find a space to leave it. And, Henry, if you look along the street there, you'll see that most of it is uphill from here. And a pretty steep uphill, wouldn't you say?"

  "And so that's why you're carrying the backpacks. Because you figured that if you carried those, then the pickup wouldn't be so heavy. Smart, Sanborn."

  "No, no, my friend who left us to push the truck alone, not so. I am carrying my backpack and Chay is carrying your backpack because Chay's pickup doesn't lock. In fact, he has no memory of even having a key that fits into any of the locks."

  Chay shrugged.

  "So we were searching all over Millinocket for the guy who ditched us, and looking for a hardware store that might be open to buy a gallon of radiator fluid, and hoping that we would find the hardware store first so that we could ditch the ditcher."

  They found a hardware store a block down from the way they had come, and—a miracle—it was open. Sanborn made Henry go in and pay for the radiator fluid while he kept Black Dog outside. When Henry came back out, three Millinocket Junior High School Marching Band members were standing across the street, watching them carefully.

  "I guess they like dogs," said Sanborn. He waved.

  "I don't think that's it," said Henry.

  The three marching band members suddenly turned and ran off, glancing behind at Chay and Sanborn and Henry—and Black Dog—and quickly turned into a side street.

  "I think we'd better go," said Henry.

  They walked back up the main street, Henry carrying the radiator fluid. The sun was so hot now that he could feel the back of his neck reddening. He rubbed at it as they turned at a corner toward Chay's pickup.

  "Let's find someplace to eat," said Sanborn.

  "No," said Henry.

  "Who made you the lunch monitor?"

  Chay walked on a little ahead.

  "Unless you want the whole percussion section of the marching band beating on you, which is going to happen pretty soon, I think we need to get out of here."

  "Henry, why would the percussion section of the marching band want to beat on me?"

  Chay came walking back, quickly. He took both their arms, turned them around, and directed them toward the corner. Henry felt that he was in one of those dreams where you run and you run and you run and you don't get anywhere, and your legs are so tired that it feels as if you're running through oatmeal, but you keep on running because something is behind you that you don't want to let catch up.

  He looked behind himself to see what it was that was trying to catch up.

  There, parked crookedly on the side of the street, was Chay's chromeless pickup. At least, Henry thought it must be Chay's pickup. It wasn't too easy to see, since three police cars were surrounding it, all with their red lights swirling overhead.

  "You must have parked it illegally," said Henry.

  "Maybe if you had been here to help push, we could have found someplace else," said Sanborn. "But you weren't here, were you?"

  Chay propelled them both forward and around the corner. He was breathing very heavily. He was sweating even more heavily.

  "Chay," said Henry, "did you tell your father that you were taking the pickup when you left?"

  Chay didn't answer.

  "Your father wouldn't report it stolen, would he?"

  Chay walked on ahead of them.

  "I think the answer to that is, 'Yes, he would,'" said Sanborn. Chay was half a block ahead of them now. "I guess that means we're going to thumb the rest of the way."

  Henry looked at him. "Three guys and a dog, thumbing the rest of the way to Katahdin. Who's going to pick up three guys and a dog?"

  "Not to mention that the police will be looking for one of them, who is Cambodian, and who is probably right now breaking some kind of parole," said Sanborn. "And I don't think it's going to be hard to pick out the Cambodian from all the people living in Millinocket, Maine."

  "So if we did thumb, we'd have to do it at night and hope that a policeman doesn't drive by. And who's going to pick up three guys and a dog at night?"

  "No one ever said anything about three guys and a dog," said Sanborn.

  Ahead of them, Chay looked back. He waved for them to come on, then crossed the street. He leaned slightly forward against the weight of Henry's backpack.

  "Are you talking about ditching him?"

  "No one ever asked him along. He was going in the same direction, but we never asked him to climb the mountain. And what are you doing, getting all chummy-chummy with him anyway, Henry?"

  "I'm not getting all chummy-chummy with him. He gave us a ride, and I don't want him to get into any trouble because ... just because of that."

  "This is the guy who killed your brother. You take him out for a canoe ride on a lake. And now you want to bring him along to Katahdin. He killed your brother, Henry. Yesterday morning you were ready to tear his guts out, and now you're all worried that the police might find him because he stole his father's pickup."

  "So we go get my backpack and we tell him, 'Thanks for the ride. Go away now.' Is that it?"

  "Yeah, that's it. Then we climb."

  Henry looked north. Katahdin shimmered in the heat waves of a Fourth of July. Its white and purple stones rippled, and the rim of peaks hazed in the humid air.

  It was almost tropical.

  Like he might be in Cambodia. Looking up from a burning refugee camp. The mountains cool and impossibly far away. His father plowing the fields with a strap across his shoulders. Like an ox.

  And the soldiers are laughing.

  And then they see your mother.

  Trouble.

  And then they take your brother.

  Trouble.

  Your sister.

  Trouble.

  Trouble that you cannot build your house far away from.

  Not even if you cross the Pacific Ocean. Not even if you cross a continent. Not even if you learn a new language. Not even if you go to a school with yellow-and-blue shirts where no one has ever been a refugee, and you try to forget that you ever were—even though they won't let you.

  Not even if you meet an American gir
l who laughs easily, cries easily, is one of the best female athletes in Massachusetts but doesn't talk about it because she doesn't want to show up her brothers, who eats Rice Krispies with bananas and brown sugar, who watches Saturday morning cartoons and then takes the afternoon to get ready to go to the Boston Symphony because she likes Stravinsky.

  And suddenly, Henry knew everything about the accident, knew it with a sureness and precision as sharp as a geometric axiom. He could see it all like a story, every moment full and slow, every look, every glance, every cry. And all the long nights that followed that were so horribly alone—he knew about those, too.

  He knew.

  He looked around and set the gallon of radiator fluid beside a parked car. Then he began walking after Chay, who was waiting for them on the other side of the street. "We're not ditching him," he called over his shoulder. He heard Sanborn sigh. Henry turned. "We're not ditching him. He got us all the way up here, and it's only another few miles to the mountain."

  "It's eighteen miles, Mr. Rand McNally."

  "It's not eighteen miles, Sanborn."

  "So the sign that said 'Katahdin 18' must be talking about how old the mountain is."

  "That's right," said Henry. "Are you coming?"

  Sanborn hefted his pack higher up on his back and came on. Henry felt the disapproval he wore, but he waited for him to catch up, and together they followed Chay, who took the first side street to avoid any policeman-like eyes. Which was just fine for Henry, too, who still wanted to avoid the percussion section of the Millinocket Junior High School Marching Band. They turned at the end of the block and paralleled the main street until they came to another road that headed straight for Katahdin. They set their feet on it together, and so began the eighteen miles that would take them to the base of the mountain.

  21

  WHICH IS NOT TO SAY that they walked along the road.

  They did follow it for a short while. They passed old farms, worn and beaten up by too much winter, and lumbered land where tall pine forests once grew, while dozens of cars, more than dozens, passed them, some still wearing their red, white, and blue bunting from the parade, all headed up for light picnics on Katahdin's once-holy trails.

  Chay watched the road nervously, and Black Dog shied away every time a car passed. Finally, Chay nodded off to the left, and they crossed when a break came in the line of decorated traffic and hiked out into a fallow field, away from the road, crunching down the stumps of cornstalks harvested last autumn.

  "In case you haven't noticed, that big rocky thing over there—that's the mountain, and we're not heading for it," called Sanborn.

  Chay pointed ahead. "No one will see us in the trees," he said.

  "Those are three miles away," said Sanborn.

  "A quarter mile," said Henry.

  "This according to the guy who's not carrying a pack."

  "So give me yours for a while," which Sanborn agreed to, and Henry let Black Dog off his belt and put it back on. Then together, with Black Dog joyously running on ahead, they crossed the rest of the field and so came into the cool shade of pines.

  It really had only been a quarter of a mile, at most, as Henry pointed out to Sanborn, who was very polite about being corrected, of course.

  Once inside the woods, they turned again toward the mountain. The smell of the piney resin was all around them, so strong in the cooler air under the trees. The sounds of the decorated cars on the road were gone completely; now they heard only the small snapping of the branches as they clicked them off the trunks with their passing packs. There were more mosquitoes in here, but not so many that they couldn't wave them away while they were climbing the ravines, trying to keep heading toward Katahdin.

  Still, there were enough mosquitoes for Sanborn to fuss about. There wouldn't be any along the road, he pointed out. And why hadn't Henry brought along some repellant? And now they were getting up his pants! When Chay suggested that he should pull his socks over his cuffs, Sanborn ignored him. Sometimes it is more satisfying to suffer than to take advice.

  But Black Dog loved it all. She loved sprinting up the sides of the ravines, and then clambering down, using her back legs as unsteady brakes, and nosing into the bottoms, hoping that some were still wet and muddy so she could stick in her snout and then roll in the muck and keep the smell for later. It wasn't long before she was a bouquet of forest smells so varied and thick that she would have confounded any botanist.

  She dashed out and around and among them, as Chay led and Henry followed Chay and Sanborn followed Henry, all three quiet in the effort of staying on track toward the mountain, all three sweating with the strain of climbing up and down, and none of them wanting to be the first to call for a stop. But finally Henry did, mostly because Black Dog had gotten a sharp pine twig between the pads of her paw that he needed to get out but also because it was so nice to shift the weight of the pack off his shoulders.

  Chay nodded ahead of them. "Up there," he said, and they climbed up another ravine where there was no water for mosquitoes, and where a small, very small, breeze blew through the pines.

  From the top of the ravine, Henry looked up at Katahdin.

  In the late afternoon sun, it was steely and severe. The green that it showed on its shoulders wasn't the green of spring moss and maple leaves. It was the bare green of survival, as beaten up as the farms that dwindled within sight of the mountain. The rock itself was scarred, as if God had drawn a strap over his shoulders and plowed the rock into long furrows.

  Henry looked at Chay and wondered if he saw it, too.

  Henry turned to the mountain again and scratched behind Black Dog's ears even as she was trying to lick his hand to let him know how grateful she was that he had taken out the sharp pine twig. Henry watched the high clouds sculling across the mountain. The breeze clacked the tops of the pine trees together and Black Dog panted. She was ready to move on.

  So they started out again, keeping the road barely within sight on their right, looking out from the top of the ravines to be sure that they were still heading for the mountain. They kept going until it was long past the time they should have stopped for supper—or so it seemed to Sanborn—and the land leveled out, and then dropped down, and the pine woods opened and showed them a lake whose shore meandered as far to the east and to the west as they could see in the waning light. Its waters were still, and showed the darkening blue of the sky as if it were a painter's palette. They headed east along the shore as it undulated toward the road—where now the cars were heading back in to Millinocket, most of their streamers and bunting all blown away by the wind.

  "We'll cross over at night," said Chay.

  "So why don't we eat now?" said Sanborn—which they did. They stopped by the shore and Henry pumped Franklin's Coleman stove while Chay opened three cans of beef stew. Henry heated them, and they ate ravenously. Then Henry cleaned out one of the cans and took some water from the lake. He boiled it, and then cooked up a mix of French cut beans and dried onions, and they ate that, too. And then Sanborn took out a fry pan and emptied a plastic bag of asparagus spears into it—and then a tin of sardines on a whim—and it all smelled so wonderful that they ate with their fingers right out of the fry pan.

  Black Dog got her share as well—not of the asparagus, which she smelled but wouldn't touch, but of the sardines, which she ate whole.

  As they sat eating Fig Newtons, the sun going down beyond the mountain, Henry figured that it had been, all in all, one of the best meals he had ever eaten.

  They cleaned the fry pan in the lake, crushed the cans and stored them, and tied up the packs again—there wasn't any food left over from the meal to save—and in the darkness thrown off by Katahdin, they headed out. Behind the mountain, the sky was a deep red, though the peak was still fully lit and yellow. They watched the sky grow darker and darker as they came down to the road, waited until they could see no headlights in either direction, and then climbed onto the asphalt—which seemed remarkably hard on their feet af
ter an afternoon of walking on pine needles—and crossed the low bridge over the lake, seeing in its waters the last light of the dying day. Ahead of them, the peak of Katahdin was still lit.

  On the far side of the bridge, they turned back west and walked alongside a stand of old hardwoods as the light fled utterly and the mountain slowly disappeared into the night. When they could tell Katahdin was there only because it blocked out the stars behind it, they stopped. They found some low dead limbs to hack from the trunks and downed wood that wasn't too damp and gathered it into a loose woodpile. Chay put the fire together while Sanborn and Henry spread the tarp, opened their sleeping bags, hung their packs on some stout branches, and took out sweatshirts and another of Franklin's rugby shirts for Chay. Even with a fire, you should still wear an extra shirt when you camp out, Franklin had said. Henry could almost see Franklin's hands on his own as he unpacked.

  The first spark of flame in a campfire is a sign of hope, but that wasn't what Henry was thinking about as Chay knelt low to the ground and blew on the reddening edge of the birch bark. The bark glowed more sharply with each of Chay's breaths, until suddenly it caught hold in a pale yellow flame, and then the twigs leaned into it and started crackling, and the tiny flame illuminated the column of smoke coming up. The flames lit Chay's hands and face as he added thin sticks and blew at the bottom of the pile. And it wasn't long before the crackling was constant and Chay was adding thicker wood, and all the light that the sun had put into these branches came blazing back at them. They settled around it, watching the fire turn red and white and blue.

  They were quiet, listening to the crackles. Henry felt the presence of the mountain behind him, so large that it could block out wheeling stars. And he wondered how it was that he felt like nothing so much as crying in a world that seemed so beautiful, and yet had so much Trouble. Tomorrow he would finally be at the mountain. Suppose, when he reached it, he found nothing at all?