“Because he’s lost,” Early said, taking back his journal as if I were an unbeliever and not fit to see the truths it held. “Just like Pi. And we have to find them.”
“That’s good, then, because Pi made it out of the maze, so I’m sure he’ll be okay,” I said, not sure why I was encouraging Early’s fantasy and at the same time wishing somebody could do the same for me.
“No,” Early said, his eyes on the ground, as if the trail would somehow lead us to Fisher and Pi and the Great Bear all at once. “I’ve figured more numbers, but the story is all jumbled up. And I can’t find any more ones. Pi is missing.”
“What happened? You said he made it out of the maze.”
“He found the catacombs.”
Catacombs
PI DIDN’T REALIZE he was searching for the catacombs until he stumbled across them. He still carried the shell necklace in his pack, and it weighed heavily on him. So much so that when he waded into a stream to cool off and wash the sweat from his face, the pack shifted, putting him off balance. Slipping off the rocks, he plunged into the swiftly moving current, the pack dragging him underwater. He tried to slip the strap over his head but could not get free of it.
Finally, the current swept him over a ledge, and he landed in a deep, watery basin. Kicking and pulling, he struggled to reach the surface, water crashing all around him. When he finally emerged, he grabbed for anything solid he could find and heaved himself out of the water. Dripping and half drowned, he found himself in a small cave. A bit of light came in from behind the falls, but a few steps in, the cave grew dark. Still, his eyes adjusted, and he was able to make out vague wisps of light even within the darkness. Or maybe they were shadows that were just less dark than the cave around them. He knew where he was, and he knew the kindred spirits that roamed these caverns. The damp. The dark. The walls pressed in around him. All of it spoke of a place where people would come to bury their darkest secrets and accidental treasures.
He could hear the voices, the whispers, the sighs, of these souls who were unable to let go of their burdens. They clung to them like precious gems that gave them weight and substance.
Pi understood this need to hold on. To not let go of his pain. It had become such a part of him. Who would he be without it? The thought frightened him. So he wandered the halls of the catacombs like the other souls who were half-dead and half-alive.
But the balance between life and death is precarious. After a time, Pi felt the balance tipping in him. And it made him dizzy. He took another step, and where he expected to touch ground, there was only a dark abyss. Without a sound, without a whisper, he was gone.
27
I stopped walking. “So what does that mean? What happened to Pi?”
“I can’t find any ones,” Early said, still walking. “There are a lot of zeros. And the numbers are changing color. But let’s go. We have to keep looking. The Great Bear is a mother bear, and a mother’s love is fierce. She’ll find him. So we have to find her, and she’ll show us the way.”
I stood my ground, ready to give up on his story, until something caught my eye. “Look,” I said. “More paw prints.” I pointed but stopped short.
“What is it?” asked Early. “What do you see?”
I touched my hand to the thick wetness on the ground and rubbed two fingers against my thumb.
“Blood.”
I could tell Early was shaken by the red splotches. He reached down and traced one with his own finger.
“It’s like the zeros. Liquid and red.”
“Come on, Early. We can end this right now. We can head back to school—”
I didn’t even get the whole thought out of my mouth.
“No. There are more numbers. There are. I just can’t figure them out.” Early clutched the sides of his head and rocked back and forth in his squatting position. “There are more numbers. Pi is not dead. Fisher is not dead. We have to keep looking.”
“But what if the bear is injured?” I asked. “She could be wounded. She could kill us.”
“We’ll follow her.”
He had already started off, following the tracks. Part of me knew this was foolishness. But something had stirred in me. It had started days before and had been growing in me all along this journey. Was it curiosity? A sense of adventure? It felt more like need. Whatever it was, it was powerful.
I let Early take the lead and followed him down a path that seemed both old and new at the same time. Old enough to have borne the steps of native hunters and warriors, Spanish conquistadors, and English pilgrims. New enough to cushion the footsteps of new explorers trying to find their way. At least, that’s what National Geographic would have said.
The tracks were clear for a time; then they disappeared again. But we continued in the same direction as best we could and tried to find other signs. The sky had grown cloudy, and what had been a mild blue had suddenly become a sharp shade of gray. The air had a bite in it that crept through our jackets and into our bones.
I followed Early, trying to match his stride and purpose. Just when I thought maybe we’d lost the bear’s trail, Early would point out a tree stripped of its bark. I might have suggested that any bear could be responsible for that tree, but then again, not just any bear could reach eight feet off the ground and leave such great scars in the trunk. And there were blood smears on the bark.
Visible puffs of air came out with our every breath, as if to remind us that we were living and breathing. Something that, I was beginning to see, should not be taken for granted.
As our own footsteps grew quieter, and more and more leaves had given up their place of fall glory in the trees, it seemed that all colors and sounds had been stripped away and left behind as well.
Everything in the woods had become muted and still, but we kept following the bear’s trail. Every sound, every shadow, tricked and taunted. A hooting owl, a snapping twig, a swaying branch, all seemed stranger and darker. But it was the shadows that played with my imagination the most. A darkness behind a tree. A movement seen from the corner of my eye. Was someone out there?
“Do you hear that?” I finally asked Early. “That crunching noise.” I thought of the walnut shells.
We both stopped and listened. Silence.
“Come on,” said Early.
I had the horrible realization that, just as we were following tracks, we were leaving our own at the same time. Footprints that someone else could see and touch—and follow.
Fear was rising in me and needed to be put down. I narrowed the gap between Early and me and tried to distract myself. I whistled a few bars of “Old Man River,” but it sounded too spooky. Plus, that’s not really a song made for whistling.
So I let my mind wander. Big mistake. Early’s story of Pi took off in my head and wove its tale of the young navigator entering the Land of Lost Souls, where the people were half-dead and half-alive.
Before long, everything around me started to seem like it was coming straight out of that story. Trees looked half-dead and half-alive, with their bare, gnarled limbs and scratched-off bark.
But nothing spoke more to the lifelessness of these parts than what we saw when we emerged from the trees into an abandoned logging camp. There were a few buildings—shacks, really—that some loggers must have called home for a while. A large fire pit that hadn’t warmed a meal in a long time. An assortment of abandoned logs lay about as if they’d fallen off whatever wagon they’d been strapped to and no one had had the wherewithal to hoist them back up.
Early and I stared at this ghost of a camp, looking for any signs of life, half-dead or otherwise.
“This has to be it,” said Early. “This is just the way it’s described in the numbers. They have to be here. The lost souls.”
“There’s nobody here, Early. Just look at this place. This must have been abandoned years ago. Maybe they moved the camp farther north, where there are more trees.”
But just as I was saying this, there was a noise inside one of th
e shacks. A soft plink, plink, plinking sound, as if some ghostly person were stirring a metal spoon in a pot. Early and I walked together to the shack, and Early reached out his thin, pale hand and pushed on the door. It gave a creak as it opened, and we walked inside a very cold, nearly empty log cabin. In the center of the room, however, there was a small wooden table with a chair pushed up to it, and a small dish and cup placed just so.
A curtain ruffled in the open window, giving the room a feeling of liveliness, but it was just the breeze. There was the sound again. Early looked around the room, then moved toward the table and lifted the cup a few inches off of it. Plink, plink, plink. It was the sound of a tiny drip of rain coming in through the battered roof, of single drops landing in the cup.
The plate, the cup, the curtain. All signs of occupation, maybe even hospitality, extended to a fellow logger or traveler, but the fireplace offered no warmth. The plate served no food. Maybe there were inhabitants, the ghostly kind, that were no longer at the mercy of the elements and no longer needed food or drink.
I wondered, If a person is half-alive and half-dead, which half of that person needs food and warmth? And does the other half no longer care?
The rain plinked more rapidly into the cup in Early’s hand. The way he stood there, holding it in place to catch the drops, made my heart hurt. He looked like a poor beggar boy pleading for alms and receiving only a few drops of water for his trouble. Was that just the way things were? People held out their hands without ever getting them filled?
I wanted to tell Early, Put the cup down. You’re just going to come up empty.
And then Early did put the cup down, leaving it to catch the drops. “Let’s go,” he said.
Maybe he was finally finished with this quest of his. Maybe he’d given up the ghost of Pi and the ghost of his brother.
“You’re right,” he said.
Unbelievable. I was never right about anything when it came to Early.
“We should probably go farther north. That’s what Pi would do. He’d follow the Great Bear.”
I didn’t even argue. We headed north.
We had been going wherever the bear tracks led us and now were way off the path. There was no way to know if we were anywhere close to the actual Appalachian Trail. As we walked, the terrain got more rugged. Rockier and steeper, and just wet enough from the drizzle to become dangerously slippery.
“We haven’t seen any tracks for a while, Early. How do we know we’re going the right way?”
“The numbers,” he answered matter-of-factly. “They get very hard and bumpy.”
“Hard and bumpy, huh? The cot I used to sleep on in the summer was hard and bumpy. Maybe Pi is lying all stretched out on a lumpy mattress somewhere, listening to Flash Gordon or Superman on the radio.”
Early didn’t find that likely or funny.
“Pi doesn’t have a radio. And if he did, he’d be listening to Billie Holiday, because—”
“It’s raining, I know, I know.”
It was raining, and it was getting dark. The sky rumbled, threatening still more rain.
“We’d better find a rock to crawl under for the night. You pick one and make sure it doesn’t look like it’s going to roll over on us.”
There were lots of nooks and crannies to choose from. Rock formations that had niches and indentations formed by glaciers long ago. But so far there hadn’t been any spaces big enough to hold both of us.
“You go left and I’ll go right. That way we’ll have a better chance of finding something before it starts to pour.”
“Okay. I’ll go left. I’ll yell if I find something,” said Early.
“Right. You do that.”
“Then you come and find me.”
“Okay, Early. I got it.”
“Ready, set, go.”
We parted ways.
Glaciers are funny things. Great masses of ice that, when they receded, left all kinds of interesting things behind. Waterfalls, gorges, rivers, caves, and deep glacial pools. Early and I must have wandered right into a museum of glacial art. In my search for a place to camp, I had stumbled upon a scene that could have come straight out of a National Geographic. The wooded path I was on led down to a swiftly flowing stream. The sound of rushing water filled the air around me. It felt good not to be listening for thunder or bears or pirates, or even Early. Stepping from rocks to logs, I maneuvered out into the water and hopped, skipped, and jumped upstream, finding my way to some great slabs of stone surrounded by pools of water that looked deep and dark. A fine mist sprayed my face, but it wasn’t raining, and the sound of rushing water grew louder.
The stone slabs were big enough that I could walk around the pools and around a bend. I found myself in some kind of prehistoric gorge, formed by millions of years of water crashing through its cracks and over its sides. And now, after all that time, the water kept coming. A great waterfall lunged over the top of the gorge, pouring an endless supply of icy-cold water into a seemingly bottomless pit.
I closed my eyes, letting the sound and the spray take hold of me. Wanting to be swallowed by it. Wanting to let it wash over me—wash me clean. In church they would call it being absolved. But absolved of what? Did I feel guilty about my mom? I hadn’t done anything. That was exactly it: I hadn’t done anything. I wasn’t even there—to fluff her pillow, put a cool washcloth on her face, pull the blanket up close. Hold her hand. I wasn’t there. I was in the barn. The water crashed around me. How do you get absolved for being absent? In Early’s mathematical mind, that would be like taking nothing from nothing. You’re still left with—
Suddenly, in the cascade of water, I saw a flash of color, and my stomach clenched in a knot. Had something gone over the edge of the gorge? The color stayed suspended in the waterfall for a brief instant, then disappeared. I waited for it to make its way out of the rush of water and into the current of the stream. But it never did. Had the colored object been pounded to the bottom of the pool? It took me a second to realize why my stomach was in a knot that wouldn’t come undone, why I was looking so desperately for the flash of color to emerge from the torrent of water: it was tartan red.
I set my sights on the waterfall. Going over that cliff would probably kill a person, with its water rushing over the top of the gorge and falling in a great sheet. Early couldn’t have gotten up there that fast, could he?
Where should I look? In which direction should I go? And now the rain came down, a million new drops of water joining the torrent that churned past me. Anything that had gone over the falls would be carried in one direction. I knew it made sense to follow the water. But that flash of red and the way it had lingered in the falls held me. The color hadn’t come from above the waterfall. It had come from behind it. My course was set. I had chosen to follow that red tartan jacket on this quest when I had no other beacon or landmark to follow. I would follow it again now. I turned upstream and headed in the direction of the waterfall.
The roar and surge of the water were powerful. Every step was a struggle as I tried both to keep my footing on the rocky bank and to see into the spray pummeling my face. I was heading for the incline leading to the top of the gorge. Just as I was mapping out the climb, looking for footholds and tree roots to grab on to, I noticed a narrow path veering away from the bank and seemingly into the stream. There were footprints.
He wouldn’t have walked right into the waterfall. What could he have been looking for? Again, I followed him, three, four, five steps. Then the path ended. All that was left were slippery rocks that jutted out into the water. There were no footprints coming out. Early had not turned back. He had to have walked out onto those rocks. I followed. One rock, two rocks, three rocks.
Just when it seemed the next step would have me swept away by the waterfall, I saw it. A narrow path of rocks, barely visible beneath the dark water, that led behind the crashing waterfall. Frightened yet exhilarated, I placed my feet carefully, one in front of the other, on the slippery path. Then I ran out of
rocks. I couldn’t see one more step. How do you take another step when you can’t see the path in front of you? But wasn’t that what I’d been doing all along on my journey with Early? I put my foot out where I could picture Early putting his, took a deep breath, and leaped. I landed on solid ground. The water still crashed around me, filling my ears as it echoed throughout the stone cavern in which I’d found myself.
“Early?” I called, but could barely hear myself. I stepped forward into the cavern. Where was I? What was this place? And where was Early?
“Early? Where are you?” My voice echoed back to me. It must have been bigger in there than I’d thought. And it was dark.
I pulled the flashlight out of my pack, grateful to Gunnar for having packed it in my bag. The light switched on, revealing jagged walls of ancient rock. I found myself looking for cave drawings made by people who had lived here long ago. What would they have drawn? I didn’t know much about the native people of the American Northeast. In Kansas, the earliest inhabitants would have drawn bison, and maize, and spears. I supposed that wasn’t too far off from what any early artist might have drawn. Animals, food, and weapons. The basics.
I had to think like Early. To him, this was not just a cave that he’d happened upon. He’d looked for it. He’d found it. I moved the light left, then right, and saw that the space or room that I was in led to another, just beyond it. I shut my eyes, then opened them again, trying to view my surroundings as Early would.
I saw the same stone walls, the same dark caverns. And suddenly, I saw what Early saw. Catacombs.
Pi had gotten lost in the catacombs.
I ran my hand along the rounded stone of the entrance to the next cavern, still trying to put myself in Early’s head. It seemed familiar. Or maybe it just reminded me of something. Maybe it was just like being in Early’s head. Lots of interesting nooks and crannies and tunnels from here to there, and there to here. A place where someone could get lost for a long time. But Early never seemed lost. He always knew right where he was and where he was going.