Squirm

  At the dinner table, Dawson won’t look me in the eye. He’s afraid I’m going to tell Belinda he tried to shoot the cat.

  She and Mom are doing most of the talking, as usual. This evening’s subject is the end of good manners in modern civilization. Belinda had a bad experience at T.J. Maxx today, a customer who flamed her for taking too long to count out his change.

  Mom definitely overcooked the pork chops, but I’m not saying a word. This is why knives were invented.

  “There was a cat in the yard,” I say innocently. “Cute little calico.”

  Across the table, Dawson goes pale. His fork stops halfway to his lips.

  Mom says, “Oh, that must be Mrs. Gomez’s.”

  I nod. “What’s its name again?’

  “Muffin.”

  “She’s supposed to be an inside kitty,” my sister says. “But she probably snuck out the back door again.”

  Dawson finally gets the bite of pork chop to his mouth. He chews grimly, staring down at his plate.

  I’m not letting him off the hook.

  “How long ago was it that Mr. Gomez passed away?” I ask my mother.

  “Right after Christmas.”

  “Seems like yesterday. That was really sad.”

  “Just tragic,” Mom agrees.

  “Heart attack,” Belinda informs Dawson. “He gave little Muffin to Mrs. Gomez as a present on their last wedding anniversary. Can you pass the mashed potatoes?”

  Dawson looks like he wants to shrivel up and crawl under the table. In other words, he looks like a person who almost shot a heartbroken widow’s beloved pet. My sister would dump him in a nanosecond if she knew what he’d done, so he desperately hopes I won’t say another word about it.

  And I probably won’t, if he starts behaving like a respectable member of the human species.

  “Save room for dessert,” Mom says. “I made a Key lime pie.”

  Belinda and I are clearing the dishes when somebody knocks at the front door. My heart starts racing because I assume the visitor is Dennis Dickens, my elusive father, arriving to retrieve his expensive quadcopter.

  Mom takes one step toward the door, but I get there first.

  The man standing on the front step isn’t my dad. It’s a much younger guy with no shirt, tanned arms, and stringy sun-bleached hair. Two sandy surfboards are strapped to the roof of his rainbow-colored van.

  “Yo,” the young guy says. “You see a drone come down around here?” Using his salt-crusted hands, he indicates the size of the missing craft.

  From behind I hear Mom asking who it is.

  “One of the neighbors,” I say, and slip outside to speak to the surfer dude.

  Everyone calls him Limpy. I’ve seen his beach van around town.

  Limpy tells me he was practicing with his quadcopter when the signal “went all sketch” and the aircraft drifted out of control.

  I take the broken prop blade out of my pocket and drop it in his hand.

  He looks at it and says, “Not good.”

  I open the garage to show him the drone. “It crashed in our yard,” I say.

  “Bummer.” He lifts the quadcopter and starts trudging to his van. I notice he doesn’t have a limp, so I’m wondering how he got his nickname.

  “Later, dude,” he says.

  Now it’s decision time, one of those moral crossroads that Mom talks about. Since Limpy has no clue what actually happened to his drone, it would be easy for me to let him think it was just a mechanical glitch.

  Except I feel lousy about what I did, so I hurry after him saying, “Hey, wait up! I’m really sorry, but I shot down your drone with a slingshot. I want to pay for the repairs.”

  A different look comes over his face, though it’s not anger. It’s curiosity.

  “How come you shot it?” he asks.

  “ ’Cause I thought it belonged to someone else. Long story, man. But I want to give you some money to get it fixed.”

  Limpy shrugs. “No worries, dude. One a these suckers buzzed my house, I’d probably plug it, too.”

  He smiles and sets the aircraft in the back of the van. “You must be really pro with that slingshot.”

  “Let me pay for the damage. Please?”

  “No way. A new prop can’t cost that much. We’re cool.”

  He climbs into his van, which smells like sunblock and stale sweat. On the passenger seat is a crumpled tank top and three empty beer cans.

  “You okay to drive?” I say.

  Limpy chuckles and hitches his eyebrows. “Dude. Seriously?”

  Like I don’t know a thing about the grown-up life.

  I ask if he uses the quadcopter to make surfing videos. He pauses to think about it before answering, “Yeah. For sure.”

  He drives away in a fairly straight line. I’m nagged by the feeling that he should have been unhappy—even angry—about what I did to his drone. His chill reaction seems weird.

  Walking back to the front door, I step over the divot where the drone came down hard. Lying in the grass is something I hadn’t noticed before, a small bright piece of plastic. The shape is thin and rectangular. As soon as I pick it up, I know exactly what I’m looking at. The factory label says “64g.”

  It’s an SD card, a memory chip for electronic devices. Cell phones use SD cards. Cameras use SD cards.

  So do drones.

  I pocket the card and hurry inside to help finish with the dishes, but they’re already done. Mom’s on the phone, while Belinda and Dawson are watching some lame reality show where five supermodels who hate each other are stranded on a Pacific island with no spa. I head directly to my room and lock the door.

  While waiting for my laptop to boot, I realize that I didn’t see something inside Limpy’s van that logically should have been there—the remote-control unit for the runaway quadcopter.

  I insert the SD card into my laptop, and find two videos in the file. The most recent is four minutes and twenty seconds long, from takeoff to crash. At the start of the video I recognize the launch point as a nearby city park, and at the end I recognize the kid aiming his slingshot up at the quadcopter. I’m a little surprised by the cold look on my face.

  The second video on the SD card is longer, the time stamp showing that it was recorded yesterday morning. From the rising drone you can see a busy public boat ramp on the Indian River Lagoon. I’ve been there before. Judging from the angle of the sunlight, the craft takes a southern flight path, swooping above sailboats and Jet Skis and fishing skiffs. Eventually it slows to a hover above a stand of Australian pines on a shoreline that also looks familiar.

  Slowly the drone spins in place, the camera sweeping the trees.

  And there it is, in a half-dead pine—the nest.

  And over there, high in a different tree, is one of Mom’s two cherished eagles. Its snow-white head cocks upward, suspiciously eyeing the noisy little invader.

  The other bird is busy pecking apart a dead mullet on another branch.

  With a cry, the first baldy takes flight. The sudden tilt of the video frame indicates the drone has banked sharply, trying to race away. You catch a glimpse of a flapping shadow in hot pursuit, but the quadcopter is too speedy—the bird can’t catch up.

  I wonder if it was hungry, or just pissed off.

  On the return flight to the boat ramp, the drone dips and weaves like a crazed fruit bat. The camera keeps recording, so I pay close attention to the landing:

  There’s a man on the ground holding the remote control. As the aircraft descends, the man’s image in the frame grows larger and larger—and he looks less and less like Limpy the surfer.

  I pluck the SD card from my computer and bolt out of the house so fast that Mom doesn’t have time to ask where I’m going.

  * * *

  —

/>   One time I saw a guy run over a snake on purpose. It was a pretty little king snake, totally harmless, crossing Strathman Lane early one Saturday morning. There was no car traffic, just me on foot with a fishing rod.

  I was hurrying to move the snake off the road when some jerk on a bright yellow motorcycle swerved across the center line and drove over it. Then he slowed down, glanced back to make sure he’d struck his target, and sped off. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, so I got a quick look at his scraggly, smirking face.

  Because of its long, winding nervous system, a snake that gets badly injured takes a long time to die. It’s not a pleasant way to go. I set this one in the bushes and waited until it stopped moving. Then I covered the shiny black-and-gold body with handfuls of dirt—not much of a funeral, but I was in a rush.

  It was a short jog home, where I jumped on my bike and started riding up and down every street in my neighborhood, then the next neighborhood over, and so on. Eventually I found the yellow motorcycle. It was parked at a one-story house that needed new shingles and a paint job. The shaggy driver was lounging out front, drinking a Mountain Dew and gabbing on a cell phone. He paid no attention as I rode by.

  What happened later isn’t important. The snake killer’s motorcycle mysteriously ended up at the bottom of a canal is what I heard. When he went to the police station, they saw that he had like seventeen unpaid traffic tickets, so now he pedals around town on a bicycle like mine.

  The point of the story is that patience is important when you’re hunting for something, whether it’s a snake or a motorcycle or a rainbow-colored beach van.

  It turns out that Limpy lives only eight streets from my house. There’s plenty of daylight left when I spot his van under an oak tree next to an apartment building. The second door I knock on belongs to Limpy, who’s surprised to see me.

  “Whassup, dude?” he says, in a voice just shy of friendly.

  “Here, I found this.”

  I hold up the little SD card. Limpy squints, totally puzzled.

  “It must’ve popped out of your drone,” I say, “when it crashed.”

  “It did? Oh, wow.”

  “You know what it is, right?”

  Limpy purses his lips. “Yeah, for sure. Absolutely…it’s a…you know…one a those thingies….”

  Quickly I slip past him, into the apartment. “Okay, where is he?”

  Limpy wheels around. “Whoa, dude. Where’s who?”

  “The man who owns the drone.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about—”

  “The man who paid you to come get it from my front yard,” I say.

  Limpy sniffs, looks down at his sandy bare feet, then back up at me.

  “Listen, dude—”

  “No, you listen.” I waggle the SD card in front of him. “This is not a ‘thingy.’ It’s a miniature data board for storing photos and video. Anybody who’s into drones would know that. Speaking of which, where is it? Your quadcopter, Limpy.”

  “My what?”

  “Oh, come on.” I motion around the inside of the apartment, which is basically a minefield of surfboards, skimboards, skateboards, Styrofoam fast-food cartons, and mounds of reeking laundry.

  Yet no drone.

  “Dude, just get the hell outta here,” says Limpy, and he’s large enough to make me.

  “Not until you tell me where he is.”

  “Hey, do I look like some kinda rat?”

  Actually, Limpy does sort of resemble a 160-pound rodent. It sounds mean, but the truth is the truth. I don’t have a problem with surfers, they’re fine. A kid in my sister’s class is crazy good on a short board. He gets all A’s and B’s, and he’s going to the University of California in San Diego.

  Limpy, I’m guessing, wasn’t much of a student.

  I smile at him and say: “The license tag on your van expired eight months ago. You’re lucky some cop hasn’t noticed.”

  He grabs his head. “Dude, why are you bustin’ my butt? What are you, like, thirteen? Who do you think you freakin’ are?”

  “Just a law-abiding citizen,” I reply, “trying to find his father.”

  Limpy’s expression gets cloudy as his brain struggles to fit all this information together.

  “How much did he pay you?” I ask. “Don’t worry—you don’t have to give the money back.”

  “Twenty bucks,” he mumbles.

  “How’d you meet him?”

  “I was parkin’ at that IHOP round the corner, okay, and he pulled up beside me and asked do I want to make some easy cash. He was in a mega-hurry. Said his RC drone went down and could I go pick it up for him.”

  “Didn’t it seem weird that he wouldn’t go get it himself?”

  “People are weird, dude. I don’t judge.”

  I describe what my father looks like, and Limpy says it sounds like the same guy. I’m working real hard to stay cool. “Was he driving a red Chevy king cab?”

  Limpy nods. “Covered with dust. I mean, it was dog dirty.”

  A subject on which Limpy is an expert.

  “Did you take the drone back to the IHOP?” I ask.

  “Naw, some motel down Highway One. He paid me the twenty, and I drove home. Well, not straight home. I stopped to pick up…groceries.”

  Limpy’s so-called groceries are on the kitchen table: a tube of Pringles and a twelve-pack of beer.

  “Which motel?” I ask.

  “I don’t remember the name.”

  “Then take me there.”

  “Whaaaat?” Limpy whines. “Gimme a break, man.”

  “I’ll put my bike in the back of your van, and you can drop me off. Let’s go.”

  Limpy folds his ropey brown arms. “So, this guy’s really your dad?”

  “Yep.”

  “But then how come he’s spyin’ on you? That’s messed up, dude.”

  “It sure is,” I say.

  NINE

  The sun goes down. I’m sitting on my bike in front of the Purple Pelican Motel. There’s no sign of a Chevy king cab with Montana license plates.

  I’ve got the phone to my ear waiting for Summer Chasing-Hawks to pick up on the other end. She doesn’t. I’ve already texted her like nine times and gotten no reply.

  My next call is to Little Thunder-Sky.

  “Hello there, Billy Big Stick,” she says.

  “I’ve been trying to reach Summer, but—”

  “She’s hiking up Mill Creek. There’s no cell signal on the mountain.”

  “It’s about my dad,” I say to Lil. “Is he in Florida?”

  “That would be news to me.”

  “The note he dropped to me on the river said he’d be coming here, but it didn’t say when. I didn’t tell you about it because I figured it was just him…you know…trying to make me feel better.”

  Lil says she hasn’t spoken to my father in days. “Said he’s off on another mission, but as usual, he didn’t say where.”

  I tell her about the mystery quadcopter, Limpy, and the dusty red truck.

  “Him and that drone,” Lil sighs wearily. “Why can’t he just walk up and say hi like a regular person?”

  “Sorry. Gotta go.” I hop off my bike and duck behind a bus-stop bench.

  A big red pickup has wheeled into the motel parking lot. A slender man steps down from the driver’s side holding a white bag. It’s too dark to see his face.

  I try to shout “Dad!” but only a raw croak comes out.

  Pathetic.

  The man enters one of the ground-floor rooms. When the lights come on, the blinds snap shut.

  My phone vibrates. It’s Mom calling, but I don’t answer.

  Instead, I text her, with shaky fingers: “I’m chillin at Dex’s.”

  “Don’t b 2 late,” she tex
ts back.

  “K.”

  True confession: I don’t know anybody named Dex. In fact, I don’t know anybody who knows anybody named Dex. A more experienced liar would have come up with a normal-sounding fake friend.

  I lock my bike to the bench and sneak over to the red pickup. It’s got Montana license tags, new rear tires, and a gritty coat of dust. However, one of the fenders has a dime-sized puncture that I don’t remember seeing when we came upon Dad’s truck in the Tom Miner Basin. The hole might explain the gunshot that the Forest Service officer was on his way to investigate when he saw me hitchhiking.

  Traffic is heavy tonight, and I’m worried that the passing headlights will reveal me crouching like a burglar by the motel. I ease into the shadows to plan my next move, and it turns out I’m not alone. Two heavyset dudes in T-shirts are leaning against the wall sharing a bottle of booze.

  “Gimme your money,” one of them says casually.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Right now,” says the other one, gulping from the bottle.

  I can’t see their expressions, but they sound fairly serious.

  “I don’t have any money,” I say, which is the truth. My fists are clenched, but my whole body is shaking.

  The first guy grabs the front of my shirt. He smells like cigarettes and rotten fruit. “Empty your pockets or we kick your ass.”

  “Yo, I don’t think so.”

  I’m almost sure this is not me speaking.

  The dude lets go of my shirt and takes a step back. I truly cannot move a muscle.

  “I’ll put botha you dumb suckahs down,” says the unseen owner of the voice, which I now recognize.

  The two muggers slink away, cussing. A hand settles on my shoulder.

  “You awright, Snake Boy?”

  “I’m good. Thanks, Jammer.”

  When he steps from the shadow, I see a straight blade in his right hand. He snaps it shut. “Ain’t no rattlesnake,” he says with a hard smile, “but I can sure make it bite.”

  “You saved me a trip to the hospital.”

  “Go on home, bro. This ain’t no place for you to be hangin’.”