A Week in the Woods (7 page)

If all went according to plan, he'd be ready by dark.

Anya came to say good night.

She tucked Mark's covers around him. She patted his head and said, “If you need anything, just give a call, all right?”

Mark nodded. “Sure. And thanks, Anya.”

He closed his eyes and listened to her footsteps, heard her pull the door closed. Then Mark reached over and turned off the light.

Dark, but not totally. An outside light was on, and it filtered in the windows, throwing pale patches here and there. Mark tried to close his eyes, but they seemed to spring open again by themselves. He tried to lie quietly, but he could feel his heart pounding in his chest. He sat up and looked around, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. And he smiled.

Mark smiled because he was inside a sleeping bag a
few feet away from the rope swing in the middle of the barn. And he was going to sleep in the barn all night. Alone.

When he'd gone back into the house after school to tell Leon and Anya what he wanted to do, Anya had immediately said no.

“In this cold? And with wind and more snow coming tonight? No, and no again!”

But after Leon had talked to her, she'd finally said yes.

Leon had offered to help him get set, but Mark insisted on doing it all himself. First he'd laid a blue plastic tarp over the floorboards near the rope swing, and then he put two thick cotton quilts on top of that, each folded double. After that came a thin, inflatable sleeping pad and his sleeping bag. Before he carried the sleeping bag out to the barn, he went to the kitchen to show Anya the label. It made her feel a little better: The bag was supposed to keep a camper warm even if the temperature got down to ten degrees. And tonight it was only supposed to drop down into the twenties.

Mark didn't kid himself. He'd been on overnights at summer camp, and he'd read outdoors books and some camping equipment catalogs. He knew he wasn't really camping. He had a soft mattress, a fluorescent lantern, a flashlight, a book, a thermos of hot chocolate, some Lorna Doone cookies, and two Snickers bars. Plus his pillow. And his stout walking stick close
at hand. He even had a roof above him and walls all around. And Anya had made him bring a wireless phone.

Still, this was different. No one had planned it out and packed him up and then buckled him into a van with twelve other campers. No one had told him what to bring or what not to bring. And the biggest difference? He was alone. Even though Anya and Leon were only about two hundred feet away, as Mark sat there in his sleeping bag, he felt more alone than ever before.

Mark reached for the lantern and then stopped. He knew he was afraid of the dark. That felt like a weakness, and Mark wanted to be strong. One of his goals for the night was to keep the lights off. He pressed a button on the side of his wristwatch. In the pale blue glow he saw it wasn't even nine o'clock yet.
Nowhere near bedtime, especially not on a Friday night,
he thought. And he'd brought a book in case he wasn't tired. And he wasn't, not yet.

So Mark gave himself permission to turn on the lantern.

He'd gotten the book on Wednesday. During library period he'd asked the librarian if she knew any good stories about nature and being outdoors. She'd smiled and said, “Have you read
Hatchet
?”

And Mark had said yes.

“How about Jack London? Ever read any of his books?”

When Mark said he hadn't, the librarian said, “I don't have any in our collection here, but I know the town library does.”

And she was right. That afternoon Leon had driven Mark to the small stone building on Main Street, and he'd gotten his library card and then checked out a collection of Jack London's short stories.

Mark turned over onto his stomach, propped himself up on his elbows and opened the book. He flipped about thirty pages, came to a story called “Diable, a Dog,” and began to read. A few pages later, Mark wished he'd asked the librarian another question: These stories aren't scary, are they?

“Diable, a Dog” was about a terrible man who was cruel to a big dog that was half wolf and half husky. Whenever he felt like it, the man beat the dog with a club, and whenever it could, the dog kept trying to get back at him. These two were at war, and their hatred for each other was dark and primitive. Mark wanted to stop reading, but the suspense and the great writing drove him on.

At the end of the story, the hair on the back of his neck and on his arms was standing on end, and it wasn't from the cold.

The wind had picked up while he'd been reading, and he could hear sleet bouncing off the siding at the east end of the barn. The storm was beginning. A gust shook the window panes above the big double doors,
and the beams and posts and rafters and joists of the old barn began a creaky conversation with one another.

Mark shivered. He pulled his sleeping bag up tighter around his shoulders and turned to another story. It was called “To Light a Fire.”

This story had only two characters, one man and one dog. But at least they were friends, unlike the two in the first story. The dog trotted along behind the man through the Yukon wilderness as the man followed a trail back to his camp.

After about a page and a half, Mark realized there was a third character in the story: the cold. The cold was a seventy-five-degrees-below-zero killer, and it was stalking the man and the dog, waiting for the man to make a mistake. It was so cold that when the man would spit, the liquid crackled and froze in midair before it could fall to the ground.

The man was foolish. He hadn't listened to the old-timers about traveling alone, and he hadn't listened when they warned him about the extreme cold. Again Mark shivered and wished he could stop reading, but the storyteller wouldn't let him go.

Near the end, Mark read this passage, and then he read it a second time:

A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of
freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet, but that this was a matter of life and death with the chances against him. This threw him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek-bed along the old, dim trail. The dog joined in behind and kept up with him. He ran blindly, without intention, in fear such as he had never known in his life.

The end of the second story was not quite as gruesome as the first one had been, but when he finished it, Mark had had enough of Jack London for the night.

He was done reading, so that meant it was time to turn out the light again. Mark began an argument with himself. One part of him argued that maybe it would be all right to leave it on. After all, if he was really scared, he wouldn't be out here in the barn all alone, would he? But the other part of his mind said that the deal about tonight was simple: no lights. Tonight was about not being afraid of anything, including the dark—especially the dark.

Mark turned off the lantern. The wind was blowing much harder now, and in spite of the roof and walls, a strong draft of cold air rolled along the floor of the barn. Turning over onto his back, he scooched down farther into his bag. It was the kind of sleeping bag with a hood built into it, so he pulled on the drawstring
until only his face and nose were left in the narrowed opening.

Mark felt blind. He had been staring at a white page under a bright light, so it took almost five minutes before he began to recover some night vision. Even then, there wasn't much to see. The floodlights from the house were dimmed by the grime on the small square windowpanes above the double doors, and the light was now clouded even more by the thickening snow. Mark could see the outline of the rope swing about ten feet away, see it stretch up and lose itself in the darkness far above him. He could see the outlines of the posts on either side of the center space, and overhead he could see some of the beams and the front edges of the north and south haylofts. But most of the barn was hidden in deep shadow or complete darkness.

Mark tried keeping his eyes shut. The noise of the wind was muffled by the sleeping bag. But almost immediately images from TV shows and movies came pouring into his thought. They seemed to have their own light, and he saw each so clearly. People with guns. Insane killers. Crashes and fires. Not to mention things like aliens and snakes and spiders. Awful stuff. Mark opened his eyes again, but that didn't stop the image flow. Shutting it off took him a while. It wasn't like turning off a faucet. It was more like mopping up a big spill when it's spreading across a tabletop. It took
some work, but Mark made himself think about other things, look for other pictures.

With his eyes open, he focused on the plumes of water vapor that rose into the dim light every time he exhaled into the cold air. It was a little like lying back on a sunny afternoon and looking up at drifting clouds.

Mark began sifting through his life. He reached back as far as he could, looking for his very first memory. And he found it.

It was a hot afternoon in Santa Fe when he was less than two years old. He was wearing a pair of bright yellow overalls. When his mom wasn't looking, he pushed the kitchen door open and toddled out into the back courtyard and started along the hard clay path that wound toward the pool and the covered patio. Then he tripped and fell forward onto his hands and knees. The red clay was hot from the desert sun. The searing heat burned his hands and knees, and he began to scream. His mom rushed out of the house and scooped him up. At the kitchen sink she ran cool water over his hands, then hugged and rocked him until he stopped crying. Then the little boy looked at the bright red marks on the knees of his yellow overalls, burst into tears, and had to be comforted all over again.

Lying there in the dark on the drafty floor of the barn, Mark wondered why that was his earliest memory. Was it the pain from the burning hot path? Was it
the colors, the red clay and the bright yellow of his overalls? Or was it the way his mom had hugged and cradled him?

And thinking of that question, Mark was suddenly homesick. Which seemed silly, to be at home and feel homesick. Except it had happened to Mark before.

Mark knew what he wanted. He wanted to see his mom's face. That's what always cured his homesickness. He wanted a hug and a good-night kiss. Mark missed his dad, too, but it wasn't the same. His dad always made him feel secure and protected, but all his life, whenever he'd had a strong feeling of home and warmth and comfort, it was his mom who'd made it happen. Home had been mostly Mom's department.

That is, until about four years ago. That's when Eloise Chelmsley had started to take on more and more business responsibilities. Home and business had fought it out, and Mark's mom thought she had done a good job of splitting her time and her thoughts in half. But really, the business world had won. And that's when Anya and Leon had been hired.

A blast of wind pulled Mark back to the present. It sounded like a giant palm had swatted the south side of the barn. Above the gale he heard a sharp crack and then a thump against the south wall. Mark could picture a sheet of icicles cracking off and knocking against the barn. He could also picture a mummy with fire in its eyes trying to break through the wall so it could
slouch across the floor and sink its rotting teeth into his brain. But he quickly pushed that image out his mind.

The sound of the wind steadied off at a new and higher pitch, and still lying there in the dark, Mark thought about his old school. He wondered about two of his friends, Carson and Ben. Good guys. He had thought maybe they'd write to him after he moved, or at least call. Nothing yet. Of course, without Instant Messenger he was way out of the loop. And the satellite DSL connection wouldn't be working for at least another week.

Another week.

Another week of school.

And that thought started Mark winding back through his first two weeks at Hardy Elementary School. He pictured himself walking stiffly from room to room, sitting alone at lunch, walking quickly out of the building to get into the big black car. He saw himself looking away from faces, trying not to care, always keeping his distance.

And lying alone in the dark he caught a glimpse of the truth:
I've been acting like a stuck-up jerk.

Even in the cold Mark felt his face flush, embarrassed by this harsh view of himself. Almost immediately another truth came and saved him. Because Mark saw a way out: He could change. Maybe not completely, but he knew he could be friendlier. But what
if the kids really didn't like him? Then it wouldn't be his fault, that's what. At least he'd know he tried. There was nothing to lose, so why not?

And then his thought jumped to his teachers. They weren't really so bad. He could lighten up on them a little, too. Just ease up and see what happens. Like with Mr. Maxwell. Just give the guy a chance.

The wind didn't die down, the barn didn't stop creaking and groaning, and it certainly didn't get any warmer. But Mark felt unafraid, almost peaceful. The darkness seemed softer, and the barn was his friend, his protector from the storm.

Turning onto his stomach, he loosened the drawstring, enlarged the opening of the sleeping bag, and pulled his pillow inside. He burrowed deeper into his little cave of nylon and goose down. He settled himself, and in five minutes he was sound asleep.

Mark didn't forget what he'd decided in the barn on Friday night. He wasn't going to be the new kid at school anymore. He was going to be the new and improved kid.

On Monday morning he had Leon drop him at school a little early, about ten minutes before the first bell. It was a cold morning, so all the kids had to wait in the gym. Mark stood in the doorway a moment. He spotted a group of five fifth-grade boys. Putting on a friendly face, he walked over and edged his way into the circle. The conversation stopped, and everyone turned to look at him. Mark smiled and said, “Hi, guys.”