Fort (7 page)

The squirrel looked oddly human now. “It kind of looks like a pygmy,” I said. “A dead pygmy. A naked, headless, armless, footless pygmy,” I added.

Augie laughed and started cutting the body into pieces for frying. He nodded toward the skin and guts. “Why don't you bury those over there someplace.”

“Sure. Hey,” I said, holding up the tail. “Maybe I'll keep this.” I was picturing attaching it to my bike's handlebar, or to the back of a baseball hat, or even—“Hey, we could fly it from the fort, like a flag!”

“We could,” said Augie. “We'd have to boil it and salt it, though. Or it'll start to stink.”

“Oh. Yeah. Like with mummies, right? Didn't they use salt on them?”

Augie shrugged.

I decided to bury the tail. I didn't have a shovel, and digging a hole with a stick didn't work so great. Then I spotted a fairly big rock half-buried in the ground and got an idea. I pried it up, dropped the tail and the pelt and the guts into the hole it left, and covered it back up—sort of—with the rock.

At the fort, we got set up. There were leaves and twigs on the ground inside the fort, and we brushed them out the doorway, and threw out all the rocks we could feel. Then we laid out Al's linoleum, which was a little small, but covered a good part of the ground. When we'd spread out our sleeping bags and set up the orange crates with our other stuff, the place looked great.

Then we gathered wood, cleared an area in front of the fort, and started a fire, which was easy with all the dry pine needles and twigs around.

Augie took the empty gallon milk jug and a cup and headed toward the stream. When he came back, I saw he'd filled the jug with water, which seemed like a good idea what with the blazing fire and all.

When the flames died down a little, we put two big rocks on either side of the fire and balanced the frying pan on top. I threw in a gob of margarine. When it was sizzling, Augie put in the pieces of meat and I sprinkled salt and pepper on them.

The smell of the frying meat was incredible.

We ate some cheese sticks while we stared hungrily at the pan, turning the pieces of meat from time to time.

When I was about to die of starvation, Augie declared the meat done.

We sat in the drifting smoke from the fire, gnawing squirrel meat off the bones and slathering slices of bread with margarine.

“What'd I tell you?” Augie asked.

“You said it would be
good
,” I answered.

He looked at me, surprised. “You don't like it?” He shrugged. “Oh, well. More for me, then.” He reached over and grabbed the remaining two pieces from the pan.

“Not so fast!” I said, taking one of them back. “You said it would be
good.
But
this
 … this is
epic
. This is the best meal I've ever had in my whole life.
The. Best. Ever.
” I stuffed a whole slice of bread in my mouth for emphasis.

Augie grinned. “Yeah? I mean, you've been to some real fancy restaurants, right?”

I nodded, but repeated with my mouth full, “Uh. Beft. Eh-er.” This cracked us both up, and when I laughed my whole mouthful of bread kind of shot out right at Augie. He threw it back at me, and I picked it up and finished it.

We chewed every shred of meat off the bones, licked our fingers clean, and finished it all off with some Oreos and licorice.

The nice white bandage Aunt Hilda had wrapped around my thumb was pretty dirty from all the work we'd done and greasy now, too, so I pulled it off and threw it into the fire. The cut had some dried blood on it, and still hurt a little, but not much.

It had gotten pretty dark by then, so we piled more wood on the fire, and Augie got out the calendar he'd swiped from Al.

Even with the fire built up, it was kind of hard to see. Augie got a flashlight and rummaged around for a minute. He came back with the milk jug filled with water and the duct tape, and pressed the lit end of the flashlight against the side of the jug.

“Hold this here while I tape it,” he told me.

The beam of light shining through the jug made the whole thing glow—“Like a lantern!” I said. “So
that's
why you brought that stuff.”

“Gram and I do this whenever the power goes out,” Augie explained. “Which happens a lot.”

I sat back and admired the lantern. It seemed to me that Augie knew how to do everything—everything important, anyway. For a second, the question popped into my head: What am
I
good at? No answer came to mind. I shrugged the thought away.

We sat by the fire, going through the calendar, month by month, examining the pictures by the light of the lantern. There was a lot to discuss. One thing we agreed on for sure was that when we were old enough to drive, we were going to own pickup trucks.

When the fire died down we doused the embers until they were cold, then got ready for bed. We left the flap open and lay back on our sleeping bags, looking out at the stars shining through the tree branches and shooting the breeze. After a while we grew quiet.

“I wish we could live out here all the time,” I said.

“Mmm,” said Augie.

I could tell Augie was just about asleep, and so was I. But I fought to stay awake, thinking how this was the best night of my life and I didn't want to miss any of it.

 

6

It was great waking up in the fort, with the whole day and another whole night ahead of us. It was at that moment when I realized the real beauty of a fort. There's nobody to tell you what to do or when to do it.

I felt my hand throbbing a little, so I held it up to have a look. There was just enough early morning light coming through the trees so I could see. It looked okay. I remembered Aunt Hilda asking if I'd had a tetanus shot. I'd said yes, but I had no idea, really.

Suddenly a book I'd read popped into my head. It was about some old-time explorers who were trying to find a river in Canada. They got totally lost and ended up spending the winter, which they didn't plan to do, and they all died of starvation and cold, except for the guy who lived to write the book. And one of them got cut with a dirty knife and got tetanus, except in the book they mostly called it lockjaw.

The book included gruesome, detailed descriptions of all the guys dying. The author really got into telling about the guy with tetanus: how his body spazzed uncontrollably, his neck muscles got all stiff, and how he died with a horrible grin frozen on his face because his jaws clenched tight and wouldn't move.

Thinking about all this gave me an idea for a terrific trick to play on Augie.

I waited until he started squirming around in his sleeping bag, making little noises like he was starting to wake up, and I let out a loud moan.

Augie squirmed some more and rolled over onto his back, eyes closed.

I moaned again.

“Mmmmmm,” said Augie. “Whazzzat?”

I moaned louder and longer.

Augie suddenly shot up to a sitting position, looking around in confusion. “What's that?” he cried. “What's going on?”

I tightened my face into a horrible frozen grin, just the way I imagined the guy from the book looked. Keeping my neck stiff, I twitched in a series of shivery spasms. From between clenched teeth, I managed to gasp, “Ock-aw.”

Augie stared at me in dismay. “What's the matter with you, Wyatt?” he said.

I made the whole length of my body go spazz again, and stared up at Augie all wild-eyed and crazed.

“I can't—” he said. “What are you—are you sick?”

I held up my injured hand. “Et-us. Um a ut.
Ock-aw
.”

“Wyatt, can't you talk normal? I can't understand you! What the heck is the matter with you?”

“Ock-aw!”

Augie looked at me, a mix of horror and frustration on his face.

I spazzed again, then pointed weakly toward the notepad and pen which I had set on the orange crate shelf the night before. Augie jumped to his feet, grabbed them, and handed them to me. Keeping the upper half of my body and my face rigid, I took the pen, held it in a clawlike grip, and wrote, shakily,
Lockjaw
.

Augie stared at the word, his own jaw dropping.

Dying
, I added.

Augie's eyes bugged. “
What? No! Don't die!
Wait!” He stood stock-still for a second, clearly trying to think. “What should I do? Should I go for help?” He nodded. “Yes! You—stay right there!
But don't die!
I'll be right back and—”

I couldn't keep it together any longer. Watching Augie freaking out was just too much. I started shaking with silent laughter. At first Augie looked at me with even deeper concern, no doubt worried that I was entering my final death throes.

Then, when he realized that I was actually laughing—hysterically—at him, he fell to his knees and started pummeling me with his fists. He wasn't really hitting me hard, and I was partly protected by the sleeping bag, so it barely even hurt.

“I wish—” I said, gasping for air between bursts of laughter, “you could—have seen—your face!” In a high, shrill voice I cried,
“Don't die! You can't die!”

“You're gonna die, all right, you little twerp,” said Augie furiously, grabbing both my arms and holding them. “Right now!”

I grinned the horrible frozen grin at him and said,
“Ock-aw!! Ock-aw!!!”

At this, Augie cracked up, too, and we both rolled around for a while until we were able to get hold of ourselves.

So, all in all, it was a pretty great way to start out our second day.

 

7

We lazed around for a while, then we dug for worms and headed to the creek with our fishing poles. Most of the stream was pretty shallow, but we walked until we found a place where some big boulders and a fallen tree had made a deep pool. We snuck up close.

“Try this,” Augie whispered. I watched him cast onto the bank right near the edge of the water, then twitch the tip of his pole enough to make the worm drop in.

Bam!
A hungry little brook trout flashed out of nowhere and grabbed the worm. Augie flipped the fish up onto the bank.

Then he took a piece of fishing line from his pocket and made a stringer, looping one end through the trout's mouth and gill, tying the other end to his belt loop. That way, the fish stayed cool in the water but couldn't escape.

Neat.

“Okay, so first we'll catch the little guys hanging out near shore,” he explained. “Then we'll keep casting farther out, and finally we'll see if there's any big ones hanging out in the middle, at the bottom of the pool.”

“Genius,” I said.

“Go easy,” Augie warned, “so we don't spook them.”

The plan worked great. We caught a bunch of little fish, then some bigger ones, and then Augie got a ginormous one. They were beauties, with red and yellow spots and some blue spots on their sides, and I was feeling kind of bad when they died until Augie started talking about how great they were going to taste.

We built a dam with rocks and made a little pond to keep the fish cool until we cooked them. Then we swam and goofed around in the water and didn't get out until we were all shivery and pruney.

We lay around by the side of the stream, drying off and warming up in the sun.

“I'm starving,” I said, suddenly realizing I was.

“Me, too,” said Augie.

He showed me how to clean the fish and we took turns, using Augie's pocketknife. It was no big deal: you just cut off the head, make a slit up the belly, and scoop the guts out with your finger. Augie said it was okay to put the guts back in the stream for crayfish and stuff to eat. We went back to the fort, built the fire up, waited for it to settle down some, then heated up a glob of margarine. When it was sizzling, we put in the fish. Augie said the skin was one of the best parts, but you had to let it get really crispy.

It was hard to wait, I can tell you.

I think maybe those fish were even better than the squirrel. We crunched right into the little ones, eating them whole, tiny bones and all. We ate the meat off the bigger ones, pulling the skeletons out and throwing them on the fire.

We finished off our feast with cookies and just sat for a while, feeling full and lazy.

“This is the life,” I said.

“Definitely,” Augie agreed.

When we got tired of sitting around, we went to check out the gorge. We had to hike a long way through the woods. We could hear the waterfall before we saw it. Looking over the edge at the steep, sharp drop, I could see why nobody ever came across from the other side.

We walked upstream for a long while, to a place where the cliffs weren't quite so steep. Augie said he'd heard about people finding fossils in the cliffs, so we searched around. Neither of us had ever found a fossil before. We figured we'd know one when we saw it, but if we did see one, we didn't know it.

By the time we headed back, it was starting to get dark. We had just crossed the little stream near our fort when I noticed that the rock I'd used to cover up the remains of the squirrel had been moved. I called Augie over.

“Look,” I said, pointing. “That's where I buried the stuff. Do you think an animal found it? Like a raccoon or a bear?” The idea of a bear being so close to where we'd been sleeping the night before was both exciting and scary.

Augie examined the hole and the overturned rock. “Where's the tail?” he asked, looking perplexed.

I looked again. “It's gone!”

We stared for a minute.

I said, “That is
so
weird. I mean, most animals would be after those nice stinky guts, right?”

“Right,” said Augie thoughtfully. “It's definitely weird that it only took the tail. There's not much meat on a tail.”