Lost at Running Brook Trail (5 page)

Kimberly inspected the Storm, turning it over in her hand. It seemed to be all right, in spite of the hit it had taken. Maybe they were wrong when they said the newer phones were more fragile than the older ones.

“Well,” said Miriam, “aren’t you going to call someone?”

“She doesn’t ask me if the phone works, but she wants to know who I’m going to call.”

Miriam stepped toward Kimberly. Elaine, sensing what might happen, stepped in front of Miriam.

“Does the phone work?” Elaine asked.

“Why are you asking? You’re not the one who tried to damage it.” Kimberly folded her arms and placed the phone under one of her arms. She wanted to get at Miriam.

“I’m asking because I want this ridiculous back and forth to stop so you can tell someone where we are.”

Kimberly laughed. “Do we know where we are? Oh, sorry, I guess we’re somewhere near a creek on a rocky road.” She was the one with the phone. They had nothing. Let them wait. They’d been told no electronic devices, but she’d been smart and had brought her iPod and her phone.

“Actually, that’s exactly what you would say.” Elaine heard the crunch behind her and held her hand backward to ward Miriam off. “In addition to any other details that you can pick out around here.”

Kimberly slowly unfolded her hands and toyed with something on the face of the phone. “No signal.”

“Great,” Elaine said.

Susan, a bystander to the conversation, ate the other half of her sandwich. “Who would you call?” she asked, her mouth half full.

“The lodge.”

“Do you have the number?”

“That’s right, we don’t, but one of us could call home and get someone to call the lodge.” Elaine didn’t want to be the one to make any calls because her parents would want to know how she had gotten herself lost. Her mother would go on and on about listening and paying attention to what was said by experienced adults. She would probably tell Elaine that she had not grasped whatever lessons there were to be learned. Kimberly had the phone, so she could make the call if they ever got any signal.

“Kimberly, could you check at intervals to see if you’re getting a signal?” Elaine asked.

“We’ll see,” Kimberly said in her usual terse and ambiguous manner. She was either going to check or she wasn’t. What choice did she have anyway? Was she going to cut off her nose to spite her face? Sometimes she felt like doing just that—place herself at a disadvantage so that others would be inconvenienced—but she probably wouldn’t do it now, especially with Miriam breathing down her neck. Kimberly placed the Storm in one of the pockets of her black cargo shorts. They moved on.

Susan was the first to feel the effects of the loading up of her stomach with water. Her bladder felt as if it was about to explode. She had to go, but where? “I need a bathroom,” she said.

“The only bathroom you’re going to find out here is those bushes.” Elaine pointed away from the path.

Susan looked in the direction of Elaine’s hand with alarm.

“You either want to go or you don’t. Which is it?”

“Who knows what’s out there?” Susan said, still looking in the direction of the bushes.

“Just more trees,” Elaine said.

Kimberly reached into her pocket and took out the Storm. Still no signal. It was possible they would never get one out here.

“Do you have any tissue?” Susan asked Elaine, deciding she really had to alleviate the pressure in her bladder.

“Don’t you?” Elaine responded, dodging the question.

“No, that’s why I asked you.”

“I have some, but I don’t want to finish it, especially not now.”

“I only need a little.”

Elaine reached into her bag and pulled out one full roll of tissue still in its plastic wrap. She removed it and measured exactly three blocks.

Susan quickly disappeared behind some trees to do her business.

“Geez,” Miriam said, “you have a whole roll of tissue, and you’re storing it like it’s going to run out.”

“I brought it for myself, and now that I know that nobody else has any, it might run out.” Elaine had always travelled with toilet paper wherever she went. She never knew when it would come in handy. She couldn’t count the times she had gone into public restrooms and there was none. She liked to be prepared.

Susan reappeared, and they all took turns going. Kimberly was the last to go, refusing to ask for tissue and simply holding out her palm in front of Elaine. Three blocks were also dropped into her hands.

“I need more than this,” Kimberly said, refusing to move her outstretched palm.

“Oh well,” Elaine said, “we all need a lot of things that we probably won’t get. C’est la vie.” She replaced the tissue in its plastic, dropped it in her bag and walked away. Kimberly finally trotted off to find a concealed tree.

The road seemed endless and their feet felt heavier by the minute. There was the physical intensity, but there was the mental weight of not knowing where they were and exactly where they were going. When they came upon an overturned canoe that lay on the side of the road half concealed by the bushes, they stopped again. They would have passed it without notice but one of its pointed ends was sticking out.

“Are there Indians in these woods?” Kimberly stared at the pointed end as if it was a foreign specimen that she didn’t want to contend with.

“Yes, these parts are filled with savage Indians with bows, arrows, spears and the whole works.” Miriam observed Kimberly with amusement and perhaps a little irritation. This was the same girl who had attempted to make fun of her Filipino heritage along the corridors of Anne Beaumont Private High. Now here she was again thinking only Indians used canoes. “Frankly, I’m just waiting for the bushes to come alive, brown, painted faced men to appear and for all four of us to be encircled by spears. Maybe they’ll use us as human sacrifices to their ever-hungry gods.”

Kimberly stared at Miriam with disdain. She opened her mouth to say something and then decided against it. It was strange to see a canoe with no paddles, turned over like that. It wasn’t like the canoes that she had seen in the movies made from logs or some kind of tree bark. This one looked like some kind of silvery metal, although with the ravages of time, it was hard to tell. Out here in the boonies she had expected a log canoe.

It was almost part of the landscape now, entangled in thickets, bushes, trees and shrubbery, stained by rain, sun and the colours of various leaves. They all crowded in on the overturned canoe as if they were at the zoo with some strange caged animal that they were trying to figure out.

“Why would someone leave a boat here with no paddle?” Susan asked.

“Well, we don’t see any paddle,” Elaine said, “but the thing isn’t facing up, so there may very well be paddles under there somewhere.” Elaine had wanted to go canoeing, but she was a little unsure of how she would cope with an implement that had no wheel for steering and only two little blades for guidance.

“In any case,” she said, “this thing is abandoned, so paddle or no paddle, this thing is going nowhere.”

“Maybe that’s why it went nowhere, no paddles,” Susan said.

Miriam used her boot to move vines and greenery to get a closer look. “Is there a lake or a river near here?” she asked. “Why would a canoe be where there’s no lake?”

Elaine looked through the bushes. “There’s a creek, and creeks usually lead to bigger bodies of water.” She could see nothing through the trees that would determine the existence of a lake. They didn’t even hear the creek anymore. All was eerily quiet except for twigs cracking under their feet.

Susan didn’t like the quiet of the woods. It scared her. Here they were looking at a canoe that was almost a tree. Canoes belonged on the water with paddles to keep them going. She wanted to hear something other than themselves.

“Look at the water’s expanse …”

“
What water are you talking about?” Kimberly mistook Susan’s first line of the second verse of her poem for her own thoughts.

“It’s a poem,” Elaine volunteered.

“Why would she know that when she spends class time looking at her face?” Miriam had now stopped inspecting the canoe.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

“And see if you catch your offense. Perhaps not, the density is hard to conceive. Oh why are we all so naïve?”

“You like that poem?” Elaine said. She liked that poem too. She always liked the ones that rhymed. They always seem to have a better rhythm coming off the tongue and helped in memorization.

“Don’t know.” Susan really didn’t know why she was saying it, other than it started with “down by the water we go.” It somehow seemed appropriate.

“You can say a poem by heart and don’t know if you like it?”

“I know it, that’s why I say it,” Susan said. “They made us study it like it was going out of style.”

“Maybe it
was
going out of style,” Elaine said.

The canoe had presented a reprieve and a distraction in their walk. They moved on with the thought that civilization was getting farther away.

“How come this gravel road is so long? You think someone brought all this gravel here?” Miriam continued to play soccer with the stones. With every kick, her brown-blond ponytail shook like a horse’s tail.

“So much rock?’” Elaine asked. “I doubt that. That would be a lot of work.” She tried to picture men bringing tons and tons of gravel to make this long road but couldn’t imagine it, as hard as she tried.

They walked in a straight line across the road, none wanting to be at the back or at the front. From an aerial view they might look like four linked sausages stretched out horizontally.

With all the running and the haters clawing at her face, Kimberly had just remembered that she was listening to her iPod. Back to Britney! She stuck one bud in the left and one in the right and was running down her playlist to find a selection.

Miriam saw this, broke the line and yanked one of the buds from Kimberly’s ear. “We all need to listen!” she shouted at Kimberly, standing in front of her as a dare.

“You’re just jealous because you have nothing to listen to but your own stupid, useless thoughts. Arrrrrrrgh!” Kimberly screamed with her fists clenched by her sides. She pulled the other bud out in anger. She wrapped the cord around the iPod and placed it in her pocket.

Susan had watched the episode and made an elaborate cross over her heart. From the beginning, something had been going on between Kimberly and Miriam, but Susan didn’t know what it was. Maybe she would never know, but she knew that neither girl would let up.

“You know, Miriam,” Elaine said, “if we were to run over this”—she nodded toward all the gravel—“how far do you think we would get?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“It wasn’t intended to be, but now that you ask, I guess it depends on how you answer.”

“Well,” Miriam said, tapping her head with her forefinger, “we would probably be grounded like that canoe back there. It’s hard to run on stones. I tried running in sand at the beach. It’s good exercise but it’s hard. So I can just imagine running over gravel.”

Elaine drank some water and used some to wash her face and wipe around her neck. “You didn’t have to haul the earphone from her ear like that, you know.”

“You think I should have asked her? Said something like, ‘Kimberly, could you please remove the earphones from your ears, we all need to be attentive at this time’? Is that what I should have done?” Miriam looked incredulously at Elaine and held her hands out in a plea. “She does not listen to reason!”

“Yeah, you’re right, but she’s not going to respond positively to aggression either.”

“I’m right here!” Kimberly shouted and spat in the stones. “So stop talking about me as if I’m not!”

“Yes, we know you’re right here, sweet face,” Miriam said, “and now you can hear us and everything else loud and clear.” She stuck her two index fingers in her ears, turned to Kimberly and clucked her tongue in mockery.

Kimberly scoffed and looked away. Her ear was still smarting where Miriam had dragged the bud out.

After another couple kilometers the gravel road began to fall away, giving way to smaller pebbles and a mixture of sand. Beyond this a serene, slow-moving river snaked its way along. There was no sign of civilization. The rough beach was strewn with discarded paddles and parts of broken boats.

“Maybe this is where that canoe came from.” Elaine, her feet hot from heat and the extended sojourn on packed gravel, took off her boots and placed her feet in the water, which was surprisingly and refreshingly cold.

Above them, flying too low for comfort, numerous hawks thrust themselves through the air on broad wings.

“Why was it out there?” Susan was rooted to the spot. She looked up at the squawking birds. She could see their talons, sharp and menacing with every bold swoop.

Miriam, who also had her feet in the water, quickly withdrew them. “Elaine, there are things moving in there.”

Elaine removed her feet too and observed. She saw the hard shells of several turtles sliding into the water. What else might be in there?

“Eww,” Susan said, “good thing I didn’t put my feet in there.”

“You’ll put your feet in nothing.” Elaine looked up at the hawks. Their hooked beaks were prominent and they seemed to have red on their shoulders.

Kimberly was also glad that she had not put her feet in the water. She had taken off her boots and her socks to give her feet some air, but she had not trusted the water.

The river was partially enclosed by dark green evergreen trees, their leaves elongated and sticking out like needles. The cast-off brown cones were scattered along the ground. Huge rocks jutted up from the ground, washed from time to time by high tides and rain. On these, all four of them played silly games of hopscotch. It took their minds off where they were and why they were there. After they jumped and leaped from rock to rock, they ate what would have been lunch because it was now far into the afternoon. Susan, who had already eaten her lunch, pulled out yet another chocolate bar from her bag and devoured it.