Saving Lucas Biggs (8 page)

Fall kept falling, and the desert nights grew colder. I got to thinking that if we stacked rocks around the edges of our tents to stop the mountain wind from whistling straight through, then maybe our blankets wouldn’t blow off in the middle of the night while we tried to sleep, leaving us dreaming of glaciers and hugging our knees. What I didn’t foresee was how hard it would actually be to find a rock to pick up. Even
one
. I mean, the desert around there, the whole shimmering thing, was like a work of art. It should’ve had a guard in a uniform and a sign: Do Not Touch.

It was perfect. It was beautiful. Red! Green! Yellow! Blue!

Brighter than you ever imagined! Every rock fit into every other rock like the pieces of a mosaic.

When I finally did locate a loose stone that didn’t look like it’d mind being picked up, it turned out to have the outline of a leaf embedded in it.

“Petrified fern,” observed Luke from behind me.

I dropped the fern on my foot. “I thought you had football practice,” I said, hopping around like a Ringling Brothers clown. Even though almost nobody on the football team was actually speaking to him, because they were all Victory kids, Luke still got to put on his helmet and his pads and play quarterback, son of a Greek miner or not, since there was nobody else in Victory who could throw a fifty-yard pass, and without a quarterback, how were they going to beat Mercury, New Mexico?

“I don’t need to practice,” he said. “Coach says I couldn’t be much better than I already am.”

If another guy had said this, he might’ve sounded like a lunk, but Luke just sounded like he was telling it like it was, because he was.

“I was looking for something to weigh down the corners of our tent,” I told him, “but—”

“It kind of feels like robbing a church, picking up rocks out here,” supplied Luke.

Which was exactly how I’d have put it, if I’d thought of it.

“Instead of fossil ferns,” suggested Luke, “how about lumps of coal? Like bad little boys and girls get in their stockings?”

“Lumps of coal would work,” I allowed.

“We’ll have to wait until dark,” said Luke.

“I’ll finish my homework in the meantime,” I replied.

And so we started stealing coal from the Victory Fuels Corporation by sneaking around their shut-down mine at night and picking up all the stray chunks that had fallen between railroad ties and through cracks in the wall of the coal chute and places like that. Turned out, coal chunks were perfect for weighing down the skirts of a residential tent. Also, you could burn them to stay warm, if you did it at night so nobody from the company saw the smoke.

Preston started to cough again. So did a lot of people, actually. Being hungry, cold, tired, shot, and sad all at once will do that to you.

Dad got cracking building a wheelchair for Mom out of an old dining seat and the wheels off the bicycle Luke and I shared. He didn’t ask to use the wheels, but Luke and I could both walk, unlike Mom, so we didn’t complain.

Mom had never liked having help doing anything, and now, when I had to roll her to the table for breakfast, or reach high on a shelf to find the salt, her neck went stiff and her eyes focused on something far away.

Dad managed to locate a tire gauge, and he constantly busied himself with the challenge of getting her inner tubes inflated to the proper level, like maybe, somehow, hitting on just the right air pressure would fix everything.

The shadow that fed on Preston’s cough grew like a storm cloud over us. “I’m not complaining,” he said one night before bed. And that was true. Preston had a nonstop mouth, but he never used it for complaining. “I’m just hungry.”

The next day, coming back from Honey Brook with an armload of clean undershorts, some with Aristotle or Luke emblazoned on them in the indelible ink of Aristotle’s black pen, I thought I saw a jackrabbit the size of an Irish setter lope through our camp. Looking back, I think hunger and desperation might have clouded my vision. Maybe he was only as big as a beagle. Either way, what he had written across his rear end in flashing Looney Tunes letters was DINNER!

“Luke!” I shouted. “Get out here!”

I heard his big Greek football feet clomp out of his tent. By then the bunny had looped into the desert and was heading toward the mountain south of town. Luke and I chased him, and as we skidded to a stop at the foot of Mount Hosta, we could see him perched on an outcrop shaped like the nose of a Roman emperor, watching us. I dug up a good clonker from a small rockslide that had tumbled down the slope, a stone about the size of a golf ball, and heavy, and jagged, and I let it fly. My throw was uphill, the jackrabbit was half a football field away, the sun shone in my eyes and the wind blew in my face, but one thing I
had
learned back in Low Ridge, Mississippi, was how to bean my own meals.

“Crackerjack!” applauded Luke, giving a whistle.

“Just—bringing home dinner,” I mumbled.

“How’d you do it?” asked Luke.

“Well,” I answered, keeping an eye on the slope above us in case a coyote happened to get wind of my handiwork and try to steal it, “the trick is—you just gotta hold your mouth right.”

Luke picked up a rock. “How?” he asked.

I showed him.

“Stick your bottom teeth out from under your top ones,” I advised, “and squinch your right eye more.”

“But I’m left-handed,” pointed out Luke.

“Then squinch your left eye,” I amended.

He gave it a whirl.

At first, I couldn’t even see what he was throwing at, but as his rock flew, I realized it was closing on a big fat pigeon winging overhead, and it bopped that bird right on the head. Down came the pigeon with a juicy plop somewhere near my rabbit on the ridge above us. I’d never seen anybody knock a bird out of the sky before.

“Okay, well, yeah,” I said, “pretty good.”

“Thanks,” said Luke modestly.

“I mean, for your first try and everything,” I added. “Let’s go get ’em before the coyotes do.”

The rabbit was giant. He didn’t outweigh an Irish setter or collie, but he’d definitely have been able to whip certain beagles.

The pigeon was just right for a pie.

“Awwww,” cooed Luke as I picked up my rabbit, his furry head lolling, his pink tongue sticking out. “He’s cute.”

“Um,” I replied.

“We should name that bunny.”

“But—” I said.

“Look at his big brown eyes!” Luke persisted. “I think we should call him—”

“Come on!” I protested. “Name him what?”

“Stew!” declared Luke. “Throw some carrots in there, maybe chop up an onion—”

“Stew. Good one,” I had to admit.

“Sorry, Stew—” Luke told the rabbit.

“—better you than us,” I said.

“Now what about the pigeon?” asked Luke, cradling him in two hands.

“Reginald,” I said.

“Perfect,” declared Luke.

I hefted the dead bunny, or as I liked to think of him, dinner, and Luke turned around to clamber back down the outcrop, which looked very different from where we now stood.

“Which way do we go?” I asked.

“Down?” he suggested.

“Sure,” I replied. “But
which
down?” Because it wasn’t as simple as you’d have thought. Mount Hosta was complicated—splitting into ridges, spines, gorges, ravines, rockfalls, cliffs, and gullies as far as the eye could see. In the three minutes we hadn’t been paying attention, we’d gotten ourselves completely lost.

“Maybe we could ask over there,” suggested Luke, pointing at a perfect little house in a mountain meadow just visible over the next ridge like something from a fairy tale: peaked roof, red shutters, yellow window boxes, and green trim.

“If a weird old lady comes to the door and asks us in,” whispered Luke as we knocked, “don’t get between her and the oven.”

A weird not-so-old lady came to the door. “Would you like to come in?” she asked. The mothball fumes billowing around her probably stunned migrating butterflies as far away as Mexico. “Leave your pets on the front porch if you don’t mind.”

Luke and I glanced at each other, but since there wasn’t another mysterious mountain cottage handy, we dropped Reginald and Stew in the grass and stepped inside that one. In the light, I got a good look at the woman who lived there. Behind eyeglasses as thick as the windshield of a spaceship, she had the same green eyes as the doctor who had saved all my friends. I was sure she must be Doc O’Malley’s sister.

“I’m Josh Garrett, and this is my friend Luke Agrippa, ma’am,” I said.

“Don’t ma’am me, sir. I am
Miss
O’Malley,” she snapped, scorching me with those peepers of hers, but not too much. “You may call me
Aunt
Bridey.”

“But you’re not our—” Luke started to point out.

“You may
call
me Aunt Bridey!” repeated Aunt Bridey in a tone that brooked no argument.

Luke scratched his head as if he was trying to put all this together, but I saw how it fit. She wasn’t married. She’d never been married. Maybe she’d wanted to marry somebody once, and maybe one day she still would because she wasn’t all that old. But for now she lived up here in her mountain meadow with her green eyes and probably some binoculars to spy on birds with and carried a fruitcake down the mountain to her brother and her nieces and nephews every holiday season so they wouldn’t forget she existed, and the rest of the time she stayed up here wearing her essence of mothballs sweater and stayed out of everybody’s affairs.

I shot Luke a look expressing all this.

“Right,” he said. “Pardon the intrusion,” he added. “If you could just direct us back to Victory, we’ll be on our way.”

“There,” she said, pointing over the edge of a nearby cliff.

“I, ah, thanks,” said Luke, eyeing it dubiously.

“Oh, don’t be such a
sissy
!” chided Aunt Bridey. “The drop-off isn’t as bad as it looks. And there’s a trail. Leads past the beehive. Along the brook. Antelopes use it all the time.”

“Thank you,” I said.

On our way out, something on her hall table caught my eye: a photograph. A gauzy, faded photograph of a soldier not much older than I was, dressed in the ragged, dirty, gray uniform of the Confederate States Army. And beside the soldier stood, unmistakably, Aunt Bridey, when she was maybe fifteen years old.

SMACK!
went the picture, facedown on the table, shattering the glass. Aunt Bridey glared at me, picking a shard out of her finger. “It’s rude to stare at other people’s personal effects,” she snapped. “Now, if you don’t mind, out!”

Luke and I obediently trooped through the door.

“Wait,” she said, following. “I’ve got something for you.”

I could tell Luke was expecting her to fork over a handful of magic beans, or fetch a spinning wheel and weave for us an enchanted cloak, but instead she led us through an orchard of tiny, gnarled trees, arrayed like a hundred little old ladies on parade in her backyard. “Apricot orchard,” said Aunt Bridey.

“Did you plant it?” asked Luke.

“No,” she snapped. “Elves did it while I slept.”

“I was just—” protested Luke.

“I know what you were just,” shot back Aunt Bridey. “Now. Look here.”

She led us to the face of a cliff looming over the northern border of her garden. Into the base of the cliff was bolted a wooden door. Aunt Bridey retrieved the key from atop the lintel. Behind the door, hidden in the cool shadows, were thousands of jars of apricot jelly.

“It’s just me up here,” she said, “and I have an overly large orchard. So I make a lot of preserves. About two hundred times more than I could spread on my toast over the next fifty years.”

“But why—how do you—are you saying this is for us—are you on our side?” asked Luke.

“Despite these glasses, I’m not blind,” she told us, glaring furiously past the edge of the cliff. “And I’m not deaf. I know what goes on. Don’t touch the Honey Brook Nectar!” she added suddenly, as I reached toward a row of glass bottles on a high shelf. “And don’t you dare tell the government about it!”

I knew from my days in Mississippi that this meant Honey Brook Nectar was actually moonshine.

“My bees make the honey from apricot blossoms and I make the nectar from the honey and it’s off-limits!” emphasized Aunt Bridey.

Apricot blossom honey moonshine. “We won’t tell the government, Aunt Bridey,” I promised.

“And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t let anybody from the Victory Corporation find out I’m giving you jam,” she added.

“We’ll be careful, Aunt Bridey,” Luke assured her.

“Good-bye!” she said, stalking back to her little house. “Take a bushel of those brussels sprouts from beside my porch when you go! And don’t forget your dead animals.”

Aunt Bridey’s apricot jelly and the brussels sprouts helped. And Reginald and Stew made for one very nice dinner. But after that, without bread, or biscuits, or crackers, we just had to eat the jam with a spoon, and surprisingly, jam out of a spoon didn’t make for a very satisfying meal. And brussels sprouts, well, when you get right down to it, they’re nothing but brussels sprouts.

And the cold air blowing off the mountain got colder.

I gave Preston my blanket and managed to convince him I thought it was
fun
sleeping in my coat, boots, hat, and gloves, but still he got sick and then he got sicker.

Doc O’Malley, who didn’t seem to notice the difference between the brick homes of Victory and the tents of Canvasburg when the people inside them were sick, listened to Preston’s chest while he lay on his cot and said, “Double pneumonia. One, you need to keep him warm. And two, you need to feed him something besides apricot jam.”

Luke, who had been hovering in the corner of our tent hanging on Doc O’Malley’s every word, disappeared before he got to “two.”