The Skeleton Tree (20 page)

At the high cliffs the wind howled straight up from a white sea, stretching my capes high in the air. Along the beach, it tore the waves into a blinding blizzard. Head down, I shouldered into the wind.

Many things had washed ashore, and many others tumbled in the surf among the breakers. But I didn't stop to search for treasure. I was interested in nothing but finding Frank.

When he appeared ahead of me in that whirling fog of spray and sleet, it was almost magical. Just a shadow at first, and then a gray shape, he took form from the sea and the wind. One moment I saw nothing, and the next he was there, plodding toward me.

He was bent over like a little old man. Leaning into the storm, he used the gaff for a cane. He went staggering up the beach as the wind gusted, then fought his way back down again. The fog thickened around me as a gust ripped spindrift from the sea. And when the fog cleared, the beach was empty.

Frank was gone. He had vanished, just like that. I started running—or tried to. I reeled and stumbled over the stony beach as the wind snatched at my capes. I could hardly see a thing; I could hear nothing. But something made me stop in the right place, and peer in the right direction, and I saw Frank huddled behind a stranded stump.

White and waxy-looking, he gazed up as though he didn't recognize me.

Two salmon lay beside him. They were big and shiny, the best fish I had seen in a long time, and I knew that Frank must have searched for hours to find them. But now they were wasted. Seagulls had pecked out the bellies, the eyes, the layers of flesh from the ribs. It made me sad to think that Frank had carried them so far, but couldn't keep the birds from eating them.

As I held out my hand to help him up, I remembered our first morning in Alaska, when he would hardly let me near him.
The day I need your help, that's the day I kill myself.
But now he took my hand gladly, and I pulled him to his feet. I held him as he got his balance.

I didn't bother with the fish.

“Dad was a loser,” says Frank suddenly.

This is not what I want to hear on the day we'll be saved. I clamp my hands over my ears.

“It's true. His whole life was crap.”

“Don't say that, Frank.” I can spend forever trying to make sense of my father's life. But right now, with the sun shining and men on their way, I don't want to talk about rotten things.

But something in the story of Kaetil has made Frank angry again. He slaps the book into his lap. “Dad wrecked everything,” he says. “He was useless.”

“That's not true,” I tell him. “He had all sorts of trophies for football and baseball and—”

“Yeah. From
high school,
” says Frank. “That's the last time he was any good to anyone. From then on he was just a loser.”

When I look at Frank now, I see Dad. His gestures, his habits, the sound of his voice are things I can sort of remember. He's a model of the father that I had when I was very young, the father he had known himself. Maybe that's why I grew to like him.

I wish I was Frank. I want to be the one who was raised to play sports. The one who went camping and canoeing. The one who sat on a couch with his dad on Saturday mornings to watch
World Wide Wrestling.
I never got to roll around on the carpet with
my
dad, practicing the Texan death grip and the pile driver. I would have been the boy of my father's dreams. But if I was Frank I would feel bitter now too, because all of that ended.

Couples break apart, and people move away. It wasn't Frank's fault, what happened; it sure wasn't mine. But his father became my father, and Dad did everything differently with me.

I'd always thought he was disappointed with me. Now I see that isn't true. Maybe I was never his favorite, but that's all right. Dad loved me just as much as he loved Frank, and he made me stronger by making me stand alone. I think he did it on purpose, knowing he couldn't always be around to help. But Frank would say he just didn't care, that Dad moved from one thing to another without caring what he left behind, drifting through life like a broken-down boat. Like a castaway.

I don't know if I should be angry or sad at the way things worked out. I guess I could wonder forever how things were
meant
to be. But in the end I turned out stronger than Frank.

I carried the gaff and kept an arm around Frank, and when he stumbled I held him up. The wind pushed us along, and rain streamed from our capes. I heard a constant
tick-tick-tick,
like stones being tapped together, that I couldn't figure out at first. It was the chattering of Frank's teeth.

He staggered through the cabin door and stood shivering in the middle of the room. In my hurry to leave I had forgotten to bank the ashes. The fire had gone out long ago. I uncovered the embers and breathed fire into them while Frank fumbled with his capes. His fingers were claws, so cold he couldn't bend them. He tore frantically at the plastic, trying to rip it to shreds, but he couldn't do it. I had to peel off his capes and work his jacket over those hooked fingers, as though untangling something from barbed wire. Frank didn't say a word. He just stared at nothing, as though he teetered on the edge of his old wide-awake sleep. Like a robot, he lay down on the bed. His hands grabbed the mattress as I folded it around him.

Something had happened out there. But what it was, Frank couldn't say.

I read aloud from
Kaetil the Raven Hunter.
All evening and into the night I kept reading, using different voices to make the story exciting. Though Frank fell asleep I didn't stop, thinking the sound of my voice made him calm.

The storm ended overnight. So did Frank's strange mood, and the morning was sunny and pleasant, with five more days to go.

That seemed amazing. “In five days we'll be rescued,” I said. “In five more days we'll be saved.” Frank still looked doubtful, but I felt happy and excited, as though bathed in warm sunlight. Then I thought of Thursday. I had five more days to find him.

I went out to the skeleton tree, where he so often perched in the evening. The wooden saint still stood at the edge of the shore, glistening with his oily sheen. He had not moved, though the streamers had been torn from his hands. Thursday wasn't there.

I called and whistled as I searched to the south, along the sandy beach. Many things lay cast ashore or bobbing in the water, but the most shocking was a piece of wood painted red. I recognized it as a shattered plank from Uncle Jack's dinghy, and I waded out to get it. Every time I bent down, it skittered away, pulled in or out by the waves. I chased it along the beach until I finally caught it.

The little fitting that had held an oarlock was still screwed to the wood. I touched it, remembering everything in reverse: the tumbling landing in the surf; the awful hours of rowing; the shock of
Puff
sinking; and every moment I'd ever spent with Uncle Jack.

I buried the plank deep in the sand among the driftwood. I didn't think Uncle Jack would want it lying in my little cemetery, so far from the sea that it couldn't hear the waves. As I scraped out a hole I felt him standing behind me. It was not a frightening feeling. Not even sad. I thought that Uncle Jack was proud of me.

I left no marker. I even swept away my fingerprints. “Goodbye, Uncle Jack,” I said.

I found more floats, more bottles, more chunks of foam. I found an artificial rose and a bobblehead dog. But I didn't find my raven. I collected two plastic bottles and tapped them together as I walked back toward the cabin. The sound they made was like one of Thursday's loveliest calls: of pebbles dropped into barrels.

Bawk-block. Bawk-block.
I was sure the sound carried far into the forest.

I climbed the trail and on through the ancient forest.
Bawk-block. Bawk-block.
It was quiet and beautiful there, and the last thing on my mind was any sort of danger. As I reached the stream I saw something white rolling in the water near the bottom of the little pool. It tumbled over and over, a blob of white and orange, like a puffy bit of mushroom. I bent down to catch it. But all of a sudden, in that wonderful place, a feeling of doom came over me.

It was an animal instinct that made me freeze in place, as though turned to stone. A prehistoric part of me sensed that I was prey.

Something was waiting for me in the forest.

This was the same place where Frank had seen eyes in the dark. Like him, I stared among the trees, between the trunks and through the branches, watching for any movement, listening for every sound.

The feeling passed. But I still went slinking away, quiet as a cat. Then I turned and fled. I raced to the cabin, but it was empty. I ran to the meadow and out to the rocky point. And there was Frank, lounging in a plastic chair. I raced up behind him.

“There's something in the forest,” I said.

He moved slowly, turning to look up at me. In that moment I wished I hadn't come to find him. I must have sounded like the frightened boy I'd been before, the one afraid of everything. But then I saw him smiling in the strangest way.

“I'll tell you one thing,” he said. “It's not the bear.”

His tone and words turned me cold. “What do you mean?” I said.

Frank tilted the chair on its wobbly legs. “Let's just say I took care of that old bear.”

“What did you do?”

“Don't worry about it.” He looked so smug and knowing. “He just won't be around anymore. Okay?”

“But what did you
do
?” I said.

It scared me, the way he smiled. I felt like grabbing the plastic chair and tilting it backward. I wanted to give him a fright, to make him squirm and kick to catch his balance. But I knew his plans never worked out, and I actually felt sorry for him.

“Five more days,” I said.

“Sure, Chris.” He nodded. “Five days more.”

I went to sleep hungry that night. Frank rationed the salmon, but cooked a big pot of seaweed and sedge. The smell made me sick. I was so thin that I could see each one of my ribs, and the bones in my arms right up to the elbows, but I couldn't eat more than a few mouthfuls of that awful gruel.

The moon came up, big and yellow, and we heard the wolves again, much closer. There must have twenty or more, all calling back and forth. “What do you think they're singing about?” I asked Frank.

“They're gathering,” he said.

“For what?”

The howling rose to a high warble, then fell away. Farther in the distance, other wolves took up the song.

“Frank, why do you think they're gathering?” I asked again.

“I guess we'll see,” he said.

In the morning, with four more days to go, I wanted to search for Thursday at the river. But it scared me to think of walking through the old forest to get there. I asked Frank, “Do you want to go fishing?”

“No,” he said. “There's no more fish.”

“We could try anyway. We—”

“No,” he said. “There's no more.”

“Well, I'm going anyway.” I took the gaff and the knife, and I crept along the trail. But in the moss-covered forest I found nothing but birds. A woodpecker cried its giggling laugh, and sparrows sang from branch to branch. In a moment I was past the stream, heading down toward the beach.

I found the skeletal salmon that Frank had carried so far from the river. They lay in a pile of kelp, with sand fleas swarming their bones. I wondered again if he had tried to fight off the seagulls, if he had tried to guard the fish. Or had the birds followed him, just waiting—like buzzards—for their chance?

It seemed an unsolvable mystery. But it suddenly made sense when I reached the boulders near the river.

Another big salmon lay there. Hidden from the gulls, it was nearly intact. Though the silvery scales had faded to gray, it still glistened and shone. It
sparkled,
like no fish I'd ever seen. I nudged it with my foot. It rocked on its side with a clinking, grinding sound, and I knelt down to look.

Frank had stuffed that fish with broken glass.

He must have gathered a bucketful at the wreck of the
Reepicheep.
From the boat's shattered windows he had chosen the sharpest slivers, the perfect pieces to fit the salmon's tail and fins.

“Let's just say I took care of that old bear.”
It made me sick to think of Frank searching for the finest fish to be his bait, then arranging it so carefully. I could picture the intent look on his face as he worked with that salmon. The scales must have stuck to his fingers in shimmering specks. He would have remembered that frightening time from his childhood, his mother calling 911 in a panic when she found his mouth full of glass. Did he smile when he finished, imagining the bear's dim delight as it discovered the gruesome fish? I thought of the glass shattering between its teeth, slicing its gums and its throat, tearing it open from the inside out.

As much as I feared the bear, as much as I hated it, I couldn't let that happen. It was too cold-blooded and cruel. I picked up the fish by its tail and knocked out the pieces of glass. I thumped it down against a rock, and the glass shot in all directions. It lay glittering around the pool as I threw that salmon out to sea.

I guessed there were others. Frank would have set enough traps to be sure the bear had found at least one of them. But I went a long way up the river without finding a single salmon, living or dead. Even the gulls had deserted the river.

As I started back, I was furious with Frank. When I saw the mound of red plastic stacked at the skeleton tree, and Frank adding one more thing to the pile, I wanted to get away from him forever. But even then I couldn't stay angry. He looked small and helpless, dwarfed by that ridiculous pile of plastic that was, in his mind, the one great hope for our rescue. He was trying his best, but it was useless. I watched him fling something red to the top of the pile and saw it tumble down again.
My brother,
I thought. The idea struck right down inside me.