Fire on Headless Mountain, page 9
At the edge of the clearing, Virgil found the stick that Kaitlyn had dropped in the dark. He stood it by her bed, where she’d find it when she woke.
Half an hour later she came out of the van with the last can of soup, with a spoon in her mouth and another for Virgil. “We can eat half of this,” she said. “Someone will come before noon.”
Virgil frowned. “You said someone would come first thing in the morning.”
“So it’s taking a little longer,” she said. “But I’m sure they’re coming.”
Virgil was careful not to scoop out any more soup than Kaitlyn had taken. When they finished, he sucked from his T-shirt the drops that he’d spilled. But he still felt hungry, as though his stomach was tied in a knot.
Kaitlyn tucked the stick under her arm and moved to the grass at the side of the road. Virgil crawled under the van.
“I don’t know why you’re doing that,” said Kaitlyn, as she watched him wriggle underneath the back bumper. “Josh told you it can’t be fixed.”
He ignored her. Flat on his back, he had to reach up to scrape the dirt from the broken fitting. He could see the crack easily now. Almost an inch long, it grew wider when he twisted the hoses.
It reminded him of the time when he’d taken his broken bicycle to Uncle Birdy.
---
The parts of Virgil’s bicycle are spread out on the workbench, the bones of a strange skeleton. Uncle Birdy is sorting through them with fingers that are black with oil and grease.
“Here’s your problem,” he says. “There’s a crack in your frame, Virg.”
“Can you fix it?”
“You forget who you’re talking to,” says Uncle Birdy. “There’s only two things in the world I can’t fix: a broken promise and...”
“The crack of dawn!” He’s heard it so often that the words came out exactly as Birdy would say them: the cracka dawn.
Uncle Birdy laughs. “That’s right, Virg. Let’s weld ’er up.”
He gets out his black helmet with its heavy visor. It always make Virgil think of an armored knight. “Hang onto this, will ya, while I get ready.”
He puts it on. It falls way over his ears, almost down to his shoulders. He pries up the visor to watch his uncle pulling on the thick gloves with their burned fingertips.
“There’s a trick to welding,” says Uncle Birdy. “You don’t just fill up the crack. You melt the sides and flow ’em together. You make everything one again.”
---
When Virgil crawled out from under the van, the smell of smoke seemed stronger. His mouth felt dry and dusty, his tongue a wooden slab. He picked a pebble from the road and popped it into his mouth, a trick he’d learned from his mother. “It fools your mouth into making saliva,” she’d said. “You don’t feel thirsty.”
He walked up to Kaitlyn. “I know how to fix it,” he said.
“How?” she asked, looking up from the grass.
“I’m going to weld it.”
The hopeful expression that had come over her face vanished again. “Okay, Leonardo.”
“No, really,” he said. “I know how to do it. I’m—”
“The smoke’s getting worse,” she told him. “You can really smell it now.”
Virgil wasn’t interested in talking about the smoke. Disappointed by her reaction to his news, he just turned around and walked away. In the middle of the gravel pit, he knelt by the remains of the little fire from the night before. There were still embers down in the ashes, and he piled them with moss and fanned them into flames. Then he heated a knife from Rusty’s kitchen drawer, turning the blade round and round in the fire.
When the knife glowed a deep red, Virgil got up and dashed to the van. He squirmed underneath the engine, reached up and grabbed the hose. After staring into the fire, he found it hard to see anything in the shadows above him. But afraid that the knife would cool if he didn’t work quickly, he held onto the fitting and stabbed at the crack.
Foul, black smoke drifted among the hoses. With a sizzling sound, a bead of plastic dripped onto the road. Virgil twisted the blade and pushed harder.
When his eyes adjusted to the dark and he saw what he had done, Virgil felt his heart sink. The little crack had become a slot as thick a nickel. The knife had plunged right through it, and he’d made things worse than when he’d started.
“Oh no!” he said.
Kaitlyn yelled back, “What’s wrong?”
Virgil felt like screaming. But he thought of his uncle Birdy working patiently through every problem, never getting angry when something went wrong. “Don’t blame the doohickey,” he would say in his slow singsong. “The doohickey’s not out to get you.”
Kaitlyn shouted again. “Virgil, what’s the matter?”
“This isn’t working,” he said.
“You should have listened to Josh.”
That made Virgil even more annoyed. But just as his uncle Birdy would have done, he put the knife down in the dirt and thought about the problem. There was only one thing to do: he had to take off the fitting.
From here and there he collected a handful of tools that weren’t really tools at all: the dinner knife to loosen the clamps, a fork to pry at the hoses, a chopstick that he thought might be useful for something. For two hours he worked under the van, blackening his hands and scraping his knuckles, sometimes kicking the dirt in frustration. But he got most of the hoses off, and there was only one to go when Kaitlyn called his name.
“What do you want?” he snapped.
“Come and look at this,” she said.
“At what?”
“Just come and look, Virgil. Please.”
Whatever it was, it made Kaitlyn’s voice sound shaky and frightened. The only thing that Virgil could imagine scaring his sister that much was a Sasquatch. But when he scurried out onto the Boneyard and stood beside her, he saw something that scared him even more than Sasquatches.
Across the tops of the trees, he stared at the flat summit of Headless Mountain. It looked like a volcano erupting.
24
The Bucket
A line of flames crawled along the ragged edge of Headless Mountain. Thick smoke streaked across the sky, stretched into streamers by winds a mile high. Virgil thought of his brother walking over the mountain and into a burning forest, and he blamed himself for not seeing the signs of fire: the heat, the lightning, the colors in the sky. His mom would have known what they meant; he was sure of that.
Kaitlyn was standing up, leaning on the branch that she used for a crutch. “Are you sure you can fix the van?” she asked. “’Cause if you can’t, we should leave right now.”
“Where would we go?” asked Virgil.
“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “Down to Little Lost Lake, I guess.”
“That’s twenty-six miles.”
“Not if we cut through the forest.”
“It’s still a long way,” said Virgil. “You can’t walk that far.”
“I can if I have to. If you help me.”
Virgil tried to imagine the two of them staggering twenty miles through the forest. He glanced toward the fire and wondered if they could even keep ahead of it. No matter what they did, it was coming toward them quickly. At first, fixing Rusty was just something he wanted to do. Now it was something he had to do.
“I’ll get the van going,” he promised. “I know I can do it.”
“But how long will it take?”
“An hour,” said Virgil.
He went back to work under the van, twisting the hoses, prying with his makeshift tools. The deerflies crawled on his arms and his ankles, and the day grew hotter than ever.
His hour went by, plus a little bit more. When he finally levered the last hose off the plastic and twisted the fitting free, the smoke was thickening all around. He came out from under the van to find Kaitlyn asleep, twitching like a dog in a dream. Her arms and legs, as brown as chestnuts, were scored with white lines where her fingernails had scratched at the bug bites. Her ankle looked so big and purple that Virgil didn’t believe she could walk more than a mile or two.
He didn’t wake her. He went into the van and rummaged through the glove compartment, pulling out maps and gas receipts, every bit of paper he could find. He fed it all into the fire and heated his knife till the blade was glowing red. Then he pressed the tip against the fitting, trying to weld the crack.
It might have been that he was in too much of a hurry. Maybe his hand was shaking. Maybe the knife was too hot. Whatever the reason, Virgil ended up with a hole so big that he could stick his finger inside it. He’d made things worse instead of better.
Again he felt like shouting. He could have flung himself down and thrown a little tantrum as though he was four years old. But he just squeezed his eyes shut, balled his hands into fists, and waited until the feeling passed. Then, with a sigh, he went back to the van to look for something to plug the hole.
The noise that he made searching through cupboards woke Kaitlyn. She appeared in the doorway, balanced on one foot, and asked, “Is it fixed?”
“Not yet,” said Virgil.
Kaitlyn looked up at him, sad and worried. “Then we’d better start walking.”
“I can fix it,” he said.
“But what if you don’t?” asked Kaitlyn. “That’s got to be a big fire, Virg. All those animals we saw, all the birds, they must have been running away from it. We can’t be trapped here. We have to head down to Little Lost Lake.”
“What if Josh comes back and we’re not here?”
“We’ll leave a note.”
“What if it burns up? Josh wouldn’t know where we are. Nobody would.”
“Don’t you think he’d figure it out?” asked Kaitlyn “Where else are we going to go?”
“Back to the highway. Down to the museum.” Virgil pointed in every direction. “Maybe straight for the river.”
“We can’t get to the river,” said Kaitlyn. “It’s down in a canyon.”
“He might not think of that.”
With a big sigh, Kaitlyn looked again toward the mountain. The flames seemed tiny in the distance, a row of fairies dancing on the ridge.
“If you were Josh coming back from the mountain,” asked Virgil, “wouldn’t you want us to wait for you?”
She thought about that. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll wait a little longer. But if the van’s not fixed real soon, we’re going to start walking.”
Virgil watched his sister turn around and limp away. She had trouble crossing the tiny gravel pit; how could she ever hike through the forest? But the fire was coming closer, and time was running out. He found the roll of duct tape sealed in his father’s sad little tool kit and slipped it over his wrist like a bracelet. Then, without thinking, he reached around the front seat and put his hand on the wooden box with his mother’s ashes.
He held it up, wishing she was with him, that she could suddenly appear in the van and tell him what to do. Even out at Little Lost Lake, in the middle of nowhere, she had always found a way to fix anything that broke.
He remembered her fixing the bucket.
---
“What happened to the bucket?” asks Mom.
She’s holding it up by its wire handle, a bright, red bell swinging from her fingers.
“What’s wrong with it?” asks Kaitlyn. She’s a little girl in pigtails, with freckles on her nose.
Mom tilts the bucket to let them see the bottom. There’s a huge, jagged hole in the plastic. “Who did this?”
With a look of guilt, Dad holds up his hand. “I was trying to put up a clothesline,” he says.
“So you stood on the bucket?” cries Kaitlyn.
That makes Mom laugh. “Well, now we’ll have to make a new one,” she says. “Come and help me, Virgil.”
She takes the camping knife and heads down the trail through the forest. He tags along behind her, so small that his eyes are level with his mother’s waist. The Oregon grape is a towering wall beside the trail.
They go down to the end of the lake. An aspen felled by the beavers lies half on the ground and half in the water. Mom straddles the trunk and peels off strips of white bark. Virgil rolls them into little tubes, thinking he’s a great help.
“Now all we need is some glue,” says Mom.
“But there’s no store!” shouts Virgil.
“Use your imagination,” she tells him, with a pat on the head. “We’re in the biggest store in the world. Everything we need is right around us.”
---
Virgil put the box back on the seat. He walked out to the trees at the edge of the forest and searched for dribbles of sap on the bark. It looked like candle wax hardened into globs and tiny icicles.
At Little Lost Lake, Mom had done the same thing. She had pried off the sap with her camping knife and rolled it into a sticky, sweet-smelling ball. “People used to mix this with moss and use it to patch canoes and all sorts of things,” she’d told him. “It sticks like crazy, and it’s absolutely waterproof.”
With a big glob of sap and a handful of moss, Virgil went back to the van. Above the trees, white smoke was rising in thick plumes where there’d been no smoke before.
“Look at that,” said Kaitlyn. “The fire’s spreading round the mountain. It’s going to cut us off if we don’t get out of here soon.”
“I’ve got everything I need,” said Virgil.
She stared at the things in his hands, but didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. Virgil looked down at the lump of sap and the shreds of moss, at the roll of duct tape around his wrist, and doubted that he’d ever fix the van.
25
Seeing the Light
At the dizzying edge of El Malvado, Joshua trudged south across the side of Headless Mountain. Whorls of smoke twisted around him, gusting up the slope.
He could no longer see the summit or the valley floor below him. But he could hear the fire roaring in the smoke. It had scaled the cliffs and rounded the mountain, heading for the Bigfoot River.
Somewhere ahead, the light still glinted among the trees. But the flashes that had once come steadily were now long minutes apart.
Joshua was sure that someone was signaling to him. He hoped it was a message leading him to safety, the blinking light telling him, “Come here. Come here.” But he was growing afraid that it might be a cry for help from someone just as lost as he was himself.
With his arms out in front of him, he staggered along like a zombie, pushing his way through the bushes. The smoke made him cough, and he stopped now and then just to breathe. But only for a moment. Then he forced himself to walk again, until he came out of the forest at the edge of a chasm, a deep cut in the cliffs.
It was wide and steep, and the bottom—far below him—was covered with boulders and stones. Avalanches had swept away the forest, leaving shattered bits of ancient trees poking through the rubble.
Joshua was looking up and down the gully, wondering how to cross it, when the light flashed from the other side.
He didn’t see where it had come from. He waited—and he waited a long time—until he saw it again, a blink of light among the trees. For the first time, Joshua saw exactly where the light was coming from. Across the gully, a few hundred feet below him, a wooden structure stood among the trees.
A fire lookout.
26
The Cardboard Robot
Sitting cross-legged on the gravel, Virgil wrapped strips of duct tape around the fitting. One after the other he layered them on, covering his plug of moss and sap. When he finished, he didn’t even want to show Kaitlyn what he’d done. It looked too much like one of his father’s repair jobs, an embarrassing wad of gray tape.
In that moment he wished he had listened to Kaitlyn and headed for Little Lost Lake. They might not have gone more than three or four miles, but they would be that much farther from the fire. He should have known better than to try to fix the van. He had imagined something tidy and perfect, but he had ended up with one of his old childish failures.
Virgil remembered the robot. He hadn’t thought of it in ages, as though he’d blocked it from his mind. But, suddenly, in his mind, he was nine years old again.
---
He’s walking home from school with Liam, his best friend. A few yards in front of them, two teenage boys are talking loudly about girls. All along the street, garbage cans stand at the curb, waiting to be picked up in the morning. Beside them are the blue bins for recycling, overstuffed with tin cans and cardboard. Virgil and Liam look into each one, hoping for treasures.
Half a block from his house, Virgil sees what his dad has carried out for recycling. Poking up from the blue box is the robot he made a week ago. Its body is a Cheerios box, its head a juice can with holes hammered out for the eyes. Its arms and legs are the stubby cardboard tubes from rolls of toilet paper.
It’s standing up in the box with its arms sticking straight out, and to Virgil it looks sad and lonely, as though it’s a child waiting for someone to play with. But when the older boys see it, they laugh. One of them yanks the robot out of the box by one arm and stands it on the sidewalk. It has juice-pack shoes that make it rock back and forth.
“Who made this piece of junk?” asks the kid.
Liam must know. He’s been to Virgil’s house many times, and they meet outside it every morning. But he doesn’t say anything, and Virgil is squirming with embarrassment.
The older boy gives the robot a punch that sends the head clattering across the pavement. The cardboard body rocks backward and topples onto the sidewalk. He kicks the arms off, kicks the legs off, and rams his foot through the cereal box.
Virgil feels shocked, as though he’s watching a murder. But as the pieces of the robot go flying, Liam starts laughing so hard that he falls on the ground, nearly hysterical as the robot is slaughtered in front of them.
---
With one more look toward the sky, Virgil wriggled back under Rusty’s engine. He worried that his repair job was no stronger than his cardboard robot. With a sense of dread, he began connecting hoses.
