The Lost Skiff Page 2

  “Then they had nothing to fear if they only knowed it,” Jack said. “Not from one of those poor creatures.” Sometimes the words Jack uses wrong can make me wince, but still, what he had told me about jays was news to me all right and probably the truth. Jack wouldn’t go to the trouble to lie. It looked like Jack had forgotten about me, and then he shook his head at the radio like he was giving up on it for the time being and got up from the chair. “Well,” he said, “I reckon you had planned to lie in bed until noon listening in on China, but in about a half an hour we’re going up to The Landing and fix up the boats like we should have done last fall, if you want to come.”

  “Way up there?” I said.

  “What’s distance to you?” Jack said. He looked at the radio and shook his head. “Anyhow, we ain’t planning to walk.”

  Last summer, when I came to The Hill for the first time, we had gone up to The Landing once, and about all I could remember about it was a long, hot dusty trip over dirt roads in the back of their pickup, being bounced around on that hot steel truck bottom until I felt like some kid caught in a clothes dryer, and then getting to this little river, which was deeper than it was wide, it seemed to me, and black, where I couldn’t see the bottom and sure as hell didn’t want to jump in and see if I could find it with my feet, the way Jack kept trying to do. What I remembered most about it, if I am going to be honest, was the mosquitoes, which Jack said were bad that year, and Jack’s sister, Ellen, who was seventeen, first scaring me half to death by threatening to push me off The Landing pier, and then wrestling with me about it much more than I was used to wrestling with older girls in bathing suits, and scaring me more this way than the river scared me, so that I jumped in. I came up, still plenty worried about the kind of crazy river I was swimming in, and then Ellen dove in, neat and white and hardly making a splash and came up right in front of me and blew some bubbles at me and then said, “Don’t be scared,” and after that I wasn’t. I remembered that most of all.

  “Is Ellen going?” I said. I was still not too wide awake or I wouldn’t have said that.

  Jack grinned a little, but that was all. “I believe she has some such plans,” he said. “Anyhow, she sent me to ask you. Otherwise I might have let you sleep. Growing boys need sleep, Ma says, especially skinny ones. But I forgot, we will be staying overnight, and maybe China cannot be spared having you mind its business for so long a time.”

  I have never yet been able to raise China on my set, and Jack knows it. I got out of bed and switched on the set and handed Jack the phones. “Why don’t you fool around while I get dressed,” I said, “and see if you can’t electrocute yourself.” I got dressed and went into the kitchen, where Aunt Vera was fixing breakfast, and told her I was going up to The Landing with the Haywoods. Then I ate and came back out on the porch, and Jack was sitting there, sweating, with the earphones all the way on, for a change, and a big stupid smile on his face. “Hey,” he said, “I reckon I got Russia this time for sure.” I took the phones and held them to my ear. Jack had a fine bunch of squeaks and squawks, faint, but clear. I listened a minute and then shut off the set. “That was Russia, all right,” I said. “Only it was Siberia. What you heard was the wolves howling in the snow.”

  “No wonder I couldn’t understand it,” Jack said, and then he watched me putting a bunch of clean underwear and clothes and my swimming trunks in my United Air Lines bag and he said, “Holy cow”—his mother has really got him trained not to swear—“holy cow, we are not leaving the country, you know, just camping out for the night.”

  And then I said a dumb thing, which shows how my mind works sometimes, too slow for my big mouth, I mean, as I had already asked Jack once if Ellen was going, but that was before I had known we would be camping out together, and somehow this made it another matter, so to speak, so I said, “Ellen, too?” Camping out, I meant.

  Jack looked at me and shook his head like I was a sad case. “Well,” he said, speaking slow and phony the way he will do when he thinks he has got something clever to say, “I haven’t said nothing to Ellen about it, but I more or less figured you and me would be camping off by ourselves somewhere.” Then he just stood there grinning at me like he knew he had just read something dirty in my mind. And what bothered me about that was that if he had been right—and he wasn’t, not really—then he shouldn’t have been grinning like that because after all it was his own grown sister I had been thinking about. There are some things I don’t understand about Jack Haywood. Maybe even most things.

  But all I said was, “Ha, ha, you are a real comic, you are,” and then I took some of my clothes back out of the bag and said, “Well, I guess there will not be much of a place to change clothes there at that.” I have noticed that I never say just one stupid thing at a time.

  “Only the whole woods,” Jack said, “although if you are worried I can ask Ma and Ellen to hide their eyes.” Then I guess Jack saw that I was starting to get mad, although the truth was I was getting mad at myself, not Jack. While Jack is big and can be rough and in most cases is about as subtle as a train wreck, there is nothing mean about him. Anyhow, I guess he saw me going white a little, which I am told is what I do when I get angry, so he laughed and gave me a shot which was meant to be friendly but which felt like it broke my arm, and I gave him a good sharp elbow in the gut, which he pretended for a while was surely a fatal blow—he can be a clown, when he wants to, but I happen to know that about the only thing that could knock the wind out of him would be a fall from a two-story roof—and then we heard his father honking the horn of the pickup across the road and we ran over and jumped in the back.

  Ellen was already there, I noticed. She could have ridden up front with her father and mother. But she was sitting in back on a big piece of folded canvas and she smiled and said there was room on it for me, too, so I sat down next to her. “Well,” I said, “I see you are going to be riding back here with us delinquents.”

  “I guess I’m still a kid myself,” Ellen said.

  Truth is, much as I like her, Ellen is not always too subtle either. That was kind of like the shot to the arm Jack had given me. It was meant friendly, but I happen to be two years younger than she is; still a kid. But then she said, “I like riding in back, rough and windy as it is. Seems like you see the country better. Like it just goes sailing by. And anyhow, I haven’t seen you to talk to any length of time for a week now, at least.” I thought that was a nice thing to say, and I believed that she meant what she said about liking to ride in back. I remembered from last summer, and if you don’t mind the dust, the country does seem to go sailing by in a nice way at that. Then Ellen noticed my United Air Lines bag and she said, “But I suppose the country is most beautiful of all when you see it floating down there under you from an airplane, like a bird. Do you have to buy the bag, too, or does that come with the ticket?”

  I had flown down this time, from New York to Mobile, on United. My opinion of flying was not quite like Ellen’s. I hadn’t thought I would be scared, but when I got up there and looked down and realized it, there was something in my bones, it seemed, telling me that I wasn’t brother to any birds or any kind of angel, but just a boy in one hell of an unnatural place for a boy or any sort of man to be. “I’d sooner see the country from the back of your pickup,” I said. “Any time. They only give you the bag when you’re flying out of the country, I think. Anyhow, this is one they gave my father once. All they gave me was some propaganda about how safe it was to fly and how I’d love it.”

  “You didn’t really like it?” Ellen said.

  I guess it wouldn’t have hurt anything if I’d said I liked it, but then later I probably would have forgotten and told them the truth anyhow, so all I said was, “What I liked most of all was getting here.”

  Ellen looked at me a minute and then she smiled and said, “You are a funny one, honest. Any other kid would have naturally said he loved it. Whether he did or not.”

  Well, I thought, if I am going to be a funny kid
I might as well be a good and funny kid. “I was scared stiff the whole damn time,” I said.

  “Ha,” Jack said. “I bet you was.” I didn’t answer, and then Jack’s mother came down finally and got in front with Mr. Haywood and Jack yelled for us to fasten our seat belts, and then Mr. Haywood backed over the cattle guard and Jack hollered, “Blast off,” and Ellen shook her head at him like she pitied him. Then we went bouncing up the hill and down over the railroad tracks to the highway, and we were off for The Landing, with the country sailing by.

  2

  I guess I should stop and clear up some matters about who I am, actually, what I look like, and what bugs me and that sort of thing, although as far as I am concerned a little of this sort of thing can go a long way, so I’ll keep it short. Not too much to tell anyway.

  To begin with, I am fifteen years old and my name is Rodney Gerald Blankhard. That’s what people call me, Rodney. And I guess that ought to tell you something about me right there. No nickname for me. It is clear that up to now at least I haven’t struck any of my contemporaries, north or south, as being an old buddy Rod or a big-wheel R. G. type. Easy mixing is not my strong point. I’m sorry about that, but it’s the truth. Also, I am tall for my age. When you are tall you can either slump or stand up straight. I stand up straight. Maybe too straight. Because there is this one wise guy at school that calls me Sir Rodney. He is one of those cute ones that has funny names for everybody. But that’s the picture and enough to go on, I would think; I am tall, skinny, generally quiet, and around girls, anyhow, I’m nowhere.

  I have this friend, sort of, where I live in White Plains, New York, who is really with it when it comes to girls, or at least he claims he is, and keeps telling me that one of these days some great chemical thing will happen and I will really get turned on and my whole life will start clicking away like an atomic pile or something, and I won’t be the same guy, by which he means a drag. Well, I have news for him about being turned on. I stay turned on. I just don’t do anything about it.

  I’m trying to be honest. Girls drive me half nuts. They don’t even have to be sensationally beautiful or have great knockers, as my friend calls them, or, his specialty according to him, low-hung butts. They just have to be alive and walk by. If they smile they’re beautiful. If they are shy as well, I am in love. If they have a natural way about them and move easy when they walk, as far as I’m concerned, they’ve got it.

  If this sounds like it is all a matter of biology, that is not how it really seems to me at all, although there is no denying that biology matters, too. Like that is a pretty big difference, all right, the biological one, between a boy and a girl. Just about as big a difference in people, generally speaking, as I have come across yet. But that’s about it, and how smart I am when it comes to girls. I read all the time about what the kids today know and do. Not this kid. For instance, a little thing, but an example. One day at school this girl called my name and I turned around and she came running down the walk toward me, moving as natural and easy as you could imagine, and then she stopped in front of me smiling and breathing hard, from the exercise, I guess, and said my name again, a girl I hardly knew except that I knew that she sat two seats over across from me in English. And all she wanted, she said, and it was probably all she wanted, was the next day’s English assignment. But this could have led to a decent conversation, at least. But not with me it couldn’t. Because what I did then, with this pretty girl standing there in front of me still breathing a little hard, which I couldn’t help noticing, was what I will always do on a rare occasion like this. What I do is stand up straight and freeze and say something idiotic if I am able to say anything at all. And that’s what I did, and that was that with that girl. Except that for the next week I could close my eyes in class any time I wanted to and see the whole thing just as it happened. And sit there and curse myself for a coward and a fool.

  So what I have not told my friend about his great theory about how someday I’ll get turned on until I am practically a sex fiend is that what I would like to do is to get turned off now and then. Just so that I could be natural with girls and not all eyes and two left feet whenever I get near them, old silent Sir Rodney, standing there with my hands hanging down at my sides like an ape, and with a feeling in the back of my mind that I must be some kind of a nut. It’s hell sometimes, and that’s the truth.

  But that’s about the biggest problem I’ve got, and probably not worth the time I have already given to it. The other problem, and this makes sense at least, is about where I am apt to be living from one day to the next. This has been a problem ever since my mother died when I was thirteen. I get along fine with my father, but half the time he’s somewhere down in Latin America or over in Asia or almost anywhere, and while I think I could take care of myself all right when he is away, he says it just wouldn’t be right for me to live alone, and I can see his point. But there is no point in going into all of this at any great length, either; but it explains how I spent a summer a year ago on The Hill with my Uncle Charles, and how, miserable and practically disastrous as that summer was, when I had a choice this summer between my Aunt Clara in Mount Vernon and Uncle Charles on The Hill, I thought it over and I couldn’t figure what else I could do wrong on The Hill that I hadn’t done the year before, so I picked The Hill.

  I wouldn’t say that knowing Ellen Haywood would be there had nothing to do with it, however silly that may seem, even to me, but that wasn’t all of it, either. I mean that what I would have been doing in Mount Vernon all summer would have been pretty much what I had been doing all along in White Plains. Or to put it another way, one city to me is pretty much like another, but The Hill is like no place else that I know. It’s mostly nature, I guess, and what I know about nature is nothing at all. So as far as I know, that’s the real reason I decided to try it again. Although sometimes, even in the few weeks I have been here, this strikes me as having been a pretty cockeyed reason, at that.

  Leaving The Hill, we turned north. I would have sooner turned south, as about thirty or so miles to the south is the Gulf, where there are usually a lot of people on the beach fooling around and nobody notices you much, the way it is with crowds. At The Landing, there is only one house back up from the river where some people named Matthews live, friends of the Haywoods. The time I met them there were only these two old people who had as little to say about anything as any two people I have ever met. For the rest, there is nothing at The Landing that I could remember but this one flat clearing down at the edge of a creek called the Little Star, surrounded by one hundred per cent nature. Personally, I’m more at home with crowds. Trees and shrubbery don’t do much for me, although I will say that the way the creek comes twisting down through these woods and the way the clearing opens up right at The Landing, when you come up on it, it’s a pretty enough sight in a way. Something you don’t expect, anyhow; not so much a place for people, but just a place, all to itself. You get the feeling that it has been just like that forever, although it probably hasn’t. On the other hand, natural and perfect as it seems, you find out pretty quick that there is not too much you can do with it, either. Unless you are crazy about fishing, which I’m not, particularly.

  Jack is a nut about it, though, although to care about fishing like he does it is surprising how few fish he seems to catch. But then, to Jack, almost everything he does is half a joke. He just enjoys himself.

  Sometimes I wish I was more like that myself. Like right at the time, for instance; here we had been heading north all the time on this nice straight macadam highway, the morning still cool enough, the green pine woods and the brown and green fields sliding past us big and slow and open the way you could never see it in a movie or any other way, with now and then a bird singing as we went past and Ellen’s long black hair whipping around in the wind beside me, and instead of really enjoying all this I have a polite conversation going on with Ellen, which I have to shout a little to do to be heard above the wind, telling her all about all the c
razy places around the world I have managed to listen to with my Star Roamer set. Which seemed to interest her all right, because she kept asking me more about it, as though I was not just a kid with a shortwave set, but kind of an expert on the world itself. As though I had been to all these places. Made me feel a little phony.

  Then we turned east off the highway onto a dirt road that got both hilly and bumpy in a hurry, and polite conversation got pretty much impossible under the circumstances, which sometimes included the possibility, it seemed, of one of us getting bounced clean out of the pickup into a ditch. Naturally this was the time that Jack decided to open up his tackle box and untangle all the junk in it and straighten it all out. “Jack,” Ellen hollered at him, “you are out of your mind.” But Jack just grinned at us and went on holding the tackle box between his knees and bouncing when he had to bounce, with all the stuff in the tackle box bouncing, too, so that at times he looked like some overgrown weirdo trying to play a game of jacks sitting down. Guess it seemed like a challenge to him.

  He was still working at it when we got to The Landing, and the tackle box still looked like as big a mess to me as it had looked at the start. But when the truck stopped and Jack saw where we were, he just shut up the box and said, “Well, I’m sure glad that’s done,” and jumped out of the pickup and started hauling stuff out, while Ellen sat there shaking her head for a while.

  Then Ellen and I jumped out, too, and started helping him, first setting up some sawhorses and putting planks across them for a table—these were already there, stored under a hunk of canvas at the back of the clearing—and then Jack and I fixed up the tent his mother and father would use. That was the canvas that Ellen and I had been sitting on, I found out. It wasn’t a tent exactly, but a big piece of canvas with mosquito netting sewed to it all around, and which I never could have figured out if it hadn’t been for Jack. We stretched it over a rope tied between two trees at the back of the clearing, and tied the corners to other trees, and that was it. You could see clean through it. “That’s so they can get a breeze if there is one,” Jack said.