Samurai Summer (14 page)

“A slip of the tongue.”

“Really?”

Was it really a slip of the tongue? Right now the camp was actually the only home either of us had. My mother was on the run and Janne was going to be sent to a foster home.

“Jump in from the dock in the moat,” I said. “That’s home, isn’t it?”

Janne laughed.

“We’d better fill it with water then,” he said.

“Have you heard the one about the loons who spent day after day diving into a swimming pool? One day somebody came along and asked if they were having fun, and they said
yes, they were, but it would be a lot more fun tomorrow because they’d be filling the pool with water.”

“Ha ha,” said Janne. “Have you heard the one about the loons who left the asylum every morning and came back every evening with bruises and broken arms and legs?”

“How’d they leave the asylum if their legs were broken?”

“Do you want to hear the joke or not?” he asked as he stuffed the last of his hot dog into his mouth and swallowed it almost without chewing.

I nodded.

“Okay. One morning one of the nurses followed them and saw how they climbed up one of the tallest trees in the forest. Then they hung from the branches and shouted, ‘I’m ripe now,’ let go, and fell to the ground.”

“Ha ha,” I said.

“They were pretending to be windfall fruit, get it?” asked Janne.

“Yeah, I get it.”

“Have you heard the one about…” he began but stopped when the canoe came gliding back into view and the explorer in the front saluted us once again.

“Maybe they want something,” said Janne.

“Maybe they want to fight,” I said. “We’re trespassing on their territory.”

The two explorers brought the canoe to a standstill in
the middle of the river. Then they turned in a semicircle and paddled toward us, heading for the narrow strip of sand between two pine trees. They stepped into the water and beached the canoe on dry land. The one with the hat said something to the other one; then they stood motionless between the two trees. They were about twenty-five yards away.

Janne put his hand on his sword.

“Take it easy,” I said.

“Guess they could be peaceful,” said Janne, taking his hand away.

“Maybe they don’t think we are,” I said. “Here they come.”

Janne prepared himself for battle, but he didn’t draw his sword. If he had, he’d have been forced to kill one of the explorers before we could go back to camp.

The explorers stopped several feet in front of us. The archer was holding his bow in his hand, but his arrows were still in his quiver. The one with the hat was holding a tomahawk. It looked heavy.

“Who are you?” he asked with a local accent.

“Samurai.” I remained motionless. “We’re samurai.”

“Are there any more of you?” He looked at his companion and then back at me. “How many of you are there?”

“Just us two.”

Janne stepped forward.

“We come in peace,” he said.

The archer muttered something I couldn’t make out.

“Where are you from?” asked the other one. He was swinging his tomahawk back and forth as if he were weighing it. It must have weighed a pound. If that landed in your skull you’d find yourself in the happy hunting grounds pretty quick. “You’re not from around here, are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

I told him where I came from.

“Anyone who comes from there is an idiot,” said the archer. “That place is a real sewer.”

Almost everyone there is an idiot
, I thought. He was nearly right.

“You’re a long way from home,” he said. “Did you catch a ride here? Or did you run away?”

“We walked here,” said Janne.

They looked surprised. The city I was from was almost thirty miles away.

“You walked all the way here dressed like that?” said the one with the hat as he eyed us up and down.

“We’ve come from the summer camp,” I said.

“You mean you’ve run away?” asked the archer. “Uh-oh.”

“Have you been there?”

“No, but we’ve heard about it. There are one or two kids from around here who were forced to spend time there.”

“Who?”

“Uh…” He looked at the boy with the hat. “Didn’t Benke get sent there?”

“Isn’t he there now?”

The archer turned to me.

“Do you know Benke?”

“What does he look like?”

The archer described him. It wasn’t anybody I recognized.

“Come to think of it, they’ve moved away,” said the one with the hat. “His old man got a job up north, I think.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Explorers,” said the boy with the hat. “What did you think?”

I pointed to the canoe.

“Mohawks maybe?”

“You don’t know much about Indians, Mr. Samurai.”

“Can you paddle all the way to the lake from here?” I asked.

There was a water system from the town to the lake that was shorter than the route we took through the field. Janne and I sat in the middle of the canoe. The explorer with the hat sat in front of us. The feathers on his hat were taken from a rooster. They were so big that they could even have come from an eagle. His hat was triangular and looked pitch black in the shade. He was wearing long shorts, and his fringed
leather jacket lay in the bow of the canoe, some of the fringes touching the water like fingers. His back was so tanned that it also looked black as night, and the muscles rippled between his shoulders as he paddled. I wouldn’t have liked to face him in a wrestling match. With swords that was something else. But he only had his hunting knife stuck into his belt at the back. It looked like a real Bowie knife, though. I recognized the handle from pictures in books at the library back home. The library seemed very far away right now, like it was on another planet or even in another solar system.

I looked around at the archer, who was paddling behind me and Janne. He looked back, but he didn’t smile or anything, and I could see in his eyes that he knew we were heading into a storm—into big trouble. He was wearing a fringed, belted jacket, and the big buckle over his stomach looked like gold when the sun burst out from behind the trees on the hill we were passing. The quiver was slung over his shoulder, and the bow lay at his feet ready to be picked up in just a second. I could see it was made of juniper, which is the best wood for bows. It looked strong and fast and ready to send his arrows anywhere he wanted them to fly.

The archer was wearing some kind of suede pants that looked like they’d been walking all over the world almost by themselves, and he wore Indian moccasins on his feet. The one with the hat wore suede boots of a kind I’d never
seen before—worn and brown like a second skin. It looked like these guys had everything—like they’d done some real exploring in America and bought everything they needed when they were over there. The archer had a fur cap tucked in his belt. A telescope that looked a hundred years old lay in the back of the canoe. When we’d jumped into the canoe earlier in town, they’d even told me it was built on the designs of canoes originally made by the Mohawk tribe. Maybe they were just putting me on, but I wanted to believe it. It felt safer to believe it.

There were some perch lying in the bottom of the canoe, but I couldn’t see a fishing rod. They must have used their bare hands to control the line. The life of an explorer didn’t seem too bad. They didn’t have to go to bed in a dormitory every night. My guess was that they slept under the stars. They looked wild. Maybe they’d forgotten that they ever had a mother or a father. That got me thinking about Mama again. I didn’t want to give the impression of being worried. Not even to myself. So I said to myself:
Kenny, everything’s just like always. You’ll go back home at the end of the summer and your mother will be standing in the doorway and she’ll try to hug you, but then she’ll have to hurry back into the kitchen to make sure the pork chops don’t get burnt.

Maybe some news about Mama had arrived by now. That would make them start looking for me and find out that I’d
run away. I hoped the news would come after we’d made it back to the camp.

The river started getting wider, which meant it would soon be flowing into the lake. The trees were thick on both sides. It was like a jungle. The sun shone down on the water making it look like it was covered in a layer of gold. Water runners were jumping around on the gold. You could see millions of insects buzzing in the sun’s haze. We swallowed lots of them every time we breathed, so we were pretty well fed.

That was why I never felt hungry, even though I didn’t eat the food served up at the camp. But I sure was hungry when the lady in the hot dog stall gave us the hot dogs. And to be honest, I felt hungry again as I looked at the perch and thought about what they would taste like once they were skewered on a branch and grilled over a campfire.

I turned around. Janne smiled. His face was as tanned as mine, but I could see that his chest was white behind his samurai armor. He looked puny compared to the archer paddling behind him. The archer’s arms were thick like he’d spent all his life paddling. Maybe he had. Maybe he was born in this canoe. The one with the hat might have been born in it too, although they didn’t look like brothers—no more than Janne and I did. We hadn’t asked them their names, and they hadn’t asked us either.

I faced forward again, but I was still thinking about Janne. He was used to not having a mom or a dad. Was that something you could get used to? It must be worse having a stepmother and stepfather. I’d never heard of a nice stepfather, but of course, everybody at the camp exaggerated. I preferred not to think about the possibility that I might have to have stepparents.

“This is how it ought to be all the time,” I heard Janne saying behind me.

“We could get ourselves a canoe too,” I said.

“Wouldn’t that be expensive?”

“Ask them,” I said.

“We got ours from my dad,” said the archer.

So he had a dad.

I thought about our castle. That was our canoe and our river and our jungle.

The summer camp looked small from the middle of the lake, which made it seem like a nice place. I’d been out in the camp’s lifeboat but not this far out.

“Have you been here before?” I asked.

“Lots of times,” said the one with the hat.

“I’ve seen you.”

“Did you recognize us in town?”

“No, but I’ve seen the canoe.”

“Have you ever gone ashore?” asked Janne. “By the camp?”

“It seems much too dangerous,” said the archer.

I turned around and saw that he was smiling. But he wasn’t kidding.

“The counselors probably would have beaten you to death,” said Janne.

“Yes, and served us up as the evening meal,” said the one with the hat.

“Kenny doesn’t eat the food at the camp,” said Janne nodding in my direction.

“Pleased to hear it,” said the archer.

“‘The missionary was a good man,’ said the cannibal,” the one with the hat joked.

“What did the cannibal say when he didn’t like the food they served on the airplane?” asked the archer.

Janne and I shook our heads.

“‘I’d like something tasty! Bring me the passenger list!’”

We laughed. I don’t think they could hear us back at the camp. I couldn’t see a soul on the playground. Maybe they were all searching for us in the woods. In that case I hoped our troop had camouflaged the castle.

“How come you go there, anyway?” asked the archer, as he waved his paddle toward the headland where the camp sat. The outline of the buildings now looked sharper, as if
the sun had switched on an extra searchlight when he asked.

“Because it’s fun,” said Janne.

The explorers knew he didn’t mean that. You only needed to look at the buildings.

“We’ve heard stories about it,” said the one with the hat.

“What kind of stories?”

“That they beat you, for instance.”

“That’s no big deal,” said Janne.

“They stole my bag of Twist,” I said.

“You’re kidding,” said the archer.

“And then they made me take it back again.”

“I don’t understand,” said the one with the hat.

So I told him.

Y
ou should all run away,” said the archer, starting to paddle toward one of the headlands to the east where we could land without being seen from the camp. “Or report them to the police or something.”

“Do you think they’d believe us?” asked Janne. “We can’t prove anything. Can you go to the cops if you don’t have solid proof?”

“Well…”

“What about your parents?” The boy with the hat had turned around to face us.

Janne and I looked at each other. We didn’t answer. The one with the hat seemed to understand. He didn’t ask any more questions but faced forward again and continued paddling.

When we reached shallow water, Janne and I climbed
out of the canoe. We could hear voices and shouts from the camp. Maybe they were playing burnball again.

“Let us know if you need any help,” said the archer.

“How would we get in touch if we did?” asked Janne.

“Smoke signals,” said the one with the hat.

“It might be too late by then,” I said. I imagined smoke, thick black smoke, rising up over the camp and the lake and the fields, spreading as far away as the town.

“Too late for what?” wondered Janne, but I didn’t answer.

The castle was deserted. The only sound was a magpie shrieking high up in the trees. It sounded like a warning cry.

The clearing was not far from the headland where the explorers had dropped us off. I was still thinking about those perch as I walked to the castle.

“They’ve done quite a lot,” said Janne looking around.

The walls were a little higher. So was one of the towers. But the moat was just as dry as before. The only thing that could fill it would be a cloudburst.

“The castle will be ready to move into soon,” I said.

“You mean we’re going to move in for real?”

“It’s almost time.”

Somebody had made a fire in front of the castle. You could tell it had been a small fire so the smoke wouldn’t be seen
from the camp. I poked at the embers. Some of them were still glowing. It was dangerous to leave glowing embers in the forest, especially when the summer was as hot as this one.