We Are All Crew (13 page)

the birmingham kid

The engine hiccups and spurts smoke. We turn up a stream and then down another, and come to rest in a lagoon at the bottom of a steep hill. A pipe runs down the hill and pours oil into the water near the boat.

This stopped being fun a long time ago, but now I’m completely freaked. This whole thing is so not cool. Squirrels bite? What would have happened if a bunch of them took after me like that one did to Arthur?

Kang clangs around with the hemp cooker some more, and the big lightning-shaped crack looks bigger. I wish I could get him to just keep going and put some more water between us and the white boats. How long does it take to repair frog damage?

Seabrook shouts from the hold. He’s holding two fistfuls of gauze and tape—the bandages have been ripped from his shoulder blade. The hole on his back oozes through rust-colored crust, and his skin is the color of an early model iPod and speckled with sweat. Occasionally an electric current trembles through him. His eyes are open but probably blind behind his gooey tears. He mumbles something, gibberish mostly, but I can make out the name Lydia.

I want my mom. I know that sounds totally lame, but it’s the truth. I want my mom worse than anything. I’d go off and find a phone, but I’m afraid those baddies in black would come back.

Kang redresses the wound and covers Seabrook in blankets. Soon Seabrook’s eyes close again. He stops talking and starts to breathe heavily again.

* * *

Kang finishes welding the cooker. We help him reload it and then mop the deck while he revs the engine to test it. Nobody talks.

We finally get ready to head out again when we hear a popping noise. Everybody freezes.

I scan the tops of the trees. For a while there’s nothing but the wind brushing past. Then I hear footsteps and heavy breathing. Someone is running through the forest.

Another bang.

“It’s a gunshot!” I cry. “Kang, let’s get out of here!”

A man darts out of the forest. He stops at the edge of the river and waves at us as we pull back from shore.

“Help! Help! Don’t go nowheres without me!” He raises his arms over his head and jumps up and down. The man is sporting an undershirt beneath overalls and a blond bowl cut that nearly falls into his eyes—a style that’s
so
’90s.

“It’s one of those guys!” I say. “Keep going, Kang!”

But Esmerelda furrows her brow. “It doesn’t look like a cop, Winthrop,” she says.

She’s right. On his back is a bright green knapsack. Another gunshot pops in the woods, and something thuds against our hull.

“Help me!” the man shouts again.

“They’re shooting at him, Kang!” Esmerelda says. “Let him get on board.”

I think that’s crazy. I mean, what are we doing? We need to get to a town. It’s a miracle we made it this far. Seabrook stuck his neck out for someone, and look at him.

But I don’t say anything.

Kang stops the boat. The man wades into the water, taking off his knapsack and holding it over his head like it’s full of mint-condition X-Men action figures. He climbs aboard, and Kang speeds away.

Over the engine, the radio sputters snatches of conversations: “
My responsibility,”
someone says, “
is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.
”
⁸

The man rests against the gunwales, gasping for breath and clutching his backpack to his stomach with big, meat-slab hands. He smiles and nods a hello. A big jaw bites his upper lip, and he smells worse than a gym locker at school—why does everyone smell so awful out here? I back away.

“Y’all done me a huge favor,” he says. He has an honest to God Southern drawl. “That’s what you done. Y’all done Charlie Lee a big ol’ honkin’ favor.”

“Hi,” Esmerelda says, stepping forward and holding out her hand. “My name’s Esmerelda. And this here’s Winthrop and Arthur, and that there driving the boat is Kang.”

“Name’s Charlie Lee Bowden, and I’m pleased to meet y’all,” Charlie Lee says. He nods at each of us in turn. He wrinkles his nose at the sight of Kang. Then he leans toward Esmerelda and whispers, “’Scuse me for saying, little lady, but is that there an Injun you got driving this here boat?”

Esmerelda frowns. “His name is Kang, and he’s a Native American.”

Charlie Lee leans back against the gunwales and nods. “I don’t mean no disrespect, ma’am. I just never met an honest to goodness Injun—er, Native American before.”

I cover my nose and moved further away from the guy. “So,” I say, “who was shooting at you back there?”

“Po-lice,” Charlie Lee says. He sits up straight and looks at Esmerelda and me, sticking his thick jaw out at us. “See, they’s after me for doing the Lord’s work.”

Esmerelda glances at me. We just left a camp full of religious wackos, and now we’ve picked up a Southern evangelist? It isn’t that I don’t believe, people. I’m sure there’s a heaven and a hell and that one of those celestial video game remotes holds sway over my destiny, but it’s all too far away, and talk of it bores me worse than the news on TV.

“Like, just what exactly is the Lord’s work, Mr. Bowden?” Esmerelda asks with narrow eyes.

“Well,” he says, “I’m afraid, little lady, y’all done gone and picked yourselves up one honey of a hitchhiker. I’m the Birmingham Kid.”

“The . . . what?”

Charlie Lee’s eyes fall, and his smile slips from his face. “Come on now. Y’all mean to say you ain’t never heard of the Birmingham Kid?”

“No,” Esmerelda says.

“Well, they call me that because I’m from Birmingham. Only I ain’t from there exactly—I’m from the town of Crawdad, Alabama, which is about an hour’s drive away. They done called me Birmingham because it was the closest big town, and I daresride.

ay it wouldn’t be right calling me the Crawdad Kid on account of my bidness.”

“What business is that?” Esmerelda asks.

“Well, ma’am, I go from place to place doing the Lord’s work.”

“So you said,” Esmerelda chirps. “And just what does that mean? Like, why were those cops shooting at you?”

“Well, the po-lice, they don’t always take too kindl although most of the God-fearing people do.” He hugs his backpack more tightly. “I just done a bit of work there in the town of Fenton, Kentucky, when the police caught on and run me off. Usually I find a house or some folks who appreciate the Birmingham Kid where I can lay up, but I didn’t find nothing of the sort this time. That’s how I come upon y’all, and thank heavens I did. Y’all done Charlie Lee a big ol’ honkin’ favor.”

Just then, the doctor groans from the hold and something strikes the metal floor below. All of us, including Charlie Lee, go belowdecks—except Arthur, who takes the wheel from Kang.

Seabrook has attempted to crawl back out of bed, but he’s collapsed before reaching the stairs. He’s lying on the metal floor. Kang takes his shoulders and I grip his feet, and we carry him back to his bed.

“That man been shot?” Charlie Lee says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Two days ago. Shot in the shoulder.”

“Well, now that’s a darn shame. Y’all ain’t planning on taking him to no doctor, now are you?”

Esmerelda narrows her eyes. “Why?”

“Well, doctors are agents of the devil,” Charlie Lee says. “They’re all about taking people away from life everlasting and getting in the way of God’s will.”

“What?”

“Doctors,” Charlie Lee snaps. “Don’t listen to them, y’all. Y’all trust in the Lord. He’ll see your friend through.”

is there a doctor in the house?

The sky is just beginning to turn pink when we see the town. Houses poke up above the trees, and cars speed past on blacktop roads. Docks lined with bobbing white boats jut out from shore. Church spires rise into the sky, and a water tower that looks like an upside-down scallion pokes up from behind the rooftops.

“Why, that must be the town of Crofton,” Charlie Lee says.

I suck wind until my lungs are ready to burst. Just beyond the house, two golden arches hump—McDonald’s burgers are on the wind.

Kang anchors upstream and out of sight, waiting for dark when we can sneak by unseen.

Esmerelda comes up from the hold.

“Kang,” she says, “he looks really bad.”

We all go back down again. Seabrook is lying very still. His breath is coming in short, rasping spasms.

“He needs a doctor,” Esmerelda says.

We all stare at her. A hospital, of course, we decided we can’t do. But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any living person look that color before.

Esmerelda is crying. “I’m afraid he’ll die. Kang, we have to go over to that town and find a doctor.”

Kang stares at her gravely.

“We can make something up,” she says, tossing a hand at him as if he’d refused. “I mean, I know doctors are supposed to report stuff like gunshot victims. But we can make something up and leave before anybody has a clue.”

Kang nods.

Esmerelda exhales. “Okay. It’s settled. I’ll go.”

Kang stiffens. He shakes his head vehemently.

“What else are we going to do? Talking isn’t, like, your strongest suit, man. Plus, if something goes wrong, none of us knows how to drive this boat.”

She and Kang go back and forth. Arthur signs at her. He doesn’t want her to go by herself. Charlie Lee and I watch them blathering on and on.

As for yourstruly, I want neither option. I want to get off this ride, but what’s waiting for us if we do? If only we had one of those invisible cloaks that they have in that
Larry Spackler and the Killer Animals
movie.

An idea pops in my head.

“We go secret–agent style,” I say.

stealth mission

“This is ridiculous,” Esmerelda says. “Everybody is staring at us.”

We’re hiding in an alley next to a drugstore. We make our way through the town, hiding in doorways.

Despite what Esmerelda says, my disguises are awesome. I took the ponchos Kang got us, then borrowed some of his feathers and a few ribbons of Seabrook’s extra gauze tape to fashion us each miniature headdresses. Also, using some of the red paint Kang has for the hemp cooker, I gave us each a crimson war face.

“The point is,” I say to Esmerelda, “those guys in black are going to be looking for three kids, right? Not three Native Americans.”

When we first arrived in town, Charlie Lee, who’d been heehawing at our costumes, said he was off to get himself something to eat. We watched him saunter away, his overalls and backpack cruising down the hard pavement and right angles of a city street. He disappeared into a restaurant called the Steak Shack. The name made my stomach rumble.

I was so starved, I might have considered going with him if I hadn’t spotted the man in the black suit. We’d been hiding in the entryway of a bank building with the
Closed
sign flipped over.

It wasn’t a Green Police uniform—just a black business suit. He had a crew cut and sunglasses, and looked like a member of His Eminence’s security detail.

But he passed us. He saw us, gave us a look with a knitted brow, and seemed in no hurry to loose saber-toothed rodents on us.

“Look,” Esmerelda says. She’s taken off her headdress. “I’m going in there to see if I can get some kind of painkiller or something for the Doc, and maybe see if we can use a phone.”

Arthur follows her. I wait outside to keep a lookout.

Crofton sure isn’t much of a town. One stoplight at the corner of Main Street divvies up a couple of bars, churches, and a Shell station. A handful of houses with rusting aluminum siding line the crumbling sidewalk. Probably zero music scene. Cars zip past without stopping, and the drivers don’t seem to look out the windows.

I spot a metal box marked AT&T in the alley across from the drugstore. I run across the street to get to it, nearly into the path of an oncoming car. I glance over my shoulder to see if Arthur and Esmerelda can see me. Through the drugstore window I see a few adults moving around, but no sign of red faces and ponchos.

There’s a push-button keypad at the center of the metal box, which bends and mangles my reflection. Attached to it is this super old receiver thing. What do they do in the movies?
Zero for operator,
it says.

I press it.

“Directory assistance.”

“I want to call the Brubaker residence in Philadelphia.”

“You want to make a collect call?”

“What’s a collect call?”

“Sir, that means the party you’re dialing will be responsible for the charges.”

“Sure. Let’s do that.” I give the number.

From the corner of my eye, I see the man in the black suit again. He emerges from an alley and stops on the shoulder. His mirrored shades flash in the late afternoon sun.

I drop the receiver and let it dangle, then turn to run. I’m walled in on all sides by brick, and for a brief few seconds I wish I had the arms of those monster trees to dart back into.

When I search for the man in black again, his back is to me. He’s wandering off in the direction of the restaurant where Charlie Lee had gone for dinner.
He’s just a guy, he’s not a baddie
, I tell myself.

I exhale. Still no sign of Arthur and Esmerelda.

="tx1">I pick up the receiver and put it to my ear.

It’ll be okay. His Eminence will send a car. Once he hears about the
Tamzene
and how great it is, he’ll pull some strings and maybe even bring those black-uniformed baddies up on charges.

“They told me this was going to help your career,” I say to myself, rehearsing, as the line clicks and beeps, presumably darting across the country to con Compound.

I realize how hollow I sound.

As for that patch thing
, I tell myself,
it’s sure to be some kind of coincidence
.
That’s all
.

That sounds hollow too.

I shake my head. I’ll tell Esmerelda and Arthur that it must have been a fluke. His Eminence’s people must have just spotted us on a spy satellitenect me with the

CHAPTER SIXTEEN