We Are All Crew (7 page)

“Like Caine in
Kung Fu
!” I say. “Just walking the earth. Or that guy in
The Last of the Mohicans
!” I beam at Kang. “That’s badass, man. Bad
ass
.”

Then, I whisper to Seabrook: “Why does he glow at night?”

“Excuse me?”

“That first night, he was . . . never mind.”

* * *

You can’t tell which way you’re going on a river because it’s all twists and turns. One minute you’re on what looks like a big lake with the sun burning a hole through your back, and then a minute later the sun is in front of you, the trees are clawing at you on either side, and it’s hard to tell there’s water under you at all. Sometimes there’s a fork in the river and you don’t know if it’s the start of some new waterway or if the one you’re on has split in two.

It gives me a headache, but Seabrook gets all ramped up by it. I mean, he has a GPS locator, but he gets giggles out of figuring things out on paper. He spots a landmark, unfurls his map, and scrawls in a little spiral notebook full of numbers he keeps in the cabin. Then runs back to the hemp cooker and twists a few knobs. That makes the cooker’s
whoosh-whoosh
noise hiss and the big pistons move faster or slower.

We run into a three-pronged fork. There’s a wide, tree-lined mouth on the right and a narrow trickle of water on the left—or we can head straight the way we’re going, downriver and around a bend. Seabrook frowns and scrawls on his pad, then erases it, sticks his tongue in the corner of his mouth, and replaces it with more writing.

“Mr. Brubaker,” he says, “get my pocket compass. It’s there on the top shelf.”

Arthur and I have been helping Kang with the anchor while Seabrook figures out where we’re going. I go to the far end of the cabin and look at the tall set of shelves.

“Where?” I ask.

“Top shelf,” Seabrook says again.

I look up at the shelves. They must be about six feet tall, so I should be able to reach, but I stand on tiptoe and can’t get it.

“Mr. Brubaker?” Seabrook’s back is to me, and he’s chewing the top of his eraser over his equations.

It’s embarrassing. Four foot eleven. Another half inch and I could get it. I strain. I grab the shelves. Maybe I could climb them, but they are these rickety metal things that would probably teeter over on top of me if I risked it.

Something bumps into my rear and I turn. It’s an empty plastic crate that was sitting near the door. It clicks that I can stand on the crate to reach the compass.

I see Arthur standing next to Seabrook. I can tell he’s glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.

I give the compass to Seabrook and stand next to Arthur.

If you’re tall—or at least normal height—it probably doesn’t mean much to you, but this was a cool move. Arthur could have just come over and grabbed the compass and handed it to Seabrook himself, which would have dissed me big time, even if he didn’t mean to. More often than not, when my shrimp frame shames me, there’s somebody—a Paste Eater or His Eminence or even the Moms—there to remind me what a little freakshow I am.

But Arthur bumped the crate at me nonchalantly and then pretended it didn’t happen. He’s a gangly kid, a good head and a half taller than yourstruly, but it’s like he knows what it’s like to be me.

I stand next to him and watch the water churn by. “So what are you going to do when you grow up, man?”

“
Law school
,” he writes on his pad.

Well that doesn’t compute. With some guys, you can just tell what they’re going to be. Burton Trotsky, for instance—if our band doesn’t save him from it—is going to be a lawyer. He doesn’t have publicspeak like His Eminence, but the kid is a born schmoozer.

I’m sticking to my vow never to insult Arthur, so I don’t mention the obvious—lawyers usually gab a little better than he does. “That’s cool, man,” I say.

Arthur shrugs. “
My dad went to Harvard, and he says I’m going there
.”

“So did mine,” I say. No big surprise. Everybody I know is Harvard grad spawn. And His Eminence never told me specifically I’m going there, but he often says “When you’re at Harvard in a couple years” like it’s a given.

“
Dad works for the NSA,”
Arthur writes.
“Hush hush stuff. Says I’m going to be a legacy there. That’s why I was at Godspeed Summer Camp. First step
.”

“Well, what do you want to do?”

He shrugs again. “
I like dinosaurs. I’ve thought about archaeology or anthropology, but of course my dad won’t have any of it
.”

“Wow, that sucks,” I say. “You see, me and my boys are starting this band. We’re wicked psycho. Doesn’t matter what my folks say—come eighteen, I’m out the door.”

We talk for a while longer until Seabrook yells, “Weigh anchor. We’re going to starboard. We’ll keep to the trees and hope they don’t spot us.”

Arthur is geeky, people, but I’m beginning to learn that he isn’t such a bad dude.

He tells me his dad does all kinds of secret agent stuff for the NSA. Everything is super quiet where he works: people mumble in soundproof rooms, phone conversations are whispered. They don’t even talk around the watercoolers like they do in the offices you see on TV. Coworkers only nod at one another when they pass in the hallways. One time, Arthur says, he went with his dad to a government-mandated father-son day, and people shot him dirty looks because of the soft noises his sneakers made when he tiptoed on the carpet. Things are so soundless at work that, when Arthur’s old man gets home, he needs a break from all the peace and quiet and relaxes with a little noise and tension. Every night, he turns up the TV set full blast, throws his briefcase down with a loud
kerplunk
, and hollers at his wife. And she shouts back, Arthur figures, because she knows how much he loves noise and tension, and she’s grown to love it over the years too.

“What’s for dinner tonight!” he shrieks.

“Pot roast!” she yells back.

“Again?! Can’t you speak to the help, dear? Chef just made pot roast last week! Do I have to do everything around here?”

Up until Arthur could actually speak, he looked as if he’d be a world-class loudmouth too. His
goo-goos
were loud enough to make the French doors to his nursery wobble. During his christening, church members actually stuck cotton balls in their ears to try to get some relief from the piercing sounds of his crying.

It wasn’t until he was old enough to actually speak that his parents noticed the volume coming down.

“Dinosaurs, Arthur?” his father would shout at him. “What good do you think you’re possibly going to get out of playing with dinosaurs?”

“Why don’t you play football, Arthur? How are you ever going to make friends if you don’t play football?”

“Why do you sit inside and read constantly? Why don’t you go outside and play, for God’s sake?”

Arthur tried to answer, but it was like somebody was twisting his sound knob to the left. Arthur kept speaking more and more softly until he was barely whispering.

At first, Arthur’s pediatrician said it was a mental thing. But his old man was convinced that wasn’t the answer. So they took the kid to other doctors, who hooked him up to machines that X-rayed his throat and scanned his brain. They jabbed him with needles and looked at his blood under microscopes. Arthur went to fifty of these other doctors in all, and none of them could find a thing wrong with him—physically, that is.

Then one day Arthur’s old man came home, kerplunked his briefcase down, and yelled about how he’d been right all along. One of the doctors who had just checked Arthur out had phoned and told him so. It wasn’t psycho-something. It was a birth defect. There was bad stuff in Arthur’s throat, this cloud of muscle that encircled his vocal chords. As Arthur got older, the muscle kept getting bigger and bigger and tighter and tighter around the vocal chords, which in turn kept getting weaker and weaker and littler and littler. It was incurable; surgery would have killed him. But the condition wouldn’t—it just meant ? Nobody talked

CHAPTER NINE

birds

It looked no different than any other smoke the town of Lynnbrook produced—a black, roiling pall that poured from the towers. Some felt a tingling under their wings; others sensed a change had happened within themselves.

By that spring, they knew. No bird was a mother. The eggs that were laid were weak. Mothers crushed babies in their nests before they could become pink things gasping for food. Instead of the cries of thousands of tiny voices, there was only the wind in the trees and the melting of the snow.

Some knew it was the smoke. Others thought it was another trick men had played on them on purpose.

Some, however, recognized that the stone yards where the men laid their dead had grown larger that season.

The smoke stopped altogether. Not just the poisoned smoke, but everything that had come from the towers stopped flowing. The silent trees became filled with another cry, one the birds hadn’t heard before at such volume.

Some of the men moved into the trees and ate what they could find on the ground.

The birds watched them and sang.

i meet esmerelda

Yellow-Hunter forces us into the chicken wire dome next to the bonfire logs. The whole town surrounds us. They yell and poke us through the chicken wire with spears and sticks. Some call us wraiths. Then Yellow-Hunter gets between our cage and the crowd and tells the crazies that the prisoners must be left unharmed, and that the great Shwo-Rez will let them all know by nightfall what he’s decided.

Even after Yellow-Hunter calms them down, most of the crowd hangs around, gawking at us like we’re the monkey cage at the Philly zoo.

Arthur crouches and rocks back and forth. He isn’t bawling anymore but he looks plenty scared, so I sit next to him and say: “
When the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls
. . . you know . . .”

Frowning, he stands and goes to the other side of the cage.

I follow him. “So what do you think they’re going to do to us?” I ask. “Our dads do have a lot of cash after all. Maybe they recognized me from TV . . .”

His frown gets darker, and he turns his back on me.

“So I was wrong about the reality TV thing. I can admit it,” I say. “I mean, who would really think that actual homeless people would talk like that without a script? You have to admit, though, it’d make for a pretty good show—kidnapping people and throwing
Lord of the Rings
at them . . .”

While I’m talking, Arthur picks up a branch from the ground. In the dirt in front of him, he draws the words,
GO AWAY
. Then he takes out his pocketknife—the Shrub People must not have seen it—and starts whittling the branch.

What a pantload! I feel like reminding the kid that if it hadn’t been for me, he’d still be back in Pennsylvania like a little loser.

So I just say, “What-
ev
-er, man,” real cold and walk away from him.

Eventually the crowd peters down, and the crazies return to their cardboard boxes, leaving us alone. Kang and Doctor Seabrook examine the cage—a dome of chicken wire with long sharp ends the hunters have shoved into the ground. Kang could probably push the cage over no problem, but the hunters positioned us in the center of town. Every time we move a Shrub Person has his eye on us.

“Don’t bother,” Clarence says.

I forgot he was here. When they brought us into the camp he hollered at the homeless guys who captured us, but since then he’s shut up. He’s sitting Indian style in a corner of the cage. The chicken wire’s shadow creates crosses over his skeleton-like body.

“They’ll nail you with a spear if you try to escape.” His voice is phlegmy. “I’ve been here two days, I have.”

“Why didn’t you yell for the police?” Seabrook asks.

He snorts. “Police. There’s no such thing out here. Besides, you really think they’d put old Bob Schwartz away?”

“I knew it!” I shout.

“Ain’t you all from Lynnbrook?” Clarence asks.

“No,” Seabrook says.

“
They’re not even from Lynnbrook
!” Clarence shouts. Nobody cares.

“The guy running the show here is Bob Schwartz,” he continues. “Used to be on the city council. Took so many bribes he’s still the richest man in the county. And this here is his land.”

“Listen,” Seabrook says. “Who are all these people, and what do they want from us?”

“It ain’t them,” Clarence says. “It’s Schwartz. Most of these people don’t care about you any more than I do. Schwartz runs the show, and all of them do anything Schwartz says. Except me, and that’s why they put me in here.”

“What does he tell them to do?” Seabrook asks.

“You got to act nuts. You got to put your duds on all funny and sing songs and parade around. You got to believe in ghosts. You got to say Schwartz is your king. And you got to change your name. All that for some free food and a cardboard box to keep the rain off your head.”

“And if you don’t?” Seabrook asks.

Clarence smiles. I think he might have one tooth, but it’s way back in his head and I can barely see it. “They put you in here,” he says. “I come here from Lynnbrook, I did. Cops are hassling you all the time in Lynnbrook. So people say all the time,
Go out to Bob Schwartz’s land. There’s free food and free junk
. So I come on out here. But when I got here, I seen them all acting like this. I tried it out for a bit like the rest of 6" class="tx">Wh