“We’ll go north along Apple Creek, past Devil’s Hole, and pitch camp tonight here.”
He draws an X. The map crinkles.
“Old Sam says the crash site’s somewhere east of there. We’ll cross the creek and start the search tomorrow morning.”
We divvy up the equipment and load our packs. Pete grunts as he lifts his; that tank-round of grape juice swishes somewhere inside.
My brothers don’t know it, but I’ve packed a little something extra too. Will may have pinched Dad’s map, but I pinched his Kodak camera—and two rolls of film.
There ain’t a doubt in my mind whose sin is greater, but I figure it’s worth it.
When Frankie submits his story to the newspaper, it’s going to have photographs.
There’s no feeling like the kind you get when you begin a journey to find something you ain’t ever found before. Us boys were always going places in these hills, crawling through streambeds or climbing haystacks or sneaking across railroad bridges or wherever to find Lord knows what. But whatever things we found—arrowheads, old snakeskins or snakes still in their skins, or salamanders, or four-leafed clovers—we’d seen them all before.
None of us has ever laid eyes on a fighter jet.
Every boy loves the idea of flying. Some want to be astronauts, like Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin, and that’s sure something special. But astronauts don’t fly into a battle in the sky. That’s why us Elliot boys love fighter pilots. They’re fighters.
And though we tell Ma that we’ve decided to go camping for a time with Frankie, when my brothers and cousin and my big galoot of a dog set off to follow Apple Creek north for the ten thousandth time, it ain’t like any time before.
We are going farther than we’ve ever gone before.
Up north, Apple Creek twists like a python between high, rocky hills. The path gives out, and Pete has to find us a narrow deer trail along sharp outcroppings. We follow it for a mile until it gets slashed by a deep, dark gorge.
Pete leads us down into the gorge and then up the far side, but the walls are so steep we have to go hand over hand, grabbing hold of tree roots that poke through the pale clay until we reach the top, covered in mud and out of breath—only to see another deep gash waiting for us, and down we go again. The land is crossed with ravines, some with piles of dry, dead leaves in their bottoms and others with trickles of water gleaming in the dark.
It’s slow going for us. Butch loves it. He trots along the ravine bottoms, stirring up clouds of silt and the hair along his legs getting wet and bristly.
Once, Frankie slips and slides almost thirty feet on his backside all the way to the bottom. When he gets up, there’s streaks from the seat of his pants all the way up his back to his neck, so dark I know they ain’t ever coming out.
Pete and Will bust out laughing, and even though I try not to, I can’t help it.
“Why we going this way, anyway?” Frankie asks, red-faced. “Are all these rivers on your map?”
Will tells him that it was heavy rains collecting between the hills that cut these grooves.
“They change over time,” Will says. “But these canyons are a bad place to be when the heavy rains come.”
Looking about, I can see he’s right. I imagine torrents of water rushing down these dark ravines to join the creek. With all that extra water flowing into her, Apple Creek, normally so calm and gentle, becomes a raging monster.
“Isn’t there any faster way?” Frankie asks.
“No rush,” Pete tells him. “That wreck ain’t going nowhere.”
Pete may be right, but it ain’t the wreck’s going anywhere that worries me. It’s Pete’s going somewhere.
Days are ticking down till he turns eighteen, and Frankie and me ain’t got one story published yet.
I try wiping some of the mud off Frankie, but it’s no use and I tell him so.
“Forget it,” he says, and I do and we start to climb the next wall again.
When we leave those rocky ravines behind, we come to a forest of fir trees standing like sentries at the creek’s edge.
Pete calls a break and we set our packs down in a dusty clearing beside a piece of deadwood that’s been stripped of all its bark so that it gleams white as one of those old bones Butch likes to chew on. We sip metal-tasting water from our canteens and listen to the hum of summer around us: cicadas in the trees overhead and across the creek.
Will lays Dad’s map out over the bare trunk and he and Pete hunch over it, murmuring to each other in their way. Pete checks his compass.