Getting Air (10 page)

We tiptoed the rest of the way to the campsite, where my sister and Mrs. Herschel were crouching behind the plane. They looked like they were playing hide-and-go-seek. I peered over to where they seemed to be staring, and a few yards from the campsite, next to a tree, there was a big, fat, rabbit.

“How did you catch it?” Henry whispered to Arcadia.

“We didn’t catch it yet,” she replied. “We’re
trying
to catch it.”

There was some kind of a weird apparatus next to the tree. The girls had turned my skateboard wheels up and stuck a stick under one end of it. Tied to the bottom of the stick was a piece of dental floss, and I could see it extended on the ground to where Julia and Mrs. Herschel were hiding. Lodged between the front and back wheels of the skateboard was a big rock, I guess to give it weight.

“That’s called a deadfall,” Henry whispered. “You yank the stick out with the string, and the weight falls on the animal.”

“You mean we just spent an hour wandering around the woods for nothing and we could have caught a rabbit right here?” I asked.

“I didn’t think of it,” Henry admitted.

“Yer a foon,” David said.

The rabbit was about two feet away from the deadfall, and it was sniffing around the ground. I couldn’t tell what was under the skateboard, but it was a little white glop.

“What’s she using for bait?” David asked Arcadia.

“Toothpaste,” she replied.

“Do rabbits like toothpaste?” I asked.

“We’re going to find out,” Arcadia replied.

The rabbit couldn’t seem to make up its mind about going under the skateboard. Maybe the toothpaste wasn’t interesting enough. Too bad we didn’t have better bait, I thought. But then, if we had better bait, we probably would have eaten it ourselves.

“Come on, Mr. Rabbit,” Henry whispered. “You should brush your teeth twice a day.”

Julia was being patient. If she pulled the string too soon, the rabbit would run away. She had a good view of it from behind the plane, and Mrs. Herschel was right next to her, whispering in her ear.

Finally the rabbit nosed forward a few steps to get a sniff of the toothpaste.

“Now!” Mrs. Herschel said, and Julia yanked the dental floss. The stick popped out and the skateboard came crashing down on top of the rabbit. The rock held it down.

“Got him!” Julia shouted, and we all started cheering.

“Ooh, another extreme-sports accident!” Henry shouted, like he was an X Games announcer. “That just shows how dangerous skateboards can be.”

“Especially if you’re a rabbit,” I said.

“Or a snake,” added David.

“This wouldn’t have happened if the rabbit had been wearing a helmet,” Henry noted.

It occurred to me that there were probably more animal guts on my skateboard than any other skateboard in the world.

I felt sorry for the little guy if, in fact, it was a guy. But after all, it was his own fault. Nobody forced him to go under the skateboard. He did it of his own free will.

“Who wants to put him out of his misery?” asked Julia.

“It’s not my cup of tea,” Mrs. Herschel said. “You may have the honors, sweetie.”

“I’d love to help, but I have to do my homework,” said Henry.

“I’ll help,” David said, and I breathed a big sigh of relief. I can’t even look when the doctor gives me a shot. No way was I going to kill a rabbit.

“We’ll need one of those sharp pieces of metal from the plane,” David told Julia.

Henry, Arcadia, Mrs. Herschel and I—the big chickens—hustled over to the far end of the campsite so we wouldn’t have to hear the tortured screams of protest from the poor innocent creature who was about to have his guts ripped out by my friend and my sadistic, demented sister.

“Oh, the poor bunny!” Arcadia said.

“We should hold a memorial service for it,” I suggested.

“Yeah,” Henry said, “right after we eat.”

“I don’t think I can eat a bunny,” Arcadia fretted.

“Don’t think of it as a bunny,” I told her. “It’s a rabbit.”

“It’s a
bunny
rabbit!” Arcadia said, nearly in tears.

“Maybe it would help if you thought of it as an
evil
bunny rabbit,” Henry suggested.

“Oh, don’t be silly, dear,” Mrs. Herschel said. “You ate snake. You ate a bug.”

“I spit the bug out,” Arcadia corrected her.

It took a while for Julia and David to kill, skin, and do all those other nasty things to the rabbit before we could eat it. Henry suggested we pass the time by playing the license plate game, and since Mrs. Herschel didn’t get the joke, we had to explain to her what the license plate game was and why it would be funny to play it out in the woods. Mrs. Herschel said we were “daft Yanks” and took it upon herself to explain the rules of cricket to us, which made absolutely no sense at all. But it did help pass the time.

“Dinnertime!” Julia finally announced. “You wimps can come back now.”

“Great,” I said. “I’m so hungry I could eat a rabbit.”

The sheet of metal was laying by the fire with a bunch of thin strips of meat lined up perfectly in rows. It was impressive.

“
That
was the rabbit?” Mrs. Herschel asked. “How did you do that?”

“It was simple, really,” Julia said. “First we sliced the loose fur from his back and peeled the rest of his skin off carefully…”

“…and then we cut off his feet and severed his head,” explained David. “We hung him upside down to drain the blood, cut his throat, removed his guts, and sliced him into cutlets.”

“Great,” I said. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

But of course I was. While Julia and David wiped the rabbit guts off their hands with leaves, Henry added enough wood to the fire to get a good blaze going. Arcadia and Mrs. Herschel gathered some long sticks. We attached the rabbit cutlets and began to roast them.

We didn’t have any spices or seasonings, but the smell of cooking meat was wonderful anyway. Julia said we should be careful not to overcook it, because the more you heat something the more nutrition is lost. But we were all a little afraid of germs and bacteria, so we burned the meat a little.

I couldn’t wait anymore. The smell was overpowering. I took my stick out of the fire and blew on the meat to cool it down. Then I took a bite.

I’ve been to a few nice restaurants in my time. You know, those places where you have to wear your good clothes and your parents make you put the cloth napkins in your lap? Well, the food in those places was nothing compared with the taste of fresh rabbit roasted out in the woods. I had never tasted anything so delicious in my life.

“It tastes like chicken,” said Henry.

“It tastes better than chicken,” I said.

For the most part, we didn’t say anything. We were enjoying the food too much. The only thing that would have made it better would be a big glop of mashed potatoes on the side. Or french fries. And a drink. A soda. That would have been perfect.

When we finished all the cutlets, the six of us just sat back on our seats and relaxed.

“I couldn’t eat another bite,” Arcadia said.

“Do you know how much food the average person eats in one year?” Julia asked. “A ton.”

Unbelievable. We had eaten almost nothing in the last few days. Back home, I took food for granted. Any time I felt a rumble in my stomach, I could just go to the kitchen and grab something from the fridge. I never once thought about where the food came from, whether it was grown from the ground or killed or how it was prepared. Maybe the rabbit tasted so good because we caught it, prepared it, and cooked it ourselves. Or some of us did, anyway.

Arcadia and my sister got up and went inside the plane. They came out a minute later with a platter and what looked like a chocolate cake on it.

“Happy birthday to you,” they began to sing. “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Mrs. Her…schel. Happy birthday to you.”

Mrs. Herschel was beaming from ear to ear.

“Is that a real cake?” I asked, incredulous.

“Of course not,” Arcadia said. “We made it out of mud.”

“How did you know it was my birthday?” asked Mrs. Herschel.

“You told us you were going to turn eighty in a few days,” Arcadia said. “That was a few days ago. So we figured you must be eighty.”

“We wish we had candles for you to blow out,” Julia said.

“Forget the candles,” Henry said. “I wish you had a real cake.”

“Well, I think it’s lovely,” Mrs. Herschel said. “Thank you. I’ll always remember where I was the day I turned eighty.”

It had been three or four days. We didn’t know exactly, because we didn’t know how long we had been unconscious after the crash.

We started keeping track of the days, carving a line to represent each day on a tree trunk near the campsite. It was Mrs. Herschel’s idea. That’s what prisoners in jails do, she told us. Otherwise they go crazy. After a while you forget what day of the week it is, and how long you’ve been locked up. Eventually you lose your mind.

We were beginning to settle into a routine, the six of us. Every morning, the first person awake would get the fire stoked up and throw some wet leaves on it to produce smoke in case a plane flew overhead. One by one we would go to the “bathroom.” Arcadia liked to pick berries for breakfast. Mrs. Herschel would lead us all in yoga and stretching exercises. Sleeping on the floor of the plane left us all achy in the morning.

Julia built a new deadfall so that maybe we could trap another rabbit or small animal. Once we had the taste of meat, we all wanted more.

We had seen no sign of rescue since that plane flew overhead a few days earlier. I, for one, was beginning to give up hope that anybody would find us out in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t tell the others, but I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe the world had stopped looking for us. Maybe everybody assumed we were dead. People don’t usually survive plane crashes. I know that after a certain amount of time, rescue teams give up because the chances of finding survivors becomes smaller and smaller. They can’t keep searching indefinitely. Rescue missions cost a lot of money.

I was getting depressed. I think we all were.

David suggested that maybe we should leave the campsite and start hiking south. We could use the sun to navigate, he said. If we could cover twenty or thirty miles a day, in ten days we would be 200-300 miles south. Eventually we’d have to stumble upon a town or some evidence of civilization.

We talked it over as a group. The rest of us were inclined to stay at our campsite, where we had shelter, fire, food, and water. Henry said one of the first rules of survival is to stay where you are. If you go wandering all over the place, it’s even harder for rescue teams to find you. And who knows what you might encounter in your travels?

We voted 5-1 to stay put. I thought David might go strike out on his own the way he did earlier, but he didn’t. After his experience with the snake, I guess he decided it would be safer to stick with the group.

After the morning chores were finished, there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Henry was sitting in one of the airplane seats and staring into the fire. He looked like he was lost in thought. I plopped down in the seat next to him.

I didn’t know what Henry was thinking about, but I was thinking about home and what was going on back there. If I was home, I could just skateboard into town and get an ice-cream cone. That would taste so good. What were my parents doing right now, I wondered? They were probably at work. If only I had a webcam or something and could see them on the screen. Did they miss me and Julia? Did they hold a memorial service for us? Did they already have a yard sale and sell all my things? They’d better not sell my skateboard stuff—the magazines, the posters, my old boards, wheels, and bearings.

“Man, I miss skating,” I said, and Henry nodded.

“Y’know, skaters look at the world differently,” Henry said, poking a stick absentmindedly into the fire. “To most people, a skateboard is just a piece of wood with wheels on it. It’s a toy. To me, it’s like an extension of my body.”

I knew exactly what he meant. When regular people look at a set of stairs, all they see is a way to get from one floor to the next one. But when you’re a skater, you look at a set of stairs and you see an opportunity. You wonder if it’s possible to jump those stairs. Is it possible to grind that banister? Every ledge, every curb, every rail is a potential skate spot. A challenge.

David parked himself in the seat next to Henry.

“Hey,” he said, “remember the time we tried to skate off the garage onto the roof of the old Cadillac that Henry’s dad was fixing up?”

Just thinking about it made me smile. We had been shooting our
Woodpushers Gone Wild
skate video. We were sure it would be so impressive that one of the skateboard companies would
have
to sponsor us. We got a big black umbrella that we were using like a parachute. David skateboarded off the garage holding the umbrella and tried to land on the car.

“You almost died, if I recall,” Henry said.

“Yeah,” David said, laughing. “It was great.”

“I’d give anything to skate right now,” I said.

“I’d cut off one of my fingers to skate right now,” Henry said.

“I’d cut off my ear,” David said. “That’s what Vincent van Gogh did.”

“He was insane,” I told them.

The sun had positioned itself right between two branches and it was shining in my eyes. I closed them so I wouldn’t be blinded. When I turned my head a little and opened them again, there was a bright yellow afterimage of the sun superimposed over our plane. It almost looked like the rays of the sun were shooting out of the plane itself. It was a startling image, and it seemed almost spiritual, or mystical, or something. It was like a higher power was trying to send me a message.

I thought about it for a moment or two, and then I realized something that I had never noticed before.

The shape of an airplane’s body is identical to the shape of a halfpipe.