Getting Air (6 page)

A fire. Of course! Fire not only cooks food, warms you up, and creates light, it can also be a distress signal. If we had a fire, it would have produced smoke and that plane would have seen it. We would have been rescued. It was so obvious now. My little sister was the only one who realized it.

“How are we going to make a bloody fire?” Mrs. Herschel asked.

I looked at Julia. She probably has every ribbon, badge, and award the Girl Scouts give out. She
must
know all about fires. But she kept her mouth shut.

“Did anyone come across a book of matches in the suitcases?” Arcadia asked. “A lighter?”

Everybody shook their heads.

“This is one situation where
not
smoking can be hazardous to your health,” Henry said.

“I know how to start a fire,” David said.

David had kept his mouth shut ever since the plane flew overhead. He knew he’d made an idiot of himself saying we didn’t need a fire, and must have been working very hard to keep quiet. But David is just not the kind of person who can sit back and let other people take charge.

“I saw this in a movie once,” he said. “Somebody get me a smooth, straight stick, about a foot and a half long.”

David had us run around the woods to get him all the stuff he needed—firewood, a little chunk of wood, a bigger piece he could use as a base, and a shoelace, which Henry contributed. David peeled the smooth stick until it had a point at one end. Then he wrapped the shoelace around the middle of that stick once, and put it pointy end down against the base. He had me hold the wood chunk against the top of the stick to press it down against the base.

“When I pull on each end of the shoelace,” he said as he demonstrated, “it spins the stick. See? That creates friction. Friction makes heat. Heat produces sparks. Sparks give us fire.”

It made sense, I suppose. I pushed the block down on top of the stick and David began pulling on the two ends of the shoelace one at a time to spin the stick. It was a pretty ingenious little machine, I had to admit.

The only problem was, it didn’t make any heat, sparks, or fire. After five minutes of furious spinning, the point of the stick was barely warm. At this rate, it might take a week to make a spark.

“What was the name of that movie you saw this in?” I asked.

David ignored the remark and went back to work, pulling the shoelace back and forth even faster. I could see the sweat beading up on his forehead. He stopped, panting.

“Wow, that’s some inferno,” Henry said. “We might have to call the fire department to put out the blaze.”

“How about
you
take over for a while?” David suggested to Henry. “My arms are tired.”

“I’m tired just from
watching
you do that,” Henry said.

I sure didn’t want to do it. The girls weren’t volunteering either.

“You got a better idea?” David asked.

“It’s not gonna work, David,” I told him. I have to admit that in some weird way, I was happy to see him fail.

“It will
too
work!” David insisted. “You’ve got to be patient, Zimmerman!”

“Can I try?” Julia asked timidly.

“Knock yourself out, Squirt,” David said, handing her the stick and shoelace.

“Thanks,” Julia said, “but I’d like to try something else.”

Julia hobbled over to the suitcases we had found near the back of the plane. She opened one up and came back with a bag of cotton balls and a jar of Vaseline.

“What are you gonna do, Squirt?” David asked. “Put on your makeup?”

Julia ripped open the bag and took out a few cotton balls. Then she opened the Vaseline and smeared some on a cotton ball. I had no idea what she was trying to accomplish.

She asked me to take the sticks we had gathered and separate them into four piles: skinny sticks,
really
skinny sticks, fat sticks, and fatter sticks. She picked up a few of the skinniest sticks and broke them into tiny pieces. Then she mashed them into the cotton ball.

“We could really use some paper,” she said.

“Where are we gonna get paper?” David said.

“Oh, I have some,” said Mrs. Herschel. She reached into her pocket and took out those hundred dollar bills.

“You’re going to use
bills
to get the fire started?” Arcadia asked.

“The money won’t do Annie any good,” Mrs. Herschel said. “I don’t think you can change a hundred in heaven.”

“Rip it into the thinnest strips you possibly can,” Julia told Mrs. Herschel.

“That’s a hundred bucks!” David said as Mrs. Herschel tore the bill down the middle. “What if we can’t get a fire going?”

“Then I wasted a hundred dollars,” Julia admitted.

Mrs. Herschel gave each of us a hundred-dollar bill and we shredded them into tiny strips. Julia mashed the strips up into a big, fluffy ball the same way you would make a snowball. Then she pushed one of the Vaseline-covered cotton balls partly into it.

“This has got to rank up there with the dumbest things I’ve ever seen,” David said. “That’s six hundred bucks you just tore up.”

“It’s a fireball,” Julia explained. “Vaseline is petroleum jelly. Petroleum burns.”

“But how are you going to light it?” Arcadia asked.

“Does anybody have a magnifying glass?” Julia asked.

“Of
course
we don’t have a magnifying glass!” David said. “Why didn’t you think of that before you ripped up the six hundred bucks?”

“Oh, get stuffed,” Mrs. Herschel told him. “It’s not your money.”

“Any glass might do,” Julia said. “Do we have a bottle? Binoculars? A piece of the windshield might even work.”

“My friend, Agnes, loved taking pictures,” Mrs. Herschel said excitedly. “I’m pretty sure she had a camera in her suitcase.”

“Can you look, please?” Julia said.

Mrs. Herschel went through the suitcases until she found her friend’s camera. It was a nice one, not one of those junky little disposables or a PHD camera (push here, dummy).

“Would it be it okay to take it apart?” Julia asked. “We only need the lens.”

Mrs. Herschel tried to pull the lens off, but it wouldn’t unscrew. She looked at the camera for a moment, and I thought she was going to hand it to one of us, but she didn’t. Instead, she raised the camera up over her head and smashed it against a rock. It broke into a few pieces and the lens fell off.

“Agnes won’t mind,” said Mrs. Herschel.

“Maybe it’s still under warranty,” Henry said.

Julia breathed on the lens and wiped it with her T-shirt. Then she looked up into the trees. It must have been around noon. We were in the shade, but I could tell the sun was high in the sky.

“Let’s move over there,” Julia said, pointing to a patch of sun between the trees about thirty feet away.

Each of us grabbed a pile of sticks. Julia carried the camera lens and her fireball. She sat down on a patch of dirt in the sun and put the fireball on the ground.

“A convex lens takes a beam of light and concentrates the rays on one spot,” she said. “If you hold it at the right distance from an object, it generates a lot of heat.”

“That’s not gonna work,” David said.

“Maybe not,” Julia admitted.

She held the lens above the cotton ball. The circle of sunlight was about an inch wide, so Julia moved the lens closer. The circle got smaller, until it was a tiny white pinpoint.

“I used to do that with bugs in the field across from my house,” Henry said. “But they never caught on fire.”

“Burning bugs is sick,” Arcadia said.

“
All
guys do that,” I told her.

“All guys are sick,” Arcadia said.

Suddenly, a tiny puff of smoke came off the cotton ball.

“It’s working!” Mrs. Herschel said.

Julia held the lens steady and the smoke kept puffing up, but there was no flame.

“We need a spark,” Henry said. “We need some friction.”

Friction? I had an idea. I ran to get my skateboard.

“This may not be the best time for skating,” Arcadia said when I got back.

“The grip tape on the top of the board feels a lot like that little black strip on a matchbook,” I told them. “Maybe we can use it to make a spark.”

“Genius runs in the family,” Henry said.

There were plenty of sharp objects around. I grabbed a shard of metal and scraped it against the grip tape. Nothing. I tried throwing it at the grip tape. No sparks. A piece of glass from the windshield didn’t do anything either. Maybe grip tape wouldn’t work.

Henry picked up some rocks and rubbed each one against the grip tape. The first few didn’t do anything, but the fourth one made a tiny spark.

“Bring it over here!” Julia said excitedly.

Henry held the skateboard right next to the fireball and scraped the rock back and forth against the grip tape. Julia kept the beam of light focused on the spot and leaned over and blew gently on the fireball. The little plume of smoke kept puffing away. Then, somehow, Henry managed to shoot one of the sparks on the spot where Julia was focusing the sunlight.

A flame leaped to life.

“Fire! We have fire!”

It was so cool! The Vaseline ignited. That set the cotton ball on fire, which set the shredded money on fire, which set the little twigs on fire. It was beautiful.

Mrs. Herschel and Arcadia started dancing around like a couple of cavewomen who had discovered the secret of fire. Henry and I jumped up to join them.

Julia didn’t join in the fun. She grabbed more skinny sticks and made a little tepee over the flame. When that caught fire, she took some of the thicker sticks and crisscrossed them on top. Then she took the biggest sticks and put them on. With each layer of sticks, the fire grew bigger.

“We have to make sure to leave a little room for air to get in,” Julia said as she added wood to the fire and poked a stick into it to arrange it the way she wanted.

“Julia, you are The Man!” I said, so proud of my little sister. Everybody except David clapped her on the back.

The smoke rising off the fire wasn’t all that visible as it snaked up through the trees. It didn’t look like anyone would be able to see the signal. But Julia said we would build the fire bigger and that if another plane came by, we could throw some green leaves on the blaze to make the smoke darker. Until then, we had a nice little fire going that we could use for cooking, heat, light, and to keep bugs or animals away.

For the time being, there was something comforting about just staring into it. I always loved staring at a fire.

“I wish we had marshmallows,” Henry said, “and some hamburgers and hot dogs.”

I had been feeling hungry for a while, but it wasn’t until Henry said the word “hamburger” that I started to get that feeling in my stomach. It wanted to be filled. A hamburger would taste
so
good.

I tried to figure out how long it had been since my last meal. A day, at least. And that was just a bowl of corn flakes. I wished I had stuffed myself with food back then.

Maybe it would be better not to think about it, I decided. Just think about something else.

“Now that we’ve got a fire,” David said, “we have to get something to cook. Something to eat.”

“What are you going to do,” Arcadia asked. “Catch a bear?”

I shivered, imagining in my head a bear chasing us around and devouring us one at a time. What if there
were
bears in these woods? Or something more dangerous?

“Maybe we should sit down as a group and figure out what to do next,” Henry suggested.

Sounded like a good idea. David snorted and rolled his eyes.

“Do we have to debate
everything
?” he asked. “Next you’ll be telling me we need a Congress and a House of Representatives. You know, sometimes you just have to
act
and not sit around deciding what to do next. We waste so much time. It would be so much faster if one person made a decision.”

“So you’d prefer a totalitarian form of government?” Mrs. Herschel asked.

“
Yes
!” David said. “We’re hungry! Let’s go get some food! End of debate. What’s to discuss? What could make more sense? What’s wrong with you people?”

“Y’know, you don’t know everything,” Arcadia said to David. “You were wrong when you said we didn’t need a fire. You were wrong when you tried to make the fire too.”

“Was I wrong about going after those hijackers?” David asked. “Lucky we didn’t have to vote on
that
, huh? If I hadn’t done anything, we’d all be dead now.”

He was right, I had to admit.

“I have an idea!” Henry piped up. “Let’s vote on it!”

“Vote on what?” I asked.

“Let’s vote on whether or not we should vote on stuff.”

I wasn’t sure if Henry was kidding or not.

“That’s stupid,” David said.

“All in favor of voting on stuff raise your hand,” Henry said, sticking his hand in the air.

Mrs. Herschel put her hand up right away. Then Arcadia raised her hand. So did Julia. I put my hand up too.

“All opposed to voting on stuff raise your hand,” Henry said.

“You expect me to vote against voting?” David asked.

“It doesn’t matter whether or not you vote,” Arcadia said. “We already have a majority.”

David stood up abruptly and started marching around, like he was really mad.

“Do you guys remember why we started the Woodpushers?” he asked. “We didn’t like rules. We didn’t want to play football or soccer or basketball with their rules and clocks and uniforms. We didn’t want to be on a team. We wanted to do our own thing. Remember?”

“We’re not skateboarding here,” I reminded him. “This isn’t a sport. We’re trying to get along. And survive.”

“We are a group,” Mrs. Herschel said. “It will certainly be better for all of us if we can find a way to work together instead of separately.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” David said. “I say it’s every man for himself. You folks can sit around gabbing and voting until you all starve to death. I’m going to get something to eat. See you later.”

“Fine,” Arcadia said. “Have fun.”

David took a few steps, and then turned around and stopped.

“Hey, Zimmerman,” he said, “can I borrow your board?”

“What for?” I asked.

“Maybe there’s a halfpipe in the middle of the forest,” David said.

I laughed and handed him my board. The nearest flat surface was probably a hundred miles away. David took the board and headed out into the woods.

“We shouldn’t let him leave,” Mrs. Herschel said.

“I’d like to see you stop him,” muttered Henry.

“Good riddance, I say,” Arcadia said once David was out of earshot. “How do you deal with that guy?”

“He’ll be back,” I said. “He always comes back.”