Middle of Nowhere (15 page)

I'd never hit a person in my life.

Then I heard a snort from Mrs. Burt. The weird thing was, she seemed to be coming back in the opposite direction from the one she'd left in. Coming just in time to see the slap that was itching at the end of my hand.

When she snorted a second time, I looked past Artie.

It wasn't Mrs. Burt. A bear was lumbering toward us, its snout twitching in the air.

Everything went quiet. So quiet I could hear Mrs. Burt humming “I've Heard That Song Before” from where she was picking berries way up the path in the other direction. I think I even heard her berries plinking in the can.

The bear's head thrashed from side to side and he reared up on his hind legs, enormous and black. He made an awful bear sound, not a snort at all, and Artie spun around. He didn't seem surprised by the bear towering over him.

Then an angry chirring sounded.

“Watch out!” Artie screamed at the bear. “There's a squirrel behind you!”

The bear spooked. It crashed to the ground and charged right past us, toward where Mrs. Burt was picking. A moment later we heard a scream, then a lot of noise, like trees ripping out by the roots. Mrs. Burt appeared, not quite running, puffing, her hand on her chest, the tin can swinging round her neck, blueberries flying everywhere.

By then Artie had collapsed on the path completely hysterical over the squirrel.

“Get the lotion!” Mrs. Burt roared, and without even thinking, I ran back to the cabin.

I couldn't find it. It wasn't in our room. I checked by the sink and on the shelves. The last place I looked was in Mrs. Burt's room.

That's where I found it, on her dresser. As I ran back, I noticed how light the bottle was.

THE PIE SIR
Mrs. Burt baked that night was to celebrate King Artie's wondrous deed, how he drove away the fearsome bear
and
the fearsome squirrel.

“Weren't you frightened of that terrible bear?” Mrs. Burt asked him.

“No,” said Artie, shoveling in the pie. “It only had two legs.”

“I was terrified. I thought it had already killed you boys. I thought I'd find you eaten up on the path. What's the matter, Curtis? Don't you like the pie?”

I was poking at it with my fork.

“Not bad,” I said, and she laughed, thinking I was imitating Mr. Munro.

Actually, it was the best pie I ever tasted, but I was too mad to tell her.

That night I didn't sit out and watch the fire with Mrs. Burt like I usually did. I got Artie to sleep and I stayed with him, listening for the owl that sometimes roosted close to the cabin. It sounded like somebody blowing over the mouth of a bottle.

When it was time to get ready for bed, Mrs. Burt shuffled inside, lit the kerosene lamp, brushed her teeth at the sink. I heard her slow steps carry her to her bedroom and the sounds she made as she undressed and put on her nightie.

Shuffle, shuffle. She came and stood in our doorway with the lamp, lifted it and shone it around the room. She was looking for the lotion. I sat up in my sleeping bag and rubbed my eyes, pretending that she had woken me with the light.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, shining the lamp one more time at the dresser where the bottle of lotion used to be before she took it. “Go back to sleep.”

I lay down again, smiling and feeling with my feet for the bottle at the bottom of my sleeping bag.

THE NEXT DAY
I thought she would come right out and ask me where the lotion had got to. But she didn't. She didn't have to because Artie got up in the night and went to her anyway. She had been rubbing herself with that lotion to lure him away. Now that she had him trained, she didn't need it anymore.

I felt sorry for Mrs. Burt because she lost her little boy all those years ago. Now she was here with Artie and she wanted to give him all the love she couldn't give her own son. Even though I didn't like what she was doing, I understood.

But I was disappointed in Artie. When I stayed with the Pennypackers, whenever Mrs. Pennypacker tried to hug and kiss me, I would make myself as stiff as a piece of wood. I would turn my head to the side so her kisses could never reach me. All my kisses were for my mother, no matter what she'd done.

Artie had given up too easily on our mom.

That afternoon I asked Mrs. Burt again when I could swim across the lake. She asked if I thought I was ready, if I was strong enough. I told her yes.

“Show me then,” she said, plunging forward.

We started to swim side by side, away from the shore where Artie was in the water with the walker, pretending it was a canoe. I turned my head to take a breath and saw Mrs. Burt right beside me. We were swimming neck-and-neck. And because we were so close, I felt spurred on to swim harder, to race her. I fluttered my feet and drove my arms into the lake, cupping the water and throwing it behind me the way she had shown me, so I would be faster.

Which I was, I saw, when I finally noticed that I was swimming alone. I stopped and looked around and saw Mrs. Burt's turquoise bathing cap bobbing far behind me and Artie on shore so small I could have squashed him between my thumb and finger.

That was when I realized I was floating in the middle of the lake in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing under my treading feet but a terrible black bottomlessness.

I felt so small. I felt like a little kid who'd lost his mother, who was losing his little brother, too. I panicked and started to flail, then sink. I swallowed water, coughed it up. I went under.

I was drowning.

Then Mrs. Burt's big wobbly arm reached out and flipped me on my back and started to tow me in.

SHE WOULDN'T SPEAK
to me after that, she was so mad. She stayed in the cabin the rest of the afternoon smashing pans around, jamming sticks of wood into the stove, slamming the cast-iron door. Artie was so terrified he hid in our room. I went and sat in the outhouse and thought about Mom until Mrs. Burt called us to supper.

She had cooked so much food — biscuits, split pea soup, potato hash with tinned meat, sliced tomatoes from the garden, blueberry cobbler — all of it crowding out the table. But because it had been cooked in anger, it didn't taste as good. Also, we weren't hungry. Neither was she. She drank her tea and glared at us miserably lifting our forks to our faces.

“What?” she snapped.

We hung our heads and chewed and, when we had choked down all we could, I got up to clear the table.

“That's it?” said Mrs. Burt.

“I'm not very hungry,” I said.

“Not hungry? I thought you'd be starving after that great big swim you had.”

I knew I had to apologize.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Burt. I'm sorry for swimming ahead. It was stupid. I know I scared you. I scared myself, too. I won't do it again.”

She slammed her mug down. “Your little brother was all alone in the water! What if something happened to him? Who was I supposed to go to? Who was I supposed to choose?”

At the sound of her raised voice, Artie started to cry. I looked at her, surprised she wouldn't automatically have chosen Artie. Then Artie's crying registered and her expression softened.

“Get the lotion,” she said to me.

“No.”

“Pardon me?”

“I'm saving it for when we really need it. It's okay if he cries sometimes.”

I guess that was the first time I said no to her because she looked shocked. A grunt escaped her. It sounded like the bear the day before. And something else. It reminded me of that time before we knew her, when Mom and Artie and I walked by her house. She grunted then, too, as we went by, like she disapproved of us.

She got up from the table, grabbed one of the pans, stomped over to the kitchen and began scraping food into the garbage. She'd never thrown out food before. Usually she made something else with the leftovers the next day — something just as good, or better.

“Mrs. Burt,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“You don't like it.”

Artie cried out, “We like it! We'll eat it tomorrow!”

“No. You don't like it. You probably prefer the kind of muck you used to eat.”

“No!” Artie wailed. “
She
cooked terrible! I like what
you
cook!” And he dragged the barely touched cobbler dish over and began to spoon it into his mouth.

Muck.

I said, “Our mom's not as good a cook as you are, Mrs. Burt, that's for sure. But it wasn't muck.”

“It
was
muck,” Artie said, still stuffing himself. “She's a no-good cook!”

People are no good. Mom's no good. It sounded familiar now.

“Mrs. Burt? Have you been saying mean things about our mom to Artie?” I said.

“No, I haven't!” But she looked so flustered that I knew she had.

“You're always saying everything's so terrible now, not like in your day,” I said. “That nobody has any pride.”

“It's true!”

“It isn't! I have pride. Enough to ask you to stop turning Artie against our mom.”

“I did not!” Mrs. Burt said, and again her guilty look said something else. “I was just trying to help him get over it.”

“Get over what?”

Mrs. Burt, all bristled up until that moment, shrank down now to her normal unangry size. She shook her knitted cap.

“Oh, Curtis.”

“She's coming back,” I said.

“She's not.”

“I'm ten out of ten positive she is!”

This was a lie. I was thinking more around a three by then.

Mrs. Burt said, her voice soft, “You don't believe that. You never believed it. If you did you wouldn't have come away with me. You would have done more to find her.”

“What would I have done?” I asked.

“You would have . . . checked the hospitals.” She turned very red when she said this and so did I because I'd never thought of it. If Mom was in the hospital, somebody would have told us.

I turned and ran out of the cabin. I kept on running up the road. I didn't know where I was running. If anything, it was away, away from what she had just said. Because I
did
doubt Mom was coming back. Why else was I running? As for the hospital, I put that completely out of my mind.

She couldn't be dead. She couldn't.

I tore into the trees. Branches whipped my face and ferns sliced my shins. I stumbled and crashed to my knees, panting hard. I had no idea where I was.

This was how Artie felt all the time. I was so impatient with him for being such a scaredy, but now I felt it, too.

I struggled to my feet and stared around me, completely lost.

Everywhere, trees. Just trees.

I had to find the lake. If I found the lake, I could walk around it. Even if I walked in the wrong direction, eventually I'd find my way back to the cabin.

I bushwhacked. A great whooshing sound exploded behind me, a bomb of feathers. I screamed and covered my head. Then I threw up all the supper I hadn't wanted to eat.