Middle of Nowhere (17 page)

AFTER SUPPER WE
always sat together at the table for our lessons. I looked through my notes from last year. One section in my binder was called “Personhood.”
Treat others with respect
, I had written.
Respect = not only what you say but how you say it. Be tolerant. Be compassionate. Exercise your extraordinary reasoning abilities at all times. That means: THINK ABOUT IT!!!!

At the same time I was reading, I watched Mrs. Burt teaching Artie, Artie struggling to remember the sound each letter made. She took a slurp of tea. She loved her tea.

I got up for a knife to sharpen my pencil. At the same time, I took a peek in the tea canister. About a quarter full. The provisions were stored under the counter. There were cans and bags and bins of things — more of some, less of others. There was still a lot of oatmeal, for example. I lifted the lid off the big box that was labeled
3000 TEA BAGS
. It was hard to say, but there might have been a few hundred cups to go.

That is, until I reached inside and grabbed about twenty bags and stuffed them in the hotdog pocket of my pants.

I went over to the woodstove and lifted a burner off with the handle. As I whittled my pencil to a sharper point, I let the shavings fall into the stove. Now and then I took a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure Mrs. Burt wasn't watching. Then I dropped a tea bag in. It smelled kind of funny, but she didn't notice.

I did that for a few days. Every time I went inside the cabin I burned a tea bag. I was going in and out a lot to get boiled water from the kettle to drink. Because you work up a thirst chopping wood and scouting trees to chop. We were burning more wood and, though Mrs. Burt didn't know it, we were burning a lot of tea bags, too.

When we ran out, we would have to go to town and buy some more.

What was I planning to do when we got to town? I wasn't sure. Maybe a police officer would wander into the supermarket and I'd just take him aside and explain the situation. I'd say that we'd been at our neighbor's cabin in the middle of nowhere but now I wanted to go home and find my missing mother so I could give her my brother's tooth. Even if she didn't want us back, it belonged to her. And if the officer asked me why, I'd say because it went with the other one she already had. Or used to have. The one that was taped inside a stranger's bathroom cupboard now.

Actually, I tried not to think about what I would do in town, because in every case the police officer burst out laughing and walked away shaking his head.

The mistake I made was talking too often about going to town. I slapped my binder closed and said, “I already know all this stuff, Mrs. Burt. We need to
go
to town
so that I can get some new books.”

Mrs. Burt took the binder from me and opened it at random.

“What's the square root of sixty-four?”

“Square root? Is that like finding the area of a square?”

She slid it back to me and tapped her finger on the question I'd got wrong.

A few minutes later, she brought over cookies and milk for a snack. Our milk was powdered.

I said, “I'd do anything for a glass of real milk. Or ice cream. Can we
go to town
for ice cream?”

She squinted at me through her glasses. Then she belched.

13

THE CABIN SMELLED
of fresh baking when I woke up. Artie got up first and came back to bed with a blueberry scone. Everything seemed normal except for how quiet it was in the cabin without Mrs. Burt's humming filling it up.

I hoped she was in the outhouse, but then too much time passed and I knew she was gone. Still, I had to torture myself by getting Artie dressed and walking all the way up the road to see the four flat spots of yellow grass where the Bel Air had been parked for two months.

Artie thought we were going to play taxi. He was mad that I'd made him walk all that way for nothing. I sank down on the ground and put my head on my knees.

“Where's the car?” he asked.

“Mrs. Burt went to town.”

“Why didn't she take us?”

We could reach the highway by following the road, but then what? Hitchhike? I'd seen those movies at school. Getting into a car with a stranger was about the same as asking to be murdered. Maybe I would have taken a chance, but not with Artie. I sure couldn't get him to walk all the way to town. But I couldn't leave him behind, either.

I was scared of Mrs. Burt now.

“She's thinks we're going to run away,” I said.

“I'm not going to run away! I love Mrs. Burt!”

She had powers, too. She had cast a spell on Artie and turned him against our mom so he didn't believe in her anymore. She had made him love her instead.

“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet. “Let's go back.”

“I'm tired.”

“I'll carry you.” I squatted so he could climb onto my back. Then I staggered down the overgrown road, my little brother on my back, his hands too tight around my neck, singing at the top of his voice, “It seems to me I've heard that song before . . . I know it well, that melody . . .”

When we got back to the cabin, I left him and went and sat in the outhouse on the comfortable seat. I didn't think about my mom or anything. I just stared at the finger of smoke that pointed up from Mr. Munro's cabin.

I remembered the afternoon he took me fishing. If only we had a canoe, I could paddle over there and ask him to help us. Maybe I could build a boat. No, a raft. I'd built an outhouse. Maybe I could secretly build a raft.

From the middle of the lake the loon let go its crazy, lonely cry. The first time we heard it, the hair lifted on my arms and the back of my neck, but I was used to it now.

Mrs. Burt was like that loon. When we met her, she'd been a little crazy with loneliness. That was why she didn't want to go back to the city, I thought.

MRS. BURT HOBBLED
into the cabin in the early afternoon with two things in her arms: another 3,000 tea bags and a carton of chocolate ice cream.

Artie ran to her. “Why didn't you take us? Why?”

“You boys were sleeping so peacefully I thought I'd just slip out.”

When she handed me the ice cream, I pretended to be excited about it. I pretended not to mind that she'd gone to town without us.

“Ice cream!”

Then I did a stupid thing. I hugged her. I'd never done that before. She drew back with her eyes all narrow, and I realized that she had been expecting trouble from me.

“Thanks for remembering,” I said, turning very red.

“Of course I remembered. I remembered the milk, too,” she said with a sniff. “It's in the car. All I want is for you boys to be happy, Curtis. That's all I want in the whole world.”

Artie and I ate the entire carton of ice cream for lunch. We had to before it melted. Then I walked up to the Bel Air and unloaded it.

Food. So much food. Tubs of shortening, bags of powdered eggs, sacks of onions and potatoes. There was more fresh food, too, but it was the canned and dried stuff that worried me. Trip after trip, I lugged it down. Then, when I looked in the bags from the department store and saw winter coats and mitts, I almost died. In another bag there were boots.

She planned on staying in the cabin for the winter. How? There was only the woodstove to heat and cook with. I would never be able to chop enough wood. And what about water? The lake would be frozen. We'd have to drink melted snow.

I brought all the bags down to the cabin and acted like I hadn't seen what was inside them. Mrs. Burt was busy organizing everything.

“Look what I got you boys! Look!” She rooted through a bag and pulled out a matching pair of long underwear. “Stanfields!” she cried.

They were a gray wool that itched your eyes just to look at them, one-piece with buttons up the front and a “trap door” in the back. Mrs. Burt showed us how the trap opened and closed, fixed at the corners with buttons. Artie put his on right away, as happy as a logger.

I'd get in Mrs. Burt's tutu before I got in those Stanfields. That's what I told myself.

I CAUGHT A
bad cold. It was as though the ice cream had given it to me. I must have had a fever, too, because I thrashed around so much in my sleeping bag.

Sometime in the night I woke and saw Mrs. Burt snooping through the dresser. She took out Mom's wallet and emptied the change compartment into her hand.

“No!” I shouted.

Too late. She'd found Artie's tooth. She held it up and smiled. Then she swallowed it.

But it was just a bad dream. When I really woke up, I got out of bed and checked the wallet. The tooth was there.

I stayed in bed the next day. The day after that Mrs. Burt fed me a huge logger-style breakfast with the fresh eggs that she'd brought from town. I could tell she was worried. She watched me closely as I ate and felt my forehead several times. Worried about me, I thought. But after I finished eating and stood to take the dishes to the sink, she excused me.

“I'll do that, Curtis. You get started on the wood.”

Dressed in my new wool socks and my new jeans and my trusty steel-toed boots, I left the cabin with my headache and my stuffed nose. I felt tired, but managed to scuff around in the woods until I found a good log. Dead, but not so dead that it was rotten. That was the kind of tree that made the best firewood. I started to saw it into choppable lengths but never finished the job because I suddenly felt dizzy. I had to go back in the cabin and lie down.

“You just rest up,” Mrs. Burt said. “Don't push yourself.”

Later, I heard her outside trying to chop the wood herself.

“Blast it, blast it, blast it,” she kept muttering, before she gave up.

After lunch, she and Artie set out to gather sticks and branches.

“This will be our new quest,” I heard her say to him.

Over the next few days, I'd wake feeling okay, eat a good breakfast, saw a couple of logs, carry them down and split them. Then I'd feel too tired to go on. All I wanted to do was lie by the stove. I took the air mattress off the bed and carried it out of our room and flopped down for the rest of the day. Mrs. Burt encouraged me to get up, to get moving. She'd bought me all kinds of books in town — science books that explained the stars, books about nature, adventure novels by Jack London that she said I'd love.

“Here,” she said. “I got you one about the King Arthur legend.”

I took it from her and put it under my head. The cover felt so cool under my hot cheek.

I wasn't faking it. I felt so tired it didn't even occur to me to pretend. But one morning Mrs. Burt stood over me with her hands on her thick waist and her glasses sliding down her nose.

“You're not on strike, are you, Curtis?”

I blinked up at her. “What do you mean?”

“Are you really sick or are you doing this on purpose?”

I was sick with hopelessness. I'd been lying by the stove because it seemed there was nothing else I could do. I couldn't change her mind about going back and I couldn't get us out except by leaving alone and risking that Mrs. Burt would abscond with Artie. Now she had told me exactly what I had to do to escape. I was already doing it.

Nothing.