The Book of Joby (72 page)

This morning, Blue, Tholomey, and Ander had gone off early, coming back with enough fish to make breakfast for them all, though, when Joby had asked about their angling secrets, they’d just grinned at one another, and said, “If we told, we’d have to kill you.” As Jupiter and Sky had fried up the catch on a patch of foil above the fire, shy, sunny Ander and gentle, soft-spoken Blue, had competed to describe the grizzly ceremonial techniques Joby’s sacrificial slaughter would necessitate, gleefully inventing new and shockingly bloodthirsty details as they went.

Now, sadly, their adventure was finally at an end. Tomorrow they would hike back into the real world, and face the resumption of school. As if in denial of this melancholy fact, their rowdiness had climbed to new levels of intensity. They’d even concocted a bawdy song together, every verse ending with, “Wasn’t that precipitous!” When they’d gone, earlier that evening, to rehang their extra food in a distant tree, Joby had joked that there was hardly any need, since their ruckus must already have scared everything with legs off the mountainside.

As Joby reflected on all this, a quiet finally fell across their camp. Some stared at the fire, others turned to watch bats flutter erratic zigzags over the dimming lake in search of summer’s last mosquitoes.

“I can’t believe I’ll have homework on Monday,” Tholomey lamented.

As a teacher, Joby felt he ought to cast the fact in some more positive light, but, in all honesty, he wasn’t much happier about it than they were. He was grateful to be spending another year teaching, of course, though sorry that his good fortune should be founded on someone else’s hardship. Charlie Luff’s fight with cancer wasn’t going well.

“I don’t mind so much,” Hawk said. “I’m kind of ready for a change.”

“Yeah, right,” Tholomey teased. “You just want an excuse to see Rose every day!”

Hawk smiled awkwardly.

“Hawk’s in love,” Ander whispered too loudly to Blue.

“You got any more of those Ymril stories, Hawk?” Joby said, trying to rescue him.

On the two previous evenings, Hawk had told them stories from the imaginary history of Ymril that he and Solomon had been inventing together all summer. They’d been surprisingly good tales, earning both rapt attention and outspoken praise from everyone. Tonight, however, Hawk just shook his head.

Ander looked at Joby, and said, “Tell us about that club you started.”

Joby looked blank.

“The Roundtable.” Ander smiled.

“How do you know about that?” asked Joby

“Hawk told us,” Blue said.

Joby looked at Hawk, who shrugged and smiled. “Mom told me all about it.”

“She did?” Joby asked uncomfortably. “What did she say?”

“She said it was cool.” Hawk grinned. “Like being characters from your book, and you were like King Arthur.”

Joby dismissed this with something like a snort. “I was more like a fourth-grader with pretensions,” he said, then, surprised to find that it no longer shamed him to talk about it, he began telling them about games on the tournament field, and how Hawk’s mother had gotten to be their official damsel in distress, and later a full-fledged knight. Warming to the subject, he went on to describe some of their more famous secret missions—and Laura’s role in keeping the club appraised of who needed encouragement.

Jupiter turned to grin at Blue, and said, “That’d be so damn fast, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah!” Tholomey replied.

“It was secret, right?” asked Ander. “No one else knew who did those missions?”

Joby nodded. “We left little yellow disks of cardboard with a red dragon on them to let someone know they’d been aided by the Roundtable, but no one outside the club was ever told who exactly had done the deed.”

“Then shut up, you guys.” Ander grinned at the others.

“How about this great weather,” Jupiter mused, his face suddenly comical with feigned innocence.

Joby smiled, fairly sure the idea would be forgotten by morning.

Joby woke to find the eastern sky aglow with approaching dawn, and himself filled with restlessness, as if he’d forgotten something urgent, or remembered something . . . almost. Knowing he was through with sleep, he slipped quietly from his dewy bag and left camp to relieve himself. After that, he went down to the water’s edge and settled on a rock ledge above their swimming hole to watch the sun rise and bid the lake and all its pleasant memories farewell.

The water was glassy smooth, utterly silent. Not far off a trout leapt, then another. The spreading rings merged slowly as they move toward shore. Peaks around the lake turned rose then golden as the sun came up, until the rocks he sat on were gilded too, and the water at his feet changed from black to blue to emerald. In its glassy depths, hypnotic moirés of light moved slowly across the lake bottom. Two trout swam lazily by, utterly secure in their shimmering world. Giving in to the lake’s allure, Joby stripped his clothes off, stretched his arms up, and dove far out over the water, seeing himself reflected in its still surface, as if in flight, before the stinging slap, the shock of cold, and the beautiful, gliding stream of motion through its liquid embrace.

After forty feet of freestyle to warm himself, he ducked beneath the surface, letting his breath go and plunging toward bottom. The water grew colder, but he loved the feel of it on his skin. Opening his eyes, he hung motionless in dancing, tranquil brilliance, lost in silence, utterly relaxed, completely alive. Only when his lungs lost patience with him did he push into the soft mud beneath his feet and shoot up and up, bursting back into the morning with a gasp.

Climbing back onto the ledge, he sat naked and dripping in the early sun, covered in undulating reflections of sunlight, and feeling suddenly as wild, as still, and as beautiful as everything around him. Lost in light and warmth, he
gazed out across the dazzling water, and became aware of movement all around him in the silence.

Tiny flies danced on the lake’s surface. Bees and dragonflies darted or hovered all along the shore. Ants searched the rocks and pebbles for morsels to bring back to their queen. Thistle seeds and iridescent strands of gossamer drifted through the open air, backlit with rainbow fire by the rising sun, until it seemed the entire world was one slow, swirling dance of glinting, golden illumination. It was the strangest feeling, yet familiar in some nameless way as well. A small wasp landed on Joby’s arm, carrying the rainbow in its wings, but he felt no fear of being stung, only the tickling touch of kin. A bottle fly, also covered in rainbows, landed on his knee; one more intimate connection with the moving, luminous scheme of life that stretched away across the lake into the forest beyond, and on out of sight. With a surreal surge of wholeness and well being, Joby wondered how he’d stumbled into this sudden fairyland, and what might happen if he tried reaching farther into—

“Whaaaaaaawhoooo!”

The shout and several pounding steps behind him were all the warning he received before Jupiter’s body came hurtling past him to land like a depth charge in the lake, drenching Joby and his perch with spray, and shattering the spell. An instant of wrenching dismay at the loss of his fragile ecstasy was followed by a spontaneous explosion of pure wildness in Joby’s breast, released in a banshee shout as he cannonballed into the water beside Jupiter. Within minutes, everyone had joined them, ending their retreat as they had begun it, in naval warfare.

After breakfast, they packed their gear and reluctantly left the lake behind.

They’d been under way for several hours when they reached a particularly steep and rocky stretch of streambed. The trail switchbacked higher on the embankment, but some of the guys, impatient for speed, or just tired of eating one another’s dust, hiked into the margins of the stream itself, and began to hop from boulder to boulder as if their packs weighed nothing.

“That doesn’t look very safe, guys,” Joby called down to them. “Why don’t you come back up on the trail?”

This earned him a withering look from Sky, who said, “We’re not two-year-olds.”

“Yeah, but who do you suppose your folks’ll blame if something dumb happens out here?” Joby pressed. Ignoring him completely, Hawk jumped
down from one boulder to another right behind Sky. “Come on, Hawk. Your mom’ll skin me alive if I bring you back with a broken arm.”

“Joby!” Hawk frowned. “Lighten up.”

Seeing that he’d embarrassed Hawk, Joby shrugged and shut his mouth.

Sky hopped from one large boulder, onto a second smaller one at the lip of a pool, then down onto a third, as wide as he was tall, which rocked forward suddenly, and gave way beneath him.

“Whoa!”
Hawk cried, as Joby whirled to see Sky flail in midair, then drop like a sack of sand, landing facedown under his pack on the muddy bank as the huge rock tumbled over his legs and went crashing into the underbrush downstream.

There was a moment of shocked immobility before everyone hurried toward Sky, who lay facedown and motionless.

“Don’t move him!” Joby shouted, rushing to the boy’s side. When he got there, he knelt down, overtaken by an eerie calm, and said, levelly, “Sky?”

The boy did not respond.

“Sky, you hear me?” Joby said, trying to calculate how long it might take him to drop his pack and run back to their cars at the trail head. It would take hours to get help. Should he send someone else? The others stood around in helpless silence, pale with fear. Did any of them know enough first aid to cope until . . . what? A helicopter arrived? From where? No matter how they handled this, it was going to be a nightmare. Dully surprised at his own persisting calm, Joby wished with all his might for some kind of miracle, and said again, “Sky, if you’re conscious, I just want you to move something. A hand or anything.”

Slowly, Sky turned his head, revealing a pale, muddy face, and said quietly, “Just give me a minute.”

Joby felt a wash of relief. At least he was conscious.

“How bad are your legs?” he asked, still embedded in improbable calm.

To his amazement, Sky rolled over and said, shakily, “That was scary.” Everyone seemed to breath again at once. Sky stretched out a hand to Blue, who’d been hovering over him all the while, and said, “Help me up.”

“Whoa, whoa!” Joby said. “Don’t put any weight on those legs! Aren’t you hurt?”

Sky shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m just gonna sit up, okay?”

Joby could not believe that Sky was unhurt, but after Blue pulled him up into a sitting position, the boy bent his knees and said, “I’m fine. Really. I just
wanted to be sure before I moved, that’s all.” He smiled wanly. “I guess I had that coming, huh?”

Weak with incredulous relief, Joby said nothing.

“You sure were calm, Joby,” Tholomey said.

“Yeah,” said Hawk. “I thought you were gonna freak, for sure.”

“Well,” Joby said, suddenly wanting nothing so much as a long nap, “for future reference, when I get that calm, you can bet we’re in deep, deep shit.” He felt shaky now, and so, so sleepy. “Sky, are you sure you’re not hurt? That rock rolled right across your legs. It must have weighed half a ton.”

“It must’ve just looked that way from where you were standing,” Sky said sheepishly. “’Cause I’m fine.”

“But . . . Didn’t the rest of you see it?” Joby insisted, turning to the others.

“Looked kind of like it bounced a little to me,” Blue said nervously. “Maybe it just rocked over them, you know?” He didn’t smile, seeming oblivious of his own pun.