The Skeleton Tree (2 page)

My mother tried to warn me about Uncle Jack. “He's a daredevil,” she said. “He can't be happy unless he's facing danger.”

But I loved my uncle. He raced motorcycles; he jumped out of airplanes; he fought forest fires for a living. My father was an accountant who drove a brown minivan and worked in an office. It was no wonder that Uncle Jack was my hero when I was small.

He went away on long adventures, sometimes for months at a time. When my father died and Uncle Jack turned up for the funeral, I hardly recognized him. He stayed only three days, then vanished again. He bought a boat and set off to sail around the world.

It was almost exactly a year later when he came back into my life. My mother answered the phone and there he was, talking from the dock in Kodiak, Alaska.

They had a long conversation that she made sure I couldn't hear. She turned her back and whispered strange things in a strange voice, all beginning, “Oh, Jack.”

“Oh, Jack, do you think that's a good idea?”

“Oh, Jack, Christopher doesn't know about any of that.”

“Oh, Jack, I'm just not sure it's the right thing for him now.”

When she hung up the phone she was red and flustered.

“What don't I know about, Mom?” I asked.

She stared at me. “Well, sailing,” she said. “For starters. Jack wants you to fly up to Kodiak and sail home on the boat.”

I wasn't sure what to say, or even what I felt. I hardly knew my uncle anymore, and I had never been on a sailboat.

“You realize you'd have to miss nearly a month of school,” said Mom, and suddenly sailing with Uncle Jack seemed like a great idea. I begged her to let me go.

“It might be a learning opportunity,” I told her.

“No doubt,” said Mom, with a little snort. “I'm just not sure I want you learning what Jack would teach you.”

She stood at the bookshelves, where a jumble of pictures showed my father as a boy. In one he was peering up through the poles of a lean-to. In another he was holding a fishing rod and a huge salmon. But my mother picked up the only one of my dad and Uncle Jack together. They looked almost like opposites, one short and dark, the other tall and fair, one thin and one muscled. They sat on the back of a horse that had no saddle, Uncle Jack in front, my father behind him, peering around his shoulder. They wore nothing but shorts, and little war bonnets made of cardboard, with painted feathers that stuck straight up. They were suntanned and smiling, and my father looked really happy in a way that I could sort of remember.

“Oh, I don't know what's best,” said Mom. “Maybe a bit of adventure is what you need right now. But you have to be careful of men who love danger. Even Jack.”

She dusted the picture with her sleeve, then put it back in its place and sighed. “All right, you can go,” she said. “I just hope I won't live to regret it.”

Less than a week later I was on an airplane flying up the coast. Around my neck hung a sign that said
Unaccompanied Minor.
It was a month after my twelfth birthday, but the flight attendants—like almost everyone else—thought I was more like nine or ten. They made a big fuss over me because I was a little kid traveling by myself. They talked in that embarrassing way that grown-ups use for children, with phony voices and phony smiles.

All the way north I stared through the window at endless rows of mountains. Although it was nearly the middle of August, vast fields of snow gleamed in the sunshine. I imagined I could see a thousand square miles at once, but not a single house, not a road, not a sign of people anywhere.

I pictured the plane making an emergency landing on a glacier, and me crawling from the wreckage to find that I was the only survivor. I could see myself standing on one of those mountaintops, screaming for help, with no one to hear me.

We arrived in Kodiak five hours late, after the sun had set. A flight attendant took my hand and walked me through the terminal as though I was a little boy. Uncle Jack laughed when he saw me. He tore off the sign and flung it like a Frisbee toward a garbage can. “You don't need
that
nonsense anymore,” he said.

We took a taxi to the dock, where Uncle Jack had parked his boat. It was called
Puff,
and it looked too small to have gone all the way around the world. Tiny portholes glowed with yellow light from the cabin. When Uncle Jack pushed open the hatch and led me down a steep ladder, I was surprised to see a kid sprawled along a bench.

He was older than me by two or three years. His arms were long and tanned, and his black hair hung over his eyes. Uncle Jack put his hands on my shoulders and told the kid, “Say hello to Chrissy.”

I wished he hadn't used that dorky name from my childhood. By the little flicker that came into the kid's eyes I knew he'd tease me about it later.

The boy heaved himself up from the table. Thinking he meant to shake hands, I reached shyly toward him. But he only tossed his head to flick the hair from his eyes and told Uncle Jack, “I'm going to bed.”

“Don't you want to stay up for a while?” asked Uncle Jack. “Have a gam, as the whalers used to say?”

“No,” said the kid. He pushed past me and slouched away.

“Hey, Frank, come on,” said Uncle Jack, disappointed. But the kid kept going, through a narrow door at the front of the boat.

We watched him go. Then Uncle Jack sort of laughed and said, “That's Franklin.”

Franklin?
I nearly laughed. It was an old-fashioned name that didn't suit the kid at all. The only Franklin I'd ever known was my grandfather, a human prune named after President Roosevelt.

“Who
is
he?” I asked.

“Well, that's a long story,” said Uncle Jack. “And it's a little late tonight. So let's wait till tomorrow, till we're under way, and you can both hear it.”

“He's coming with us?” I asked.

Uncle Jack started nodding, then kept going like a bobblehead doll. “Yeah. I guess he is.”

We spent the night at the dock. At first I felt awkward being around Uncle Jack again. But he was very kind. He showed me all the things he'd collected on his voyage, then talked about my dad. He told funny stories I'd never heard before, and he said how much he missed my dad, and that he could only imagine how hard it was for me.

“Your father loved you more than he loved the whole world,” said Uncle Jack. “I hope you know that.”

I slept on a narrow bed that Uncle Jack called his sea berth. And I woke early, to hear seagulls crying outside. But Franklin didn't get out of bed until Uncle Jack went in three times to wake him. Then he dragged himself around without saying a word. He kept flicking his hair out of his eyes, as though hair flicking was his favorite hobby. He never smiled or anything. He was the sort of kid who looked as though he was always making fun of people inside his head.

He sat down at the table and took out an iPod. Quick as a snake, Uncle Jack snatched it from his hands.

“Give that back!” cried the kid.

Uncle Jack shook his head. “There's no place at sea for gadgets. Believe me, you'll find plenty to keep you interested.” He asked if we had other things, and took them all away. He even took the kid's wristwatch because it had a game built into it. “Yours too, Chrissy,” he said, waggling his fingers.

“But it's just a watch. See?” I turned my wrist to show him the dial. “It was a present from my dad.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. Everything else went into a box that he locked in a drawer. “Now for the tour. Because Frank slept in, we'll have to hurry.”

In one quick sweep, Uncle Jack led us through the boat. He showed us how to start the engine, where to find the flares, how to work the little VHF radio if we had to call for help, and he did it all in just a minute or two. Then we trooped up the ladder and out to the deck.

“I'll get us shipshape,” said Uncle Jack. “You boys go forward and haul the dinghy aboard.”

“Tell
him
to do it,” said the kid.

“I'm telling you both to do it.”

The dinghy was a little red boat sitting on the dock. Made of plywood, blunt at both ends, it looked small and worn-out. Lashed to the seats was a pair of stubby oars and a plastic scoop tied to a bit of old string. Frank took one end and I took the other. But he pulled too hard and yanked the boat right out of my hands. Flakes of red paint scattered across the planks as it fell on the dock.

Uncle Jack looked up. “Be careful there, Chris,” he said. “That's our lifeboat.”

“Our
lifeboat
?” I asked.

“It's all you need,” said Uncle Jack. “If you know what you're doing.”

There was no wind that morning, so he used the diesel engine, and we headed out to sea. Over big, smooth waves we soared like a slow roller coaster, the three of us sitting at the back, in the place that Uncle Jack called the cockpit. The big steering wheel was there, and so many ropes lying all over the place that I felt as though I was sitting in a bowl of spaghetti. The kid stuffed his hands in his pockets, flicked away his hair for the nine thousandth time, and stared right past us.

“We'll get clear of the coast, then put up the sails and have our little talk,” said Uncle Jack, shouting above the sound of the engine. “If you start feeling queasy, let me know. I can give you pills that'll take care of that.”

I was already feeling queasy, but I didn't want to say so. Frank looked fine, and I was determined not to be the only one to get sick. The boat lifted on the waves and slid down their backs, and the smell of exhaust floated around us. I felt my breakfast slosh inside my stomach.

The land faded behind us. Uncle Jack kept pointing out interesting things, but I was too woozy to turn my head. I just slumped there and watched garbage floating past. Plastic bottles, metal barrels, fishing floats, they all bobbed dizzily on the waves. Uncle Jack said it was debris from a tsunami that had hit Japan more than two years earlier. “This is nothing,” he told us. “There's a whole floating island of garbage out there. I kid you not. I saw it in front of me one morning and thought I was going to run aground.” He steered the boat with one hand, lounging in the sun. “I'll spare you the details, but I saw things that don't bear thinking about.”

“Really? Like what?” Frank sat up like a squirrel, his eyes bright. “Things like bodies?”

“You don't want to know,” said Uncle Jack, which made me think they must have been terrible things. “The point is, it's all going to wash up on the shore one day. In some places, it's washing up already.”

Around noon, I started thinking I might throw up. I thought no one could tell, but Frank cried in a delighted voice, “Look at him! He's turning green.”

“I think we need something to eat,” said Uncle Jack. He went down to the cabin and clattered through drawers. When he brought up the lunch, so did I. The smell of Spam and ketchup made my stomach twist, and in one hot rush everything spewed out through my nose and mouth.

“Oh, gross!” said Frank.

Uncle Jack made me lie down in the cabin. He gave me a big blue pill to make me sleep. Then he gave me another just to make sure. Still in my boots and jacket, zipped into my sleeping bag, I lay in a bed that heaved and tossed, and I dreamed of those things that didn't bear thinking about.

It seemed whole days went by. Confused by the blue pills, I couldn't tell what was real and what was not. I was sure that my father brought me a glass of water, and that a seagull flew into the cabin and told me a story. I was aware at one point that the engine had stopped. Through the open hatch, I could see the sail full of wind, glaring white in the sun as
Puff
rushed along.

I dreamed terrible dreams. Zombies chased me across an island made of garbage. One of them caught me and held me down; he started to rip my arms off, and I woke wrestling with Uncle Jack. “Chrissy, it's all right,” he said. He'd brought water and soup, but I wasn't hungry. He talked in a voice that was loud and distorted, and he stared at me with a worried look as I fell again into woozy nightmares.