Navigating Early (15 page)

“Early,” I whispered. His breathing was deep, and he was slumped against me. “Early,” I said again, shaking him. I grabbed the backpacks. “Let’s get out of here.”

Early stirred, but just as we stood up, we heard a voice yell, “Olson, go get those boys!” It was a wiry fellow whose shoes clomped as loud as a peg leg. “Have ’em haul up those barrels and put ’em in the truck.”

Olson was the man who’d been watching us. He came back and pointed to a stack of medium-sized barrels. “Haul up those barrels and put ’em in the truck,” he said, as if we hadn’t just heard Long John Silver say the same thing.

Early tried to lift one on his own. “These are heavy. What’s in them?”

“Never you mind what’s in ’em,” said Olson. “Just get a move on ya.”

“I bet it’s rum. Pirates like rum.”

One by one, Early and I lugged the barrels and set them in the back of a flatbed truck that was waiting at the end of the dock. The night was dark, and with only a gas lantern propped on the dock railing, we couldn’t make out any labels on the barrels. I hoped it didn’t matter whether they were going in right side up or upside down, because we couldn’t tell top from bottom. Besides, those barrels were likely to fall out, as the bed of the truck was full of holes and rotted boards.

Of course Early, who had more curiosity than what
killed the cat, climbed right up in the truck with the lantern, poking around, his bright-red tartan jacket popping up here and there among the barrels until Olson caught him.

“Get out of there, kid,” he snarled.

“Okay,” said Early. “But I’m here to tell you, whoever sold you your rum is having a good laugh. It’s all dried up.”

“Is that so?” said Olson, raising a flask to his lips. “Then it’s a good thing I got some good and wet right here.”

“Are you three sheets to the wind?” asked Early. “That means drunk. You can also say
tipsy
,
pickled
, or
schnockered
. But my favorite is
goosed
. The custodian at school has a little too much to drink on weekends. He calls it
having the whirligigs
. Have you ever had the whirligigs?”

Olson just stared at Early, his flask half-raised. Whirligigged or not, this seemed like a good opportunity to hightail it out of there. “We’d like our boat now, and we’ll be on our way,” I said, even though I figured it wasn’t going to be that easy.

“Well, that’s fine and dandy. Why don’t you go on up to the Bear Knuckle”—he pointed to the shack up the hill—“and tell that to the boss. I’m sure he’ll hand it right over.”

“What’s his name?” asked Early.

“The boss? MacScott.”

“But what’s his pirate name?” Early said, with no small amount of disappointment.

“Oh, I get it,” said Olson. “Eye patch. Pirate. You’re funny, kid. He can be pretty nasty, but I don’t think he’s got his pirate name yet.”

Olson climbed in the truck and started up the engine,
grinding it into gear. He pulled away from the dock and started the slow climb up the mountain, hitting every rut and rock along the way. Early and I were left in darkness.

“Mangled MacScott,” Early breathed with satisfaction. “That’s a good pirate name. I bet his first name is Darius. What do you think would be a good pirate name for Olson?”

I didn’t care what his pirate name would be, but I thought Early might move quicker if I answered him. “Sir Drinks-a-Lot,” I said.

“Sir Drinks-a-Lot.” Early pondered the name. “I like it.”

“Now let’s get moving,” I said, trying to figure out a way to get the
Maine
back without having to face MacScott again.

“But we’re getting closer, Jackie.”

“Closer to what? Having our heads chopped off in a guillotine?”

“No, Jackie. Pirates don’t do that. They might hang you by the neck, or cut out your insides, or slit your throat, or string you up and let birds pluck your eyes out, or feed you to sharks, or cut out your tongue, or—”

“All right, Early.” I stopped him before he could come up with a hundred and ten other gruesome types of death and torture.

“Let’s go find the pirate MacScott,” said Early. “Maybe he knows something about the Great Bear.”

There seemed nothing else for it but to do just as Olson had suggested: go find MacScott and see about getting our boat back.

Early and I walked up the hill about fifty feet. We came to what might have been a road but turned out to be just a
dried-up creek bed that allowed a couple of mangy trucks and a beat-up old motorcycle to somehow ease their way up to a ramshackle building.

In the moonlit night, we got our first glimpse of the Bear Knuckle Inn. When Early and I walked in, MacScott and two of his men sat at the bar, and a thin, pitiful-looking girl stood behind it. Animal heads loomed on every wall—moose, deer, elk. A ferocious bear head, its teeth showing in an angry snarl, seemed to be leaping from a place of distinction just above the bar.

Of course, two kids walking into any drinking establishment would draw some attention, but Early and I walking into this one seemed to stop everyone in their whiskey-filled tracks.

I started to tug on Early’s sleeve, which everyone knows is the unwritten code for
Let’s get out of here!
Everyone but Early, that is.

“That’s a nice bear you got there.” Early pointed to the bear head on the wall. “Have any of you seen a different bear around here?” he asked in his too-loud voice. “We’re looking for the bear we read about in the newspaper.”

That was news to me, but I could piece together Early’s thinking. Pi was always trying to keep the constellation of the Great Bear in his sights. It was his guiding light. So it made sense, in an Early kind of way, that he would follow the Great Appalachian Bear to find Pi.

The burly men in their heavy jackets looked at each other while the girl behind the bar wiped out a glass with a dirty rag.

“Early, come on.” I tugged on his sleeve.

“It probably looks like that one you’ve got there, only bigger.”

MacScott laughed, a smoky wheeze, his weathered fingers cradling a mug of ale. Keeping his gaze on his drink, not turning to face us, he said, “He’s twice as big as that one.”

“So you’ve seen him?” said Early. “Is he still alive?”

MacScott’s shoulders hunched. His hand trembled slightly, making the liquid slosh in his glass. “Alive?” He raised his eye patch and turned to face us.

I flinched as if I’d been slapped. In the dim light of dusk, when MacScott and his men had overtaken our boat, his face had been somewhat shadowed. Now, in the light of the bar, I could see the horrible scars on the side of his face—his eye was missing, and the socket was pulled into a misshapen divot. How old he was, I couldn’t be sure. Old enough to be a grandpa, although I couldn’t imagine him being one.

“Alive?” He repeated the question as if he couldn’t make up his mind. “Like most demons, it’s more dead than alive.”

“Did the bear do that to your face?” Early asked.

The man took a drink. “Yeah.” Then he smiled, his skin pulling tight and shiny. “But not before I killed her cub and got off a round in her. Took out her left eye, so tit for tat, you might say.” He placed a hand on the lever of his rifle, propped against the bar. “I plan to finish her off and collect the bounty. Folks are getting so scared, it’ll be up to a
thousand dollars before long.” He pounded back the rest of his drink and set down his glass. “Another,” he said, turning his back to us.

The girl looked up from her task of scraping something off the bar top with her fingernail, then poured him another drink, peering at Early and me through her stringy red hair.

I wanted to leave. There was a hardness in this place. I’d been around people who drank before, but it was usually a festive kind of drinking among friends at a wedding dance or Fourth of July picnic. These were not festive people. These men preferred to drink alone, inside, with their coats on.

“Is your name Darius?” Early asked. “I think your name is Darius.”

“I think my name is none of your business,” MacScott growled.

We had to get out of there before Early drove a half-crazy man all the way crazy. “If we can have our boat back, we’ll be going now,” I said.

MacScott slammed down his glass, splashing his drink onto the bar top. “That boat is
my
boat now.” He kept his back to us while nodding at the two men sitting at the bar. “Take care of them.”

The burly men stood and grabbed Early and me by our coats. They didn’t seem to be interpreting MacScott’s instructions to mean they should draw warm baths for Early and me, give us mugs of hot apple cider, and tuck us into fluffy feather beds for a cozy night’s sleep. Just as I was envisioning a pit of hissing vipers, Early spoke up.

“You want to hear a story?” Early nudged me and whispered in a voice that everyone could hear, “Remember, Jackie, how pirates like stories?” He addressed MacScott again. “I know someone who’s looking for the Great Bear, and he’ll find her before you do.”

MacScott hoisted himself from his stool and stepped toward us. He put his face up close to ours so that we could see every scar, hear every wheeze. “If someone’s crazy enough to go looking for that bear, they’ll need to have a better reason than the bounty. That animal is a killer.” Still, there was an uneasiness in his voice at the mention of someone else looking for the bear.

“Come on, Early,” I said more firmly. “We need to get out of here.”

“He’s just trying to scare us,” said Early as I pulled him away from MacScott.

“Yeah, well, he’s doing a pretty good job.”

“The someone I know that’s looking, he’d always kept his eye on the Great Bear,” Early continued. “But then he got lost.”

“I figured’s much.” MacScott’s words were slurred. “It takes some doin’ to track that bear. She’ll lead you deep into the woods, only to double back and come up behind you.” MacScott held his glass of ale in front of him, gazing deep into the cloudy liquid as if he might find the Great Bear within his murky sights.

“Pi, that’s his name,” he explained to MacScott and his men. “He got lost. But he remembered a story about an ancient burial ground—big, watery caves where people went to bury their dark secrets and accidental treasures.”

MacScott stared at Early, his interest suddenly piqued and his eyes smoldering. “Go on,” he said. “Tell me about this cave. This place of buried secrets and treasures.”

He motioned to the barmaid, who set about preparing sandwiches and hot soup and refilling the men’s glasses with ale and whiskey.

Early continued his story, starting from a place I hadn’t heard before.

Land of Lost Souls
 

P
I WAS LOST
. He sailed under stars he did not recognize. The Great Bear eluded him. He knew he had traveled far to the south, and in that strange sky, there was a group of stars that formed what looked like a cross or perhaps a spear. But what did it matter? There was nowhere to go. No one to find. The shell necklace his mother made had become a heavy burden—a weight he could no longer bear around his neck. He removed the string of shells and placed it in a pouch with a strap that he slung across his shoulder.

But he remembered a story he’d heard from the Thinkers. They told of an ancient burial ground. A place of great, cavernous tombs. Catacombs, they called them, where the dead were laid to rest. But not all of the dead rested.

Many brought their burdens of life and roamed the catacombs, trying to shed these burdens. From one soul to the next, they tried to fix the unfixable. These souls roamed the halls of rock tombs, uttering words they wished they had
said or grasping to take back words they wished had been left unspoken. They turned this way and that, trying to retrace steps from the road gone bad or searching for the path not taken.

When Pi had first heard of this place, it had sounded horrible. A place where desperate souls tried to find meaning for the random happenings of life. He shuddered to think of it and wanted never to go to such a miserable place. But now, the caves, the darkness, the souls—they beckoned him to join their ranks, to wander in their world of loss and regret. He would find this place. He would join those souls, these kindred spirits who had no direction and no hope. He would carry his own burdens to this place.

After many months of sailing with no real direction, the ocean currents somehow landed his boat on a rocky shore. It felt good to have his feet on solid ground. No more rocking and listing on the waves. So he left his boat behind and set off. He walked and walked. And as he made his way inland, the trees grew large and thick around him, buffering him on all sides. The dense foliage dimmed the bright sunlight. Fallen leaves muffled the sounds around him, so that he could hear the rhythm of his own breathing—and he thought if he strained hard enough to listen, he might hear his own heartbeat. It felt as if the world were growing smaller around him. But the feeling was strangely comforting.

Then he realized he was not alone. At first it was just a movement, a flutter of leaves or a branch twitching back and forth. Then a glimpse of something passing just out of sight. Eventually he saw them. Real people, but
not
real too. Pi
could see them, but there was a transparency to them, as if one could see them but see through them at the same time.