Navigating Early (3 page)

Several hands shot up at the last clue.

“Preston Townsend?”

“That would be pi, sir,” answered an athletic-looking boy in the second row. His hair was precisely combed, and the way he sat back in his chair, poised with pencil in hand, he looked like he was about to call an important meeting to order. I figured his father must be a banker or a politician. Or maybe the governor of the great state of Maine.

“Yes, pi. The holy grail of mathematics. That mysterious number that has entranced mathematicians for millennia. It originated with the Babylonians, was used by the Greeks in measuring the Earth, was thought to be a miraculous number by some and the work of the devil by others. So what is the number pi? Robbie Dean?”

“That’s a trick question, Mr. Blane. Everyone knows that pi starts with 3.14 and keeps on going. We all had to memorize the first one hundred digits last year. But pi is—”

The whole class joined him in saying, “A never-ending, never-repeating number.”

“See, everyone knows that,” concluded Robbie Dean.

“You mean everyone has accepted that as fact,” countered Mr. Blane.

We shifted in our seats, unsure of what he meant.

“Alongside Sir Galahad, I believe, we can add another name to the list of great seekers. His name is Professor Douglas Stanton. He’s a mathematician at Cambridge who is on a quest of his own. He has spent much of his career studying this number and has a theory that, contrary to popular belief, pi is
not
a never-ending number. That yes, it is an amazing number that has over seven hundred digits
currently known, and thousands more that haven’t been calculated yet. But he believes it will, in fact, end.”

Mr. Blane brushed the chalk dust from his fingers. “Why do I mention this today? Because this year, we are going to embark on a quest of our own to expand our minds, to challenge what we think we know, and to push the boundaries of mathematics. If pi, the most venerable number, can be proven to end, what else are we blindly believing that might be put to the test? So”—Mr. Blane loosened his tie—“let’s get down to the business at hand. Open your textbooks to page one, and let’s begin.”

I glanced behind me, but Early’s desk was empty and the classroom door quietly shut.

3
 

W
alking into the cafeteria that first day, I remembered the headmaster’s words of advice about sitting with a group in the lunchroom.

As much as I would have preferred to be by myself right then, I made my way through the lunch line, picked up my tray of meat loaf, green beans, and Jell-O with banana slices, then ventured over to a table of boys I recognized from some of my classes.

One boy—it was the chubby Sam Feeney—moved over easy enough as he continued the conversation. “Anybody who thinks you can outrun a cutter with a gig is a pinhead. Let’s ask the new kid. Baker, which is faster? A cutter or a gig?”

I had no idea what they were talking about, so I took the safe way out. I shrugged and said, “Six of one, half dozen of the other.”

“Well, what about the oars?” asked Robbie Dean. “Do you prefer whiffs, wherries, or rum-tums?”

“Oh, you know. Whiffs or wherries, usually. But rum-tums’ll do in a pinch.”

They looked at me steadily, I’m sure wondering what to make of me, when Preston Townsend said, “So, what brings an inlander like you to Maine?” The way he asked the question, I decided his dad was probably a lawyer instead of the governor.

I felt my face get hot. “Just needed a change of scenery, I guess,” was my weak reply.

“I hear it’s so flat in Kansas that you can see all the way to the next state in every direction,” Sam said. “Is that true?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “What with the waving wheat and the brilliant sunsets, I guess we don’t bother to look too far away.” I was putting up a good front, but my diversionary lines were running out. One more question and my jitters would probably show through in either spilled milk or dripping sweat. Thinking fast, I decided to shift the focus to someone else’s strangeness. “So, what’s with the kid who never shows up to class?” I asked.

“Early Auden?” Preston answered. “Not much to tell. His dad was on the board of trustees, had a heart attack and died. So now the kid gets a free ride here, but he picks and chooses what classes he wants to show up for. Sometimes he takes a seat and then leaves as soon as the teacher says something he disagrees with. He’s so weird that nobody does anything about it.”

“Yeah,” Sam piped in. “Last year he walked out of biology
class and never came back just because Mr. Nelson said there are no venomous snakes in Maine. Early insisted there are still timber rattlesnakes up north and walked out.”

“How come he’s so sure there are timber rattlesnakes?” I asked.

“Who knows. He’s all-fire sure about most things. Sometimes he has these weird fits when his eyes go all blank and he kind of twitches. They think having those fits messed up his brain somehow.”

The bell rang, ending any further discussion about the odd boy. But I knew there had to be more to the story than that.

“See you at PE, Baker. And don’t forget your rum-tums.” Preston smirked as he got up from the table.

Coach Baynard stood at the deep end of the indoor pool, light reflecting off the water, which was in turn splashing ripples of light on the tile wall. The air was thick and moist, with the sharp scent of chlorine. He gave his whistle a firm blast that echoed around the room. Boys in black swim trunks lined up, displaying an assortment of bare legs: long, short, mostly skinny, a few chunky, hairy, white, knobby kneed, gangly, awkward.

Coach blew his whistle again, “All right, you yay-hoos, let’s see what you can do with this.” He hefted a ten-pound weight off the floor and threw it into the deep end. “Dive in, then push or carry the weight as far as you can without coming up for air. Once you surface, that’s your distance. Robbie Dean. You’re up.”

Dean stood at the pool’s edge, raising his spindly arms
with hands clasped above one shoulder, then the other, as if he were the reigning underwater-weight-moving champion of the world. “Let me show you how it’s done, fellas.”

After a few catcalls from the crowd he grinned and dove into the water.

The rest of us watched from the deck as he frog-kicked his way to the bottom, first pushing, then pulling on the weight. Robbie Dean got it halfway up the sloped floor before he came to the surface, sputtering and grinning. “Beat that, boys,” Robbie Dean called.

The boys on deck pointed and hollered as the weight slipped back to its starting position at the bottom of the deep end. “You really showed us. Yeah, give us another lesson, why don’tcha?”

Sam Feeney was next. He got the brick up the incline before he had to come up for air. Preston Townsend did the best, pushing the brick halfway across the pool.

The coach called out another name. “Baker. You’re up.” I looked around, surprised, thinking there must be another Baker, then realized he was looking at me. “Come on, son. You know how to swim, don’t you?”

Of course I could swim. My mom took me to the pond near our house from the time I was little. I could swim faster and hold my breath longer than any boy close to my age.

“I can swim,” I answered, taking my place at the pool’s edge. My big toe pressed into the eight-foot marker, etched in red. The lights playing on the tile wall left me feeling unsteady. But with everyone’s eyes on me, I dove in.

I swam easily to the bottom, down by the drains. There
was the ten-pound brick, waiting for me to be the first one to push it all the way across the pool. But something else caught my attention. Something shiny, glimmering. A ring? I knew it had to be my imagination. My navigator ring was nowhere near this pool. Still, something shimmered near the drain. I’d been so excited when my dad gave me the ring, just before he left for the war. That was back when I thought it could make me a navigator like him, guiding a ship by the light of the stars. And that with that ring, I could always find my way. But after the scout survival camp last July, which I barely survived, I knew these things weren’t true. Like I’d told my mom, it was just a stupid ring. But now it weighed heavily on me, pulling me under.

I reached for it in the bottom of the Morton Hill pool, the deep water pressing in around me. My ears hurt and my lungs were bursting. Then I couldn’t see it anymore. Nothing glimmered. But it had been there. I pulled on the metal drain cap. It wouldn’t budge. I felt sleepy, like my eyes couldn’t stay open anymore. But I had seen it. It had been there.

Suddenly, I felt strong hands clamp around my arms and pull me toward the surface. Air. Light still splashed on the tile walls. And lots of faces stared at me.

Coach pulled me toward the side and some other hands dragged me out of the water.

“Is he breathing?” Robbie Dean whispered.

I sputtered and coughed, answering his question.

“Move out of the way,” Coach barked. “Hey, Baker?
What were you doing? You were under for over a minute and didn’t even touch the brick.”

“I … I …” Tears were lurking just behind my eyes. “I feel kinda sick,” I muttered.

“Right. You do look a little pale. Hit the locker room, kid. You’ll get it next time.”

It had been there, that shiny ring.

I grabbed a towel and stumbled my way to the locker room, only to hear a group of upperclassmen whooping and snapping towels at each other. I’m no genius, but even as cloudy-headed as I felt just then, I knew my skinny white legs would be all too easy a target in there.

So I opened the first door I came to and followed the stairs down a flight, to the open doorway of a dimly lit workroom. My head still spun as I leaned back into the coolness of the metal door marked
Custodian
. I closed my eyes, waiting for the feeling to pass, remembering.

Our Boy Scout survival outing was in the woods of northeastern Kansas. The scout leader set each of us out on a course that we’d have to navigate using only landmarks, the stars, and our wits. We’d been preparing for weeks. We’d gone over the North Star, the Big Dipper and Little Dipper—all the constellations. I could identify them all. But that day the sky was overcast. It was only supposed to be a mile out and a mile back. We’d have to rely on landmarks unless the clouds cleared. I knew I’d be done before it got dark and wouldn’t need to use the stars anyway.

But as I walked on that humid July evening, each tree
looked like every other. One bush blended in with the next. Rocky paths meandered this way and that, leaving me so turned around, I could barely tell which way was up.

It was almost ten o’clock at night before I heard the scoutmaster and the other scouts calling for me. The whole way home I had to listen to the boys’ teasing—how I couldn’t find my way out of a bushel basket and how they were glad my dad had a better sense of direction than I did, or his ship would have never found the shores of Normandy on D-day.

But sitting there on the way home, miserable and stewing in the back of the jostling pickup truck, I had no idea how lost I was soon to be. If I had known about my mom—what would happen to her—what could I have done differently? I don’t know that anything would have changed what happened.

Suddenly, I realized the water dripping from my swimsuit was making a small puddle around me. I opened my eyes and ventured past the doorway. The room was warm and hummed with a soft, crackling, airy sound. It seemed like a typical custodian’s room, cluttered with all kinds of tools; hammers, pliers, wrenches. Anything you would expect to find in the custodian’s quarters, only it was much neater. My dad would have felt right at home. A place for everything and everything in its place.

But as I let my eyes roam around, I noticed things you wouldn’t expect. Like a cot, bookshelves, chalkboards filled with numbers, equations, and drawings. Not just any
drawings, but kind of connect-the-dot pictures. A hunter, a scorpion, a crab. And a great bear. I recognized them. They were constellations. The bear was Ursa Major.

There was also a bulletin board with several newspaper clippings tacked up. The headlines read:

BLACK BEAR STALKS THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL

LARGEST BLACK BEAR TRACKS ON RECORD

REWARD FOR KILL OR CAPTURE
OF GREAT APPALACHIAN BEAR

There was still the sound—airy, like a long breath, only not that. I followed it until I came to an old phonograph with a record spinning on the turntable, but the needle was at the end, making only that rhythmic whispering sound. There was a collection of record albums, all neatly placed on a shelf. I was about to see which record had been playing when I heard a voice from a back corner of the room.

“They don’t know where he’s buried.”

I spun around, gripping the towel about my shoulders. It was Early Auden.

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