How
about a short story this week. Actually, for the next two weeks. It’s two-parter, so I’ll finish it on the 26th. Enjoy.
*****
NERDS IN THE WILD
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| Courtesy Flicker.com Creative Commons-3 |
Now, it just seemed like work. Loaded down
with a spanking new backpack that rode heavy on my shoulders and rose half a
foot over my head, I was tired and had aching feet. My brand new boots were rapidly
raising a brand new blister on my right heel.
“Ron,” I wheezed, “we’re the only ones up
here.”
“Yeah, isn’t it great?”
I glanced at him. His cheeks were
unnaturally red and sweat fogged the thick lenses of his bottle glasses.
“Why isn’t anyone else up here?”
He stopped and leaned back to look at the
tiny patch of sky visible above the canyon’s steep, soaring walls. Unbalanced
by a pack with the price sticker still on it, he would have fallen over backwards
if I hadn’t propped him up.
“Maybe the weather scared them off. It’s
supposed to rain, you know.” He waved a hand in a vaguely westward direction. “But
that’s over in Howard County.”
“Yeah, like the rainstorm knows where the
county line is,” I said, heavy on sarcasm.
I quit bitching in order to concentrate on
where to put my sore feet on a path composed of nothing but loose rocks.
When we came to a flat shelf high above the creek rushing down the floor of the
canyon, I rebelled.
“That’s it. I’m not going any farther.”
He turned eyes magnified by a factor of
two by his bifocals on me. “Zeke, you’re such a wuss.”
I dropped my pack it to the ground,
shucked the canteen, and loosened my father’s military web belt laden with a knife and compass
and a GP locator. Why did I need a GPL in a canyon you could only go up or
down? But Ron had insisted.
“I’m not a wuss,” I said. “I’m a geek, and
so are you. I need to be surrounded by computers and IPhones and Wi-fi and
things electronic.” I waved my hand around. “Not by rocks piled on stones and
limestone stacked on …” I ran out of geologic terms and stopped.
“This is nature, man. Enjoy it.” He surveyed
the area, which was no more than about a fifty-foot square of stone, containing a few strands of grass and two scraggly pines for shade. “Not too bad. We can set up
our tent here, I guess.”
I bent over to pick up my pack and jumped
backwards. “Whoa!”
“What? What is it?” Ron’s eyes went
owlish.
“Snake. There. On a rock.”
He gawked at the tightly coiled serpent
watching us from ten feet away. “Man, she’s big one? What kind is she?”
“Those button thingys on its end are probably
a clue. It’s a rattlesnake, dodo.
Tell it to go away.”
“How do I do that?”
“Wave your arms or something. This trip
was your idea, man. Do something. And why did you call it a she?”
“Well, she could be. Snakes have males and
females, too, you know.”
“What clued you? The long lashes on her
eyes or the delicate curve of her fangs?”
“Zeke, stop being shitty. Throw a rock or
something at her.”
Even after the snake got tired of our
throwing stones at it and slithered down toward the creek bed, I was uneasy.
What if this was a rattlesnake roundup place or something. Still, I was too
tired to start walking again.
We put up the tent we’d purchased
yesterday afternoon. Actually, we popped
up the tent. It was one of those all-in-one things that actually pops up. Well,
that’s the way the sporting goods salesman explained it, but since it didn’t
have wires and resistors and sensors, we had a little trouble with it.
The tent was no sooner up than it began to
shower. Mid-morning quickly began looking like twilight. I gazed straight up
into boiling, seething clouds that seemed to scrape the top of the canyon walls
before scrambling inside our temporary home. Despite myself, I began to enjoy
the pitter patter of the drops gently assailing the canvas sheltering us. Except
it wasn’t canvas. It was some kind of fancy new material. Before long, the
drops got louder and came down harder. Our shower had turned into a rain. Soon,
it became a deluge.
“Crap, Ron, this is never going to stop. I’ve
half a mind to head back to the car.”
In the gloom of the closed tent, I saw him
shiver. “That’s a cold rain, man. You’d drown or freeze before you got there.
Besides, it’ll stop soon, and tomorrow morning we can go exploring.”
“Explore, my ass. I just wanna go home. I’m
hungry, and all I’ve got is hot dogs and fixings. We can’t even build a
campfire. How am I gonna cook the weenies?”
He brightened and rummaged around in a
pack – my pack, as a matter of fact – to haul out a black, cast iron skillet.”
“No wonder my backpack was so heavy. What
do we need that for?”
“To cook the fish we’re gonna catch
tomorrow.
“You made me haul that up the mountain? Why
didn’t you put it in your pack?”
“No room.” He opened a can of something
that looked like Sterno but had a different name on it.
“It’ll take forever to roast a weenie on
that.”
“Uh, uh.” Ron dumped the whole can of nauseating-looking
gel out into the skillet and put some scraps of paper in the stuff. It didn’t
seem to want to start, but eventually, he got it going. The flames were a
little high, but reached nowhere near the top of the tent. The entire enclosure
was instantly a bit cozier. He had a couple of wire hangers that worked just as
well for cooking weenies as they did for roasting marshmallows. Before long, I
was full of weenies and buns.
“What’s that smell?” I asked as I leaned
back to relieve the pressure on my stuffed gut.
“What smell?”
“Oh, Geez! The tent’s on fire.”
“Where?”
“There! Underneath the pan.”
Well, it wasn't actually burning, but it was
going to be. Soon. Wisps of smoke oozed from beneath the iron skillet.
Ron lunged for the handle. “Unzip the
tent!”
I had my hand on the zipper when he let
out a yelp and dropped the skillet. Burning goo flowed sinuously out of the
tipped pan onto the floor.
Our fancy new tent might be waterproof,
but it sure wasn’t fireproof. Flames danced merrily. When they penetrated the
first layer of the floor, the soft cushion of air that kept us off the ground instantly escaped and settled us on jagged pieces of rock.
I grabbed my canteen and emptied it on the
flames.
“Nooo!” Ron howled. “Water spreads it.
Smother the fire.”
I shrugged out of my coat and threw it on
the burning mess. In a few seconds, the flames were out, but my coat was
ruined. Charred and smeared with a pink goop, I wouldn’t even put it on again.
The rest of the day dragged by like an
inchworm. Or maybe a quarter-inch worm. We had no computers. Our phones wouldn’t
work. Ron had forgotten to bring his checkers, and I’d left my chess set
behind. There wasn’t anything to do but stare at one another, try to ignore the
smell of charred material, keep out of the water oozing up through the burnt
hole, and occasionally talk to one another. It was still raining when we gave
up and crawled into our sleeping bags.
Just before I surredered to exhaustion and fell asleep, I heard him ask if I thought that rattlesnake
could get in through the hole in the floor.
*****
Please
try to contain yourself until next week. And keep on reading. We authors are
counting on you to do lots of that.
New Posts are
published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.
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