The Skeleton Tree Read online

  “How far did we go before we sank?” I asked.

  Frank didn’t answer.

  “How long were we sailing?”

  He still ignored me. He spat out the grass stem and flicked his hair. “Jack’s dead, isn’t he?” he asked.

  I couldn’t admit it so bluntly. I just nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was trying to help.”

  Frank glared at me. “The day I need your help, that’s the day I kill myself.”

  Well, I had already saved his life. But I didn’t point that out. Frank got up and started walking. A moment later, he whirled around and shouted at me, “Do you know he’s dead?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “I saw it.”

  “You saw what?”

  I felt tears coming into my eyes, so I turned away. “He was in the boat when it sank,” I said. “He was right in front of me, down in the cabin.”

  “Then why didn’t you save him?”

  I looked up and stared right back, not caring now if my eyes were red. “Why didn’t you save him?” I said.

  “I would have,” said Frank. “If I’d been that close.”

  “He told me to stay outside!” My hands were clenched so tightly that my fingernails pressed into the skin. “He went down to get the radio, and the water trapped him. What do you think I could do, you stupid idiot?”

  “You could have tried,” said Frank.

  I shrieked at him, “The boat was sinking!”

  Just a few feet apart, we snarled like animals about to kill each other. My heart was pounding, and Frank was flushed with anger. But just as I thought he was going to hit me, he reached up and flicked his hair again. Then he turned toward the sea, and a little bit of a calm came over us.

  “So what about the radio?” His back was toward me. “Did he get it? Did he call for help?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t want to tell him about my fumbled catch. But into my mind came an image of Uncle Jack in the sinking boat, and it didn’t seem fair to tell less than the truth. “He got the VHF,” I said. “He tried to toss it through the hatch. But I missed.”

  A little sound came from Frank. Because I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t know if he was angry or amused. When he slowly turned around I saw only that annoying sort of pout that hid all expression.

  “You’re such a moron,” he said. “I would have caught it.”

  “You couldn’t even move. You were like a zombie.” I glared up at him. “Why were you on the boat anyway? How do you know my uncle Jack?”

  Frank just shrugged.

  “Who are you?”

  I hated looking up at him. He stared back until I had to turn away. Then he laughed and said, “I’m your guardian angel, Chrissy. I’ve been sent to Earth to save you.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  I went on toward the north again, along the narrow strip between cliff and trees. But Frank barreled past and led the way. His jacket, still soaking wet, dripped water. His boots squelched with every step.

  Oh, I envied his boots. My socks already had holes in the heels, and my toes poked out the front. Stones and roots jabbed into my feet. “We could take turns with those boots,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess we could,” said Frank. But he kept walking.

  Where the cliffs jutted, we took shortcuts through the forest, down trails that deer had made. Frank liked to bend the branches and let them spring back at me, so I learned to stay a bit behind. He plucked berries from the bushes and shoved them in his mouth.

  “You shouldn’t eat those,” I told him.

  “Why not?”

  “They could be poisonous.”

  He laughed his annoying laugh and kept eating.

  “Didn’t you ever hear of poisonous berries?” I asked.

  A heavy branch snapped from his hand and swung toward me. “Didn’t anyone ever show you the good ones? Didn’t your dad do that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.” It was a stupid question. “He just didn’t.”

  Frank grunted.

  “You don’t go grazing for berries in the city,” I told him. “Where do you live?”

  He wouldn’t answer that either. But he was desperate to show he knew more than me. “The purple ones are salal,” he said. “The red ones are huckleberries. So are the blue ones, I think.”

  He stopped and broke off a sprig of red berries. He peeled away a handful them and shoved them into his mouth. Juice dribbled down his chin as he held out the branch. “Try some,” he said.

  “I’ll wait a bit.”

  “Moron.” He shrugged and started walking. I watched him carefully, in case he began to stagger. But the foul taste of seaweed was still in my mouth, and I ached with hunger. So after a while I tried the berries. The salal tasted bitter, but the huckleberries were sweet and juicy. They took away my thirst, but I felt as hungry as ever.

  Our clothes dried as we walked. Frank took off his jacket and carried it over his shoulder, and in the miles that passed we never said another two words. I watched with dread as the sun sank lower, and I wished that my father had been more like Frank’s. No one had ever taught me how to find water on a cliff, or food in a forest.

  When Frank stopped to drink from a little stream, I kept trudging along, thinking about things. The forest grew dark, and when I looked back, Frank was not there.

  I called his name. But he didn’t answer. I had no idea how far I’d gone without him. I started back—at a walk, and then a run—and I found Frank kneeling by the same stream. In front of him lay a little pile of twigs and moss. He was busy scraping sticks together.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “What does it look like, moron?” He didn’t even lift his head. “I’m making a fire.”

  “You could have told me you stopped,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked, still not looking up.

  “Why not?” I said. “I got you to shore. I saved your life. We have to stay together.”

  “Why?” he asked again.

  “ ’Cause that’s what you’re supposed to do!” I shouted.

  “Why?”

  I felt like picking up one of the stones from the river and bashing his stupid head. I plopped down on the grass and watched him.

  I had always thought that lighting a fire would be pretty easy, but I had never seen anyone actually try. Though Frank rubbed the sticks furiously, I saw no spark or plume of smoke. He had a serious, stubborn look that was somehow sad to see.

  His hands began to shake, and his teeth showed in a hard line. He hunched forward over the little shreds of moss and worked in sudden bursts that left him exhausted. At last he fell back, muttering to himself as he glared at the sticks.

  I tried to encourage him. “It’ll be nice to have a fire,” I said.

  What anger flashed over him! “Do you think you can do better?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “That’s not—”

  “Anyone who thinks it’s easy to start a fire in a rain forest doesn’t have a clue.” Frank picked up the sticks again.

  The sky darkened. A swarm of blackflies came. Frank swatted at them as he worked, then suddenly swept the moss away and threw the sticks aside. “We don’t need a fire tonight,” he said. “It’s too hot.”

  Well, he was hot. He was sweating from his efforts, but I was already cold.

  Frank pulled his jacket around himself like a little tent and huddled inside it, safe from the blackflies. I kept slapping at them as they whined all around me, and I shivered in my T-shirt and sweater. From the distance came the howling of wolves. More eerie for its faintness, the sound tingled through my nerves.

  I didn’t sleep until the sky began to brighten. Then, as soon as I closed my eyes, it seemed, Frank was standing beside me, kicking my sore feet. “Let’s go,” he said.

  His fingers
and lips were stained blue with huckleberry juice. But he didn’t bring any berries for me, or give me a chance to find my own. He kicked me again, then started walking north. I had to scramble to follow him.

  We stayed at the edge of the sea, sometimes high on sheer cliffs, sometimes down on little beaches of gravel or rock. Three or four times I looked at my watch and saw the hands frozen at 3:15. It was as though we were doomed to walk forever, with time never changing.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Frank’s back as we passed through a strip of trees. “What are we going to do?”

  As always, he ignored me. We went another half a mile, across a ridge and out again to the cliffs. Frank stopped and turned around. He looked angry. “Why are we going north?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “What’s the diff?”

  “ ‘What’s the diff,’ ” he said, mocking me with a laugh. “What are you, eight years old?” Stiffened with salt, his hair hung over his eyes like a pirate’s patch. “How do you know there’s not a whole city just south of here?”

  It was another question that I had no answer to. I said, “I don’t think there’s a city anywhere.”

  “You don’t know that, moron.”

  “I saw the land from the boat,” I said. “You didn’t.”

  Frank crossed his arms. “Maybe we should split up. You go north, and I’ll go south.”

  I didn’t like that idea, and he knew it. He just wanted me to plead with him. But I had done that too often for schoolyard bullies to want to do it again. If I let him push me around once, it would never stop. He would just push harder the next time. I shrugged and said, “Whatever,” and started walking north.

  Frank didn’t follow me. It would have been too embarrassing to turn around and trail along behind him like his puppy, so I kept going. After half a mile, I knew I’d made a big mistake.

  Below me was a little beach covered with garbage. I decided to explore it, hoping to find a pair of shoes for my sore feet. Then I could climb again to the next point, turn around, and catch up with Frank. “There’s nobody there,” I’d tell him. “We have to go south.” It was a clever plan; he would get what he wanted, but I wouldn’t be giving up. It was what my father would have called a “win-win.”

  In Vancouver, I couldn’t have walked a quarter mile on English Bay without finding a flip-flop, a sandal or a sneaker. Along with baseball caps and disposable lighters, they had seemed as common as clamshells. In Alaska, it was even better.

  The beach was made of pebbles; I sank right into them, as though trudging through a bowl of marbles. Among the stranded logs I found the same sort of stuff I’d seen floating in the ocean and remembered Uncle Jack. “It’s all going to wash up on the shore one day.” I found bottles and buckets and the bones of a giant whale. I found two cigarette lighters that wouldn’t work, and then a sandal for my right foot. It was so oversized that it might have belonged to Bozo the Clown. But I slipped it on, and soon I found a pink flip-flop with a little heart on the sole.

  Proud to have solved at least one of my problems, I tackled the rocks at the end of the beach. I climbed up and up, until I came out on top of a cliff so high it made me dizzy. White gulls flew below me tipping in the wind, and I must have seen for a hundred miles, over forests and mountains with no sign of people.

  At that moment I was absolutely certain we would never find anyone to the north. I would have wanted to find Frank and head south. But a bigger, better beach lay before me now. Made of sand like golden sugar, it stretched for a mile along the shore, and the breakers tossed and gleamed. Standing high above it, I felt as though I owned all I could see.

  I had stepped into my mother’s favorite movie: Robinson Crusoe. I could picture the castaway in his ragged goatskins, looking over the ocean from a ridge on his lonely island. That movie always made my mother cry. “We’re all of us castaways,” she told me once. “We get thrown ashore on the rocks of life, but somehow we survive.”

  I looked back, down the hill that I’d climbed. Something was moving through the bushes, crawling up toward me.

  Wolves, I thought. Too frightened to move, I just watched the bushes sway and toss; I heard the branches crackle. Then, in a break between two trees, Frank appeared.

  He was hurtling up the slope—almost frantically, it seemed—as though something was chasing him. He pulled with his hands as he pushed with his feet, blundering through the bushes. Then he glanced up and saw me standing above him, and for a moment I thought he was going to turn back. He sank down into the bushes, then appeared again, and he started walking up the hill. When he reached me, he was breathing heavily.

  “I looked for miles to the south,” he said. “There’s nobody there.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “We’ll go north instead, so you can stop crying now, you little crybaby.”

  Well, I wasn’t crying. It was Frank who had lost something, and we both knew it. He shouldered past me to lead the way, and I followed in my familiar place. But I didn’t mind anymore. I had learned an interesting lesson: even Frank didn’t want to be left alone in all that wilderness.

  Three chairs are set out on the point, around the wooden saint. Of course we only need two, but I like to have the extra one. I imagine this is where we’ll be sitting when someone comes to save us. He will be so surprised to see us alive that he will just stand and stare with his mouth open. I’ll gesture toward the empty chair and say politely, “Hello. Won’t you please sit down?”

  I can picture it clearly, even what our rescuer will look like. He will have sandy-colored hair, and a brown cap and dark sunglasses.

  That’s the way I see him. If he ends up looking different, it doesn’t matter. I sometimes imagine things so clearly that I convince myself they will happen.

  Pinned to our fridge back home is my second-grade report card, signed by Mrs. Lowe. She wrote, Christopher has a vivid imagination. I think he will be a great artist one day. Perhaps a writer. Underneath, she added a different thought. Christopher has trouble making friends.

  I laugh now when I remember this. In our first days in Alaska, I thought I would never be friends with Frank.

  •••

  It was late in the afternoon when we came down to the sandy beach.

  I kicked off my pink flip-flop, only to find that the sand scraped my blisters like a cheese grater. I limped like an old man. But I was glad to be out of the woods and down from the cliffs. Along the mile-long beach, waves collapsed in creamy foam. A flock of sandpipers raced back and forth at the edge of the water, as though afraid to get their feet wet.

  Frank walked where the sand was firm and damp, and his shadow stretched across the beach like a stick man. I stayed higher up, where thousands of logs, whitened by the sun, made a giant’s boneyard.

  It was such a wild place. In Vancouver, city workers raked the sand every day and rearranged the logs into perfect rows. My father would wear his suit to go beachcombing, his tie flapping in the wind. Sometimes he’d talk like a pirate: “Come along, matey, there’s treasure for the finding.” He would make a game of turning junk into pieces of eight, but I expected to find wooden chests brimming with gold, and always went home disappointed.

  All the stuff that Uncle Jack had talked about lay scattered across the sand. We found fishing floats and tangles of rope, bottles and buckets and all sorts of plastic things. But everything was covered with barnacles and weeds, and most of it was smashed into pieces. We hurried from one thing to another, shrieking and pouncing like seagulls. For a little while we were just two kids having fun on a sandy beach. But then the things became depressing—the endless number of them, the stories they whispered. It was strange to think that all the junk had been important once to people who were probably dead.

  I had seen the tsunami on TV, whole cities swept away, people running for their lives, people trapped in cars or perched on rooftops. I had seen the enormous masses of debris washed down flooded streets and out to sea. Now those same things lay scattered all around me. />
  I collected bottles to fill with water, and more shoes than I could ever wear. There was not one that matched another, but I found two that I liked, and I kept another four for spares, carrying them around my neck on bits of rope.

  “Watch for lighters,” said Frank, as though I wasn’t already doing that. But there were fewer than I’d expected, and they were rusted and brittle, ruined by salt or sunlight. Though I could see butane still sloshing inside when I held them up, they were useless.

  At the end of the beach, a rocky finger stuck out into the sea. Along its back—like hackles on a dog—stood a few tall trees that swayed in the wind. A bald eagle came soaring above them, and behind the eagle came a raven, shouting crow-like cries. It swooped at the eagle’s head, turned and swooped again, herding that huge bird through the sky.

  Frank stopped to watch them pass. Then he sat on a log near the end of the beach.

  If he was settling down for the night, he wouldn’t say so. Not Silent Frank. So I kept walking, thinking I would cross the narrow point and see what lay ahead. I stayed among the logs until I saw an animal trail leading up through the bushes. Then I ducked under the drooping branches of a half-fallen tree, and stood again to step over the last log.

  And I stopped with my foot in midair.

  Pressed into the sand right in front of me was a human footprint.

  It wasn’t freshly made. The edges had crumbled, and a few brown tree needles had collected inside it. Shielded from wind and rain, it might have lasted for a long time, like footprints on the moon. But for sure it must have been made after the winter storms had passed. Sometime in the spring or the summer, someone had walked along the beach just as I had. He had crawled under the branches and stepped over the log, heading for the trail through the forest.

  I shouted at Frank, “Somebody’s here!” Then I followed the man’s forgotten shadow, stumbling in the sand because I hurried. I sprawled facedown in his old footprint, got up and ran to the head of the trail. There, in the black dirt of the forest, I found another footprint preserved in hardened mud.