No doubt about it.
I’m running a fever, sure as I’m breathing.
How bad? Have to hide it. Can’t let Pete or Will see.
My brothers are still asleep. Gray lumps in the gray light. So is Frankie, his glasses hanging crooked off his nose, mouth wide open at the sky like he’s trying to taste the coming day.
I lie still, and through my headache I am able to taste it too: wet dew on my blanket and on my clothes; the blush of warm sunlight on my face; across the creek, a mourning dove . . .
I let its newness flow through me, into me, over me, try to let it heal me.
I get up on one elbow and feel the blood rushing hard in my temples. I wince, but I stay up.
My clothes are wet from sweat too, and in the early morning cool I shiver.
How long before Pete and Will wake? How long before they decide to call off our expedition because I’m too sick?
The whole thing is something fun for them, a great adventure. They don’t know it’s something more, that it’s Pete’s ticket to safety, to staying out of the draft, to staying out of Vietnam and those murderous jungles.
Mist curls over Apple Creek’s glassy surface, white, ghostlike.
The creek. Cold and clean. I crawl out of my bedroll and across damp sand to it and, cupping my hands, bring that water to my face and the back of my neck. I wash in the creek in the early morning and feel the thrumming between my ears let up just a little.
Pete’s voice startles me.
“First one awake has to make breakfast,” he says from his place, still with his eyes shut.
I sigh. “Yes sir.”
Slowly, tenderly, I draw a few twigs of deadwood out from the pile Frankie and me gathered last night and start the fire. A few of the coals on the bottom still have life to them, the faintest red glow. I breathe soft and easy on them, and soon I’m rewarded with a cheerful snippet of yellow flame.
“Two eggs over easy, a side of Canadian bacon, and a cup of coffee, black,” Pete tells me.
I sigh again.
Will rolls and I realize he’s awake too. “Short stack of blueberry flapjacks for me.”
We take only what we need for the search. Everything else we leave on the bank. Pete says it’s base camp and wants to give it a name. Will ain’t pleased.
“What on earth for? A camp’s a camp!”
“This ain’t just any old camp. This is our camp. And it’s got to have a proper name.”
Neither notices as I sneak Dad’s camera out of my pack and into my back pocket.
“We’re wasting time!” Will shouts.
Pete shakes his head. “Not without a name.” His eyes fall on me. “Well, Jack? What’ll it be?”
I think fast.
“Camp Beowulf.”
Pete smacks his hands together. “Camp Beowulf! Established in the year of our Lord nineteen-hundred and sixty-eight—”
“For heaven’s sake, Pete—”
“Hush, Will, I’m commemorating the camp—by the Elliot brothers, Peter, Will, and John Thomas, and their city-boy cousin, Frankie.”
Pete picks up one of the fire-darkened sticks and shoves it into the sand. I don’t know what that was supposed to do, but somehow it did it, and we’ve commemorated Camp Beowulf now and forever.
“Okay, Will,” says Pete, brushing the sand from his hands. “Which way?”
Will sucks in a long breath through his nose.
“North, northeast half a mile. That should put us right on top of it. Keep your eyes open for anything like the piece Frankie found last night. They’ll lead us to the big wreck. And watch your step for any unexploded bombs or missiles. They should be easy to spot too. Any questions?”
Frankie and me shake our heads. Even if we had any, we wouldn’t ask. The magic has got us, the draw of that fantastic fighter jet. It’s time.
“Then let’s go!”
We follow Apple Creek a quarter mile north and cross at a sandbar where the water is ankle deep and crystal clear in the early light. Climbing up the far bank, we pass through a stand of pricker bushes and come at last to the other side.
Dark trees stand like old gray men at attention. We pass through their gloom and heavy quiet, spying into their deep timbers as if they’re cages for some living thing.
That lost fighter jet might as well be alive—a creature of living metal, sending out its pulses, like a heartbeat, for us to follow. I can almost smell jet fumes and burnt rubber on the thick, stifling air.
At Pete’s command, we spread out and walk slow through the spiderwebbing shadows, casting our eyes over ground covered with old leaves, dead leaves, rotting leaves, looking for anything that don’t belong: a flap of torn cloth, a gleam of metal, the shine of glass.
No one speaks, and even Butch seems to understand in his animal way that we are very near to the place where a man has died.
What was that night like? Blasts of stinging ice and howling dark. A sound like the world was ripping in two and a sudden flash of fire raging against all that bitter cold. Then silence.
Like it’s silent now.
The deeper we go, the less daylight there is trickling down through the treetops.
A thick dead-leaf perfume hangs on the air. Musty. Almost too much. A sudden sense of floating inside my head, and I have to place a hand against one of those old gray trunks to steady myself.
My brothers don’t see. They have all gone ahead, already tiny shadows under the trees. Like me, they’re thirsting to make the next discovery, hoping to repeat Frankie’s miraculous find from last night.
To my right, a stand of waist-high ferns catches a bit of sunlight that’s leaked in from above. It’s a cheerful splash of color in all that gloom, and I head for it, hoping I’ll come across pieces of the airplane on my way.
I don’t.
Just strips of old bark and rotten logs.
A bead of sweat runs down my forehead. Fever’s back.
I sigh, a muffled sound in that closed-up air.
I’m sweating more; I don’t care. That fighter-jet excitement is in my blood. We’re close, so close to the discovery that will save Pete’s life.
I feel for Dad’s camera in my pocket. The reassuring square box is there. And the two rolls of film . . .
The film!
I stop dead in my tracks. Both rolls of film are in my pack—at Camp Beowulf. I forgot the film.
“Oh no.”
My voice sounds funny, as if I’m hearing myself from far off.
How far back was camp? A half mile?
I turn around.
There’s no choice now but to go back for it. I might miss being there when the next discovery is made, maybe the one that leads us to a trail of still more fantastic pieces—a long, glittering trail of twisted metal leading us straight to the wreck itself.
I could kick myself for my foolishness. But there’s no other way. We’ve got to have pictures. We need pictures of Pete standing triumphantly alongside the plane, pointing, smiling. The newspapers need those pictures of Pete.
I’m close to Apple Creek, can hear its sweet babbling, when I realize that my clothes are clinging to my body like a second skin and I’m sweating all over, trembling all over. It seems my shoes are filled with sand, heavy, dragging.
Dimly, I realize the fever has laid hold of me.
And the trees . . . all those tall gray trees, so close, so near. Before, they looked like a cage for some wild animal. Now I realize they are my cage.
I stagger forward a few more leaden steps and stop when a shape appears in the trees before me. It’s white and moving toward me. Shadows cover the head and face. No. Not shadows—a hat. A black felt hat.
In some back corner of my mind, maybe the last part of my brain that ain’t burning up with fever-fire, a single clear thought rises: call for help.
With the last of my breath I give the greatest cry I can, and then the world rocks like a seesaw under me and then everything goes dark.
It’s a dream, that much I know. I am somewhere very high, hanging over the ocean. And far, far below I see waves gently rolling. They’re singing to me, singing my name, over and over. Their song is beautiful, like a lullaby.
But I know if I go, I will never wake up again.