“You didn’t hear anything like this?” Eric howled.
Dodge’s jaw dropped. “That was you?” He looked at Rabbit and then back at Eric. “You?” Rabbit slapped his thigh. “Told you it wasn’t ghosts.”
Dodge snapped back, “I didn’t say they were ghosts. I said it sounded
“You were scared.”
“So were you.” Dodge looked back at Eric again. “How’d you do all that?”
“It wasn’t all me, son. It wasn’t all me.” He wouldn’t say any more about it. They finished lunch.
“So what about the treasure trove?” asked Dodge.
Eric thought about the library at Boulder. Thousands of books: books on farming, metallurgy, medicine, astronomy. “I guess maybe you’re right about that,” he said. “I’ve got a treasure in mind if I can get to it. If it’s still there.”
Dodge said, “You’re gonna need help carrying it back, then, right?” Rabbit nodded in agreement. Eric picked at a piece of meat jammed between his front teeth. “Your dad…”
“Dad’s scared your gonna teach me something he don’t want me to know,” said Dodge. “You ought to hear him go on. He’s asking me all the time, ‘What’s he saying to you now? What’s the old man saying?’
And he keeps telling me to stay away from you.” Dodge bit his lip. Eric thought it a sad expression. It was a habit Troy had when he was young. He’d bite his lip so often that sometimes it’d turn blue from the bruises underneath. “I don’t want to stay away from you, Grandfather.” Eric explained why they couldn’t go, how the trip might be dangerous, how an old man who knew the ways of the world would be safe but if he had to look after two kids that they all might get hurt, how their parents would worry about them. He used all his best arguments, so it was with more than a little amazement, when he reached the intersection of Bowles Avenue and C-470 and moved up the hill towards the stone hut, that he realized the boys were still with him, and that he had agreed to take them. As they cleared trash off the hut’s floor so there would be room for their sleeping bags, Rabbit said, “You know, somebody’s been watching us.”
Eric said, “Excuse me?”
Holding the corners, Rabbit snapped his ground cloth out and it settled gently to the stone floor. “They been spying on us since lunch. Surprised you didn’t notice.” It was the longest speech he made all day.
Chapter Four
HOLDING HANDS
Four days after the motorcycle thugs shouted their parting curses, hopped on their motorcycles and roared away, traffic on the highway stopped. The night before, the bumper to bumper parade had crept west, headlights glinting from the chrome and windshields of the cars in front of them, taillights winking bright red as they tapped their brakes. Sometimes someone would beep, and the horn echoed from the granite wall across the stream. Two or three hours after sunset, Eric’s mother relieved him. They’d been keeping twenty-four hour watch of the path to the cave. But in the morning, when Eric took the lookout again, the empty, silent road greeted him. He put on his headphones and thumbed on his radio for news, hoping that the batteries had somehow recharged in the night, but they were dead. Three days later, when he took the morning watch, he still wondered what no traffic meant. Had they cured it? Did the doctors fix everything and no one was scared? He sighed. There was no way to know without a radio. He couldn’t believe that Dad would have had the foresight to store all the food and other supplies in the cave, but forget to include a radio. He looked around at the familiar terrain. A thin coating of frost covered the shaded part of the rocks. A quarter-inch band of moisture marked the boundary between the shade and sun. He pressed his hand against a rock and left a five fingered shape in the frost. He pulled the useless headphones around his neck. The cold metal raised goose bumps on his legs and arms. He tried not to touch his hair, which felt heavy and flat. Oil coated his skin like paint. Dad had said they’d wash at the river, but he hadn’t said it was safe yet. He said he didn’t want to risk being seen on the road. Eric believed himself lucky that Dad let him brush his teeth.
He thought about Amanda Grieves, a girl he liked at school. What would she think of him now, dirty and hiding in a cave? She sat next to him in the band, the flute section, an instrument he’d picked two years earlier because Ian Anderson, the lead singer for the group Jethro Tull, played it. She was second chair; he was third. Each day he’d think about how close they were. Their legs sometimes touched. He felt her warmth through his jeans. He had dreamed about holding her hand for weeks, but he didn’t tell anyone, not even his friend, Mike, who talked about “scoring” constantly. “I really bagged one last night,” he’d say. “We back-seat bopped till we dropped.” But Eric just wanted to hold Amanda’s hand. He imagined them walking down the hall, fingers intertwined.
Rocks clattered behind him and he jumped. His dad was coming toward him, methodically kicking pebbles on his way, keeping his head down as if he were purposefully clearing the path.
“Quiet?” Dad asked.
Annoyance flared in Eric. The canyon was empty from end to end. Obviously it was quiet. He considered something clever like, “You just missed the floats and bands,” but said nothing. Dad rested his hands on the boulder Eric used for a watch post. As big as a refrigerator on its side, it offered a perfect view of the only approach to the cave and was easy to hide behind. Dad bent his elbows until his chest met the rock, doing a kind of leaning push- up. Eric doubted his dad was strong enough to do a real push-up, then he thought about the boxes in the cave: cases of canned fruits and vegetables and the other supplies. He still marveled over the mattresses. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t imagine his scrawny, unatheletic, bookish father muscling the mattresses up the scrub oak choked trail from the road. A black holster hung from Dad’s belt. Eric couldn’t imagine his dad carrying a gun either, but there it was, dark wooden handle sticking out of the dark leather. Dad said, “I have to go to the van.”
“I thought you’d got it all.”
Dad grimaced and pushed himself upright. “Is your radio working?” Eric shook his head.
“I’m going to find out about this.” He waved his hand at the road. “Then I’ll drive into Idaho Springs. I want you to go with me.”
Normally, before this horrible, weird week, Eric hated driving with his father, partly because Dad braked a half block earlier than he needed to, as far as Eric was concerned, and he always took the shortest route, even if a slightly longer one had ten fewer stop lights. He also hated driving with his father because of the silence. Long, dry, uncomfortable minutes would pass, and neither of them said anything, then Dad would say something stupid like, “How’s school?”
In Idaho Springs, though, Eric could buy batteries. “Sounds great. Let’s go!” He slid his arms into his pack straps and followed Dad down the path.
A half mile east of the cave, US Highway 6 went through a short tunnel. Dad had hidden the van down a weed-choked access road that cut away from the highway right before this tunnel. He’d parked it behind a thick stand of Cottonwoods. Eric walked ahead, though Dad kept urging him to stay back. The air smelled wet and cold next to the river. By the cave, a hundred feet above the canyon floor, it smelled dusty, like pinyon.
Eric was thinking of Amanda again. She had baby-fine blonde hair that brushed her shoulders. When she played the flute, her head tilted to the side and he could see the pulse in her neck, the way her lips pursed over each note. He had wanted more than anything to hold her hand in the hallway, so he made a plan, a stupid plan, now that he remembered it, but the only one that he thought might work. The door out of the band room was wide enough for two people to walk together. If he left the room the same time she did, if he let his hand swing as he walked, he could time the swinging of his hand with her hand, then naturally, oh so naturally, let them meet. Then, they would be holding hands.
“Eric, stay back,” repeated Dad. The darkness of the tunnel loomed before them. It amplified the river, making the splash of water on rocks sound like clapping. They turned onto the access road. A patch of brambles caught Eric’s sock. He bent and carefully brushed them away. Dad walked past him. When Eric caught up, Dad stood to the side of the road, his arms crossed on his chest. The van, Eric saw, rested on four flats. The windows were broken in and the hood was up. Eric didn’t need to look at the engine to know that it too was vandalized. “Sheesh. Now we’re in for it.” Eric peered into the van, careful to keep his hands off the jagged edges around the windows. The seat covers were slashed and white stuffing pushed out of the slits. Dad climbed the slope above the car and rolled some rocks off a pile.
