Navigating Early – by Clare Vanderpool

13

 

I had been right about Billie Holiday singing. And the room was warm and toasty. But Early had a few surprises up his sleeve.

I didn’t think he’d heard me come in, as he stood with his back to me, wearing his bright-red tartan jacket, putting items near his backpack—matches, a flashlight, a rain poncho, and peanut butter sandwiches, apples, hard-boiled eggs, and canned beans. Not just items but supplies. I’d forgotten about Early’s quest and hadn’t taken him very seriously about going anywhere. Compass, map, pocketknife, length of rope, canteen—that all made sense for a journey. But then he also packed a jar of honey, a tobacco pouch, a pack of gum, his jar of jelly beans, and a leather journal of pi notations. I was most surprised at the wad of dollar bills that Early took from a jelly jar. He rolled up the bills and put them in an empty can of beans, placing the tin lid on top and securing it with a rubber band. He was definitely packing for a journey of questlike proportions.

Early dumped the jelly beans out of their jar, and this time, instead of sorting them by color, he began counting them. He sectioned them off into rows of ten, as I’d seen the pharmacist at home do, counting out pills or vitamins.

I wish I could say I stayed quiet because I didn’t want to interrupt, but the truth was, I was ashamed. I’d dumped Early from the race and ruined the Sweetie Pie in the process. Leaving Early to count his jelly beans, I turned to the bulletin board that he had layered with newspaper clippings, graphs, string, maple leaves, maps, and, of course, numbers and equations.

I hadn’t really paid much attention to the clippings before. They were such a hodgepodge of news. Everything from articles on D-day and the Normandy invasion to Maine weather conditions to news of the great black bear still stalking the Appalachian Trail. It seemed to be a nonsensical array of information. But then, who could understand the way Early’s mind worked? To him it probably all made perfect sense.

One article told of the supposed killing of the Great Appalachian Bear. The picture showed a large black bear, reportedly six hundred pounds, but the article said the paws were too small to be those of the much larger bear still on the loose. The grainy picture must have been taken before the authorities measured the paws, as it showed the hunter standing proudly next to his kill, apparently unaware that he wouldn’t be winning any bounty money, and off to the side, a bearded lumberjack who seemed somewhat amused by the whole spectacle.

The bulletin-board collage looked just like what I imagined you might find in Early’s mind—a hodgepodge of information, texture, color, clutter, and chaos that only Early could understand. Navigating Early was as challenging as navigating mysterious and uncharted waters.

“I think Billie Holiday and Mozart would have been friends.”

I jumped at Early’s voice. His back was still to me. Had he known I was here all along?

“They would have liked each other’s music.”

He didn’t say anything about the race. I knew Early was different. Odd. Maybe he didn’t feel things like disappointment or the pain of being left out. Maybe he was just simple and unaffected in that way.

“If they were on a boat,” said Early, “Billie Holiday would never leave Mozart behind. That’s not what friends do.”

Scratch that idea.

“Dorothy didn’t leave Toto. Ruth didn’t leave Naomi. Captain America would never leave Bucky.”

I got the point.

“Don’t you know the school motto, Jackie? Semper Fidelis? That means—”

“I know what it means.” I did know. “ ‘Always Faithful.’ ” And I knew all too well what it meant to be left behind.

“Early, I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”

“Okay, Jackie,” he said, lifting his frog out of a pondlike terrarium. “Bucky and I need to get going.”

Now I knew where he’d come up with the name for his frog. I smiled. And if the frog was Bucky, that made Early …

“Listen, Captain America. I know you’re really gung ho about heading out on your big quest and all, but you can’t go running off into the woods by yourself. You’ll get lost or eaten up by that bear that’s roaming the trail. Let’s just get a good night’s sleep, and we’ll both be more clearheaded in the morning.”

Early’s breath became a little rapid and shallow. He knew I was giving him a pat on the head.

“I’m going.”

He meant it.

“He’s lost, and I have to find him.”

I was tired, but the thought of going back to my room in the empty dorm was unbearable. He’d probably only be out for a few hours anyway.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go with you. But we’ll have to leave Bucky here.”

There was a pause. Then Early picked up the frog. “Friends don’t leave friends behind, Jackie.” He put Bucky in his pocket, then picked up the coxswain seat. “You row and I’ll navigate. Let’s put this on the boat.”

Suddenly I had a knot in my stomach. He planned to go by boat up the Kennebec River. I thought he knew I’d ruined the Sweetie Pie. I swallowed hard. “Early, the boat, the Sweetie Pie. She’s damaged. I ran her against some rocks. You were there. I know you called out commands for me to get back, but I almost sank the whole thing!”

Early picked up two oars, different from the ones I’d used earlier that day. They looked older but were a better make. He wiped them down as if he hadn’t heard a thing I’d said. I had to make him understand. I grabbed one of the oars.

“Early, there is no boat.” I waited for his reaction. Would he cry? Would he hit me? Would he put on the empty space of a record and retreat into himself? I prayed he’d hit me.

But he just handed me the other oar and said, “Not that boat.” He stepped into the hall and pulled a tarp from a mound I must’ve walked right past when I’d entered his workshop.

Early didn’t say voilà! But he might as well have. Because, like a magician, he revealed the last thing in the world I expected to see.

The Maine.

In my shock, I glanced around, fearing we’d be caught red-handed, having stolen the holy grail from the Nook. Even in the dim light, the Maine gleamed almost with a light of her own. The rich alternating woods of mahogany and oak were cut and honed and painted with a beauty that made the Maine seemed like a work of art rather than a racing boat.

“Early,” I breathed, “you can’t take that boat. It shouldn’t even be down here. Don’t you know this is like the treasure of all treasures at Morton Hill?” I couldn’t believe I was having to explain this. He’d been here for years. I’d been here only two months, and I knew the significance of the Maine. “You might as well have brought the Mona Lisa down here. Or the Ark of the Covenant or … or … the Statue of Liberty!”

Early busied himself folding up the tarp.

“How’d you get it here?” I asked. “You couldn’t have carried it by yourself.”

“Mr. Wallace helped me on the condition that I don’t tell anyone he took more than a few swalleys during the storm this morning. He doesn’t like storms. They make him nervous.”

I didn’t care how many swalleys Mr. Wallace had taken. “Early, don’t you know whose boat this is?” I spoke to him kind of slow, as if he were a simpleton. “It belonged to someone who is a legend at this school. He was a student here and then went off to war. Surely you’ve heard of him. They call him the Fish.”

Early stood looking straight into my eyes, as if he couldn’t understand what I was so intent on getting across to him. Finally, he spoke.

“I know who he is. His name is Fisher. He’s my brother.”

To say you could have knocked me over with a feather would be putting it mildly. This didn’t make sense. Heroes and legends didn’t have brothers, did they? No one ever talks about Sir Galahad’s brother. Superman had two sets of parents, but, as far as I knew, he didn’t have a brother. The Lone Ranger had Tonto but no brother.

Uh-oh. I was starting to think like Early.

Then I realized something—this was coming from a kid who had conjured up a whole story out of a number. He probably knew full well who the Fish was and had created this fantasy world in which they were brothers.

I put my arm on Early’s shoulder. “Okay, let’s say he is your brother. That doesn’t mean you can just make off with his boat, does it?”

“It’s not just his boat, it’s our boat. We built it together.” Early took a wooden seat from inside the boat and fixed it into position toward the stern of the Maine. It went in as nice and easy as you please and fit perfectly. We’d had to do some heavy-duty finagling to get the coxswain seat to sit right on the Sweetie Pie because it hadn’t been designed for one. But the Maine seemed to have been designed to hold not just any seat, but this very one.

If it was true that Early and the Fish were brothers, why hadn’t any of the other boys mentioned it? There had been plenty of talk of Morton Hill’s greatest athlete and fallen war hero. Why hadn’t they said anything? I already knew the answer to that.

Because they didn’t want to believe it. I knew how they felt about Early—he was strange, he lived in a cluttered old workshop, and he rarely showed up for class. They had cast him aside, and they didn’t want to acknowledge that the Fish could possibly have had a brother who was such an oddity, such a misfit. They ignored Early, students and faculty alike. They ignored him into nothingness, to the point where his name could be called during roll and nobody noticed or cared that he never answered. Or that he lived in the basement.

And apparently nobody cared that he was still at school when nearly everyone else had left. Mr. Wallace, the custodian, was still around, but he was a bit of a loner himself and would probably not be aware of Early’s comings and goings throughout the break.

Early stepped back into the workshop and headed toward his bulletin board, with its display of papers and leaves. He reached up high, to the upper right corner, and removed something. A chain—with two silver-colored metal pieces. He handed them to me. Dog tags. A soldier’s identity tags, worn around the neck. I touched the raised letters on metal that spelled out a name, serial number, and hometown:

FISHER AUDEN

37887466

BETHEL, MAINE

 

Then he handed me a small, crisply folded piece of paper. A letter with the words typed so sharply, I could feel them, raised, on the other side, so that forward or backward you’d get the same message.

It is with deep regret that I write to inform you of the death of your brother, Lieutenant Fisher Auden.

 

The message was clear. Your brother, Lieutenant Fisher Auden. This must be what Mr. Blane meant by proof by contradiction. Because those dog tags contradicted everything in my head that said Fisher could not be Early’s brother. The typed words went on.

Eight members of Bodie Company were on a mission to destroy the Gaston Bridge along the Allier River in central France. Their position came under heavy fire. An enemy tank destroyed their barn shelter with a direct hit. There were no survivors. The remains were buried on site.

 

I held the tags and remembered the clothes Early had loaned me after the incident in the pool. Clothes that were too big for Early. Fisher’s clothes. I felt my heart break for Early. His brother was dead as surely as my mother was dead. But somehow Early had maintained a sense of direction. He knew who he was and where he was going.

I did not.

By then the rain had slowed so that it no longer tapped on the window but only ran in teary streaks down the glass. The only sound left was Billie Holiday’s voice. That grainy sound of the record playing, and her words, filled with sadness and heartache.

The song wound its way around me with echoes of gloom and sadness and ghosts of yesterday. A yesterday that was gone and wasn’t coming back.

A restlessness rose in me. I didn’t want to be left alone with the gloom and the rain and the ghosts from the past. I knew then that I would follow Early, wherever he was headed. He may get us both lost, but that would be better than being lost and alone. That was what I thought, anyway.

I turned around and handed Fisher’s dog tags to Early just as Billie Holiday finished her song and the needle shifted into the crackly empty space. Early handed me a backpack and indicated a drawer where I could find a few things to pack for myself. Among the items I threw in were a pair of extra socks, another flashlight, and my own Swiss Army knife, which I’d left there a few days earlier. Then, together, Early and I hoisted the Maine onto our shoulders and carried it to the mouth of the Kennebec River. The rain had stopped.

“READY ALL, ROW!” Early called the command that was the rowing equivalent of “LOAD ’EM UP AND MOVE ’EM OUT!” His voice was a little flat and a little too loud. And it was clear and true. Right now, his was the only voice I could hear. And the only one I could trust. With that knowledge, I dipped the oars in the water and began rowing into the night with Early as my guide. If I still had any doubt about Fisher being Early’s brother, it was dispelled when the moon broke through the clouds and I saw a name carved into the handle of each oar: Early on one and Fisher on the other.

I knew it was crazy to be searching for a fictional character who existed only in numbers, but Pi’s journey struck a chord in me. He was a voyager, Early had said. A navigator. One who keeps plotting a course and finding his way.

“Early,” I said, working my arms and legs in smooth, efficient strokes as he had taught me, “don’t you think you’d better fill me in on how Pi got lost?”

Early crouched in his seat, letting me row on my own without calls or direction. “Well, it all started back at the part where every number shows up in a row except one.”

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