Cave-in Read online

  “How do you do the tent?” Sandy asked.

  Sandy always asked and played the “helpless” card. About everything.

  “We went over this, Sandy,” Eamon said, trying hard not to be exasperated. “Remember? In the gym?”

  “Yeah, but …” Sandy said and looked around.

  Do not help her, Ursula commanded herself. Do not go over and help her.

  Ursula decided, instead, to get her own tent set up. They all had single-person tents, little snail shells, that Eamon had lobbied for with the school administration. Back in the day, she knew, they’d had large communal tents for the Outing Club, but Eamon had argued, correctly, she thought, that they were better off in small tents. No back-and-forthing, no sneaking into one another’s tents, no goofing off in the middle of the night. It was a little less fun, perhaps, but much more organized and more secure. Besides, they could stay out beside the fire as long as they wanted, or at least fairly late, but when they turned in that was the end of the day.

  She slipped her tent out of its stuff sack and rolled it out on the ground. It popped up with internal brackets. The only reason Sandy wouldn’t be able to do it, Ursula realized, was because Sandy wouldn’t try.

  “How’s it going?” Eamon asked, suddenly appearing beside her.

  “It’s okay. Just getting my tent up.”

  “I thought we were in big trouble with the landing,” Eamon confessed in a lower voice. “Captain Bertie got a kick out of dumping us like that.”

  “You think so?”

  Eamon nodded. Then he leaned closer.

  “It’s cold, isn’t it?” he said. “I didn’t want to say that to the kids. They’re looking a little shell-shocked.”

  “I think we’re all just chilled.”

  “I didn’t want to tell them, but we can set up in the powder magazine if it gets really windy. The magazine is underground and it’s lined with stones. It’s probably pretty dirty, but it’d get us out of the wind.”

  “Powder magazine?” Ursula asked.

  “Where they used to store munitions. In World War Two they kept submarine mines in it.”

  “Are we supposed to go in there?”

  “You can wander around all you like. The city of Portland owns this land, but it’s pretty much abandoned. We’ll take a look once we get settled in.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks for helping with all the baggage. We need to have a little talk about group participation, don’t we?”

  “I guess so.”

  He left as she finished getting the form of the tent set up. The wind came up and nearly jerked it from her hands. She rolled her backpack into the toe of the tent. Then she unrolled her sleeping pad and fit it into the interior. It all worked, all fit together properly. She took a few minutes to sink pegs into the bony ground, then weighted the tent a little extra with rocks. When she finished, she looked up to see Sandy standing beside her, her face red and pinched.

  “Can you help me?” Sandy asked.

  Ursula, against her better judgment, nodded and followed Sandy back to her tent. Right next to her location, Mary had already erected her tent. Mary was the opposite of Sandy: independent, calm, competent. Ursula didn’t like to admit it to herself, but Mary was a bit of a favorite. Ursula tried not to show any favoritism, but when confronted by Sandy on one side and Mary on the other, it was nearly impossible not to fall into it.

  “How are you doing, Mary?” Ursula asked before she helped Sandy.

  “It’s beautiful here,” Mary said from her knees. She had been jamming her backpack into her tent, but she stopped to look around. “I love the ocean.”

  “It is beautiful,” Ursula agreed and admired her view of the sea. “We’re going to have a great time here.”

  “I’m already having a great time,” Mary said.

  Ursula grew aware of Sandy beside her, impatient and needy.

  “It’s cold, is what it is,” Sandy said.

  “We each make our own world,” Ursula said, which was a phrase her dad used on her whenever she became cranky. “Try to be cheerful, Sandy. Things will work better that way.”

  “I’m cooollddddddd,” Sandy whined.

  Ursula took a deep breath to calm herself. Then she told Sandy to grab the other end of the tent and to roll it out carefully.

  Sam Harding played the movie game with himself as he set up his tent. It went like this:

  Scene: Maine island.

  Cast: Kids doing a community service project. Superenthusiastic teacher/bird lover.

  Conflict: Cold, wind, severe weather conditions.

  Plot?

  He couldn’t think of a plot. Not yet. As he popped open the tent, then pegged it down, he considered that this was a situational movie, not a character movie. A situational movie was the type where the situation was the most important element. Like Gravity, maybe, or like Jurassic Park. You put characters in a difficult environment, applied pressure, and voilà. You had a movie. Zombie movies generally relied on the situation, not character, to carry them forward.

  You could make a wizard zombie movie on the island, he thought. Great light, great bird sounds. And the wind could almost become a character all itself.

  Meanwhile, he had to blow on his hands to keep them warm. He had forgotten gloves. He had them next to his backpack when he was packing, but somehow between there and here he had lost them. Maybe in his mom’s car. Maybe in the white Cedarbrook van. One way or the other, he had lost them, and now his fingers felt thick as breakfast sausages as he tried to work on the tent.

  “How’s everyone doing?” Mr. O’Connell asked, coming around. “Tents up? Anyone having a problem?”

  “Nope,” Sam said under his breath. “No problem.”

  He finished getting his tent up, then slid his sleeping pad and sleeping bag inside. A little cocoon, he thought. Then he put his backpack inside and lashed up the door. Done. He stood and looked around.

  It wasn’t really that bad. The place, he meant.

  Actually, it was kind of cool. He knew the kids complained a lot and made a big deal about having to camp on the island for a community service project, but it also was a little adventure. They had to clean up the island so the nest sites would be ready when the puffins returned in the spring. Everything was about puffins; Mr. O’Connell was nuts about them, and he was some sort of grand puffin king at the Audubon Society. Everyone at Cedarbrook gave Mr. O’Connell toy puffins, or emailed him video links because that’s what you did to butter up a teacher. Even the headmaster made jokes about puffins, and it was all har-de-har-har whenever the school had an assembly, because you could count on some sort of puffin joke becoming a running theme. Sam didn’t have anything against puffins, but he didn’t have anything for them, either, at least not in any special way. He was along for the ride, that was all, and for the credits he could get for community service on his permanent record.

  “How you doing, Sam?” Ms. Carpenter asked from where she was helping Sandy Bellow set up her tent. “You all squared away?”

  “I think so.”

  “Make sure you have plenty of weight to hold it down. This wind is something, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Reminds me of Hitchcock’s The Birds. You ever see it, Sam?”

  Sam shook his head.

  “Great film,” Ms. Carpenter said and then turned her attention back to Sandy Bellow.

  “I bet,” Sam said, but he was pretty sure the wind carried his voice away and dumped it in the ocean.

  “Come on over, come on over, up here!” Mr. O’Connell called.

  Azzy jogged over to where the group had collected by the wall of the fort. Azzy always jogged, ever since she had read an article about a national champion wrestler from Iowa. The guy was old school, sure, but he jogged everywhere, never walked, and he claimed it was the reason he had become a champion. When all else failed, you could always outwork the next person, and Azzy — a three-sport athlete: ice hockey, lacrosse, and
soccer — knew that recipe to be true. She was always in better shape than anyone she played against. That much was a given.

  So she jogged up the hill to where everyone crowded around Mr. O’Connell. He had found a small rock to stand on and he had a happy, somewhat goofy look on his face. The Puffin Master. That’s what kids called him. Azzy stopped on the outside of the small circle. The wind slammed down at them, but closer in, beside the building’s wall, the wind didn’t possess as much strength. Everyone seemed to understand that and they crowded forward, trying to get out of the cutting air, until Mr. O’Connell held up his hand.

  “That means ‘quiet,’” he said. “That means I’m requesting quiet. It’s an old Cub Scout thing.”

  “Everyone quiet,” Ms. Carpenter said. “Hand is up.”

  Azzy thought, Cub Scouts? Really?

  Coach Clemins would have laughed at that, she reflected. Coach Clemins would have howled.

  “We made it!” Mr. O’Connell said. “I know the landing wasn’t perfect, but we’re here. It was okay, right? We’re here for five days and four nights. Bertie is going to pick us up Tuesday afternoon. Anyone have any questions on the schedule?”

  No one had any questions on the schedule, Azzy knew.

  “Okay, then,” Mr. O’Connell went on. “Well, welcome to Hog Island Ledge. As you can see, it’s pretty remote. We are on our own, yeah!”

  He waited for a rallying response, but none came.

  “Our job over the next few days is to prepare nesting sites. The currents are wicked strong around this island, so they pull in all kinds of stuff. Lobster traps, driftwood, plastic bottles, you name it. When the puffins come back in the spring, they won’t establish nests if we don’t clean up a little. So it’s pretty simple, really. We’re going to start at the far end of the ledge and clean this way, bringing everything down. What we can burn off, we will. We can have some great bonfires. But the plastics and other materials, well, we’ll collect those and load them up when Captain Bertie comes back for us. Any questions?”

  “When do we start?” Sandy Bellow asked.

  “Now, really. We’re going to divide into two teams. Boys with me, girls with Ms. Carpenter. First, though, I’m going to take you on a little tour. This fort behind me is called Fort Gorges. It was planned after the War of 1812 and then built finally around the Civil War. It’s on the National Registry, but it’s not a creaky antique. We’re free to roam around it as much as we like.”

  Azzy listened with half her attention. The rest of her attention drifted away to the fort. It was a huge stone mass, shaped, she knew, in a D. The rounded part of the D pointed out toward the ocean. The rear flat shape stared back at the mainland. Her dad, Edgar, said the fort was haunted. He said everyone knew the fort was haunted, and he was surprised the teacher — he didn’t know Mr. O’Connell’s name offhand — would bring a bunch of kids out there on Thanksgiving weekend. It was haunted by plenty of ghosts, her dad said, but most particularly by Whistling Willy, a peg-legged ghost with a cannonball in his guts and a single eye that dangled from the socket when he bent over.

  That eye, her dad said, hangs from a Slinky. Just like it. That eye comes out and slithers toward you.

  It was ridiculous. And also kind of creepy.

  “Okay, are we good?” Mr. O’Connell asked. “We ready to take a look around?”

  “Someone said there is a powder magazine out here,” Harry Cameron yelled. “Is that true?”

  Harry, Azzy knew, was a nut about explosives. A powder magazine was a little piece of heaven to him.

  “You’ll see, you’ll see,” Mr. O’Connell yelled, jumping down off the rock. “Five minutes. Assemble here.”

  Azzy nodded. She turned and jogged back to her tent. As she went she couldn’t deny that she heard a thin, high sound among the birds calling. It sounded like a whistle, like Whistling Willy saying hello.

  Sandy Bellow hated everything about the island. And about the powder magazine, whatever it was. And about the gulls. And about the sleeping bags. And tents. And toilets …

  Check that. There were no toilets.

  Five days with no toilets. No showers. No heat.

  How was this possible? That was what she thought as she followed Ms. Carpenter around the edge of the fort toward the back side of the island. She had been miserable before in her life, plenty of times, but this set a new record. This was one for the ages. She wondered why anyone on Earth would prefer to be here rather than in a tidy, candle-scented mall on this of all days.

  Black Friday. The biggest shopping day of the year.

  She hated her life.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. She hated her stepdad. She hated Lenny, with his long sideburns, his weird, 1950s flattop hair, his honey-I’m-home flannel shirts. She hated him with a fury that made her ears burn.

  “That wind really bites, doesn’t it?” Ms. Carpenter asked everyone in their little marching brigade. “It cuts right through you.”

  “It does,” someone said.

  Sandy nodded. She couldn’t risk saying anything for fear of wind zooming down her throat and freezing her tonsils. Lenny would have laughed. Lenny the evil stepdad, who said things like Be darn good for her to get a little fresh air in her lungs.

  Be a step in the right direction to put some Spackle on her tail.

  Spackle on her tail? What did that even mean? Sandy wondered.

  So here she was. After relatively little conversation, and certainly no significant opposition from her mom — Honey, you never know, it might be good for you and you get credits and it looks great on your record and it’s not too early to start thinking about that — trekking behind Ms. Carpenter and the other idiots who planned to spend the long, long, long weekend on this forsaken island.

  “Oh, look at that!” Mr. O’Connell exclaimed from the front of the pack. “Just look at that. Look at that sun!”

  Sandy followed the eyeline of the group and saw the sun ticking down over the trees to the west. It established a pretty trail along the water, she acknowledged, but it did not do a single thing for the wind that buffeted them like a puff of polar-bear breath. Actually, no, she decided, polar-bear breath would be warm. This was far, far colder than that.

  “Does it seem cold to you?” Sandy asked Mary Eihorn, who happened to stand beside her.

  “What?” Mary asked, her eyes fixed on the slanting light scraping across the ocean waves.

  “Cold to you?” Sandy repeated.

  Mary shrugged. Mary the back-to-earth moon child. Mary, the kid who got dropped off at school by a pair of parents driving a VW Westfalia, a camping thingy from the 1970s. That Mary.

  “Not that cold,” Mary said, slowly drawing her eyes back from the beginning of the sunset. “I’ve been in worse.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t cold, right? I mean, just because you’ve been in worse doesn’t mean it isn’t cold right here, right now, right?”

  Mary smiled. And didn’t answer.

  Sandy suspected she had been whining. She whined a lot, she knew. At least that’s what other people said. Frankly, she considered it a case of submitting her opinion to the world, but that was only her own opinion.

  Lenny always said she whined.

  After sufficient oooooohs and aaaaaahs, Sandy followed the group toward the fort. A gull banked in the wind directly over her head and pooped down on the crowd. The stream landed on Mary’s shoulder, which gave Sandy a certain amount of happiness. But Mary simply reached to the side of the trail, grabbed a clump of grass, wadded it to make a small sponge, and wiped her shoulder clean. She didn’t seem to care. When she finished, she tossed the grass away and didn’t even inspect her coat.

  Sandy worked her way into the center of the group. At least there, she figured, the wind wouldn’t be as bad and the gulls would have more trouble finding her.

  Mary Eihorn ducked her head down and stepped into the powder magazine and looked around. It was sort of amazing. She wasn’t entirely sure what she
had expected it to look like, but it wasn’t like this. It was a long stone building, built into the earth. You could not see it from above. The roof had grown over with weedy grass a long time ago, and unless you looked for it you would have missed it altogether. Someone had said when they first stepped inside that it looked like a baseball dugout, the major-league type, and that was probably as good a description as any. Except it was constructed with stone. And it was far away from the fort on purpose.

  In case it blew up.

  That’s what Mr. O’Connell said. He also pointed at the floor, rotted and eaten up now, but once upon a time made of wood. The wood had no nails, Mr. O’Connell said. Nothing that could cause a spark. Sparks could ignite gunpowder. And gunpowder was what you kept in a powder magazine.

  “Doesn’t it feel good to be out of the wind?” Mr. O’Connell asked at the front of the group. “Go ahead, you all can look around. Just mind your step. Be careful. This is an old, old building, and it’s badly weathered. Don’t stand on the roof. You might come right through it.”

  Mary reached in her pocket and pulled out a headlamp. It was dim inside the magazine. She put the headlamp on and walked slowly around the perimeter, close to the walls. People had tagged it with initials and names inside of hearts. And swearwords, names of teams, graduating classes, who had visited, what they thought of things … the usual stuff. Mary didn’t understand the impulse to deface a building. What struck her most was the fact that you had to plan it out: first think about it long enough to care, then buy a can of paint, or ten cans of paint, get yourself to the location, then sneak around and spray your name on a wall that no one saw or cared about anyway. What was the point? It seemed boring to her.

  At the east side of the powder magazine, she smelled something gross. Better to avoid that corner. She veered away and went back to the west. A few slots at eye level allowed people inside to look out, probably to check for ships, but for the most part the place was solidly underground. It felt like somebody’s old, old basement, except no house rested on top of it.

  She was still inspecting the walls with her headlamp when the first tremor hit.