* * *
The boy awakes before the sun itself. He lies on his side with his knees drawn to his chest and examines his discomforts with a private nurse’s care. He is cold, especially a three centimeter-wide belt along his back where his shirt has escaped his pants. He tenses his muscles to trigger a shivering fit. He is famished. He pulses his stomach a half-dozen times until the organs begin writhing on their own. His guts churn, but find nothing to grind. His hands ache from the fists they have made throughout the short hours of sleep. Beyond those aches are the blisters at the base of his fingers from the hours of gripping the STA’s handlebars. Some things hurt and others are raw, but of all those things, it is the deep muscle aches in his thighs that take pride of place. Joe gently touches the surface of his thighs, but hesitates to do more because of the fear that the slightest movement might cause them to lock up in a cramp that will leave him thrashing on the meadow.
To divert himself from his woes, Joe thinks back to the feelings of exhilaration he had had at the end of his first night on the Hudson River as the sun, in her slow stately processional, had bleached the sky of ink. Surviving that first night had given him a sense of competency, even maturity, different from anything he had ever felt before. He had done something dangerous and harrowing with no adult supervision or guidance. He had escaped the Greenlanders. Alone on the Hudson, without parents, coach, teacher or servant to rescue him from his mistakes, he had survived. That satisfying thought leads to the next, one much less reassuring, of being held underwater in the Hudson’s implacable current. That thought leads to a question he has been keeping at bay throughout the hours since being abandoned by Bob Tom.
Is he too much the boy and too little the man to help Prissi? More directly: is he nutz?
That question, as unanswerable as it is, causes him to consider why it is that ever since he has decided to help her that he has been thinking less of Prissi Langue as a fellow Duttonian, a funny fascinating friend, and an irritating unknowable near-girlfriend and more of her as a quest, The Holy Grail, a catalyst for his metamorphosis into something heroic. In other words, Joe tells himself, what he has been doing over the last days is seeking a new Joe rather than a lost Prissi. And, that thought leads Joe back full circle to the question he has been avoiding: Does he have what it takes to help his friend?
Joe answers that question with action rather than more thought. He rolls onto his stomach, draws up his knees and pushes himself upright. He draws a deep breath as he stares at the bleed of red oozing along at the horizon. He holds the chilly air inside his lungs in the same way as he had on the Hudson.
In less than twenty minutes, Joe is sitting on his bicycle staring at a four meter high mesh fence. The fence, whose bottom is hidden by a pile of leaves and trash dropped by the westerly winds, is about ten meters away. Beyond it, perhaps twenty meters from where the boy balances on the bike, is a double mound. Joe studies the two humps and sees that it disappears into the distance, almost like an immense mole’s mound. The nearer mound is much lower than the one behind it and seems to be composed of white almond and globular shapes. The higher mound behind is a dense puzzle of white sticks.
It takes Joe a minute to make sense of what he is seeing.
Animals from the east come under the laser screen. The beam kills them and then burns through the skeleton. The skulls fall forward to make up the smaller mound and the torsi remain behind. If, because of a malfunction with the fence, an animal happened to survive, it still would have to climb over the four meter fence to escape.
Dismounting his bike, Joe walks forward. As he reaches out to grab the fence he abruptly stops as the thought comes that the fence itself might be electrified. As he stares through the fine mesh, he sees a scattering of small delicate skeletons on the ground between the laser and fence, which he realizes are the remains of birds.
As Joe’s eyes follow the length of the dead zone until it disappears in the dawn’s mist, he is overwhelmed at how much life has ended here. The boy squats down onto the dew-drenched, but sere, grass as he tries to come up with a plan for how to get beyond the barrier. He assumes that Prissi was healthy enough to fly over the laser. He looks up to see the source of danger fifty meters above, but, even as he looks, a low flying wren suddenly stops its flight and begins a corkscrew fall to earth. Joe pushes away any thought of Prissi’s fate matching that of the just fallen bird.
Joe sits without insight until he decides to stop thinking like Joe and start thinking like Bob Tom. As soon as he shifts his focal point, he can envision the old man using his fly rod to test whether the fence itself presents a problem. Moments later, Joe has removed his belt, made a noose to secure a wrench from the bike’s repair kit and is swinging it toward the fence.
Satisfied that the fence isn’t electrified, Joe tries to work his fingers into the fence’s fine mesh, but with no success. The boy backtracks to the woods where he scours around until he finds a dead sapling. He works the small tree loose from the earth’s hold, balances it across the bike’s handlebars and rides back to the barrier. Joe uses his belt to strap the bicycle to one end of the tree. He wedges that end into the ground before leaning the other end against the top of the fence. After testing his improvised ladder, Joe begins to shinny his way up the sapling. When he gets to the top, he straddles the fence before he pulls the tree free from the ground and begins hauling. When the bottom of the bike’s wheels clear the top of the fence, Joe carefully reverses his position and that of the sapling so that the bike now is suspended over the ground between the fence and the laser field. Joe’s butt, the same butt that has held Prissi’s attention during a class period, is beginning to ache from the pressure of the wire fence poking into it. When Joe hurries to lower the bike, he loses his grip on the sapling. The STA crashes to the ground with the sapling cudgeling it a split second later.
Joe’s bitter swearing continues even as he flips around, dangles his feet and drops to the ground. Either the STA is an exceedingly well-made bike or there is power in Joe’s words because, when the teener inspects it, the bike is unharmed. Joe swings his leg over the frame and ignores the cracking sounds as his tires crush bird bones. He rides south looking for some weakness in the laser curtain.