43
“We weren’t always homeless,” Zero said. “I remember a yellow room.”
“How old were you when you …” Stanley started to ask, but couldn’t find the right words. “… moved out?”
“I don’t know. I must have been real little, because I don’t remember too much. I don’t remember moving out. I remember standing in a crib, with my mother singing to me. She held my wrists and made my hands clap together. She used to sing that song to me. That one you sang … It was different, though …”
Zero spoke slowly, as if searching his brain for memories and clues. “And then later I know we lived on the street, but I don’t know why we left the house. I’m pretty sure it was a house, and not an apartment. I know my room was yellow.”
It was late afternoon. They were resting in the shadow of the Thumb. They had spent the morning picking onions and putting them in the sack. It didn’t take long, but long enough so that they had to wait another day before heading down the mountain.
They wanted to leave at the first hint of daylight, so they’d have plenty of time to make it to Camp Green Lake before dark. Stanley wanted to be sure he could find the right hole. Then, they would hide by it until everyone went to sleep.
They would dig for as long as it seemed safe, and not a second longer. And then, treasure or no treasure, they’d head up the dirt road. If it was absolutely safe, they’d try to steal some food and water from the camp kitchen.
“I’m good at sneaking in and out of places,” Zero had said.
“Remember,” Stanley had warned. “The door to the Wreck Room squeaks.”
Now he lay on his back, trying to save his strength for the long days ahead. He wondered what happened to Zero’s parents, but he didn’t ask. Zero didn’t like answering questions. It was better to just let him talk when he felt like it.
Stanley thought about his own parents. In her last letter, his mom was worried that they might be evicted from their apartment because of the smell of burning sneakers. They could easily become homeless as well.
&nbs
p; Again, he wondered if they’d been told that he ran away from camp. Were they told that he was dead?
An image appeared in his head of his parents hugging each other and crying. He tried not to think about it.
Instead he tried to recapture the feelings he’d had the night before—the inexplicable feeling of happiness, the sense of destiny. But those feelings didn’t return.
He just felt scared.
The next morning they headed down the mountain. They’d dunked their caps in the water hole before putting them on their heads. Zero held the shovel, and Stanley carried the sack, which was crammed with onions and the three jars of water. They left the pieces of the broken jar on the mountain.
“This is where I found the shovel,” Stanley said, pointing out a patch of weeds.
Zero turned and looked up toward the top of the mountain. “That’s a long way.”
“You were light,” Stanley said. “You’d already thrown up everything that was inside your stomach.”
He shifted the sack from one shoulder to the other. It was heavy. He stepped on a loose rock, slipped, then fell hard. The next thing he knew he was sliding down the steep side of the mountain. He dropped the sack, and onions spilled around him.
He slid into a patch of weeds and grabbed onto a thorny vine. The vine ripped out of the earth, but slowed him enough so that he was able to stop himself.
“Are you all right?” Zero asked from above.
Stanley groaned as he pulled a thorn out of the palm of his hand. “Yeah,” he said. He was all right. He was worried more about the jars of water.
Zero climbed down after him, retrieving the sack along the way. Stanley pulled some thorns out of his pant legs.
The jars hadn’t broken. The onions had protected them, like Styrofoam packing material. “Glad you didn’t do that when you were carrying me,” Zero said.
They’d lost about a third of the onions, but recovered many of them as they continued down the mountain. When they reached the bottom, the sun was just rising above the lake. They walked directly toward it.
Soon they stood on the edge of a cliff, looking down on the dry lake bed. Stanley wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see the remains of the Mary Lou off in the distance.
“You thirsty?” Stanley asked.