“Twelve is too young,” Kyle said.
“When you were the same age you shot two men,” Ben said.
Kyle had no good response for that but explained that there truly wasn’t enough room in the fourteen-foot boat for three bodies plus all the gear.
Ben complained and threatened to blow the whistle on Kyle and Raheem.
But it hadn’t happened.
Kyle felt blessed. He felt like the explosions they’d heard in town would distract attention away from them. Especially when sirens filled the air a few minutes later.
*
“LET’S HURRY,” KYLE SAID.
Raheem nodded and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet. He did that when he had nervous energy. Raheem had a lot of nervous energy. He let Kyle do the thinking most of the time, though. When it came to the great adventure the two boys planned to take on the Missouri River, Raheem deferred completely to Kyle because it had been Kyle’s obsession in the first place.
For over three years, ever since he’d seen the old black-and-white photo of Theodore Roosevelt chasing down a pair of boat thieves on the Missouri, Kyle had wanted to set off on the river. He’d started a list of things he would need and kept the list, and the gear he could find, hidden in his bedroom and in a part of Grandma Lottie’s garage she never checked out.
The list started with:
Sleeping bags
Food (jerkie jerky, crackers, things like that)
Fishing poles and tackel tackle
Rain coats
Binokulars Binoculars
Pistol or rifle (animals, hoboes)
Journal for writing
Map
Knife
X-tra clothes
Swimming trunks
Rope
Tent
Plates and utensuls utensils
Matches
Oars (get B4 summer)
Cell phone
Money
And went on to include a camp stove, sleeping mats, freeze-dried stew, a pump water purifier, cooler, books (including a paperback of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn he’d struggled with and hoped would make more sense once he was on the river), an iPod for music (which Raheem had been loading with hip-hop and country), and dozens of other items. Kyle had started the list years before and had corrected a few words he’d misspelled earlier but he was still a poor speller.
The discovery of a beat-up Marlin .22 bolt-action rifle with a seven shot magazine was like discovering a pirate’s buried treasure for Kyle. It had been propped in the corner of a garage of an abandoned house along with a hundred rounds of ammunition.
The load got so big that Kyle added a new item: supply raft. They’d lash a gear-laden raft to the boat itself and tow it down the river.
Kyle had located nearly every item on his checklist in garbage cans and Dumpsters that he’d looted in the alleys of Grimstad during the summer and before and after school. He was always astonished at the value and importance of things people threw away. The pickings were the best when the price of oil dropped and people moved away. Often, they simply piled perfectly good stuff on their driveways just before they drove out of town.
Like the brass sextant Kyle found in one pile. He couldn’t believe it. Although Kyle didn’t know how it worked, he knew a sextant could be valuable for on-the-water navigation.
Still, though, Kyle felt uprepared. He’d never actually spent time on a boat or gone overnight camping except in Grandma Lottie’s backyard. He knew there would be dams and other obstacles to be negotiated somehow, and he had little knowledge and less experience to deal with them. But he recalled Ben’s mom Cassie saying to him that he’d “been dealt a bad hand since Day One but that never seemed to hold him back.” He liked that.
And he hoped she was right.
*
RAHEEM HAD BEEN THRILLED that morning when Kyle peddled his bike to his house on the way to school and said, “Today is the day.”
Raheem surprised his father by going back inside and hugging him and saying goodbye. Apparently, he hadn’t done that for a while.
For his part, Kyle had left a short letter on Grandma Lottie’s kitchen table. Monday morning was when she left for her weekly appointment to get her hair done.
It read:
Grandma Lottie:
I won’t be home after school because today I am going on a great adventure. I want to see more of the country than North Dakota but don’t think I don’t like North Dakota because I do. I want to see what’s out there in the world on my own.
It has nothing to do with you. I love you and you’re great. Please don’t be sad.
I can’t tell you where I’m going or you’ll try to get me back. I’ll come back but not for a while.
I borrowed $120 from your drawer. I’m sorry and I’ll pay you back twice that when I can. I’ll send you the money when I can. We needed to get going before it got too cold and icy.
This was nobody’s idea but mine.
Love,
Kyle
*
AS THEY TIED the supply raft to the stern of the johnboat, Kyle looked up. A dark curl of smoke from town was rising above the tops of the dense cottonwood trees near the river. The sirens howled so relentlessly he had to shout.
“Did you get my map?”
Raheem pointed to his ear indicating he couldn’t hear.
“My river map.”
His friend understood and gestured to a thick flat Ziploc bag pressed down by a strap to the top of a duffel bag. Kyle nodded his approval.
The map consisted of pages he’d ripped out of an atlas from the school library. It looked like a pretty good map and Kyle wanted it handy even though he had the route memorized.
They’d float downriver to Lake Sakakawea and on to Bismarck. Then they’d exit North Dakota into South Dakota: Mobridge, the Cheyenne Indian Reservation, Pierre, the Lower Brule Indian Reservation, Yankton, and Vermillion. Sioux City, Iowa, was the next big town, followed by Omaha. Then St. Louis where the river joined the Mississippi. Then south to Memphis and New Orleans.
He’d never even been to South Dakota before, where the exotic place names (Pierre!) started. And beyond that it got even more exciting. Kyle couldn’t even imagine what Memphis must be like.
And Raheem had shown him YouTube videos of women in New Orleans lifting up their shirts to expose their breasts in the street.
What he didn’t want was for the boat and raft to be caught up in the heavy ice floes. Even though Theodore Roosevelt had somehow done it in March of 1886, Kyle couldn’t imagine floating downriver surrounded by huge sheets of ice.
September was kind of late already, he knew. The weather could turn any day.
Even if they made good time it would take months, Kyle figured. But every mile they’d be further south and it would get warmer.
That was fine with him.
*
IT WAS AWKWARD AT FIRST, with Raheem on the oars in the middle of the boat stroking like crazy. They were both wet to above their knees just from shoving the boat and raft out into the water and climbing inside.