I sat in the dark of the cabin replica to think. Thoreau's mantra, “
Simplify, simplify,
” played endlessly in my head. I'd acted as straightforwardly as possible by calling the proper authorities but hadn't expected such a negative response. I knew I had to get to the heart of the matter and confront Gus. This strategy might be simple, but I dreaded it nonetheless.
I approached the makeshift tent Gus had erected deep in the woods. The place looked like command central for something imminent and evil. Laptops, boxes, flashlights, shovels, even racks of clothes filled the small space. A large pine table was covered with one of the survey maps. The map was held in place by a sizable bowie knife.
Gus entered right behind me, his face smudged with grease as if he were at war. “The prodigal son returns.”
“Stop calling me son.”
He folded his wide arms across his chest and asked what he could do for me.
“You can call off whatever it is you're planning.”
He told me he'd never been much of a planner and was more the spontaneous type. I grabbed the survey map from the long table.
“You pretended we were surveying the land to walk in Thoreau's shoes, but what you're really up to is determining where to bury land mines.”
Instead of denying it, his smile grew even wider. “Is that what you think?”
I told him yes.
“Well, since your thoughts manifest to actions, I'm sure there
will
be mines.”
“Are you trying to blame this on
me
? I'm only thinking about them because of you!”
“You've got to learn to accept responsibility for your thoughts. I taught you that weeks ago.”
I had to give the guy credit; it was amazing how he could turn an argument around. Behind him, Mike and several of the other guys suddenly appeared.
“Look out, boys,” Gus said. “Larry here is thinking about terrorism so there
will
be terrorism. Someone should notify the authorities.”
Mike grabbed me by the arm and threw me to the ground.
“What's wrong with you?” I shouted. “I just had surgery!”
As if in response to the word
surgery,
betagold entered the tent. She'd been sporting a polyester camouflage tracksuit and beret
97
since she'd moved into Victopia a few days ago.
“Take him outside and beat the crap out of him,” she told Mike.
“Whoa, Che betagold!” I wiped off my jeans and stood up. “I didn't give you one of my major organs so you could become
a revolutionary. You must have
some
gratitude for the sacrifice I made.”
When she knocked me back down to the ground with her walking stick, I took that as a no.
“I refuse to have my kidney take part in any criminal activity,” I added. “In fact, I've just decided I want it back. I'm going to see if we can have the operation reversed.”
To my surprise, she took the bowie knife from the table and handed it to me. She removed the jacket of her tracksuit and turned around. “You want your kidney back?” betagold asked. “Take it.”
Gus's impish smile made me think he might actually be enjoying this. Mike started to go for the knife, but Gus held him back.
“Go ahead, Larry. If that's what you want, do it. I'll even hold her down for you.” He held betagold against the long table.
I didn't want to remove her kidneyâcertainly not without anesthesia or sterile equipmentâbut what
did
I want to do? I thought about holding the knife to betagold's throat and using her as a hostage to leave the tent alive. I could defend myself against Mike and his gang of spiritual thugs all the way to the parking lot, but that also seemed extreme. In the end, I threw the knife on the table like a bartender whipping a bottle of beer down the length of the bar.
“I don't want any trouble,” I said. “But if something illegal is going on, it stops now.”
“Oh, really?” Mike picked up the knife from the table. “And why should we care what you think?”
“Because I told the FBI everythingâabout the survey
maps, the land mines, the visiting dignitaries from the Pentagon on Thursday. They've got this place under surveillance. You're all looking at serious jail time.”
I watched fear spread across Mike's face like a cumulonimbus cloud.
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He and the others turned to Gus, who didn't seem fazed in the least.
“You told the FBI, and they didn't believe you, probably because of your past shenanigans. The fact that you're here right now tells me they didn't.”
Why was this guy always right?
“I don't want innocent people getting hurt,” I said.
“No one from the Pentagon is innocent!” For the first time, Gus lost his cool and started screaming. “The war machine is out of control! When does it end? People like us”âhe motioned to everyone in the tent, including meâ“need to put our foot down and stop the madness!”
“Not with more madness,” I said. “You'll only make things worse. And using Thoreau and Gandhi as cover-ups, that's just plain wrong.” I kept telling myself the P.I. had called back to say there'd been a mistake, that Gus wasn't my biological father. But part of me recalled Peter's description of him as a paranoid rabble-rouser. I'd always wanted to meet my father. But I hardly wanted him to be ranting in a tent about anarchy.
I thought I was getting through to Mike; he was digging a small hole with the toe of his sneaker, avoiding Gus's gaze. But I was mistaken. After a moment, Mike looked up at me with
even more determination. “We've been working too hard for one goody-two-shoes to screw it up. You think you're so specialâit makes me sick. As if making the world a better place is an actual career path and you're bucking for a promotion. Who are you trying to impress, anyway?”
I was just about to answer when his fist nailed my side. I tried to protect my one good kidney as he came in for another punch. I fell to the ground with the sound of betagold and Gus cheering him on.
I woke up nursing my kidney, but it gratefully seemed oblivious to yesterday's fight. I rolled back the bandage to gaze at the scar. Pink, raised, and amazingly only three inches long. Yesterday it seemed like a merit badge for Selfless Service to Mankind. Today it signified nothing more than a foolish decision.
When Beth entered my room, she noticed the sticky notes covering the wall above my desk. “This reminds me of when you decided to run for president. You used so many stickies, it looked like you'd re-wallpapered the room in yellow.”
I leaned back in the swivel chair and tried to make sense of all the information. “There's something else going on, but I don't know what. Images that don't make sense, scraps of conversation, and those chess piecesâit's almost as if this is some kind of game. Sometimes I feel as if Gus set up this whole thing for my benefit.”
“He's planning to attack some bigwigs from the Pentagon and it's about
you
? Even on the Swensen narcissistic-meter, that theory's off the charts.”
I had no evidence, no proof that Gus was playing me for a fool; it was just a growing feeling of unease. “There was a rack of clothes in Gus's tent, some of them still with price tags. The
FBI agent who came to the house had a price tag hanging from the waistband of his pants. Coincidence, sure, but what if Gus is orchestrating some huge âJosh' game?”
“Your self-absorption is killing me!”
“Secret phone calls, a guy with a videocamera I keep bumping into at the pond, and when I was talking to Katie the other day, she kept checking her hand as if she was reading crib notes. Everything related to Gus seems staged. It's like he's a puppetmaster, pulling strings to make the rest of us dance.”
“Why don't you try and turn him in again?”
I told her I'd visited the park ranger who'd arrested me with Brady, thinking he might be interested in the violent act being planned on his precious historic site. Maybe he would've listened if someone else had brought him the information, but all he saw when he looked at me was trouble. He barely glanced up from his newspaper as he told me to get lost.
“Well, we've got to do something,” Beth said. “The dignitaries will be here in less than a week.”
I pointed to the wall of scribbled notes and told her I'd contacted several organizations specializing in deactivating land mines. Unfortunately many of them were located in other parts of the world. “There's a man in Cambodia who can get here in two weeks, but that's too late.”
Beth climbed onto my bed as I explained what I'd learned in the past few days. I told her about the trained dogs who sniffed out explosives. Sadly, the cost was prohibitive.
“Too bad you got Brady killed,” Beth said. “Maybe he could've pulled a Lassie and saved the day.”
I grabbed one of my sneakers from the floor and hurled it at her. She threw it back with equal velocity and nearly nailed my head. As I got up to tackle her, I noticed Peter in the doorway. He asked Beth if he could talk to me privately; on her way out of the room, she sailed the other sneaker at me, clocking me on the ear.
Peter surveyed the wall of notes. “I see you're back to your old selfâmaking plans, taking actionâall the stuff you're good at.” He handed me a piece of paper, which I recognized as the letter from the DNA testing service I was sure I'd thrown away at the hospital. “So you think your biological father is still alive?”
“Not anymore. Once I saw âInconclusive Results' on that letter, I put that lamebrain idea out of my head forever.”
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“You think someone is your biological father, you go to the trouble of sending DNA to a lab, and you don't tell me about it?”
“I didn't want to hurt you.”
“I thought our relationship was a little more honest than that.”
Before I had a chance to explain, Peter jumped back in. “Let's seeâyou pretend to kill yourself, put me through unparalleled grief, then come waltzing into my life as if nothing happened. I take you back with open arms. You run for national office, I'm with you every step of the way. You take off for eight months after your girlfriend, send me depressing letters from the road, then come back and never leave the couch, not even
to eat or take a shower. You need money for some cockamamie enlightenment course, and I give it to you. But this”âhe held out the letter againâ“this is too much. You want to find another father so badly, you have my permission. Go find one.”
I followed him down the hall, apologizing with every step. “It was stupid. I should've told you. I don't want another fatherâI have you.”
When he turned around to face me, he looked as if he'd aged ten years since yesterday. “Just tell me you didn't think it was Gus. That's all I want to know.”
Tell someone what he wants to hear or be honest? It seemed like the eternal unanswerable question. I opted for honesty and told him yes. He gave me a slow, sad smile.
“Your mother left me with a handful, that's for sure. If someone told me back when I proposed that I'd end up here, I would've taken that sapphire ring off her finger, turned around, and run.”
His words hit me like the frigid water at Walden. “Gus isn't my father,
you
are. I was just telling Beth this is all a game to him, that he's intentionally messing with me. I don't even know what's real anymore.”
Peter put his hand on my shoulder. “Let me make this easy for you. You're welcome to stay till after the holidays, until college starts in January. After that? I'm done.”
“But I don't wantâ”
He held up his hand to stop me. “I'm too old for this, Josh. Too old for FBI agents, presidential debates, fake suicides, and land mines. I just want to run my little business in peace. Is that asking too much for a guy my age?”
I had to agree it wasn't. I told him I'd take care of everything myself
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and would be on a train to Princeton in less than a month. When I looked at him leaning against the table, I couldn't decide which wore Peter out more, the lethargic, depressed Josh or the hyperactive, solve-the-world's-problems-by-dinnertime version. But I knew one thingâneither would be Peter's problem anymore. I was now officially on my own.
“We either make ourselves miserable,
or we make ourselves strong.
The amount of work is the same.”
Â
Carlos Castaneda
Needless to say, Christmas was a disaster. I almost would've preferred an all-out brawl; the silent, polite day Peter and I shared reeked of phony cheer. I was relieved when he excused himself to work on pitching his event-planning services to a new client in Framingham.
Beth and I exchanged Christmas presents according to the rule we'd instituted several years agoâhomemade gifts only. In between searching online for ways to deactivate land mines, I gathered up dryer lint, blended it with water and scraps of colored paper, then pressed the mushy pulp into a large plastic container. After much drying and experimentation, I ended up with several sheets of beautiful, thick, homemade paper. She loved it.
For my gift, Beth had woven together strips of brown and black suede to form a chessboard you could fold into your pocket. I tucked it into the collar of my shirt. “A checkered ascot.”
She grabbed it and placed it on top of her head. “A multicolored yarmulke.”
I took it back and pretended to blow my nose. “A handkerchief.”
We went back and forth with the joke for much too long, as we did every year.
“Seriously,” Beth said. “You've been so obsessed with Gus, I figured you could put this to good use.”
I retrieved the chess pieces Gus had given me and placed them on the new board. When I finished, I looked up to see Beth putting on her coat.
“I've got so much work to do,” she said.
“It's Christmas!”
“Unless someone left psych and poli sci papers under the tree, I've got to go.” She kissed me on the top of my head.
Sitting alone with a partly finished chess game seemed an apt metaphor for my life. Instead of playing solo, I borrowed Peter's car to find Janine. She snuck out of Victopia as if her father was asleep upstairs.
“How come I can't come in?” I asked yet again.
“Katie's parents are here for the dayâI just want to give her some privacy.” She hopped in Peter's car and we drove to Walden.
The fresh snow nestled on the pines made the reservation seem as if it too had been decorated for the holidays. Janine and I sat on the stone wall down by the beach and breathed in the cold air, watching it escape from our mouths moments later as vapor.
“I searched Gus's room yesterday while he was outâno boxes or canisters resembling the ones you found in his truck.”
“I know I didn't imagine them,” I said. “We should check his tent. I doubt anyone will be there Christmas Day.”
We gathered our courage and hiked into the woods. Like
extras in a war movie, we inched along the ground as we approached Gus's headquarters, finally making our way inside. Lots of camouflage gear and lanterns but no land mines.
“Let's find the maps,” I suggested. “At least we'll know where the mines are buried.”
We tore apart the tent until we found a cache of rolled-up maps. Unfortunately, they were our original versions, without the critical
x
's. Janine tossed them to the floor in a tirade of curses.
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I couldn't help but think of the conversation I'd had with Beth about Gus. Why did I still get the impression he was up to something more than terrorism? Some kind of sick game? As if to illustrate the point, I spotted a carved king on the pine table. I shoved it into my pocket. When I'd been here last, one of the survey maps had been fastened to the table by the bowie knife. I ran my hand across the tabletop, and sure enough, the impressions of several
x
's were carved into the soft wood. I grabbed one of the maps and laid it over the table. Janine caught on to what I was doing and put on one of the miner helmets from the shelf. When I pressed down on the map and she shone the light, we could faintly make out where the
x
's had been drawn.
“It's not this map,” I said. “The
x
's are in the middle of the pond.”
We tried four more maps until we found one where the
x
's corresponded to places people would walk. I marked the
x
's with a pencil, then rolled the map under my arm.
“Finding the locations of the mines is the best Christmas present I could've asked for,” I said. “Let's go dig them up.”
“Are you nuts?” Janine yelled. “We're not trained for that.”
“The biggest problem in digging up mines is that you don't know where they're buried,” I explained. “But now we know exactly where they are. Professionals just use garden trowelsâthe excavation part isn't that hard.”
“Are you listening to yourself? We're not digging up land mines!”
“What else am I supposed to do? I've contacted the FBI, and they don't believe me. I've got to put my money where my mouth is. It's the most tangible lesson Gus taught us.”
She pulled out her cell phone. “I'm telling Peter you've finally lost it.”
I grabbed the phone from her hand. “I'm not Peter's problem anymoreâhe's made that clear. I'll take care of this myself.”
“I want nothing to do with this.” Janine stormed out of the tent but returned a moment later. She tossed me the miner's helmet. “Merry Christmas. If you're going to kill yourself for real this time, you might want to see what you're doing.”