The Last Notebook of Leonardo (5 page)

I couldn't sleep. I had had an easy night, comparatively, and I had also slept for a few hours before dawn. Now I sat cross-legged on the floor beside our makeshift table and started to look through Dad's boxes of papers. I didn't have anything else to do. On top of one box I saw the photocopied pages of the ship's log, written in Spanish. And when I dug around in the box, I found a Spanish-English dictionary. I didn't know how far Dad had gotten in translating the log, but I thought I could give it a try, at least until I felt sleepy. So I found a pencil, and some blank paper to write down my translation, and I got started. I opened up a bag of celery and munched on a stick now and then. Now that my dad was an orangutan, I was eating less junk food and more veggies, which was probably healthy.

Flipping through the pages, I noticed a list of names at the very end of the log. It was a roster of all the sailors who had disembarked in Spain at the end of the voyage, and of how much each one had been paid. Leonardo Vince was not on the list. Somewhere between the time the Santa Torpedo had left the coast of Spain for America, and the time it had returned, he had disappeared.

I decided to start at the beginning of the log and
work my way through it. I didn't have to translate every word. Usually after the first few words of an entry, I could tell that it had nothing to do with Leonardo. Every little thing had been written down. All the spare canvas, all the spare wood for repairs, the food, the cloth, the number of chickens in the chicken coop on the deck, the number of pigs down below, the bottles of wine for the captain, it was all spelled out. Whoever wrote that log seemed to be interested mainly in how much everything cost.

Still, I began to get a sense of what it was like on that ship. And with the wind roaring over the tent, whistling in the ropes, I had fun pretending that I was right there on board. I knew what the sailors ate every day, and I knew how fast the ship went, and whether the water was stormy or calm. I saw a word that translated as “overboard,” and I got worried about Leonardo. It would be a horrible waste if the great man simply fell over the side one day. Also, our journey to his final resting place would end up uncomfortably watery. But when I translated the whole entry, I found out that it was one of the chickens that went overboard. The cook had been about to cut its head off on the railing, when a gust of wind ripped the chicken out of the cook's hands and tossed it into the ocean. At first I felt sorry for the chicken, but then I decided that a chicken
stood a better chance in the Atlantic Ocean than in a cook's pot.

I skimmed along, munching celery sticks as I worked, translating a word here and a phrase there to get a sense of what was happening on deck. A few hours later and about a quarter of the way through the log, I ran into an entry that was so interesting I put my celery stick down on the table and translated the passage very carefully, word for word. It went like this: “Six good iron rods ruined. One of the men caught entertaining the aft cabin by bending them with his bare hands. When ordered to do so, couldn't bend them back perfectly straight. Denied rations that evening as punishment.” I remembered that when Leonardo was a boy, he used to do the same trick with iron rods to impress his friends.

Until that moment, I had been doubtful about my dad's theory. I could see a lot of coincidences stacking up, but I wasn't sure that the Leonardo Vince on that ship was really the same as Leonardo da Vinci. Now I felt more certain. Who else would do such a thing? And poor Leonardo, sent to his bed without dinner. I felt sorry for him. He was only trying to amuse the other sailors. I thought about waking up my dad and showing him the passage, but he was still sound asleep snoring on the other side of the tent. I figured I could tell him later; there was no hurry.

I turned back to the manuscript and continued to skim through the entries, but for a long time I didn't find anything else interesting. No mention of the Italian sailor. Finally I found the part where the ship reached land. I didn't understand the nautical notation, but I guessed that my father had deciphered the numbers. He already knew that the ship had landed just north of Manhattan. The first day after the ship reached America, a group of six men rowed ashore, explored a little bit, shot some deer and a squirrel for food, and rowed back to the ship. The next day they sailed a mile down the coast and tried again. They were looking for a river or a stream, so they could fill up their water casks with fresh water.

The entry for the third day of land exploration went like this: “V. of shore party, disappeared into forest, not seen again. Men searched two hours, no sign. Captain's opinion, jumped ship. First Mate's opinion, killed by ferocious animal. Will wait two days.”

Two days later, according to the log, the Santa Torpedo upped anchor and sailed to a new location on the coast. Vince was never mentioned again. I skimmed through the rest of the log and didn't find his name anywhere. Whoever wrote the log seemed to care more about the hides of the strange animals they had shot and the prices they might be able to get back in Spain.

“Dad!” I said. I couldn't help it. I had to tell him. “Dad, quick, wake up and look!”

“What?!” he shouted, sitting up and bashing his head on the roof of the tent. He was under the artic quilt part of the roof, so I don't think it hurt him any. “ Where's the tiger?” He looked around wildly.

“No tiger, Dad,” I said. “Wake up and look.”

His hair stood out around his head and his eyes were stretched wide open so that, even as an orangutan, he looked insane. “ What's wrong?” he shouted.

“Nothing's wrong, Dad. Did you ever read through this ship's log?”

As soon as I mentioned the ship's log, and waved it around in the light, he woke up thoroughly and scrambled across the tent on all fours to take a look. “I only got to a part of it here and there. Did you find anything, Jem?”

“Listen to this, Dad.” I read the part about the iron rods.

“That's him!” my dad sang out. “That's got to be him!”

Then I read the part about disappearing into the forest. When I was done reading, Dad said in a hushed voice, “ You found it, Jem. That's the critical entry. By God, he jumped ship, and he disappeared in the New World. Now we have something to go on!”

“But don't you think he might have gotten eaten?” I said.

“Nonsense!” Dad said. “He probably had a knife and one of those iron rods down his pants. Any bear came around to bother him, and wang! He probably mashed it over the head and then pulled out a notebook to sketch the thing.”

“But they didn't find any trace of him,” I said. “They didn't even find any trail to follow.”

“That's exactly right,” my dad said. “Don't you see? If he had been eaten, they would have found a skeleton. That captain was smart. He knew. He knew that Vince had left on purpose. That was Leo's plan to begin with, don't you see? He wanted to explore a new continent. He didn't mean to come back.”

“What if he got captured by Indians?” I said.

“He might have,” my dad said, thoughtfully. “He might have fallen in with a local tribe. That's very smart, Jem. We'll have to research Native American lore.” But then he stopped and smiled at me. “Jem. Listen. Do you hear anything?”

We were quiet a moment. “Nope. What is it, Dad?”

He grinned again. “The wind is gone. And look at the light.”

I realized suddenly that the tent was glowing from sunlight that filtered in through the nylon material.
Our candle had gone out a long time ago, but I hadn't noticed. The ship's log had been too absorbing. And the package of celery was empty. I had eaten it all. I hoped it wouldn't give me a stomachache. “What time is it?” I said.

Dad checked his watch, pushing aside the matted hair on his wrist that covered up the dial. “It's five in the afternoon. We've been here all day, and the storm is over. Jem, you better duck outside and see what's happened to the world.”

His head looked like a pumpkin, but he was friendly.

The Earth had turned a sparkly white. The sky was clear blue and the sun was bright near the horizon. The bushes were no longer visible; they were bulges of whiteness glittering in the sunlight. They had funny irregular shapes, and reminded me of bears and dinosaurs that had crouched down and gotten covered up. The trees were also covered with snow, but I could still see their dark prickly branches sticking out here and there. The road was a shallow white trench and the wooden telephone poles standing along the road were crusted with white on one side where the wind had blown the hardest. Even the wires that connected the telephone poles had snow on them, and they stood out against the sky as lines of icy white. Everything was absolutely still. The wind had stopped entirely. The air was clear and cold, but not so cold that it hurt my nose or stung my throat. I
could put down my hood and look around and enjoy the sight. You can't enjoy the world as much if you are wearing a hood, because it puts a frame around the world and makes you feel like you are watching a television screen; and also it blocks the sound from your ears and makes everything seem unreal. But once I put my hood down, the whole snowy countryside came rushing up around me.

I walked knee deep to the roadside and looked up and down and all directions, but I couldn't see a house or a barn anywhere. All I saw was open fields and snow-covered woods. I saw a few bird tracks in the snow, and some other tracks that I couldn't recognize; but nothing very big, and nothing that wore a boot or a shoe. After a while I started to hear a rumbling sound to my left, and I peered down the road as far as I could. The road bent out of sight about half a mile away, and something came scraping and grinding around the bend into view. It was a snowplow. I thought I would watch it go by and wave at it. It came grinding up slowly, pushing the snow to one side in a huge stack. When it got closer I could see it was not a very high-end snowplow. It was somebody's old rusty pickup truck with a plow blade fixed to the front. I didn't want it to accidentally plow me under, so I stood pretty far back from the roadside and waved as it drove past.

The truck stopped and the window opened. A head stuck out of the window and looked at me. It was a very large, round head, wider than it was tall because the cheeks were so fat, with smile lines around the eyes and the mouth, and with a lot of shaggy blonde hair on top. The face was red, like a giant round pumpkin that somebody had put a wig on. I couldn't tell at first if it was a man or a woman, but when it started to talk I realized it was a man.

“My goodness you sure gave me a fright!” he said. He opened his mouth and his eyes very wide, and laughed very loud, as if he had said something funny. He didn't wait for me to reply, but kept on talking. “I says to myself, ‘what is that, is that a bear?' I says, ‘Goodness,' I says, ‘I'm'a go back and tell Gladys I saw a bear standing on the side of the road,' except if it was a stump or I don't know what, then I thought it was a person. What
are
you doing here all alone on the side of the road? I saw a raccoon about six miles back, poor thing was so froze up and hungry it just sat there and didn't budge, I says, ‘If I had a sandwich,' I says to myself, ‘I'd toss it out the window for the poor thing,' that's how hungry it looked. Only I wouldn't tell nobody else about it. People like to hunt them. But I didn't expect a bear. I tell you. Then I says to myself, ‘Well, Bill, since when is a bear bright blue with red trim?'
Because that's the color of your coat you know. I says, ‘That can't be a bear.' I says—”

“Um,” I said; I didn't like to interrupt, but I wasn't sure if I'd get the chance otherwise. “Is it very far to the next town?”

“The next town!” the person said. “Depends on what you call a town. There's Sutton, but it's hardly a town at all. And there's Collingwood, which has a nice store which is called Collingwood's and has garden gnomes and things like that which are very nice, you know, made out of stone, and there's . . . say, how long have you been out here, Sonny? You all alone? Did I tell you, you sure give me a fright? I thought you was a bear! You want a ride anywhere?”

“Um,” I said, trying to decide which question to answer first, “I'm with my dad.”

Bill turned his round head one way and the other, looking everywhere, and said, “I don't see your dad. What is he, froze under the snow?”

“He's in our tent, back there,” I said. “We're looking for Indian relics,” I added.

He looked surprised and scratched at his nose with a pudgy red hand. “Tell you the truth, it's not such a great time to look for Indian relics. I heard of arrowheads and things like that scattered here and there, but with the snow and all, it's a little hard to spot them. Say, what did you say your name was? Anyways
there's Blackwood too. Did I mention Blackwood? That's a town that's got an auction house I got me a radio for six dollars and a broken pair of pliers. Didn't know the darn thing was broke. Well I says to Stan who was next to me, ‘Stan,' I says, ‘that whole box that's going for fifty cents is got a pair of pliers worth five dollars in it so I'm'a bid on it.' And Stan he says—”