The Last Notebook of Leonardo (8 page)

“Dad,” I said after a while, “I have an idea. Let's write out a sign, and I can flash it at the cars as they go by. Then somebody might stop and help.”

“Oh brilliant,” Dad said. He was becoming grumpy from the exercise. “Absolutely. We're obviously not noticeable enough as it is.”

“I thought I could write, ‘Indian Shaman in Bear Costume, Needs Ride.' Then people wouldn't be as scared off.”

“What!” my dad said. “Jem! That's a lie!”

“It's almost true,” I said. “But if you want to pull that thing for another fifty miles, we can forget the sign.”

He groaned and said, “Oh, go ahead then.”

I took some blank paper and a pen and drew our sign in big block letters. Then we parked the wagon on the roadside and both sat on top of it, side by side, me holding up the sign, Dad leafing through the Tribes book. For a long time nobody drove by. The road was probably never frequently used, and now it was sheeted in ice. The people who lived along it were most likely at home already. The wind blew my dad's hair around. I didn't mind if the wind went from me to him. But sometimes it switched around and blew his long wispy orange hair into my face and right up my nose.

“Achoo!” I said. “Dad. When we find that cave, can we live in it? I always wanted to be a cave man.”

Dad looked up from the book, his fingernail pressed down where he had left off reading. “Hm?” he said. “Oh, it'll be a while before we find it, I
expect. Might be in the spring. Or next year. Who knows. There's probably hundreds of caves we'll have to explore. But we'll find it in the end.”

“I wonder,” I said, “if he carved his initials on the wall? You know, ‘LDV wuz here'. Otherwise it'll be hard to know if we found the right place.”

“That's a good point,” Dad said. “What exactly did he leave behind? I'm hoping we'll find the remains of his ornithopter. That was the flying machine he invented. It had leather wings that flapped like a bird's, and you worked it by pulling on metal handles. The plans are in his notebooks.”

“Maybe we'll find his skeleton,” I said. “That would be creepy. I don't know if I'd live in a cave that had a skeleton in it.”

“It wouldn't hurt you,” Dad said. “Skeletons mainly mind their own business. But Jem, quick, get your sign ready, someone's coming.”

We watched an old rusty station wagon crawling up the road. When it came near us I held out our sign and waved it around. I thought the car would accelerate as soon as the driver saw Dad, but it didn't. It stopped next to us and an old lady rolled down the window and looked out. She had to crane her head up to see us, because we were sitting ten feet above the road. At first I thought she might be so old and blind that she hadn't properly seen Dad.
Then I thought that if she was so blind, we might not want her to drive us.

“Hello Indians,” she said cheerfully. She couldn't have been too blind to read my sign. “My, you look cold out there.” Her face was creased and swirled like a pool of mud that had gotten stirred around with a stick. Under the wrinkles I could see she had wide cheekbones and a high forehead, and her hair, which had gone gray but was still streaked with black, was pulled back behind her head. Her eyes sparkled at us, and all at once I had the thought that she was an Indian, a real one, a Native American, and not fake like we were. She was a tiny woman who could barely see over the steering wheel. She looked about ninety years old. “I don't think you can fit your wagon in my car,” she said in her cheerful but brittle old-lady's voice. “ You can tie it behind, if you like. I think,” she added, looking Dad up and down, “that the boy had better sit in the front seat next to me, and the man in the bear suit had better lie down in back. I don't suppose you'll fit otherwise. I do like a big man with a hairy chest.”

Dad winked at me and grinned. He tied our wagon handle to the back bumper with rope, and then crawled into the back seat of the station wagon. He could just fit, his head up against one door and his big feet up against the opposite door. I sat in the
front seat and the little old lady drove down the road, very slowly because of the ice everywhere and the wagon in tow.

“What tribe are you from?” she asked politely, looking at my dad in the rear view mirror.

“Well, . . .” Dad said. His voice was muffled because his face was pressed into the door and the padded handle had gone partly into his mouth. “It's this way. See, we're . . . what I mean is . . . you could say we're Mahicans.”

“Oh wonderful!” she said, smiling, her eyes sparkling, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that she knew perfectly well we were not. “You have a wonderful bear suit. It fits you very well. I'm not familiar with the bear species. When I first saw you, I thought you might be a Sumatran orangutan. But I'm sure that you know best.”

“Good God,” Dad said. “Jem! Did you hear that? The lady knows what she's talking about.”

“Sometimes she does,” the lady said, with a light, tinkling laugh. “Sometimes she doesn't. What is your Mahican name?”

“Uh,” Dad said. “Carl. Carl Martin. And my son is Jem.”

“Carl Martin,” she repeated in her precise, old lady's voice. “Jem Martin. Very glad to meet you. Most people call me Noma. It's short for Nomasis,
which means ‘little grandmother' in Mahican.” She laughed again. “I decided you were probably not a Native America shaman when I saw that you were studying the subject in a book. It seemed most unlikely.”

“Well, okay,” I said, jumping in because my dad had trouble talking around the upholstery. “It's a little embarrassing, but see, we couldn't think of any other way to get people to stop for us. Everyone gets scared of my dad and drives away. We thought that if he was an Indian shaman, maybe they'd be less scared, or more curious. And we really wanted to get a ride to Ipskunk.”

“Quite understandable,” she said, smiling at me. “And it certainly worked. I
am
curious. Do you live in Ipskunk?”

“Oh no,” I said. “We're looking for Leonardo da Vinci.”

“Of course,” she said, politely. “I should have guessed. Under what circumstances did you hope to meet him?”

“In a cave,” I said. “Not him exactly. Well, maybe his skeleton.”

“Jem!” Dad sputtered around the door handle. “You're getting at it from the wrong direction. Tell her from the beginning, and maybe she can help. She might know.” So I told her the whole story, starting
with my dad turning himself into an orangutan and us getting kicked out of our home. She shook her head at that part. I told her about our quest, and how we had traced Leonardo across the Atlantic to North America, and realized that he must have taken up with the local Indians. Then I told her about the legend of the cave, and her eyes glittered and she had an odd smile on her face as she drove.

When I was done, she said, “What a beautiful story. I'm so glad I stopped to give you a ride. And now you want to know if I can help you? I certainly know about the legend of the cave.”

“ You do?!” Dad sputtered. “Do you know the right cave?”

“I might,” she said. “But that's hard to prove. There's more than one cave that might fit the legend. Six or seven, I believe. But the one that I'm thinking of is special. It's the only one that nobody has been able to reach. Ever since I was a little girl I wanted to explore it, but it's quite inaccessible. When I was fifteen I broke my leg trying to climb the cliff face, and when I was thirty I broke my wrist. I'm afraid I rather stopped trying after that. I've seen a few rock climbers shake their heads and give up because the cliff is too full of rubble.”

“I bet that's the one!” Dad said. “I bet that's Leonardo's cave!”

“I don't know about that,” she said. “The legend of the cave always seemed, well,
legendary
to me. Merely an excuse to explore a new cave. I'd hazard a guess that my special cave is filled up mostly with old bird's nests.”

“Bah!” my dad said. “It has an ornithopter in it.”

“All the same,” she said, “I wish . . . I still do wish I could see the inside of it. I admit, however, I'm a little old for spelunking. Do you know, when I was little, I used to look up at that cliff and think, if only I were a monkey, I'm sure I could climb it. If I had four hands I could climb anything. Carl Martin, I will make a deal with you. I'll show you where my cave is. In return, if you can reach it, throw me down a rope. I'll tie it around my waist and you can pull me up.”

“It's a deal!” my dad roared, sticking his hand forward between the two front seats. Noma's hand was so small and fragile that she could only manage to grasp one of Dad's fingers, but she shook the finger, and the deal was made.

We drove four hours along that icy road at a creeping rate, up into the Catskills through a tangle of back roads, onto a gravel lane that seemed more like a rutted driveway, and reached Ipskunk late in the evening. The sun had long gone down, and there was no point trying to climb anything until the next
morning. Noma drove us to her house. I got out and pulled on my dad's arm to help him slide out of the back seat. He had to lie on the ground in the snow for a few minutes to expand to his proper size, and then he could stand up all right.

Noma's house was a little one-story cottage that she said her father had built. It was on a saddle in the mountains, several miles from any town. It was made out of old gray weathered boards, and had a front porch about big enough for a single chair, and one window, and a metal pipe sticking out of the roof that must have been the chimney. My dad could never have fit through the door. She said we could set up our tent in her yard, if we wanted to, and stay for the night. Or, if we liked, we could sleep in the barn.

Her house was in a clearing in the trees, lit up by the moonlight so that the slate roof seemed to glow. Away from the house, just under the branches of the woods, stood a spooky dark barn. The front window was covered over in wire and looked like a snarling mouth with braces. She said the barn used to have goats in it, but hadn't been used except by barn swallows for about thirty years, and was probably good protection against the wind. Dad would have slept in it, but I didn't want to. I wanted our warm, comfortable tent.

Dad unhitched our wagon from the car and put up the tent in the moonlight beside Noma's house. Noma watched him, standing in the snow and clutching her shawl around herself to keep warm. She must have been amazed at how good he was with his hands and feet. He set up the tent in record time. I bet it was less than two minutes.

“If you can't climb up to that cave,” she said, “I don't think anyone can.”

“How far away is it?” Dad said. “Can we get there early in the morning?”

“As early as you wish,” she said, smiling at him and pointing. “It's right there. Didn't you realize?”

About hundred yards from the house, a giant rubbley cliff rose up out of the trees and slanted up in the moonlight. It was just far enough from the house that if a boulder fell off the cliff it probably wouldn't smash through the roof.

“Now you know why it's my special cave,” she said. “I've been looking at it all my life. Good night, Carl Martin. Good night, Jem Martin!” She turned around, hobbled to her little house, and went inside.

Dad and I crawled into our tent. I wanted to go to sleep, but Dad lit some candles, sat down and clutched his head between his hands. “Jem! How can we sleep? That might be the cave up there! I think I saw it. A kind of a dark spot. What if we find
something that belonged to him? My god! I don't know if I can wait. Maybe I should try it now, in the moonlight.”

“Dad, don't be ridiculous!” I said. “It's just starting to snow. Anyway, do you know what night it is?”

“No. What?”

“It's Christmas eve. I think. Tomorrow is Christmas day.”

“You're right! I totally forgot about it! Good thinking, Jem. Merry Christmas. I suppose I should be good and wait till morning to unwrap the present.”

He blew out the candles and curled up in his blanket. During the night I woke up a few times, and in the faint glow of moonlight through the tent roof I could see his massive furry back rising and falling with his breathing. But he wasn't snoring. He was probably lying awake thinking about that cave.

“Good morning, Indians!” Noma said, knocking on the metal surface of the wagon that made up a wall of our tent. “I thought you wanted to get up early?”

My dad and I woke up together. We had had an exhausting few days, and had overslept. Dad must have dropped off finally in the early morning. He sat up bleary and stared at his watch through the tangles of hair over his eyes. “Jem!” he groaned. “It's ten thirty.”