Zebra Forest (13 page)

He cocked his head at that, as if trying to remember. “I did like the trees,” he said. “Liked them a lot. But I liked books even better. You’ll laugh when I tell you what I had planned.”

I shook my head. “I won’t,” I said.

He smiled then. Andrew Snow’s smile made me forget a lot. And I forgot enough to smile back at him. “I wanted to be a librarian,” he said. “I thought they read all day.”

O
nce I knew he loved books, I found the best of them for Andrew Snow. I figured as long as he spent half his time by the door, he might as well have something to read. And he did read, but he also sat by the door less. He spent a lot of time in the kitchen, keeping it in order and getting our meals. And one day he even started on the front room as I watched him from the stairs.

On day fifteen, Rew came back down from his room. He didn’t say anything to me, and certainly not to Andrew Snow, but he settled himself on the couch and pulled out his chessboard and pieces.

“Want to play?” I asked him. He ignored me, and I saw he was setting the board to play Fox and Hounds. Fox and Hounds is how Gran started teaching us to play chess. Instead of using all the pieces, you just use four pawns and one bishop. The fox has to try and get to the other side of the board, moving diagonally only on the black pieces, and the hounds have to try to stop him from doing it. If the hounds surround the fox, he’s captured, but if the fox gets through to the other side, he wins. You’d think the hounds would have the advantage, since there are more of them, but it isn’t true, because each of the hounds can move only one space at a time, and they can only go forward. So if you’re hounds, and you move one of them forward and then realize you’ve left a wide-open space for the fox, too bad for you. Rew loved being the fox, because he always found a way past me, no matter how deliberately I moved those hounds. Just like in real chess, I could never beat him.

I hated the game, because I hated pawns in general. When we played chess, my pawns got knocked off right and left, and I considered them pretty useless. Gran told me that pawns were an important part of the game. True chess masters, she said, knew how to use their pawns. I wondered if Rew was in that category.

We hadn’t played Fox and Hounds in a long time, but I was so lonely for Rew, I’d have played anything. “Can I be the fox?” I asked him.

“You’re not playing,” he said. “I’m playing myself.”

“What?” I said. “That’s like playing tic-tac-toe against yourself. It won’t work. You always know the other side’s next move. You’ll stalemate.”

He didn’t answer that, just moved his fox out onto the first square.

Andrew Snow came out of the kitchen to watch.

“He won’t stalemate,” he told me. “The fox will win. At least at first.”

Rew snorted at that. “What would you know about it?” he said. “You don’t even know how to play.”

“Your gran taught me, a long time ago,” Andrew Snow said. Rew didn’t look at him, but I could see he meant to try to win with the pawns, just to show Andrew Snow.

He took a long time with it, but he couldn’t cheat, moving the pawns back when he made a mistake. We were watching. So the fox broke through.

He blew a bubble of air out in frustration, making his bangs jump. But he put the pieces back and tried again. The fox won that time, too.

“You’ll only win with the pawns if you learn how to make them move forward without breaking the line. You can’t open a space, or the fox wins,” Andrew Snow said.

“I’m not stupid,” Rew answered angrily. “I know that. And who asked you to watch, anyway?”

He gathered up his pieces and moved to the stairs then, settling himself on the landing at the bottom with his back to us. But even there, I could see him setting up the pieces again and again. Rew was nothing if not stubborn.

A
ndrew Snow had been at our house for more than two weeks when he began thinking long-term. I could see this because he started stocking our cabinets. On day eighteen, he sent me out not just for the regular groceries but for a few things I’d never heard of — like wheat germ.

“It’s good to have a supply of staples,” he said, explaining that he didn’t mean the kind that stuck paper together, but things that kept well in the kitchen. “Things you can add to dishes, or make soup out of, or use when you’re running low on groceries.”

Wheat germ didn’t appeal much to Rew.

“I thought germs were bad for you,” he said suspiciously when I showed him the list. “Sounds more like poison than food.”

“I think this is a different kind of germ,” I said. “Besides, I don’t think they sell poison at the grocery store.”

Rew looked like he wasn’t too sure. But I didn’t care, because at least he was talking to me again. He spent a lot of time with his chessboard, but he was back on the couch with it, and when I said something to him, he answered.

I was so worried about the strange things on the list that I took the bus an extra stop, all the way to the big grocery store on the other side of town. It was the place I’d lost Rew in, and I hated it, but at least Molly wouldn’t be asking questions about who thought to tell me about wheat germ.

The Super Mart was ice-cold inside and smelled like a hospital. Even the floors looked glossy, and I wondered what in the world someone was wasting all that shine on, when all it reflected was feet. But they had wheat germ, and everything else, and no one said a word to me there as I pushed my cart up and down the aisles.

At the checkout, I picked up the local newspaper, which was always on Andrew Snow’s list. On the front page, a big headline announced that the warden had been cleared of all responsibility for the riot and would keep his job, which showed that Molly knew what she was talking about. In the lower right-hand corner, they even had a story about the newly released hostage, who was in Switzerland, getting tested for something called “neurological problems.” I didn’t know what kind of problems those were, but they sounded serious. And the government was saying people shouldn’t get their hopes up that any other hostages would be out anytime soon. I figured that meant you had to be nearly dead before they let you go, over there in Iran.

I didn’t see anything more about Enderfield or about how many prisoners had been brought back. But I folded the paper in half and put it carefully in with the groceries. And then I bought some gum. I thought I might try cracking some on the way home.

When I brought the groceries in, Rew came to the kitchen to watch me unload the wheat germ, along with everything else. It had been almost more than I could carry.

Andrew Snow looked with satisfaction at his staples, which included flour and sugar and cornmeal — things that made other things, instead of just canned goods and bread, which was more what I was used to buying.

“Wheat germ is good for muffins,” he told us, starting to pour ingredients into a big bowl. “It adds a lot of vitamins, and you don’t taste it a bit.”

He sprinkled some of the light-brown flakes into his muffin batter.

“I’m not eating those” was all Rew said.

He did, though, once I’d eaten one. And he stayed in the kitchen that afternoon, watching Andrew Snow bake. He wouldn’t say a word, but he didn’t leave, either.

This didn’t mean he had given up on his war with Andrew Snow. Later, I found Rew sitting in the front room, alone, staring at the door.

“He thinks I won’t go tell anymore, but I will,” he said angrily. “I’m just not doing it yet. I don’t want to upset Gran.”

I didn’t point out that Gran, who had not spoken for days, seemed pretty well past being more upset. Instead I said, “You should talk to him, you know. You wouldn’t believe it, but he can tell stories.”

“I don’t want to hear his old
stories,
” Rew said. “I don’t want to hear anything from someone who
kills
people.”

Rew was right, I knew. He had always been smarter than me, and he was now. But the problem was, I couldn’t see the angry man so much in Andrew Snow. I looked for him, plenty. I looked for him when Andrew Snow made muffins, or read books in the chair by the door, or told about his father, who taught him about moss in the woods. I looked for him, trying to put the pieces of Andrew Snow together. But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t do it.

And so for a while, I pretended, like I’d always done out in the Zebra Forest. Only this time, Andrew Snow wasn’t a test pilot or a spy. He was a librarian. My father. And he was on vacation with us for a while, because it was summer and his library had closed.

Only Andrew Snow wasn’t very good at pretending. On day nineteen, he stood by the kitchen door, peering through its little square windows at the Zebra.

“I used to look at those trees all the time,” he said when he heard me come into the kitchen. “But I never saw all of them. The wall blocked them. I never realized how nice the trunks were, too.”

I looked out the back window to the side of the door, realizing with a start that he had washed it. I could see the Zebra Forest clearly, those white trunks and deep brown ones bright in the midday sun.

I tried to pretend he hadn’t mentioned the wall.

“The white ones peel,” I said to him. “The bark comes off in strips, and we write on them sometimes, Rew and me. We have a whole pile of bark messages buried out there.”

Andrew Snow nodded at that, but he didn’t stop looking at the forest. “I used to spend a lot of my free time looking at the tops of the trees,” he said. “Back in prison. I liked the fall, especially. The leaves turn orange and red then, and I liked to think how much my father would have loved this place.”

I sighed. The word
prison
didn’t fit in with my library pretending, so I gave it up.

“Is that why you came this way?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer for a while. He left the window and went to the sink, washed his hands, and took out the vegetables, getting ready to start dinner. He was quiet so long, I thought he wouldn’t answer me. I thought maybe I’d stumbled onto one of his rules, found a question that silenced him. But after a while, when he was sitting at the kitchen table, he said, “I guess that’s it. I hadn’t really thought of it. A few weeks before the riot, some of the guys were talking about running. I didn’t pay that much attention. I didn’t think they’d ever do it. They all liked to talk, especially during meals. And they said if they ever got a chance to run, they’d head down the highway, get a car somewhere, and head straight for the city.”

“How come?” I asked.

He shrugged as if the answer were obvious. “You could lose yourself easier in a city, I guess.”

Lose yourself. I’d never heard anyone say that before. I didn’t like the idea of it at all. But I thought I might know what it meant.

“So that’s what they did?” I asked.

“I guess so. Once they’d gotten the gates open, that’s where they all ran to. Half the prison ran out down the highway. But I just turned around and went round the back, to the woods. No one else did. The guys had all said you’d lose your way in those woods and probably starve. But I didn’t think so. I’d been in woods once or twice. Besides, I wanted to see what those trees looked like up close. Maybe that was it.”

Until he said it, I hadn’t realized that I’d been hoping something. Sometimes you don’t know you want something until you don’t get it. But when Andrew Snow said that, I realized I’d been wishing he’d been lying that night when he acted like he didn’t know we were there. I’d been hoping he had come looking for us. It was only when he told me about the trees that I knew it wasn’t true.