Shred of Evidence

“In 1592, one hundred years after Columbus discovered the Americas, Johann Van der Flieder and sixty-one men landed on a small island off the coast of Maine. That was in the summer. Their ship left them with a supply of tools, food, weapons, and water. They spent the remainder of the summer building two longhouses to use as barracks, and a small command post for Van der Flieder and two officers along with a surgeon. Several men had dysentery and what I guess we would call a bad case of the flu, but they continued working into the fall, chopping firewood, gathering berries and nuts even though there was a mother bear and two cubs in the area. The father bear was nowhere to be seen, but one man didn’t come back from a foraging expedition. There was talk of a retaliatory search for the culpable bear, but the first snow fell on the next day, October twentieth, taking the men by surprise. They redoubled their efforts, preparing for the winter—more firewood, more berries, and Van der Flieder ordered that twelve fish of good size be smoked for each man in the expedition. This, even though the bad weather that had arrived on October twentieth had come to stay.

“Van der Flieder wrote, I think with some remorse, that one man, sick already and on the rocks trying to catch his quota, slipped, hit his head, and fell into the water of a small bay and drowned. He had been fishing alone and was missed at nightfall when he didn’t return to the longhouses. A search party found him the next day, his body face down in the ice water, gently tapping into the rocks with each ripple.

“By the end of November, the men had smoked the requisite number of fish and they had found the mother bear with her cubs and they smoked them too. One other man died after stealing more than his ration of rum. Van der Flieder found him drunk and ordered twelve lashes on his bare skin well laid on with a cat-o-nine-tails. The man spent the night in the surgeon’s bed but, though he had only bled a little and showed no more than the normal signs of discomfort, the surgeon awoke in the morning sitting next to a dead man. Twelve lashes should not have caused the man’s death, but…”

“Christ, Tommy,” Mikey roared. “Is this going anywhere? Is there going to be a point to this?” He always was impatient. I put a hand up to ask for continued patience, and I hurried with my story.

“Anyway, winter started for real two or three days later, dumping thigh high snow on the island and freezing the coastal waters into giant ice chunks that smashed their only rowboat. The temperatures went well below freezing and stayed there. The fires were going day and night in the longhouses, and the pile of wood that Van der Flieder says was taller than he was and forty paces long was half consumed before Christmas. The nuts, which Van der Flieder says were “acrid” in taste, were finished off by then too. The berries were mostly gone, as were the bear cubs. Two more men “trembled themselves to death” because of the cold. The snow was so high that their bodies were just moved a few feet away from the longhouses where they froze solid.

“On the last day of the year, starting in the early morning, thousands of crows began to line the branches of the trees around and even perched along the ridge of the longhouse that Van der Flieder had ordered abandoned to save firewood. They ‘cawed lustily,’ Van der Flieder says, and they scared the men. It was otherwise a mild day, but between men who were sick and those who were afraid of the crows, no work was done…”

“Because of birds?” Mikey interrupted. “What kind of men were these?”

I shrugged. “They were Dutch mostly. Some French.”

“Dutch and French? Figures. Anyway, go on. And get to some point. I asked for a million dollar plan, not a history lesson.”

“That same night, Van der Flieder was told that the whiskey ration was running low, the fish rations were not going to hold another month and six men were so sick with a disease affecting their mouths that they had to be forced to eat anything at all…”

“What kind of disease is that?”

“What?”

“What did the sick guys have?” Mikey asked.

“Oh, Van der Flieder’s surgeon wasn’t certain, but it sounds like scurvy…”

“Scurvy?” Mikey repeated. His face told me that the disease name sounded a little too exotic to be real.

“It’s from a lack of vitamin C—these guys probably said ‘yes’ to the bear meat and ‘no’ to the berries. When it gets bad, the gums turn to mush, the teeth fall, and the disease spreads back into the nasal cavity. Very gross; I looked it up. Anyway, Van der Flieder ordered that the sick no longer be forced to eat. He calls it ‘an unnecessary expenditure of resources’ as though he didn’t feel bad about his decision, but that night, he went out into the cold and stared at the stars for an hour.”

“Why? He made the right decision. You gotta save the rations for the people who are going to pull through.”

“Yeah, Mikey. But that doesn’t mean you have to like the decision. Anyway, you’re getting me off track—you want a plan to make a million dollars, here it comes.”

“ ‘Bout time.”

“While he was staring at the stars, the crows were still cawing, unusual for night-time. Van der Flieder gave up. He wasn’t going to tell his men, but he was pretty sure no one was going to make it off the island. The winter was going to pick them all off one by one. For Van der Flieder, the crows were a sign of this, an omen…”

“Again with the birds.”

“But there was more. Just when Van der Flieder was making up his mind to go back inside, he spotted a bright light in the sky. It was streaking towards him and the camp. It got brighter. It passed overhead, trailing a huge noise, dispersing the crows for a few minutes, making them go crazy. He took a few steps to the side of the longhouse and saw the ‘wheel of fire’ as he called it, disappear in the woods behind a ridge—there was, he said, ‘a terrific thunderclap,’ and for the next few days there was a glow from the area beyond the ridge as though there was a great fire, but he never saw the fire or smelled it. That, my friend, is where we make our million dollars.”

I sat back on the sofa I had been leaning forward on, and folded the hands I had been using to gesticulate. I smiled.

Mikey thought for a moment, shook his head and put his palms facing up.

“It was a meteor,” I tried to help him. “It couldn’t have landed more than a mile or two from the expedition’s camp. We can go and get it. I don’t think anyone has looked for it before.”

Mikey thought for a half minute, then stood up, digging his hands into a pocket, looking for his car keys.

“It’s a rock, Tommy. How is that going to make me rich?”

“It’s not a rock,” I stood up too. “It’s a meteor, metal. Meteors have a market—museums, collectors. They’re worth their weight in gold.”

Mikey’s eyes widened.

“How much does this one weigh?” he asked.

“Impossible to tell. Van der Flieder never went to look for it. For him, it was a dis-aster, a bad star; another omen. For us, it’s a little goldmine that only we know about. I’ve already talked to a couple of guys who sell these things. They say if it comes off of state land, it’s a problem, but if I tell them it came from my mother’s backyard on Long Island, they will be happy to do business with us.”

Mikey paced, and I smiled again. I knew Mikey was sold on the idea.

Mikey stopped in mid-pace. “We can do this right?”

“It’s there if we want it,” I said.

The plan was set before the end of the day. Mikey would get the shovels and pickaxes. Jimmy had access to detailed, satellite drawn maps. I would get the metal detectors; Mikey and Jimmy owned pickup trucks; I owned an SUV; we all had camping equipment. Mikey took a few days off from work; Jimmy quit his job—a dead end affair. I didn’t have a job just then.

We left before dawn, Friday morning, bought gas and stuff to eat and drink and drove. We stopped for a late lunch and drove some more. The evening saw us in Maine but still a couple hundred miles from the place we wanted to be. We stopped for the night, ate at a diner, and spent the night in a motel across the street. The whole day we didn’t say much more than twenty words to each other. At breakfast it was different. I got to the diner a few minutes after the others, and Jimmy had a problem.

“This thing could be radioactive,” Mikey said.

“What? Who says?” I knew Jimmy had said this. It was the kind of thing he would think up.

“Jimmy says that anything that goes through space has to have some radioactivity because of the Sun’s rays and other crap like that.” Mikey shrugged, and put a slice of bacon in his mouth.

I looked to Jimmy to see what he had to say for himself. Jimmy shrugged too.

“It’s a fact,” he said. “It’s got to have some level of radioactivity. The question is whether the level is low enough.”

“Is it?” I asked. Jimmy shrugged again.

“I can’t tell until we get close to it. If the meteorite had landed a million years ago, it would be completely clean, but the way I figure, this one’s only a little over four hundred years old. It might be hot.”

I played with the coffee cup in front of me. It’s hard to enjoy breakfast five hundred miles from home when the conversation is about how radioactive something is.

“I think I heard meteorites lose their radioactivity because they’re so old,” I said. It was a half memory from something on TV. Jimmy looked at me sideways like he was trying to judge whether I was making it up. I looked at him head on and didn’t blink. “It’s true,” I said. “They fly around for millions of years before they reach Earth. They’re harmless. Unless, of course, they land on you.”

“But I found a website that said that one in a million of these meteorites has some Uranium in them. They won’t ever be safe.” That was Jimmy’s answer.

“Okay, but those are pretty long odds,” I said.

“Not when you realize that millions of meteorites land every year.”

“You couldn’t think of this before we left the city?” I said.

“I did think of it,” Jimmy said. He tapped his right temple. “I brought along a Geiger counter from work.”

Jimmy did bookkeeping for a firm that tested soil, water, and air samples for pollution. They had all kinds of scientific equipment that Jimmy knew nothing about, but he was the closest thing to a scientist in our group.

“They’re not going to miss it?” I asked.

“It’s surplus. It won’t be missed until the end of the next quarter when they do inventory again. By then, they’ll have no idea who took it.”

“So if the Geiger counter ticks a lot, it’s a radioactive rock, right?” Mikey asked.

“Yup. It’s not too bad for a short while, but if the thing goes off the scale, maybe we should come back later…”

“Like what? Like a million years from now?” I said. The waitress brought me eggs and toast.

“No, I mean when we have some radiation suits.”

“What’s a safe amount?”

“Amount of what?”

“Amount of radiation, amount of ticks from the Geiger counter.”

There was silence from across the table. Jimmy had no idea. He scratched his neck, shrugged, then threw himself back in his chair. Of the three of us, he was the most upset by the radiation angle.

“You moron,” Mikey said, and Jimmy put up no argument.

“So what do we do if we get radiation poisoning?” I asked. I wasn’t that worried, but I thought an answer on this would let us get past the issue and keep us all focused.

“Activated charcoal,” Jimmy said.

“Activated charcoal? That’s for barbeques,” Mikey said. It came out through clenched teeth.

“No,” I said. “I think it’s for poison.”

“Well, that’s what I mean,” Jimmy said. “It’s for poison. You drink it down, and it takes the poison out of your blood.”

He looked down at his plate of pancakes and picked at them with his fork. He had no idea what he was talking about and even Mikey could tell.

“There’s a pill. I forget what it’s called,” I said. “Maybe it’s iodine.”

“Like in salt?” Mikey asked.

“Yeah, I think so. Anyway, there is a pill. I’m sure of it.” If you’re going to bluff, you have to back it all the way. Mikey’s wheels were turning.

“Like in Three Mile Island,” Mikey said. He smiled. “With all that radiation, no one died. They gave people pills. Okay,” he said. “Okay. We can do this.”

That is all I really wanted to hear. We finished eating and got back to our cars. I had Jimmy bring out the Geiger counter. I just wanted to see it, but he turned it on for us. It started ticking immediately. Mikey jumped back. I took over the machine. It ticked at everything—the truck, the extra cup of coffee I had brought out, a tree, and a dog that was tied to the tree.

“Surplus, huh?” I asked him.

“Well, the label didn’t say it was defective or anything. Maybe it needs to be primed or something.”

“Primed?” I asked.

“You moron,” Mikey threw in. We stowed the Geiger counter, got in our cars and started driving.

Later that day, we reached the mainland point closest to Van der Flileder’s island. There was a ferry that would take us across, but only during the hunting season which was months away, late in the fall. We bribed the ferryboat captain and showed him that we had no rifles, so he wouldn’t be “aiding and abetting” people who were “conspiring” to hunt out of season. He agreed to take us and our vehicles.

“There are bears, you know,” he said. “It might not be so wise to stay out there without some form of protection.”

“How big can a bear be?” Mikey asked.

“Eight feet tall.”

“Can I kill it with a pickaxe?”

“Sure,” the man said. “If it’s asleep.”

The island was more than an hour off the coast. There was a haze on the waters, and we were almost upon the island when it finally came clearly into view. The shore of the island was full of big, black rocks. There was a little shack near the wooden pier the ferry used, probably some sort of forest ranger’s outpost.

“When do you want me to pick you all up?” the captain asked.

“Can we call you?” I asked showing a cell phone.

“They won’t work here,” the captain said. I turned mine on and he was right.

Our plans hadn’t included intermittent ferry service, so we huddled. The task ahead of us was potentially large; the island was a small one, but still nine hundred and eighty acres of forest and fields. The meteor might be buried and its pieces hard to find.

“Come back Friday, noon,” I said. That gave us five full days of searching and a weekend to get back to the city.

There was a campsite on the island, cleared away once, but abandoned now. Apparently state cutbacks meant that the less used parks were not maintained. We parked and started putting up our tents. It was May, but the Sun was setting and there was a definite chill. We collected firewood, of which there was an enormous supply, and built a fire. At twilight, we saw several raccoon, several deer, and we heard what I figured was coyote. Jimmy insisted that they were wolves, and he was certain he could hear two different packs, each with a half dozen animals. Mikey said he didn’t care how many wolves there were, but he kicked a ten foot long tree branch to pieces and added it all to the fire, then he used a shovel to make a rough point on a stick the length of a baseball bat.

The next morning, there was a crow. Its screeching woke us all.

“That’s just like in the guy’s story,” Mikey said.

“Van der Flieder wrote about thousands of these birds. This one’s alone,” I answered.

Mikey threw a stick at the bird and went off behind a tree to pee. The bird was back before Mikey.

The site of Van der Flieder’s longhouses was marked by a bronze plaque embedded on a boulder. There was no sign of the structure itself, but the plaque had an etching of what it would have looked like and where it would have been. The doors were facing the rising sun, and I surmised Van der Flieder would have been looking in that direction and that the meteor would have fallen to the West. We turned on our metal detectors and started our search.

By lunch time, we had found three quarters and a dozen bottle caps. We went back to camp to eat and found our bags had been ransacked either by raccoons or hungry but delicate bears. There was food left, but not enough for the full five days. There wasn’t enough even for three. Mikey went around our campsite with a torn backpack saying, “Oh man, oh man, oh man.”

“This is just like what the guy wrote,” he said. “It’s like the story. We’re stranded, we’ve got no food, and there are crows.”

“Mikey’s right,” Jimmy said. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“First of all,” I said speaking calmly. “We can’t leave until Friday. There’s no ferry until then. Secondly, come on guys. We can go on rations and stretch the food out. We’ll be hungry, but we can also be millionaires.”

“What about the crows?” Mikey said.

“Crows? There was one crow.” I couldn’t believe Mikey, the man who started this all, was being scared away from a million dollar deal by a single bird.

“I saw a few others,” he said. I nearly blew it.

“So what? They’re birds, Mikey. They won’t hurt you.”

“And the wolves?”

I ignored the question and sat to eat something. Our lunchmeat was gone. The granola bars were all intact.

“I can’t live on this,” Mikey whined.

“When we go back out, take your spear with you,” I said. “If you find a rabbit, kill it.”

Mikey followed my suggestion. That afternoon, I found a fragment. I swept over what looked like an ordinary rock with the metal detector, and it went crazy. I dusted off the rock, and found it was black metal. I called out to the guys, and they came running.

“What’s that?” Mikey asked.

“This is a fragment from the meteorite,” I said. It was the size of a quarter, and I held it up between thumb and index finger to show it off.

“That’s it?” Mikey asked.

“It’s part of the tail.”

Jimmy stayed a short distance away.

“I should get the Geiger counter,” he said, then he turned to go.

“Why don’t you take it with you?” I said.

“What? Are you kidding me?” he answered over his shoulder, still moving away.

I turned to Mikey, but he had taken a couple of steps back.

“You too?” I asked.

“I want to have children one day,” he said, and he was serious.

When Jimmy used the Geiger counter on the pebble, it ticked, but no different than it had ticked at my cup of coffee. We decided we would keep it near the campsite, but pack it in the truck when we were ready to leave and not before to limit the contamination time.

Mikey found another fragment before twilight; it was also the size of a quarter. He refused to pick it up, and I refused to pick it up for him; we didn’t even bother to ask Jimmy, so Mikey kicked it back to camp. He lined it up next to the earlier fragment.

“How much do you think we have here?” he asked.

“I would say we might have a couple of hundred dollars.” It was, I think, a good estimate. It didn’t make Mikey happy.

“It’s gonna take a hell of a lot of these to make a million,” he said.

That night we ate granola bars and drank beers.

“What happened to Van der Flieder,” Jimmy asked, and I told him.

“Van der Flieder died. After the meteor, he made about a dozen more entries, but he didn’t last the winter. The surgeon carried his diaries back to Europe.”

“What killed him?”

“His hair started to fall out, probably from stress and malnutrition, he got a rash that turned to sores.”

“That sounds like radiation.”

“Well, that didn’t kill him. He became violent. Several of the men did. Van der Flieder talks about having them subdued and about having to kill one man himself. That man came at him with a knife. Van der Flieder put a bullet in him, but the guy kept coming. Van der Flieder kicked him a couple of times to buy himself time to reload, then put a slug in the guy’s head. Later, the men wound up having to defend themselves from their captain. They killed him.”

“How did they kill him?” Mikey asked. He had been paying attention though pretending to poke the fire.

“He attacked one of his men, and the surgeon stabbed him in the back.”

In the morning, we ate granola again. I fed a piece of my bar to the crow, and as it pecked at it, I bashed it with the dull end of Mikey’s sharp stick. Lunch.

This was a productive day. Each of us found a fragment before noon. Jimmy found the first. I was stretching my back, looking at him the moment his metal detector went off. He jumped back about two feet and never got closer. He ran for the Geiger counter.

“What did you find?” I called out as he passed by.

He held a hand out in front of him as though he were palming an invisible softball. When he came back, he wasted half an hour trying to find the rock because he forgot to mark the spot. The metal detector found it for him, and he retreated to what he figured was a safe distance.

“That rock’s probably worth about ten thousand,” I told him. “Aren’t you going to pick it up?” Jimmy looked at me as though I’d asked him to eat a worm.

Mikey wouldn’t touch it either, so I dug the rock out of the dirt and carried it back to the camp. It weighted more than ten pounds, and it was about a five hundred yard walk. I had a talk with the guys when I got back out to the field.

“I can’t carry all these rocks out of here,” I told them. “The next one might weigh fifty pounds, it might weigh a hundred. The next rock might be buried three feet in the dirt. You guys have to pull your weight.”

They nodded agreement. The next rock was the size of a marble. I found it; I carried it. Mikey found one that weighed about a pound; he kicked it to camp.

The next day it rained, the fire went out, and we froze. Mikey turned on his truck radio, a Bose system that cost a baseball size meteorite. There was static and one clear country station. We listened to the six CD’s I had packed. We plotted where to begin searching in the morning. We figured out that the meteor’s trail was headed into the woods. The meteor itself might have landed in the sea past the trees.

“How the hell are we gonna get it out of there?” Mikey asked.

Jimmy told us about a Discovery Channel show he had seen where tiny submarines were used to retrieve treasure from the ocean floor. We all went to sleep after that.

There was a rabbit near Mikey’s tent in the morning. He tried to chase it with a stick. All of us got into the game of cutting off its escape routes, making sure it didn’t reach safety in the bushes. After about fifteen minutes, just as the three of us were about to give up, the rabbit sat. It was panting; it kept licking its lips, looking right at me as I approached with a shovel.

The Sun burned twice as hot, I guess making up for the day before. I found the first fragment. It took me an hour to dig it out of a root ball. It probably weighed thirty pounds, and it nearly killed me to carry it about a half mile to the camp. I hadn’t noticed that the terrain sloped away from the camp. It was nearing lunch, so I threw myself down in my tent to nap until the other guys came in.

During lunch, Mikey and Jimmy talked about the rocks they had found.

“The one I found was huge,” Mikey said. With his hands, he described a rock the size of a beach ball. What Jimmy had found was more the size of a basketball.

“What do you think we should do?” I asked. Both had reported that the fragments were lodged among a thousand roots. Jimmy’s was embedded at the bottom of a dead tree.

“I think we should work on mine first,” Mikey said. “That thing probably weighs a hundred pounds, maybe more.”

The rock Mikey had found was certainly larger than what he had described, and probably weighed several hundred pounds. It was entangled in the roots of a tree that had died and worn down to a stump, probably a hundred years before we were born. There was a half-mile of woods and brush to drag it through before getting to the campsite. Jimmy brought his Geiger counter over. The ticking was as frantic as the other samples.

“I’m not getting near that thing,” he said, then he started to walk off.

I didn’t want to fight Jimmy on this. I was tired, the Sun was beating on all of us, and the rock was probably heavier than the three of us could easily carry. We could leave it for last. Me and Mikey followed Jimmy to the piece he had found a little further away from camp. Jimmy applied the Geiger counter to this one too and the ticking was as bad as Mikey’s sample.

“I can’t do this, guys,” Jimmy said.

“What are you going to do, Jimmy?” I was getting a little upset at his behavior.

“I’m going to keep looking for other samples. I just can’t help you guys dig these things out and carry them.”

He walked away, sweeping the metal detector in front of him, the Geiger counter hanging from a strap on his shoulder. Mikey stayed and helped me dig the meteorite from underneath the tree that had lived and died on it. This took hours. When we were done, Mikey stood apart, picking up all the equipment we had both carried to the site, leaving the rock to me. It felt like fifty pounds.

“I can’t carry this on my own, Mikey.”

“It’s not that big, Tommy” he said.

“But it’s a half mile.”

Mikey looked at me with tears welling up in his eyes. His lower lip started to tremble.

“I can’t help you,” he said. “I want to have children one day.”

“Children!” I exploded. “You don’t even have a girlfriend! You haven’t had a girlfriend since 1999.”

“I just can’t.”

He walked away. I hefted the rock to my chest and carried it like the heaviest bag of groceries in the world. I had to put the rock down every few steps; the edges of it dug into my hands and made small tears in my jeans. In an hour, I had gone a hundred yards. Mikey and Jimmy came to my rescue. They had pulled out the passenger seat belt from Mikey’s truck and the plastic lining from his truck bed. I put the rock on the lining to use it as a sled, and they lassoed the meteorite with the seatbelt. I pushed and they pulled. In another hour, we were at the camp, the lining was cracked in a dozen places, and the seatbelt had nearly shredded. I carried the rock the last few yards to put it with the others.

As I was taking off my shoes, Mikey asked how much I thought the metal beach ball was worth. I shrugged. We didn’t have a scale.

“A hundred thousand?” he asked. I still had no idea.

“Do you think,” he spoke slowly, “it might be worth like a quarter of a million? You know, on the outside.”

“I have no clue,” I told him.

“Because, I was thinking we might stop, now that we have a lot. We could enjoy the rest of our time camping…”

Mikey kept talking, but I fell asleep, and I didn’t wake up again until early morning.

Jimmy and Mikey were zippered into their tents at that hour; the Sun wasn’t fully up. I went behind a tree to piss and felt the pain in my hands as I tried to flex them to undo my zipper. My palms were bright red and there were pus bags. My fingertips were blistered. I rolled up my sleeve and found more blisters. I pulled up my shirt and where I had held the rock up against me, there were more blisters and redness. There were also scratches.

I took Jimmy’s Geiger counter from his truck bed. My hands ticked, my chest ticked, my groin ticked. I went back to the tree I had pissed on and tested it to give myself a laugh. It ticked too. For some reason, I thought this was all funny. A crow cawed at me as I stood at the base of the tree. I shushed it. “Bad omen,” I said. It cawed again as though confirming my statement, and I laughed harder. I’ve always hated crows.

When I put the Geiger counter back, Jimmy awoke and stuck his head out of the tent, still sleepy.

“Who’s there?”

“Can we get a move on?” I said this out loud, and Mikey crawled out of his tent too.

I had on work gloves and my sleeves were back over my forearms by the time the two of them came back from the respective trees they went to each morning.

“One of us has to get some food,” I said. “We’re down to one granola bar each.”

Jimmy volunteered, as I knew he would.

“What are you going to get, Jimmy?” Mikey asked.

“Maybe another rabbit.”

“Don’t be too picky,’ I said. “The main thing is that we have to eat. Rabbit, crow, fish, berries, whatever, just bring back a good amount.”

Jimmy promised to do this.

Mikey and I had some luck. The fragments we found before noon were small enough to be carried and plentiful. I found an Indian head nickel and a small meteorite pebble. I tucked them both into a back pocket. I also found two apple sized and three football sized pieces. Mikey found a piece that was almost perfectly rounded except for a deflated patch. He put that side up and slid it on the smooth side. Without Jimmy, Mikey was less afraid. We took everything to the camp and piled it with the rest. Jimmy wasn’t back.

“Do you want to look for him?” Mikey asked.

“He’s a big boy, and I’m tired. I’m gonna nap for an hour or two; hopefully he’s in by then: I’m hungry.”

Mikey called out for Jimmy a few times with his hands cupped around his mouth, then he went into his tent to rest.

Jimmy didn’t come back with food. He was dead. Mikey and I woke up around three in the afternoon. We walked in the direction we had last seen Jimmy take. We saw no trace of him until we came to the rocky shore of a little bay. There he was, face down, his body knocking gently against a rock as the tides moved him. We picked our way carefully among the rocks to fish him out of the water, but he was wet and heavy and we had no secure footing.

“We can get another seatbelt,” Mikey said.

As we were making our way back to camp, there was a crow cawing in the trees, but even though we stopped, we couldn’t find it. We started up again.

“Tommy,” Mikey said, and I shushed him.

“Don’t you dare tell me this is like what happened to Van der Flieder,” I told him.

“I wasn’t gonna say that,” he said.

“Okay, then what?”

“Forget it.”

“I thought so.”

“This is bad,” Mikey said after a few more paces.

“Of course this is bad. We have to think about what we’re going to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we can’t just tell the cops ‘We were out here looking for a fortune, poaching stuff illegally off of state land, and Jimmy turned up dead.’ That would sound a little fishy.”

“But that’s the truth.”

“But it’s fishy. You can see it doesn’t quite sound right.”

Mikey was silent for a while as we neared the camp.

“What are we gonna do then?” he asked when he couldn’t hold it in anymore.

I stopped about fifty yards from the camp.

“Look, nothing we do can possibly help or hurt Jimmy, right?”

“Right.”

“Then I think we should leave him.”

“That’s not right,” Mikey answered.

“There’s no right or wrong here, Mikey; no better or worse. If we fish him out or leave him there, if we tell the police or we keep it quiet, Jimmy don’t care. He’s gonna stay dead. When the guy with the boat comes in tomorrow, we can say Jimmy wanted to stay behind a few more days and get picked up on Wednesday. By the time they come looking for him, no one will be able to tell how he died. They’ll see it was an accident. When the police come knocking on our door, if they come knocking, we’ll tell them we last saw him healthy. They’ll figure out that he slipped in the water and drowned, the way it really happened though maybe off by a few days, that’s all.”

We stood silently in the woods while Mikey tried to think. A crow cawed and it was our signal to keep moving. It was getting cold and dark. We built up the campfire, putting all we had left from the woodpile. The sun wasn’t down yet, but there was a coyote call and then another.

“Do you think his body will float out to sea?” Mikey asked.

I shrugged. I knew nothing about the currents. “Maybe,” I said. The possibility seemed to shake him. He was agitated. He paced.

“That’s not right,” he said. “It’ll be like he got erased from the world. Like he never existed.”

“What are you talking about? Of course, he existed. What difference does it make whether he’s underground or under the sea?”

“He’s got family, man. He’s got a mother in Poughkeepsie. His father lives out in LA. There won’t be anyplace for them to put flowers. No gravestone. Nothing.”

My shoulders slumped. I was tired and hungry, and I had no idea how to calm Mikey down. It was too late to go back for Jimmy, even Mikey had to see that.

“Okay, let’s just get some sleep and think about this in the morning.”

“We should go get him.”

“Okay, but in the morning. If one of us gets hurt on those rocks, there could be two dead bodies, you understand?”

Mikey understood, and we both went to our tents. I spent an hour trying to think of what Van der Flieder would have done given the same circumstances. Van der Flieder died during his ordeal, however, which was not a response I could use.

A crow woke me. Mikey woke up before me and had another seatbelt out with a loop tied at one end. I went to my tree. Blisters covered my hands and belly and the rest of me felt like it had been shredded. There was a small blister on my butt where I had left the meteorite pebble in my back pocket all night. I felt like heaving, but I hadn’t eaten since the granola bar the morning before.

We marched into the forest toward Jimmy; Mikey carried the seatbelt and a long-handle shovel; I carried a long tree branch with a crook to it.

We had about four hours to get Jimmy back to camp before the ferry came. When we got to the bay, Jimmy was about twenty yards out to sea and moving slowly further. We stood for a moment watching him, then we stood a moment longer with our heads bowed.

“What are we going to do?” Mikey asked. “Do you think the tide will bring him back?”

“I think we should load the truck and wait for the ferry. I doubt the tide will bring him back to this tiny little island. It looked like it was gonna keep pulling him out to sea for a while.”

“So we’re gonna pretend like nothing happened?”

“What else do you want to do?”

Mikey looked out to sea, but he didn’t find an answer there, so we started back to camp. It was a slow walk, Mikey behind me a few paces saying, “It’s not right,” every other minute. He didn’t quit his chant as we took down our tents and packed up our gear. To add to the annoyance, he refused to help me with the fragments.

“I can’t believe this,” I told him. “I’m out here because you asked for a million dollar plan. There’s a million dollars sitting right there, and you don’t want to pick it up? Don’t you want any of it? Just say the word Mikey, and I’ll take all of it home.”

“Take it,” he said. “I just want to get out of here. That million dollars is blood money, and it ain’t right.”

“Beautiful,” I said, and I started loading my vehicle. I didn’t have the strength for the biggest one, the one on the pickup bed liner. It was a beauty, but I had enough.

When I was finished, I found I couldn’t easily take off my gloves. My blisters had all burst and my hands were stuck to the cloth. My shirt was plastered to my belly in the same way. No difference, I decided. A hot shower, some gauze and twenty hours of sleep were the first things I’d get myself when I got back to the city. Then I’d go to the hospital.

I walked towards Mikey who had lain down to rest on the ground where his tent had been. When he saw me, he jumped to his feet and grabbed the stick he had sharpened on the first day.

“A bear!” he shouted.

I spun around and the biggest animal I’ve ever seen was about five feet behind me, sniffing. I ran toward Mikey and so did the bear. I thought, in the split second this took, that Mikey would turn and do the same. Instead, as I went past, he got into a batting stance and knocked a homerun swing into the bear’s face. I took a stutter step, looking back to see the bear go down, but it didn’t. It rammed into Mikey full force, and he flew through the air landing on the hood of his truck and sliding off.

“Run!” I screamed, but Mikey didn’t listen to me or follow my example.

I made it to the woods and turned to watch. The bear sniffed Mikey’s groin. Mikey moved, and the bear bit into his right knee. I was thirty feet away, but I heard the crunch and the bones snap. Mikey screamed and tried to pull himself away, but the bear wasn’t letting go.

“Tommy! He’s gonna kill me, Tommy!”

I tried to think what to do. There was a dry tree limb not far from me, but I had seen what Mikey was able to do with one.

“Tommy! Tommy!”

The bear lifted Mikey by his knee and slammed him down again. Mikey tried punching the beast. The bear let him go a second, sniffed him again then took him by his left thigh. I heard that bone snap too.

“Oh, Jesus!” Mikey yelled. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Jesus, Mary, Joseph.” It was a prayer.

The bear was pressing down on Mikey’s chest with his front paws, squeezing the air out of him. I heard the sound of Mikey’s ribs breaking. When he stopped struggling, the bear got off him. He took a look around the camp, sniffed Mikey again, and walked off into the woods the same way he came.

I got to Mikey’s side. He was bleeding from the mouth, but he was smiling. His eyes were closed.

“Is he gone?”

“Yeah, Mikey, but don’t talk too loud. He could come back.”

Mikey tried to laugh, but it hurt.

“I survived a bear attack,” he said. Every breath stabbed pain into him, but he wanted to talk. “When the ferry man comes, you two can carry me out to the boat.”

“It’s gonna be hard, Mikey.”

“Maybe he can radio for a thing.”

“What thing?”

He made a circular motion in the air.

“A helicopter? I don’t know. Maybe.”

The woods were quiet—no bear, no crow, no coyotes howling. Mikey’s breathing became a bit more regular, and that was the only sound for a while. Then the ferry’s horn sounded.

“The ferry’s here,” I said.

“When you come back,” Mikey said holding my arm. “Bring a blanket for me.”

“Sure,” I said. In all of this, he hadn’t opened his eyes. He was as dead as Jimmy, but he didn’t know it yet.

I drove down to the pier and onto the ferry.

“Where are your friends?”

“They have a few more days of vacation time,” I said. “They want another week out there.”

“Should I come back next Friday?”

“Yeah. Friday, noon.”

When we were under way, the captain came out to where I was sitting next to the SUV.

“Beautiful up there, no?”

“Very.”

“Well, your friends are lucky they got each other.”

I looked at him.

“I mean, I wouldn’t let just one man up there by himself. It’s dangerous. But two’s okay.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

“Should be good weather the next few days.” He went into the pilot’s cabin for the rest of the trip to the mainland, which I watched grow larger from my seat.