Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [86]
He dozed off. A while later he was awakened by a scratching sound. He sat up.
“You finally pooping?” he asked the kitten, but found that it was curled up asleep inside the red wool hat that girl had brought him on Thanksgiving. Its tiny chest rose and fell with every breath.
“Hey,” someone called from outside the tent. It was just a whisper, or maybe it was the wind. “Hey.”
Patrick stood up and untied the door flap. The girl who’d brought him things was lying at his feet, wearing what looked like a bear skin. A trail of pink snow led down the hill behind her and into the woods.
“Hey,” Tragedy whispered to the toes of Patrick’s boots. Then she passed out. The black kitten stalked over and lay down on her hair.
It wasn’t snowing anymore. The sun was trying to come out. A few stray flakes drifted down from the trees. Patrick picked up the girl’s cold, red hands and dragged her inside. She didn’t stir. Was she dead? He knelt down and put his ear next to her mouth. A little puff of air tickled his earlobe. But man, her hands were cold, and her face was all shiny and red, like it had been power-washed. She was frozen stiff.
He flailed around in the half dark of the tent, setting up the little camping stove and lighting it with the wooden kitchen matches he kept sealed in a Ziploc bag. He turned the flame up as high as it would go and moved the stove as close to the girl as he dared. She lay stiff and cold in her mangy fur coat.
“Shit.” The stove was pathetic. It barely gave off enough heat to defrost a mouse. He needed a bigger flame.
The tent was full of random crap—a metal cooking pot, a pair of mittens, a can of corn. He was suddenly reminded of Quest for Fire, the only movie he’d ever seen at a drive-in, and one of his earliest memories. His parents had taken him just after Shipley was born, and they had both fallen asleep in the front seat with the baby while he watched the movie from the backseat. It was all about cavemen looking for burning embers in old fires because they’d lost their original embers and didn’t know how to start fires on their own. Man could not exist without fire. Man’s evolution could be traced back to the quest. In the half-dark of the yurt he stumbled over Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. It killed him to burn it, but it was a nice thick book. Once it got going, the flames would be huge.
He opened the book and ripped out a few pages, crumpling them into tight balls and dropping them into the bottom of the cooking pot before tossing the whole book in. Then he turned off the stove and disconnected the little kerosene tank so he could douse the book with kerosene. Perching the pot on top of the stove, he lit a match, dropped it in, and poof, the book burst into flames. He rocked back on his heels, pleased with his work. It even smelled good.
One by one, the sage words of L. Ron Hubbard—“survival,” “engrams,” “audit,” “clear,” were singed and disintegrated as the book caught fire. Patrick placed the pot right next to the girl’s shoulder. The girl slept on, except she didn’t look like she was sleeping. She looked like a drowned person who’d been dredged out of the Gowanus Canal, just like on Law & Order, a TV show he’d watched in the truck stop in Lewiston where he hung out from time to time. The kitten mewed plaintively and pawed at the girl’s limp hand. It seemed less afraid of her than it was of him. Patrick put one hand on the floor and reached out over her body with the other hand to pet the kitten.
“Go on, crawl inside her coat or something,” he told it. “Warm her up.”
The kitten walked around the girl’s head and lay down on her hair, blinking its eyes in the firelight. Patrick sat back on his haunches. The hand that had been on the floor felt sticky. He examined his palm in the flickering light. It was matted with dark red stuff. Blood.
“Shit!”
The girl hadn’t moved since he’d dragged her inside. He poked at her fur. Was that the source of the blood? Had she skinned an animal and put on its coat?