Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [39]
My brother and I skulked off, heading back up the hill toward our street again, seething. By the time we reached the top of the hill, my brother decided that he wasn’t about to follow some stranger’s orders, especially since he’d kept the arrow.
As he put it: “He can’t tell me what to do.”
My brother loaded an arrow and tightened the bow, then leaned back with the intention of shooting the arrow straight up into the sky in a statement of defiance, a sort of “take that!” He launched the arrow and it zoomed skyward, higher and higher, until it was just a speck in the sky.
Of course, he hadn’t taken note of the light breeze that afternoon. Nor did my brother actually shoot straight up, though—as God is my witness—that was his intention. Instead, the arrow had just enough angle to sort of veer in the direction of the house (and workers) at the bottom of the hill, and the wind took over from there. I watched the arrow’s changing trajectory, feeling my chest begin to constrict as I realized where it was heading.
“Micah—is that arrow heading where I think it is?”
“Oh, no . . . no . . . NO . . . NOOO . . . NOOOO-OO!!!!!!”
My brother, turning white like me, was hopping up and down in ardent denial, as if hoping to change the obvious. We watched the arrow as it began arcing downward, toward the worker who’d confiscated the previous arrow. Had Micah aimed, had he purposely been trying, there wasn’t a chance he’d ever launch an arrow two hundred yards with such accuracy.
“NOOOOO . . . NOOOOOO!!!!!” Micah screamed, continuing to hop up and down.
I watched the arrow descending toward doom itself, surer with every passing second that we were actually going to kill the guy. Never had I been so terrified. Time seemed to slow down; everything moved with dreadful determination. I knew we’d end up in Juvenile Hall; maybe even prison.
And then it was over.
The arrow hit the ground, less than a foot from where the man was working with a shovel, landing in a poof of dust. He jumped to the side in shock and horror.
“Oh, thank God,” Micah said with a long sigh. He smiled.
“You got that right,” I agreed. “That was close.”
Of course, at that age—and in that particular moment—we weren’t able to fathom how the worker might view this particular incident. Unlike us, he wasn’t thankful at all. One minute, he’s doing his job, and the next minute, he’s nearly impaled by an arrow, launched by two kids at the top of the hill. No, he wasn’t thankful, not even a little bit. He was ENRAGED! Even from two hundred yards, we saw him raise his eyes toward us, toss his shovel aside, and start racing for his truck.
“You think we oughta run?” I asked, turning to Micah.
But Micah was already gone, racing back toward our street, his legs moving as fast as I’d ever seen them.
I ran after him; thirty seconds later, as I was chugging across neighbors’ lawns, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the truck come to a screeching halt at the edge of the woods, saw the man jump from the truck and start chasing us the rest of the way on foot.
Oh, he caught us all right, and he was even madder up close than he was far away. When my dad learned what happened, he was mad, too, and we were grounded for a couple of weeks. Even worse, later that afternoon, the sheriff came and confiscated our bows and arrows.
With the exception of the one trip to the Grand Canyon, our vacations would be spent with relatives in San Diego.
For whatever reason, the majority of both my mother’s and father’s family had moved there, and consequently, we were able to visit them and enjoy the beach without having to spend much money. A good thing, I might add, for a family that didn’t have any to spare.
We would always drive the ten hours it took to get there, the three of us crammed into the back of the Volkswagen van, along with Brandy (our Doberman) and assorted luggage. Though we would stop for gas twice in those ten hours, we never bought food or drinks; instead, our meals consisted of ham sandwiches, Fritos, and