The Hidden Summer (5 page)

I wonder how many snakes are in this grass.

“What are the four deadly poisonous snakes in Alabama?” I ask Lydia.

“Shut up, Nell.”

I answer myself silently. We learned them in fourth grade: copperhead, cottonmouth, rattlesnake, coral snake. Once I watched a slow-motion video of a rattlesnake killing a bird—the snake moved so fast that the bird couldn’t even fly away. It just sat there and let the snake sink its fangs into its feathery little body.

I am beginning to wish I didn’t watch so much National Geographic.

Still, for all we know, this golf course has turned into the lost city of snakes since people stopped coming here. I saw a movie about a snake—it had old crumbling ruins full of human skulls, and snakes were crawling in and out of their eye sockets. There’s also the possibility—especially in the dark—of falling into a big pit full of snakes just waiting for a snack.

I am beginning to think I should just stop watching television altogether.

I focus on the sound of our feet moving through the grass.
Swishhhh crunch
.
Swishhhh crunch
. Snakes make
swish
ing sounds, too, it occurs to me.

“I was thinking that maybe we should live downtown,” Lydia says.

I wonder if she could tell that I needed distracting. This is one of our favorite topics—what we’ll do when we grow up. We’ll be roommates, of course.

“We could get a loft,” she continues. “My aunt has one. We could get one with high ceilings and brick walls. And wood floors. And a big couch where we can watch movies at night.”

While she talks, we keep heading in a straight line, using the red letters of the City Federal Building as a compass point. As long as we head toward it, we won’t get lost. Everything looks the same. There’s just grass and occasionally a tree, and I think I might have seen a lake off to our left. The sounds are more noticeable than any of the sights. The crickets are playing their little legs like violins—
reek-eek, reek-eek
—and the bullfrogs are croaking out their own rhythm. There’s the howl of coyotes nearby. Very nearby. I shiver. At least the howling takes my mind off snakes.

We live at the bottom of Red Mountain, which was named for the color of the iron they used to mine out of the mountain. They stopped mining a long time ago, so now there are boarded-up mines—strewn in the middle of all the nice neighborhoods—that haven’t been used in sixty or seventy years. I’ve always heard rumors that coyotes live in the abandoned mines. Sometimes you’ll hear a neighbor say they saw one through their window, slinking across the street in the middle of the night. If a yappy dog goes missing, usually people blame it on coyotes. (I personally think it’s a very long list of suspects if you’re asking who would want to get rid of that Pomeranian that used to bark at leaves falling.)

We stand for a minute, listening to the howls. A few neighborhood dogs bark back. Then, from right next to me, comes the loudest howl of all.

“Ah-ooooooooh,”
howls Lydia, her face tilted up to the sky.
“Ah-ah-oooooooh!”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m saying hello,” she says. “And I’m saying it’s a nice night for hunting mice.”

I giggle. “Do coyotes hunt mice?”

She pauses and cocks her head to the side. There’s another howl or two in the distance. “Oh, yes,” Lydia translates. “They say mice are delicious. They taste like hot dogs.”

“Well, tell them to stay off the golf course tonight. They might think we taste like hot dogs.”

She doesn’t howl much longer, and then we both just settle into the stillness. I look up at Red Mountain and there are a few houses still lit up, but mostly just streetlights. None of the sounds we hear are human. There are no voices, not even any cars. The wind blows past us, and it feels like we’ve just landed on a new planet. All of a sudden I don’t worry about snakes or coyotes or anything creeping around in the dark. All I can think about, as the wind lifts up my hair, is that anything is possible out here. You know that feeling you get when you have a nice brand-new set of colored pencils, you pull out a sketch pad, and you just stare at that blank page for a minute? Because there’s a kind of rush knowing you can draw anything, create anything—that snow-white page is just waiting to be filled.

Standing on the golf course is like that feeling, only way, way bigger.

“I wonder if this is how Christopher Columbus felt,” I say.

“I think he explored America during the daylight,” says Lydia.

I see Marvin over the trees, and the dark seems a little less dark. Everything seems a little more familiar.

“Let’s go see the putt-putt course,” I say.

CHAPTER 5

HERE BE MONSTERS AND ROCKET SHIPS

The putt-putt course is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Unlike the real golf course, the grass is fake here, so it looks a lot like it must have when it was still working. Everywhere we step is either concrete or green carpet. There are some standard things—Holes One, Two, and Three involve a windmill, a lighthouse, and a dry waterfall. But then things start to get interesting. On Hole Four, if you actually had a club and ball, you’d hit the ball through the legs of a zebra, and then it would roll around the curves of a giant sleeping python.

Hole Five is Marvin, and he looks even better up close. He’s at least twelve feet tall—I can barely touch his huge chest. He’s an orange brontosaurus with subtle splashes of purple, if purple can be subtle. He’s smiling so you can see stubby little teeth and a pink tongue. He’s like a cartoon come to life. I reach up and pat his belly, and it makes a surprisingly loud sound—there’s a clang and an echo, like maybe Marvin is hollow. I walk around him slowly, running my hand along his short legs and his thick tail. When I come to his back leg, I notice a crack in his skin, and I trace the crack until I realize it’s a rectangle.

“I think this is a door,” I say to Lydia.

“Of course,” she says. “Everyone knows brontosauruses had doors in their back legs. That’s where they stored their food for the winter.”

Lydia can get a little sarcastic when she’s tired.

I try to pry the leg-door open, but it won’t budge. Finally I push it—a couple of light shoves and then a hard one—and it springs open with a whine. A lightbulb comes on inside.

“Everyone knows brontosauruses had lightbulbs inside their stomachs,” says Lydia, but quietly. “Um, Nell, surely they turned off the electricity when this place closed down. I mean, didn’t they?”

“I guess not.”

“Could be ghosts,” she says, sounding a little too excited for my tastes. Lydia loves horror movies.

“It’s not ghosts,” I say.

“Could be,” she says, squinting at the open doorway. “Ooooh, like, maybe creepy golfer ghosts, floating around and dragging their clubs behind them.”

Well, that image makes the idea of ghosts a little less scary. Still, I walk in slowly, just in case there’s some long-lost janitor trapped in here. Or in case Lydia’s right and a very weird ghost—golfer or not—has chosen to haunt the inside of a dinosaur. But there’s nothing here, at least nothing alive. The light is soft and warm, not the kind that gives you a headache. The door must have been sealed tight, because we don’t see any bugs or spiderwebs or birds’ nests. What we do see are ribs and veins and a very large fake pink heart tucked in between fake pink lungs.

All around us, the inside of Marvin’s body is pale and pink and crisscrossed by painted veins and arteries. It’s actually very pretty—it makes the walls look fragile and delicate, like butterfly wings. Marvin’s eyes are made out of some sort of screen, so when you look toward his head you can see the night sky through two eye-shaped holes.

I don’t say so to Lydia yet, but I decide in a split second that I want to move into Marvin’s rib cage. When you go to a summer camp, you stay in a cabin. Lydia’s taught me that much. Marvin will be my cabin. I will cover his floor with blankets and pillows, and I’ll close the door to keep out mosquitoes and roaches. I notice an electrical outlet, and I think a small Lava lamp would go really nicely with the veins and arteries.

“Better than we thought, huh?” I say, in an encouraging way.

“Yeah,” she says slowly. “It’s not bad.”

I suspect she’s still thinking about her comfortable bedroom, but I know I’ve got her attention when we get to Hole Six. It’s a spaceship. Or maybe it’s a rocket. I’m pretty sure it’s what I thought was a tower from my bedroom window.

“Where do you think you’re supposed to hit the ball?” Lydia asks.

I was wondering the same thing. Hole Six starts with a long, Z-shaped course, maybe a par 3, but there’s no place for you to putt the ball. Instead of a hole at the end of the Z shape, there’s this huge rocket ship. Maybe whoever designed it got so interested in building the rocket, they forgot about adding a hole for the ball. Really, now that I think about it, this whole putt-putt course feels like maybe somebody had a little too much fun designing it. I mean, Marvin has veins on the inside. He has pores on his skin. And he has toenails. That seems like more details than are actually necessary.

This rocket is nearly as tall as Marvin, and it also has a door. A pink light glows from underneath.

“Ghosts?” I say.

“We can hope,” says Lydia with a grin, and she makes a dash for the door.

I follow right behind her, and the first thing we see is a control panel with blinking yellow and red lights. It’s lit up like the flashing lights on a Christmas tree. (You can understand why the people who owned the golf course went out of business if they couldn’t even remember to turn the lights out after they went bankrupt.) There are two chairs by the control panel, and we sit down in them for a little while and push buttons while we spin the chairs around. Then we head up the spiral staircase behind the chairs, which looks like it leads to some sort of loft.

“Do you think they built fake aliens up here?” asks Lydia as our feet thud on the staircase. “Who sleep in fake bunk beds?”

“Maybe fake astronauts?” I suggest. “Or maybe astronauts who have fake aliens bursting out of their chests?”

Like I said, Lydia’s a horror movie nut, so she actually gets that joke.

There aren’t any aliens at the top of the stairs. But there are bunk beds. And a steering wheel that looks like it belongs on an old ship instead of a rocket ship. The walls are mirrored, so I see at least twenty versions of myself and Lydia. There’s a skylight at the top of the rocket and round windows everywhere you look. We’re so high that we don’t even see the trees—all we see are stars and sky and endless reflections of ourselves.

Lydia doesn’t say anything, but I can see she’s impressed.

“Like it?” I say.

She shrugs. She’s still thinking things over, so it’ll take her a little while to be able to actually say she’s impressed. I can deal with that.

We check out the rest of the course. Hole Seven is a two-level hole with a slide—an actual slide—and it looks like you hit your ball down the slide, and it rolls out by the hole, and then you slide down after it. We try out the slide, but it’s not very slick. We each get stuck about halfway down and have to scoot on our butts the rest of the way down. Hole Eight is a volcano—you’d aim for a hole in the base, and then it looks like the volcano would shoot your ball out of the top. We climb the fake rocks, peer into the open pit, and see the spring that would launch a ball.

Hole Nine is the most amazing. It looks simple at first—just a flat green with two little empty concrete ponds next to three openmouthed fish. A ball could roll into any of the three mouths. But on the other side of the fish, there’s a staircase leading down into the ground. There’s a soft glow coming from the bottom of the stairs, and, since we’re used to how things work here by now, we jog down the stairs, expecting to see something strange and wonderful.

We’re not disappointed. We wind up in a hallway, and the walls of the hallway are glass. Pretty soon we realize that they’re not walls at all—they used to be aquariums. There’s still algae in a few spots, plus lonely bits of colorful rocks and coral. We stop and peer through the glass.

“I bet there were sharks in here,” Lydia says, drawing a circle with her finger on the dust-covered glass.

“It’s not big enough for sharks.”

“Small sharks. Small killer sharks.”

I’d bet there were some jellyfish myself, plus maybe some eels and manta rays. But I do like the idea of sharks.

Lydia tugs at my shirt. “Look at that, Nell.”

She’s pointing to a bright green arrow that’s been painted on the glass. It’s right about eye level, and it slants down to the left. Next to the arrow is a group of solid purple circles—not in any order, just a bunch of round purple dots. Next to the dots are scattered blue marks, like eyebrows or sideways commas. The drawings remind me of cave paintings I’ve seen in books, but it seems very unlikely that prehistoric people were living in a putt-putt course. Also, the paint is shiny and new looking.

“Some other kids got in here and left some graffiti?” I suggest.

“It’s weird graffiti,” Lydia says. “There aren’t any words in it.”

The arrow doesn’t seem to be pointing to anything, and there’s no other writing on the glass. But Lydia loves a good puzzle, and she stands there for a while trying to solve the symbols.

“Go underground to find snow and rain?” she guesses. “Um, there are frog eggs and tadpoles in the basement? Or, wait, balls roll downhill and then they hit . . . worms?”

I thump her on the back of the head and she glares at me. But she stops talking.

About ten feet past us, at the end of the hallway, there’s another staircase that leads us to ground level. We climb up and realize that the three fish mouths in the first part of the hole would spit out the golf balls next to the top of this staircase. The aquariums don’t seem to have had anything to do with the route of the ball—they’re just here for fun. Like the rocket ship.

Back in the night air at the end of Hole Nine, we look around us at the entire overwhelming putt-putt course, with its animals and machines and underground shark houses. I feel a twinge of sadness that this place is here, so magical and odd, and no one has been able to enjoy it for so long. It’s such a waste. The crickets are chirping, and the shadows of the trees are waving across the fake grass. We didn’t close any doors, so several of the holes are shining with faint lights. There’s a glow all around us.

Sometimes when Mom goes out late at night, Lionel leaves on the kitchen light so that she can see it from her car when she gets home. He says that coming home to a dark home is lonely, but a lit-up window means someone is waiting for you. That’s what it feels like here—like the golf course was leaving the lights on for us. And we’ve finally come home.

“Nell,” says Lydia. I think she might have called my name once before, because she says it sort of impatiently. “Nell!”

“What?”

“All right, we’ve seen what’s here. It’s not bad. It’s really pretty good.” She looks over at the rocket ship. “Okay, it’s really, really good. But we still can’t just disappear.”

“I know that,” I say. “I’ve got it figured out.”

So we go back to Lydia’s rocket ship—that’s already how I think of it—and we sit down in the control room while I tell her my plan. I’ve thought this out carefully. I’m not an idiot—I know that even mothers as unenthusiastic as ours would eventually notice if we disappear every day.

“So how do we do this?” asks Lydia, tipping her chair back as far as it will go.

“We just walk out the door,” I say.

She laughs. “That’d be nice.”

She stops laughing when I reach into my backpack and hand her a piece of paper.

It reads:

Dear Mrs. McAllister:

We are very pleased to offer your daughter, Lydia, a full scholarship to attend Camp Elegant Earth, the only day camp devoted to designing and creating breathtaking jewelry from recycled products. We will show our talented campers how to make earrings from erasers, how to turn bicycles chains into necklaces, and how to turn yogurt cartons into bracelets. And don’t forget our famous aluminum can pants!