At 3:20 in the morning I woke and rode my bike down the old coast road to Casey Bellows's house. I followed the broken white line in the middle of the road, ghostly gray under the stars. Every now and then somebody's yard light blinked from the jungle, but mostly it was black as tar. The only living thing I saw was a toad that sprang out and leaped across the road. Scared the spit out of me.
By 3:45 I stood with Casey by the old Ford van in his yard, our camping gear strewn around us in the yellow glow from the garage. We both wore T-shirts, shorts, and hiking boots strong enough to take a beating. My boots were new, and stiff. I hoped they wouldn't give me blisters.
I was wide awake now, and could feel the anticipation jumping inside me. This time tomorrow we'd be sleeping under a volcano in a place so remote even rats had no business going there.
I looked east, out toward the black ocean across the coast road. No hint of dawn. "Jeese," I said, wiping the back of my neck. "Already I'm sweating."
Casey grunted, securing his sleeping bag to his backpack. "Wait till you feel the heat where we're going . . . you'll wish you were dead."
"You always come up with just the right thing to say, Case."
"That's why I'm here, bro."
Casey was my shaggy-haired best friend, a redhead with freckles and a raspy voice. He wasn't big, but he was strong. He played eighth-grade football with the hunt-and-kill mind of a Cro-Magnon, and I felt sorry for anyone who had to face him.
I took off my glasses. For this trip I'd tied nylon fishing line to the stems and made a cord so that if my glasses fell off I wouldn't lose them. Without them everything looked blurry.
"Where's your dad?" I asked, rubbing my eyes.
"Making coffee." Casey picked up his mess kit and checked to see if everything was in it.
My dad was a few thousand miles away. He was supposed to be flying in tomorrow or the next day from a job that had ended in Alaska. He was a big-ship skipper and took freighters all across the world, which meant he was away a lot. But when he was home he was on me like a four-star general. We got along okay, I guess, but it took him a few days to get out of his big-boat-boss mode. He wasn't a fan of my spending time with the Scout troop because he wanted me home helping Mom while he was away. But I liked Scouts, and was learning good things, and I wanted him to be proud of that.
"Hey, Dylan," Casey said. "We're packing the van, remember?"
I blinked and put my glasses back on. "Yeah, sorry."
"So," Casey said, his hair sprouting up like a pineapple top. "Take both our tents or share one?"
"Why take two?"
"Yeah. Mine's bigger."
"Yours, then. Hey . . . you need to rake that weed patch on your head."
He grinned and pulled his camo boonie hat out of his back pocket and slapped it on. "That help?"
"Not really. Ugly is ugly, ah?"
Casey threw his mess kit at me. I ducked. "Watch your back while you sleeping, punk," he said. "Anyway, you just jealous 'cause I got the ladies'-man hair, right? They like red, you know, not that rotten-banana color you got."
I laughed. "That's good, that's good."
"We aim to please."
He tugged his boonie hat closer to his head. It used to belong to his dad, a former U.S. marine. "Still a marine," Mr. Bellows always corrected us. "Once a marine, always a marine, and don't you forget it." Casey wore that hat everywhere--school, Scouts, church, even to my cousin's wedding, though my mom snatched it off his head and stuffed it into her purse. Casey was going to be a marine, too. "Special Operations," he said. "Only real men survive." I'd known Casey all my life and knew he could do it.
We piled our gear in the middle of the van, leaving room to sit around the edges.
"Help me with the quartermaster box," Casey said, heading into the garage. "Weighs a ton." The box was the size of a giant cooler and held our big cookstove, lanterns, cooking gear, first-aid kit, ropes, knives, U.S. Army foldable shovels, and other tools. "Grab that end."
"Stand down, shrimp," I said. "I'll carry it by myself."
"Be my guest."
It was heavy, but I was taller than Casey and I could get my arms around it better than he could. I was used to lifting because we were working out with a weight set in my garage, trying to bulk up for high school football. But we were only eighth graders and still had a long way to go.
I lugged the box to the van and shoved it in, wondering how we'd fit into that shoe box on wheels with all the gear we had. There'd be eight Scouts, two adult leaders, and a driver.
We waited in the yard for Mr. Bellows, who was our scoutmaster. Casey dropped to the grass and started doing push-ups, grunting. "Five, six, seven--"
"What's taking your dad so long?"
"Coffee . . . nine, ten . . . gotta have it. You know . . . cops." Mr. Bellows was a Hilo Police Department detective.
Casey fell to the grass.
"How many?" I said.
"Twenty. . . . Usually do fifty . . . every morning."
"You're an animal."
"Thank you."
Mr. Bellows opened the door from the kitchen and ducked into the garage. He eased the door shut and winked. "Don't want to wake the boss."
"No, sir, we sure don't," Casey said. He stood and slapped bits of grass and dirt off his hands.
Mr. Bellows often referred to Mrs. Bellows as the boss, as though she ruled the house and if we woke her she'd come out with a stick. But I knew he was kidding. She was one of the nicest people I'd ever met, and always treated me like her own son. Mr. Bellows did, too.
Mr. Bellows still looked like a marine, clean, lean, and fit as a boot-camp drill sergeant. He measured six foot one the day all of us in the troop marked our height on the wall in Casey's garage. He had red hair like Casey, but his was whitewalled, military style. On the inside of his right forearm was a four-inch tattoo: Semper Fidelis. "Got that before I got my brain," he'd said. "But I like what it says, Always Faithful."
He raised his coffee cup and silver thermos. "I'm a whole man now. You boys ready?"
"Just waiting for you, old man," Casey said.
Mr. Bellows grunted and glanced around, saw that we'd packed everything. "Excellent. Let's roll!"
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