could reach it. I did not like wearing a gun. “A complete easterner is what you’ve become!” my western dad would have said.
It was true. Dad had taught me to shoot when I was eight. Guns were as common as pencils in the West, and I had grown up with them, but the eastern view of guns had seeped into me. I thought of them now as the toys of macho slow-brains and redneck wimps.
I unstrapped the pistol in its red, white, and blue pouch and buried it in a deep mass of black humus that had gathered on a windowsill in the first of the empty stalls.
“I thought you wouldn’t come,” said Snowy, suddenly coming up behind me after I’d looked in every stall and called out his name five times.
“Where were you hiding, Snowy?” I had a feeling he’d been there all along, watching me.
“I wasn’t hiding.”
“Then what’s happening? And where are you living off campus?” Snowy was maddeningly secretive.
“I found out where the bone came from,” he said.
“Where? How?”
“Over Thanksgiving I spent the four days with the Finneys.”
“Snowy, are you living with Mr. Finney and his wife?”
Snowy gazed out the doorway and kicked some straw, both his hands deep in his front pockets. “I took the collie out. I took her for runs day and night. One afternoon she led me to where she found the bone.”
“Where, Snowy? Where?”
“I won’t tell.”
“Come on, Snowy. You dragged me into this. That’s not fair!”
“I’ll take you there. But I’ll only take you because I need help.”
“Help?”
“I will need help soon, anyway. I need an intelligent aide who can keep his mouth shut. I picked you because you’re smart and you want a place to hide away from Sader and Damascus and their friends,” Snowy said. Intelligent aide, I thought. Snowy’s vocabulary comes right out of hand-to-hand combat in the Libyan desert.
“You’re right there,” I answered. “I can’t stay in the library after school forever. Sader and the guys are staring right past me these days, but I know they’re just waiting for a chance to get me alone. I guess I’m smart enough—I have a three-point-nine average. And I won’t say a word to anyone.”
Snowy went on as if I’d said nothing and he was recruiting the head of a brigade. “You must swear on your honor as a man and an American never to tell a living soul what we find, never to remove anything, and I’ll only lead you there blindfolded.”
“Blindfolded!”
Snowy opened his hand. In it was a black disk the size of an Oreo. “I carry a listening device to make sure we aren’t followed,” he said. “Take it or leave it, Barney.”
I took it. He wound the back of an old black soccer shirt over my eyes, tied it in back, and secured it above and below with masking tape. Then he walked me around the woods for three quarters of an hour, never more than five minutes in any direction and with several complete three-hundred-sixty-degree turns. “This is ridiculous!” I yelled at him several times.
“You want to come or not, Barney?” Snowy answered each time. Finally he got me on my hands and knees, gave me a string end that led to his belt, and then told me to fall on my belly and crawl through an opening. “You can take the blindfold off now,” he said after a minute’s crawling. “Don’t lose it. Put it in your pocket.”
I ripped off part of my eyebrows with the tape.
We were in a kind of basic darkness. Blinded, I thought I would suffocate too. “Where in hell are we?” I screamed. “Get me out of here!”
“Don’t be afraid,” said Snowy. His feet shuffled on just ahead of my face. “We’re in a cave. Or we will be soon. Follow me.”
“A cave! I hate caves! Do you have a flashlight?”
“Of course. A little one. And Sunday afternoon I brought down a kerosene lamp. I left it here.”
I struggled along through the clammy mud tunnel after him. Panicky not to get stuck in the darkness, I yelled, “Turn the stupid flashlight on,