‘I’ll walk down with you,’ Annalee said. ‘We hike over all the time for fish and abalone.’
Dolly glanced at Daniel.
‘I carry him. One of those kiddie-carriers, sort of like a backpack.’
‘It’s fun,’ Daniel said.
‘There’s no point, really. And if somebody caught up with me at the last minute…’
Daniel said hotly, ‘I wouldn’t tell! Never, never, never.’
Chuckling, Dolly rumpled his hair. ‘I wasn’t worried about that. You got so much face you could never lose it all. But I don’t want them to take you hostage.’
‘What’s hostage?’
‘Where they trade you for me.’
‘I wouldn’t trade,’ Daniel said flatly.
‘I would,’ Dolly told him. ‘That’s why you and your mom are staying here.’
Dolly left a few minutes before 10.00. Annalee and Daniel walked with her down through the orchard to the saddle trail. Annalee gave her an old day pack that she’d stocked with a sandwich, the last of the large gauze pads, and extra batteries and bulb for the flashlight. Dolly lifted Daniel in her arms and gave him a huge hug, waltzing him around a moment before setting him down. She and Annalee embraced briefly.
‘Thanks for the help and hospitality,’ Dolly said. ‘You’re real people, both of you.’ She took a deep breath of the clear October night. ‘Damn,’ she sighed, ‘it’s so good to be loose.’
‘Stay that way,’ Annalee said.
Hand in hand, Daniel and Annalee watched as Dolly, limping slightly, set off alone toward the coast.
Shortly after Daniel’s fifth birthday, Annalee sat down with him and outlined the possible benefits and disadvantages of attending school as carefully as she could. She left the choice to Daniel. It only took him a moment. ‘Naw,’ he said, ‘school sounds shitty.’
However, while Daniel was unschooled, he wasn’t uneducated. Annalee – an excellent student herself before her parents’ deaths – had already taught him to read by the time he decided against institutional learning. On their supply runs to town, they spent half their time at the library as Daniel selected his reading material till the next trip – and he was always careful to determine from Annalee exactly when that would be. His reading choices were eclectic, but he had an abiding interest in animals and the stars. When he was nine years old, he ordered a color poster of the Horsehead Nebula. He rhapsodized over it for days, lecturing Annalee on the nature and mysteries of the seething whirl of gas and dust. Annalee had never seen him so entranced.
She said, ‘I bet I know why you like the Horsehead Nebula so much.’
‘What are we betting?’ Daniel said. She only made bets like that when she wanted to know what he was thinking. He liked the odds.
‘Dinner dishes.’
‘Okay,’ Daniel agreed. ‘Why do I like it?’
‘Because it’s beautiful.’
‘Nope.’
‘Well – why then?’
‘I like it,’ Daniel said, ‘because it’s as much as I can imagine.’
Annalee pounced. ‘That’s exactly what I meant by beautiful.’
‘Wrong,’ Daniel declared. ‘You have to do the breakfast dishes too, for trying to cheat.’
Like most teachers, Annalee learned with her student. Each New Year’s Eve they chose a subject to study together. One year it was rocks. One year, birds of prey. The year devoted to meteorology was the most fun. Each night they put their sealed forecasts for the next day’s weather into a jar, opening them after dinner on the following day as if they were fortune cookies. They plotted their relative accuracy and the day’s weather data on a wall chart that had become a mural by winter solstice. On New Year’s Eve, a few minutes before midnight, they ceremoniously rolled the mural up, tied it with a sky-blue ribbon, and stored it like a precious scroll in a fishing-rod case.
The toughest subject for them both had been plants. They’d worked hard, but the subject was simply too large. The living room worktable was usually covered with sprays of specimens and stacks of well-thumbed botanical keys. Wildflowers and trees weren’t too difficult, but the fungi were tough, and the grasses proved impossible.
Paradoxically, playing permanent hooky provided Daniel with a healthy diversity of teachers. Not all the safe-house guests took an interest in Daniel’s education, but most found his eagerness and aptitude irresistible.
He studied penmanship with Annie Crashaw, a forger of considerable renown. Sandra XY, a revolutionary witch, instructed him in the delicate arts of subversion and sabotage, stressing the importance of analyzing whole systems for points of vulnerability, seeing not only the parts but how they were connected. The delicacy of Sandra XY’s art stemmed from her commitment to nonviolent means, a conviction somewhat lost on Daniel. His only examples of violence had been supplied by nature and he was neither attracted nor repelled. Violence was a fact of life. When he pressed the point, Sandra XY said, ‘Fine. As long as you eat what you kill.’
He received detailed lessons in structural engineering from Bobby ‘Boom-Boom’ Funtman, who’d developed his knowledge on the subject as a necessary adjunct to his passion for precision and efficiency in explosions. Boom-Boom knew whereof he spoke, for it was widely claimed that he could do more damage with a single stick of dynamite than a squadron of B-52s. ‘It’s not the size of the charge,’ Boom-Boom constantly reiterated, ‘it’s the placement.’
A young poet named Andy Hawkins, a draft resister on the run, echoed Boom-Boom’s lesson when he introduced Daniel to Japanese poetry, particularly the ephemeral density of haiku. Daniel’s studies in Oriental verse were often frustrated by the absence of his teacher, who was in bed with his mother. She had seduced young Andy about three minutes after he walked in the door. She’d never slept with a guest before. When Annalee had said, ‘Good night sweetie, I’m going down to the guest house and sleep with Andy,’ Daniel was shocked, jealous, frightened, bereft, confused, and utterly delighted by his mother’s clear happiness.
Daniel’s favorite teacher among the forty or so who’d been guests was Johnny Seven Moons. Johnny Seven Moons was the closest Daniel had come to a father. Johnny Seven Moons was also the only guest who’d ever come back for a purely social call, though a few of the more incorrigible offenders had returned on business, the continuing thermal exchange of hot and cool.
Johnny Seven Moons was an old Pomo Indian who fervently believed that one of the highest spiritual pleasures available to human beings was blowing up dams. Early in March, just before Daniel had turned seven, he went out to feed the chickens and found Johnny Seven Moons sitting on the porch, comfortable, self-contained, as if he’d materialized with the sunrise. For both of them, it was love at first sight.
The old claim that great teachers have no subject was certainly the case with Johnny Seven Moons. Another pedagogical assertion – ‘The great teachers don’t teach’ – also applied. Seven Moons just did things with Daniel – make a bow and arrows, build fish traps, paint the guest house, gather mushrooms, cook and clean – taking what the day offered and Daniel’s thriving curiosity suggested. Like Annalee, Johnny Seven Moons treated Daniel more as a companion than a charge. Seven Moons, to Daniel’s initial disappointment, didn’t pass on much Indian lore. As he explained to Daniel, he didn’t know a whole lot, having attended missionary schools. His hitch in the army had given him advanced training in demolition. After his discharge, he’d spent time in prison for applying his military training to man-made impediments of natural flows, such as dams, irrigation canals, and aqueducts. ‘But don’t worry,’ he told Daniel, ‘I know some Indian stuff. You see, I have the Indian mind, but not all the little details.’
If it was sunny Daniel and Seven Moons did something outside. Rainy days were devoted to marathon games of chess, played with a small set Seven Moons had carved from elk horn. The white pieces were done in the likeness of cowboys, the reddish-brown pieces as Indians. However, according to Seven Moons, when you played Indian chess, the dark pieces always move first, and only Indians can play the dark pieces – though in Daniel’s case he made a magnanimous exception. Seven Moons played shrewdly and without mercy, exploiting every blunder Daniel made, and crowing with glee as he did.