As they left, Kevin turned to look up at the mountain, which was nothing but a big blur now. "He's gonna pay," Kevin would always say when Bertram laid into him, but lately Kevin wasn't sure that Bertram would ever pay for anything. He wondered if the world was really a place where all the Bertrams and Hals were somehow brought to justice—or if it was like the mountain, which merely watched in silence as Kevin was beaten to a pulp.
2
THE DIVINE WATCH
Kevin didn't think of climbing the mountain until much later that night. The idea first occurred to him sometime around twilight, but he pushed it away. There were more pressing things to think about. Like how was he going to face the world looking the way he did?
It was sunset now, and the white cliff of the mountain had taken on a bright red face, bathing the campsite in unearthly shades of scarlet and vermilion. Most of the other kids were clustered around the campfire, making s'mores, but Kevin wasn't about to leave his tent.
His small travel mirror showed him an eye as bruised as they come and lips puffy and swollen from the painful kiss of the pinecone. He barely recognized himself.
Bertram had, of course, received a reprimand from Kirkpatrick and was "put on warning"—the same warning he had lived under his entire life. He had no problems facing the world with a reprimand.
But for Kevin to go out now, with the evidence of Bertram's victory all over his face—that he couldn't do. So instead he just stayed inside, peering out of the slit of his open tent like a hermit.
It was Josh who dragged him out.
"If you don't come out," said Josh, "it'll make Bertram look even better. It'll mean he beat you up so bad you were ashamed to show your face."
Kevin had to accept the logic, as much as he hated to.
The sun was already beneath the horizon when Kevin shuffled over to the campfire. Now the mountain reflected a rich purple blanket across the campsite that clashed with the flickering orange flames of the fire.
Kevin couldn't quite make out the faces, but he imagined that they all stared at him as he sat down.
He grabbed a marshmallow stick and poked it into the fire, sending sparks that flew into the air and faded quickly out of focus. Embarrassed to look up, Kevin just listened as Kirkpatrick rambled on in his earth-science sort of way about the mountain.
"The Divine Watch," he said, "is a mountain of mystery, a place with roots dating back thousands of years." Kirkpatrick turned to look at the dark peak, its shade of violet getting deeper and deeper. "It was sacred to the Native Americans. They called it 'The Eye of God.'"
Now Kevin began to pay attention. When he squinted, he could make out Kirkpatrick's face across the fire. He was leaning into the center of the circle, drawing everyone into the story.
"The Native Americans believed that the sun-god peered off the top of the mountain each morning to drive back the forces of darkness and clear a path for the coming day. They feared that if he slept through dawn and didn't fight back the darkness, the sun would never rise again, and the world would be thrown into chaos."
Kevin reached into his pocket and pulled out a badly scratched eyeglass lens. He peered through it at the mountain. Its face was completely black now—an absolute ebony against a sky filling with stars.
Kevin began to forget his swollen mouth and black eye as he listened to Mr. Kirkpatrick weave the ancient legend.
"There's a prophecy," said Mr. Kirkpatrick, "that goes something like this."
The flames began to leap higher as he spoke.
"What does it mean?" someone asked.
"It means," said Nicole Patterson, who always knew what everything meant, "that if morning never came, we would sleep forever and never wake up."
"Something like that," said Mr. Kirkpatrick, raising his eyebrows.
Bertram tossed a plastic fork into the fire.
"Dumb Indians," said Bertram. "What do they know?" The plastic fork twisted to a slow, painful end in the flames.
"I think they knew quite a lot, Bertram," said Mr. Kirkpatrick, "because that's not where the story ends." The last glow of twilight was gone from the sky now, and the fire played on Mr. Kirkpatrick's face. That and his crazy gum-shorn hair made him look like a shaman—an Indian medicine man.
"There's another place," he said, "fifty miles to the west, called the Devil's Punch Bowl. It's a huge bowl a mile wide, carved into the stone like the crater of a meteor, and in the very center of the bowl is a tall spike of rock, hundreds of feet high. That spike is called the Devil's Chair."
"So?" said Hal.
"So," said Mr. Kirkpatrick, "about a hundred years ago, two astronomers discovered something incredible! They discovered that the shadow of the very tip of the Divine Watch rests on the Devil's Chair at dawn, twice a year!"
"When?" asked Josh.
"I know!" Kevin blurted out. "In the balance of dark and day.' That must be the spring and fall equinox—it's the only time when both the day and night are exactly twelve hours long!"
Mr. Kirkpatrick gave a broad shaman's smile.
Josh smiled back at him, calling his bluff. "How conveeeeenient," said Josh, "that tomorrow is September twenty-first—the fall equinox. C'mon, Mr. Kirkpatrick—the whole thing's a bunch of baloney, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Bertram agreed, greatly relieved. "I knew it. I knew it all along."
"Maybe," said Mr. Kirkpatrick. "And maybe not." With that, he got up from the circle and poured a bucket of water on the flames. "Pleasant dreams," he said as the steamy smoke rose to meet the heavens.
The moon peeked its full, round face from behind the Divine Watch, casting a pitch-black shadow of the mountain across the forest.
There were more stars in the sky than Kevin had ever seen before. Enough to make the sky seem impossibly deep, and the universe impossibly large. Kevin had done a comprehensive ten-page report on the universe last year. There were supernovas and giant quasars out there at the far reaches of existence. There were billions of stars in each galaxy, and there were more galaxies than people on the face of the earth. Just thinking about it could make a person realize how small and insignificant his own problems were.
But not Kevin.
"Are you coming in, or what?" asked Josh. He had already satisfied his interest in the majesty of nature and was now in the small tent they shared, reading a comic book. The tent was gradually filling with mosquitoes and moths that flew in holding patterns around Josh's flashlight. Kevin, who stood just outside the tent, had left the zipper on the mosquito net open.
Kevin couldn't turn away from the mountain because he had the uncanny feeling that it was watching him. A soft wind rasped through the trees, and Kevin imagined if a mountain was a living thing—if it could breathe—this is what it would sound like.
"Put a leash on that imagination," his mother's voice said in his head, "before it drags you across the lawn."
Kevin broke his trance and stepped into the tent.
"Listen to this," said Josh, flipping a page in his comic book. "The Steroid Avenger gets sucked into a black hole, travels back forty years in time, and accidentally kills his father."
"Can't do it," said Kevin, "because then he'd never get born."
"That's the thing," said Josh. "Now the only way he can get born is if he becomes his own father."