Go Big or Go Home Read online

  “Some of the time, not all of the time.”

  “You know what, I wanna see if you can dunk.”

  “Get out of here, Quinn. That’s impossible.”

  “I’m not kidding. The way you vaulted over that buffalo yesterday, I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  “The buffalo was about to kill me. That was adrenaline.”

  Quinn flipped me the ball. “What’s to lose? Give it your best shot, Brady. Whatever you had yesterday, maybe you’ve still got it.”

  He had me wondering. Truth was, I was buzzing like I had my finger in a light socket. To actually jam in front of Quinn would totally blow his mind. His head would go flying off of his shoulders.

  I went to the corner of the concrete apron, dribbled a few times, then started toward the basket. Like an NBA star at the slam-dunk contest before the all-star game, I accelerated as I went. Off that last step, I got major air.

  Major, major air.

  It was beyond beautiful. What a rush! I slammed it down with a vengeance.

  “That was sick!” Quinn cried. “Do it again!”

  And I did, again and again and again, each time differently. “Stuff it!” Quinn kept yelling. “Stuff it, Brady!”

  “Enough,” I said finally, my heart pounding like thunder. “That was crazy.”

  “That was insane! You’re five-foot-six!”

  “There’s a five-six guy in the NBA who dunks.”

  “You’re fourteen and he’s got muscles! I’m tellin’ you, you’re a mutant.”

  “Hey, knock it off, Quinn.”

  “We have to start thinking about your high school career, Brady. When do you unveil your dunk?”

  “They’ll think I’m on steroids, and not the kind in my inhaler.”

  “Let ’em test you! They won’t find anything!”

  “We’re keeping this under wraps, Quinn. You gotta promise me you’re not telling anybody, and I mean anybody, even your dad. It’s way too strange.”

  Quinn wasn’t too keen on it, but I made him promise. I knew I could count on him. We’ve always kept each other’s secrets.

  “So, what are we going to do next, Brady? It’s still morning and we’ve got worlds to conquer!”

  “Got any ideas?”

  “How about the Halls of the Dead—I’ve been wanting to explore it.”

  The Halls of the Dead was the name Quinn had given to the cave we’d discovered the summer before. I’d been hoping he wasn’t going to bring this up. It had been skin-crawling spooky, and we hadn’t even gotten that far in.

  “Maybe later,” I said. “We could climb Harney…”

  Mount Harney is only four miles from my house. It’s the highest peak east of the Rocky Mountains and is sacred to the Sioux. Every spring, more and more of the Lakota Sioux were coming back to the Black Hills and climbing the mountain for a ceremony they call Welcoming Back the Thunders.

  “No sale,” Quinn said. “We’ve been up there a bunch of times.”

  “What about fishing? I’ve never seen you turn that down.”

  “Maybe, if it’s something we haven’t tried before.”

  “We haven’t ever caught lake trout at Pactola.”

  “We’ve tried, from the shore. We don’t have a boat, remember?”

  “I know where we can get one,” I countered, thinking as fast as I could. “At the Wal-Mart in Custer, they’ve got a little inflatable raft with oars. With one of those we could get out in the middle of Pactola and troll the deep water.”

  One thing about Quinn, he’s decisive. “Sounds pretty extreme—you talked me into it. We’ll get licenses and a couple of new lures. Think the boat is small enough to carry on our bikes?”

  “If we take it out of the box, I’m pretty sure it’ll fit in one of our backpacks.”

  “Okay, we head for Custer and buy what we need for the lake. Where’s Fred?”

  “Still in my backpack.”

  “That’s what I thought. Do you think it’s okay to be carting Fred around wherever you go? Is he safe in your backpack? We sure don’t want to lose him, not after the professor said he’s ‘quite’ valuable.”

  “Where else would we put him? I don’t want to let him out of my sight. Of course he’s safe in my backpack. Who’d take better care of him than me?”

  Quinn looked unsure. “What about the Carvers? Remember what Crystal said, how mad they are at you?”

  I had to give that some thought. “They might try to trick me, something like that, but they wouldn’t just steal him. That’s not their style. I’ll be super careful.”

  “Okay, enough jawing. Let’s get on the road before we fossilize. If we’re quick at the Wal-Mart, we might even make it to Pactola tonight. Fish the lake in the morning and see the professor on the way home.”

  The town of Custer is ten miles south of home. Halfway there, we stopped for bison burgers at the Crazy Horse Memorial. We ate outdoors in front of the Indian Museum of North America. We had an amazing view of the mountain. Quinn said he could tell that a lot more rock had been removed in the year since he’d seen it.

  My dad had taken us up top a few times. Once, we got to stand thirty feet out in front of Crazy Horse’s face. It filled up the sky. It was an amazing sight, an amazing feeling. The last time we were up there, we ran way out on his arm.

  One of those tiny humans up there drilling on the cliffs at this very moment was a big man named Charlie Steele. I squinted and tried to make my father out. I thought I had him spotted but couldn’t be sure.

  At first, to hear my dad tell it, Crazy Horse had just been a job, one with more future than gold mining in Lead. As time went by, though, he became as dedicated as the Ziolkowski family, if that’s possible.

  It all started when Korczak Ziolkowski, an assistant sculptor at Mount Rushmore, got a letter from a Lakota chief named Henry Standing Bear. The chief had been watching the carving of the presidents’ faces. He told Korczak that the Indians had great heroes, too. Would Korczak carve a monument to one of their great leaders?

  The hero they picked wasn’t one remembered for great speeches at signing ceremonies. They chose Crazy Horse, sometimes called Strange Man of the Lakotas, for his powerful and mysterious ways. When he was about my age, he had a vision. He saw himself charging into battle on a spirit horse. The bullets were whistling all around him, but they could never touch him. And they never did.

  Bit by bit, the mountain is turning into Crazy Horse the warrior, at the front of every fight, symbol of courage, nobility, and resistance. Crazy Horse was one of the leaders at the Battle of the Little Bighorn when George Armstrong Custer and his men got famously rubbed out in 1876.

  Korczak went to work in 1948. For years, he did all the drilling, blasting, and mucking alone. An insane amount of granite had to be removed before he could begin on the actual statue. At the museum you can see old films of him at work on the mountain. As his sons grew up, they joined him. Korczak didn’t live long enough to see even the face completed, but his family carries on. More than a million people visit every year, and they donate enough money to keep the dream alive.

  When it’s finally done, the statue of the Lakota chief on his warhorse will be way bigger than Rushmore. It’ll be as long as a cruise ship and tall as a sixty-story skyscraper.

  Crazy Horse will be pointing into the distance. The gesture comes from a moment in history. A year after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse’s band was on the verge of starvation. The last herds of buffalo had been killed so the Indians wouldn’t have anything to eat. Crazy Horse came to a fort to listen to promises about food and blankets. When he did, he was taunted by an Army officer: “So where are your lands now, Crazy Horse?”

  Crazy Horse pointed to the horizon and said, “My lands are where my dead lie buried.”

  As soon as Crazy Horse saw they were going to put him in jail, he resisted. He was held from behind, and they ran him through with a bayonet. Crazy Horse was still young, only a couple of years over thir
ty.

  Quinn knows all the history. We didn’t talk about it over burgers, about the Carvers either, though we both might have been thinking about them, too. I know I was.

  It was all because of my dad working at Crazy Horse, and me feeling the same way he did, that Max and Buzz had a grudge against me. They’d been carrying it since fourth grade, when we studied the Black Hills in social studies practically all year.

  Along about April, I gave my big report on the history of the Crazy Horse Memorial. I laid it on thick about George Armstrong Custer, how he was no hero like he used to be considered. This wasn’t really news, even in the Black Hills.

  The next kid up was Max Carver. He stood up in front of the class, glared at me, then announced the topic of his report. It was about an ancestor on his mother’s side, a cavalry officer who rode and died with Custer. Uh-oh.

  How was I to know? Every kid in class, even the teacher, turned and looked at me. They knew I was in for it.

  I never got beat up or anything like that. Maybe if I had, it would have been over with. Like Max told me after school, “We’re never going to forget this, Steele.”

  And they never had.

  13

  Discount Shopping

  WE PULLED INTO CUSTER and headed for the Wal-Mart. It didn’t take long to find the little inflatable raft I’d told Quinn about. The Challenger was made in China, ours for only $39.99. Its plastic oars came in two pieces that you screwed together, and they would pack nicely. We began to wonder, though, about our fishing rods back home. They didn’t break down small enough to carry on our bikes.

  A couple of aisles over we found telescoping fishing poles for $19.99, also from China, that came with reel and line. You could carry one in your back pocket. It was the name that closed the deal; it was called the Eliminator. My eighth-grade English teacher would have gotten a kick out if that. He was always preaching against “thesaurus abuse.”

  We threw two Eliminators into the cart and picked out some new lures. Lake trout are known to favor big, shiny spoons. It takes something flashy to lure them out of the depths.

  As we stood at the counter waiting to buy our fishing licenses, we got to figuring how much storage we’d have left after filling one backpack with the raft. Basically, we had the other backpack and our bike panniers, which we always called our saddlebags. “I can tell you right now,” Quinn said, “there’s no way we’re going to have room for your tent.”

  “Good point,” I had to admit.

  We found the solution across from where we were standing: an item by the uninspired name of Tube Tent, ours for $3.99. It weighed next to nothing and wouldn’t take up any space.

  Our shopping expedition had been the way we like it—quick. We got on the Mickelson Trail and blasted home to start packing.

  Half a mile short of our driveway, we crossed the Carvers’ driveway. Attila had stationed himself there as if waiting for somebody to come home. I’d never seen him do that before.

  Here was something else I’d never seen. Attila started following us. Following me, to be exact, hanging right by my side.

  The most surprising part was, it wasn’t like he wanted a piece of me. The way he kept looking at me as he ran alongside, it was more like we were old buddies.

  “What’s that about?” Quinn called.

  “No idea,” I replied. At first I tried yelling, “Go home, Attila, go home!” as I kept riding. He kept bounding alongside, unfazed. I put on a burst of speed, thinking I’d leave him in the dust, but he took it for a game and left me in the dust. I’d never seen a dog run that fast in my life. A greyhound would have choked on his exhaust.

  “Will you look at that,” Quinn marveled. “That beats everything.”

  The war dog was waiting for us at my driveway. Strangely, his tongue wasn’t even hanging out. I yelled at him to go home, this time at the top of my lungs. He barked back at me, at the top of his lungs, then wagged his tail. Not only that, he began to whine, like I’d hurt his feelings.

  We rode on up to the house, Attila trotting alongside. “Call the Carvers?” Quinn wondered.

  Before I even had to face the thought, Attila bounded for home across the footbridge and over the barbed wire fence. We shrugged, headed inside, and started pulling out our camping equipment.

  It was killing me to leave so much stuff behind, like cooking gear, my little Primus stove, and especially food. According to Quinn, all we needed was two plastic bowls and two plastic spoons, some granola, and some powdered milk. “It’s just an overnight,” Quinn said. “We’re not gonna starve.”

  I had to admit, he had a point. By the time we got through packing our sleeping bags, fishing gear, jackets and rain gear, and so on, there wasn’t room for our toothbrushes.

  “It’s almost 3:30,” I said. “You still think we can make it to the lake before dark?”

  “Sure, but we better get going.”

  I wrote my dad a note, told him where we were headed, said we’d be back tomorrow. He’d always been fine about me going off camping with Quinn, no problem.

  Within a half hour we were blazing north through Hill City. No time to stop in and see Crystal. She spotted us flying by, though, and gave us a wave.

  From home it was a twenty-mile ride to the lake. Days were long, but we were going to have to blister some asphalt to beat the dark. As soon as we left Spring Creek, we started climbing the first grade. The clouds were building, and the wind was blowing against us. On the merits of my riding the day before, Quinn had me out front, drafting him. With all the weight we were pushing, this should have been a killer, but it wasn’t. Strange as it still seemed, I was going to have to watch my speed so I didn’t run Quinn into the ground.

  Traffic was heavy, including hordes of bikers southbound out of Deadwood. What a roar they made. No helmets on any of them, I noticed: like Uncle Jake, they were more afraid of helmet hair than they were of death.

  The wind was blowing harder all the time, always against us. Slow and steady, we won the race. The sun was about to crash into a mountain as we pulled into the campground at Pactola Lake.

  The place was jam-packed. Every corner we turned, we found kids running around, music playing, dogs barking, steaks sizzling on the grills, picnic tables filling with food. Our chances of finding a campsite appeared to be south of zero.

  We downshifted past a couple of girls who checked us out with mild interest. No doubt they were thinking of inviting us to dinner. Hey, guys, we have tons of food. We’ll tell Dad to throw on a couple more steaks. Look, here’s a spot where you can pitch your tent right next to our RV. After dinner we can go for a long walk around the lake.

  Yeah, right. Truth be told, they were like bored trout watching a couple of fishermen go by in a drift boat. “They had no idea they should be asking for your T-shirt,” Quinn said with a sly grin.

  On we went, hopes dimming. Just when we thought we’d have to crash in the woods somewhere, we found the last untaken campsite. It had a latrine view and a bit of a latrine smell, but otherwise it was perfect. We decided not to bother pitching the tube tent. We’d use it for a ground cloth, throw our sleeping bags on it, and sleep under the stars.

  Quinn got out the bowls and spoons, mixed up some powdered milk, and set out our ration of granola. He said it was excellent, but he was lying. “Let’s play some cards. Bet you brought ’em.”

  “Yeah, and a flashlight. It’s getting dark.”

  I fetched my backpack and started pulling things out, including my fleece jacket. The night air was suddenly cold. Something fell out of my balled-up jacket and hit the ground with a thud. It was Fred.

  Just then a guy drove by selling firewood out of his truck. Quinn bought a couple armfuls. We were able to start our card game by the light of a toasty campfire. We stayed up late, as late as the last barking dog in the campground.

  14

  The Worm Grunter

  THE FIRST RUMBLE CAME about 1:30 in the morning. The thunder sounded far off but ominous.
I wondered if Quinn heard it, but I wasn’t going to ask. Ten minutes later, the lightning strobes were making it easy for me to look at my watch and time the thunder. The storm was about eight miles away. I got up on one elbow. “Hear that, Quinn?”

  “Fuhgeddaboudit, it’ll go away,” he mumbled.

  I tried to fuhgeddaboudit. Five minutes later, here came thunder strong enough to loosen our fillings, and the wind started blowing hard. “Tube tent,” Quinn announced, and we sprang into action.

  I grabbed the parachute cord we’d brought along and fed it through the tubular sheet of flimsy orange plastic we’d thrown down and gone to sleep on. We ran in opposite directions for trees to tie to, just like in the picture that came with the tube tent.

  The so-called tent was shown with a perfectly triangular opening at each end. At the moment, ours looked like a housepainter’s drop cloth flapping on a clothesline. We found a few rocks and threw them inside to try to spread the thing out and make a floor.

  Our shelter without poles and doors was as pitched as we were going to get it. We dove inside with our sleeping bags just as the storm broke. Wouldn’t you know it was a smackdown gullywasher. Thirty seconds was all it took before a stream deep enough to float trout was rushing through our little home in the woods. The rain lashed our faces as we held up the floor at the uphill entrance, trying to keep the flood out.

  “Get under the picnic table?” I suggested. My question was answered by the next bolt of lightning, which revealed a pond collecting under the table.

  “Run for the outhouse?” wondered Quinn.

  “No sale,” I replied.

  Fifteen minutes, and the cloudburst had swept on through. “That was fairly extreme,” I said.

  “Insane,” Quinn agreed.

  We put on our jackets and thrashed around in our wet bags trying to get back to sleep. Quinn’s teeth were chattering, but mine weren’t. He asked if I wasn’t freezing. “Not too bad,” I said. The weird thing was, I wasn’t cold at all.

  Next thing I knew, Quinn was shaking me awake. Morning had come, but the sun hadn’t reached our campsite yet. Quinn hadn’t slept at all and was on fire to go fishing. He’d already fixed our granola by the time I dragged myself to the picnic table.