The Last of the Gullivers by Carter Crocker Page B

nearest door. But Gordy was still jammed in the window and the dog turned on him. Now the barking and screaming brought the whole neighborhood. Nick didn’t wait, but took off in the old car.
    Police flooded the street in short minutes. Peter and Phil got away, but Gordy only got a face full of dog bites and a year in YOI.
    Nick drove all the way to the crossroads. He turned off the engine and sat in the car and pounded the dash. Why was this happening? He was losing control of everything; nothing was going right for him. Michael wouldn’t have gotten stuck in that window. It would’ve been all right if
he’d
been here to help. Nick had put a lot of time and effort into the kid, and Michael kept letting him down.
    Maybe Freddie was right: maybe the boy needed a good beating.
    When Michael went back to the cottage the next day, he found Lemuel in a far corner of the back garden, where the little farms gave way to forest, clearing late-autumn leaves from the wall drains. It was a chore he had to keep up.
    â€œIf this gets blocked in a hard rain,” he said, “the whole city will be underwater.”
    The two of them carried leaves and twigs from the garden. Michael went looking for a wheelbarrow, but found none. He tried the barn, but its doors were padlocked. He asked Lemuel if there might be one in the barn and the old man said no, there was only a car in there.
    â€œA car? I didn’t know you drove.”
    â€œNever have, never will.”
    â€œThen why,” the boy asked, “do you have one?”
    Lemuel answered with this story.
    â€œWhen I was young, I captained my own ship, one of the last on the India route. It was mid-July as I set off on another voyage. The sailing was smooth at first and my ship soon rounded the African Cape. We were in the middle of a calm sea when the monsoon hit and the whole ocean turned on us. The storm thundered across the water like a thousand horses. Clouds as big as mountains hid the sun, the air turned bitter cold, and the rain hit like hornet stings. Gale winds lifted the waves higher and higher still, each peak shredding into foam. Lightning came in blinding blasts and rattled every plank of the ship, every bone in my body.
    â€œI called the crew to haul up the foresail and square the yards as we raced over one wind-driven swell and into the deep trough below. We were blown miles off-course, but there was nothing we could do. We went where the storm took us. My men climbed the rain-slicked rat lines and clung to the yardarms and pulled in more sail; but even then, it was too late. The wind was driving us onto a rocky shore.
    â€œBy dawn, the worst of the monsoon had passed. We’d been blown halfway up a beach, the mainmast splintered and barely standing. But we were alive, not a man lost.
    â€œSome farmers took me and my crew by ox-cart to the nearest village, and I hired woodworkers to repair the ship. As my crew settled in for a long wait, I decided to explore. I set off one morning, alone, into the wilderness, through a steaming rhododendron jungle, under tamarind trees full of screaming parrots and monkeys, and across hot mud-thickened rivers flowing with crocodiles.
    â€œAs I moved through a narrow canyon, I began to hear a sound, a strange new sound, a music like I’d never heard. I followed and it led me through an overgrown pass, where the mountain walls opened onto a plain. There was something here, mostly lost to trees and jungle vine. If I hadn’t looked twice, I might not’ve seen it.
    â€œIt was a temple, hid in the wild growth, a hundred feet high and half a mile wide, carved from one mountainous rock, thousands of years ago. It was so old, its gods had been forgotten. The entrance was flanked by sixty-foot stone Elephant Kings, settled on haunches, trunks raised in trumpet, crowns on their great smiling heads. The rest of the façade was a maze of dancing monkeys, some real, some not. And still there was