Walking in a Winter Wonderland
"You'll be happy to hear that I managed to record the message on the blackboard before you erased it in a huff," Mark informed Rob, as they entered their hotel room after practice and shut the door behind them.
"What a relief." Rob pretended to swipe a stream of sweat off his forehead with the cuff of his sleeve. "All practice I was agonizing over whether that bunch of gibberish would be preserved for posterity. I'm ecstatic to hear that it will be around for future generations to marvel over as they would the pyramids in Egypt."
"I didn't say it was one of the Seven Wonders of the World," answered Mark, removing the bubblegum wrapper on which he had copied the hint from his pocket and deciding it was time to give his roommate a challenge to sink his teeth into before his tongue became unbearably sharp and sarcastic. "I just was implying that it was a clue to help us find our missing tree."
"Stolen." Rob pressed his lips together. "Stolen, not just missing. Precision of language is very important to solving a mystery, and when you say 'missing' it sounds as if we misplaced our tree when really it was taken from us by so-called friends."
"Our stolen tree, then," conceded Mark, accepting the correction as gracefully as he could and praying, not for the first time, for an infinite reservoir of patience to deal with his left-winger's need for exactness in everything. "If we want to find our stolen tree, we'll have to figure out how to interpret this clue."
"Maybe." Rob's eyes narrowed shrewdly. "Or perhaps the hints in the locker room aren't meant to lead us to our tree, after all. Our tree could be somewhere else entirely, and Rizzo and Silky just think it is amusing to imagine us scurrying around like rats following the clues that will never bring us to our tree."
"You have a sick imagination," muttered Mark, scratching at his chin as he forced himself to listen to this perverse logic.
"I have to." Unabashed, Rob shrugged. "Our teammates have macabre ideas of the humorous."
"Well," stated Mark after a moment's reflection, "I'm not suggesting that your point isn't valid and worthy of keeping in mind as we proceed with our search for the tree, but I'm not certain it should change our next move. I mean, helpful or not, the clues at least provide direction for our investigation. If we don't have some sort of focus, we would go crazy running around Lake Placid looking for our tree. When it comes down to it, I figure that the hints are the best search patter we have at the moment, Robbie."
"You're right." Rob nodded. "I'm merely pointing out that we always need to keep in mind that, in mysteries, nothing is as it seems, and the only thing that can be expected is the unexpected."
"Thanks for the reminder to always be prepared for a hearty serving of red herring." Grinning, Mark crossed over to sit at the desk, spreading the bubblegum wrapper with the clue out in front of him. "Let's begin to crack our next hint."
He waited for Rob to join him, perching on the place where the Christmas tree had once occupied on the desk, and then went on, "I'm thinking that this clue is a sort of word puzzle in which we have to rearrange the letters into English words that make sense together. Every time there is a space, I believe that signals the start of a new word, so this message probably has eleven words we need to unscramble."
"The first four words should be pretty easy," Rob observed. "If your word puzzle theory is accurate and I don't have a better idea of what to do with the jumble of gibberish, the first word is my name horribly misspelled, the second is a terribly mangled rendition of 'and,' and the third is your name gone through a food processor. Then there is only one way that the two letters of the fourth word can be reorganized. Our fourth word would seem to be 'oh.'"
Grabbing a sheet of the hotel's complimentary stationery (which they were using far more of than Mark had envisioned when they arrived days ago) and a pen with the hotel's name etched in script from the holder, Rob wrote the word 'oh' down in neat letters. As he did so, he smirked, "Perhaps this is a love note, not a clue. That's a new way to declare undying love: write a nonsensical message on a locker room chalkboard."
"Perhaps it's not a declaration of love. Maybe it's just an expression of brief infatuation." Mark smiled and then commented, "Well, Rob, we were quick out of the gate, but the engine might have just stalled. The next word is a little longer than the others were."
"You're so easily intimidated, Magic." Rob clicked his tongue in admonishment. "The word following it can be rearranged to spell 'tree'—" Here, he paused to record the word 'tree' on the stationery—"and the second word has the letters 'c' and 'h' somewhere in it. Now, what type of tree that might be relevant to our case has the letters 'c' and 'h' at the beginning of the name?"
"A Christmas tree." Mark's eyes glittered with all the excitement of fresh snow as Rob added the word 'Christmas' to the stationery between 'oh' and 'tree.' "Oh Christmas tree! It's lyrics to a Christmas carol, just like the first clue was."
"Yep." Clearly not enjoying this even half as much as Mark, Rob snorted. "It seems the fool who wrote these hints needs to readjust the bunny ears of his television and get with the program. This isn't a Christmas Carol. It's a mystery."
"If this were a Christmas Carol, you'd be Scrooge." Mark snickered. "Before the transformation, that is."
"And you'd be Tiny Tim, because you're short and weak," retorted Rob. "Buzz would be Bob Crachit and that bit of casting is so perfect it requires no explanation. Rizzo would be the Ghost of Christmas Present because he's hyperactive and never shuts his trap. Pav would be the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come because he never talks and just gestures. Hey, maybe our team could put on a production of a Christmas Carol as fundraiser. Then we could splurge on cutlets for Chicken Parmesan instead of eating Rizzo's nine thousand pasta dishes."
"As if Herb would ever let play rehearsal distract from hockey practice." Mark shook his head as if to cleanse it of the idiocy of this notion. "That doesn't mean we can't create our own cheesy Christmas special in our downtime, though. I'm sure that we'll discover the Christmas tree we seek as soon as you find the Christmas spirit buried in your hard heart, Mac."
"What a vomit-inducing concept." Rob smirked. "Could we change the channel back to reality from wild fantasy?"
"Come on." Mark chuckled. "You know, Paul explicitly stated in the epistle to the Corinthians that tragically got lost in the mail—because the Roman post was good, but not that good—that he who has not Christmas in his heart shall never find his Christmas tree."
"My lie detector is blaring on that one." Rob rolled his eyes. "Christmas trees weren't invented until around the nineteenth century in Germany, so Paul would never have talked about them even in a lost epistle."
"He was divinely inspired," countered Mark wryly. "He could write whatever he wanted. It's one of the prerogatives of divine inspiration, remember?"
"How could I forget?" All innocence, Rob twirled his pen between his fingers. "Being so often divinely inspired myself?"
"Feeling any divine inspiration about the rest of the clue?" asked Mark, waving his hand at the bubblegum wrapper.
"Prophets cannot see upon command, Mark!" Scandalized, Rob gasped. Then, he continued in a more conversational, less melodramatic tone, "Anyway, the final words of the hint look like a continuation of the lyrics you noticed earlier. I think the rest of the gibberish translates into 'how evergreen are your branches.'"
"The letters all correspond." After a moment of scrutinizing the letters of the last five words to ensure that each one was accounted for, Mark nodded. "Evergreen. Do you think that might be a suggestion to search for our tree among its real counterparts?"
"I think it is," Rob announced decisively after a pensive pause. "Trees would work with the previous clue, too, because you could make a manger with wood from an evergreen, couldn't you?"
"I'm no carpenter, but I would assume so," responded Mark. "I noticed a trail off the hotel grounds that seems as if it goes through some evergreen groves. We could see if our Christmas tree is hidden somewhere along it."
"A hike through the wilderness of upstate New York." Beaming with the light of an upcoming challenge, Rob pushed himself off the desk. "Lucky we practiced our orienteering skills yesterday."
Five minutes later, bundled in down coats, hats, gloves, boots, and thermal socks, they stepped onto the trail. Crunching through the snow, Mark thought that, even if they didn't find their missing Christmas tree, this experience wouldn't be so bad. White icicles glistened from branches like holiday lights, and everything was silent except for the muffled sounds of their feet sloshing a path through the woods. The trees stretched into the distance, and he could imagine that they reached all the way to the Arctic, so that he and Rob could hike up there if they wished and didn't have a game to play tomorrow.
"That oak still has an acorn on it," Rob commented. A second later, he jumped up, snatched a snow-covered acorn from the limb of a giant oak towering above their heads, and wrenched the bottom of the nut away from the top. Then he tossed the bottom into the snow bank on the side of the trail and lifted the top to his lips, blowing into it to emit a series of piercing whistles.
"It's the mournful song of the beached humpback whale lost in the woods," Mark teased. "You are pretty good at that acorn top music, though. I never could manage to whistle with an acorn."
"You can't whistle with an acorn?" echoed Rob, blinking at Mark in amazement. "No offense, but…"
"How reassuring," Mark mumbled. "That's how people always begin when they know what they're going to say is rude, but they can't be bothered to rephrase."
"By my standards, it's not too rude." Slyly, Rob smiled. "Anyway, as I was going to say before you so inconsiderately interrupted my brilliant observation, whistling with an acorn is so easy. How can you not know how to do it?"
"It's easy for you, not for me," explained Mark, shaking his head. "I've tried many times, but I've never been able to do it."
"You do it like this," Rob said, showing Mark how he pressed his thumbs up close against each other in front of his mouth where it held the acorn top and then dumped it into Mark's outstretched palm. "It's simple, you see."
Knowing that he was probably going to fail at acorn whistling as he had on so many hikes before, Mark attempted to imitate Rob, but he couldn't figure out how to make those little wedges with his thumbs on the wooden cap and blow through his knuckles to produce a shrill whistle. After several botched attempts that Rob, watching, managed not to laugh at, Mark's clumsy fingers shattered the acorn top.
"I'm hopeless." Mark sighed. "Good thing I never wanted to play the flute or anything."
"Don't worry." Rob clapped him on the shoulder as he threw the pieces of the acorn cap into the forest. "We'll find you another acorn top to learn to whistle on sometime."
Mark opened his mouth to reply that further humiliation of this sort would not be necessary, but ended up closing it again without a word. It was a sign of friendship that Rob refused to give up on him learning how to whistle with an acorn top, and he wasn't going to reject it.
"It took me awhile to figure out how to acorn whistle on hikes at sleep-away camp," Rob continued, as if sharing stories of his past failures would be a real consolation for his companion's current embarrassment. "I might have been the last boys in my cabin to master it, but I was the best at soccer and tennis."
Having absolutely no complications picturing a young but no less intense Rob McClanahan motivating himself for any real or imagined competition by constantly comparing his progress to that of his cabin mates, Mark remarked, "That last bit doesn't exactly send me into shock. You played tennis and soccer in high school, didn't you?"
"Yeah." Rob's eyes sparkled in a way that probably meant he was recalling all the awards he had achieved in those sports. "I had to have something to keep me busy during the off-season, you know. I had to get the blood pounding in my veins with some healthy competition, and, anyway, I wouldn't want the neighbors gossiping about me lounging around watching television in the den like a total couch potato."
"Were soccer and tennis your favorite activities at camp?" Mark asked, willing to bet they had not offered hockey at the summer camp Rob had attended.
"Nah, my favorite activity was an unorganized one." Rob smirked, obviously reminiscing on past misdeeds. "After lights-out, the boys in my cabin and I would all pull out our flashlights, hold them under our chins, and share the sort of unsophisticated, tasteless jokes elementary school boys believe are the height of hilarity. Gosh, I remember it so clearly—there we'd all be, listening in the dark with lunatic grins of anticipation on our faces, barely able to restrain ourselves until finally whoever was telling the joke would reach the punchline. Then we'd dive into the depths of our sleeping bags, out of control, howling and snorting, thinking nobody could hear us, although, of course, in the peaceful stillness of the forest night, we must have sounded like water buffalo giving birth over a PA system. Then our bedraggled counselor would storm out of his room, telling us that he was really tired of this, night after night, and if he heard one more sounds out of us, we'd have to clean the latrine the next day."
"Yuck." Mark wrinkled his nose, thinking that ranked high on the disgusting scale.
"Yeah, it was a serious threat," Rob confirmed, leaping over a log on the trail. "It was one of those very odorous summer camp latrines where you wondered how it could possibly be so revolting when nobody ever had had the courage to use it. Evidently, somewhere along the line, it had reached Critical Latrine Mass and developed a lifestyle of its own. Anyway, after delivering this threat, our counselor would stalk back into his room, and there would be silence for maybe a minute. Then there would be this tiny whisper, so faint only a trained ear could discern it, and it would be the joker repeating the punchline. Of course, this resulted in a situation where, never mind having to clean the latrine, never mind that our counselor was standing in the middle of the cabin clutching a weighty flashlight and threatening to break everybody's skulls, the only thing any of us could think about was whether we'd ever be able to draw breath again. So, we had a terrific summer, and all because of idiot jokes, which, though I would never tell them in public except under the influence of sodium pentothal, still do a better job of cheering me up than any major religion."
"Elementary school jokes are the best." Mark chuckled, as they reached a grove of evergreens. They glanced around at the trees they could see from the path and saw nothing resembling their Christmas tree.
"I'll look on the left, while you search on the right." Already walking off the trail in the direction he had assigned himself, Mark called over his shoulder, "Don't stray out of sight of the trail, and shout if you need any help, okay?"
"Magic, I've been in the woods before." Rob snorted, and Mark could hear in his voice the attendant eye roll.
Acting as if he could not, Mark combed through his side of the evergreen grove, alert for any sign of their lost, fake Christmas tree. Finding none after a solid five minutes of investigating his part of the grove, he trudged back to the path. On the trail, he waited for only a moment before Rob emerged from a cluster of snow-encrusted evergreen branches.
"No luck." Before Mark could ask, Rob shook his head as he fell into step beside Mark.
"Drat." Scowling, Mark bent, scooped up a fistful of snow, molded it into a ball, and hurled the missile at the trail marker on a tree ten feet ahead.
"Bull's eye." Appreciatively, Rob hooted and nudged Mark in the ribs. "That's why we call you Magic. You turn drats into bull's eyes."
"Just think." Mark's scowl softened into a grin. "If we had been at a carnival, I would have won a prize."
"A carnival." Rob pronounced the second word in the derisive tone one might use when describing a termite infestation. "Only a person from Wisconsin would think a carnival is fun."
"You seem to know so much about Wisconsin." Mark arched an eyebrow as they followed a trail marker directing them toward the right. "Why don't you share two Wisconsin facts with me if you're such an expert on the state?"
"Easy." Rob gave a smug laugh. "Wisconsin is famous for its cheese, and the fact that Laura Ingalls lived in a little house in a big woods there before her family dragged her in a covered wagon to a little house on the prairie."
"Ah, yes, the depths of your knowledge drown me." Mark's lips quirked. "For your information, carnivals are great places to impress your girlfriend. If you have a decent aim, you can win her all these stuffed animals at the game booths."
"If your girlfriend is impressed by stuffed animals, then she's about twelve, and you shouldn't be trying to get up her skirt," scoffed Rob.
"One day a passing pickup truck will stop to pull your mind out of the gutter." Mark emitted a long-suffering sigh, and then added, "If you aren't a fan of the game booths, you can always take your girlfriend for a ride on the Ferris Wheel."
"The Ferris Wheel—the slow circle ride!" exclaimed Rob with mock delight. "What could we do for an encore? Oh, I know, I could take my girlfriend for a ride on an elevator. Maybe, if she gets really scared and I play my gentlemanly cards right, she might even hold my hand."
"You know what your problem in life is, Robbie?" Mark demanded rhetorically. "It's that you are sarcastic about everything."
"Sarcasm is the only way I could survive the onslaught of the rest of the world's stupidity," Rob riposted, as they arrived at another grove of evergreens. "I'll go on the right, and you take the left again. See you in a few minutes."
Mark strode off the trail into the left side of the grove. After examining the area thoroughly, he concluded that there was no evidence of their missing Christmas tree, and, stifling his disappointment and frustration, he returned to the path, where Rob was already waiting for him.
"Looks like you were about as successful as peace talks in the Middle East," observed Rob dryly, jerking his chin at Mark's empty hands.
"I might have been even less successful. At least the Middle Eastern governments will occasionally write treaties that have the longevity of a snowball in July, but I didn't even find anything remotely relevant to our investigation." Mark punched the bridge of his nose, reminding himself sternly to focus on the next step to success rather than his annoyance that his last one had ended in failure. "Let's keep moving. The sun is almost down, and it's not a wise idea to be caught out after dark with no supplies in the winter on an unfamiliar trail."
"We have some supplies. I was smart enough to bring my licorice." Rob munched on one and proffered another candy to Mark, who accepted it with a nod of thanks. "Licorice beats trail mix every day of the year."
"I never met anyone as obsessed with licorice as you," Mark said, biting into the stick of candy and not caring if it made him lose his appetite for dinner. Everybody had to be irresponsible and spontaneous every once in awhile.
"I'm an obsessive person," answered Rob without a flicker of shame. "It's part of what makes me so stubborn, and, excuse me, but aren't you going the wrong way?"
"What do you mean?" Frowning, Mark froze in the middle of plunging straight ahead down what he was sure was the trail.
"There's a sign on this tree." Rob pointed at what appeared, in Mark's opinion, to be a scuff on the bark rather than a trail marker. "It's telling us to turn left."
"That isn't a sign." Mark shook his head. "It's just a scuff on the bark, Mac."
"It's a sign," insisted Rob testily, folding his arms across his chest.
"It's just a scuff on the bark," Mark repeated. "Come on, Robbie. I don't want to spend the night here arguing with you about the obvious."
"Then don't try to convince me that the sign staring me in the face is just a scuff on the bark," hissed Rob, jaw clenching in an obstinate manner that made it plain he would not budge from his position until Mark agreed to travel left instead of straight. He probably wouldn't even care if they missed tomorrow's game arguing in the woods, and Herb hanged them both from the nearest tree for skipping a game to go hiking. "What, Magic? Are you really so arrogant as to believe that you're the only one on the team who can navigate a trail?"
"Rob." Mark couldn't contain an exasperated eye roll. He just couldn't. "Let's not get carried away here. You know I don't think that."
"Don't roll your eyes at me," snarled Rob, hands flying to his hips, and Mark barely managed to squelch an eye roll over Rob's hypocritical indignation of a teaspoon taste of his own medicine. "That's my rude trademark. You'll have to invent your own disrespectful gesture, so stop being a vile copycat."
Opening his mouth to snap back that humans had been rolling their eyes as an expression of scorn for centuries before Rob was conceived, Mark recognized that this spat was the definition of juvenile he would see if he looked the word up in the dictionary. With a deep breath, he throttled back his pride and temper, then said as levelly as he could, "Perhaps it is a sign, and I'm mistaken. Let's try going left."
Rob, Mark walking in his wake, stalked to the left, grumbling, "You know, the way you do that takes all the fun out of being right."
"The way I do what?" Mark's forehead knitted in a tapestry of bewilderment.
"Give in." Rob glowered as they approached the end of the woods, nearing one of Lake Placid's streets. "It's like even though I'm right and you're wrong, somehow you're just humoring me. Serenity is all very well, but in someone our age, it's sort of creepy."
"What do you want from me?" Exasperated, Mark threw his palms in the air.
"Argue! Fight!" Rob flapped his own hands around like a frazzled bird's wings. "Don't do this…this pretend calm routine. Can't you just be argumentative for once?"
Mark's mouth tilted into a slight smile. "No," he said, as they stepped onto a street in front of a Chinese restaurant.
With a miffed noise, Rob jerked his chin toward the Chinese restaurant and muttered, "Let's grab a bite to eat. I'm famished after our hike."
Without a protest, Mark followed Rob into the restaurant, which was vaguely Asian in décor and filled with the scent of oriental sauces. His mouth watering, Mark nearly missed Rizzo, his arms circling like a windmill, shouting from a wraparound corner booth, "Mark! Robbie! Over here! Come join the party! The more the merrier!"
Crossing over to Rizzo's table with Rob beside him, Mark saw that Rizzo was clustered with OC and Silky around steaming platters of mu shi chicken and pork lo mein.
"We don't want to intrude," Mark replied.
"Or mooch off your food," added Rob.
"Nonsense!" Rizzo exclaimed, waving a chopstick impatiently. "It's not intruding if you're invited, and I'm practically begging you two to steal our food, because these plates are so huge. When the waiter said they were meant to feed a whole family, I didn't realize he meant Jimmy's family."
"If Jimmy's family wants to take a car ride together, they have to hire a limo," quipped OC as Rob squeezed into the booth beside him and Mark wedged himself in next to Silky. "Oh, and if his family wants to have dinner together, they have to rent a banquet hall."
"Can we not talk about Jimmy?"" Silky glared at OC. "I thought we were lamenting my problems."
"What's wrong, Silky?" Rob, rolling a helping of mu shi chicken into a pancake, wanted to know. "Is it anything licorice can fix?"
"Not unless it's the licorice that makes you skate so fast, in which case I wouldn't want to know what you laced them with, and neither would Herb." Silky fiddled with his lo mein. "My problem, Rob, is that I'm too slow. That's all Herb said to me at practice again today."
"Don't worry about it," Rob reassured him through bites of mu shi chicken pancake. "Herb wouldn't know what to say to us if he couldn't demean his players all the time. That's just who he is, and it's the main reason why, if he was ever unfortunate enough to end up on a lifeboat, the other passengers would chuck him overboard within the hour even if they had plenty of food and water, because they couldn't stand being told one more time that they were never going to reach the shore on talent alone."
"Simple for you to say." All petulance, Silky speared his lo mein with his chopstick. "You're fast. Herb loves fast. That's why you're on the first line with Magic here."
"Listen, Silky." His face serious, Rob leaned forward in the booth so far that his shirt almost landed in the platter of mu shi chicken. "Speed is overrated. I make mistakes like everyone else, and when I do, it's worse because it's faster, so there's no way to stop the train wreck. When you skate so quickly, you can easily take yourself out of play by accident and stuff. Being fast by itself is analogous to being the first done with an exam but getting half the answers incorrect. In other words, it's not much to brag about."
"You're doing great, Silky," put in Mark, remembering how Dad always had a specific praise for every player and testing that technique for himself. "That goal you scored off the boards today was a beauty. You keep getting goals like that in games, and we're going to win this tournament."
"The MVP has spoken, Silky. All must hear and obey." OC flipped his chopsticks around his fingers with dexterity and offered Mark his patented, cocky quarter moon grin. "What do you think, Magic? Should I give it all up and become a drummer?"
"You'd hate it," Mark responded between nibbles of lo mein. "You'd have to dye your hair a wacky color, get a weird tattoo, and get a nipple ring or something."
"Ladies love nipple rings." OC tapped his chopsticks on the table emphatically to highlight the importance of this statement. "Gives them something to play around with in bed."
"Getting a nipple ring is probably automatic grounds for BU to revoke your degree, OC." Rizzo chortled.
"Doesn't matter." Indifferently, OC shrugged. "That wouldn't prevent me from having a literally smashing career as a drummer."
"Exactly," agreed Rob in a sage voice. "You don't need a degree to compose a poem entirely out of curse words, Rizzo. I'll bet the average drummer doesn't even know what a college is, nonetheless how to attend one."
"That's it!" Dramatically, Rizzo raised his palms in the air. "Tomorrow I'm resigning as captain of this team and taking up a career with a little less stress like commando in the Marine Corps. You guys are all insane."