Trans Pacifica

Chapter 6

"How are we gonna find her?" Wendy asked. "If she didn't go to the woods near the river, and she won't answer her phone, what do we do?"

(Dipper) said, "Hang on, hang on, I got this." He took Pacifica's phone from his pocket, but then grunted in frustration. "Hey, Mabel, what's her password?"

Mabel leaned over, looking at the phone's screen. "It's—uh. I forgot!"

"Aggh! OK, let me think—Wendy, is my phone in the bottom right inside vest pocket? It'll be buttoned up."

"Let me check—yep, here it is." (Wendy) handed it over.

"This ought to work. Mabel and I have the exact same phones."

Mabel shook her head. "Wrong-o! Yours is a dull boring gray. Mine's an exciting hot pink. Ka-POW! Hot. Pink!"

"Except for the cases, they're the exact same!" (Dipper) snapped. He punched in a number, then did something complex with the buttons. "Yes! Write this down," he said to Mabel. He read out a string of numbers. "Got that?"

Mabel was scrounging through the mess on the coffee table, stuff that she was mostly responsible for, from candy wrappers to kazoos. "Lookin' for a pen."

"Gahh!" (Dipper) reached for a pocket that wasn't there. He balled up his fist in frustration. "Why don't girls have pockets? Or pens?"

"Wait, wait, I'll get one!" Mabel ran to her room and after a few seconds bounded back with a sketch pad and a red marker. "Read it again, brobro! Or in this case, sissis!"

"OK, it's—Mabel, that's not funny!"

"Yeah, it is!"

"It's pretty funny, Dude," (Wendy) agreed.

"So what were those numbers again, Dip?"

(Dipper) read the numbers again in what he meant to be a blunt, level, no-nonsense tone, but coming out in Pacifica's voice, it sounded like a petulant, pouty diva whine.

"Those like geo-caching coordinates, dude?" (Wendy) asked.

(Dipper) nodded. "Yeah, it's the app that lets you trace down a lost phone. Our parents insisted that we get it and install it 'cause Mabel has lost hers before."

"Pfft!" Mabel said. "Once, last year, and I did not lose it! It wasn't even lost. All the time I knew exactly where it was."

(Dipper) said bluntly, "Sure you did. It was in Gompers's stomach."

"Yeah, that goat'll eat pretty much anything," (Wendy) said. She added with a casual glance at Mabel, "Saw him eat a rocking chair once."

"And don't forget the car tag that came up from the Gulf," Mabel added with a grin.

"A goat couldn't eat a rocking chair—wait a minute, that never happened. That's . . . a . . . MOVIE!" (Dipper) yelled. He'd flipped open his laptop and was keyboarding at a machine-gun pace. "Don't distract me, guys. Come on, come on, load. Maps, OK . . . Oregon . . . feed in the coordinates . . . enlarge. Yes! She's right here, close to the river south of the lake, about where I was hunting the spider monkeys but a little more to the south, where the river bends, see? Guys, we must've missed her by less than a half-mile. Let's go!"

"Whoa, Dip," (Wendy) said, "Hang on, dude. Think about it. Seems to me you'd better sit this one out."

"But it's your body out there! We've gotta get her back—and put her into this body, so I can get mine back from you!"

"Dipper," (Wendy) said, "there's a reason she's not answerin' her phone, and I'll bet it's 'cuz she's realized she's in serious trouble with me an' Mabel. Now, look, we'll go in very calm and let her know we're not gonna go all medieval on her. I'm pretty sure Pacifica'll come to me, because she'll think I'm you, and probably she'll come to Mabel, who'll she'll think is me, but if she sees herself hunting herself, she's totally gonna freak out the way she does. She's likely to hide or some junk."

"Wendy's got a point," Mabel said. "You hold down the fort, Dipper. But we'll stay in constant touch, and you can direct and advise us."

(Dipper) groaned. "Oh, man! This sucks! I hate being in this body!"

"Then we'll go and find Pacifica and get you sorted out as soon as we can, Dip," Wendy said. "C'mon. You know this is the best way to do it, right?"

In a frustrated tone that came out all wrong, (Dipper) agreed: "Right."

Mabel couldn't help giggling. "You sound like a grumpy-grump talking doll!"

Grinding Pacifica's teeth, (Dipper) said, "Just . . . go!"

He went out into the yard and watched them take off, Wendy on his bike and Mabel riding hers. There go the Mystery Twins, he thought bitterly, but I'm still right here. (Dipper's) head hurt. He went back up to the attic and sat at his desk, his phone out and the laptop open, turned on, and plugged in. He picked up a pen and clicked it nervously. Why hadn't they called? Oh, it was because they'd been gone only forty seconds. Why didn't the time go faster?

It took the girls over half an hour to phone in. It was Mabel: "Dipper! We're close to the river. When we got here, we found the golf cart off the road parked behind some bushes, like she tried to camouflage it. And we just located the phone—it was laying on the ground under a tree a little way into the woods, but there's no sign of Pacifica!"

"Laying on the ground?" (Dipper) asked. Why in the world would Pacifica have tossed away her only link to—wait. "Hey, don't Wendy's flannel shirts have a pocket?"

He heard a muted back-and-forth, and then Mabel said, "That one has two!"

"Mabel, what kind of birds are you hearing?"

"Huh?"

"What kind of birds? It's important."

"Uh—well, there's—huh. No birds, Dipper. Don't seem to be any around."

Feeling as if cold fingers were walking up his spine, (Dipper) said, "Listen to me carefully. Look up into the trees. Look very closely. Tell me what you see." He bit his lip, hoping the answer wouldn't be—

"Dipper! There are like bunches and bunches real fuzzy ropes hanging in big saggy loops all over the place up there! They're kinda hard to see 'cause they're greenish, like the leaves!"

"They're not ropes," he groaned. "Webs!"

"Oh, my gosh! Wait a sec, Dip!"

"What? What? What are you doing? Mabel!"

Seconds ticked by, and then Mabel said, "Bro, I've just sent you a picture! See if you can tell what this thing is!"

The phone chimed to tell him he had an email. "I'll take it on the computer," he told Mabel, tapping at the keyboard. "Come on, come on, come on . . . ."

The email showed up, he opened it, and then he opened the attachment and blew it up to full screen.

The picture was . . . an abstraction in blotches and lines of green.

"Mabel, what am I looking for?"

"It was moving, so it's probably blurry. Upper right part of the screen. Brown."

"Looking, looking—got it. Oh, my gosh! Mabel, this is what I was searching for—an Oregon spider monkey! Weird-looking, man! Doesn't seem to have a tail, but four really, really long legs and—huh. No head!"

"Look closer! It also has a strand of web coming out of its butt!"

"Yeah, I see that now. Does it really not have a head, or is it just a weird angle?"

"I see another one. No head that I can see."

"How big are these things?"

"Um—bigger than a possum, smaller than a raccoon. 'Bout the size of a fat housecat, I'd say. Want me to take another picture—"

"No, not now." Talking half to himself, (Dipper) went on, "All right, all right, think now, these things are some freaky combo of monkey and spider. They string webs in the treetops, probably live on birds and squirrels and stuff like that . . . if they trap food like spiders do—Mabel!"

"Here!"

"Listen, look up in the trees where the webs are. Look for something hanging up there that will be like a great big cocoon!"

"Cocoon? That's adorable—no, no, it isn't! Oh, no! You mean Wendy's body may be—"

"I don't know, I don't know, I don't know! But look for something big wrapped up in webbing! And watch out for these things—there's nothing about them in the Journals except one little reference. No telling what they're capable of. Don't let one near you! But find Wendy!"

"Understood. Mabel out!"

(Dipper) fought back the urge to get up and run to the place as fast as Pacifica's legs could carry him. No, no, he told himself, Wendy is there—she's always cool in a bad situation. Let her and Mabel carry the ball this time. He sat tight. It was about the hardest thing he had ever done.

He didn't even feel proud of his successful deduction: If Pacifica had been carrying the phone in Wendy's shirt pocket—it would have fallen out when something snatched her and hauled her upside-down, off her feet and up into the trees. That was the logical explanation for the phone's being on the ground.

He'd been right.

Although at the moment would have given his right arm to have been wrong.


And speaking of the moment, at that exact same time but a continent away, two brothers (one of them very, very nervous) were taking off in an airliner bound for Oregon. Here is what had happened to them just the day before . . . .

Stanford Pines stooped in the thin gray rain to lay the bundle of wrapped flowers on the grave. He straightened and cleared his throat. "Mom, Dad," he murmured.

"Figures it'd be a lousy day like this," Stanley said, trying without complete success to hold the umbrella over his brother. "Here we are with wet feet in grass up to our ankles! It feels miserable! So are ya happy, Dad?"

"Show respect, Stanley," Stanford told him.

"Yeah, well, that's more than he ever showed me." The two brothers stood side by side in the rain, heads bowed, each one with his own memories.

Stanford sighed and then said softly, "Well, Mom and Dad, both of your sons came to see you at last. Sorry it's so late."

"Late's right," Stanley said. "We waited 'til we both look like Dad. It ain't pretty, let me tell ya."

With a little smile, Stanford said, "Yes, it's true. We're not the boys we used to be, but you know, after all these years we finally found each other. And we also found our great-nephew and great-niece. And I hope you'd like to know that we're at peace with where our lives have taken us. That's more than I could have hoped for even a year ago, when I was lost in a very strange place farther away from here than you could even imagine." He put a six-fingered hand on Stanley's shoulder and squeezed as though comforting his twin. "But thanks to my brother, I found my way back home. Dad, believe me, you were so wrong about Stanley. He's not a screw-up at all. He's the bravest man I ever met."

"Ah, he won't believe ya," Stanley said, sniffling a little. "Here, let me put in a word or three. Listen, Dad, you told me not to come back before I'd made a fortune, remember? Guess what? I did make a fortune! An' I spent it all to bring Stanford back. Ya probably think that was dumb of me, but let me tell ya, I'd do it again! 'Cause what you never understood, Dad, is that money isn't what matters most in life. Family is. I wish you'd learned that years and years ago. Ya got the message now? Family!" He fished a handkerchief from his raincoat pocket and blew his nose with a honk like a foghorn. "Mom—I always loved ya. You know that. I just wish that when Pop was blowin' his top you would've calmed him down now an' then. But that's OK. Water under the bridge, an' I know you loved him and us, as much as you could. I hope you an' him are at peace now."

"I wonder if Dad ever forgave us," Stanford murmured.

Stanley shoved his handkerchief back into place and tightened his grip on the umbrella as a breeze sprang up, dashing some rain into their faces and dimming his spectacles. "Don't matter, Ford, if we forgive him."

"Stanley, sometimes you surprise me."

"Well—I may be a con artist and a master of deception, but I'll tell you one thing. In all those years when I was runnin' the Shack, I learned a hell of a lot about human nature. And ya know what? Only about ninety per cent of human nature is bad. The other ten per cent—that's what makes life worth livin'."

"Before we go back home I'm going to arrange to have the grass trimmed and this place neatened up. We'll have to bring the kids here some time to visit the folks. Show them around and tell them about the old days. You know, I was surprised the old pawnshop looks almost the same as it did."

"Yeah. Too bad there's a bookie shop up where our apartment used to be. Though I dunno, maybe Dad woulda liked that."

"Well," Stanford said, hunching his shoulders against another drift of rain, "we've seen our old haunts—except for the ones they've torn down—and we've visited our cousins—except for the ones in jail. Ready to go home now?"

"Almost," Stanley told him. "Just one place left that I'd love to visit."

"What? I thought we'd seen everything we came for."

"Well—except for Atlantic City. You still good at calculatin' odds, Ford?"

Despite the forlorn surroundings and dismal weather, Stanford Pines laughed. "As good as you are at controlling the fall of dice, Stanley."

"Let's go make Dad proud of us," Stanley said with a broad grin. "Let's go make some money!"

"Sounds fine to me. Goodbye for now, Mom and Dad. We'll bring the kids to see you before the end of summer."

"Yeah. Dad—you had lots of bad points, but ya toughened me up, so thank you for that. Mom—me an' Ford will always love you. So long for now."

The two men walked side by side, threading their way through the tombstones to their rented car. Stanford climbed into the passenger seat, and after closing the umbrella, Stanley slipped behind the wheel, took out his handkerchief again, found a dry corner, and polished the rain off his specs.

He held them up, saw they were clean, donned them again, and said, "'Course, Ford, technically I'm not even supposed to be in the state, let alone in a casino. But after all these years, they probably won't recognize me. So there's a little bit of a risk, and there's a definite but small chance we may both wind up behind bars. So what do ya say, Poindexter? Play it safe an' drive to the airport, or Atlantic City?"

Stanford leaned back in the seat. In a cool, cheerful voice he replied, "Stanley, I say 'Roll the dice.'"

Stanley gave a bark of laughter. "Now you're talkin' my language." He started the engine and the car rumbled out of the cemetery and made the turn.

The roses on their parents' grave twitched and drooped a little as the rain became heavier. Steadily, big drops fell from them and splashed onto the turf of the grave.

It was almost as if, silently, they wept.