The Inheritance

Derrick set the phone down on the sofa and blinked. He had a strange look on his face; as if he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

Gonga pulled a banana off the bunch sitting in the kitchen and threw one at his friend.

Instinctively, Derrick reached up to catch it before it smacked him in the face. “That was my Mom,” he said. “Apparently Great Uncle Hubert just died.”

“Who?”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking. I’m not even sure how I’m really related to him. But apparently he had a heart attack last night. They’ve set a date for the funeral and now they want me to come up and help clean out all his junk.” Derrick grimaced.

“Did he do cool stuff, kayaking, climb mountains? Did he like bananas?”

“Oh yeah, just go paw through his junk and take stuff I want, huh?”

“Well, did you know him very well?”

“Naw. Not really sure what he did. No. Wait. He wrote textbooks. He helped edit a bunch of them too, I think. Something about biology. Not sure really.” He kicked his feet up on the sofa and put his hands behind his head. His mouth twisted as he studied the ceiling.

“Well, if you want to get cash for textbooks, Gonga can help.”

“Thanks,” Derrick rolled his eyes. Then he sat up. “Actually, that might not be a bad idea. Want to come on up to Kirksville tomorrow and help me load up a trailer full of stuff?”

“Trailer?”

“Yeah. Trailer. That guy’s got a whole basement full of boxes of books. At least, he did five years ago when I saw him last. I doubt anyone else will want them. I’ll double check.” He pulled out his cell phone.

“Trailer how big?”

“He’s got a trailer up there I can probably borrow. I bet it’s big enough for just three trips. Hello Mom?” Derrick swiveled away.

Gonga stared at his friend. What in the world was he getting himself into?

River Running

It was time.

Gonga looked forlornly at the bright red kayak penciled into his calendar. The 340 mile long Missouri River race was scheduled for this week. At least, it had been. That was before the flooding began. Now the ground was parched, but the river had never stopped running strong. It was high. Too high.

Gonga sighed.

The MR-340 was postponed. And Derick no longer had any incentive to show back up in Columbia. Gonga was doomed to boredom.

He kicked the dry bag full of camping food across the room. It was over. He was tired of the whole thing. Tired of having his hopes up. Tired of packing. Tired of planning. Tired of things falling through at the last minute. This was not how the summer was supposed to progress!!!

Something thumped against the door to Gonga’s apartment.

Gonga growled.

It thumped again, harder.

“Dude, hurry up!” Derick’s voice sounded muffled by the door. “I can’t hold this thing forever!”

Gonga jerked the door open to see a bright red tandem kayak hull sailing towards him. Derick stumbled inside with the kayak on his back and flipped it over onto the living room floor. He shrugged off a couple backpacks and dropped the paddles before pausing to straighten his back.

“How’s it going?” Derrick asked, grinning broadly.

“It’s cancelled.” Gonga glowered. He was not going to let his hopes rise again just to get crushed. He was sick of the rollercoaster.

“So, we’ll pick a different river. I was thinking about doing the Gasconade. Or maybe the Current. What do you think?”

Gonga stared at him.

“Oh come on dude. Just ‘cause they cancel the race doesn’t mean we can’t have fun!” Derrick punched Gonga in the shoulder. “We just have to come up with plan B.”

Gonga shook his head, still reeling from the shock. No. He couldn’t believe it.

Textbook Imagination

Gonga slouched in his chair, staring out the window of his apartment. He looked away, blinking at the dancing bits of darkness imprinted by the sun. He was bored. So, so bored. He had survivled his trip to South Dakota and now he was just waiting for Derick to show up again. Waiting for Derick to come crashing through the doors with his energy and spunk and a whole boatload of new adventure stories to share.

A page flapped in the breeze of the fan rotating above.

Gonga glanced down. It was an old, old textbook about horticulture. He guessed it was copyright 1972 based on the design on the cover.

Horticulture.

Now there was an idea!

Gonga bent down and stripped a page out of the book. It had pictures of some sort of roses on both sides. He bent it between his fingers, swiftly crumpling and shaping the paper. The red splotches blended together with the black and white text, creating a mottled surface for the flower petals that began to appear between his hands.

The next couple hours were a flurry of tearing and shaping and cutting and pasting and more tearing. Gonga paused to admire the boquet of Cowslips that rose out of the glass in front of him. Then he started working on something a bit more complicated. Roses.

Before he knew it, his eyes were straining in the dark to see the next page. Gonga blinked. Had the day really flown by so fast?

OK, time to put away the flowers and go enjoy the outdoors while the sun way gone.

Actually, no! Don't put the flowers away. What was he thinking!?! He knew exactly where to take them. He grinned broadly and set out.

Mount Rushmore

Gonga quivered with excitement as he stood in line at the Mt Rushmore tourist center ticket booth. All his life he had heard about the stone faced men who lived in South Dakota. Now it was time to see them in person.

Taking his ticket, he followed the herd of other tourists down the walkway out the back of the building.

Would the men speak to him? Would they even acknowledge his presence? What did they think of gorillas? Surely they would be kind to him. Only a few people seemed to hold particular grudges against Gorillas. And most of those people were individuals whom Gonga had knocked down or frightened away in the middle of one of their dastardly deeds. So beyond failing to ingratiated himself with the more dangerous segment of the population, Gonga had few enemies.

But you never knew when you met someone new.

“I can’t wait to see George Washington!” a girl in ponytails skipped ahead of Gonga, clapping her hands and tugging on her mother’s jeans. “Will he look just like the history books?”

Gonga squinted his eyes. He remembered one of the books The Textbook Game had sold the previous year. It had a beautiful picture of Mt. Rushmore on the front, with word bubbles floating out of the mouth of each individual. He tried to remember what they said, but it escaped him.

Through the pine trees ahead of him, Gonga caught a glimpse of granite. The gray stood in stark contrast to the evergreens.

Gonga continued his pilgrimage, listening to the kids around him whine or groan of squeal in proportion to their interest in historical stone figures.

More and more stone appeared between the trees until suddenly Gonga came out into a clearing. He gasped. The others seemed overwhelmed by the sheer size of the heads carved above them, but Gonga’s attention was fixed in the far right figure. It was a gorilla! In fact, it looked exactly like Gonga’s great-great-great grandfather who had been instrumental in one of the WWII expeditions the U.S. had made in Africa.

Gonga chuckled. He laughed. Then he kicked up his feet and spun around. His very own three times great grandfather! Up on Mount Rushmore.

His trip was complete.

Black Mountains

Gonga rolled the window down. “One McChicken,” he grunted, “and one chocolate sundae.”

The electronic voice crackled back at him, muttering something unintelligible and his order flashed up on the screen in front of him. He assumed they were asking if it was right, so he said, “Yes, that’s all,” and pulled forward.

It was a hot muggy day. Typical for Missouri weather. Even after driving north half the day, Gonga had not quite made it out of the state, and the temperature had only continued to climb.

Black mountains. The phrase echoed around his mind.

They sounded so mysterious, so ominous. Which was precisely why Gonga had decided to drive out to see them.

He rolled his window up after receiving the food from the drive-through window and proceeded to work the wrapping off his McChicken sandwich. Oh how he loved the peppery tang of those chicken sandwiches.

With the icecream melting rapidly in the cupholder beside him, Gonga pulled out onto the highway once more. He needed to make better time. No more stopping to tour each rest area which presented itself, no more darting down side roads just to see where they went, and definitely no more stopping for food every hour. It was time to get serious. The Black Mounatins were waiting.

Mountians

“Mountains, Gandalf, Mountains!” The hobbit gestured wildly up at the wizard on the TV screen across the room.

Gonga grunted, sliding down further on the couch.

“I want to see mountains!”

Gonga reached over and punched the pause button on the remote. Mountains. He did want to see mountains. Quite a lot. His friend’s planned expedition to Mount Everest interested him slightly. Though he wasn’t so much a fan of ice and cold. Gonga didn’t really like altitude much either. One trip up Kilimanjaro as a teen had pretty much ruined his appetite for anything higher than 4000 feet above sea level.

But he did want to see mountains again. He’d had enough of sitting around watching the library’s entire DVD collection over the last two weeks since classes were over. It had been interesting the first week. But now the actors were all jumbling together, and he was pretty sure the producers had all watched each other’s movies. They all seemed oddly alike at any rate. He wasn’t even sure if he had kept the “Need to watch” stack separate from the “Already watched” stack.

Gonga pushed himself off the couch.

Where was Derick anyway? He had disappeared a couple weeks ago for some insane outdoor adventure up in Minnesota. But he had invited him to go on a canoe trip, right? When was that again?

Gonga shuffled through the litter of empty water bottles and wadded up newspapers towards his calendar. There is was. A bright red canoe sticker was plastered on July 27th. Ah. That’s when Dereck said he would get back.

Gonga scratched his head, wondering if he was supposed to prepare anything. And then wondering where in the world the canoe trip was, and furthermore, what he was supposed to do in the next month.

Mountains.

That word intrigued him. Perhaps he would find mountains over the next few weeks.

He glanced down at his fur. Black. Black mountains! That would be perfect. But where?

Freedom!!!

Gonga did a quick two-step and clicked his heals. He spun around in circles. He jumped in the air and tumbled into a somersault. Freedom!!! Summer was finally here. The last final was over. It was done.

Now it was time for one last grand adventure of summer before buckling down to the more routine work of catching birds with the mist-net gun.

A backpack came hurtling through the air and bounced off Gonga’s chest. He grunted in expectation of a stack of books. But the backpack caved and slid down to the ground. He looked up to see Dereck grinning at him.

“Got rid of them all,” his friend said. “Finals done, books sold, now I’m ready for one good canoe trip before heading out to Mount Everest.”

Gonga cocked his head to one side. “Gonga like canoeing.”

“Really.” Dereck scratched his chin.

“Gonga know how to swim,” Gonga added.

“You’re not saying you want to spend a week with me in a narrow strip of metal going down category three rapids?”

Gonga smiled. “Gonga love water. Especially when it is hot.”

Oh no. This had nothing to do with the cryptic message he had received the night before. Go with Dereck, the message had told him. He has information you need. Yeah. That made a lot of sense. Go hang out for a week with this random person who had befriended Gonga. Keep your Gonga guise in place. See if you can last a week of close scrutiny without detection. Besides, what in the world could Dereck know that would have any bearing on the mission? And was the mission really worth it anymore anyway?

“Well,” Dereck has been silent for a while, pondering. “I suppose you can come with me. I have a couple other buddies going, but one had to bail yesterday. So we have two canoes and three people. Do you know how to paddle?”

“Gonga can learn,” Gonga declared, smacking his fist into his chest.

And with that, it was settled. Gonga would go canoeing.