100 Sideways Miles (16 page)

He swung again. This time he missed the ball entirely.

“I quit,” Cade said. “No more driving range for me today.”

“Okay.” I put my club away too. “Well, do you have any?”

“Yeah,” Cade said. “No problem. Whatever. I'll give you a couple rubbers, dude. Happy fucking birthday. I've got some in my truck.”

I was so relieved.

I'd also totally ruined Cade Hernandez's day.

“Here,” Cade said.

As soon as we climbed into his truck in the parking lot at Vista Driving Range, Cade reached across the cab and pulled open the glove box. He fumbled through the stack of crap that invariably accumulates inside glove boxes and uncovered a strip of individually wrapped condoms. I had never seen packaged condoms like this before.

Oddly, they reminded me of candy.

There were four of them, stuck together in perfect two-inch square, perforated tear-off foil packets that were colorfully labeled in glossy blue print.

Cade detached two of the squares and handed them to me.

He said, “Here are your roller-coaster tickets.”

Holding the actual devices in my hands was a little strange. I could feel the contour of the condoms inside each packet, how they squirmed around beneath my pressing fingers because of all the slippery lubricant on them.

I wondered if the lubricant had been derived from the rendered bodies of dead horses.

I also remembered that I'd heard in health class that it was not a good idea to store condoms inside the glove compartment of your car, so I reminded Cade of this fact.

“In health class, they told us that condoms should never be kept in your wallet or in the glove compartment of your car,” I pointed out.

“Dude, that's just a conspiracy against horny teenage boys,” Cade said. “Where else is a kid going to keep condoms? Just laying around in the open, on display at his parents' fucking house?”

It was a fair question.

I had no idea where I would keep condoms, especially since I didn't drive.

I turned the things over and over in my sweating hands.

“Um. Are they easy to put on?”

Cade Hernandez shook his head and laughed. “You are so fucking dumb, Finn. It's as easy as putting on your socks.”

I thought I could handle that.

“Uh, Cade,” I said. “I just noticed something.”

“What?”

“These condoms have an expiration date on them. They expired two months ago. See?”

It was a frightening thought.

Expired condoms.

What do you do with expired condoms? Expired condoms are like nuclear waste: There's nothing sensible you can do with it.

I held the little packets up so Cade could see the black date stamped across the foil.

“Dude, it's not like milk. They're rubbers. Even milk is still good after the expiration date,” Cade argued.

“You drink
expired milk
?”

I was horrified by my friend's disregard for boundaries.

“You are fucking nuts, Finn,” Cade said.

He started the truck and turned the air-conditioning on full blast. I needed it. I was sweating like a pig at the front of the slaughterhouse waiting line.

I argued, “I suppose you'd get on that roller coaster even if the car in front of you skipped the tracks and splattered everyone riding in it all over the pavement.”

Cade thought about my question.

He said, “Dude, when you've waited a long-ass time and you're finally at the front of the line, you're going to get on the fucking ride. You'll see.”

I put the condoms back inside Cade Hernandez's glove box.

“Well, I am
not
going to use expired condoms,” I said. “I like my penis just the way it is.”

I shut the glove box with a finalizing
click!

And Cade said, “Fine. I am driving your ass to the 7-Eleven right now, and I am going to make you suck it up, go inside, and buy yourself a box of condoms.”

“Uh.”

I really did not want to go.

But what could I do? I had already buckled my seat belt on the Cade-Hernandez-is-driving-you-to-buy-some-rubbers ride.

This car was bound to skip the tracks and splatter me hard.

• • •

Markie Rodriguez worked behind the counter at 7-Eleven.

Just my stupid epileptic fucking luck.

Markie Rodriguez had played shortstop for the Burnt Mill Creek High School Pioneers baseball team. He graduated in June. Apparently, selling condoms, Slurpees, and chewing tobacco at a 7-Eleven was the realization of his post–high school ambitions.

Markie was an okay guy, just a little tightly wound and twitchy. You get that way playing shortstop, where it is so easy to make costly mistakes, which are closely related to extinction.

I believed there was something very ironic in the thought of purchasing a box of condoms from our former shortstop.

“Come on,” Cade said.

Cade Hernandez grabbed my elbow and walked me toward the counter where the cash register and Markie Rodriguez were located. It felt like I was being arrested, or being taken to get a spanking or something.

I had never been spanked in my life, by the way.

Nobody would ever spank a kid who'd had a dead horse fall on him.

And as Cade dragged me the twelve feet from the doorway to the counter, I glanced around in terror, taking in as many details of my environment as possible.

First, I noticed as we entered the store that according to the height chart on the aluminum frame of the doorjamb that was intended to help people estimate the size of stick-up men, Cade Hernandez was six feet four inches tall.

That's a big robber.

Cade had grown this year.

I also noticed there was a mother and three kids at the back
of the store filling up drinks at the serve-yourself refreshment bar. In the center of the store, a sheriff's deputy poured coffee into a tall paper cup, and a couple of brown-skinned men who looked like gardeners stood in front of the open beer box at the end of the aisle that displayed motor oil and pressurized cans of flat-tire-repair foam.

It was as though all of humanity had gathered at this particular 7-Eleven to watch Cade Hernandez force the epileptic boy to shop for condoms.

I was so horrified, I felt like I could vomit.

Never in my life had I considered willing myself into an epileptic seizure, but if I could have wished one to happen, I would gladly have blanked out on the spot. I even considered faking it, but then I looked at the sheriff's deputy and grimly considered what it would taste like if he attempted to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on me.

He had a mustache. And besides, no one wants coffee breath on a hot afternoon.

I attempted to reason with Cade.

That was ridiculous.

“Let's go somewhere else,” I pleaded.

“Stop being a little bitch,” Cade said.

“Little Bitch is my bullfighting name,” I pointed out.

“You are
going
to do this.”

Cade tugged me along.

“Ow. You're hurting my arm!”

I sounded like such a baby.

Markie Rodriguez beamed a smile when he saw us in the store.

“Win-Win! Finn! Hey, what's up?” he said.

Without hesitating, Cade said, “We came in to buy some condoms.”

I was certain there was not one person in that entire zip code who couldn't hear Cade Hernandez's announcement.

Look: Apart from having had sex with Iris Boskovitch, there was nothing in the world that could ever embarrass Cade Hernandez. So when he had the opportunity to address an audience in such a way as to make every single listener feel somewhat awkward and ill at ease, he was unflinching in his willingness to seize the moment.

Even the two thirsty gardeners standing in front of the stacks of twelve-packs turned their attention to the front counter and the kids who'd come in looking for condoms.

And Markie Rodriguez said, “Um.
We?
”

Markie looked from me to Cade and back to me again. One of his eyebrows drawbridged provocatively.

And Cade, never once reducing the volume of his reply, said, “Well, not
we
. Him. Not that he's the
man
and I'm the
woman
. The condoms are for him and someone else. Who is also not a guy, in case you were wondering. So everything's cool. But Finn needs condoms.”

Markie cleared his throat and said, “Glad you cleared that up, Win-Win.”

So Cade said, “That kind of gave me a boner. Do you ever get a boner when you talk about sex, Markie?”

Markie answered, “I guess I do. Sure. Who doesn't?”

“Really,” Cade said. “It's ridiculous, though. How about you, Finn? Do you ever get a boner when you talk about sex?”

I felt the blood draining from my head. I half expected the shoppers in the store to shower us with outrage. Everyone watched Cade and me in rapt attention. The mother at the drink station nervously told one of her junior-high-school-aged boys to turn around and not look at us. She grabbed the kid's shoulder and spun him to face the ice machine.

I could no longer speak.

And Markie asked, “What kind of condoms do you want, Finn?”

Kind?

There are
kinds
?

“Um.”

There were kinds. Just at eye level behind Markie Rodriguez's buzz-cut head, beside a display of Red Man chewing tobacco, hung several rows of various brands of condoms. Markie reached up and started pulling them down one by one, laying the boxes on the counter in front of us.

The sheriff's deputy came up and stood in back of me and Cade. He was ready to pay for his coffee. I wished he would shoot us both.

It was a real dilemma: What do you do? Ask Markie to take care of the deputy first? Make him wait behind the condom shoppers?

Cade held up a box.

“Look at this,” he said. “AfterGlow brand. These condoms get hot. Have you ever seen that? Condoms with shit on them that gets hot?”

He was asking his question to the deputy.

The cop shrugged and didn't reply. He was obviously interested
but maintained his aloof law-enforcement defense barrier.

Cade went on. “Who would want to put something that
gets hot
on his dick? That's the dumbest thing I ever heard of in my life. Remember that time we put Bengay in your jock, Markie?”

Markie nodded. “That was fucked up.”

Then the deputy chuckled. “We did that once, back when I played football.”

Cade Hernandez drew a little horizontal triangle in the air between me, Markie, and himself.

“Baseball,” Cade said.

The deputy nodded. “Oh. Pioneers?”

“Yeah,” Markie said. “Not a good year.”

“Hey! You're Cade Hernandez, aren't you?” the deputy asked.

Cade was a very talented pitcher. He'd already been scouted by three major-league teams.

Cade shrugged and nodded.

“So, which one of you guys would want to put burning shit on your penis?” Cade asked.

Nobody answered.

Cade said, “That's what I thought,” and put the hot condoms down.

A line stretched behind the deputy. The gardeners each carried cold twelve-packs. The mother and her three kids stood with their drinks. The kids watched their shoes, but their ears flared out like steam shovels.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

My knees shook.

Cade grabbed a different box. “Ultra-thin. Sounds risky, don't you think?”

“Uh,” I said.

Although “ultra-thin” did sound risky, I had completely lost the ability to communicate with language.

“Look,” Markie offered. “This might be what you want. These condoms have spermicidal jelly on them.”

I shook my head. I did not want spermicidal anything. It made me feel sick to think of killing my sperm with jelly.

“I like these condoms in assorted colors,” Cade said.

“Lots of guys buy those ones,” Markie pointed out.

Two girls from school entered the store. Thankfully, I didn't know their names. They were both about five feet five, though.

“Just give me these,” I said. I pointed to a blue box of Trojans. They looked the same as the ones Cade had in his truck.

“Good choice,” Markie said.

“An American classic,” Cade agreed.

Markie Rodriguez scanned the condoms into the register.

Then Cade said, “Throw in a box of those colored ones for me. The condoms I got in my truck are expired. Only a dumb shit would use expired condoms.”

“Smart kids,” one of the gardeners said.

Cade looked back at them and smiled. “Thank you. And put a can of Copenhagen in there too, Markie.”

“Got it,” Markie said.

“Markie,” I said, “I'm going to need an extra bag to put over my fucking head.”

July fifteenth came.

I was so nervous.

It seemed the preceding week had been all a blurry haze. Although I hadn't had a seizure since May, the night of the perigee moon—which was now one hundred million miles behind me—I felt disconnected and drained.

And I was so agitated.

My father noticed it. Everyone did.

“Are you okay, son?” he said to me.

Dad looked straight into my eyes. He could see stuff back there, I was certain. I could tell he was trying to see if maybe I'd blanked out and not told anyone about it. I still felt very guilty for not telling him what had happened to me on the living room floor while he was in New York.

We sat together on the morning of my last day as a little boy, the morning before my seventeenth birthday, drinking our coffee on the patio beside the pool. Laika, freshly bathed the evening before, following a complete body massage on a
dead jackrabbit, rested her chin on top of my bare foot.

I said, “I'm okay, Dad.”