Reality Check (2010) (10 page)

Cody drove out of the alley and turned onto the street, where he paused behind a car letting someone off at the Red Pony. He'd just had time to see that the someone was Mrs. Redding when the driver's door opened and Tonya came running out. Cody rolled down his window.

"This is so weird. Clea and everything. Plus have you heard the latest?"
"About Clea?"
"Nothing new about her, not that I've heard. I'm talking about her father. He came back from the search for business or something and now he had a heart attack. They had to do one of those bypasses."
"How do you know?"
"Friend of my mom's is a nurse at Western Memorial--she thinks he'll make it." Tonya glanced into the car. He caught her smell; a very nice one. "Where you headed?" she said.
"No place special."
"Sounds good."
"Huh?"
"No place special, Cody. Got room for me?"
He almost said Huh? again. Instead, for once, he did a little better. "How's Dickie?"
"Dickie," she said, "is a dick."
Cody laughed. All his impressions of Dickie--someone he'd been dealing with since the earliest days of Pop Warner-- came snapping together into an accurate picture.
"So what's the answer?" Tonya said. "Got room for me?"
Their eyes met. Maybe hers weren't quite symmetrical, maybe her hair, cut in a lopsided way, with purple at the ends, was a little silly, but there was something about Tonya. "You're going places, Tonya." That just popped out; he was blurting all sorts of things in the past little while.
Tonya's mouth opened in surprise.
"Later," said Cody, and he drove away. He glanced back in the rearview mirror. She was giving him the finger, a smile on her face.

Cody stopped at an ATM and took four hundred dollars from his account, the most it would give him in one day. Then he got on the interstate and headed east, away from the mountains. He'd been west, into the mountains--and even across and all the way to San Diego once, a long time ago, blue waves just at the edge of memory--but he hadn't been more than twenty miles the other way, east of Little Bend. He thought of the scene in the
Lord of the Rings
movie where the hobbits stop at the edge of a cornfield marking the border of the Shire. His own border was an exit in the middle of a flat nowhere:
INDIAN
_VALLEY
, 6
_MILES
. Cody hadn't been planning to do this, hadn't had the slightest notion, but he took the Indian Valley exit.

Cody had been to Indian Valley twice before. The first time, with his mother, to see the farmhouse where she'd grown up, he barely remembered. The second time, to her funeral, he didn't remember much better, although by then he'd been almost eleven. He had clear memories from that year--returning the opening kickoff for a touchdown in his very first Pop Warner game--so why was his mother's funeral reduced to just a few shadows? Cody drove into Indian Valley--a crossroads with endless fields all around, now bare until spring--and parked behind the little church.

There was no one around. Cody made his way through the cemetery. He couldn't remember the exact location of his mother's grave, but the Indian Valley cemetery wasn't very big, and soon he was standing before it: a small dark stone, rounded at the top and glinting with mica or some other mineral. It had her name, Gina Laredo, and her dates, much too close together for bracketing a human life.

You were supposed to bring flowers: Cody knew that from the movies. He looked around for something pretty, but nothing qualified. He bent down, swept away a few scraps of paper and some dead leaves. His mom had kept the reality of things hidden from him. All that--what was the word? Trauma. All that trauma: the discovery, very late, of an aggressive form of breast cancer; mastectomy; chemo or radiation or maybe both--Cody still wasn't sure. What the hell difference does it make now? his father had said the one time he'd asked. But whatever the treatment, she'd lost her hair, and that couldn't be hidden, although she'd tried. He'd lain beside her on her bed--this was before the apartment, in their house, a nice little house with a park across the street--and she'd told him she'd been sick but was all better now, and her hair would soon grow back. And her hair did grow back--but different, with gray in it--and she'd returned to her job in a lawyer's office. Then one day, carrying groceries up the front steps, she'd tripped and fallen. Cody, beside her, heard a cracking sound, and his mother had cried out in pain. "Mom! Mom! Are you okay?" He'd helped her up and she'd limped into the house, partly supported by Cody's shoulder. The cracking sound had come from her leg breaking, not one of the two smaller bones below the knee, but the big one from the knee to the hip, which doesn't break often. His mother's bones had turned out to be full of cancer. It hadn't been long after that. That bone crack: Cody remembered it more clearly than her face.

Light faded. Her name and dates grew invisible. Cody had an idea. He went back to the car, opened the trunk, took out an old practice football he kept in there just in case an opportunity for throwing it around came up. In the glove box he found a Sharpie. He wrote on the ball:
_{RIP MOM}
.
_{LOVE CODY}
, 11. Football players always followed their name with their uniform number. He went back to the gravestone and laid the ball in front of it.

Cody drove out of Indian Valley, got back on the interstate. The way his father was now: How much came from his mother dying, both the fact of it and the how of it? Some, for sure, but hadn't there always been too much drinking? Cody thought so. And what about the meanness? Cody wasn't so sure about that. Who'd first taught him football, shown him how to throw and catch? His father, of course. He owed him for that. Maybe his father had knocked him around some in those sessions, but hadn't that been to toughen him up? You had to be tough, and not just in football.

The stars came out, so many and so beautiful in the black sky, but not much company. Cody tried to find something on the radio. He drove through the night. The road went on and on, lit-up sights flashing by but mostly just the darkness. For the first time in his life he felt American. He'd been American the whole time, of course, just had never translated it into a feeling. Did all Americans share the feeling, have it the same? Cody didn't know. At some point during the night, he realized he'd forgotten his boots.

And maybe he was going to need them. Snow was falling the next day when he reached Chicago. He hadn't slept and his eyes were getting heavy, but Chicago didn't look like a good place for sleeping. He kept a lookout for Soldier Field but didn't spot it.

Halfway across Indiana, or maybe a little more than that, traffic, so heavy since Chicago, finally thinned out. A sign rising high over the flat land read:
MOTEL
.
Cody took the next exit. He'd stayed at motels before--with his parents on the San Diego trip, and several times on the road for Pop Warner tournaments--but he'd never handled the signing in before. It turned out to be easy, especially when you paid with cash in advance. Ten minutes after getting the key, Cody was fast asleep in room twenty-three of the Hoosier Grand Motel.

It was dark when Cody woke up, and for a few moments he didn't know where he was. He got up, felt his way around the room, parted curtains, looked out at the unfamiliar. On the other side of the wall, a woman was saying, "I've had it up to here with the bastard." Cody thought of turning around, going home, a thought he overcame after a minute or so. He took a shower, changed clothes, went to a diner across the street, where he was the youngest person in the place by far. Cody ate two cheeseburgers with sides of fries and cole slaw, drank a Coke, felt better. He paid the check, calculating the tip by doubling the sales tax, the way experienced restaurant-goers did it, according to Frank Pruitt. Taking his change, Cody realized he was still hungry and bought himself a KitKat, the biggest size they had.

By dawn--a gray, colorless dawn and the New York State Thruway cutting endlessly through brown scenery--he was hungry again. Just past Syracuse, he took a pit stop. He gassed up, bought coffee and muffins, found an ATM and withdrew another $400, leaving a balance of $946--not bad. A school bus parked beside his car just as he was getting back in. Some kids who looked about his own age gazed down. A window slid open and a girl called out, "Hey, Colorado!" And behind her another girl said, "Take me with you." Balancing the tray with coffee and muffins, Cody glanced up at them, couldn't think of anything to say. "Are they all as cute as you in Colorado?" the first girl said.

"I'm the cutest," Cody said. "They threw me out." Hey, all of a sudden thinking of something to say.
The girl looked surprised, then started laughing. "What did he say?" said the other girl.
Cody got in his car, rolled back onto the Thruway. The kids on the bus seemed a lot like the kids at County High. He felt good to be out on his own, crossing all these states. Just another driver on a long, long road: If he didn't screw up, no one would care about his age or anything else. It was a free country.
Cody left the Thruway in Albany, continued east on a smaller road that slowly rose into greenish-brown hills. Just as he crossed into Vermont, the sun came out, and the hills grew prettier, if not quite so nice as the mountains back home. But as he turned north, the hills got taller and nicer, took on all sorts of interesting, rounded shapes; and he realized he'd never seen anything like this; every size was just right, if that made sense. Cody went through a beautiful little town with a village green and a white church, and then a few more, even more beautiful. At 1:07--Cody noted the exact time--he drove into North Dover, the most beautiful of all.
He went down a road lined with tall old trees and big old houses, came to a main street, parked by a cafe called the Rev, a cool place, you could just tell. Cody got out of the car, intending to ask directions to Dover Academy. He paused; he'd been out of touch: Was it possible Clea had turned up, that everything was all right? He reached for his cell phone, about to try her number, but as he did, heard a drone from the sky. Cody looked up and there, over high wooded hills to the north, saw a helicopter flying low. That answered both his questions. He got back in the car.