The Flying Troutmans (15 page)

Yes, I said. I was listening hard, but to the van, trying to determine if it was still making that sound.

That's wild, eh? she said.

Yeah, I said. It
was
making that sound.

When Logan and I were little, she said, we only knew one number: 911.

Well, if you're going to know only one, I guess…, I said.

Then she told me a story. One day we were bored, so we called it eight times in a row, she said.

They had hung up every time the operators answered. But eventually the 911 people sent six cruisers to their house with lights flashing and sirens wailing. Min looked out the window and said oh, bite me hard in the ass. She asked the kids what was going on. They told her what they had done. They'll charge us with mischief, said Min. Or neglect. Or some damn thing. (Another thing about our family, apparently, was that we were never able to define, precisely, or understand the charges being brought against us. Patterns of incomprehension.) Min ran to the kitchen, grabbed the cast-iron frying pan from the top of the microwave, plunked it on the floor and messed up her hair. The cops banged on the door and she opened it and told them, in a thick Eastern European accent, that everything was okay now, she was so sorry, she had wanted to heat up some perogies, her frying pan had fallen on her head, she had been knocked out for a minute or two, her husband was at work, her children had panicked but were self-conscious about their English and afraid to speak to the 911 operator. No, she had not been assaulted. No, they had not been broken into. She told them she loved Canada. She told them she loved horses. Thebes didn't know why she'd said that. The cops asked the kids if they were okay. They said yeah. The cops told the kids that next time there was an emergency at home they should attempt to speak with the 911 operators, even though their English wasn't good. They said okay. The cops left and Logan and Thebes watched them laugh all the way back to their cars.

Hmm, I said. I smiled at Thebes. Your old lady rules. So I guess you've stopped calling 911?

It was one of those stories that could have gone in so many different directions. Had Thebes been embarrassed when she saw the cops laughing? Stricken with the realization that the cops knew her mom was nuts, hadn't believed a word she'd said, and thought it was hilarious? Or had she been proud of Min's wacky resourcefulness, sure that the cops had bought it, or, even if they hadn't bought it, had been impressed with the effort, and had gone away feeling happy. Another trippy day of serving and protecting. Was Thebes trying to tell me that Min could handle tricky situations if she needed to, that all was not lost, that she could live life on life's terms, or was she trying to tell me that Min had seemed crazy to her for a long time?

I think we're in Arizona, said Thebes. I liked the way she sat up in her seat then and looked around with fresh eyes, like things might be radically different now that we had crossed an invisible state line.

 

twelve

I WAS AT MIN'S PLACE
when Cherkis left. I played with Logan in the backyard while Min, with baby Thebes on her hip, chased Cherkis down the front sidewalk, screaming obscenities and at the same time begging him not to go. A few of the neighbours had come out to watch.

Logan was wearing a red plastic fireman's hat and was pretending to put out a fire with the garden hose. I was a
burn victim and wasn't allowed to move. Every time I heard Min shriek I'd turn my head and try to get up, but Logan would race over to me, put his hands on my cheeks and his face close to mine and attempt to redirect my focus. You'll be okay, he said. Don't worry. You're gonna make it. You won't die. And then he'd race back to the fire.

Later on, after Cherkis had successfully managed to escape, Min lay sobbing on the living room floor and Logan sat beside her watching TV. I tried to get him to come for a walk with me and Thebes but he said no, he wanted to watch the Ninja Turtles with Min. When we got back I told Min that I was going to leave for a few hours but that I'd be back that evening to make dinner and help her get the kids to bed and after that I'd hang out with her and sleep over if she wanted me to. I tried to talk to her about Cherkis, about everything, but there was nothing she wanted to say or hear.

It took me forever to leave because Logan had hidden my shoes and wouldn't tell me where.

 

Thebes convinced Logan to play Deborah Solomon's Q and A.

Okay, she said, I'm Deborah Solomon and you are you. Logan Troutman, she said. You've experienced a lot of failure in the past. What makes you think this venture will be a success?

Logan: What do you mean
failure
? Fuck off.

Thebes, interjecting as herself, told Logan that he
wouldn't really say that to Deborah Solomon. Remember, it's
The New York Times,
she said. Let me start again.

Logan Troutman, she said. You've experienced a lot of failure in the past. What makes you think this venture will be a success?

Logan: What venture?

Okay, cut, said Thebes. Logan, please work with me here.

It's not TV, he said, it's print. It's a column. You don't say “cut.” God.

Okay, said Thebes. The venture I'm talking about is this trip to find Cherkis. Okay?

Deborah Solomon doesn't get all personal in her columns, said Logan.

Well, this time she is, okay? said Thebes. I'm going to start again.

Logan Troutman, she said. You've experienced a lot of failure in the past. What makes you think this venture will be a success?

Logan: I have a very positive mental attitude. Plus, it helps that I really don't care.

Solomon: Well, which one is it? A positive mental attitude or you just don't care?

Logan: I just don't care.

He said he was done with the game and was going to lie down.

Any of those secrets you'd like to cash in on? Thebes said to me.

What are you talking about? I said.

Your certificate, she said.

Oh yeah! I said. Okay. Yes. You are the coolest, most beautiful kid on the planet. You're my inspiration and my rock and the wind beneath my sails. You are the shit, T.T.

That's not a secret, she said. And don't be sarcastic. Tell me something about yourself that you haven't told anybody.

I thought for a long time.

Okay, I said. I had sex with my swimming coach when I was sixteen and he was thirty-seven and then I blackmailed him and told him I was pregnant and needed five hundred dollars for an abortion or I'd tell his wife that he was a pervert and he gave me the money and I spent it all on acid and mushrooms and quit the swim team.

Thebes silently reached around to the back seat, dug out her hole puncher, took my certificate out of the glove compartment and ceremoniously punched a hole in the first box.

You can't tell anybody, I said.

Ew, she said. As if. Besides, this seals it. She waved the certificate around.

I worried that I had chosen the wrong secret to share with an eleven-year-old. I apologized to her for being indiscreet.

Well, Hattie, she said, I'm on shaky ground here. It's not my department. Just remember that not all your secrets have to be disgusting, all right? Like, were you a slut when you were young?

No! I said. I wanted to mention that I'd been lonely, vulnerable, pathetically enamoured with this guy's twisted attention, probably conducting a misguided search for a
father figure, periodically terrified of my sister, whom I loved and revered but never understood, definitely insecure about my body and my brain, wanting to be adored by somebody adorable, lousy at swimming, on the verge of an eating disorder and dangerously impulsive…but that would have dragged this thing out even further.

She let it go. She asked me if I remembered how Grandma used to brag about her ability to memorize fifty three-letter words a day.

 

I saw a gas station down the road and decided to stop and fill up. Thebes could buy a
Tiger Beat
or something and focus on teenage mishaps other than mine and we could drive in silence for a while, maybe. Logan was sprawled out in the back seat, asleep and oblivious to the bass that was still pumping out of his headphones loud enough that the guy filling the van with gas started nodding his head in time with the beat and said he loved that band.

I told Thebes to go check out the magazines and then darted around to the side of the gas station to use the pay phone. There was no answer at the hospital. Had it been evacuated? Firebombed? Were the inmates rioting, throwing mattresses out the windows and cutting off the phone lines? When doesn't a hospital answer its phone?

I went back to the van and talked to the gas jockey.

That's a kick-ass mohawk, I said. Can I…?

Sure, he said, and leaned over so I could graze it with my fingertips. You know you're leaking oil, he said. Big time.

I know, I said, what do I do about it?

Well, you fix it, he said. It took him half an hour to get those four words out. I smiled.

Dude,
how
do I fix it? I said. He told me if it was a wonky seal or a busted gasket it would cost a lot, maybe five hundred bucks, and would take probably an entire day to fix. An oil leak is not good, he concluded, half a century later.

Do you think I can make it to Flagstaff? I said.

Yabsolutely, he said. He asked if he could come along. He had a girlfriend there whose head he wanted to break. I told him I wasn't going to give him a ride if what he had in mind was domestic violence and he said no, no, he was only kidding. He just wanted to talk to her about her bad habits.

What about your job? I asked him.

I'm quitting right now, this second, he said.

Thebes came hopping over on one foot with an Archie comic and a new knife for Logan. She laid it across his throat for him to find if he ever woke up.

We got into the van and I started it up while he and Thebes were chatting. Logan slept through all of this. The guy's name was Colt.

Colt, said Thebes. Like a baby, male horse?

I guess, said the guy, or a gun.

Well, which do you prefer? she said.

What do you mean? he asked.

Like, how do you prefer to think of yourself? As a baby, male horse?

No, he said, he didn't really like to think of himself that way.

Well, then, as a gun? she said.

No, not really, he said. He preferred basically not to think of himself at all.

Isn't that impossible? she said. How can you not think of yourself at all?

Well, he said, he just thought about other things.

Such as? said Thebes.

About his girlfriend, mostly, he said.

Yeah, she said, but not in relation to yourself? He didn't think so. Anything else? said Thebes.

Well, I do think about life on other planets, he said.

Really? she said.

He said yeah, he thought a lot about this planet called Moralia.

C'mon, she said, there is no planet called Moralia.

This was good. I'd picked up a violent nutcase named after a gun who believed in a planet that didn't exist.

Do you mind if I smoke? he asked.

Not at all…may I have one of those? I said.

Actually, we do mind, said Thebes.

Then she started relating to this guy by telling him how, when she was a little kid, she had this magazine and in it was an advertisement for this miniature fake town called Thomas Kinkade Lamplight Village. She wanted to live there so badly. She would lie in her bed gazing at this village, with its cute gabled houses and meandering, narrow pathways and smoking chimneys and thatched roofs and homey lanterns and warm, orange glow and cry her eyes out wishing she was in it.

Word, said Colt, I'm down. I wished I lived on Moralia. Thebes had found a soulmate in this homicidal
cosmonaut. Impeccably, sombrely united in their mutual, impossible longing to live in places that weren't real, they high-fived and punched and slapped and then gazed for a while out the window at the real world, the one they'd had it with.

Nice head, said Colt, finally. He pointed to the dash.

Yeah, I said. The guy sleeping next to you with the knife on his throat made it in Thebes's art class.

Who's Thebes? he said.

That one, I said, nodding my head in Thebes's direction.

In Old English, said Thebes,
colt
means young ass or camel. She slammed her dictionary shut.

Hey, isn't the Grand Canyon around here somewhere? she said.

Hey, another chunk of the world missing from our lives. Another giant hole in the surface of our universe. Let's find it!

Yabsolutely, said Colt. Where are you guys from, anyway?

The True North strong and free, said Thebes.

Cool, he said, where are you going?

Twentynine Palms, she said.

Where's that? he asked.

California, she said.

What for?

To meet our father, she said.

Are you the mother? he asked me.

I'm the aunt, I said.

Then Colt told us a story about how he was a conduit for love, but I'd stopped listening.

Logan woke up and he and Colt politely introduced themselves to each other and then Thebes said we had to see the Grand Canyon. I said I was worried about the van and really wanted to get to Flagstaff. But Logan said yeah, he wouldn't mind checking out the canyon, and Colt said he wouldn't mind either, he had a window before he was scheduled to break his girlfriend's head.

I don't know what to say about the Grand Canyon that the name itself doesn't evoke. It's big and deep and brown. The four of us stood at the edge of it and looked down and saw a line of donkeys with tourists on them snaking along a path at the bottom.

With her underwater camera Thebes took a picture of Logan, Colt and me beside the canyon looking slightly dazed and disappointed.

Let's get outta here, I said. It gave me the creeps. I snapped at Thebes to back away from the edge. I yelled at Logan when he pretended to push her over,
that's so not fucking funny,
and begged Colt for one of his smokes.
Yabsolutely!

I glared at a swarm of tourists who were staring like they recognized me from
Rosemary's Baby
and flicked my butt into the canyon when I was done.

 

Logan wanted to drive into Flagstaff, so I let him, partly in a glasnost attempt to make up for screaming at him earlier. Wild West. And mostly he was using one hand, his good one, to drive. Someday he'd have a valid licence and in the meantime he needed to practise. I knew he thought it
looked lame to be riding into a new town with his sister and his aunt and I knew he thought Colt was a goof. Ideally he would have had us all duck down and make ourselves invisible while he drove around listening to his tunes, playing it cool, pretending he was something other than a fifteen-year-old Canadian boy in a leaking Ford Aerostar minivan.

We dropped Colt off in a 7-Eleven parking lot. He said he needed to buy a newspaper and a razor and some other things and he could get to where he was going from there.

Not Moralia, said Thebes. Later, skater. She was yawning.

Hey, I said, act nice and gentle, eh? Nice meeting you.

You too, said Colt. Thanks for the ride.

Take it easy, said Logan. They shook hands, awkwardly because of his cast.

Logan peeled out of the parking lot and we drove around looking for a hotel. It was late, around ten, and I'd have to find a garage in the morning. We found a cheap Motel 6 and while I checked us in and Thebes lay down on a ratty sofa in the lobby and read some literature on Flagstaff, Logan carried our stuff to the room. When Thebes and I got there the TV was blaring and Logan was pacing around, fuming.

That fucker jacked my knife, he said.

Colt? said Thebes. The new one I bought you?

Yeah, he said, when I was sleeping. He must have.

I lay on the bed and closed my eyes. We'll buy you a new one, I said. We'll just keep buying knives and pistols.

Thebes lay down beside me and continued to read her brochures. Did you know that Flagstaff has a disproportionate number of methamphetamine addicts and scam artists? she said.

I didn't know why a hotel would have a brochure with that kind of information. Is there anything in there about horseback riding or museums or anything like that? I asked. I thought maybe there'd be something fun to do the next day while the van was getting fixed.

Um, said Thebes, it says there's a psychiatric museum housed in an abandoned mental asylum somewhere around here. Apparently it's haunted with—

Okay, no, we're not doing that. Maybe we'll see a movie or something.

Logan asked if he could take the van and drive around and look for a basketball court.

No, I said. I was an ugly wall of no. It's late. It's dark. And I don't trust the van. And didn't you hear what Thebes just said? This place is crawling with meth-heads. I was also afraid that he'd try to find Colt to get his knife back, but I didn't want to tell him that in case he hadn't actually thought of it.